Death in a Desert Land

by Andrew Wilson

  “Ask away. I’m an open book.” That was not entirely true.

  Miller began to ask me some questions and I told him a little about my writing, my childhood, and my first marriage. He did not, thank goodness, ask about my disappearance in December 1926, an event in my life which had been on the front page of every newspaper. I also shared with him the feelings of guilt I felt about Rosalind: she blamed me for the breakdown of the marriage. It was important for me to show my vulnerable side to him if the plan was going to work.

  “Sometimes I feel so alone,” I said. “Of course, I have my writing, but often I think I only do that to tell myself stories because there’s no one around to talk to.”

  “You don’t have to be. Alone, that is.”

  “I know it’s partly my fault. I’m not a terribly social being, I’m afraid.”

  “No, I didn’t mean that exactly,” he said. “You . . . you could always marry again.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, laughing. “After all, who would want an old maid like me?”

  Miller reached out and placed a hand on my shoulder. The touch was like a current of electricity through me. Although my mind felt detached—I knew exactly what I was doing—my body was a different matter. The photographer saw the effect his gentle caress had on me and, after looking into my eyes, felt emboldened to take a step closer. It had been so long since I had experienced anything like this. There had only been Archie. And then he gradually absented himself from our bed. He turned away at night, pleading tiredness. Then he started to spend more time away from home. There was business, he said; there was the golf. In truth, all along it had been the other woman in his life, Miss Neele, a woman who was now the new Mrs. Christie.

  “Don’t put yourself down—you’re no old maid,” whispered Miller. His hand moved from my shoulder to the small of my back and he drew me towards him. The sensation was a delicious one. I had to tell myself once more not to fall for his charms. There was something I needed to accomplish—to keep Miller away from his room long enough for Davison to search it. Davison and I had agreed on that much, but we had had different opinions on the actual methods involved. I could not risk telling my fellow secret agent what I intended to do in case he ruled against it. Davison assumed that we were going for a walk—nothing more than that. Of course it was a risk, but I thought it was one worth taking.

  Miller moved his head forwards and bent down to kiss me, but I stepped away from him and looked around to see if anyone had spotted us. My reticence was all too real, and he simply interpreted my actions as those of a woman of my class and background.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I overstepped the mark.”

  “No, not at all,” I replied.

  “Perhaps we should get back to the house,” he suggested, looking at his watch. “No doubt they’ll be wondering what’s happened to us.”

  I knew Davison would still be searching Miller’s room. I had to try and delay him.

  “I’m rather out of practice, I’m afraid,” I said, blushing. “Since my husband left me, well, it’s been . . .”

  “You don’t have to explain,” he said, moving towards me again. He reached out and, with the tip of his thumb, touched my lips. He took hold of my hand and led me into a dark, shaded corner of the ziggurat where no one could see us. “Look, there’s nobody around. You don’t have to worry.” As his face neared mine I inhaled traces of his expensive-smelling cologne. The aroma was deliciously heady and transported me away from the desert sands, but I had to remind myself that Miller was using it to mask something. The scent wasn’t his true smell, and his name wasn’t even his real one. What exactly was he covering up? I hoped Davison would be deep into the search of his room now.

  “You seem distracted,” he said.

  “No, I was just thinking about—”

  And with that he stepped away from me. “I really must be getting back,” he said, coughing in embarrassment.

  “Oh, dear,” I said, starting to panic. “I hope I didn’t give you the impression that I was . . .” I couldn’t quite finish the sentence.

  “No, not at all,” he said, trying to smile.

  “Perhaps we can go to the top of the ziggurat. We could admire the view from there.”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “I can see that the recent troubles have taken their toll. I wouldn’t want to add to that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Agatha, if I may speak plainly . . . ?”

  “Of course. Please do.”

  “It seems to me that you’re not ready to embark on a new romance,” he said. “I think what happened with your husband is still preying on your mind.” He started to walk away.

  “But I do find your company very appealing,” I said, feeling a flutter in my breast. “I can relax with you, something I haven’t felt able to do with . . . well, with anyone since my husband.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “But I think we need to take this—what is it they say in novels?—at a slower pace, if only for your own sake.”

  Despite the evidence that seemed to suggest he was covering something up—perhaps something as evil as a murder—he was behaving like a gentleman.

  He presented me with his arm and asked, “Shall I walk you back?”

  It appeared I had no choice. I would have to think of some other way to slow his return. “Yes, that would be very nice, thank you,” I said politely.

  On our walk back to the house I asked him what he missed about America. He tripped off a list of seemingly trivial items—ice cream, the movies, the energy of a big city—before he mentioned one thing that I thought could be significant. “I suppose the idea that you can be whoever you want to be.” The comment was a casual one, and he soon began to talk of skyscrapers and baseball and the grandeur of railway stations, but the phrase stayed with me.

  I slowed my pace as I began to talk about my youthful dreams of being an opera singer, a concert pianist, a sculptor. I took my time describing each of these ambitions in turn, outlining the various hurdles that had stood in my way: my shyness, my horror at performing in public, my lack of talent. Miller did not want to offend by cutting my stories short, but I could tell a certain dullness had stolen into his eyes. As I waffled on, he stood there making appropriate facial gestures until finally he looked at his watch and said, “I’d love to talk more about all of that, but I really do think that—”

  “Of course. I’m sorry if you find my stories boring,” I said, pretending to be hurt by his decision to end our conversation.

