Agatha Christie - Murder in Mesopotamia

‘The windows were shut when you found her,’ he said. ‘Were they also shut when you left her at a quarter to one?’

‘Yes, they were always shut in the afternoon. There is no gauze over these windows as there is in the living-room and dining-room. They are kept shut to keep out the flies.’

‘And in any case no one could get in that way,’ mused Poirot. ‘And the walls are of the most solid – mud-brick – and there are no trap-doors and no sky-lights. No, there is only one way into this room – through the door. And there is only one way to the doorthrough the courtyard. And there is only one entrance to the courtyard – through the archway. And outside the archway there were five people and they all tell the same story, and I do not think, me, that they are lying…No, they are not lying. They are not bribed to silence. The murderer was here…’

I didn’t say anything. Hadn’t I felt the same thing just now when we were all cooped up round the table?

Slowly Poirot prowled round the room. He took up a photograph from the chest of drawers. It was of an elderly man with a white goatee beard. He looked inquiringly at me.

‘Mrs Leidner’s father,’ I said. ‘She told me so.’

He put it down again and glanced over the articles on the dressing-table – all of plain tortoise shell – simple but good. He looked up at a row of books on a shelf, repeating the titles aloud.

‘Who were the Greeks? Introduction to Relativity. Life of Lady Hester Stanhope. Crewe Traine. Back to Methuselah. Linda Condon. Yes, they tell us something, perhaps. She was not a fool, your Mrs Leidner. She had a mind.’

‘Oh! she was a very clever woman,’ I said eagerly. ‘Very well read and up in everything. She wasn’t a bit ordinary.’

He smiled as he looked over at me.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve already realized that.’

He passed on. He stood for some moments at the washstand, where there was a big array of bottles and toilet creams.

Then, suddenly, he dropped on his knees and examined the rug.

Dr Reilly and I came quickly to join him. He was examining a small dark brown stain, almost invisible on the brown of the rug. In fact it was only just noticeable where it impinged on one of the white stripes.

‘What do you say, doctor?’ he said. ‘Is that blood?’

Dr Reilly knelt down.

‘Might be,’ he said. ‘I’ll make sure if you like?’

‘If you would be so amiable.’

Mr Poirot examined the jug and basin. The jug was standing on the side of the washstand. The basin was empty, but beside the washstand there was an empty kerosene tin containing slop water.

He turned to me.

‘Do you remember, nurse? Was this jug out of the basin or in it when you left Mrs Leidner at a quarter to one?’

‘I can’t be sure,’ I said after a minute or two. ‘I rather think it was standing in the basin.’

‘Ah?’

‘But you see,’ I said hastily, ‘I only think so because it usually was. The boys leave it like that after lunch. I just feel that if it hadn’t been in I should have noticed it.’

He nodded quite appreciatively.

‘Yes. I understand that. It is your hospital training. If everything had not been just so in the room, you would quite unconsciously have set it to rights hardly noticing what you were doing. And after the murder? Was it like it is now?’

I shook my head.

‘I didn’t notice then,’ I said. ‘All I looked for was whether there was any place anyone could be hidden or if there was anything the murderer had left behind him.’

‘It’s blood all right,’ said Dr Reilly, rising from his knees. ‘Is it important?’

Poirot was frowning perplexedly. He flung out his hands with petulance.

‘I cannot tell. How can I tell? It may mean nothing at all. I can say, if I like, that the murderer touched her – that there was blood on his hands – very little blood, but still blood – and so he came over here and washed them. Yes, it may have been like that. But I cannot jump to conclusions and say that it was so. That stain may be of no importance at all.’

‘There would have been very little blood,’ said Dr Reilly dubiously. ‘None would have spurted out or anything like that. It would have just oozed a little from the wound. Of course, if he’d probed it at all…’

I gave a shiver. A nasty sort of picture came up in my mind. The vision of somebody – perhaps that nice pig-faced photographic boy, striking down that lovely woman and then bending over her probing the wound with his finger in an awful gloating fashion and his face, perhaps, quite different…all fierce and mad…

Dr Reilly noticed my shiver.

‘What’s the matter, nurse?’ he said.

‘Nothing – just goose-flesh,’ I said. ‘A goose walking over my grave.’

Mr Poirot turned round and looked at me.

‘I know what you need,’ he said. ‘Presently when we have finished here and I go back with the doctor to Hassanieh we will take you with us. You will give Nurse Leatheran tea, will you not, doctor?’

‘Delighted.’

‘Oh, no doctor,’ I protested. ‘I couldn’t think of such a thing.’

M. Poirot gave me a little friendly tap on the shoulder. Quite an English tap, not a foreign one.

‘You, ma soeur, will do as you are told,’ he said. ‘Besides, it will be of advantage to me. There is a good deal more that I want to discuss, and I cannot do it here where one must preserve the decencies. The good Dr Leidner he worshipped his wife and he is sure – oh, so sure – that everybody else felt the same about her! But that, in my opinion, would not be human nature! No, we want to discuss Mrs Leidner with – how do you say? – the gloves removed. That is settled then. When we have finished here, we take you with us to Hassanieh.’

‘I suppose,’ I said doubtfully, ‘that I ought to be leaving anyway. It’s rather awkward.’

‘Do nothing for a day or two,’ said Dr Reilly. ‘You can’t very well go until after the funeral.’

‘That’s all very well,’ I said. ‘And supposing I get murdered too, doctor?’

I said it half jokingly and Dr Reilly took it in the same fashion and would, I think, have made some jocular response.

But M. Poirot, to my astonishment, stood stock-still in the middle of the floor and clasped his hands to his head.

‘Ah! if that were possible,’ he murmured. ‘It is a danger – yes – a great danger – and what can one do? How can one guard against it?’

‘Why, M. Poirot,’ I said, ‘I was only joking! Who’d want to murder me, I should like to know?’

‘You – or another,’ he said, and I didn’t like the way he said it at all. Positively creepy.

‘But why?’ I persisted.

He looked at me very straight then.

‘I joke, mademoiselle,’ he said, ‘and I laugh.But there are some things that are no joke. There are things that my profession has taught me. And one of these things, the most terrible thing, is this: Murder is a habit…’

Before leaving, Poirot made a round of the expedition house and the outbuildings. He also asked a few questions of the servants at second hand – that is to say, Dr Reilly translated the questions and answers from English to Arabic and vice versa.

These questions dealt mainly with the appearance of the stranger Mrs Leidner and I had seen looking through the window and to whom Father Lavigny had been talking on the following day.

‘Do you really think that fellow had anything to do with it?’ asked Dr Reilly when we were bumping along in his car on our way to Hassanieh.

‘I like all the information there is,’ was Poirot’s reply.

And really, that described his methods very well. I found later that there wasn’t anything – no small scrap of insignificant gossip – in which he wasn’t interested. Men aren’t usually so gossipy.