Death in a Desert Land

by Andrew Wilson

  Woolley could not take in the enormity of what I saying. He had been betrayed by the man he knew as Miller already and that had hit him hard. I could see the desperate look in his eyes: Please let this not be true . . . Please let the murderer be anyone but dear old trusted Cynthia.

  But it was Lawrence McRae who spoke up first. His suspicions of Katharine Woolley had not dissipated. “What of the marks on Miss Jones’s skin?” he asked. “And the acid burns on her legs?”

  “I’m afraid to say they were self-inflicted,” I said. “Recognizing that Mrs. Woolley was suffering from hallucinations brought on by the hyoscyamine in her creams, Miss Jones could do and say almost anything in front of her without impunity. My guess is that, while in Mrs. Woolley’s room, she repeatedly twisted and pinched the skin on her own wrist and arm until it became red and raw.”

  “But what about the business with Davison here?” said McRae. “He was sitting outside Katharine’s room. She must have drugged him so she could escape from her room and place the glass of hydrochloric acid by Miss Jones’s bed.”

  Davison stood up from the table; it was time for him to speak. “I must admit to a little deception on my part, too,” he said. “You see, before I went to take my position outside Mrs. Woolley’s room, I was given a cup of tea by Miss Jones. I took the drink with me, but in the courtyard I poured the tea on the ground, as I knew it was likely to contain some substance that would make me go to sleep. And so, later that night, when Miss Jones came to check on me, I was actually wide-awake.”

  He turned and looked directly at Miss Jones. He related what he had then witnessed. “Although I appeared to be dead to the world, I did indeed see you turn the key in the lock and open the door into Mrs. Woolley’s room before you then made your way back to your own quarters. I stayed there, outside Mrs. Woolley’s room, all night and I can tell you that the lady never stepped outside.”

  “So you see, Miss Jones, we have incontrovertible proof of your terrible crimes,” I said. “There is no escape. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

  Just at that moment, as Captain Forster reached out to arrest her, Miss Jones started to cry like a little girl. Tears streamed down her face and she began to sniff. She searched the sleeves of her blouse for a handkerchief and looked distraught at the prospect of not having one to hand to wipe her eyes and nose.

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “I appear not to have a . . .”

  At that moment Ruth Archer stood up and came towards her, proffering a handkerchief.

  “Thank you for—” said Miss Jones, reaching out for the square of white cotton embroidered with forget-me-nots.

  But before she could finish her sentence, Mrs. Archer charged at her with the fury of a mother set on avenging a recently murdered daughter. All her pent-up aggression and anger found expression in that moment. With the handkerchief in her right hand, she pushed the fabric hard into Miss Jones’s open mouth. A muffled noise came from the secretary, as if she could not breathe. She clawed at her face, her eyes stretched wide in panic, but Mrs. Archer pushed the cotton farther in.

  Captain Forster and Davison were quick to act. Forster separated the two women and Davison reached into Miss Jones’s mouth and extracted the handkerchief. Miss Jones took in great gulps of breath and fell back into a chair.

  The words dripped from Ruth Archer’s lips like poison. “You deserve to die for what you did to my daughter!”

  Nobody could argue with her. “But w-why?” Ruth was hysterical now, shouting and crying at the same time. “Why did you want to kill Sarah? What had she ever done to you?”

  After she had recovered her breath, Miss Jones sat down in a chair and said in a quiet voice, “Do you really want to know?”

  “Of course I want to know,” replied Ruth Archer. “I still don’t understand . . . What was it all for?”

  “It was a shame Sarah had to die, because I actually quite liked her—mainly because she stood up to that stuck-up bitch over there.” Miss Jones glared at Mrs. Woolley. “But her death was convenient.”

  Mrs. Archer was appalled by the secretary’s choice of word. “Convenient?”

  “Yes, convenient,” continued Miss Jones. “She was in the right place at the right time, that’s all.”

  “So you’re admitting to the murder?” asked Captain Forster. “That you killed Sarah Archer?”

  “Yes, I suppose I am,” said Miss Jones.

