The Woman on the Orient Express

by Lindsay Jayne Ashford

  Nancy blinked, as if the question was incomprehensible. “There’s no one to go back to, if that’s what you mean. Delia was the only family I have left.”

  No one to go back to. So who was the man on the train?

  Agatha suddenly wondered if she had got it all wrong. Put two and two together and made five. She had seen a face reflected in a window and assumed it was the person Nancy had seen. But what if the reflection had come from the opposite end of the carriage, confusing the eye the way a mirror would? What if Nancy had merely been trying to attract the attention of one of the waiters, visible to her but unseen by Agatha?

  If that was the case, the man who so resembled Archie could have been anyone: just a passenger who had boarded the train at Paris and got off a few stops later. Agatha silently cursed herself for being such a fool.

  “I’ve been married for less than a year, but it felt like a lifetime.” Nancy turned her head to the window. There were mountains in the distance, their peaks blue and purple in the fading light. “Forgive me for asking—have you been married long?”

  “Thirteen years.” Agatha felt heat surge into her face.

  “Did you ever—” Nancy broke off, her eyes searching the carpet again. “What I mean is . . . have you ever reached a point when you felt you couldn’t go on?”

  Her words transported Agatha back in time. The fourteenth of December 1926. Ten days before their twelfth wedding anniversary. She saw Archie’s face as he came up the stairs of the hotel in Harrogate, marching toward her with a look of cold fury. She had felt more alone at that moment than at any time in her life.

  “I loved him very much.” The words came out unbidden, as if someone else had spoken them. Agatha’s throat tightened. “We . . . I . . .” She swallowed hard. She had never confided in anyone. Not Charlotte, not even her sister. What she felt about Archie, why she had wanted him to think she might have killed herself, was too humiliating, too painful to confess. But here was a woman who was running away, just as she had done, a woman who had really tried to kill herself. Agatha suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to protect her, to tell as much of the truth as she could bear.

  “He fell in love with someone else and I thought my life was over.” Her voice sounded even stranger to her now, like a distant echo. But Nancy was looking at her, wide-eyed. She had to go on. “It was a Friday evening and I’d been waiting for him to come home. But he didn’t. So I got into my car and drove to the house where I knew he’d be staying. They were friends of his, and her car was there—the girl he’d been seeing. I don’t know what went through my head. I parked outside for a while, just watching the house, the shapes of people moving behind the curtains. Then I drove off into the night, not really caring where I was going. I remember just wanting to die. I got to an old quarry and I thought about driving right over the edge.”

  “What stopped you?”

  Agatha’s eyes went to the darkening mountains beyond the window. She knew what the answer should be. And yes, Rosalind had been there in her head as she drove to the place where she abandoned the car. But it was Archie she was thinking about as she switched off the engine. How she could make things look. How she could turn his world upside down.

  “I couldn’t leave my daughter. That would have been . . .” Agatha left the rest unsaid, her breath misting the window.

  Nancy’s head moved a fraction of an inch. A barely perceptible nod.

  “And something else went through my mind as I was sitting there in the dark,” Agatha said. “Something a teacher came out with in the middle of a math lesson when I was about twelve years old.” Remembering the words, she hesitated. What had once seemed so profound was something she was no longer sure she believed in. The teacher had spoken of love and suffering and Christ in the garden of Gethsemane. She had told them that they would all, at some time in their lives, feel as he had, utterly alone and forsaken by everyone—even by God. When that time came, Miss Johnston said, they must hold on to the belief that this was not the end, that God was there and would help them if they put their trust in him. For some reason, those words had stayed with her more than any sermon she had ever heard in church. But she couldn’t repeat them to Nancy. Not now.

  “What did she say?” Nancy leaned closer.

  Agatha took a breath. “She said: ‘All of you, every one of you, will pass through a time when you will face despair.’” That much was faithful to the original. “She told us that it was impossible to love without suffering—but if we never loved, we would never know the true meaning of life. Then she said, ‘When everything goes against you and you get to a point when it seems you can’t hang on a minute longer, never, never give up—for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.’”

