Death in a Desert Land

by Andrew Wilson

  As Cynthia placed some knives and forks down on the table, I noticed that her hands were shaking.

  “You’ve no need to feel afraid,” I said.

  “Afraid?”

  “I can tell you’re trying to put a brave face on things,” I replied. “But I doubt Mrs. Woolley knew what she was saying earlier.”

  “I have been trying to put it out of my mind, but I must admit it hasn’t been easy,” she said. “It’s good to know that there’s someone stationed outside her door.”

  Conway—who was pouring himself a generous measure of whisky topped with soda water—asked her if she would like a drink, but Cynthia declined.

  “I’ll stick to my water,” she said.

  The table had been set for six, and over the course of the next few minutes we were joined by Lawrence McRae, Leonard Woolley, and Father Burrows, who came out of the kitchen bearing a tray of food.

  “I can’t make any great claims for the quality of the meal, I’m afraid,” said Burrows as he placed the dishes on the table. “It’s all been flung together at the last minute.”

  “We’re very grateful for your efforts,” said Woolley. “So, what do we have?”

  Father Burrows guided us through the plates of vine leaves, creamed aubergine (which he warned us had been made with a great deal of garlic), a hot pepper spread, a chickpea salad, a minced meat stew, a plate of figs, and something that sat in a thick, congealed tomato sauce that I didn’t quite catch. “I suppose the Arabs have been eating like this for centuries,” he said. “One only has to look at the cuneiform tablets to see that. I’ve studied one tablet which gives two dozen recipes for a type of stew cooked with vegetables and meat, and of course they’ve always liked their spices and garlic, too.”

  “It’s certainly an acquired taste,” said Woolley as he dipped a little of the bread into the garlicky aubergine dish. “And it may be too much for some of the ladies here. Having said that, my wife has a fondness for strong-tasting Arabic cuisine, as did Miss Bell.”

  At the mention of Gertrude Bell’s name, the table fell quiet and Conway looked down at his plate. Perhaps sensing that a spirit of melancholy was about to descend on the group, Woolley decided to lighten the mood by expanding on the story.

  “I remember on one occasion when Miss Bell was here, she polished off one particular dish that was so hot and spicy, it brought tears to the men’s eyes,” he said, smiling. “We were all calling out for glasses of water after only a couple of mouthfuls, but she had a stomach like an Arab and finished it off as if it were a dollop of mashed potatoes or custard.”

  The statement presented me with the opportunity to ask a few questions, but I knew I would have to be very careful. “I remember many years ago, soon after I arrived in Cairo, falling very ill after sampling one of the local dishes,” I said. “But I was very young and foolish. I could have done with someone like Miss Bell to show me the ropes.”

  “Yes, she would have liked you,” Woolley said. “Don’t you agree, Miss Jones?”

  “Oh, yes, I’m sure she would have,” said Cynthia, spooning a little of the minced-meat stew on to her plate. “Most women she regarded as—what was it? That’s right: she called them ‘dull dogs.’ ”

  “I’m afraid I see myself as very dull indeed,” I said. “Not like Miss Bell. So very clever.”

  “She was extraordinary in so many ways,” said Woolley.

  “Did you meet in Cairo?” I asked.

  “Cairo?” Woolley looked askance.

  I knew both he and Miss Bell had worked in intelligence in Egypt during the war—as had Katharine Woolley’s first husband, who had died in Cairo, in 1919—but I could not reveal this.

  “I can’t remember exactly how I first met her,” he said. “In fact, I think I might have read her work before I met her.” He walked over to a bookcase in the corner of the room and ran his hands over the volumes before he found the one he was looking for. “Yes, here it is.” Woolley blew some dust off its cover as he extracted it. “Amurath to Amurath, published in, let’s see . . . yes, in 1911. Have you read it?”

  “No, I’m ashamed to say I haven’t,” I said.