  “No, it’s not that at all. It’s just that—”

  “I did think we had something in common,” I said, trying to bring tears to my eyes.

  “Oh, no, I’ve upset you,” said Miller, stepping closer. “That’s the last thing I wanted to do. Whatever it is I said or did not say, please forgive me.”

  Taking a deep breath, I steeled myself for what I had to do next. This was against my nature, my breeding, everything I had been told—imagine what my mother would have thought had she been alive!—but I had no choice. “No, it’s you who should forgive me,” I said. “I acted like a spoilt child.” I grasped for half-remembered images from romantic novels I had read long ago. I ran the tip of my tongue over my dry lips and tried to open my eyes a little wider. I thought of something that amused me: What was it my grandmother had said about that curious woman in her sewing circle? Was it something about her having only one passage, like a bird? The memory made me laugh, and I felt a sparkle return to my eyes.

  “What’s so funny?” asked Miller.

  “I was just thinking about what a fool I’d been,” I said, placing a hand over his. “I get so nervous at times. I’m not used to male attention, you see, especially from a man as handsome and as nice as you.”

  Miller looked slightly taken aback. “Well, I—”

  “I’d hate it if I’ve given you the wrong impression,” I said, deliberately lowering my chin and raising my eyes so that I would appear a
little more like a woman used to employing the dark arts of seduction.

  “And what impression would that be?” he asked.

  “That I was indifferent to your attentions.”

  He took another step closer to me and inclined his head in such a way that I could feel his hot breath on my face. But just then—just as he reached out his hand to caress me—I thought about what Davison might have found in his room. Proof of Miller’s original name? Or something even more sinister that would link the American with the death of Miss Bell?

  I tried to banish these thoughts from my head, but they refused to be pushed away. I caught a look of uncertainty in Miller’s face that told me he had read something in my eyes. I thought again of what my grandmother had said about her sewing woman, but the spark of light amusement was impossible to rekindle. Miller’s hand slowly retreated and, so as to not cause undue embarrassment, he pretended to brush a spot of dirt or sand from my shoulder before he stepped away from me and looked into the distance.

  “But—”

  “You’re very sweet, but I can see that I was right,” he said, smiling kindly. “Let’s not hurry things. Now I really think we must be getting back. It looks as though there’s a sandstorm coming.”

  “Could we not just . . .”

  But Miller had already turned from me and started to walk briskly back to the compound. As I rushed after him I thought about falling, claiming that I had twisted my ankle. But by the time the notion came to me, Miller had reached the gates. Had he guessed that I had been trying to delay his return? I called out his name one last time, but I saw him disappear into the courtyard. I ran as fast as I could, but my skirts kept threatening to trip me up and send me crashing down into the sand. If I wasn’t careful, my idea of hurting my ankle might actually become a reality. I felt my heart race and my face redden. Beads of perspiration broke out across my forehead, and then I felt something lodge in my left eye. I blinked and tried to rub the particle away with my finger, tears forming in my eyes as I did so. Miller had said that there was a sandstorm coming, and sure enough the horizon had disappeared, replaced by an ominous dirty brown mass.

  I had no way of letting Davison know of Miller’s imminent return. I only hoped that he had finished his search.

  By the time I reached the compound I could not breathe. Feeling on the verge of collapse, I made my way to Miller’s room. A stony-faced Davison stood in the doorway, holding out a handful of letters and other papers. Miller had pushed past him into his room, where he stood astounded and somewhat broken.

  “So, Mr. Miller, may I ask what you are doing at Ur?” asked Davison. “Or should that be Mr. Conway?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said in a rather halfhearted manner.

  “Mr. Harry Miller, as I’m sure you know, died in a car accident in 1925,” said Davison. “And don’t try and pretend that you are a different Harry Miller. It’s a fairly common name, but you’re not going to be able to get away with that.”

  Miller—or Conway, as he was—looked sheepishly at Davison, before he spotted me standing outside the room. His eyes shifted from Davison back to me before he realized the truth of the scenario that had just taken place.

  “I expected better of you, Agatha,” he said, picking up a stack of letters that Davison had left on his bed. “I thought we had something special.” He sighed deeply. “Was that—I mean all that out there,” he said, gesturing towards the direction of the ziggurat, “—was that just a tactic to try and slow me down so my room could be searched? Didn’t you mean any of those things you said?”

  I could not answer him.

  He looked at me with disappointment and despair in his eyes. Then he sat on the bed, and let his head drop down, as if all the worries and problems of the world had suddenly been shifted onto his shoulders. A pallor now replaced his former healthy tan. “Okay, you’ve got me,” he said. “I suppose I may as well confess.”

  23

  “Do you want to go and get Forster?” asked the man I now knew to be called Conway. His voice was heavy with resignation, as if he didn’t care what happened to him.

  “No, I think we can handle this for the time being,” said Davison. “Agatha, why don’t you come inside and close the door. Let’s hear what the man has to say for himself.”

