Summary
Part 2, Chapter 1
At this point, a transition takes place. Not only does a heading announce that the book is moving into part two, titled “The Evidence,” but each chapter title announces the evidence of a different character. There's also a helpful illustration of Poirot's train map inserted here. In this chapter, Poirot interviews the conductor, who is timid and seems afraid that he will be blamed for allowing the murder. The conductor, whose name is Pierre Michel, shares the following information: that he made up Ratchett’s bed while the victim ate dinner the night before, that Ratchett went to bed directly after dinner, and that the only others who entered his compartment during that period were Ratchett’s valet and his secretary, MacQueen. He confirms Poirot’s own memories of the previous night (for instance, that a woman in a red kimono walked down the corridor, that MacQueen and Arbuthnot sat together talking in MacQueen’s compartment, and that Mrs. Hubbard called for the conductor’s help. In this last case, the conductor says he was visiting a colleague in another part of the train before Mrs. Hubbard and Poirot himself called for his help). However, he isn’t able to offer much new information, such as the identity of the woman in the kimono: his seat in the corridor offered him only a limited vantage point.
Pierre Michel recalls that Ratchett rang for him at around 12:40, but, as Poirot remembers, Ratchett dismissed him, saying that he had rung the bell by mistake. He does say that he has no memory of the loud noise Poirot recalls hearing outside his room. Perhaps, the conductor says, the noise came from the compartment next door to Poirot’s, not the corridor. Finally, he says that there’s no way an assassin could have snuck onto or off of the train: it has been thoroughly searched, and last stopped at the Vincovci station at 11:58 the night before. However, Poirot surprises his interviewee with the news that one door near the restaurant car is unlocked. Pierre Michel says that this must be because a passenger opened it to look outside at the snow. With that, Poirot concludes his interview.
Part 2, Chapter 2
Poirot decides to interview MacQueen again. He tells MacQueen Ratchett’s real identity and story. MacQueen is horrified and disgusted. He has a connection to the Armstrong case, he says—his father is a district attorney who worked on it, and MacQueen says he personally witnessed the heartbreak of Daisy’s family. Yet MacQueen is wary, not wanting to seem happy about Ratchett’s murder. but Poirot says he’d be more suspicious of him if he pretended to be sad about Ratchett’s death. MacQueen is also surprised that Ratchett would carelessly leave a clue as to his identity lying around the compartment. Poirot asks MacQueen to recount his activities the night of the murder. MacQueen says that he read in his compartment for a while, stepped out of the train briefly in Belgrade but was too cold to remain outside, spoke to a “young English lady” with a compartment next door to his own, and then spoke to Arbuthnot for a long time. While Arbuthnot waited, he helped Ratchett in his compartment, and then went back to his own berth with the colonel, where the two men spoke about politics. He remembers looking at the snow with Arbuthnot in the corridor after the train had been halted. He estimates that Arbuthnot left his compartment around 2 a.m., and says that he then stood in the corridor alone while the conductor made up his bed. After that, he slept.
He recalls stepping out of the train with Arbuthnot in Vincovci, though the blizzard sent them back in immediately. When pressed, he recalls that he used the door by the dining car, that the door was bolted when he found it, but that he did not bolt it again when he reentered. MacQueen’s compartment door was open while he spoke with Arbuthnot, he reports. He says that through it, he saw the conductor walk down the corridor towards the dining hall, and also that he saw a woman in a red kimono walking the other way, towards the toilet. He did not see her face, he says. Poirot asks whether he saw the woman return from the toilet, and MacQueen says he didn’t. Finally, Poirot asks MacQueen whether he smokes a pipe, and MacQueen says he does not. Poirot resolves to interview Ratchett’s valet next. He asks MacQueen whether he and the valet ordinarily rode in second-class seats, and MacQueen says that, while the valet did, he usually rode beside Ratchett in first. However, only second-class berths were available this time.
Part 2, Chapter 3
Poirot asks the English valet for some basic identifying information, and learns that his name is Edward Henry Masterman. Masterman recalls doing a few typical tasks—like putting Ratchett’s false teeth away—the night before. He says that Ratchett was upset over a letter he’d received, and that he took out his mood on Masterman, as he often did. Masterman says that his employer always took a sleeping draught at night while traveling, which Masterman prepared, but that he doesn’t know what was actually in it. He says that he did not see Ratchett actually drink the mixture the night before. Because Ratchett always asked not to be disturbed in the morning, and because he sometimes slept late, Masterman wasn’t concerned when he didn’t wake up the next day. Masterman says he knows vaguely that Ratchett had enemies, and, though he’s reticent to say much, makes clear that he disliked his employer personally. Yet he, too, is clearly dismayed and upset by the news of Ratchett’s involvement in a famous kidnapping case.
