For her part, Katharine listened to my account with a certain regal dignity, almost as if she occupied a different, higher plane. Although she had suffered, she would not let the group know quite how much she had endured. It was a trait that one had to admire.
“And so you see, after explaining the complex situation to Captain Forster, we fashioned a confession from Cecil in which he took responsibility for the crime,” I said. “It seemed as though the motive was a clear one. He said he had been driven to kill Sarah Archer out of misdirected love. They had quarreled that night on the ziggurat. He had reached out to touch her, but there was an unpleasant scuffle and Miss Archer fell back and hit her head. Seeing what he had done, Cecil decided he had to kill her and then went on to frame Mrs. Woolley for the crime. This of course was absolute fiction. He played no part in Miss Archer’s death. But Cecil’s false confession was essential to drawing out the killer. I suspected that the person behind all of this would make a mistake. And Cecil’s confession to the murder of Miss Archer forced the killer to make their first error.”
As I approached the final moment of revelation—a moment when anything could happen—I was conscious that my heart was beating faster than normal. My mouth felt dry, and even though I took a sip of water—water I had brought with me from the safety of the kitchen—the liquid did nothing to ease my discomfort. All eyes were on me.
“What was the error?” asked Forster.
“The killer acted in such a way that they revealed their true identity,” I said as I tried to clear my throat.
“So who is it?” demanded Mr. Archer, looking around the table. “If it’s not Mrs. Woolley and it wasn’t the boy McRae, which one of us is the murderer? I demand to know who killed my daughter!”
32
“I don’t think I can stand this much longer,” said Cynthia Jones, standing up from the table. “I think we could all do with a fresh pot of tea, don’t you?”
The spinsterish woman shuffled off into the kitchen. “Yes, a very good idea, Miss Jones,” I said as I continued to look around the table at the increasingly uncomfortable faces before me. “To begin with, it seemed we had our man. I discovered someone at Ur who was not who he said he was. Mr. Miller—or should I say Mr. Conway—could you please stand up?”
“Is this really necessary?” said Conway.
“Please do what Mrs. Christie asks,” insisted Davison.
The photographer pushed himself out of his chair and nervously rubbed his mustache with the fingers of his right hand.
“Miller?” asked an astounded Woolley. “What is this? What does Mrs. Christie mean?”
Conway took a deep breath and on the exhalation began to make his confession. “It’s true,” he said. “I’m not who I said I was.” I nodded to signal that he should explain a little more. “My name’s not Harry Miller. I’m . . . I’m Alan Conway.”
“And tell everyone about your job,” said Davison. “Your real purpose at Ur, I mean.”
Conway gave me a look that pleaded with me to intervene. I had once had feelings for him, but I knew that it would be wrong to let my emotions stand in the way of justice.
“I think you owe Mr. Woolley an explanation, don’t you?” I said, perhaps more harshly than I intended.
“I’m . . . I’m here because I’ve been copying some of the treasures,” he said in a quiet voice.
“You’ve been doing what?” cried Woolley.
Conway described how he had been using his cover as a photographer to make electrotype copies of valuable objects so he could then ship the real artifacts back to America. As he listened to Conway’s account, Woolley’s face drained of color. Quite understandably, he wanted to know the specifics, but while Conway was in the middle of detailing how he had made the copies and outlined who was behind the plan, Mr. Archer lost patience and interrupted him.
“I don’t care two hoots for you and your trinkets!” he shouted. “I still want to know about my daughter. Who murdered my Sarah?”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “I was just coming to that. As I said, I did have my suspicions about Mr. Conway here, purely because of the evidence that showed he was operating under a false identity. But then something happened which proved beyond a doubt that—”
“Now who would like some tea?” asked Miss Jones as she returned to the table with a tray.
“Can’t you be quiet, woman!” shouted Mr. Archer.
Miss Jones looked shocked and upset. “I’m sorry, but I just thought we could all do with—”
“Mrs. Christie was about to tell us the name of the man who murdered my daughter,” he said.