  “But why?” pleaded Mrs. Archer. “Please tell me why.”

  “ ‘In a land of sand and ruin and gold,’ ” said Miss Jones. “ ‘There shone one woman, and none but she . . .’ ”

  That was obviously a reference to the regal Katharine Woolley. But was it not also a line from a poem. Who was it by?

  “ ‘. . . I wish we were dead together to-day,’ ” she continued, “ ‘Lost sight of, hidden away out of sight . . .’ ”

  “What’s she talking about?” asked Mr. Archer. “Has she lost her mind?”

  Even in the grip of insanity, there was a part of her that was able to tap into the poetry she had once learnt. I recognized the lines from Swinburne’s “The Triumph of Time.”

  “ ‘. . . Forgotten of all men altogether,’ ” she whispered, “ ‘As the world’s first dead, taken wholly away, / Made one with death, filled full of the night.’ ”

  She gazed at some imaginary point in the distance, and in that moment she seemed to glow with a kind of inner happiness. I knew then what she planned to do.

  “Captain Forster!” I shouted. “Davison! Watch her! . . .”

  But Miss Jones was too quick. She took out a small vial from her pocket and pressed it to her lips. As I ran towards her I smelt the slight aroma of bitter almonds. I knew my poisons. It was cyanide. The chemical started to do its sinister work quickly. She tried to quote another line from the poem, but as the life force ebbed away from her, she could only whisper a few words. And so, as I stood over her body and watched her die, I completed another, more fitting couplet from the same poem which could serve as her epitaph.

  “ ‘At the door of life, by the gate of breath,’ ” I said, “ ‘There are worse things waiting for men than death . . .’ ”

  33

  Cynthia Jones’s body had been taken away from the sitting room and both murderer and her victim, poor Sarah Archer, were hauled onto the same carriage that would soon take them back to Baghdad for burial. Alan Conway—the man who had pretended to be the photographer Harry Miller—was handcuffed and led away by Hamoudi. Davison and I would put in a good word for him—the American had helped us with part of our plan—and I hoped he would serve his sentence in his home country.

  I had a quiet word with Cecil McRae, and during a tearful confession he apologized again and told me how his parents had died. His father, in a fit of rage and jealousy, had shot his mother and then turned the gun on himself. The boy, who adored his father, had not wanted to reveal the sordid truth of the crime and had chosen to remain silent, leading to suspicion that he had been involved. I told him that I understood and how noble I thought he had been.

  Samples from the teapot would be taken and sent off to an expert in the capital for further testing, but Forster, Davison, and I had all smelt the noxious brew that Miss Jones had prepared and we were certain that it too carried the distinctive whiff of cyanide.

  Cynthia Jones’s suicide left many questions unanswered, of course, and I had to fend them off like flies around a decaying corpse. The main one was the issue of motivation: Just why did Miss Jones want to frame Katharine Woolley? The line from the Swinburne poem echoed through my mind again: “In a land of sand and ruin and gold . . .” In this case the “ruin” did not refer to the traces of ancient structures and temples found among the desert sands but the destruction of a reputation. That was at the root of the case.

  What was left of our little group remained in the sitting room, and the time had come for me to finish the story.

  “In order to see the whole
picture, we have to take a step back in time once more,” I said. “Before Katharine married Mr. Woolley here, she was married to a Lieutenant Colonel Bertram Keeling.” I opened my handbag and took out a cutting from the Times newspaper. “This is a brief report about his death, which doesn’t give us very much detail about the manner in which he died, but we know that the unfortunate man did indeed commit suicide at the foot of the Great Pyramid in Giza, just outside Cairo, in September 1919.”

  At this Mrs. Woolley began to show signs of agitation. “Do you really have to go into all of this?” she asked. “Is it really necessary?”

  “Yes, my dear, I’m afraid it is,” I said. “Before his marriage to Katharine, Colonel Keeling had had a sweetheart, someone he had met while studying at Cambridge. That woman was a Miss Edgecombe, the daughter of one of his professors there.”

