Murder in Mesopotamia

Chapter 17. The Stain by the Washstand

Mrs Leidner’s body had been taken to Hassanieh for the postmortem, but otherwise her room had been left exactly as it was. There was so little in it that it had not taken the police long to go over it.

To the right of the door as you entered was the bed. Opposite the door were the two barred windows giving on the countryside. Between them was a plain oak table with two drawers that served Mrs Leidner as a dressing-table. On the east wall there was a line of hooks with dresses hung up protected by cotton bags and a deal chest of drawers. Immediately to the left of the door was the washstand. In the middle of the room was a good-sized plain oak table with a blotter and inkstand and a small attache-case. It was in the latter that Mrs Leidner had kept the anonymous letters. The curtains were short strips of native material – white striped with orange. The floor was of stone with some goatskin rugs on it, three narrow ones of brown striped with white in front of the two windows and the washstand, and a larger better quality one of white with brown stripes lying between the bed and the writing-table.

There were no cupboards or alcoves or long curtains – nowhere, in fact, where anyone could have hidden. The bed was a plain iron one with a printed cotton quilt. The only trace of luxury in the room were three pillows all made of the best soft and billowy down. Nobody but Mrs Leidner had pillows like these.

In a few brief words Dr Reilly explained where Mrs Leidner’s body had been found – in a heap on the rug beside the bed.

To illustrate his account, he beckoned me to come forward.

‘If you don’t mind, nurse?’ he said.

I’m not squeamish. I got down on the floor and arranged myself as far as possible in the attitude in which Mrs Leidner’s body had been found.

‘Leidner lifted her head when he found her,’ said the doctor. ‘But I questioned him closely and it’s obvious that he didn’t actually change her position.’

‘It seems quite straightforward,’ said Poirot. ‘She was lying on the bed, asleep or resting – someone opens the door, she looks up, rises to her feet–’

‘And he struck her down,’ finished the doctor. ‘The blow would produce unconsciousness and death would follow very shortly. You see–’

He explained the injury in technical language.

‘Not much blood, then?’ said Poirot.

‘No, the blood escaped internally into the brain.’

‘Eh bien,’ said Poirot, ‘that seems straightforward enough – except for one thing. If the man who entered was a stranger, why did not Mrs Leidner cry out at once for help? If she had screamed she would have been heard. Nurse Leatheran here would have heard her, and Emmott and the boy.’

‘That’s easily answered,’ said Dr Reilly dryly. ‘Because it wasn’t a stranger.’

Poirot nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said meditatively. ‘She may have been surprised to see the person – but she was not afraid. Then, as he struck, she may have uttered a half-cry – too late.’

‘The cry Miss Johnson heard?’

‘Yes, if she did hear it. But on the whole I doubt it. These mud walls are thick and the windows were closed.’

He stepped up to the bed.

‘You left her actually lying down?’ he asked me.

I explained exactly what I had done.

‘Did she mean to sleep or was she going to read?’

‘I gave her two books – a light one and a volume of memoirs. She usually read for a while and then sometimes dropped off for a short sleep.’

‘And she was – what shall I say – quite as usual?’

I considered.

‘Yes. She seemed quite normal and in good spirits,’ I said. ‘Just a shade off-hand, perhaps, but I put that down to her having confided in me the day before. It makes people a little uncomfortable sometimes.’

Poirot’s eyes twinkled.

‘Ah, yes, indeed, me, I know that well.’

He looked round the room.

‘And when you came in here after the murder, was everything as you had seen it before?’

I looked round also.

‘Yes, I think so. I don’t remember anything being different.’

‘There was no sign of the weapon with which she was struck?’

‘No.’

Poirot looked at Dr Reilly.

‘What was it in your opinion?’

The doctor replied promptly:

‘Something pretty powerful, of a fair size and without any sharp corners or edges. The rounded base of a statue, say – something like that. Mind you, I’m not suggesting that that was it. But that type of thing. The blow was delivered with great force.’

‘Struck by a strong arm? A man’s arm?’

‘Yes – unless–’

‘Unless – what?’

Dr Reilly said slowly: ‘It is just possible that Mrs Leidner might have been on her knees – in which case, the blow being delivered from above with a heavy implement, the force needed would not have been so great.’

‘On her knees,’ mused Poirot. ‘It is an idea – that.’

‘It’s only an idea, mind,’ the doctor hastened to point out. ‘There’s absolutely nothing to indicate it.’

‘But it’s possible.’

‘Yes. And after all, in view of the circumstances, it’s not fantastic. Her fear might have led her to kneel in supplication rather than to scream when her instinct would tell her it was too late – that nobody could get there in time.’

‘Yes,’ said Poirot thoughtfully. ‘It is an idea…’

It was a very poor one, I thought. I couldn’t for one moment imagine Mrs Leidner on her knees to anyone.

Poirot made his way slowly round the room. He opened the windows, tested the bars, passed his head through and satisfied himself that by no means could his shoulders be made to follow his head.

‘The windows were shut when you found her,’ he said. ‘Were they also shut when you left her at a quarter to one?’

‘Yes, they were always shut in the afternoon. There is no gauze over these windows as there is in the living-room and dining-room. They are kept shut to keep out the flies.’

‘And in any case no one could get in that way,’ mused Poirot. ‘And the walls are of the most solid – mud-brick – and there are no trap-doors and no sky-lights. No, there is only one way into this room – through the door. And there is only one way to the doorthrough the courtyard. And there is only one entrance to the courtyard – through the archway. And outside the archway there were five people and they all tell the same story, and I do not think, me, that they are lying…No, they are not lying. They are not bribed to silence. The murderer was here…’

I didn’t say anything. Hadn’t I felt the same thing just now when we were all cooped up round the table?

