Murder in Mesopotamia

‘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…’

Chapter 18. Tea at Dr Reilly’s

Before leaving, Poirot made a round of the expedition house and the outbuildings. He also asked a few questions of the servants at second hand – that is to say, Dr Reilly translated the questions and answers from English to Arabic and vice versa.

These questions dealt mainly with the appearance of the stranger Mrs Leidner and I had seen looking through the window and to whom Father Lavigny had been talking on the following day.

‘Do you really think that fellow had anything to do with it?’ asked Dr Reilly when we were bumping along in his car on our way to Hassanieh.

‘I like all the information there is,’ was Poirot’s reply.

And really, that described his methods very well. I found later that there wasn’t anything – no small scrap of insignificant gossip – in which he wasn’t interested. Men aren’t usually so gossipy.

I must confess I was glad of my cup of tea when we got to Dr Reilly’s house. M. Poirot, I noticed, put five lumps of sugar in his.

Stirring it carefully with his teaspoon he said: ‘And now we can talk, can we not? We can make up our minds who is likely to have committed the crime.’

‘Lavigny, Mercado, Emmott or Reiter?’ asked Dr Reilly.