I took another deep breath. The time had come for the final revelation. “It was not a man,” I said.
There was a collective gasp and more than a few cries and exclamations, some of them quite earthy. Katharine Woolley placed a gloved hand over her mouth. Mrs. Archer looked as if she was going to be sick. Father Burrows seemed so shocked, he did not know what to do with himself. And Woolley was struck down by a strange paralysis, like one of those poor men at Pompeii whose bodies had been covered in volcanic ash all those hundreds of years ago.
“Yes, I’m sorry to say that the person behind all of this is a member of the so-called fairer sex,” I said. “I may as well name her as she is standing before us. Have you anything to say for yourself . . . Miss Jones?”
Cynthia looked at me with a mix of innocence, amusement, and astonishment. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Come, now, you know very well that there’s no point in pretending any longer,” I said. “Yes, you’ve been very clever, particularly at the beginning of your plan, because you knew that Mrs. Woolley already suffered from terrible headaches. You believed that people would think that Mrs. Woolley’s other symptoms—which we’ll come to shortly—would simply be an extension of her illness. But you’ve also been so very wicked. How could you kill that poor cat? You knew that Mrs. Woolley adored that creature. What did you do? Did you give it a special little something in its food? And I suppose you must have drugged Katharine at that time. She would have had to be sedated, because you took something sharp to her arms to make it look as though the cat had scratched her. Is that what happened?”
“This is completely absurd,” she said. She looked around the table at her friends for signs of support. “You must be out of your mind.”
“And, of course, you were the one who was responsible for spiking Katharine’s creams with the hyoscyamine, weren’t you?”
“The hyo . . . the what?”
“You know very well what I’m talking about. But I’ll explain more in a moment.”
“I think you’ve been reading too many of those silly detective stories—that, or writing one,” she said, pretending to laugh.
“I think this particular tale—and your involvement in it—is beyond anything even I could have dreamt up,” I said. “Let’s start at the very beginning, Miss Jones”—I could no longer bring myself to call her by her Christian name—“with the letters that Miss Bell wrote to her father: unsent letters which described how she feared for her life; documents in which she said that if she were to be killed, the authorities should look to Ur for her murderer.”
“But what’s that got to do with the murder of Sarah?” asked Mrs. Archer.
“Forgive me, but to understand Sarah’s death, we need to take a step back in time,” I said. “It was perfectly natural that when those letters came to light, the first line of inquiry would be to follow up Miss Bell’s suspicions. And so that’s why I was sent here: to investigate the matter.”
I paused for a moment as I cleared my throat. “I always thought that there was something odd about those two letters and the accompanying drawing of the Great Death Pit at Ur, with Miss Bell’s initials placed next to one of the stick figures. It was strange that they were never sent, that they were just waiting around for someone to find them, almost as if someone had placed them in that seed box, where the gar
dener would at some point come across them. And, despite the detailed nature of the letters, my first reaction was that they were forgeries. Yet apparently an expert had compared the handwriting of the letters to Miss Bell’s own hand and declared them to be one and the same. But then one night, during what seemed like a perfectly innocent conversation, I heard a comment that caused me to think. Do you recall what it was?”
Miss Jones did not answer.
“I thought not. Do you remember, Father Burrows?”
The priest looked bemused. “No, I’m afraid I don’t,” he replied.
“Let me refresh your memories,” I said. “It was a conversation of all things about learning the cuneiform script. Father Burrows, you very kindly offered to teach me how to write it, and in an aside you said . . . yes, this was it: ‘When I first met Miss Jones, she was a complete novice like you, and yet she picked it up very quickly.’ You added, ‘Quite the natural, weren’t you, Miss Jones?’ That got me wondering. If you could master a script like cuneiform with such ease, perhaps you were a natural at copying the handwriting of others. Not only that, you were a close companion of Miss Bell’s and you would have been privy to certain pieces of information that she would have shared only with a very good friend. But I kept these thoughts in the back of my mind. You see, at that point it was still very early days. Everyone, I suppose, was a suspect.”