  “Listen to this from its preface,” he said. “ ‘The banks of the Euphrates echo with ghostly alarums; the Mesopotamian deserts are full of the rumor of phantom armies; you will not blame me if I passed among them ‘trattando l’ombre come cosa salde.’ ”

  “Treating the shadows as the solid thing,” said Father Burrows. “Purgatorio, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “I see you know your Dante,” Woolley remarked.

  There was something to be said for Miss Bell’s words; indeed, there was something about the environment, this dry desert full of mirages, half-truths and buried secrets, that called out for such a method. However, it was just as important, I thought, to treat solid things—so-called facts and seeming certainties—as if they too were as insubstantial as shadows. Nothing was what it seemed here.

  “Miss Bell once said to me something I’ve never forgotten,” Woolley continued. “We were at the end of a long day. We’d been digging in the heat of the sun. We walked up to the top of the ziggurat and looked out at the desert that stretched before us. She turned to me and said, ‘I wonder, are we the same people when our surroundings, friends, and associations are changed?’ I thought it a very interesting question, one I could not answer easily.”

  Just then a blast of wind hit the house, shaking it to its very foundations. From somewhere outside—the courtyard, perhaps—came the sound of a pot or a tile hitting the ground and smashing into fragments.

  The noise made Cynthia Jones jump up from her chair, upsetting a glass of water by her side as she did so. “Oh, look—sorry,” she said. “I’m so terribly clumsy.”

  “Here, let me,” I said, taking up a napkin and blotting the water from the table.

  “Thank you,” she said, relieved. “I don’t know what’s come over me. It’s not as though I haven’t experienced a sandstorm before.” She stared down at the food on her plate, most of which she had not touched. “Would you mind awfully if I retired for the night? I’m not much company, I’m afraid.”

  “Of course not,” Woolley assured her, standing up. “It’s been a long day for all of us. Now, will you need anything to help you sleep?” He looked at me for a response.

  “Yes, I have a sleeping draught that you can take.” As I said this another gust of wind and sand buffeted the compound with such force that the glasses and cutlery on the table vibrated.

  “Thank you, but I think I’ll be all right,” she said. “I’ll just take some water with me.”

  After Cynthia had said good night, talk returned to Woolley’s question about identity.

  Father Burrows believed that personality was something innate, something divine that one was born with, while McRae argued that surely it was formed by one’s experiences. I’m afraid I sat on the fence and observed that it must be a combination of the two. Conway, who had remained quiet up to this moment, pointed out that the real issue at stake was not the source of one’s personality but the extent to which it fluctuated when one was wrenched out of one’s normal environment.

  “I’m sure all of us felt it when we first came here,” he said. “Looking out at the stretch of desert sands. Feeling the dry air on our faces. Hearing that incessant chant of the Arab workers as they dig up the ground.” He talked with a passion which I knew came from personal insight. “It’s enough to drive even the sanest of men a little crazy.”

  “Interesting you should say that, Mr. Miller,” said Father Burrows, pushing his wire-rimmed spectacles back up on the bridge of his nose. “I see it almost as a test, as though each of us were feeling a little of Jesus’s experience when he spent forty days and forty nights in the wilderness. I always think it would have looked something like this, like the desert.”

  Again the wind howled outside, shaking the house with an almighty force. “It’s like God is trying to talk to us tonight, don
’t you think?” Burrows asked in a voice that rang with a false brightness.

  “If God does exist, which I seriously doubt, he’s certainly not here,” said McRae, getting up from the table and helping himself to a large measure of whisky.

  “Now, now, McRae,” said Woolley, who went to join the architect by the drinks table. “There’s no point in letting gloom set in. Certainly my father would never have allowed his spirits to sink in such a situation. He was a character, I can tell you.”

  Woolley started to tell a series of amusing stories about his father, a vicar first in Clapton and then in Bethnal Green, a man who had a passion for collecting porcelain and pottery, Minton and Copeland and so on. He described to us his big black beard and dark eyes and recalled how he had always insisted on taking a cold bath each morning. In the winter, Woolley said, his father would fill the bath the night before so that he could guarantee that it would have formed a crust of ice. “Discomfort was almost holy to him,” he laughed.

