The Christie Caper - Carolyn Hart [7]
A 1930 calendar with September 11 circled in red, the date of her marriage to Max Mallowan, the young archaeologist she first met in 1929 on her second trip to Sir Leonard Woolley’s diggings at Ur.
A poster from Witness for the Prosecution, featuring Marlene Dietrich’s enigmatic, unforgettable face.
A sack filled to the bursting with bright red apples, the favored fruit of Ariadne Oliver.
A faded photograph of the Nile steamer the S. S. Karnak. Christie used the steamer in her thirtieth mystery novel, Death on the Nile, her own favorite among her books with foreign backgrounds.
A copy of the Hekanakhthe Papers, found in a tomb near Luxor. These ancient letters by an Egyptian landowner who also looked after a nearby tomb were the springboard for Death Comes as the End.
Annie sighed happily and looked beyond the books and displays to the back wall. The September paintings were wonderful indeed. She had no doubt that everyone attending the conference would be duly impressed by the Death on Demand custom of monthly hanging untitled paintings which represented famous mysteries. The first person to correctly identify author and title received a month’s free coffee and a free book. (From the current stock, not the collectibles, of course. Annie’s generosity didn’t extend to, say, a first edition of Robert Hans van Gulik’s Dee Goong An: Three Murder Cases Solved by Judge Dee, a privately printed edition of twelve hundred numbered copies signed by van Gulik, at nine hundred dollars, or a first edition of Dorothy L. Sayers’s In the Teeth of the Evidence at eight hundred dollars).
In the first painting, an elderly, black-haired man with an egg-shaped head, catlike green eyes, and a luxuriant mustache stared down at a splotched area on the dark carpet of an English country home bedroom. A soldierly-looking man observed his actions closely. The bedclothes were tumbled and tossed. The fireplace was filled with still-smoldering ashes. Summer roses bloomed outside the windows. A table by the bed had been overturned. Among the debris on the floor were a reading lamp, books, matches, and the finely crushed remnants of a coffee cup. A small purple despatch case with the key in its lock lay on a writing table. The door from the hall was closed as was an interior door. A third door, to a connecting bedroom, hung brokenly on its hinges.
In the second painting, a well-dressed man paused on the threshold of a study, bag in hand, looking back into the room at the dark blue leather chairs, the round table with magazines and journals, the bookshelves, the fireplace. The rest of the study wasn’t visible from the hallway. The man’s face was furrowed in thought as he gave that last measuring glance and began to shut the door. Approaching him from the hallway was an oily-faced butler.
Annie loved that particular book. Clever, oh, it was clever. But only one of this wonderful author’s completely original tales.
The book represented in the third painting was without doubt one of the most unusual crime novels ever written. The hands of the clock in the dining room pointed to twenty-two past nine. The eight guests in evening dress appeared white-raced and fearful, from the elderly, white-mustachioed gentleman standing by the fireplace to the rather handsome young fellow near the French windows that opened onto the terrace to the elderly woman sitting rigidly, hard spots of color in each cheek. Broken cups and spilled coffee marked where the butler had dropped his tray.
The fourth painting told a grim story. An old woman’s body lay sprawled on the floor of the modest parlor. The back of her head had suffered a brutal blow. Blood stained her gray hair and the dark carpet The desk drawers were askew; papers were strewn about. A pale young man—his face reflecting terrible horror and indecision—hesitated in the doorway. A smudge of blood stained one cuff. There was no sign of a weapon.
An elderly woman sat transfixed in the fifth painting, staring through the window of her train compartment