Free Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days by Jared Cade

at the Imperial College in London, as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. He spoke seven Chinese dialects as a result of a passion for beetles which led him to travel to China on hunting expeditions. Both Nan and George were good at golf; they had won the Prince of Monaco Cup for mixed foursomes at Le Touquet in France.
    Nan and Agatha would often sit in the Sunningdale clubhouse, watching their young daughters play together while sipping their favourite drink of milk and cream, as they patiently waited for their husbands to finish their game of golf. It was through George that Nan learned of Archie’s affair with Nancy Neele. Nan instructed George to ‘try to calm it down’, but George instead provided an alibi for Archie. Nan said nothing to her friend, not wanting to be the bearer of such crushing news.
    Most of the Christies’ friends now knew about the affair, and Nan was becoming alarmed at Agatha’s preoccupation with her fiction writing, since she seemed to be losing contact with reality as her career really took off. A photograph that Nan took on the golf course at Sandwich in Kent of George, Archie and Nancy, in which the latter two gazed uneasily into the camera lens, was a portent of the deception to follow.
    In an attempt to alleviate her loneliness an unsuspecting Agatha invited Nancy Neele to spend the weekend at Styles. Archie was appalled, being justifiably apprehensive at having his wife and mistress under the one roof. It would have seemed odd for Nancy to have declined the invitation. She came down from London to Sunningdale every weekend to play golf, and they had mutual friends in Major Belcher and his Australian wife, with whom Nancy had stayed on holiday in France the previous year.
    The tension at Styles was exacerbated by the fact that Agatha genuinely liked Nancy. Agatha admired her for many of the reasons that Archie did: she was cheerful and bright, a lively conversationalist, good at telling stories and capable of maintaining a companionable silence – a quality that Archie particularly liked in a woman. Nancy professed to be an admirer of Agatha’s books, and, as Agatha gave an account of Belcher’s irascible antics as leader of the British Empire tour, she was oblivious to the fact that she was offering her friendship and hospitality to the usurper of her husband’s affections.
    Agatha extended several irregular invitations to Nancy throughout the first half of 1926, and the other showed no hesitation in accepting. Archie, uneasy about this, told Agatha that having Nancy to stay spoiled his golf. When they went to a nearby dance, the 27-year-old Nancy thanked Agatha for acting as her chaperone, since her parents, who lived at Croxley Green in the small town of Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire, would have been worried by her going out socially on her own.
    Around this time Agatha suggested to Archie that they might try for another baby. Her request prompted him to do some serious thinking. He stalled for time by suggesting to Agatha that first of all they get another car, and he duly became the owner of a second-hand Delage.
    That spring Archie turned down Agatha’s proposal that they take a short holiday in Corsica together with the excuse that he could not get the time off work. Agatha went instead with her sister Madge, unaware of the opportunity she was offering her husband and his mistress. Agatha had begun The Mystery of the Blue Train and needed a break from work. She had reason to feel tired and drained, for her literary output in the previous six years had been phenomenal. She was by now more widely known to the magazine buying public through her seventy-odd short stories than for her handful of novels. Agatha had long forgotten the advice her mother had offered before the British Empire tour about it being a wife’s duty always to be by her husband’s side, and she was set to suffer the consequences on her return.
    The first crisis came when Clarissa fell ill