  Leonard was one of eleven children, he explained, and as a child he had been teased by his schoolmates that he was one of the flock of “Woolly sheep.”

  “But then, after a little reading, I discovered that the name Woolley actually came from ‘Wolf’s Lea,’ ” he said. “And one day, in front of the group of boys, I proudly announced that my brothers and sisters were not sheep but wolves in sheep’s clothing!”

  The comment made the group laugh, and Miller, McRae, and Burrows each revealed the names they had been called as children.

  “And what of you, Mrs. Christie?” asked Woolley. “What were you called as a girl?”

  I hesitated a moment—I never liked to reveal too much about myself—before I relented. “Well, my brother, Monty, used to call me ‘Kid’ when he was being nice and ‘Scrawny Chicken’ when he wanted to upset me,” I said. “Of course, now I would do almost anything to earn the same epithet.” The comment drew a laugh. “But I suppose we all had funny nicknames. For example, my sister Madge, or Margaret, we called ‘Punkie.” And my daughter, Rosalind, is sometimes known as ‘Teddy’ or ‘the Tadpole.’ ”

  As I thought of the nicknames I had chosen for some of the characters in my books something stirred at the back of my mind. It had been such a trivial, silly exchange, but I was sure something of import had been said. Silently, I ran through the conversation. A nickname. A term of endearment. A sobriquet. The question that Miss Bell had posed to Woolley, and which he had related to us, about whether one was the same person when taken out of one’s normal environment. A sheep in wolf’s clothing. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.

  Another wall of wind hit the house at full force.

  “Mrs. Christie, are you all right?” asked Woolley. “You’re looking a little pale.”

  I did my best to smile. “Yes, just a little tired, I’m afraid.” I stood up from the table. “Would you mind if I went to bed, too? I think I’d like to try to sleep before the storm gets any worse.”

  “Let me accompany you to your room,” said Woolley.

  “No, I’m sure I can manage,” I said.

  “But even negotiating the courtyard might be difficult in this weather,” he replied. “After all, we wouldn’t want any more accidents.”

  “No, I’m quite confident, but . . . but thank you all the same,” I said.

  Instead of going straight to my room I went to see Davison, who was stationed outside Katharine’s quarters. As I stepped into the courtyard I felt myself being sucked into a whirlwind of sand. Particles of grit covered my face and I felt the dry, deathly taste of the desert on my lips. I closed my eyes and felt my way forwards, using the edge of the wall as my guide. Just as I thought I was nearing the room I felt something by my feet. I opened my eyes but it was too late. As I fell I stretched out my hands and readied myself for the inevitable pain. I tried to imagine that I was surfing—oh, the fun I had had surfing during that glorious tour around the world I had made with Archie back in 1922!—and that I was just crashing into the sea. I think the thought helped as I landed quite lightly, with only a slight crush of palm against stone and a slightly grazed knee. It had been a tin bucket that had brought me down.

  I sat there for a moment, my hair whipping about my face in a wild frenzy, the air thick with dust and sand, and realized that I was afraid. A deep sense of unease crept over me. I felt sick to my stomach. I began to understand some of the evil that pervaded Ur. Despite the fact that Davison was here and that, if I so wished, I could spend the night making light conversation or playing cards with the people I had just left, I still felt desperately alone and exposed. A memory came to me then of a teacher I had had when I was young, at school in Torquay. During one of the lessons the teacher, whose name I could not recall, told us that, at some point in our lives, all of us would experience a crushing sense of despair, a feeling that there was no hope. She told us the story of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane and went on to talk about suffering and the importance of faith. I had to remember this. Without hope there was nothing. And yet I felt frightened, so terribly afraid.

  I pushed myself up and made my way towards Davison. Not only was I a stranger in a desert land, but there was a murderer very near. Someone who I was sure would want to kill again.

