The Woman on the Orient Express

by Lindsay Jayne Ashford

  Her gaze rested on the two nannies, who were now sitting, chatting on a park bench. With a sharp intake of breath she turned away from the window, thrusting her hand back into her bag. The silk shroud slithered to the floor as she pulled out the photograph. There he was. Her insides surged at the sight of him.

  “Please come,” she whispered. “Please don’t make me do this on my own.”

  On the other side of London, a woman with wisps of blonde hair trailing from her hat was walking up the steps of the British Museum. She had a copy of the Daily Express tucked under her arm, purchased hastily from a boy on a street corner. She was not in the habit of buying a paper and would not normally have chosen this one. It was the headline scrawled across the front of the newsstand that had propelled her across the street: Riddle of Newlywed’s Suicide.

  Katharine had been unable to look at the boy as she handed over the money, fearful that her photograph would be there on the front page. As soon as she was out of sight, she unfolded the paper. The breeze tugged the pages, making it difficult to handle. Beneath the fold was a photograph of Bertram in his regimental uniform. After just two paragraphs the report petered out, to be continued on a later page. Impossible to look at it in the street. She must wait until she got inside the museum.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Keeling.” The doorman gave her his customary greeting, the ends of his walrus-like mustache sliding into a smile. She nodded and looked away. Had he seen the paper, she wondered? Would he know? Would the porters be talking about her over their morning tea?

  She lowered her head as she made her way to the place where she knew she’d be safe from prying eyes. In the basement of the British Museum, an Aladdin’s cave of ancient objects waiting to be catalogued, was the office shared by the Mesopotamian dig team. She prayed no one else would be there this early.

  To her relief the room was empty. She sank onto a chair and spread the newspaper out on the rough table strewn with shards of pottery and beads from necklaces buried in desert sand for thousands of years.

  There was no photograph of her on the inside page, just another shot of her late husband, this one taken more recently, in Egypt. He was with a group of other men, sitting in the courtyard of the building that had been his headquarters in Cairo. His smile pierced Katharine’s heart, unleashing a flood of guilt: for being alive when he was dead, for turning the sacrament of marriage into a death sentence.

  Her eyes stung as she scanned the text, cringing at the obvious relish with which the journalist reported the awful story. Bertram had died nearly five years ago, but it had taken this long for the legal process to run its course. She had been warned that she might have to give evidence at the inquest—something she absolutely dreaded—but in the end she had not had to appear in person. The coroner had accepted her written statement of what had happened.

  The verdict was that Colonel Bertram Keeling had taken his own life while the balance of his mind was disturbed. The report drew attention to the fact that he had served his country with distinction during the Great War. So many men had returned from the conflict with shattered minds. It was easy to blame the war—but that was not the real reason for Bertram shooting himself. She knew it and the journalist obviously suspected it. The coroner’s verdict had been a disappointment, so the story had been spiced up with sly innuendo as to why a man married for just six months would take his own life.

  No one would ever guess the truth, because she was the only living person who knew it. The doctor—that stupid, stupid man—had died himself, just weeks after Bertram, of cholera or typhus or something. Divine retribution, some would say.

  Katharine folded up the newspaper and tossed it into the bin in the corner of the room. Darting across to shelves stacked with books, she pulled out three slim volumes and tucked them into her bag. Ten minutes later she was back outside, striding down the steps and hailing a cab. In an hour’s time she would be on the train that would take her far away from nosy reporters and their prurient readers.

  Inside the cab, she closed her eyes and conjured the desert landscape she so longed for: the vast, uninterrupted swathes of sand and clear blue sky; the scent of wood fires and spiced meat; the sonorous, lilting call to prayer at sunrise. This time next week she would be there.

  There would be that other business to attend to first, of course. The wedding in Baghdad. The thought of it sent an involuntary shudder down her spine, as if someone had walked on her grave.

  When Bertram died, she had never imagined taking another husband. But the dig’s high-minded backers had given her no choice. Marriage was the only way they would allow her to continue working in a camp full of men.

  She had accepted the archaeologist’s proposal with one crucial condition: that their union would never be consummated. To her surprise he had agreed with only a momentary hesitation. No doubt he thought he would be able to make her change her mind once they were man and wife.

  Poor fool. She heard Bertram’s voice as clearly as if he’d been sitting next to her. If only she had known. If only she had been to a doctor before their wedding night . . .

  “Off somewhere nice, miss?” The cab driver broke into her thoughts.

  “The Middle East,” she replied. “Mesopotamia.”

  “Blimey—can you go that far from Victoria?”

  “Certainly you can. You get off the train at Dover and take the Orient Express at Calais. The railway goes all the way to Damascus. Then you get a coach across the desert to Baghdad.”

  “How long does that take?”

  “Only five days.”

  Five days and nights. How many waking hours was that? Less than a hundred. Not very long to work out how she was going to keep this new husband from her bed.

  CHAPTER 2

  London to Paris

  Agatha didn’t venture far from her compartment on her first night on the Orient Express. She’d never been good on boats and was worn out with seasickness after the Channel crossing. The excitement of boarding the train gave way to exquisite relief as she climbed up a tapestry-covered ladder and slipped between damask sheets, knowing there would be no more sea travel until they reached Istanbul.

