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On the night of 3 December 1926, Agatha Christie left her house in Berkshire and did not come back. The next morning her car was found abandoned by the roadside, her fur coat and driving licence still inside. Of Christie herself, no trace.
A thousand police officers and thousands of volunteers searched for her; aeroplanes were brought in, almost unheard of at the time. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, took one of her gloves to a medium. The newspapers turned the case into the mystery of the year: the queen of crime, vanished as if into one of her own novels.
Eleven days later she was found at a spa hotel in Harrogate, hundreds of kilometres away, where she had spent the whole week quietly dancing and reading. She had registered as Teresa Neele — Neele being the surname of her husband's mistress, the man having just asked her for a divorce.
Christie never publicly explained those eleven days. Her doctors spoke of amnesia; her biographers, of a calculated escape; her autobiography tiptoes around the episode. The greatest mystery writer in history took to her grave the one case nobody has ever solved: her own.