Summary
Chapter 6
Arbuthnot, who seems rather cranky, admits that the pipe cleaner is his—but he claims to have no idea how it wound up at the crime scene. Poirot asks him about his earlier conversation with Mary Debenham, in which she’d said, “When it’s all over. When it’s behind us.” Like Debenham herself, Arbuthnot refuses to explain the meaning of those words, and scoffs when the detective tells him that he suspects her. However, he is shocked—as is, probably, the reader—when Poirot confidently announces that Debenham was a governess in the Armstrong household at the time of the abduction. Why, Poirot asks, did Debenham lie and say that she’d never visited America? Arbuthnot says that Poirot should ask Debenham herself.
Chapter 7
Mary Debenham enters and defiantly admits to having been a governess for Countess Andrenyi (and a kind of assistant to her older sister, Daisy’s mother), but says that she only lied to Poirot in order to protect her livelihood. The publicity of being associated with a famous murder case, she says, would have kept her from getting hired as a governess again. Poirot asks if she recognized the Countess, her former student, but she says she did not—she has not seen her for years, after all. Debenham brings up the fact that she was distracted by troubles of her own, but then bursts into tears and runs out crying. Arbuthnot is furious with Poirot for upsetting her. Bouc, meanwhile, is astounded by his friend’s intelligence: how, he wants to know, did he guess that Debenham had been a governess in the Armstrong family? He explains that Countess Andrenyi, when asked about her former governess, lied—and identified her as a Scotswoman named “Miss Freebody.” Poirot says that there was once a store in London called “Debenham and Freebody,” and that Andrenyi’s lie inadvertently revealed that she was thinking about Debenham. Why, asks Bouc, did the Countess lie—and why does every passenger seem to lie constantly? Poirot answers rather ominously that they are about to find out the answer.
Chapter 8
In this chapter, Poirot quickly proves that Foscarelli, Masterman, and Ohlsson are connected to the Armstrong household as well. He calls in Foscarelli and accuses him of having been a chauffeur for the family. Foscarelli admits that this is true, and tears up thinking about how much he adored little Daisy. He says that he did not kill Ratchett, though he believes that he deserved to die. Ohlsson is next, and, through tears, she admits that Poirot is correct: she was indeed a nurse to Daisy Armstrong. Then Masterman bursts through the door to confess that he, too, knew the family—first serving Daisy’s father in the military, and then working as his valet in the U.S. He goes out of his way to tell Poirot that Foscarelli is innocent, and that, unlike most Italians, he isn’t a violent person. Then Hardman, the New York detective, enters. He doesn’t have a confession, but simply wants to marvel at how unlikely it is that nearly every passenger has a connection to the Armstrongs, and to compliment Poirot on his incredible guesswork. Poirot teasingly asks whether he was a gardener in the Armstrong house. Hardman says no—they didn’t have a garden. Hardman notes that only Mrs. Hubbard and the Princess’s maid seem to not have been part of the Armstrong household at some point. Poirot tells Bouc, Constantine, and Hardman that there are two possible explanations for Ratchett’s murder, and that he’s going to reveal them.
Chapter 9
Poirot brings every passenger, plus Pierre Michel, together in order to speak to them. He reveals his first theory of the case: Ratchett himself predicted that he’d be attacked on the second night after the train’s departure from Stamboul. As such, it makes sense to conclude that the killer boarded the train at either Belgrade or Vincovci, when Arbuthnot and MacQueen went outside to the platform and left the door open behind them. On the train, the killer was given a conductor’s uniform, which he put on over his clothes, and a conductor’s key, which he used to enter Ratchett’s compartment. He killed Ratchett, slipped into Hubbard’s compartment, hid his dagger in her sponge-bag, and lost his telltale button. Escaping into the corridor, he shed and hid his uniform and then left before the train departed the station, using the door beside the dining car.
