Murder on the Orient Express (Hercule Poirot 10)

“Now you must just take a hold on yourself, my dear. Everything’s going to be perfectly all right. You mustn’t lose your grip on yourself. If one of us is a nasty murderer we know quite well it isn’t you. Why, anyone would be crazy even to think of such a thing. You sit here and I’ll stay right by you; and don’t you worry any.”

Her voice died away as Poirot stood up.

The Wagon Lit conductor was hovering in the doorway.

“You permit that I stay, Monsieur?”

“Certainly, Michel.”

Poirot cleared his throat.

“Messieurs et Mesdames, I will speak in English, since I think all of you know a little of that language. We are here to investigate the death of Samuel Edward Ratchett—alias Cassetti. There are two possible solutions of the crime. I shall put them both before you, and I shall ask M. Bouc and Dr. Constantine here to judge which solution is the right one.

“Now you all know the facts of the case. Mr. Ratchett was found stabbed this morning. He was last known to be alive at 12:37 last night, when he spoke to the Wagon Lit conductor through the door. A watch in his pyjama pocket was found to be badly dented and it had stopped at a quarter past one. Dr. Constantine, who examined the body when found, puts the time of death as having occurred between midnight and two in the morning. At half an hour after midnight, as you all know, the train ran into a snowdrift. After that time it was impossible for anyone to leave the train.

“The evidence of Mr. Hardman, who is a memb

er of a New York Detective Agency” (several heads turned to look at Mr. Hardman) “shows that no one could have passed his compartment (No. 16 at the extreme end) without being seen by him. We are therefore forced to the conclusion that the murderer is to be found among the occupants of one particular coach—the Stamboul-Calais coach.

“That, I will say, was our theory.”

“Comment?” ejaculated M. Bouc, startled.

“But I will put before you an alternative theory. It is very simple. Mr. Ratchett had a certain enemy whom he feared. He gave Mr. Hardman a description of this enemy and told him that the attempt, if made at all, would most probably be made on the second night out from Stamboul.”

“Now I put it to you, ladies and gentlemen, that Mr. Ratchett knew a good deal more than he told. The enemy as Mr. Ratchett expected, joined the train at Belgrade, or possibly at Vincouci, by the door left open by Colonel Arbuthnot and Mr. MacQueen who had just descended to the platform. He was provided with a suit of Wagon Lit uniform, which he wore over his ordinary clothes, and a pass key which enabled him to gain access to Mr. Ratchett’s compartment in spite of the door being locked. Mr. Ratchett was under the influence of a sleeping draught. This man stabbed him with great ferocity and left the compartment through the communicating door leading to Mrs. Hubbard’s compartment—”

“That’s so,” said Mrs. Hubbard, nodding her head.

“He thrust the dagger he had used into Mrs. Hubbard’s sponge bag in passing. Without knowing it, he lost a button of his uniform. Then he slipped out of the compartment and along the corridor. He hastily thrust the uniform into a suitcase in an empty compartment, and a few minutes later, dressed in ordinary clothes, he left the train just before it started off. Again using the same means of egress—the door near the dining car.”

Everybody gasped.

“What about that watch?” demanded Mr. Hardman.

“There you have the explanation of the whole thing. Mr. Ratchett had ommitted to put his watch back an hour as he should have done at Tzaribrod. His watch still registered Eastern European time, which is one hour ahead of Central European time. It was a quarter past twelve when Mr. Ratchett was stabbed—not a quarter past one.”

“But it is absurd, that explanation,” cried M. Bouc. “What of the voice that spoke from the compartment at twenty-three minutes to one. It was either the voice of Ratchett—or else of his murderer.”

“Not necessarily. It might have been—well—a third person. One who had gone in to speak to Ratchett and found him dead. He rang the bell to summon the conductor, then, as you express it, the wind rose in him—he was afraid of being accused of the crime and he spoke pretending to be Ratchett.”

“C’est possible,” admitted M. Bouc grudgingly.

Poirot looked at Mrs. Hubbard.

“Yes, Madame, you were going to say—?”

“Well, I don’t quite know what I was going to say. Do you think I forgot to put my watch back too?”

“No, Madame. I think you heard the man pass through—but unconsciously; later you had a nightmare of a man being in your compartment and woke up with a start and rang for the conductor.”

“Well, I suppose that’s possible,” admitted Mrs. Hubbard.

Princess Dragomiroff was looking at Poirot with a very direct glance.

“How do you explain the evidence of my maid, Monsieur?”

“Very simply, Madame. Your maid recognized the handkerchief I showed her as yours. She somewhat clumsily tried to shield you. She did encounter the man—but earlier—while the train was at Vincovci station. She pretended to have seen him at a later hour with a confused idea of giving you a watertight alibi.”

The Princess bowed her head.

“You have thought of everything, Monsieur. I—I admire you.”

There was a silence.

Then everyone jumped as Dr. Constantine suddenly hit the table a blow with his fist.

“But no,” he said. “No, no, and again no! That is an explanation that will not hold water. It is deficient in a dozen minor points. The crime was not committed so—M. Poirot must know that perfectly well.”

Poirot turned a curious glance on him.

