Murder in Mesopotamia hp-14 Page 4

  Mrs Mercado laughed disagreeably.

  ‘Normal? I should say not. Frightening us to death. One night it was fingers tapping on her window. And then it was a hand without an arm attached. But when it came to a yellow face pressed against the window – and when she rushed to the window there was nothing there – well, I ask you, itis a bit creepy for all of us.’

  ‘Perhaps somebody was playing a trick on her,’ I suggested.

  ‘Oh, no, she fancied it all. And only three days ago at dinner they were firing shots in the village – nearly a mile away – and she jumped up and screamed out – it scared us all to death. As for Dr Leidner, he rushed to her and behaved in the most ridiculous way. “It’s nothing, darling, it’s nothing at all,” he kept saying. I think, you know, nurse, men sometimes encourage women in these hysterical fancies. It’s a pity because it’s a bad thing. Delusions shouldn’t be encouraged.’

  ‘Not if they are delusions,’ I said dryly.

  ‘What else could they be?’

  I didn’t answer because I didn’t know what to say. It was a funny business. The shots and the screaming were natural enough – for anyone in a nervous condition, that is. But this queer story of a spectral face and hand was different. It looked to me like one of two things – either Mrs Leidner had made the story up (exactly as a child shows off by telling lies about something that never happened in order to make herself the centre of attraction) or else it was, as I had suggested, a deliberate practical joke. It was the sort of thing, I reflected, that an unimaginative hearty sort of young fellow like Mr Coleman might think very funny. I decided to keep a close watch on him. Nervous patients can be scared nearly out of their minds by a silly joke.

  Mrs Mercado said with a sideways glance at me:

  ‘She’s very romantic-looking, nurse, don’t you think so? The sort of woman things happen to.’

  ‘Have many things happened to her?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, her first husband was killed in the war when she was only twenty. I think that’s very pathetic and romantic, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s one way of calling a goose a swan,’ I said dryly.

  ‘Oh, nurse! What an extraordinary remark!’

  It was really a very true one. The amount of women you hear say, ‘If Donald – or Arthur – or whatever his name was – hadonly lived.’ And I sometimes think but if he had, he’d have been a stout, unromantic, short-tempered, middle-aged husband as likely as not.

  It was getting dark and I suggested that we should go down. Mrs Mercado agreed and asked if I would like to see the laboratory. ‘My husband will be there – working.’

  I said I would like to very much and we made our way there. The place was lighted by a lamp, but it was empty. Mrs Mercado showed me some of the apparatus and some copper ornaments that were being treated, and also some bones coated with wax.

  ‘Where can Joseph be?’ said Mrs Mercado.

  She looked into the drawing-office, where Carey was at work. He hardly looked up as we entered, and I was struck by the extraordinary look of strain on his face. It came to me suddenly: ‘This man is at the end of his tether. Very soon, something will snap.’ And I remembered somebody else had noticed that same tenseness about him.

  As we went out again I turned my head for one last look at him. He was bent over his paper, his lips pressed very closely together, and that ‘death’s head’ suggestion of his bones very strongly marked. Perhaps it was fanciful, but I thought that he looked like a knight of old who was going into battle and knew he was going to be killed.

  And again I felt what an extraordinary and quite unconscious power of attraction he had.

  We found Mr Mercado in the living-room. He was explaining the idea of some new process to Mrs Leidner. She was sitting on a straight wooden chair, embroidering flowers in fine silks, and I was struck anew by her strange, fragile, unearthly appearance. She looked a fairy creature more than flesh and blood.

  Mrs Mercado said, her voice high and shrill: ‘Oh, there you are, Joseph. We thought we’d find you in the lab.’

  He jumped up looking startled and confused, as though her entrance had broken a spell. He said stammeringly: ‘I – I must go now. I’m in the middle of – the middle of– ’

  He didn’t complete the sentence but turned towards the door.

  Mrs Leidner said in her soft, drawling voice: ‘You must finish telling me some other time. It was very interesting.’

  She looked up at us, smiled rather sweetly but in a far-away manner, and bent over her embroidery again.

