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“Therefore this story, the story of a small dark man with a womanish voice dressed in Wagon Lit uniform, rests on the testimony—direct or indirect—of four witnesses.”
“One small point,” said Dr. Constantine. “If Hildegarde Schmidt’s story is true, how is it that the real conductor did not mention having seen her when he came to answer Mrs. Hubbard’s bell?”
“That is explained, I think. When he arrived to answer Mrs. Hubbard, the maid was in with her mistress. When she finally returned to her own compartment, the conductor was in with Mrs. Hubbard.”
M. Bouc had been waiting with difficulty until they had finished.
“Yes, yes, my friend,” he said impatiently to Poirot. “But whilst I admire your caution, your method of advancing a step at a time, I submit that you have not yet touched the point at issue. We are all agreed that this person exists. The point is—where did he go?”
Poirot shook his head reprovingly.
“You are in error. You are inclined to put the cart before the horse. Before I ask myself, ‘Where did this man vanish to?’ I ask myself, ‘Did such a man really exist?’ Because, you see, if the man were an invention—a fabrication—how much easier to make him disappear! So I try to establish first that there really is such a flesh and blood person.”
“And having arrived at the fact that there is—eh bien—where is he now?”
“There are only two answers to that, mon cher. Either he is still hidden on the train in a place of such extraordinary ingenuity that we cannot even think of it, or else he is, as one might say, two persons. That is, he is both himself—the man feared by M. Ratchett—and a passenger on the train so well disguised that M. Ratchett did not recognize him.”
“It is an idea, that,” said M. Bouc, his face lighting up. Then it clouded over again. “But there is one objection—”
Poirot took the words out of his mouth.
“The height of the man. It is that you would say? With the exception of M. Ratchett’s valet, all the passengers are big men—the Italian, Colonel Arbuthnot, Hector MacQueen, Count Andrenyi. Well, that leaves us the valet—not a very likely supposition. But there is another possibility. Remember the ‘womanish’ voice. That gives us a choice of alternatives. The man may be disguised as a woman, or, alternatively, he may actually be a woman. A tall woman dressed in man’s clothes would look small.”
“But surely Ratchett would have known—”
“Perhaps he did know. Perhaps, already this woman had attempted his life wearing men’s clothes the better to accomplish her purpose. Ratchett may have guessed that she would use the same trick again, so he tells Hardman to look for a man. But he mentions, however, a womanish voice.”
“It is a possibility,” said M. Bouc. “But—”
“Listen, my friend, I think that I should now tell you of certain inconsistencies noticed by Dr. Constantine.”
He retailed at length the conclusions that he and the doctor had arrived at together from the nature of the dead man’s wounds. M. Bouc groaned and held his head again.
“I know,” said Poirot sympathetically. “I know exactly how you feel. The head spins, does it not?”
“The whole thing is a fantasy,” cried M. Bouc.
“Exactly. It is absurd—improbable—it cannot be. So I myself have said. And yet, my friend, there it is! One cannot escape from the facts.”
“It is madness!”
“Is it not? It is so mad, my friend, that sometimes I am haunted by the sensation that really it must be very simple…
“But that is only one of my ‘little ideas.’…”
“Two murderers,” groaned M. Bouc. “And on the Orient Express.”
The thought almost made him weep.
“And now let us make the fantasy more fantastic,” said Poirot cheerfully. “Last night on the train there are two mysterious strangers. There is the Wagon Lit attendant answering to the description given us by M. Hardman, and seen by Hildegarde Schmidt, Colonel Arbuthnot and M. MacQueen. There is also a woman in a red kimono—a tall, slim woman—seen by Pierre Michel, by Miss Debenham, by M. MacQueen and by myself—and smelt, I may say, by Colonel Arbuthnot! Who was she? No one on the train admits to having a scarlet kimono. She, too, has vanished. Was she one and the same with the spurious Wagon Lit attendant? Or was she some quite distinct personality? Where are they, these two? And, incidentally, where is the Wagon Lit uniform and the scarlet kimono?”
“Ah! that is something definite.” M. Bouc sprang up eagerly. “We must search all the passengers’ luggage. Yes, that will be something.”
