Murder in Mesopotamia

The novel is narrated by Amy Leatheran, a practical 32-year-old English hospital nurse who becomes an eyewitness to murder at an archaeological expedition in Iraq. Her account is framed by a foreword from Dr. Giles Reilly, a civil surgeon in the town of Hassanieh, who has asked her to write an unbiased record of the events at the Tell Yarimjah dig.

Amy has come to Iraq to attend a patient and her baby. When that job ends, Dr. Reilly recommends her for a new position: looking after the wife of Dr. Eric Leidner, a gentle, middle-aged archaeologist who leads a museum expedition excavating an ancient site. Dr. Leidner describes his wife as suffering from "nervous terrors" but remains vague about the cause. Amy notices his curious use of the word "safer" to describe how his wife would feel with a nurse present.

Before departing, Amy hears gossip in Baghdad. Mrs. Leidner's nickname is "Lovely Louise," and acquaintances report a strange atmosphere of tension at the expedition, where everyone seems stiff and overly polite. The unease is attributed to Mrs. Leidner herself, who apparently amuses herself by setting people against each other.

Amy arrives at the expedition house, a mud-brick compound built around a courtyard with a single arched entrance. She is surprised by Mrs. Leidner's beauty: fair-haired, violet-eyed, and fragile. At tea she meets the full staff, including the devoted Miss Johnson; Father Lavigny, a French monk serving as epigraphist, or specialist in ancient inscriptions; shy photographer Carl Reiter; quiet David Emmott; the watchful Mercados; cheerful Bill Coleman; and Richard Carey, the strikingly handsome architect. Amy senses the overly formal politeness she was warned about.

Over her first days, Amy observes interpersonal tensions. Mrs. Mercado watches her husband's interactions with Mrs. Leidner with jealous fury. Carey works late with an extraordinary look of strain. During a walk, Amy and Mrs. Leidner spot a man trying to peer through a window of the house; Mrs. Leidner clutches Amy in terror but relaxes when the man proves to be an Iraqi. Amy concludes that Mrs. Leidner fears a specific, real person. A night alarm follows: sounds in the antika-room, the storeroom for excavated artifacts, but nothing is taken. The incident prompts Mrs. Leidner to confide in Amy.

Mrs. Leidner reveals that her first husband, Frederick Bosner, was exposed during World War I as a German spy. She reported him to her father, a War Department official. Frederick was sentenced to death and escaped, but was believed killed in a train wreck. After his supposed death, anonymous threatening letters arrived whenever Mrs. Leidner grew close to another man, warning she must remain Frederick's wife or die. Her father suspected the letters came from Frederick's younger brother William. When Mrs. Leidner married Dr. Leidner, no letter arrived before the wedding, but two came shortly after, followed by a near-fatal gas poisoning. They went abroad and had 18 months of peace, but the letters resumed at Tell Yarimjah, culminating in a hand-delivered note: "I have arrived." Mrs. Leidner also describes a dead, grinning face she saw pressed against her window one night.

Amy later sees Mrs. Leidner's handwriting and realizes it closely resembles the writing on the anonymous letters. She begins to wonder whether Mrs. Leidner wrote them herself.

On Saturday afternoon, Mrs. Leidner rests in her room while Dr. Leidner works on the roof and Emmott supervises the pot-boy Abdullah in the courtyard. At quarter to three, Dr. Leidner enters his wife's room and emerges grey-faced and staggering. Amy finds Mrs. Leidner dead, killed by a massive blow to the right temple. The windows are closed and barred from the inside. There is no weapon and no sign of an intruder.

Dr. Reilly estimates the time of death at approximately half past one. Since no stranger entered the compound, he concludes the murderer must be a member of the expedition. Dr. Reilly reveals that Hercule Poirot, the renowned Belgian detective, happens to be passing through Hassanieh the next day, and Dr. Leidner agrees to seek his help.

