Death in a Desert Land
Page 31
“Of course, the police will have to be told about your connection to Miss Jones, but I can assure you there’s no need for them to know about . . . well, about your own personal history and background.”
“And you don’t think other people suspect?” she asked.
How had that old cat Betty Clemence guessed at the truth? Perhaps Cynthia Jones had initiated a vicious campaign of gossip, another weapon in her arsenal designed to destroy Katharine Woolley’s reputation. “No, of course not,” I said. “How could anyone suspect such a thing? No, we’ll keep this strictly between ourselves.”
“I don’t know how to thank you,” said Katharine flatly. But then a thought occurred to her which brought life back into her face. “I’ve got the most perfect idea!” she said, sounding like a schoolgirl. “Although I’ve been enjoying working on my novel, I realize that I’m never going to make it as a proper author: I haven’t got your talent. But one day, when I’m dead, perhaps you could write a book about what happened here and tell the whole story—like one of your mysteries.”
“I’m not sure whether I would be up to it,” I said demurely.
“I can see it now,” she said. “It’s got everything—murder, secrets, suspects—and all set against the backdrop of an archaeological dig. I’ve even got a title for it: Death in a Desert Land. What do you think?”
I thought about it for a moment before I replied yes, that might work very well indeed.
Epilogue: The Facts
The body of the writer, traveler, and archaeologist Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell—who helped found the modern state of Iraq—was discovered at her house in Baghdad on July 12, 1926. She appeared to have taken an overdose of Dial (diallyl barbituric acid), a sedative. While the two letters that open the novel are fictitious, some of the details contained in them are authentic and come from Bell’s archive held at Newcastle University: http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk. I also drew on the excellent Gertrude Bell biography Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations by Georgina Howell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).
In the autumn of 1928, after her divorce from Archie, Agatha Christie traveled by herself on the Orient Express to Istanbul and then by another train to Damascus. From there she journeyed across the desert to Baghdad in a bus organized by the Nairn Line, a trip that took two days. She then took an uncomfortable train south to Ur, where she met Leonard and Katharine Woolley and Father Eric R. Burrows, a Jesuit priest and an expert on cuneiform tablets. “I fell in love with Ur,” Agatha writes in her autobiography, “with its beauty in the evenings, the ziggurat standing up, faintly shadowed, and that wide sea of sand with its lovely pale colors of apricot, rose, blue and mauve changing every minute.” Although Agatha acknowledged that Katharine could be a divisive figure, she remained friends with the Woolleys and she went on to dedicate her 1932 Miss Marple short story collection The Thirteen Problems (The Tuesday Club Murders, 1933, in the US) to the couple. It was in 1930 in Ur that the Woolleys introduced Agatha to the archaeologist Max Mallowan, who was indeed suffering from appendicitis during her first visit to the site in the autumn of 1928. The couple married in Edinburgh in September 1930. Christie’s experience at Ur—and subsequent visits to the Near East—inspired her 1936 novel Murder in Mesopotamia, which features Louise Leidner, an archaeologist’s wife who bears a striking similarity to Katharine Woolley.
Leonard Woolley led a joint expedition at Ur organized by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania between 1922 and 1934. He worked in British Intelligence during the First World War and was stationed in Egypt. It was there that he met Gertrude Bell, who also worked for the intelligence services. He met Katharine Keeling in the spring of 1924, when she came to Ur as a volunteer, and the couple married in April 1927. On their wedding night, Katharine locked him in the bathroom until he promised that he would not try to sleep with her. Leonard Woolley contemplated divorce but thought that the scandal would ruin his career. For more information about the lives of Katharine and Leonard Woolley—including the detail of the boyhood taunt of Leonard being a “Woolly sheep”’ and his subsequent retort that he was actually a wolf in sheep’s clothing—see H. V. F. Winstone’s superb biography Woolley of Ur: The Life of Sir Leonard Woolley (Secker & Warburg, 1990). A good online site is: www.penn.museum/blog/museum/adventure-calls-the-life-of-a-woman-adventurer/.
