Summary
Chapter 13
In this chapter, Poirot reflects on the evidence he’s gathered so far, helping Bouc and Constantine make sense of a seemingly senseless tangle of facts. Firstly, he says, the crime either took place at 1:15—as much evidence suggests, including the broken watch—or it took place at another time, with the watch planted as evidence in order to confuse investigators. For the time being, Poirot decides to follow the “1:15” hypothesis, since it seems most logically likely. Poirot moves on to the murderer’s identity. Determining this partly depends on whether they decide to believe Hardman concerning his true identity, and Poirot sees no reason not to—though, he notes, him being a detective doesn’t mean he’s not guilty of murder. His testimony is consistent with Hildegarde Schmidt’s account of the conductor with the womanly voice, and Schmidt’s testimony is consistent with the button Mrs. Hubbard found in her room. Meanwhile, Arbuthnot and MacQueen both say they saw a conductor pass MacQueen’s compartment—but since Pierre Michel wasn’t in that part of the train during the period in question, this conductor must have been the intruder. Now that he has ascertained that this intruder probably is real, Poirot says, it’s time to move on to the question of where he is.
There are two places he could be, says Poirot. One option is that he’s hidden somewhere so creative that searches of the train yielded nothing. The second is that he’s one of the passengers in disguise. If he’s disguised, it’s a question of which passenger he is: probably one of the female ones, because all the male passengers are very tall and this intruder was small with a high voice. Indeed, Poirot says, maybe Ratchett knew that his killer would be a woman, but warned Hardman about a man because he figured she’d disguise herself as one. Then Poirot drops a bomb, telling an already-despairing Bouc about Constantine’s discovery—namely, that Ratchett had been stabbed again a significant length of time after he was killed. And then, Poirot notes, there’s the matter of the woman in the red kimono: is she the same person as the mysterious conductor, or a different one? Poirot makes a prediction: when the men search the luggage, they’ll find the red kimono in one of the men’s bags, and the conductor’s outfit in Hildegarde Schmidt’s. But this isn’t an accusation, he says—if they don’t find the conductor’s uniform in Schmidt’s bag she might be innocent, and if they do, in fact, find it there, then she is certainly innocent. Then, suddenly, Mrs. Hubbard bursts into the compartment, yelling something about her sponge-bag, a knife, and blood—then she faints.
Chapter 14
While an attendant revives Mrs. Hubbard with cognac, Poirot, Bouc, and Constantine run to her compartment. The other passengers are crowded outside it, with Pierre Michel blocking the door. Poirot and his two companions slip inside, and Pierre Michel shows them what all the fuss is about. Mrs. Hubbard’s sponge-bag is hanging on the handle of the door to the adjoining compartment, and, on the floor having fallen from it, is a dagger. The dagger is the cheap kind sold to tourists in Constantinople, and it’s covered in dried blood. Constantine says that this is surely the murder weapon: all of Ratchett’s wounds could have been made from it. This distresses Poirot, who finds it extremely confusing that two different people could have stabbed Ratchett with this single weapon. Poirot tries to open the door between the two compartments but it doesn’t budge, because, as Constantine points out, they already bolted it from the other side. Bouc notes that the murderer must have slipped out of Ratchett’s compartment into Hubbard’s, felt the sponge-bag hanging on the door, and impulsively slipped the weapon into it. But Poirot is evidently skeptical.
Hubbard returns and, between her usual anecdotes about her daughter, announces that she refuses to stay in her old compartment, No. 3. Bouc tells her she can be moved to a totally different coach. In fact, Poirot says, rather than be placed in compartment No. 3 in the other coach, she should be placed in No. 12. The three men walk with her to her new coach. Poirot asks her about her evidence again. How, he asks, could the man have entered her compartment if the door between her and Ratchett’s rooms were locked?
Mrs. Hubbard doesn’t know, but assures Poirot that the door was indeed locked, because the Swedish woman, Ohlsson, checked for her. The Swedish woman checked it for her, she says, because she could not see the lock herself from where she lay—her sponge-bag was blocking it from view. Poirot posits that Ohlsson may have made a mistake. If she merely tested the door rather than looking at the lock, she may have concluded that it was bolted on Mrs. Hubbard’s side, when in fact it was only bolted on Ratchett’s. Poirot asks Hubbard if she reached Smyrna, where her daughter lives, by train. She says no: she sailed to Stamboul, was met by a friend of her daughter’s named Mr. Johnson, and subsequently boarded a boat to Smyrna. Before dismissing the very-upset passenger, Poirot asks to search her luggage. He finds nothing of interest, though Mrs. Hubbard spends a long time narrating the various family photographs in her bags.
Chapter 15
Now, Poirot, Bouc, and Constantine proceed to search every other passenger’s luggage. Hardman, who is amiable and cooperative, has a great deal of liquor in his luggage—he’s smuggling it into the U.S., where it is under prohibition—but nothing else of note. Hardman and Poirot discuss the relative charms of European and American women and culture, and Hardman notes that he’s feeling stir-crazy in the stopped train, what with the bad atmosphere created by murder.
Arbuthnot’s luggage contains a bombshell bit of evidence: pipe-cleaners of the same kind found at the crime scene.