Poirot rose also.
“I will make a prophecy,” he said.
“You know where they are?”
“I have a little idea.”
“Where, then?”
“You will find the scarlet kimono in the baggage of one of the men and you will find the uniform of the Wagon Lit conductor in the baggage of Hildegarde Schmidt.”
“Hildegarde Schmidt? You think—”
“Not what you are thinking. I will put it like this. If Hildegarde Schmidt is guilty, the uniform might be found in her baggage—but if she is innocent it certainly will be.”
“But how—” began M. Bouc and stopped.
“What is this noise that approaches?” he cried. “It resembles a locomotive in motion.”
The noise drew nearer. It consisted of shrill cries and protests in a woman’s voice. The door at the end of the dining car flew open. Mrs. Hubbard burst in.
“It’s too horrible,” she cried. “It’s just too horrible. In my sponge bag. My sponge bag. A great knife—all over blood.”
And, suddenly toppling forward, she fainted heavily on M. Bouc’s shoulder.
Fourteen
THE EVIDENCE OF THE WEAPON
With more vigour than chivalry, M. Bouc deposited the fainting lady with her head on the table. Dr. Constantine yelled for one of the restaurant attendants, who came at a run.
“Keep her head so,” said the doctor. “If she revives give her a little cognac. You understand?”
Then he hurried off after the other two. His interest lay wholly in the crime—swooning middle-aged ladies did not interest him at all.
It is possible that Mrs. Hubbard revived rather quicker with these methods than she might otherwise have done. A few minutes later she was sitting up, sipping cognac from a glass proffered by the attendant, and talking once more.
“I just can’t say how terrible it was. I don’t suppose anybody on this train can understand my feelings. I’ve always been vurry, vurry sensitive ever since a child. The mere sight of blood—ugh—why even now I come over queer when I think about it.”
The attendant proffered the glass again.
“Encore un peu, Madame.”
“D’you think I’d better? I’m a lifelong teetotaller. I just never touch spirits or wine at any time. All my family are abstainers. Still perhaps as this is only medical—”
She sipped once more.
In the meantime Poirot and M. Bouc, closely followed by Dr. Constantine, had hurried out of the restaurant car and along the corridor of the Stamboul coach towards Mrs. Hubbard’s compartment.
Every traveller on the train seemed to be congregated outside the door. The conductor, a harrassed look on his face, was keeping them back.
“Mais il n’y a rien à voir,” he said, and repeated the sentiment in several other languages.
“Let me pass, if you please,” said M. Bouc.
Squeezing his rotundity past the obstructing passengers, he entered the compartment, Poirot close behind him.
“I am glad you have come Monsieur,” said the conductor with a sigh of relief. “Everyone has been trying to enter. The American lady—such screams as she gave—ma foi! I thought she too had been murdered! I came at a run and there she was screaming like a mad woman, and she cried out that she must fetch you and she departed, screeching at the top of her voice and telling everybody whose carriage she passed what had o
ccurred.”
He added, with a gesture of the hand:
“It is in there, Monsieur. I have not touched it.”
Hanging on the handle of the door that gave access to the next compartment was a large-size checked rubber sponge bag. Below it on the floor, just where it had fallen from Mrs. Hubbard’s hand, was a straightbladed dagger—a cheap affair, sham Oriental, with an embossed hilt and a tapering blade. The blade was stained with patches of what looked like rust.
Poirot picked it up delicately.
“Yes,” he murmured. “There is no mistake. Here is our missing weapon all right—eh, docteur?”
The doctor examined it.
“You need not be so careful,” said Poirot. “There will be no fingerprints on it save those of Mrs. Hubbard.”
Constantine’s examination did not take long.
“It is the weapon all right,” he said. “It would account for any of the wounds.”
“I implore you, my friend, do not say that.”
The doctor looked astonished.
“Already we are heavily overburdened by coincidence. Two people decide to stab M. Ratchett last night. It is too much of a good thing that each of them should select an identical weapon.”
“As to that, the coincidence is not, perhaps, so great as it seems,” said the doctor. “Thousands of these sham Eastern daggers are made and shipped to the bazaars of Constantinople.”