  The steward said she would have the compartment to herself as far as Belgrade, and so she lay in her bunk without pulling down the blind, watching the darkening landscape as the train rolled through the fields of Normandy. Past black fingers of trees newly stripped of their apples, past silhouettes of horses startled into life by the snort of the engine. It looked so tranquil, so untouched by time. Hard to believe that a decade ago this place was ravaged by war.

  She thought of Archie soaring over these fields in his Cody biplane. One of the few qualified pilots in Britain when war broke out, he was lucky to have survived. He had written to her from France before they were married, wanting to know if she was worried about his flying. She had read between the lines—seen that what he really wanted was to reassure himself about the danger of what he was doing. She had sent him violets and a Saint Christopher with the letter she wrote back. She told him she was not in the least bit worried because she had seen him in the air and knew how good he was. She was careful to avoid any reference to what dominated her life back home, to the broken bodies of the men and boys she tended every day at the hospital in Torquay.

  It’s a filthy job, nursing. I hate to think of your doing it.

  He had written those words the week before his first leave. And because he couldn’t bear it, she never mentioned her work to him again. Her letters became dreams of home, of the life they would have when the war ended.

  Their wedding took place in a rush on Christmas Eve, 1914. They were staying at his mother’s house, and after telling her the previous evening how wrong it would be for them to marry with a war on, Archie had marched into her bedroom at eight o’clock the next morning to announce that he’d changed his mind: they must do it immediately. He had just forty-eight hours’ leave, so there had been no time for buying a dress, choosing flowers, even makin
g a cake. Agatha had married in the jacket and skirt she had worn for her interview at the hospital. Their witness was a friend who just happened to be passing the church after the vicar had been located and paid eight pounds to grant their desperate request. And then, after just one night of honeymoon, Archie was on his way back to France.

  Agatha closed her eyes, summoning images to blot out the memory of his hard, lean body sinking into her soft white flesh. She traveled back in time, to a place in her head where it was always summer, never winter, to the beach at the foot of the cliff in Devon where she had spent endless carefree days fishing for crabs in rock pools and feasting on hard-boiled eggs and fish paste sandwiches.

  After a while she drifted into sleep. She woke because the train had stopped. Where were they, she wondered? Paris? Or farther than that? Dijon? Lausanne? Agatha raised herself on her elbows and peered through the glass.

  She glimpsed the figure of a man on the smoky moonlit platform. There was something horribly familiar about him. The high sculpted cheekbones and diamond-bright eyes. It couldn’t be . . . could it? She blinked, craning her neck. It was months since she’d seen him, but somehow Archie was there now, outside the window. It was as if he’d followed her across the sea, lost her somewhere around Calais, and then, with supernatural speed, overtaken the train.

  He was looking, not at her, but at something further along the platform. There was an air of impatience about him. His lips twitched, then parted, as if he was speaking, though she could see no one near enough to catch his words. Suddenly she heard his voice inside her head.

  Running away again, are we? Perhaps you’ll make a better job of it this time . . .

  Agatha closed her eyes tight, telling herself it wasn’t him: it couldn’t be. He was in England, tucked up in bed. Probably dreaming of her, of what he would be doing in a few days’ time, after the wedding.

  When she stopped torturing herself and opened her eyes, he had disappeared. She told herself that her imagination was working overtime. As the train began moving again, she settled back against the pillow, making herself breathe in and out to a slow count of four. Each breath brought the comforting scent of freshly laundered linen. Then she made a mental list of all the treats in store on the train: the food, the music, the places she would see. There was something so very safe about being on a train. She was not really alone—she had only to ring the bell and a steward would appear.

  Agatha thought about where she was headed, and her stomach did an involuntary flip. Could she really do it? Could she really go all that way by herself? Yes, she whispered, of course you can do it: you’re thirty-eight years old and you’re not going to the moon, just to Baghdad. The word sounded the way a shiver felt. At the dinner party in London it had been a shiver of excitement, but now it held a frisson of dread.

  She knew precious little about the place. She had been to Egypt once with her mother, and she imagined it would be something like that. At eighteen years old she had squandered her time there, far more interested in men and dances than the pyramids and tombs.

  There had been one man—a very kind, rather handsome colonel a good deal older than herself—who had asked her mother for Agatha’s hand in marriage on the boat back to England. She was cross when her mother told her, feeling cheated because she thought the question should have been put to her. By the time she found out about it, they were back in Devon. Now his face hovered in the semidarkness of the wagon-lit. If she had married him instead of . . .

  She tried to stop thinking, to concentrate on the rhythm of the engine and the sound of the wheels on the track. And she prayed that when she fell asleep, she would dream of anything but Archie.

  Nancy moved from the window to the door and back again, pacing the small compartment like a caged animal. From the moment the train had pulled into Paris’s Gare de Lyon, she had pressed her face to the glass, desperate for a glimpse of him. But it was too dark and too smoky to see properly. There were knots of people along the platform, some waiting, some ready to climb aboard. She wanted to jump off the train and run among them, aching to see his face. But that would be too great a risk. She might miss him—or worse, the train might set off without her while he was already on board.

