Agatha Christie - Murder in Mesopotamia

‘And her husband?’ asked Poirot.

‘She never wanted to hurt him,’ said Miss Reilly slowly. ‘I’ve never known her anything but sweet to him. I suppose she was fond of him. He’s a dear – wrapped up in his own world – his digging and his theories. And he worshipped her and thought her perfection. That might have annoyed some women. It didn’t annoy her. In a sense he lived in a fool’s paradise – and yet it wasn’t a fool’s paradise because to him she was what he thought her. Though it’s hard to reconcile that with–’

She stopped.

‘Go on, mademoiselle,’ said Poirot.

She turned suddenly on me.

‘What have you said about Richard Carey?’

‘About Mr Carey?’ I asked, astonished.

‘About her and Carey?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ve mentioned that they didn’t hit it off very well–’

To my surprise she broke into a fit of laughter.

‘Didn’t hit it off very well! You fool! He’s head over ears in love with her. And it’s tearing him to pieces – because he worships Leidner too. He’s been his friend for years. That would be enough for her, of course. She’s made it her business to come between them. But all the same I’ve fancied–’

‘Eh bien?’

She was frowning, absorbed in thought.

‘I’ve fancied that she’d gone too far for once – that she was not only biter but bit! Carey’s attractive. He’s as attractive as hell… She was a cold devil – but I believe she could have lost her coldness with him…’

‘I think it’s just scandalous what you’re saying,’ I cried. ‘Why, they hardly spoke to each other!’

‘Oh, didn’t they?’ She turned on me. ‘A hell of a lot you know about it. It was “Mr Carey” and “Mrs Leidner” in the house, but they used to meet outside. She’d walk down the path to the river. And he’d leave the dig for an hour at a time. They used to meet among the fruit trees.

‘I saw him once just leaving her, striding back to the dig, and she was standing looking after him. I was a female cad, I suppose. I had some glasses with me and I took them out and had a good look at her face. If you ask me, I believe she cared like hell for Richard Carey…’

She broke off and looked at Poirot.

‘Excuse my butting in on your case,’ she said with a sudden rather twisted grin, ‘but I thought you’d like to have the local colour correct.’

And she marched out of the room.

‘M. Poirot,’ I cried. ‘I don’t believe one word of it all!’

He looked at me and he smiled, and he said (very queerly I thought): ‘You can’t deny, nurse, that Miss Reilly has shed a certain – illumination on the case.’

We couldn’t say any more just then because Dr Reilly came in, saying jokingly that he’d killed off the most tiresome of his patients.

He and M. Poirot settled down to a more or less medical discussion of the psychology and mental state of an anonymous letter-writer. The doctor cited cases that he had known professionally, and M. Poirot told various stories from his own experience.

‘It is not so simple as it seems,’ he ended. ‘There is the desire for power and very often a strong inferiority complex.’

Dr Reilly nodded.

‘That’s why you often find that the author of anonymous letters is the last person in the place to be suspected. Some quiet inoffensive little soul who apparently can’t say boo to a goose – all sweetness and Christian meekness on the outside – and seething with all the fury of hell underneath!’

Poirot said thoughtfully: ‘Should you say Mrs Leidner had any tendency to an inferiority complex?’

Dr Reilly scraped out his pipe with a chuckle.

‘Last woman on earth I’d describe that way. No repressions about her. Life, life and more life – that’s what she wanted – and got, too!’

‘Do you consider it a possibility, psychologically speaking, that she wrote those letters?’

‘Yes, I do. But if she did, the reason arose out of her instinct to dramatize herself. Mrs Leidner was a bit of a film star in private life! She had to be the centre of things – in the limelight. By the law of opposites she married Leidner, who’s about the most retiring and modest man I know. He adored her – but adoration by the fireside wasn’t enough for her. She had to be the persecuted heroine as well.’

‘In fact,’ said Poirot, smiling, ‘you don’t subscribe to his theory that she wrote them and retained no memory of her act?’

‘No, I don’t. I didn’t turn down the idea in front of him. You can’t very well say to a man who’s just lost a dearly loved wife that that same wife was a shameless exhibitionist, and that she drove him nearly crazy with anxiety to satisfy her sense of the dramatic. As a matter of fact it wouldn’t be safe to tell any man the truth about his wife! Funnily enough, I’d trust most women with the truth about their husbands. Women can accept the fact that a man is a rotter, a swindler, a drug-taker, a confirmed liar, and a general swine without batting an eyelash and without its impairing their affection for the brute in the least! Women are wonderful realists.’

‘Frankly, Dr Reilly, what was your exact opinion of Mrs Leidner?’

Dr Reilly lay back in his chair and puffed slowly at his pipe.

‘Frankly – it’s hard to say! I didn’t know her well enough. She’d got charm – any amount of it. Brains, sympathy… What else? She hadn’t any of the ordinary unpleasant vices. She wasn’t sensual or lazy or even particularly vain. She was, I’ve always thought (but I’ve no proofs of it), a most accomplished liar. What I don’t know (and what I’d like to know) is whether she lied to herself or only to other people. I’m rather partial to liars myself. A woman who doesn’t lie is a woman without imagination and without sympathy. I don’t think she was really a man-hunter – she just liked the sport of bringing them down “with my bow and arrow.” If you get my daughter on the subject–’

‘We have had that pleasure,’ said Poirot with a slight smile.

‘H’m,’ said Dr Reilly. ‘She hasn’t wasted much time! Shoved her knife into her pretty thoroughly, I should imagine! The younger generation has no sentiment towards the dead. It’s a pity all young people are prigs! They condemn the “old morality” and then proceed to set up a much more hard-and-fast code of their own. If Mrs Leidner had had half a dozen affairs Sheila would probably have approved of her as “living her life fully” – or “obeying her blood instincts”. What she doesn’t see is that Mrs Leidner was acting true to type – her type. The cat is obeying its blood instinct when it plays with the mouse! It’s made that way. Men aren’t little boys to be shielded and protected. They’ve got to meet cat women – and faithful spaniel, yours – till-death adoring women, and hen-pecking nagging bird women – and all the rest of it! Life’s a battlefield – not a picnic! I’d like to see Sheila honest enough to come off her high horse and admit that she hated Mrs Leidner for good old thorough – going personal reasons. Sheila’s about the only young girl in this place and she naturally assumes that she ought to have it all her own way with the young things in trousers. Naturally it annoys her when a woman, who in her view is middle-aged and who has already two husbands to her credit, comes along and licks her on her own ground. Sheila’s a nice child, healthy and reasonably good-looking and attractive to the other sex as she should be. But Mrs Leidner was something out of the ordinary in that line. She’d got just that sort of calamitous magic that plays the deuce with things – a kind of Belle Dame sans Merci.’