Agatha Christie's Golden Age by John Goddard

Author:John Goddard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spiffing Covers

12

Murder In Mesopotamia

Solution

Poirot investigates the murder of Louise Leidner in Mesopotamia, the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers corresponding today roughly to Iraq. Most of the story is set in an expedition house occupied by the members of an American archaeological team, the University of Pittstown Expedition to Iraq. The team, led by Louise’s husband Dr Eric Leidner, an American Swede, are excavating an Assyrian city, Tell Yarimjah, near Hassanieh.

The rectangular, one-storey expedition house is built around a courtyard accessed through an arch on its north side. As the plan (chapter 4) shows, the courtyard is surrounded by 23 rooms – six for the expedition’s work (such as a laboratory and an antika-room for storing the finds), nine bedrooms for the expedition team including Leidner plus a separate bedroom for Louise, six rooms for their communal use and one bedroom for nurse Amy Leatheran.

Most of the rooms open onto the courtyard – chapter 4 says that they all do but the plan shows this is incorrect – as do most of their windows, except on the south side where there are also windows onto the outside country, with the corner rooms of Louise and Father Lavigny looking only onto the outside. In the south-west corner a staircase goes up to a flat roof running along the south side of the building. Outside the house are the natives’ sleeping quarters.

The nine members of the expedition team comprise Leidner; Richard Carey; Anne Johnson; Joseph Mercado; Marie Mercado; David Emmott; Bill Coleman; Carl Reiter and Father Lavigny.

Nurse Amy Leatheran, who narrates the story, joins the expedition after its work has started. She is asked to do so by Leidner who tells her that Louise, whom he married less than two years ago, suffers from nervous terrors and would feel safer if a nurse looked after her. In fact, Amy fails to keep Louise safe because in chapter 10 (out of 29), about a week after Amy’s arrival, Louise is murdered in her bedroom by a blow on the front of the head from a heavy quern (a grinder) which is found in chapter 25.

Even though more than two thirds of the book remains when Louise is killed, she is the character around which it revolves and Poirot refers in chapters 20, 22 and 27 to the importance of knowing what she was like. She was beautiful – though not young (aged between 30 and 40) and with a rather haggard face but lovely eyes – and worshipped by Leidner. She had to be the centre of attention and enjoyed exercising power over those who came under her irresistible spell. Everyone had to acknowledge her sway and, if conquest was too easy, she indulged her cruel side, turning ugly if she didn’t get her way. She enjoyed getting at people and setting them against each other – not quarrelling herself but making others do so. She was dangerous, ruthless and temperamental, being nice one day but devilish the next. In short, she was,

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