Death in a Desert Land

by Andrew Wilson

“Casting your mind back to when you took the pictures of Sarah, do you remember seeing anything that struck you as unusual?”

  He fell silent for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t think so. It was such a jolly occasion to begin with, wasn’t it? Everyone in such good spirits. I took some shots of us strolling towards the ziggurat, people chatting, the food, the servants.”

  I thought back to Mrs. Woolley’s wild theory regarding her first husband and the incredible suggestion that he might actually still be alive. “Can I ask: Have you noticed any of the Arabs behaving in a peculiar manner recently?”

  “In what way?”

  “I don’t know; perhaps a man who seemed out of place or one who looked like he might be in . . . disguise?”

  “Disguise? What do you mean?”

  “I know it sounds extremely unlikely, but when I was talking to Mrs. Woolley, she mentioned her fear that her first husband might not be dead—that he could be here, on this dig, perhaps disguised as one of the workers.”

  “But that sounds absurd!”

  I had to agree. “I wanted to mention it in case you had seen anyone acting strangely.”

  “Sorry, but no, nothing springs to mind.” Harry returned to the desk and looked down at the shards of his Leica. “What I want to find out is who is responsible for smashing up my camera. I don’t know what to do.” He gazed at some pieces of metal in the vain hope that they might meld together and somehow miraculously form a camera once more. “Do you think we should go and ask the others if they saw or heard anything suspicious?”

  “Yes, it might help,” I said. Although the culprit was unlikely to declare himself, perhaps it might be possible to gauge the reactions and pick up traces of guilt. I told Harry that if he broke the news of what had happened, I would watch the faces and the bodies of the rest of the group for any hints or clues. He picked up the remains of his camera, together with the ruined spool of film, and walked into the main room, where he threw everything onto the table.

  “Oh, my, what’s happened?” asked Cynthia Jones. She was about to lay the table for lunch.

  There were similar cries of astonishment from Father Burrows and Lawrence McRae, while Cecil remained sullen and silent. Harry explained how he had found his broken camera and voiced his suspicions about a possible motive behind the destruction. And as I thought, no one admitted they had seen or heard anything untoward.

  “And no noise at any time?” asked Harry, staring at each of the group in turn. “Nothing? It seems extraordinary that none of you heard the sound of smashing from my room while I was gone.”

  “Perhaps you need to inform Mr. Woolley,” suggested Cynthia.

  “Don’t you think he’s got enough on his plate at the moment,” sneered Cecil, “what with having a wife for a murderer?”

  We all ignored the boy’s blunt remark. “Yes, I’ll ask him if I can have a word,” said Harry before he left us in uncomfortable silence. I studied the figures in the room in earnest; none of them seemed to be showing any sign of guilt. But then, when did those with a criminal bent ever show signs of culpability? They were, I knew, masters of deception, well practiced in the art of duplicity.

  A minute or so later Harry Miller returned with Woolley. The photographer had already explained what had happened, but Leonard wanted to see the evidence for himself. He walked over to the table and picked up the shattered pieces of Harry’s camera.

  “Damn shame,” said Woolley, turning the fragments over in his hands. “Nice piece of equipment it was, too. I used to own one similar—an older model, though.”

  “Do you think Mr. or Mrs. Archer heard anything?” asked Harry. “Where are they now? In their room?”

  “No, they’re still with their daughter’s body,” replied Woolley. “I don’t think now is the best time to ask them.”

  “How is your wife?” I asked.

  “As well as can be expected,” he said.

  “She didn’t take the news of her imminent move well, I imagine,” Lawrence McRae ventured.

  Woolley ignored the remark and encouraged the group to get on with their lunch as normal. Soon he would accompany his wife out to the shed, which he believed should now be ready for her.

  “Mr. Miller and I were just talking about the keys to the padlock,” I said. “We were wondering how many copies exist and who has them.”