  In a minute or two she said: ‘There are some books over there, nurse. We’ve got quite a good selection. Choose one and sit down.’

  I went over to the bookshelf. Mrs Mercado stayed for a minute or two, then, turning abruptly, she went out. As she passed me I saw her face and I didn’t like the look of it. She looked wild with fury.

  In spite of myself I remembered some of the things Mrs Kelsey had said and hinted about Mrs Leidner. I didn’t like to think they were true because I liked Mrs Leidner, but I wondered, nevertheless, if there mightn’t perhaps be a grain of truth behind them.

  I didn’t think it was all her fault, but the fact remained that dear ugly Miss Johnson, and that common little spitfire Mrs Mercado, couldn’t hold a candle to her in looks or in attraction. And after all, men are men all over the world. You soon see a lot of that in my profession.

  Mercado was a poor fish, and I don’t suppose Mrs Leidner really cared two hoots for his admiration – but his wife cared. If I wasn’t mistaken, she minded badly and would be quite willing to do Mrs Leidner a bad turn if she could.

  I looked at Mrs Leidner sitting there and sewing at her pretty flowers, so remote and far away and aloof. I felt somehow I ought to warn her. I felt that perhaps she didn’t know how stupid and unreasoning and violent jealousy and hate can be – and how little it takes to set them smouldering.

  And then I said to myself, ‘Amy Leatheran, you’re a fool. Mrs Leidner’s no chicken. She’s close on forty if she’s a day, and she must know all about life there is to know.’

  But I felt that all the same perhaps she didn’t.

  She had such a queer untouched look.

  I began to wonder what her life had been. I knew she’d only married Dr Leidner two years ago. And according to Mrs Mercado her first husband had died about fifteen years ago.

  I came and sat down near her with a book, and presently I went and washed my hands for supper. It was a good meal – some really excellent curry. They all went to bed early and I was glad, for I was tired.

  Dr Leidner came with me to my room to see I had all I wanted.

  He gave me a warm handclasp and said eagerly:

  ‘She likes you, nurse. She’s taken to you at once. I’m so glad. I feel everything’s going to be all right now.’

  His eagerness was almost boyish.

  I felt, too, that Mrs Leidner had taken a liking to me, and I was pleased it should be so.

  But I didn’t quite share his confidence. I felt, somehow, that there was more to it all than he himself might know.

  There was something – something I couldn’t get at. But I felt it in the air.

  My bed was comfortable, but I didn’t sleep well for all that. I dreamt too much.

  The words of a poem by Keats, that I’d had to learn as a child, kept running through my head. I kept getting them wrong and it worried me. It was a poem I’d always hated – I suppose because I’d had to learn it whether I wanted to or not. But somehow when I woke up in the dark I saw a sort of beauty in it for the first time.

  ‘Oh say what ails thee, knight at arms, alone – and(what was it?) – palely loitering…? I saw the knight’s face in my mind for the first time – it was Mr Carey’s face – a grim, tense, bronzed face like some of those poor young men I remembered as a girl during the war…and I felt sorry for him – and then I fell off to sleep again and I saw that the Belle Dame sans Merci was Mrs Leidner and she was leaning sideways on a
horse with an embroidery of flowers in her hands – and then the horse stumbled and everywhere there were bones coated in wax, and I woke up all goose-flesh and shivering, and told myself that curry never had agreed with me at night.

  Chapter 7. The Man at the Window

  I think I’d better make it clear right away that there isn’t going to be any local colour in this story. I don’t know anything about archaeology and I don’t know that I very much want to. Messing about with people and places that are buried and done with doesn’t make sense to me. Mr Carey used to tell me that I hadn’t got the archaeological temperament and I’ve no doubt he was quite right.