  Agatha glanced at her hands. At her mother’s ring on her wedding finger. “And so I wrapped myself up in my coat and closed my eyes. I must have fallen asleep. And when I woke up, it was morning. The sun was coming up through the mist and there was a blackbird singing. And I was glad I was alive.”

  “Thank you.” Nancy’s hand moved a few inches into the space between them, freezing in midair, as if she wanted to touch Agatha on the arm or the shoulder but was afraid of the intimacy of such an action. A footfall outside the door made her snatch it back.

  “If you need to escape, come and find me,” Agatha said quickly. “I’m in compartment number sixteen.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Sofia to Simeonovgrad

  Katharine looked up from her novel, wondering what was taking Agatha so long. She glanced at her watch. Twenty minutes, at least, since she’d left the compartment. What if she’d had a fainting fit and was lying, unconscious, on the floor? Katharine sprang to her feet. She shouldn’t have allowed herself to get so wrapped up in the damned book with its cryptic scenario of a body behind a door locked from the inside. It was a lot of nonsense, of course: what her father would have called chewing gum for the brain. But clever nonsense, all the same.

  As her fingers made contact with the door, she felt it move.

  “You took your time,” she said, as Agatha appeared. “I nearly sent out a search party!”

  “I called in on Nancy Nelson,” Agatha replied.

  “Oh, it’s Nancy now, is it?” Katharine cocked her head. “And?”

  “We didn’t have much chance to talk.” She sank down onto the banquette, rubbing the place beneath the broken skin on her forehead. “She has a woman with her: someone from the Wagons-Lits company.”

  “I suppose they’re worried she’ll try again.” Katharine nodded. “Did she say why she did it?”

  “She was running away from her husband.” Agatha hesitated, looking away from Katharine into the darkness beyond the window. “She said she couldn’t stand it any longer because he doesn’t love her. She was going to stay with a relative in Baghdad. Delia somebody. But there was a telegram yesterday saying she’d died. That’s what pushed her over the edge.”

  “Delia?” Katharine frowned. “Delia Grandfield?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think she mentioned a surname.”

  “It must be her,” Katharine said. “I met her a couple of times. Sharp as a pin and spoke fluent Persian as well as Arabic. She was a spy, I think.”

  “A spy?”

  “Yes. She worked for the British Consulate. Got to know the wives of the local tribesmen and monitored activity in the Kurdish area to the north. She came to the dig once. Leonard showed her round.”

  “I wonder how she died,” Agatha said.

  “Well, she was doing a pretty dangerous job. It’s not hard to imagine someone like that—a woman, especially—getting herself murdered.”

  “Poor Nancy. As if she didn’t have enough to contend with.”

  Katharine took a cigarette from the case on the table. “What will she do now? Did she say?”

  “I don’t know. If I was her, I’d catch the next train back to London. If she’s planning to go it alone, she’ll have a better chance there than in a
foreign city where she knows no one.” Agatha shrugged. “But she says she can’t go back.”

  Katharine lit the cigarette and blew out a plume of smoke. “Is the husband really such a brute?”

  “I suppose he must be.” Katharine saw Agatha’s eyes go hard and smooth, like pebbles in a river. Thinking about her own marriage, perhaps. There had been much speculation in the newspapers, when she ran off to Harrogate, about Archie Christie having a mistress.

  She took the cigarette from her mouth, thought about saying those five simple words: I know who you are. But something stopped her. She could pretend to herself that it was concern for Agatha’s physical and mental state after the traumatic events of last night, or respect for her clear desire to hide her identity. But it wasn’t that. The truth was that she relished the power this knowledge gave her. She would play her hand when the time was right.

  “I suppose we should think about getting ready for dinner,” Katharine said. “I should change that dressing first, though: the bleeding should have stopped by now.”

  Agatha made no sound as the blood-encrusted lint came away from her skin. She seemed to have retreated to a place inside her head where the outside world no longer registered. The place, Katharine imagined, that she went to when she was writing her books. It was something Katharine could easily understand. She experienced a similar escapism when she was reconstructing an ancient object. The concentration—the mental effort required in visualizing something as yet unformed—was the best therapy, the surest way of banishing memories that still had the power to overwhelm her.