  “Yes, it’s something I was thinking about, too,” he replied. “Probably a good idea to gather all of them together, considering what’s happened.” He turned to address the group. “If you could search through your things and see if you have any small keys that might fit a padlock, I would be so very grateful.” It was difficult to know whether Woolley was being sarcastic or whether he really was apologizing to his colleagues for putting them to this trouble.

  The group started to check their pockets, and some of them went off to their rooms to search their drawers and desks. A few minutes later three people—Leonard Woolley himself, Harry Miller, and Lawrence McRae—returned to the main room and placed their keys on the table.

  “That’s all of them?” asked Woolley. “Miss Jones? Cecil? Father Burrows?” All three shook their heads.

  “And who is going to guard the keys?” asked McRae.

  “Well, I thought I might,” said Woolley.

  “But what if the desire to liberate your wife suddenly came upon you?” persisted the architect.

  “What would you suggest, Mr. McRae?” said Woolley icily. I could tell he was doing his very best to keep his temper under control.

  “Perhaps Mr. Archer should keep them.”

  “Oh, no, I don’t think that would be a very good idea,” I said. All faces turned to me.

  “Why ever not?” asked McRae.

  “I was thinking that we shouldn’t place that burden on his shoulders at such a difficult time,” I replied. The truth was that I did not trust him or his wife with the keys.

  “Yes, that’s a good point, I suppose,” said Woolley. “So why don’t we let Father Burrows take charge of them?” He turned to the emaciated priest, who had taken his spectacles off and was in the process of cleaning them with his handkerchief. “Eric, what do you think? Would you be prepared to do that?”

  The Jesuit paused for a moment, looked through his glasses, placed them back on the bridge of his nose, and nodded. “Yes, I don’t see why not. I’ve got a strongbox in my room. They’ll be safe enough there.” He was indeed the best choice for the job; after all, I knew that he had not killed Sarah Archer because father Burrows had remained at my side as he accompanied me down from the top of the ziggurat.

  “Well, then, what are we waiting for?” said McRae, addressing Woolley. “You may as well take her over there.”

  The archaeologist began to protest. “I think she should be allowed to enjoy a few more hours in her room. After all, lunch—”

  Just then two pale figures appeared like ghosts in the corner of the room. Mr. Archer’s demeanor, once so confident and impenetrable, seemed to have crumbled: his eyes were red and raw from grief and his shoulders had slumped forwards as if all life had been sucked from him. His wife looked almost deranged: her hair hung about her swollen, tearstained face and it was clear that she had not changed her clothes from the day before.

  Mr. Archer cleared his throat. “I think it’s best if she went into the shed straight away, don’t you?” he said weakly.

  How could anyone argue with a parent who had just spent hours sitting next to the body of his murdered daughter?

  “Very well,” said Woolley in a quiet voice. “I’ll take her in there myself.”

  Woolley left the room and we fell once more into silence. Cynthia Jones went over to Mr. and Mrs. Archer and tried to encourage them to eat some lunch, but the couple refused. I suspected that none of us had much of an appetite for food at that moment.

  “At least come and sit down and have a cup of tea,” urged Cynthia.

  “No, thank you,” replied Mrs. Archer, her head angled to
wards the door and her eyes full of fury.

  “But you must be feeling so weak,” continued Miss Jones. “You have to keep your strength up. Mr. Archer, please try to persuade your wife to have something. We don’t want you to—”

  At this point Ruth Archer broke away from her husband and ran out of the room. A moment later we heard her screaming as though demented. Each of us sprang up from our seats and ran towards the courtyard, where a nasty scene between Mrs. Archer and Katharine Woolley was taking place.

  “You murderer!” shouted Ruth Archer, her face red with rage.

  “Please contain yourself, Mrs. Archer,” urged Woolley, who had been leading his wife from the house.

  “Why did you do that to my daughter?” Mrs. Archer shrieked, her voice breaking. “Just tell me why? What did she ever do to you?”

  Katharine opened her mouth to say something, but Leonard pulled her towards him. “Try to ignore her. She’s suffering; one must pity her,” he said.

  “It’s you I pity,” hissed Mrs. Archer as she lurched forwards.