Slowly Poirot prowled round the room. He took up a photograph from the chest of drawers. It was of an elderly man with a white goatee beard. He looked inquiringly at me.

‘Mrs Leidner’s father,’ I said. ‘She told me so.’

He put it down again and glanced over the articles on the dressing-table – all of plain tortoise shell – simple but good. He looked up at a row of books on a shelf, repeating the titles aloud.

‘Who were the Greeks? Introduction to Relativity. Life of Lady Hester Stanhope. Crewe Traine. Back to Methuselah. Linda Condon. Yes, they tell us something, perhaps. She was not a fool, your Mrs Leidner. She had a mind.’

‘Oh! she was a very clever woman,’ I said eagerly. ‘Very well read and up in everything. She wasn’t a bit ordinary.’

He smiled as he looked over at me.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve already realized that.’

He passed on. He stood for some moments at the washstand, where there was a big array of bottles and toilet creams.

Then, suddenly, he dropped on his knees and examined the rug.

Dr Reilly and I came quickly to join him. He was examining a small dark brown stain, almost invisible on the brown of the rug. In fact it was only just noticeable where it impinged on one of the white stripes.

‘What do you say, doctor?’ he said. ‘Is that blood?’

Dr Reilly knelt down.

‘Might be,’ he said. ‘I’ll make sure if you like?’

‘If you would be so amiable.’

Mr Poirot examined the jug and basin. The jug was standing on the side of the washstand. The basin was empty, but beside the washstand there was an empty kerosene tin containing slop water.

He turned to me.

‘Do you remember, nurse? Was this jug out of the basin or in it when you left Mrs Leidner at a quarter to one?’

‘I can’t be sure,’ I said after a minute or two. ‘I rather think it was standing in the basin.’

‘Ah?’

‘But you see,’ I said hastily, ‘I only think so because it usually was. The boys leave it like that after lunch. I just feel that if it hadn’t been in I should have noticed it.’

He nodded quite appreciatively.

‘Yes. I understand that. It is your hospital training. If everything had not been just so in the room, you would quite unconsciously have set it to rights hardly noticing what you were doing. And after the murder? Was it like it is now?’

I shook my head.

‘I didn’t notice then,’ I said. ‘All I looked for was whether there was any place anyone could be hidden or if there was anything the murderer had left behind him.’

‘It’s blood all right,’ said Dr Reilly, rising from his knees. ‘Is it important?’

Poirot was frowning perplexedly. He flung out his hands with petulance.

‘I cannot tell. How can I tell? It may mean nothing at all. I can say, if I like, that the murderer touched her – that there was blood on his hands – very little blood, but still blood – and so he came over here and washed them. Yes, it may have been like that. But I cannot jump to conclusions and say that it was so. That stain may be of no importance at all.’

‘There would have been very little blood,’ said Dr Reilly dubiously. ‘None would have spurted out or anything like that. It would have just oozed a little from the wound. Of course, if he’d probed it at all…’

I gave a shiver. A nasty sort of picture came up in my mind. The vision of somebody – perhaps that nice pig-faced photographic boy, striking down that lovely woman and then bending over her probing the wound with his finger in an awful gloating fashion and his face, perhaps, quite different…all fierce and mad…

Dr Reilly noticed my shiver.

‘What’s the matter, nurse?’ he said.

‘Nothing – just goose-flesh,’ I said. ‘A goose walking over my grave.’

Mr Poirot turned round and looked at me.

‘I know what you need,’ he said. ‘Presently when we have finished here and I go back with the doctor to Hassanieh we will take you with us. You will give Nurse Leatheran tea, will you not, doctor?’

‘Delighted.’

‘Oh, no doctor,’ I protested. ‘I couldn’t think of such a thing.’

M. Poirot gave me a little friendly tap on the shoulder. Quite an English tap, not a foreign one.

‘You, ma soeur, will do as you are told,’ he said. ‘Besides, it will be of advantage to me. There is a good deal more that I want to discuss, and I cannot do it here where one must preserve the decencies. The good Dr Leidner he worshipped his wife and he is sure – oh, so sure – that everybody else felt the same about her! But that, in my opinion, would not be human nature! No, we want to discuss Mrs Leidner with – how do you say? – the gloves removed. That is settled then. When we have finished here, we take you with us to Hassanieh.’

‘I suppose,’ I said doubtfully, ‘that I ought to be leaving anyway. It’s rather awkward.’

‘Do nothing for a day or two,’ said Dr Reilly. ‘You can’t very well go until after the funeral.’

‘That’s all very well,’ I said. ‘And supposing I get murdered too, doctor?’

I said it half jokingly and Dr Reilly took it in the same fashion and would, I think, have made some jocular response.

But M. Poirot, to my astonishment, stood stock-still in the middle of the floor and clasped his hands to his head.

‘Ah! if that were possible,’ he murmured. ‘It is a danger – yes – a great danger – and what can one do? How can one guard against it?’

‘Why, M. Poirot,’ I said, ‘I was only joking! Who’d want to murder me, I should like to know?’

‘You – or another,’ he said, and I didn’t like the way he said it at all. Positively creepy.

‘But why?’ I persisted.

He looked at me very straight then.

‘I joke, mademoiselle,’ he said, ‘and I laugh.But there are some things that are no joke. There are things that my profession has taught me. And one of these things, the most terrible thing, is this: Murder is a habit…’