Princess Dragomiroff says that her maid has the keys to her luggage, and when Poirot asks follow-up questions, she repeatedly emphasizes her total trust in Hildegarde Schmidt—despite the fact that, as Poirot points out, she seems like the type to be cared for by a chic French woman. While Bouc and Schmidt search the luggage, the Princess tells Poirot all about how she would have liked to kill Cassetti, given her love for the Armstrong family. Poirot replies that, while she seems emotionally capable of it, the elderly woman likely could not actually stab a man to death.
Next up are the Andrenyis. They’re technically allowed to refuse the search since they have diplomatic passports, but they opt to have their luggage searched. Poirot seems to feel awkward, and makes various banal comments throughout. Poirot also notes that the compartment’s cupboard holds a few cosmetics and a container of trional, the Countess’s sleeping medicine.
They skip the next three compartments, which belong to Mrs. Hubbard, Ratchett, and Poirot himself, and then reach the second-class spots. They search Mary Debenham and Greta Ohlsson’s shared compartment. Poirot gets Ohlsson out of the room by sending her to help Mrs. Hubbard, and Debenham immediately accuses him of trying to talk to her alone. He decides to be straightforward, and asks her about the nature of her suspicious conversations with Arbuthnot, as well as about her agitation regarding the train’s delay (which has now dissipated). She tells him that the conversations had nothing to do with Ratchett’s murder, but avoids telling him their actual topic or explaining her earlier panic. Finally, Poirot asks her what she thinks of Arbuthnot, telling her that he’s implicated by being the only pipe-smoker on the train. Though she claims to have met him only days ago, she says she knows he wouldn’t commit a crime of this sort.
Next they visit Hildegarde Schmidt’s compartment and find, as Poirot predicted, a wagon-lit conductor’s uniform missing a button in her bag. She panics, telling them that she did not place it there, and Poirot assures her that he believes her. He explains his theory: the criminal, bumping into Hildegarde Schmidt in the corridor, panics because he has been seen, making his disguise a sudden liability. Meanwhile, the snow means he can’t escape, and he has to hide his outfit on the train. The only empty compartment belongs to Schmidt, who is still out in the corridor, so he stuffs the uniform into her suitcase. In the pocket of the uniform, Poirot finds a key used by conductors to unlock compartments, which explains how he was able to move between seemingly locked doors (though, perhaps, he forgot to re-lock the door between Mrs. Hubbard and Ratchett’s compartments).
They then search MacQueen’s bags, and find nothing unusual, though MacQueen himself seems uneasy: he loudly talks about his relationship to Ratchett, recounting how he, MacQueen, had to translate the simplest phrases for his employer on their travels. Finally, they search Foscarelli and Masterman, but find nothing. This is disappointing, since they still don’t know who wore the red kimono. Yet when Bouc, Poirot, and Constantine return to Poirot’s compartment to debrief, they discover the kimono, folded on top of Poirot’s own suitcase.
Analysis
These chapters represent a turn away from passenger testimony and back to the gathering of physical evidence—objects like the kimono, the conductor’s uniform, and pipe cleaners—that characterized the earliest part of Poirot’s strategy. There are several reasons why these physical objects matter on a narrative level. Firstly, they help center the reader’s focus during the passengers’ interviews. As the passengers talk, possibly telling lies and very often focusing on irrelevant information, readers (and Poirot) can keep a mental list of things they really need to pay attention to. Therefore, even though it’s still entirely unclear who actually killed Ratchett, we can focus on the micro-mysteries created by these objects, and, as we solve those mysteries, we’re able to keep track of just how far we still have to go in solving the big, overarching murder mystery. For example, readers know that they must figure out who dropped the pipe cleaner. As Poirot interviews each passenger about their smoking habits, eventually discovering that Arbuthnot smokes a pipe, readers feel some relief and triumph despite the overwhelming tangle of evidence before them. At the same time, readers know that the mystery of the kimono remains entirely unsolved, and the desire to learn who wore that kimono propels us forward to the next page or chapter.
Furthermore, this physical evidence helps solve a potential problem inherent in the mystery novel. Most novelists fill their stories with vivid scenes full of concrete imagery. While a suspenseful plot is an essential part of many novels, readers might not care about the plot if they can’t picture the scenes playing out. But a book like Murder on the Orient Express paradoxically revolves around a scene that we, as readers, aren’t able to picture. The murder scene, which is in a way the climactic moment of the book, happens hidden from our eyes. We don’t know what it looked, sounded, or smelled like, and if we did, then the mystery would be solved and we would have no book. So the evidence to which we do have access plays a huge role in helping the reader feel invested in the plot via concrete imagery. Though we may not know how it all fits together, it gives us a montage-like set of aesthetic ideas that build drama around the climactic, but missing, murder scene. We picture Ratchett’s murder through a screen of red kimonos, daggers, handkerchiefs, and buttons. These turn the scene around which the whole book revolves from a total blank space into something more compelling, with colors and textures of its own.
Meanwhile, though these chapters certainly do focus on the discovery of the weapon and the search through passengers’ luggage, these activities also provide a kind of excuse for more interaction with passengers. In other words, as Poirot enters the other characters’ compartments to look through their bags, he ends up conducting follow-up interviews with them. If he simply called each character in for a second interview, this would feel repetitive and boring. But the luggage search makes these conversations feel fresh and different, and the characters’ behavior is somewhat different precisely because they don’t think they’re being formally evaluated. Thus Poirot is able to try and catch Mary Debenham off guard, or to note that MacQueen, for unknown reasons, is behaving strangely. While the actual evidence discovered in the luggage matters, it is the process of searching for that evidence that yields the most tantalizing information.