  I stepped into Conway’s room, took out my handkerchief, and wiped my face of dust. I studied the details of the room. The white walls were festooned with hundreds of photographs: pictures of street scenes in Baghdad; an image that looked almost obscene but which I realized was a close-up of the inside of a pomegranate; the craggy, lined faces of Arabs; dozens of views of the ziggurat taken at different times of the day and seemingly hundreds of representations of the undulating sweep of the desert sands. Here too were snapshots of some of the team at Ur. A smiling Woolley holding an ancient gold cup he had just removed from beneath the earth; Katharine Woolley with her cat; Father Burrows stooping over a cuneiform tablet, his brows knitted in concentration as he tried to decipher its secrets; and Lawrence and Cecil McRae at work on their drawings. One wall was completely devoted to images of the artifacts unearthed at Ur: daggers, earrings, bowls, cups, necklaces, rings, headdresses, cylinder seals, and cloak pins.

  Davison walked over to a desk situated in the far corner of the room and picked up a maroon-colored photograph album that was lying underneath a pile of papers.

  “Now, this is interesting,” he said. I walked over to see what he had found.

  As Davison turned the pages I saw image after image of Sarah Archer, photographs of her in every decent pose imaginable, together with close-ups of her neck, shoulder, wrists, and mouth.

  “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not like that,” said Conway, standing up and reaching for the album.

  “What is it like?” asked Davison, taking a step back.

  “I liked the kid; of course I did,” replied Conway. “She was beautiful. Everyone could see that. But I just wanted to try and see if I could capture that beauty.”

  “Are you sure there was nothing more to it than that?” asked Davison.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, unfortunately we can’t ask Miss Archer about the nature of your relationship and what really passed between you, because she’s dead,” said Davison. The words were harsh if not a little cruel.

  “You don’t think that—” Conway could not complete the sentence.

  “Think what, Mr. Conway?” Davison took a step towards him. “You see, we know now, thanks to these papers that I just happened to find, that your real name is not Harry Miller. That you stole that name from a dead man. My feeling is that if you could lie about that, you could lie about almost anything.”

  Conway turned to me, a pleading look in his eyes. “Agatha, surely you don’t think that . . . that I had anything to do with Sarah’s death?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what to think any longer,” I said. “But you said you wanted to confess.”

  “Yes, but not . . . not to that,” he said. He looked as though he might be sick.

  “If not that, then what?” I asked.

  He took a couple of deep breaths and began. “As . . . as you now know, my name is not Harry Miller. It’s Alan Conway. Before I tell you any more, I must say, once again, that I had nothing to do with Sarah’s death. I could never have hurt that girl. You do believe me, don’t you?”

  “If you don’t tell us what you are doing here, then I’m afraid we have no choice but to suspect you of the murder of Sarah Archer,” said Davison.

  “But that boy, Cecil, he’s already confessed to the crime,” said Conway.

  Davison thought quickly on his feet. “We have reason to believe that Cecil was not in his right mind when he made that statement.”

  “So he didn’t do it?” asked Conway.

  “No, we believe he didn’t,” said Davison. “Which means that unless you convince us otherwise, then—”

  Conway, panicking now, interrupted h
im. “I know when the game is up.” He ran a hand across his sweaty forehead. “You may as well know that I got myself into trouble back in America. I owed some money, some big money, to a couple of shady characters, the Solomon brothers. You know the type: men you cannot afford to mess with. You see, my printing business went under back in New Jersey. The banks wouldn’t lend me a cent, and so I borrowed some money from the Solomons. That was the worst decision I ever made. But I couldn’t see a way out. I had bills to pay. And if you must know, I had a wife and a child to support.” He looked at me. “You’ve got every right to hate me, Agatha.”

  “My feelings are neither here nor there,” I said sharply. “What matters is the truth. How did you end up here, at Ur?”

  “It was the Solomons’ idea. They had seen the splashes in the press, all the write-ups about the treasures being pulled from the sands and how much they were worth. One newspaper said one object alone was valued at something like a hundred thousand pounds. So they came up with a plan. They gave me the passport of this Harry Miller, who had been a photographer, and told me that I was going to take a job halfway round the world, in the Near East.”

  “You didn’t object?” asked a skeptical Davison.

  “Of course I did,” he replied. “I tried to do everything to get out of it. I promised that I would pay the money back in installments. That I would find a job in America. But they were very insistent. I thought about faking my own death, but I guess they’d come across my type before. They threatened all sorts of things. What they said they would do to Mary and Tabitha—that’s my wife and daughter—well, let’s just say that I had no choice.”

  “So the story you told me about working for the Middleton Bulletin was a lie?” I asked.

  “Yes, it was, but I had loved photography as a kid. I knew how to handle a camera—I’d done some photography during my work as a printer—so that part wasn’t difficult. What was hard was what the Solomons asked me to do.”

  “Which was?” I asked.

  He looked up at the photographs of the artifacts on the wall. He took another deep breath. “They wanted me to make copies of certain valuable pieces and ship the real treasures back to New Jersey. And I was to replace the originals with electrotype copies.”