  She thought fleetingly of the images she had seen in Tatler of Nancy Nelson’s wedding day. She wondered if Nancy had felt as she had when she walked down the aisle: so excited, so in love, so naïvely optimistic. How long had it been before Nancy’s dreams were shattered? That marriage, it appeared, had crashed to earth even faster than her own.

  And Agatha. What had really happened there? She knew from bitter experience not to believe most of what was reported in the newspapers. Why was she traveling to Baghdad, of all places? And what had made her want to pretend to be a widow? Did she hate her husband so much? Or did she herself feel guilty about the failure of the marriage—to the extent that she couldn’t bear to admit being divorced? Katharine grimaced as she applied a plaster to the cut below Agatha’s hairline. If guilt was the name of the game, she could beat this woman hands down.

  As the Orient Express rolled through Bulgaria, rain began to speckle the windows. By the time Agatha and Katharine reached the dining car, hailstones were clattering against the glass. All eyes were on the windows, for which Agatha, conscious of the lumpy dressing beneath her borrowed headband, was profoundly grateful. No sooner had the two women taken their seats than a huge bolt of lightning split the night sky, followed almost immediately by a terrific thunderclap. This produced awed sounds from the passengers. The waiter smiled as he arrived with the menus.

  “Don’t be alarmed, ladies,” he said. “We often get storms like this when we are going through the Rhodope Mountains—it should pass quickly.”

  But another lightning flash, with more thunder, came as they gave their order. The woman at the table across from theirs jumped to her feet, upsetting a glass of wine that narrowly missed her gown of sequin-studded eau de nil silk. As a second waiter arrived to change the tablecloth, Agatha saw that Katharine was scanning the diners, casting her head this way and that as if she was looking for someone. When she turned her eyes back to the table, she caught Agatha’s curious face.

  “I saw someone yesterday when we got to Venice,” she said. “One of the chaps from the dig. He must have been on the train, but there’s no sign of him now.” She reached inside her bag and pulled out a cigarette. “Probably doing this leg of the journey by boat. His name’s Max. You’ll meet him when you come to visit.”

  Agatha nodded. She wondered if it would be all right to admit to her encounter with Max now that he was safely off the train. On balance, she decided, it was probably better to keep quiet.

  “He’s what you’d call the strong, silent type.” Katharine inserted the cigarette in its holder. “He was a real mouse when he first came to Mesopotamia. Straight down from Oxford and not much clue about anything.”

  “How old is he?”

  Katharine had the holder between her lips now. “Twenty-five,” she mumbled, flipping up the top of a lighter inlaid with mother-of-pearl. A plume of smoke drifted across the table. “He looks older, though. Had a fairly bad time of it just before he came to us.” She tapped her cigarette against the ashtray. “He told me he had a friend at Oxford he was very close to: Esme Howard—son of Lord Howard of Penrith. He was unwell for most of the final year, and in the end, they diagnosed Hodgkin’s disease. Max was actually with him when he died.”

  “How tragic.” Agatha blinked. The words sounded trite.

  “It had quite a profound effect on him, I think. It took a while for him to open up, but he told me all about it one night.” Katharine inhaled, turning her head sideways as she blew the smoke out. The woman across the aisle cast her a black look, which Katharine returned with a tight smile. “He told me he made a deathbed promise to his friend to convert to Catholicism. Apparently, Esme was very religious, and the way he dealt with the business of dying made a huge impression on Max. At the dig he goes to Mass every Sunday even though it’s a twenty-mile round trip by mule across the desert.”

  Agatha found it difficult to square this description with the warm, funny person who had treated her to ice cream in Venice. Perhaps, like her, grief had made him careful how much of himself he gave away.