Masterman says that last night, he left Ratchett with MacQueen and went to read in his compartment. He has the bottom berth below an Italian man, who speaks a little English, but Masterman prefers to read rather than chat. At 10:30 the conductor made up their beds, but a toothache kept Masterman lying awake. He applied clove oil and read by lamplight, dozing off around 4 a.m. The Italian man snored all night and stayed in bed. Masterman says the compartment was totally quiet, and when asked, says that MacQueen and Ratchett never showed any animosity towards each other. He says he has worked for Ratchett for nine months, before which he was employed by a Londoner who has since left the country. Finally, when asked, he says he smokes cigarettes, not a pipe. He tells Poirot that Mrs. Hubbard is overexcited, so Poirot decides to interview her next.
Part 2, Chapter 4
In a state of frenzy, Mrs. Hubbard recounts waking up in the middle of the night and realizing that a man was in her compartment. She says that she rang for the conductor, that he took a long time to come, and that, when he came, he didn’t believe she’d seen anyone. Sure that Ratchett had snuck in from the adjoining compartment, she says that she had asked the conductor to check on the door between them. It wasn’t bolted, but Mrs. Hubbard says that she bolted it then and there. Mrs. Hubbard doesn’t know what time this occurred or how the man (who, she is now sure, was Ratchett’s killer) escaped: her eyes were shut in fear. However, she’s sure he was in her compartment, not merely next door in Ratchett’s. She pulls the proof out of her overstuffed handbag—it’s a button she’s found, which she says doesn’t belong to her. Bouc points out that it’s from a conductor’s uniform, and Poirot says that makes perfect sense. There are all kinds of ways a conductor’s button could fall off in a train compartment. But Hubbard says that doesn’t make sense: she found the button on top of a magazine, which she laid down beside her bed just before she went to sleep.
Why, asks Poirot, hadn’t she bolted the door between her and Ratchett’s room before bed the night of the murder? Hubbard says she did, and that while she personally was in bed and couldn’t tell whether it was bolted, she’d asked the Swedish woman to check for her. This occurred around 10:30 or 10:45, when the woman came to take an aspirin from Mrs. Hubbard. The Swedish woman had been frightened, Hubbard recalls, because she had accidentally walked into Ratchett’s compartment rather than Hubbard’s. When this happened, Mrs. Hubbard recalls, she overheard Ratchett telling the Swedish woman that she was “too old.” After this, she says, the only noise from Ratchett’s compartment was snoring. Indeed, she says, the snoring kept her awake the previous night. Poirot asks whether she heard snoring after her scare with the man in her compartment, and she says no—after all, he was dead.
Like the other passengers, she is familiar with the case of Daisy Armstrong (though she doesn’t know the family herself), and is shocked to find out Ratchett’s real identity—though, she says, she sensed that he was evil. Poirot asks her whether she owns a scarlet dressing-gown and she says no, just pink and purple ones. She asks why he wants to know, and he says that someone in a scarlet kimono entered either her own compartment or Ratchett’s last night. She says she didn’t get a scarlet-clad visitor, so it must have been Ratchett’s. Indeed, she concedes, she heard one thing other than snoring from next door—a woman’s voice. She explains that she had refrained from mentioning this, since the implications of it struck her as unsuitable for polite conversation. When Poirot asks whether she heard the woman before or after the man appeared in her compartment, she laughs at him—clearly, she says, it wouldn’t make sense for a woman to go talk to Ratchett after he was already dead. Before Hubbard leaves, Poirot tries to casually hand her the handkerchief that he found in Ratchett’s compartment. After all, it has an H embroidered on it. But she says it’s not hers, and she departs.
Part 2, Chapter 5
M. Bouc is bewildered by the button Mrs. Hubbard brought, wondering whether it implicates Pierre Michel. Poirot, though, wants to interview the Swedish woman, Greta Ohlsson, before discussing it. She arrives and, since she speaks French, they conduct the interview in Poirot’s own language. She says she has been working at a missionary school in Turkey. Ohlsson corroborates Hubbard’s account, saying that she accidentally opened Ratchett’s door last night—though she says she didn’t understand what Ratchett said to her then. She then took an aspirin from Hubbard and returned to her compartment at 10:55. She lay awake until shortly after the train stopped in Vincovci. Poirot ascertains that Ohlsson had a lower berth, beyond an English woman traveling from Baghdad (clearly Miss Debenham). She says her roommate didn’t leave the compartment after the Vincovci stop—as a light sleeper, Ohlsson would have heard her. Ohlsson says she didn’t leave until morning, and also denies owning a red kimono. Debenham’s dressing gown is mauve, she reports. Since Ohlsson is visiting her sister in Lausanne before going home for vacation, she leaves her sister’s name and address for Poirot. Poirot asks if she’s been to the U.S. and she says no: though she’d had plans to go as a companion to a disabled woman, those plans were canceled. She also hasn’t heard of Daisy Armstrong, though she’s horrified by Poirot’s summary of the case—so much so that she cries.
When she leaves, Poirot writes out the chronology of events from the night before, which looks like this:
-9.15 Train leaves Belgrade.
-about 9.40 Valet leaves Ratchett with sleeping draught beside him.
-about 10.00 MacQueen leaves Ratchett.