  The very first morning after my arrival Mr Carey asked if I’d like to come and see the palace he was – planning I think he called it. Though how you can plan for a thing that’s happened long ago I’m sure I don’t know! Well, I said I’d like to, and to tell the truth, I was a bit excited about it. Nearly three thousand years old that palace was, it appeared. I wondered what sort of palaces they had in those days, and if it would be like the pictures I’d seen of Tutankahmen’s tomb furniture. But would you believe it, there was nothing to see but mud! Dirty mud walls about two feet high – and that’s all there was to it. Mr Carey took me here and there telling me things – how this was the great court, and there were some chambers here and an upper storey and various other rooms that opened off the central court. And all I thought was, ‘But how does he know?’ though, of course, I was too polite to say so. I can tell you it was a disappointment! The whole excavation looked like nothing but mud to me – no marble or gold or anything handsome – my aunt’s house in Cricklewood would have made a much more imposing ruin! And those old Assyrians, or whatever they were, called themselves kings. When Mr Carey had shown me his old ‘palaces’, he handed me over to Father Lavigny, who showed me the rest of the mound. I was a little afraid of Father Lavigny, being a monk and a foreigner and having such a deep voice and all that, but he was very kind – though rather vague. Sometimes I felt it wasn’t much more real to him than it was to me.

  Mrs Leidner explained that later. She said that Father Lavigny was only interested in ‘written documents’ – as she called them. They wrote everything on clay, these people, queer, heathenish-looking marks too, but quite sensible. There were even school tablets – the teacher’s lesson on one side and the pupil’s effort on the back of it. I confess that that did interest me rather – it seemed so human, if you know what I mean.

  Father Lavigny walked round the work with me and showed me what were temples or palaces and what were private houses, and also a place which he said was an early Akkadian cemetery. He spoke in a funny jerky way, just throwing in a scrap of information and then reverting to other subjects.

  He said: ‘It is strange that you have come here. Is Mrs Leidner really ill, then?’

  ‘Not exactly ill,’ I said cautiously.

  He said: ‘She is an odd woman. A dangerous woman, I think.’

  ‘Now what do you mean by that?’ I said. ‘Dangerous? How dangerous?’

  He shook his head thoughtfully.

  ‘I think she is ruthless,’ he said. ‘Yes, I think she could be absolutely ruthless.’

  ‘If you’ll excuse me,’ I said, ‘I think you’re talking nonsense.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘You do not know women as I do,’ he said.

  And that was a funny thing, I thought, for a monk to say. But of course I suppose he might have heard a lot of things in confession. But that rather puzzled me, because I wasn’t sure if monks heard confessions or if it was only priests. I supposed he was a monk with that long woollen robe – all sweeping up the dirt – and the rosary and all!

  ‘Yes, she could be ruthless,’ he said musingly. ‘I am quite sure of that. And yet – though she is so hard – like stone, like marble – yet she is afraid. What is she afraid of?’

  That, I thought, is what we should all like to know!

  At least it was possible that her husband did know, but I didn’t think anyone else did.

  He fixed me with a sudden bright, dark eye.

  ‘It is odd here? You find it odd? Or quite natural?’

  ‘Not quite natural,’ I said, considering. ‘It’s comfortable enough as far as the arrangements go – but there isn’t quite a comfortable feeling.’

  ‘It makes me uncomfortable. I have the idea’ – he became suddenly a little more foreign – ‘that something prepares itself. Dr Leidner, too, he is not quite himself. Something is worrying him also.’

  ‘His wife’s health?’

  ‘That perhaps. But there is more. There is – how shall I say it – an uneasiness.’

  And that was just it, there was an uneasiness.

  We didn’t say any more just then, for Dr Leidner came towards us. He showed me a child’s grave that had just been uncovered. Rather pathetic it was – the little bones – and a pot or two and some little specks that Dr Leidner told me were a bead necklace.

  It was the workmen that made me laugh. You never saw such a lot of scarecrows – all in long petticoats and rags, and their heads tied up as though they had toothache. And every now and then, as they went to and fro carrying away baskets of earth, they began to sing – at least I suppose it was meant to be singing – a queer sort of monotonous chant that went on and on over and over again. I noticed that most of their eyes were terrible – all covered with discharge, and one or two looked half blind. I was just thinking what a miserable lot they were when Dr Leidner said, ‘Rather a fine-looking lot of men, aren’t they?’ and I thought what a queer world it was and how two different people could see the same thing each of them the other way round. I haven’t put that very well, but you can guess what I mean.