“Everyone knows I was a friend of Gertrude’s, and, yes, I did pick up cuneiform easily—but so?” asked Cynthia, looking at Mrs. Archer for support. “That means nothing.”
“And, Mrs. Christie, aren’t you forgetting that poor Cynthia here was herself the victim of the killer?” asked Mrs. Archer. “She could have died by drinking that acid.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Archer,” said Cynthia. “At least somebody has some thought for my feelings. Now, why don’t we all have a cup of tea?”
I watched as, with a steady hand, she lifted a large teapot and began to pour. There were, I noticed, eleven cups in total. But there were twelve of us in the room. Cynthia walked around the table, placing the cups before everyone apart from Katharine Woolley. I knew, when challenged and presented with the evidence, that Cynthia would plan something—and I had deliberately allowed her to go into the kitchen when she said she was going to make tea—but I could never have imagined that she would dream up such a wicked scenario.
As people lifted the cups to their lips I said, “Don’t touch the tea. Please, whatever you do, don’t drink it. It’s poisoned.” The group froze as if trapped in a grotesque tableau.
It was in that moment that I saw Miss Jones show her true colors. She turned from the shy, retiring spinster—the kind of woman who would not say boo to a goose—into something else, something purely evil.
“Look at the cups,” I said. “Look at where she’s placed them. Each of you has one—including Miss Jones herself—everyone, that is, but Mrs. Woolley.”
“So?” said Cynthia, a darkness burning in her eyes.
“It’s the death pit, isn’t it?” I said, remembering the eerie place of human sacrifice that Woolley had shown me soon after I first arrived at Ur. “You were going to poison everyone—including yourself—and leave Mrs. Woolley alive. When the authorities came they would find everyone dead apart from Katharine. No matter how hard Mrs. Woolley tried to explain what had happened here, her account would be taken as nothing more than the crazed rantings of a madwoman. Katharine Woolley would be surrounded by eleven bodies—all victims of poisoning—and she would be the only survivor. Of course she would have to be the killer. No other explanation would make sense.”
“But why would Miss Jones want to kill herself, together with the rest of us, but leave Katharine alive?” asked Woolley, pushing his teacup away from him.
The hatred that had festered for so long in Miss Jones’s breast began to show itself now. “Just look at her, sitting there as if she were better than the rest of us, like some kind of queen.” Cynthia seemed to spit the words as she looked at Katharine. “If only you knew the truth about her.”
At this, Katharine started as if woken from a dream.
“Yes, that got your attention, didn’t it, Mrs. Woolley?” continued Miss Jones. “Or should I say Mrs. Keeling?”
The mention of Katharine’s first married name brought an expression of horror to her eyes.
“Why don’t we talk a little of Mr. Keeling and your love for him—or should I say your lack of love?” said Cynthia in a horrible, mocking voice.
“Oh, please no,” begged Katharine. “Please not that.”
“Is there something you’d like to keep secret?” Cynthia continued in her nasty tone. “People have always wondered why your husband killed himself after only six months of marriage. He shot himself, didn’t he? At the foot of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. All very dramatic.”
“Cynthia, please, I’ll do anything—anything you ask,” said Katharine, who had started to sob now.
“Stop this immediately!” shouted Woolley. “I will not have you upsetting my wife!”
“Your wife?” replied Cynthia. “Are you sure about that?”
It was then that Katharine reached for her husband’s cup and, so slowly as if to make the action almost indiscernible, began to lift it towards her. She brought it closer to her lips, and just as she was poised to take a sip, I said, “The tea! Don’t let her drink it.”
Woolley was quick to respond and dashed the cup from her hands, spilling the dark liquid across the table.
“I can’t bear it,” cried Katharine. “Oh, why didn’t you let me end it all? I wish I were dead!”