-about 10.40 Greta Ohlsson sees Ratchett (last seen alive). N.B. He was awake reading a book.
-0.10 Train leaves Vincovci (late).
-0.30 Train runs into a snowdrift.
-0.37 Ratchett’s bell rings. Conductor answers it. Ratchett says: “Ce n’est rien. Je me suis trompé.”
-about 1.17 Mrs. Hubbard thinks man is in her carriage. Rings for conductor.
It’s clear, says Bouc, that the crime occurred around 1:15, and that the Italian man is the killer. Italians are always stabbing people, and he was probably in a gang that had beef with Cassetti’s. But Poirot isn’t sure, because Masterman says the Italian never left his berth.
Chapter 6
Poirot calls Pierre Michel back to inquire about the button Mrs. Hubbard found in her cabin. He panics, but his alibi is airtight: the colleague he was visiting during the period in which the button was seemingly dropped says that they were together the whole time. Neither man is missing a button from his uniform, and Pierre Michel says he passed nobody in the corridor as he ran to answer Mrs. Hubbard’s bell. Poirot and Bouc muse that it comes down to very precise timing: everything occurred in the conductor’s brief visit to his colleague. During that time the murderer left his compartment, killed Ratchett, locked the door between Ratchett’s compartment and the corridor from inside, and then walked into Hubbard’s adjoining compartment. Mrs. Hubbard, terrified of the man in her compartment, shut her eyes for a minute, during which the man escaped into the corridor. She then rang for the conductor, but by the time he heard the bell and came to her, the killer had slipped back into his own compartment. However, Poirot knows that it’s more complicated, because of the strange nature of the wounds Constantine pointed out earlier. He decides to interview Princess Dragomiroff.
Poirot is prepared to get pushback from Dragomiroff, given her high social status and imperious manner, but she seems committed to the idea of a thorough investigation and is highly cooperative. She offers her full name, Natalia Dragomiroff, and an address in Paris. She has been staying with her maid at the Austrian embassy in Constantinople (again, confusingly, just a different name for Istanbul or Stamboul). She recounts the night before: the conductor made her bed while she was at dinner, and then she went to sleep while her maid, a woman named Hildegarde Schmidt, massaged and read to her. She is not sure when the maid left, but it was after the train had come to a stop. Hildegarde has been her employee for 15 years, and the princess trusts her completely. The Princess admits to knowing the Armstrongs well: she is close with Daisy’s maternal grandmother, a retired actress who is now very sick, and she was godmother to Daisy’s mother. Daisy’s mother has a living sister, but Dragomiroff has lost touch with her. Finally, when Poirot asks, she says that her dressing gown is black. Before leaving, she asks Poirot for his name, and when he answers, she cryptically says “this is Destiny.” Poirot seems to have no idea what she means by it.
Analysis
In a sense, what stands out most about these chapters is how little there is to analyze. While there’s plenty of dialogue, there’s very little narration, with the result that these scenes read more like a transcript than a traditional novel. The sense that they’re transcripts or otherwise uncensored, unmediated primary sources is bolstered by their presentation—namely, the straightforward and paralleled chapter titles, the repetition of the phrase “the evidence,” and the inclusion of a detailed map allowing readers to follow along themselves. Through these choices, Christie actually gives the sense that readers are working with raw evidence. Indeed, the reader here functions rather like a jury member, watching cross-examinations, viewing evidence, and, ideally, forming an informed opinion about that evidence. Poirot’s role here is less like that of a traditional novel protagonist (we’re not particularly interested in his feelings or relationships) and more like that of a judge or lawyer. He’s a lens through which we can contextualize the facts being given to us, making it easier for us to keep up with and maybe even start solving the case on our own.
So why bother putting this part of the book in a novel format at all? Why not present it like a game, with the relevant evidence summarized, thus letting readers get right to the point? As a matter of fact, why include Poirot, instead of simply laying out the alibis for readers to make sense of? Well, for one thing, parsing what exactly counts as relevant is some of the work of solving the mystery. The novel’s extraneous detail (such as characters’ clothes, dialects, and emotional reactions) create an additional challenge. Poirot and any amateur detectives reading along have to carefully decide what counts as evidence and what’s mere ambiance-building detail. Ambiance, of course, isn’t irrelevant either. The novel format, with its rich setting and characterization, keeps the case entertaining and offers respite so that it doesn’t feel like work to read it (even if readers generally enjoy the work of mystery-solving).
Finally, while Poirot is an unobtrusive figure, who refrains from offering his opinions during this presentation of evidence, he plays a subtly important role. His guidance sheds light on what we should pay extra attention to—otherwise minor-seeming incidents, like the unbolted door near the dining car or the Princess's comment about destiny, are made more prominent when Poirot dwells on them. In fact, the very moments wherein he refuses to offer an opinion still serve to shed light on his thoughts: by pointing out that Poirot seems reticent to explain a certain piece of evidence, Christie is letting us know that he’s deep in thought about it and that it will become important later.