  After a bit Dr Leidner said he was going back to the house for a mid-morning cup of tea. So he and I walked back together and he told me things. When he explained, it was all quite different. I sort of saw it all – how it used to be – the streets and the houses, and he showed me ovens where they baked bread and said the Arabs used much the same kind of ovens nowadays.

  We got back to the house and found Mrs Leidner had got up. She was looking better today, not so thin and worn. Tea came in almost at once and Dr Leidner told her what had turned up during the morning on the dig. Then he went back to work and Mrs Leidner asked me if I would like to see some of the finds they had made up to date. Of course I said ‘Yes,’ so she took me through into the antika-room. There was a lot of stuff lying about – mostly broken pots it seemed to me – or else ones that were all mended and stuck together. The whole lot might have been thrown away, I thought.

  ‘Dear, dear,’ I said, ‘it’s a pity they’re all so broken, isn’t it? Are they really worth keeping?’

  Mrs Leidner smiled a little and she said: ‘You mustn’t let Eric hear you. Pots interest him more than anything else, and some of these are the oldest things we have – perhaps as much as seven thousand years old.’ And she explained how some of them came from a very deep cut on the mound down towards the bottom, and how, thousands of years ago, they had been broken and mended with bitumen, showing people prized their things just as much then as they do nowadays.

  ‘And now,’ she said, ‘we’ll show you something more exciting.’

  And she took down a box from the shelf and showed me a beautiful gold dagger with dark-blue stones in the handle.

  I exclaimed with pleasure.

  Mrs Leidner laughed.

  ‘Yes, everybody likes gold! Except my husband.’

  ‘Why doesn’t Dr Leidner like it?’

  ‘Well, for one thing it comes expensive. You have to pay the workmen who find it the weight of the object in gold.’

  ‘Good gracious!’ I exclaimed. ‘But why?’

  ‘Oh, it’s a custom. For one thing it prevents them from stealing. You see, if they did steal, it wouldn’t be for the archaeological value but for the intrinsic value. They could melt it down. So we make it easy for them to be honest.’


  She took down another tray and showed me a really beautiful gold drinking-cup with a design of rams’ heads on it.

  Again I exclaimed.

  ‘Yes, it is beautiful, isn’t it? These came from a prince’s grave. We found other royal graves but most of them had been plundered. This cup is our best find. It is one of the most lovely ever found anywhere. Early Akkadian. Unique.’

  Suddenly, with a frown, Mrs Leidner brought the cup up close to her eyes and scratched at it delicately with her nail.

  ‘How extraordinary! There’s actually wax on it. Someone must have been in here with a candle.’ She detached the little flake and replaced the cup in its place.

  After that she showed me some queer little terra-cotta figurines – but most of them were just rude. Nasty minds those old people had, I say.

  When we went back to the porch Mrs Mercado was sitting polishing her nails. She was holding them out in front of her admiring the effect. I thought myself that anything more hideous than that orange red could hardly have been imagined.

  Mrs Leidner had brought with her from the antika-room a very delicate little saucer broken in several pieces, and this she now proceeded to join together. I watched her for a minute or two and then asked if I could help.

  ‘Oh, yes, there are plenty more.’ She fetched quite a supply of broken pottery and we set to work. I soon got into the hang of it and she praised my ability. I suppose most nurses are handy with their fingers.

  ‘How busy everybody is!’ said Mrs Mercado. ‘It makes me feel dreadfully idle. Of course I am idle.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t you be if you like?’ said Mrs Leidner.

  Her voice was quite uninterested.

  At twelve we had lunch. Afterwards Dr Leidner and Mr Mercado cleaned some pottery, pouring a solution of hydrochloric acid over it. One pot went a lovely plum colour and a pattern of bulls’ horns came out on another one. It was really quite magical. All the dried mud that no washing would remove sort of foamed and boiled away.

  Mr Carey and Mr Coleman went out on the dig and Mr Reiter went off to the photographic-room.