  I could see Mr. Archer looking at me with impatience; no doubt he thought what I was saying was nothing more than a needless digression. “Please bear with me, because this is the key to the whole mystery,” I said as I opened up my handbag once more. “Please pass this photograph around. It’s a picture of Colonel Keeling and Miss Edgecombe, taken in a punt on the river Cam.”

  Woolley squinted at the picture. “I’ll be damned . . . sorry,” he said. “It’s—”

  “Yes, that’s right, it’s Cynthia Jones, in younger and no doubt happier days,” I said.

  “I can barely recognize her,” said Katharine, taking hold of the snapshot. “She looks—I don’t know—so different. She was quite pretty, really. Nothing like . . . well, you know what I mean.”

  “Grief and hatred and bitterness can eat up a person, masking whatever beauty they once possessed,” I said. “But I also think Miss Jones went some way to disguise herself. I often wondered why she made herself so plain, taking little pride in her features. Then, Mr. Woolley, do you remember that story you told about your name? How you were a wolf in sheep’s clothing? The phrase started me thinking: What if someone was pretending to be meek and mild, but in reality they were vicious and cruel?”

  “I knew Bertie had a girl before me, but he didn’t talk about her, and I certainly never saw a photograph of her until today,” said Katharine. “Where did you find this?”

  “My colleague Mr. Davison here did a bit of digging for me,” I said. “It really was a matter of trial and elimination. I had an inkling that the past was significant in this case. But it was like a shadow always out of view. Each time I tried to get a fix on it, it seemed to slip away. At one stage, Mrs. Woolley even thought that her first husband might be still alive and that he might have disguised himself. I quickly established this was highly unlikely. When I suspected that someone was trying to make it appear as though Mrs. Woolley was mad—and then frame her for the murder of Sarah Archer—I thought about possible motivations. Of course, one’s immediate suspicions always turn to the husband.”

  “Me?” said an astonished Woolley. “You really didn’t think I would do anything to hurt my wife, did you?”

  I thought it best that the conversation I had had with Woolley—about the lack of intimacy between the couple and his thoughts on divorce—remain private. I also decided not to reveal that I had made inquiries into the beneficiaries of the wills of Sarah Archer and Cecil McRae’s parents. “Please forgive me. It’s just that husbands—or wives, for that matter—are so often to blame for this sort of thing,” I said. “But once I had ruled that out, I had to think of other possibilities. I asked Mr. Davison whether he could use his contacts back in London to do a thorough check of Colonel Keeling’s background. It was the very helpful men back in England who discovered that the colonel had had a sweetheart. Although by then I had a clear idea of the identity of the murderer, the photograph, which only arrived this morning, confirmed my suspicions.”

  “So it was all because Miss Jones was . . . what? Jealous of Mrs. Woolley?” Lawrence McRae sounded unconvinced. “Because Katharine had stolen her boyfriend?”

  “Not quite,” I said. “You see, I think Miss Jones blamed Mrs. Woolley for Colonel Keeling’s death. Of course, she was not pleased by the fact that Katharine had taken away her lover. But that wasn’t enough.”

  Katharine blinked as if to warn me off the subject.

  “She blamed Mrs. Woolley for forcing Keeling to take his own life. In her own twisted way, she got it into her mind that Katharine was somehow responsible for his suicide. And so she wanted to make Mrs. Woolley pay for the death. As I said earlier, she did not want to simply kill Mrs. Woolley: that would be too easy, and the suffering would be over too quickly. What she dreamt up was something much more wicked than plain murder. She wanted to bring about Mrs. Woolley’s downfall and ruin her reputation.”

  “What a truly terrible thing to do,” said Mrs. Archer. The sentiment was echoed by Father Burrows and Captain Forster, who was busy scribbling everything down. The American woman got up, walked over to Mrs. Woolley, and said, “I think I owe you an apology.”

  Katharine, no doubt remembering how Mrs. Archer had treated her, simply nodded her head and held out her hand as if she were a queen forced to endure the pathetic attentions of a lowly subject.