  “Leonard won’t let him have the car because he’s not keen on Catholics,” Katharine went on. “Len’s father was an Anglican priest, and he was going to go into the church himself. He’s very hot on the Old Testament: looks for names from Genesis on every tablet we dig up.” She shrugged. “He’s convinced that Ur is the site of the Great Flood.”

  Agatha had read about this theory in a newspaper report. From the look on Katharine’s face, Agatha gathered that Katharine thought her soon-to-be husband was barking up the wrong tree. There had been a photograph of Leonard Woolley alongside the article. He stared out from beneath thick, bushy eyebrows with a stern, uncompromising look—a zealous intensity in his eyes. His hair was thinning on top and gray around the ears. Agatha guessed he must be a good ten years older than Katharine. They would make an unusual couple. A shared passion for archaeology had, apparently, bridged the gulf that age and physical appearance might have put between them. Perhaps it had been an unflattering photograph: perhaps Leonard Woolley was not the ogre he appeared to be.

  “Your terrine aux fruits de mer, madame.” The waiter broke into her thoughts, depositing a small work of art on the table in front of her: a pink jellied mousse molded into the shape of a starfish, with radishes and carrots expertly carved to resemble sea anemones. She felt a trickle of saliva under her tongue.

  “You’ll like Max.” Katharine crushed her cigarette against the ashtray. “He’s a darling.”

  In the saloon after dinner Katharine wanted to order White Russians.

  “Oh, not for me,” Agatha said. “Just a glass of water, please.”

  “Is your head hurting?”

  “No—it’s not that. Alcohol doesn’t really agree with me.”

  “You poor thing!” Katharine shook her head, making the bugle bead trim on her chiffon dress dance like the raindrops on the window. “I’m going to make the most of it, I’m afraid. Not much of the hard stuff to be had in the desert—and Leonard’s a teetotaler.”

  At the other end of the carriage the pianist struck up the opening bars of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Agatha drew in a breath. The air tasted smoky. It wasn’t just Katharine’s cigarette. There were a number of men smoking cigars. Agatha longed to open a window, but the storm raging outside made that impossible.

  When the waiter brought Katharine’s cocktail, a man came in his
wake and asked if they would mind if he joined them. He was a tall, sad-eyed Frenchman who said he was an engineer traveling to Syria.

  Agatha saw straight away that Jean-Claude, as he insisted on being called, was entranced by Katharine. Her French was not particularly good, and his English was halting. Agatha could have joined in the conversation quite effectively, but from the moment he sat down, she felt like an unwanted extra. Watching Katharine with this man was like watching a beautiful bird of prey hovering over a rabbit. She was not flirting, exactly—it wasn’t as blatant as that. It was the way she looked at him from under her eyelashes, her head tilted to one side and her lips parted in a half smile, as if everything he said was clever and funny. He was talking about the dam he was in charge of building. It wasn’t the least bit funny, nothing but dry facts and figures. But Katharine seemed to be enjoying it.

  Jean-Claude called for more cocktails and turned to Agatha for the first time, looking at her glass of water. This was her cue to exit.

  “You don’t mind if I turn in, do you?” she said to Katharine.

  “Oh no—of course not.” Katharine barely turned her head. Her eyes were locked on those of her new companion.

  As Agatha made her way back to the compartment, she wondered what Leonard Woolley would say if he could see his bride-to-be knocking back cocktails with a complete stranger. The photograph in the newspaper, together with the glimpses Katharine had given, suggested a stern, high-principled, remote sort of man for whom work came before everything else. Hard to imagine him having fun of any kind. Was this evening a last fling for Katharine? And if she really was the party-loving, flirtatious type, what on earth was she doing marrying a man like Woolley?

  CHAPTER 9

  Lyubimets to Istanbul

  Agatha didn’t hear Katharine come to bed. In the restless minutes between closing her eyes and drifting off to sleep, she thought of Nancy, wondering if she was lying awake in the storm. It seemed an eternity since last night. The memory of the door flying open, the blast of the wind, and the sight of the ground falling away made her head throb. She hoped that Nancy was not awake, that she was not reliving the events of the night before, that she was not secretly planning a repeat performance.