Captain Maitland spoke with all in the house, while Dr Reilly inspected the body. Nurse Leatheran observes that the murder weapon is not in the room. His wife was struck fatally on the head with a large blunt object. He calls the nurse in to the room, as he cannot handle this loss. She is calmed only when Father Lavigny explains who the man is, and the man leaves.Ī week after the nurse's arrival, Mrs Leidner is found dead by her husband in her room. Other strangers, however, make her jump, as shown when the pair observe an unknown man at the house, peering in a window.

Mrs Leidner begins to be at ease as she trusts the nurse brought in to be her companion. It had been a group known for good humor and good relations among all the varied specialists and workers.

This dig, the whole team seems on edge, unlike previous years. Miss Johnson is a longtime part of the team, and she, Nurse Leatheran decides, is more than ordinarily attracted to the head of the team. Leidner's longtime colleague Richard Carey is formal and terse at meals with her. The young men seem to be in puppy love with Mrs Leidner, while Dr. Nurse Leatheran settles in to the routine of the archeological dig, with its mix of local people and scientists or enthusiasts from England, America, and France. Its recurrence at the dig scares her badly. No letters arrived when or after she met and married Dr Leidner, and had hoped that experience was behind her. She had no letters from him from their short marriage, so she could not ascertain whether the letters were really written by him. One of the letters was signed with her late husband's name. They arrived every time she would go out with a new man, then stopped when she broke off the relationship. She confides to Nurse Leatheran that she had received similar threatening letters several years before that were worded as if written by her dead first husband. Mrs Leidner has been frightened by weird goings on, such as a ghostly face appearing just outside her window one night and threatening letters.

He asks her to join the dig to look after his wife. It was to no avail as he ended up on a train that crashed a body bearing his identification was found in the wreckage.Īmy Leatheran is a nurse working in Iraq when she meets Dr Leidner. He managed to escape while he was being transported. He was caught, tried and sentenced to death. State Department, but was actually a spy for Germany. His wife Louise was married briefly during the Great War 15 years earlier in 1918, to a German named Frederick Bosner, a young man who worked for the U.S. A middle aged man, he is married just two years to a beautiful woman. Dr Eric Leidner is, ostensibly, a Swedish archaeologist on a dig near Hassanieh, Iraq, then a British protectorate.

Murder in mesopotamia