Murder on the Orient Express

Hardman’s evidence was necessary in case some outsider should be suspected of the crime and be unable to prove an alibi.

Instead of the usual formula, ‘Of so many people one is guilty,’ I was faced with the problem that of thirteen persons one and one only was innocent. Which was that person?

“I saw it as a perfect mosaic, each person playing his or her allotted part. It was so arranged that if suspicion should fall on any one person, the evidence of one or more of the others would clear the accused person and confuse the issue.

“Of the twelve passengers in that coach, nine have been proved to have had a connection with the Armstrong case.

“But does everybody on this train tell lies?”

“That,” said Poirot, “is what we are about to find out.”

“Mon ami, if you wish to catch a rabbit you put a ferret into the hole, and if the rabbit is there he runs. That is all I have done.”

“Women are like that. When they are enraged they have great strength.”

“And now a passenger lies dead in his berth—stabbed.”

A Colonel fromIndia and a young English lady

young French lieutenant, resplendent in uniform conversing, with a small man muffled up to the ears of whom nothing was visible but a pink-tipped nose and the two points of an upward-curled moustache.