  28

  After a brief conversation with Davison, I made my way back to my room and, despite my best efforts to stay alert, felt myself drifting off. I couldn’t be certain how long I had been asleep, but the sound of a scream woke me with a jolt. I pushed myself off the bed, grabbed a scarf, wrapped it around my head, and ran into the courtyard. Visibility was next to nothing: all I could see was a whirling dervish of sand that danced in the air as if it were a malevolent spirit from the Arabian Nights.

  I tried to shout, but the sand-filled blasts reduced my voice to a rasp. “Davison? Forster?”

  There was no answer. Using strength I did not know I possessed, I moved forwards, battling against the power of the wind. Above and around me echoed the terrible sound of the sandstorm, a noise that suggested that the vengeance of the heavens was being visited on the earth. I listened for a scream. There was nothing. Had I been dreaming, or had I mistaken the high-pitched whine of the wind for a cry?

  Then the scream came again; it was unmistakably that of a woman. Once more, using my hands to guide me, I edged my way around the courtyard until I came to its source.

  “Help me! Oh, help!” cried the voice from inside.

  Blinking through the sand, which stung my eyes, I saw the vague outline of a window. But the shutters were closed and I couldn’t see inside the room. My fingers felt their way down and across against the mud-brick wall until I found the handle to the door. I grasped it and turned it, but it was locked.

  “What’s happened?” I cried. “Are you all right?” But there was no response. “Who’s in there?”

  I banged on the door, but this only prompted more unintelligible screams. I rattled the handle and pounded on the wood.

  “Let me in!” I shouted.

  “Please get help!” came the voice from the other side of the door.

  I turned and edged my way around the courtyard until I came to what I thought was the main door to the house. I tried to open it, but it too was locked. Using my fist, I knocked on the wood with all my strength, and a few seconds later I heard the sound of footsteps and then the shifting of what sounded like a chair. The handle turned and a moment later I saw a sliver of light illuminate the inside of the frame. I pushed my way in.

  “What the devil . . . ?” said McRae as I fell into the room.

  “There’s something wrong,” I said, wiping the sand from my mouth. I felt like I wanted to gag, but it was important to get this out. “There’s a woman . . . in there, in one of the bedrooms. She says she needs help.”

  “I told you to keep that door shut,” said Woolley, making his way through the living room towards us. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s Mrs. Christie,” said McRae. “She’s saying something’s the m
atter.”

  “What?” asked Woolley.

  “In her . . . her room,” I gasped. “She can’t get out.”

  “Calm down,” said Woolley. “Take a deep breath.”

  “It’s not Katharine, is it?”

  “I lost all sense of whose room it was,” I said. “She’s in trouble. She says she needs—”

  “McRae, Miller, come with me!” Woolley shouted. “Bring those flashlights. Mrs. Christie, you stay here with Burrows.”

  I ignored them and rushed out into the courtyard, followed by the plaintive cries of Father Burrows pleading with me to take shelter inside. Realizing that I was not going to change my mind, the priest shut the door to the house.

  “Hello!” Woolley shouted into the storm. “Is someone hurt or in danger?”

  He edged his way around the courtyard repeating the question. I followed the three men until we began to hear cries.

  “It’s coming from in there,” said McRae, who seized the handle of the door to find it was still locked. “Can you get to the door?” he called to the person inside.

  But his question was only met by another terrified cry.

  “We’re going to have to break it down,” he said.

  The men quickly organized themselves. “Stand back!” shouted Woolley. “Are you ready?”

  The three men seemed to come together as one, using all their strength to run at the door. I heard the splintering of wood and a cry of pain from one of the men.

  “Nearly there, but not quite,” said the photographer.

  “Let’s give it another try,” said Woolley.

  They stood back, regrouped, and rushed towards the door once more. I heard something crack, the lock broke, and in an instant they forced their way into the room. A wave of sand followed them, making it hard to see inside. The wind unsettled a stack of paper and unused envelopes, sending them into a flurry of activity; the power of the storm even sent a pile of books crashing to the floor.

  “Oh, dear God,” said Woolley as the beams from the flashlights began to illuminate pockets of the room.