Murder on the Orient Express

Agatha Christie 
™
 MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS 
132
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 was 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, an English governess, a 
Swedish nurse, a German 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 given 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 to have protected Ratchett effectively 
was to pass the night actually in his compartment or in some spot where he could watch the door. 
The one 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 all know 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 supposed to have 
met her only 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 had been unable 
to see whether the communicating door was bolted or not, and so had asked Miss Ohlsson to see 
for her. Now—though her statement would have been perfectly true if she had been occupying 
compartment No. 2, 4, 12 or any 
even
number, in which 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 

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