Chapter 10
Hardman interjects to ask how Poirot can square this explanation with the evidence of the watch. Poirot replies that Ratchett simply forgot to adjust his watch as the train moved west into a new time zone. As a result, the time on his watch was an hour ahead, meaning that he was killed at 12:15, not 1:15. Bouc has an objection of his own: a voice called out from Ratchett’s compartment at 12:37, but according to this explanation, Ratchett was dead and the crime long over by then. Poirot has another explanation: someone went to visit Ratchett, found him dead, and rang to alert the conductor. But they panicked, fearing that they’d be accused of the crime, and called out to turn the conductor away. Meanwhile, Poirot argues that Mrs. Hubbard unconsciously noticed a man in her room, but only woke later when she had a nightmare about him. Then it’s Princess Dragomiroff’s turn to ask a question—how does Poirot account for her maid’s evidence? Poirot says that the Schmidt, in an attempt to protect the Princess, pretended not to recognize her handkerchief. Meanwhile, she did in fact see the killer at Vincovci station, and lied about the time of the encounter in order to make the Princess’s own alibi look more legitimate.
But Dr. Constantine bursts out furiously that the explanation fails to account for a whole variety of evidence. He tells Poirot that he must have another, better theory. Poirot says that he does actually have another theory: it’s up to Constantine and Bouc to judge which one is more convincing. To present this second theory, Poirot recounts his conversation with Bouc at the start of the journey. Then, Bouc had idly noted how diverse and varied the coach’s passengers were. Indeed, Poirot says, he thought about the many nationalities and classes of individuals on the train, wondering where in the world such a group of people might come together. He concluded that the answer was America, where the Armstrongs lived. Now Poirot begins to recount moments that stood out to him while gathering evidence. First he mentions MacQueen’s shock when Poirot brought up the burnt paper that he’d recovered from Ratchett’s things. MacQueen had expected the letter to be destroyed, showing that he was either a killer or an accomplice.
Then there is Masterman’s claim that Ratchett always took a sleeping draught at night. Why, Poirot says, would he have done so on this particular night, when he knew his life was in danger? He must have been given the draught against his will, by one of his employees—MacQueen or Masterman. Next, there’s the issue of Hardman’s testimony. Instead of sitting in Ratchett’s compartment, or watching the entrance to it—both tactics that would have prevented his death—Hardman simply sat in an ideal position to keep track of the other passengers. In other words, his testimony was good for one thing only: asserting that none of the Stamboul-Calais passengers could have committed the murder. Meanwhile, Arbuthnot and Debenham’s obvious intimacy showed that they knew each other prior to boarding the train together. Debenham’s casual use of the American phrase “long distance” also showed that she had spent time in the U.S., contrary to her claims. He moves on to Mrs. Hubbard’s evidence. She claims that she could not see whether the door was locked from her bed. But this is untrue, because she was sleeping in an odd-numbered compartment. Odd-numbered berths’ locks are located above the door handles, so her sponge-bag would not have obscured the bolt.
Poirot then proposes that the ruckus at 12:37, in which someone called out in French from Ratchett’s compartment, was staged specifically to fool Poirot himself. In other words, Poirot thinks that he was supposed to find the watch, realize it was a plant, and then assume that Ratchett was already dead at 12:37, meaning that it was the murderer who called out in French. But Poirot thinks that Ratchett was actually still alive, though drugged, at 12:37, and that he was killed closer to 2 a.m.
So, who did it? Poirot reflects on how odd it seemed that every person on the train had their alibi backed up by one other, rather unlikely, passenger. He recalls realizing that a bizarre number of passengers were linked to the Armstrongs. He also realized that there were 12 passengers—the same number as there are in a jury, and the same number as the stab wounds found on Ratchett’s body. Then, he realized, twelve people had purposely come together as a kind of alternative jury, determined to execute Ratchett, though the real jury in his trial had declined to do so.
In other words, Poirot says, the passengers worked together, planning in perfect detail so that nobody could be convicted of Ratchett’s murder. Each one entered Ratchett’s compartment in turn through Mrs. Hubbard’s, and stabbed him once. Hardman’s story about being employed by Ratchett was untrue. The “small man with the womanish voice,” the woman in the red kimono, the letters (except for the almost-destroyed one about Daisy Armstrong), the pipe cleaner, and the handkerchief were all planted or simply invented to confuse Poirot. The snow, and the ultimately intact letter about Daisy Armstrong, were two great obstacles to the group’s careful planning. In response, the group agreed to hide or lie about any ties to the Armstrongs.