“It’s an interesting point,” I said, trying to sound as detached and unemotional as possible. Although I wanted to go and console Katharine, who was sobbing now, I had to steel myself to remain strong. “Miss Jones could have killed Mrs. Woolley at any time. After all, she had many opportunities. She was being poisoned over time with the small doses of hyoscyamine in her cosmetic creams, and it would not have been hard to give her a fatal dose. Indeed, she could have been the one to die that night out on the ziggurat instead of your daughter,” I said, addressing Mr. and Mrs. Archer.
“And by the sounds of it she could have died drinking this damned tea,” said Forster, who went to stand guard by Miss Jones. He cast a look of warning in her direction. “Let’s clear this lot up. Burrows, would you be so kind as to take the tea things away? Don’t throw anything away, though: we’ll need to test it for poison.”
Slightly taken aback at being treated like a common servant, Burrows placed the cups, saucers, and teapot back on the tray and then carried them back into the kitchen. I waited for Father Burrows to return before I continued.
“As I was saying, Miss Jones took advantage of what she thought were the perfect circumstances in which to commit the crime. It was nighttime. The situation was chaotic. Her two victims—because there were two victims here, not just one—came together like two planets in an unholy alignment. There had been an argument between the two women, and it was clear that Mrs. Woolley did not care for Sarah Archer. Miss Jones saw Sarah rushing down the steps and then realized that, if she were to smash that rock over her head, the girl would collapse and be discovered by Mrs. Woolley. Yet even she could not have envisaged the scene that followed, with Katharine falling down by the girl’s body, besmirching her hands in Sarah’s freshly spilt blood.”
Mrs. Archer looked at Cynthia Jones as if seeing her for the first time. No doubt she was forced to reassess the moments of friendliness and quiet intimacy that had passed between them. It had all been a sham, a performance. This quiet mouse of a woman was her daughter’s killer. In addition, this unassuming spinster had prepared a pot of tea that had the capacity to kill everyone in the room, including Mrs. Archer herself. As she came to this realization hatred, emanated from her eyes.
“Miss Jones wanted to exact a revenge that went beyond murder,” I continued. “At the moment I merely want to set out the facts of the case; we’ll come to the mot
ive in a little while. When Katharine Woolley was discovered next to the body of Sarah Archer, it seemed as though she must be the killer. After all, everyone in the camp believed Mrs. Woolley to be unbalanced, if not insane. And so the stage was set. It looked as though Katharine Woolley would be hauled back to Baghdad, where she would receive a terrible punishment for her crimes and, crucially, her reputation would be ruined.
“But then something happened which skewed Miss Jones’s plan. When Cecil ‘confessed’ to the crime, I knew the real murderer would have to do something desperate. And indeed, Miss Jones was forced into a corner. First of all, there was the scene in Mrs. Woolley’s room the night of the sandstorm. Katharine had started to behave oddly. She was convinced that she could smell Sarah Archer’s blood on her hands. Then she lashed out at me. I went to find Mr. Woolley, but as I was speaking to him Father Burrows shouted for help. I returned to Mrs. Woolley’s room to discover Miss Jones in a highly distressed state. Her wrist and the lower part of her arm were all red, as if someone had twisted her skin, and she told me that Katharine had threatened her with the chilling words ‘Watch out: tonight you’re going to die. Tonight . . . I’m going to kill you.’
“The evidence seemed to suggest that Miss Jones was the victim. After all, Katharine Woolley was behaving very oddly. It looked as though she had attacked poor Miss Jones and had gone so far as to say that she was going to murder her. Then, later that night, we heard screaming coming from Miss Jones’s room, and after breaking down her door we discovered that someone had swapped her nighttime water for a glass of hydrochloric acid. The conclusion was simple: Mrs. Woolley had indeed tried to follow through on her threat to kill Miss Jones.
“And yet . . . were there any other witnesses to the conversation between Miss Jones and Katharine Woolley? No, there were not. The account came entirely from Miss Jones herself. In addition, just before the episode when Mrs. Woolley started to behave oddly, she had been massaging cream into her hands—one of the creams which I now know had been tampered with. I noticed that her pupils were dilated and she said she was desperately thirsty—both symptoms of hyoscyamine poisoning.”
Death in a Desert Land Page 29