“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 that 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 recognised 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 water-tight 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 you 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, and so on. 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 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 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, is 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 – 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 had been 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 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 have been his, and that Ratchett must have been already dead. But I am convinced that at twenty-three minutes to one Ratchett was still lying in his drugged sleep.