Death in a Desert Land by Andrew Wilson

Author:Andrew Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Atria Books

16

Nobody cared for lunch, and so all of us drifted back to our rooms. I went through my notes, assessing the case from the very beginning. Despite hours of reading and thinking, I could not find any link between the death of Gertrude Bell—which was, after all, the reason I had been dispatched by Davison to Ur—and the murder of Sarah Archer.

Were there two different killers at work here? It certainly seemed that way. After all, Miss Bell had died from an overdose in her bed at her home in Baghdad; even if she had a premonition that someone wanted to kill her, her death would have been a peaceful one. It looked as though Miss Archer, however, had been hit over the head with a rock—a nasty, brutal, painful murder. But could the two killers be working together? If so, what had they to gain from the deaths? Could Katharine have employed someone to murder Miss Bell? Leonard Woolley himself had told me that life was cheap in Iraq. What was it that Gertrude Bell had written in that letter to her father? Yes, she had been talking about a perilous journey to Hayyil, where she had been taken prisoner: “There I heard it said that in that place murder was considered so normal, it was likened to the spilling of milk.”

Did Mrs. Woolley harbor a secret resentment towards other women? Was it a simple case of madness? After all, if Katharine was that insane, then there really would be no need to examine the case for evidence of a complex motive. Perhaps, possessed by a blind rage or in the midst of some sort of maniacal frenzy, she had indeed taken that rock and bludgeoned Sarah Archer to death. I knew that it was also perfectly possible for such murderers, those classified as mentally unhinged, to erase violent acts from their memories. Maybe Katharine was guilty of the crime but believed herself to be innocent.

Yet, as I read my notes, the thing that struck me was how Mrs. Woolley had been regarded as an oddity from the very first, almost as if someone was trying to prejudice opinion against her. I had heard her described as everything from strangely attractive, demanding, manipulative, jealous, eccentric, and unreliable to hysterical, erratic, insane. After this, perhaps it was only natural to attach that other deadly label to her personality—that of a murderer—especially when she was discovered sitting next to a body with blood on her hands.

The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that there was someone behind all of this—someone who was desperate to cast Katharine Woolley in the role of a killer. But could this be a case of a very clever double bluff? I remembered the way Katharine told me that she had admired my novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I also thought back to the plot of my first published novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which featured a killer who was the most obvious suspect.

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