Poirot assembles the expedition and announces that everyone is under suspicion. Through interviews, he establishes that during one roughly 10-minute stretch, both Emmott and Abdullah were absent from the courtyard, and he concludes Mrs. Leidner was killed during that window. In private, Dr. Leidner breaks down and admits he suspected his wife wrote the threatening letters herself. Poirot outlines three solutions: Frederick Bosner is alive and carried out his threats; Mrs. Leidner wrote the letters and someone else killed her for personal reasons; or Frederick or William Bosner is living among the staff under a false identity.

Poirot's investigation deepens. He discovers that Mr. Mercado has a drug addiction, which his wife desperately conceals. He provokes Carey into confessing he hated Mrs. Leidner. Sheila Reilly, Dr. Reilly's daughter, reveals that Carey was secretly in love with Mrs. Leidner and that they met clandestinely. From a cupboard, Poirot retrieves a crude plasticine mask, confirming that someone staged the ghostly face at Mrs. Leidner's window. Amy had earlier noticed a trace of wax on one of the expedition's gold artifacts, a detail that takes on new significance.

Amy finds Miss Johnson weeping in the office one evening and watches her burn a scrap of paper whose handwriting matches the anonymous letters. Days later on the roof, Miss Johnson tells Amy in a state of shock that she has seen how someone could have entered from outside without anyone guessing, but she refuses to say more. That night, Miss Johnson swallows hydrochloric acid from the expedition's laboratory and dies in agony, her last strangled words referring to "the window."

Father Lavigny has vanished. Under Miss Johnson's bed, police find a heavy stone quern, a type of grinding tool, stained with blood and bearing a strand of fair hair: almost certainly the weapon used on Mrs. Leidner. The implication is that Miss Johnson killed Mrs. Leidner and took her own life from remorse. Amy refuses to believe it.

Poirot assembles everyone for his revelation. He first exposes Father Lavigny as Raoul Menier, a notorious French thief who impersonated the real priest and, with an accomplice, replaced the expedition's gold artifacts with electrotypes, or replica metal copies. This explains the wax on the gold cup and the nighttime disturbance in the antika-room. But Poirot says this theory does not account for Miss Johnson's dying words or her behavior on the roof.

Poirot announces the true murderer: Dr. Leidner himself. He is Frederick Bosner. After the train wreck, Bosner assumed the identity of a dead young Swedish archaeologist whose disfigured body was buried in his place. He built a distinguished career but never stopped controlling Louise. He wrote the threatening letters in a hand mimicking hers, keeping her from marrying anyone else. When he reentered her life as "Dr. Leidner," she did not recognize her first husband. No letter came before the wedding because he wanted to marry her. The letters resumed at Tell Yarimjah because he discovered her secret affair with Carey.

The murder method is simple. Alone on the roof, Dr. Leidner dangled the plasticine mask against his wife's outer window. Recognizing the trick in daylight, Mrs. Leidner opened the window, put her head through the bars, and looked up. Dr. Leidner dropped the heavy quern onto her head, then hauled it back up by a cord. An hour later, he went downstairs, closed the window, moved the body, and switched the bloodstained rug with another to obscure the connection. He had hired Amy precisely so a trained nurse could confirm his wife had been dead over an hour, proving he could not have killed her when he entered the room.

Miss Johnson, while tidying Dr. Leidner's office, had found a draft of an anonymous letter in his handwriting. On the roof, she realized Mrs. Leidner's window lay directly below the parapet and understood the murder method. Dr. Leidner perceived she knew. That night, he substituted acid for her bedside water glass and planted the quern under her bed to frame her. Her dying words about the window were her attempt to communicate how Mrs. Leidner was actually killed.

When Poirot admits he has no material proof, Dr. Leidner quietly confirms everything. He expresses sorrow for Miss Johnson's death and acknowledges simply that he loved Louise and killed her.

In an epilogue, Menier and his accomplice are caught in Beirut. Sheila marries Emmott. Amy reflects on Mrs. Leidner with ambivalence, sometimes seeing her as terrible, other times remembering her kindness and beauty. She pities Dr. Leidner despite his crimes, concluding that it is awful to be so deeply attached to someone.