“I see,” he said, “that I shall have to give my second solution. But do not abandon this one too abruptly. You may agree with it later.”

He turned back again to face the others.

“There is another possible solution of the crime. This is how I arrived at it.

“When I had heard all the evidence, I leaned back and shut my eyes and began to think. Certain points presented themselves to me as worthy of attention. I enumerated these points to my two colleagues. Some I have already elucidated—such as a grease spot on a passport, etc. I will run over the points that remain. The first and most important is a remark made to me by M. Bouc in the restaurant car at lunch on the first day after leaving Stamboul—to the effect that the company assembled was interesting because it was so varied—representing as it did all classes and nationalities.

“I agreed with him, but when this particular point came into my mind, I tried to imagine whether such an assembly were ever likely to be collected under any other conditions. And the answer I made to myself was—only in America. In America there might be a household composed of just such varied nationalities—an Italian chauffeur, and English governess, a Swedish nurse, a French lady’s maid and so on. That led me to my scheme of ‘guessing’—that is, casting each person for a certain part in the Armstrong drama much as a producer casts a play. Well, that gave me an extremely interesting and satisfactory result.

“I had also examined in my own mind each separate person’s evidence with some curious results. Take first the evidence of Mr. MacQueen. My first interview with him was entirely satisfactory. But in my second he made rather a curious remark. I had described to him the finding of a note mentioning the Armstrong case. He said, ‘But surely—’ and then paused and went on, ‘I mean—that was rather careless of the old man.’

“Now I could feel that that was not what he had started out to say. Supposing what he had meant to say was, ‘But surely that was burnt!’ In which case, MacQueen knew of the note and of its destruction—in other words, he was either the murderer or an accomplice of the murderer. Very good.

“Then the valet. He said his master was in the habit of taking a sleeping draught when travelling by train. That might be true, but would Ratchett have taken one last night? The automatic under his pillow gave the lie to that statement. Ratchett intended to be on the alert last night. Whatever narcotic was administered to him must have been done so without his knowledge. By whom? Obviously by MacQueen or the valet.

“Now we come to the evidence of Mr. Hardman. I believed all that he told me about his own identity, but when it came to the actual methods he had employed to guard Mr. Ratchett, his story was neither more nor less than absurd. The only way effectively to have protected Ratchett was to have passed the night actually in his compartment or in some spot where he could watch the door. The only thing that his evidence did show plainly was that no one in any other part of the train could possibly have murdered Ratchett. It drew a clear circle round the Stamboul-Calais carriage. That seemed to me a rather curious and inexplicable fact, and I put it aside to think over.

“You probably have all heard by now of the few words I overheard between Miss Debenham and Colonel Arbuthnot. The interesting thing to my mind was the fact that Colonel Arbuthnot called her Mary and was clearly on terms of intimacy with her. But the Colonel was only supposed to have met her a few days previously—and I know Englishmen of the Colonel’s type. Even if he had fallen in love with the young lady at first sight, he would have advanced slowly and with decorum—not rushing things. Therefore I concluded that Colonel Arbuthnot and Miss Debenham were in reality well acquainted, and were for some reason pretending to be strangers. Another small point was Miss Debenham’s easy familiarity with the term ‘long distance’ for a telephone call. Yet Miss Debenham had told

me that she had never been in the States.

“To pass to another witness. Mrs. Hubbard had told us that lying in bed she was unable to see whether the communicating door was bolted or not, and so asked Miss Ohlsson to see for her. Now, though her statement would have been perfectly true if she had been occupying compartments Nos. 2, 4, 12, or any even number—where the bolt is directly under the handle of the door—in the uneven numbers, such as compartment No. 3, the bolt is well above the handle and could not therefore be masked by the sponge bag in the least. I was forced to the conclusion that Mrs. Hubbard was inventing an incident that had never occurred.

“And here let me say just a word or two about times. To my mind, the really interesting point about the dented watch was the place where it was found—in Ratchett’s pyjama pocket, a singularly uncomfortable and unlikely place to keep one’s watch, especially as there is a watch ‘hook’ provided just by the head of the bed. I felt sure, therefore, that the watch had been deliberately placed in the pocket and faked. The crime, then, was not committed at a quarter past one.

“Was it, then, committed earlier? To be exact, at twenty-three minutes to one? My friend M. Bouc advanced as an argument in favour of it the loud cry which awoke me from sleep. But if Ratchett were heavily drugged he could not have cried out. If he had been capable of crying out he would have been capable of making some kind of a struggle to defend himself, and there were no signs of any such struggle.

“I remembered that MacQueen had called attention, not once but twice (and the second time in a very blatant manner), to the fact that Ratchett could speak no French. I came to the conclusion that the whole business at twenty-three minutes to one was a comedy played for my benefit! Anyone might see through the watch business—it is a common enough device in detective stories. They assumed that I should see through it and that, pluming myself on my own cleverness, I would go on to assume that since Ratchett spoke no French the voice I heard at twenty-three minutes to one could not be his, and that Ratchett must be already dead. But I am convinced that at twenty-three minutes to one Ratchett was still lying in his drugged sleep.