“She refuses to say more. She has got to ‘think things out.’
“And Dr. Leidner, who has been watching her anxiously, realizes that she knows the truth. She is not the kind of woman to conceal her horror and distress from him.
“It is true that as yet she has not given him away—but how long can he depend upon her?
“Murder is a habit. That night he substitutes a glass of acid for her glass of water. There is just a chance she may be believed to have deliberately poisoned herself. There is even a chance she may be considered to have done the first murder and has now been overcome with remorse. To strengthen the latter idea he takes the quern from the roof and puts it under her bed.
“No wonder that poor Miss Johnson, in her death agony, could only try desperately to impart her hard-won information. Through ‘the window,’ that is how Mrs. Leidner was killed, not through the door—through the window. . . .
“And so thus, everything is explained, everything falls into place . . . Psychologically perfect.
“But there is no proof . . . No proof at all . . .”
None of us spoke. We were lost in a sea of horror . . . Yes, and not only horror. Pity, too.
Dr. Leidner had neither moved nor spoken. He sat just as he had done all along. A tired, worn elderly man.
At last he stirred slightly and looked at Poirot with gentle, tired eyes.
“No,” he said, “there is no proof. But that does not matter. You knew that I would not deny truth . . . I have never denied truth . . . I think—really—I am rather glad . . . I’m so tired. . . .”
Then he said simply: “I’m sorry about Anne. That was bad—senseless—it wasn’t me! And she suffered, too, poor soul. Yes, that wasn’t me. It was fear. . . .”
A little smile just hovered on his pain-twisted lips.
“You would have made a good archaeologist, M. Poirot. You have the gift of recreating the past.
“It was all very much as you said.
“I loved Louise and I killed her . . . if you’d known Louise you’d have understood . . . No, I think you understand anyway. . . .”
Twenty-nine
L’ENVOI
There isn’t really any more to say about things.
They got “Father” Lavigny and the other man just as they were going to board a steamer at Beyrouth.
Sheila Reilly married young Emmott. I think that will be good for her. He’s no door-mat—he’ll keep her in her place. She’d have ridden roughshod over poor Bill Coleman.
I nursed him, by the way, when he had appendicitis a year ago. I got quite fond of him. His people were sending him out to farm in South Africa.
I’ve never been out East again. It’s funny—sometimes I wish I could. I think of the noise the water-wheel made and the women washing, and that queer haughty look that camels give you—and I get quite a homesick feeling. After all, perhaps dirt isn’t really so unhealthy as one is brought up to believe!
Dr. Reilly usually looks me up when he’s in England, and as I said, it’s he who’s got me into this. “Take it or leave it,” I said to him. “I know the grammar’s all wrong and it’s not properly written or anything like that—but there it is.”
And he took it. Made no bones about it. It will give me a queer feeling if it’s ever printed.
M. Poirot went back to Syria and about a week later he went home on the Orient Express and got himself mixed up in another murder. He was clever, I don’t deny it, but I shan’t forgive him in a hurry for pulling my leg the way he did. Pretending to think I might be mixed up in the crime and not a real hospital nurse at all!
Doctors are like that sometimes. Will have their joke, some of them will, and never think of your feelings!
I’ve thought and thought about Mrs. Leidner and what she was really like . . . Sometimes it seems to me she was just a terrible woman—and other times I remember how nice she was to me and how soft her voice was—and her lovely fair hair and everything—and I feel that perhaps, after all, she was more to be pitied than blamed. . . .
And I can’t help but pity Dr. Leidner. I know he was a murderer twice over, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference. He was so dreadfully fond of her. It’s awful to be fond of anyone like that.
Somehow, the more I get older, and the more I see of people and sadness and illness and everything, the sorrier I get for everyone. Sometimes, I declare, I don’t know what’s becoming of the good, strict principles my aunt brought me up with. A very religious woman she was, and most particular. There wasn’t one of our neighbours whose faults she didn’t know backwards and forwards. . . .
Oh, dear, it’s quite true what Dr. Reilly said. How does one stop writing? If I could find a really good telling phrase.
I must ask Dr. Reilly for some Arab one.
Like the one M. Poirot used.
