Murder on the Orient Express / Убийство в «Восточном экспрессе»

Poirot picked up the two matches and examined them carefully. One of them was flatter than the other. He felt the pockets of Ratchett's clothing and pulled out a box of matches. He compared them carefully with the burnt ones.

“The rounder one is a match struck by Mr. Ratchett,” he said.

“Let us see if he had also the flatter kind.”

No other matches were found, but from the floor Poirot picked up a small cambric handkerchief with an initial embroidered in the corner – H.

“Our friend the chief of the train was right,” said the doctor. “There is a woman mixed up in this.”

“And she leaves her handkerchief marked with an initial to make things easier for us. Exactly as it happens in the books and films!” said Poirot.

Before the doctor could say anything, he again picked up something from the floor. This time it was a pipe-cleaner.

There was no pipe in any of Mr. Ratchett's pockets, and no tobacco or tobacco pouch.

“It is a clue,” the doctor said.

“A masculine clue, this time. One cannot complain of having no clues in this case. By the way, what have you done with the weapon?”

“There was no sign of any weapon. The murderer must have taken it away with him.”

“I wonder why,” Poirot thought.

At this moment the doctor pulled out a gold watch from the breast pocket of the dead man's pyjama.

The case was badly damaged, and the hands pointed to a quarter past one.

“You see?” cried Dr. Constantine. “This gives us the hour of the crime. Between midnight and two in the morning is what I said, and probably about one o'clock. Here is confirmation. A quarter past one. That was the hour of the crime.”

“It is possible, yes. It is certainly possible.”

The doctor looked at him curiously. “You will pardon me, M. Poirot, but I do not quite understand you.”

“I do not understand myself,” said Poirot. “I understand nothing at all. And it worries me.”

He sighed and started examining the charred fragment of paper in the ash-tray. He murmured to himself, “I need an old – fashioned woman's hat-box.”

Poirot called for the conductor and the man arrived at a run. He wanted to know how many women there were on the carriage.

The conductor enumerated them – “the old American lady, the Swedish lady, the young English lady, the Countess Andrenyi, and Madame la Princesse Dragomiroff and her maid.”

“They all have hat-boxes, yes?”

“Yes, Monsieur.”

Poirot asked the conductor to bring him the Swedish lady's hat-box and that of the lady's maid.

The conductor brought the two hat-boxes. Poirot opened that of the maid, and put it aside. Then he opened the Swedish lady's and was satisfied. He took out the hats carefully and disclosed round humps of wire-netting.

“Yes, that's it! About fifteen years ago hat-boxes were made like this. You pierced the hat with a hatpin on to this hump of wire-netting.”

He skillfully removed two of the humps. Then he repacked the hat-box and told the conductor to return both boxes where they belonged.

When the conductor left, he turned to his companion.

“You see, my dear doctor, I mostly rely on the psychology, not on the fingerprint or the cigarette ash. But in this case I would welcome a little scientific assistance. This compartment is full of clues, but can I be sure that those are real clues?”

“I do not quite understand you, M. Poirot.”

“Well, for example, there are two possibilities. A man, committing the crime, decides to make it look like a woman's crime, makes several weak stabs, and drops a woman's handkerchief. Or a woman kills him and makes it look like a man's work, dropping a pipe-cleaner. Or should we seriously suppose that two people, a man and a woman, did it separately, and that each was so careless as to drop a clue to his or her identity? It is a little too much of a coincidence, that!”

“But what is the role of the hat-box?” asked the doctor, still puzzled.

“Ah! I am coming to that. All these clues we have found may be real, or they may be false. I cannot yet tell. But I think there is one real clue here – that flat match. I believe that that match was used by the murderer. It was used to burn some note that left a possible clue to the murderer. I am going to try to discover what it was.”

He left the compartment for a few moments and returned with a small spirit-lamp and a pair of curling-tongs.

“I use them for the moustaches,” he said, referring to the latter.

The doctor watched him with great interest. Poirot flattened out the two humps of wire, and with great care put the charred fragment of paper on one of them. Very quickly, he put the other on top of it and then, holding both pieces together with the tongs, held the whole thing over the flame of the spiritlamp.