However, Poirot says, if this is true, then Pierre Michel had to have been in on the plan. This leaves Poirot with 13 criminals, but only 12 wounds—meaning one person is innocent. He believes that it is the Countess, and that the Count stabbed Ratchett in his wife’s place. But why would Pierre Michel want to kill Ratchett? Poirot concludes that he is the father of the French nursemaid who committed suicide following Daisy’s abduction. He also guesses that Arbuthnot was a family friend of the Armstrongs, and Hildegarde Schmidt their cook. Hardman, meanwhile, was in love with the French nursemaid. And Mrs. Hubbard was playing a part all along: she is Linda Arden, the tragic actress who is in fact Daisy Armstrong’s grandmother.
Mrs. Hubbard/Linda Arden admits that Poirot is right. She explains that this group, in the aftermath of the Armstrong tragedy, began planning their revenge on Cassetti. As part of this plan, they all ensured that MacQueen and Masterman got jobs with Ratchett. The group took their chance when they learned that Ratchett would be traveling on the very same train that Pierre Michel conducted. However, none of them thought that a famous detective would be in the train with them. Mrs. Hubbard/Linda Arden offers to take the blame for all her fellow passengers. Poirot consults Bouc, who announces that he finds the first theory much more plausible. Constantine speaks up, saying that he retracts his earlier objections to that theory. Poirot assents and announces that the case is now closed.
Analysis
In this final section, Christie climactically reveals what she has repeatedly implied throughout the novel: that Poirot’s great skill as a detective comes, not just from his command of cool logic, but from his ability to understand others’ emotions and motivations. This empathetic tendency helps him solve a difficult case, since it enables him to look beyond the obvious evidence and see the near-invisible emotional and social currents tying the group together. But empathy also tells Poirot what, exactly, he needs to do once the case is solved. Mere cleverness, Christie implies, is all well and good. But if all that cleverness does is let you incriminate a group of good and sympathetic people, then it’s not useful at all. In this case, the cleverest thing to do is understand why Ratchett’s killers made the decision they did, and then actually suppress the truth in order to protect them. Thus Poirot’s skill is half in figuring out what happened, and half in figuring out why it matters and what should be done about it.
The book, then, operates on an underlying assumption that Ratchett’s killers shouldn’t face consequences. This more or less goes unsaid—part of what makes the final chapter funny and suspenseful is the way that every character agrees, without saying it explicitly, to pretend that Poirot’s first theory is the right one. Yet it’s actually quite a big assumption: after all, Ratchett’s twelve killers committed a violent and very premeditated murder. One way in which Christie keeps us from feeling too worried about this is by making Cassetti’s crime as horrible as possible, and making Ratchett quite unlikeable too. But she also, strangely, makes the reader more readily accepting of this particular murder precisely by making it a 12-person conspiracy. The characters’ strikingly broad range of ages, nationalities, occupations, personalities, and classes initially stands out to Poirot and helps him start solving the case. But it’s this very range, as a matter of fact, that protects them from our judgment. Readers might be able to find fault with, say, a single English valet who kills someone to avenge his former employer. But when that valet is added to a whole group of people with all kinds of reasons to detest Ratchett, his actions no longer seem irrational—after all, if so many people, with so many different talents and backgrounds, can decide that Ratchett should be killed, then they’re probably right.
Finally, in this last section, we learn that characters have actually been exaggerating certain national stereotypes in their personalities. They’ve done this in order to obscure their true identities and distract Poirot, hoping he’ll be misled and confused. Thus Foscarelli’s stereotypically Italian passion and gregariousness are revealed to cloak a gentle personality, and all three Brits’ guardedness is pulled back to reveal their deep sadness and anger at Ratchett. Finally, Mrs. Hubbard, who has acted like a cliche of an annoying and self-centered American, turns out to be a sensitive artist with experience in both real-life and onstage tragedy. These characters have given themselves roles, taking as their inspiration pre-existing narratives that dictate how people from different countries act. This isn’t the only realm in which they’ve borrowed from pre-existing cliches and narratives, hoping that they can use these to distract the detective. For instance, they play with and make use of cliches about crime and crime-solving from popular fiction. They not only plant clues, but also plant clues specifically designed to be identified as plants. However, all of these dizzying maneuvers fail to take into account Poirot’s aforementioned attention to emotion and motive, which none of them are able to adequately obscure.