According to Max Mallowan, Gertrude Bell regarded Katharine Woolley as a “dangerous woman.” (Mallowan’s Memoirs: Agatha and the Archaeologist, William Collins, 1977, paperback reissue, 2010, p 36). She was born Katharine Menke in June 1888 in Worcestershire but grew up in a German-speaking family. She dropped out of Somerville College, Oxford, after two years due to ill health. On March 3, 1919, she married Lieutenant Colonel Bertram Francis Eardley Keeling, at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London. Six months later, on September 20, 1919, thirty-nine-year-old Colonel Keeling—who had also worked for British Intelligence during the First World War—shot himself at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, Cairo. There have been a number of theories surrounding the suicide of Colonel Keeling, but according to one report he killed himself after a meeting that he had with a doctor who had been called to examine his wife. According to Henrietta McCall, author of a biography of Max Mallowan (Agatha Christie’s second husband), Katharine may have had what is now known as complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, a condition which meant that although she was born genetically male, she was insensitive to male hormones and therefore appeared female. In 1929, John Murray published Katharine Woolley’s novel Adventure Calls, about a young woman, Colin, who disguises herself as her twin brother to travel through Iraq. The quote in Chapter Eleven is taken from page 99 of Adventure Calls, a copy of which I read in the British Library. Katharine Woolley died of multiple sclerosis at the Dorchester Hotel in London in November 1945.
Many of the spectacular treasures of Ur unearthed by Leonard and Katharine Woolley can be seen on display at the British Museum, London.
One large grave site at Ur was named the Great Death Pit because it contained the remains of sixty-eight women and six guards or soldiers, together with four musical instruments, including a silver lyre. It was here that Woolley unearthed evidence of human sacrifice. As he writes: “Each man and woman brought a little cup of clay or stone or metal, the equipment needed for the rite that was to follow. There would seem to have been some kind of service down there, at least it is certain that the musicians played up to the last, then each of them drank from their cups a potion that they had brought with them or found prepared for them on the spot—in one case found in the middle of the pit a great copper pot into which they could have dipped—and they lay down and composed themselves for death. Somebody came down and killed the animals (we found their bones on top of those of the grooms, so they must have died later) and perhaps saw to it that all was decently in order—thus, in the king’s grave the lyres had been placed on the top of the bodies of the women players, leant against the tomb wall—and when that was done, earth was flung from above, over the unconscious victims, and the filling-in of the grave-shaft was begun” (Woolley, quoted in Winstone, page 153).
Acknowledgments
The British Museum’s Mesopotamian rooms are places of wonder, and so I’d like to thank the curators and staff of this wonderful institution.
I would like to thank my fabulous agent and friend, Clare Alexander, as well as the whole team at Aitken Alexander Associates, in particular Lisa Baker, Lesley Thorne, Steph Adam, Geffen Semach, Anna Watkins, and Monica MacSwan.
At Simon & Schuster in the UK, I would like to acknowledge Ian Chapman and my fantastic editor, Suzanne Baboneau, both of whom have supported me throughout the writing of this series. In addition, I would like to thank Bec Farrell, Jo Dickinson, Anne Perry, UK copyeditor Sally Partington, Justine Gold, Dawn Burnett, and the marketing department, Jess Barratt, Harriett Collins, Gemma Conley-Smith, and everyone in publicity, Gill Richardson, Claire Bennett, Richard Hawton, Rhys Thomas, and the supe
r-enthusiastic sales team. The cover was illustrated by the talented Mark Smith and was designed by Pip Watkins.
In the US, I would like to thank the wonderful staff at Atria, particularly my editor, Peter Borland, as well as Sean Delone, Daniella Wexler, and David Chesanow.
Thanks too to all the Agatha fans, scholars, and academics who have embraced the series, particularly Dr. John Curran, Mike Linane, Dr. Jamie Bernthal, Scott Wallace Baker, Tina Hodgkinson, Emily and Audrey at the Year of Agatha blog, and many more.
Lastly, I would like to thank all my family and friends and Marcus Field.
More from the Author
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Mad Girl's Love Song
Shadow of the Titanic
The Lying Tongue
About the Author
ANDREW WILSON is the author of the novels A Talent for Murder and A Different Kind of Evil, which also feature Agatha Christie in the role of detective, as well as The Lying Tongue. He is the author of three acclaimed biographies and his journalism has appeared in the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, the Sunday Times, the Daily Mail, and the Washington Post.
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Also by Andrew Wilson
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A Talent for Murder
A Different Kind of Evil
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Shadow of the Titanic: The Extraordinary Stories of Those Who Survived
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