  “Ruth, that’s not helping matters,” said Hubert Archer, placing an arm around his wife and drawing her away.

  “It’s you I’d like to kill!” she shouted at Katharine.

  “Ruth, now, that’s enough!” continued Mr. Archer. “Try to control yourself, please.”

  At this, Ruth Archer burst into tears and ran back into the house; the sound of the slamming door echoed through the hot, dusty air.

  “You can understand how distressed she must feel,” said Mr. Archer.

  “She’s still in shock,” said Woolley. “Totally understandable in the circumstances. I’m sure Katharine won’t—”

  Katharine Woolley stared in astonishment at the two men before she interrupted her husband. “Well, I’m pleased that you both feel able to talk for your wives. And, Leonard, if you were about to say that I wouldn’t mind, well, you’re wrong. I do mind. In fact, I’m not only angry but deeply hurt by the whole saga.” She turned to the rest of us watching the drama unfold and with a deep and theatrical voice said, “As for you—all of you!—look at you gawping at me as if I’m some common form of entertainment you might see in some end-of-the-pier show. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”

  “Come on, let’s get you into your new quarters,” said Leonard, trying to calm her down.

  “You make it sound as though I’m moving into a hotel. I don’t know if it’s escaped your notice, Leonard, but I’m being imprisoned against my will in a dirty, decrepit shed. Is that how little you think of me?”

  “Let’s not make another scene, now,” he said. “I’m sure all this will be sorted out when the police arrive tomorrow. It’s only a temporary measure.”

  Katharine was about to answer back but clearly thought better of it. Instead she sighed in frustration and allowed herself to be led by her husband down towards the shed. She cut a pathetic figure, with her smart lavender hat positioned so neatly on her head and her mauve scarf blowing in the dry wind, almost as if she had dressed in expectation of taking a pleasant jaunt in a motorcar. As she entered the hut she turned to the rest of us, her face full of dismay, hurt, and betrayal. It was the kind of look a sick horse might give you the moment before it was shot.

  16

  Nobody cared for lunch, and so all of us drifted back to our rooms. I went through my notes, assessing the case from the very beginning. Despite hours of reading and thinking, I could not find any link between the death of Gertrude Bell—which was, after all, the reason I had been dispatched by Davison to Ur—and the murder of Sarah Archer.

  Were there two different killers at work here? It certainly seemed that way. After all, Miss Bell had died from an overdose in her bed at her home in Baghdad; even if she had a premonition that someone wanted to kill her, her death would have been a peaceful one. It looked as though Miss Archer, however, had been hit over the head with a rock—a nasty, brutal, painful murder. But could the two killers be working together? If so, what had they to gain from the deaths? Could Katharine have employed someone to murder Miss Bell? Leonard Woolley himself had told me that life was cheap in Iraq. What was it that Gertrude Bell had written in that letter to her father? Yes, she had been talking about a perilous journey to Hayyil, where she had been taken prisoner: “There I heard it said that in that place murder was considered so normal, it was likened to the spilling of milk.”

  Did Mrs. Woolley harbor a secret resentment towards other women? Was it a simple case of madness? After all, if Katharine was that insane, then there really would be no need to examine the case for evidence of a complex motive. Perhaps, possessed by a blind rage or in the midst of some sort of maniacal frenzy, she had indeed taken that rock and bludgeoned Sarah Archer to death. I knew that it was also perfectly possible for such murderers, those classified as mentally unhinged, to erase violent acts from their memories. Maybe Katharine was guilty of the crime but believed herself to be innocent.

  Yet, as I read my notes, the thing that struck me was how Mrs. Woolley had been regarded as an oddity from the very first, almost as if someone was trying to prejudice opinion against her. I had heard her described as everything from strangely attractive, demanding, manipulative, jealous, eccentric, and unreliable to hysterical, erratic, insane. After this, perhaps it was only natural to attach that other deadly label to her personality—that of a murderer—especially when she was discovered sitting next to a body with blood on her hands.