  “And I, in turn, need to beg for your forgiveness, dear Agatha,” said Katharine, suddenly turning to me and flooding me with the light of her eyes and the brightness of her perfect smile. “Would you mind coming with me? I have a small token I’d like to bestow on you.”

  “Of course,” I replied.

  As we entered her room and closed the door, she turned to me and apologized. She did not have a present for me—this was a ruse to get me away from the others—and she also said she was sorry for behaving so regally back in the sitting room. I understood that, for a great deal of her life, she too had been playing a part, a role that sometimes restricted and imprisoned her. But what she said next surprised me.

  “I do have to thank you for so many things,” she said. “One, for saving my life. Two, for sorting out all this awful business with Cynthia. And three—and most importantly—for not telling quite the whole truth in there.”

  I did not respond.

  “But you do know, don’t you?”

  “Not the full story, by any means,” I said.

  “I think I owe you an explanation, then,” she said.

  Katharine sat me on the bed and told me, as calmly as she could, the reason why her first husband had taken his own life. They had married in March 1919, but the wedding night had been a disaster. She did not quite know why she had been fooling herself, but she must have been blinkered, like one of those poor horses you see at the races who jump to their deaths. She’d had little expectation of that side of things, she said; her mother had said nothing to her about intercourse. After a few months of sleeping in separate bedrooms, Bertie insisted she go and see a doctor for a full mental and physical examination. She tried to avoid talking about the subject, but finally, in Cairo, there was a terrible bust-up. Either she had to see a doctor or he would call an end to the marriage on grounds of non-consummation.

  That September, she swallowed her pride and submitted herself to an examination. She felt a chill descend on the consulting room. The doctor, a horrid, ratlike man, looked at her as if she were some kind of freak. After she had got dressed again, he told her the awful truth. And then he insisted on telling Bertie about it, too. She pleaded with the doctor not to, but the medico said it was a husband’s right to know.

  The words were too terrible to hear.

  “Your wife here will never have a child,” said the doctor.

  “Is that all?” exclaimed Bertie, his face lighting up. “There are ways around that. We can always—”

  “It’s not just that,” the doctor interrupted. “Your wife is not—in the strictest sense—a woman.”

  “What do you mean?” Bertie’s face drained of color.

  “It’s a very rare condition,” he replied, “where a person shares certain aspects of the male with certain aspects of the female.”<
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  “What the hell are you saying?” Bertie looked as though he might be sick. “Y-you’re saying that—that I’ve married a m—”

  And with that, Katharine had fainted. The next thing she knew, she had woken up in her bedroom. She felt groggy, as if the doctor had given her something to make her sleep. She tried to get out of bed but was unable to move. When she woke up again, she was presented with the news that her husband had shot himself.

  “That must have been awful for you to hear,” I said, placing my hand over hers.

  She nodded. “It was, but what I still don’t understand is how Miss Jones knew about it,” she said.

  “Perhaps your husband, the colonel, wrote a letter to her before he died,” I suggested. “No doubt he was feeling full of regrets and shame. It would have been natural for him to seek out the one person who said she had loved him all along—his first sweetheart. He probably poured his heart out to her and told her what the doctor had related to him. It must have been awful for Miss Jones to receive that letter, no doubt days or weeks after first hearing the news of Bertie’s death. In her view the colonel killed himself because he considered that his reputation had been ruined; he could not bear the shame of continuing with the marriage, and so he took his own life.”

  “And her name—or names?” asked Katharine. “Miss Edgecombe . . . Miss Jones?”

  “Oh, that. Quite easy to establish: the information came from Somerset House, a birth certificate which arrived this morning. Although she was born Cynthia Edgecombe, Jones is her mother’s maiden name. She simply started using that when she began work out here.”

  Katharine swallowed nervously. “And w-what are you going to do with all this information now?”

  The final pieces of information began to fit into place. I remembered the phrase that Betty Clemence, that overbearing woman on the Orient Express, had used when she described Katharine Woolley to me: “She’s not all there,” she had said. At the time, I had assumed that she had meant that Mrs. Woolley was not quite right in the head. Had she been referring to something else entirely?