On the way home from a Christmas visit to family in the south of England, we decided to break the journey in Yorkshire, roughly the halfway point. Neither of us had been to Harrogate before, and it seemed like a good place to stop. We booked into The Old Swan, an enormous old-fashioned spa hotel.

As we checked in I noticed a panel at reception telling guests that this was the hotel where Agatha Christie had stayed in December 1926, during her eleven-day ‘disappearance’. Discovering that her husband was having an affair, she left her child and her home, abandoned her car, travelled to Yorkshire, and booked into The Old Swan under, oddly, the name of her husband’s mistress, Nancy Neele.

Her disappearance made headlines around the world and sparked a massive nationwide search. She was eventually found and claimed amnesia. The real cause of her flight has never been established. Some suggest she was in the grip of a breakdown brought on by her marital problems and her mother’s death, others that it was a publicity stunt. Whatever the reason, her book sales doubled, and for the rest of her life she never spoke of the episode.

The story rang a bell, but it took me a moment to remember why. The episode had been dramatised in 1979 in the movie Agatha, with Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman, filmed partly at The Old Swan. My first wife’s brother, Nic Ede, then a young wardrobe assistant, had worked on it. We lived close by in London and used to hear all the production gossip from him. 

Getting ready for dinner in the hotel, I thought how much I enjoyed the serendipity of turning up, a hundred years after the event, in the location of a story with which I had at one time been closely acquainted. Next day we drove home to Scotland. After supper we turned on the television and almost immediately I heard a name which I knew at once but, again, couldn’t remember why. Then I heard the voice and memories flooded back. 

In the late Seventies, living in London, our circle included a number of Nic’s young acting friends, all in the early stages of their careers. One of them was an immensely gifted actor called Celia Gregory. We went to see her at The National Theatre in Saturday, Sunday, Monday, the translation of an Italian play, directed by Franco Zeffirelli. She had a big part, opposite Laurence Olivier, Joan Plowright and Frank Finlay. She was electrifying.

At around that time she married a young osteopath called Keith Bender, and it was he who was now speaking on the television. I rewound to the start of the programme. It was a BBC2 documentary called The Million Pound Shaman Scam. It told the story of how, with his marriage to Celia failing, Keith had fallen under the spell of a con-woman and naively used his connections as a society osteopath to introduce his wealthy Hampstead clients to her.

Many of her victims were ruined. Keith himself was broken by the experience. To his credit, on realising what he had become part of, he had gone to the authorities. d’Souza had later been caught and jailed. (She has since been released and is now at large again, though efforts to trace her have so far been unsuccessful.)

It was a shock at first to see a gaunt, elderly Keith on television. Yet he retained a curiously wide-eyed air of naiveté which I recall from those far-off North London days. It was there too in photos of the fashionably long-haired young osteopath we had socialised with; whose future career and marriage to his glamorous wife we had taken for granted. We were all invulnerable in those days. 

And yet, of course, we weren’t. Celia died sadly young, only in her late fifties. (There’s an obituary here, written jointly by two other friends from that era, the actors Cherie Lunghi and Allan Corduner.) Keith, according to the documentary, is attempting to re-build his life in France, now in his seventies. 

I went to bed feeling a little as if I had slipped through a crack in time. In a single twenty-four hour period two separate, wholly unexpected and unconnected threads had lead me back to that selfsame period of my life. And there was one more to come.

Next day I rang Nic to see if he had watched the programme. He hadn’t, but was intrigued to hear about it. I also reminded him of Agatha and we reminisced about the hotel. Then he said: you know who played the part of Nancy Neele, the mistress? It was Celia.

Pictured above: Celia Gregory as Nancy Neele in Agatha