  The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that there was someone behind all of this—someone who was desperate to cast Katharine Woolley in the role of a killer. But could this be a case of a very clever double bluff? I remembered the way Katharine told me that she had admired my novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I also thought back to the plot of my first published novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which featured a killer who was the most obvious suspect. Sometimes it was better for a murderer to hide in plain sight.

  And what was I to make of her wild surmise that her first husband might actually still be alive? It sounded preposterous, but nevertheless it needed to be ruled out. I intended to investigate this matter further by asking Woolley whether it would be possible to set up a meeting with Hamoudi. I doubted that the foreman spoke much English, and so Woolley or one of the other members of staff would have to be present to translate.

  I found Leonard in the antika room studying a set of precious stones lying on a sheet of white paper.

  “Come and take a closer look at these,” he said, ushering me over. “They were found scattered in one of the death pits, and this set here belonged on one necklace, I believe.”

  “What are they?” I asked as I peered at the delicate beads, some colored a dull red, others a startling bright blue.

  “A mix of carnelian and lapis lazuli, which would have been interspersed with gold using a delicate filigree technique. Can you see?” With a pencil he pointed out tiny fragments of the precious metal. “The carnelian may have come from India and the lapis from Afghanistan. The person buried in this grave wanted to look beautiful, even in death.”

  I asked after Katharine, but it was clear that Woolley did not want to talk about his wife. I then brought up Mrs. Woolley’s suspicion that her first husband may not have died back in 1919 and her fear that he was the one behind the recent attack.

  “But how could that be possible?” he asked. “And why would he want to do that?”

  “I know: it sounds rather extraordinary, doesn’t it,” I said. “But I suppose Colonel Keeling could be out to exact some sort of revenge on his wife.” I explained the possibility that he could have disguised himself in some way among the workers; then I asked whether it might be possible to put a few questions to Hamoudi. Although he acknowledged that the scenario seemed most unlikely, he agreed to send for the foreman.

  “I think Keeling spoke good Arabic, but even so, I’m sure Hamoudi would have noticed if anything like that was going on under his watch,” he said, when a look
of alarm came into his eyes, shortly followed by disgust. “But that means . . . no, surely not.” He could hardly bring himself to say the words.

  I knew what he was thinking: if Keeling was still alive, that would make Woolley and his wife bigamists. “Don’t worry, I’m certain it won’t come to that,” I said, not wanting to increase his fear by articulating it.

  “I’ll go and find him now,” he said, placing the beads back in their box. “You’re very welcome to stay here, though. I’m sure you’re not going to run away with any of our precious treasures.”

  I told him that I would wait for him to return, secretly pleased that I had the opportunity to explore a room that I had seen only once before, in candlelight and only for a few minutes. As I stood in the dusty storeroom, the sound of Katharine’s distress the evening when she had found the body of her cat seemed to echo through the air. The thought that the corpse of Sarah Archer lay only a few feet away, in the pantry, unsettled me. Despite feeling on edge and anxious, I thought it only right to search the antika room for any possible clues. After all, it was a locked room, out of bounds to most of the group.

  Ranged around the room were a series of shelves on which lay dozens of brown boxes. A label had been attached to each one, but on close inspection these did not give me much of a clue, as they were written using a particular code of letters and numbers. I picked up a box at random, carried it over to the trestle table, and eased off the lid. The box had been packed with tissue paper, which whispered to me of secrets of the past as I searched through it.

  At the very bottom of the box lay a small but beautiful dagger ornamented with gold. Delicately, I placed my finger on the very tip of the blade, which felt as sharp as if someone had whetted it the day before. I wondered who had been the last person to carry the weapon. Had it been used to kill? My imagination stirred, and I saw a man greeting his best friend, offering him a seat at his table, and asking him to consume the lavish feast his servants had prepared before walking behind him and stabbing his companion in the back. I saw it all play out before my eyes: a man who killed his friend because of the discovery of his wife’s infidelity. Although culture and customs changed, I doubted human nature did; the same problems, desires, wants, and passions existed thousands of years ago just as they did today.