  At every stop on the journey so far she had hoped he might appear. At Victoria station, as other passengers were bidding fond farewells to their loved ones, she had remained, alone, on the platform until the guard had practically shooed her up the steps, his eyebrows raised in a look of pity.

  Then, when he was not at Dover, she had walked round the decks for the entire crossing in case he had made a last-minute dash for the boat as it was about to sail.

  At Calais, where the Orient Express was waiting, she was prevented from lingering on the platform by the very attentive steward who insisted on showing her where everything was, how everything in the compartment worked, and taking her through the list of supper dishes available that evening. In other circumstances she would no doubt have found it thrilling—but she was too worked up to take it in. By the time he had finished, the train was already pulling out of the station.

  “Your companion, madame,” the steward asked in his soft, foreign accent, “will she be joining you in Paris?”

  “Er . . . yes. In . . . er . . . Paris.” Nancy was embarrassed at being confronted with the lie she had told. She had paid double the price for her tickets, booking a whole second-class compartment in the hope that he would come. Only passengers of the same sex were allowed to share, so she had informed the man at Cook’s that her traveling companion was a Miss Muriel Harper.

  She felt a flush spread from her neck to her face as the steward smiled at her. She suspected he saw right through the lie. Knew it was a lover, not a friend, who had let her down.

  Poor little rich girl. She could almost hear him thinking it.

  Paris was her last hope. There was just a chance that he had got there before her, planning to board the train in darkness to avoid being caught out by the steward.

  She glanced at her watch. They were due to leave in less than five minutes. She heard a door slam. Footsteps in the corridor outside. A woman’s voice, speaking French. Nancy sank onto the bed, her mouth so dry she could barely swallow. As she reached for a tumbler of water, she heard a soft clicking sound. Whipping her head round, she saw the handle of the door move up and down. With one bound she was there.

  “Oh, darling!” She fell into his arms, tears prickling her eyes.

  “You’d better let me in.” His lips brushed her cheek as he took her by the shoulders, moving her sideways as he crossed the threshold.

  “Where’s your luggage?”

  He wasn’t looking at her. He sat down heavily on the bed, his eyes fixed to the floor.

  “I can’t stay,” he said. “I’ll have to get off in the morning.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t ask me, Nancy—not yet. Let’s make the most of this night together. Lock the door and come and hold me, will you?” He reached out with both hands, and her body melted into his.

  Afterward, as she lay on the narrow bunk in the darkness, breathing in the scent of his damp skin, she heard the steward knock softly at the door. She called out that there was nothing she wanted. The words mocked her. The very thing she wanted most in the world was lying there beside her, but in a few precious hours he would be gone.

  She heard the steward’s footsteps recede down the corridor, and she reached out for the warm body beside her. But the spell was broken. He was sitting up. A match flared as he lit a cigarette. Now he was going to tell her what she dreaded to hear.

  “I had to come, Nancy—I couldn’t let you down.” He inhaled deeply, blowing out a plume of smoke that drifted across her face. “But it’s difficult at the moment. You do see that, don’t you?”

  She felt a hysterical bubble of laughter rise from her stomach at his words. Difficult? How could anything he had to contend with be any tougher than what she was facing? But she made no sound. Said nothing.
Waited for him to explain it if he could.

  “I think she suspects,” he said. “I’m worried she’d go to the papers if she knew for sure. Think what that would do to us.”

  “But it wouldn’t matter, would it? Not if we were in Baghdad.” Nancy couldn’t see his expression. The only light was the red glow of the cigarette.

  He let out a low grunt of a laugh. Almost a growl. “Baghdad? What on earth would we do in Baghdad?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. Just . . . ,” she faltered. “Just live, I suppose. We love each other, don’t we? Isn’t that enough?”

  His silence told her what she feared most.

  She wanted to tell him everything then. Oh God, how she longed to let the secret out. But she couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Unless he came willingly, because he wanted her, it would never work. She had enough sense to realize that. And despite everything that had happened in the past few months, she still had some pride. She was not going to resort to emotional blackmail.

  “You know how much I care for you,” he whispered. “Do you think I’d have risked coming here if I didn’t?” He leaned across her to stub out his cigarette, nuzzling her head as he shifted his weight. “If you can just lie low out there for a few months . . .” He was stroking her neck with his cheek, sending delicious shivers through her body. “We will be together—I promise.”

  Nancy closed her eyes as he slid his body against hers. She wanted so badly to believe him.

  CHAPTER 3

  Lausanne to Milan

  The next morning Agatha woke with great excitement, glimpsing the Alps through the window. The snow on their peaks reflected the rising sun, blankets of coral and pink drawn up against a perfect sky.

  She dressed quickly: the Sonia Delaunay jacket in bold autumn stripes over a camel silk blouse and matching wool skirt. When she went to put on lipstick, her reflection in the little round mirror above the basin caught her by surprise. The red tint in her hair was quite striking in bright sunlight. The hairdresser had warned her of the likely effect. You are a natural blonde, she said, so the color will be very different.