In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate . . .
Something like that.
About the Author
Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Her books have sold more than a billion copies in English and another billion in a hundred foreign languages. She is the author of eighty crime novels and short-story collections, nineteen plays, two memoirs, and six novels written under the name Mary Westmacott.
She first tried her hand at detective fiction while working in a hospital dispensary during World War I, creating the now legendary Hercule Poirot with her debut novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles. With The Murder in the Vicarage, published in 1930, she introduced another beloved sleuth, Miss Jane Marple. Additional series characters include the husband-and-wife crime-fighting team of Tommy and Tuppence
Beresford, private investigator Parker Pyne, and Scotland Yard detectives Superintendent Battle and Inspector Japp.
Many of Christie’s novels and short stories were adapted into plays, films, and television series. The Mousetrap, her most famous play of all, opened in 1952 and is the longest-running play in history. Among her best-known film adaptations are Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and Death on the Nile (1978), with Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov playing Hercule Poirot, respectively. On the small screen Poirot has been most memorably portrayed by David Suchet, and Miss Marple by Joan Hickson and subsequently Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie.
Christie was first married to Archibald Christie and then to archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, whom she accompanied on expeditions to countries that would also serve as the settings for many of her novels. In 1971 she achieved one of Britain’s highest honors when she was made a Dame of the British Empire. She died in 1976 at the age of eighty-five. Her one hundred and twentieth anniversary was celebrated around the world in 2010.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
www.AgathaChristie.com
The Agatha Christie Collection
The Man in the Brown Suit
The Secret of Chimneys
The Seven Dials Mystery
The Mysterious Mr. Quin
The Sittaford Mystery
Parker Pyne Investigates
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
Murder Is Easy
The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories
And Then There Were None
Towards Zero
Death Comes as the End
Sparkling Cyanide
The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories
Crooked House
Three Blind Mice and Other Stories
They Came to Baghdad
Destination Unknown
Ordeal by Innocence
Double Sin and Other Stories
The Pale Horse
Star over Bethlehem: Poems and Holiday Stories
Endless Night
Passenger to Frankfurt
The Golden Ball and Other Stories
The Mousetrap and Other Plays
The Harlequin Tea Set
&nbs
p; The Hercule Poirot Mysteries
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
The Murder on the Links
Poirot Investigates
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
The Big Four
The Mystery of the Blue Train
Peril at End House
Lord Edgware Dies
Murder on the Orient Express
Three Act Tragedy
Death in the Clouds
The A.B.C. Murders
Murder in Mesopotamia
Cards on the Table
Murder in the Mews
Dumb Witness
Death on the Nile
Appointment with Death
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
Sad Cypress
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
Evil Under the Sun
Five Little Pigs
The Hollow
The Labors of Hercules
Taken at the Flood
The Under Dog and Other Stories
Mrs. McGinty’s Dead
After the Funeral
Hickory Dickory Dock
Dead Man’s Folly
Cat Among the Pigeons
The Clocks
Third Girl
Hallowe’en Party
Elephants Can Remember
Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
The Miss Marple Mysteries
The Murder at the Vicarage
The Body in the Library
The Moving Finger
A Murder Is Announced
They Do It with Mirrors
A Pocket Full of Rye
4:50 from Paddington
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
A Caribbean Mystery
At Bertram’s Hotel
Nemesis
Sleeping Murder
Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories
The Tommy and
Tuppence Mysteries
The Secret Adversary
Partners in Crime
N or M?
By the Pricking of My Thumbs
Postern of Fate
Memoirs
An Autobiography
Come, Tell Me How You Live
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
AGATHA CHRISTIE® POIROT® MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA™. Copyright © 1937 Agatha Christie Limited (a Chorion company). All rights reserved.
MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA © 1936. Published by permission of G.P. Putnam’s Sons, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
For more information about educational use, teachers should visit www.HarperAcademic.com
FIRST HARPER PAPERBACK PUBLISHED 2011.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-06-207390-7
Epub Edition © AUGUST 2011 eISBN 978-0-06-174992-6
11 12 13 14 15 dix/bvg 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Murder in Mesopotamia: A Hercule Poirot Mystery Page 22