Oh!
I feel better right away.
But surely it’s all full, unless one of the gentlemen–”
M. Bouc spoke. “Your baggage, Madame, shall be moved out of this coach altogether.
You shall have a compartment in the next coach, which was put on at Belgrade.”
“Why, that’s splendid.
I’m not an extra nervous woman, but to sleep in that compartment next door to a dead man!” She shivered. “It would drive me plumb crazy.”
“Michel,” called M. Bouc. “Move this baggage into a vacant compartment in the Athens-Paris coach.”
“Yes, Monsieur.
The same one as this – the No. 3?”
“No,” said Poirot before his friend could reply. “I think it would be better for Madame to have a different number altogether.
The No. 12, for instance.”
“Bien, Monsieur.”
The conductor seized the luggage.
Mrs. Hubbard turned gratefully to Poirot.
“That’s very kind and delicate of you.
I appreciate it, I assure you.”
“Do not mention it, Madame.
We will come with you and see you comfortably installed.”
Mrs. Hubbard was escorted by the three men to her new home.
She looked round her happily. “This is fine.”
“It suits you, Madame?
It is, you see, exactly like the compartment you have left.”
“That’s so – only it faces the other way.
But that doesn’t matter, for these trains go first one way and then the other.
I said to my daughter,
‘I want a carriage facing the engine.’ and she said,
‘Why, Mamma, that’ll be no good to you, for if you go to sleep one way, when you wake up, the train’s going the other!’
And it was quite true what she said.
Why, last evening we went into Belgrade one way and out the other.”
“At any rate, Madame, you are quite happy and contented now?”
“Well, no, I wouldn’t say that.
Here we are stuck in a snowdrift and nobody doing anything about it, and my boat sailing the day after to-morrow.”
“Madame,” said M. Bouc, “we are all in the same case – every one of us.”
“Well, that’s true,” admitted Mrs. Hubbard. “But nobody else has had a murderer walking right through her compartment in the middle of the night.
“What still puzzles me, Madame,” said Poirot, “is how the man got into your compartment if the communicating door was bolted as you say.
You are sure that it was bolted?”
“Why, the Swedish lady tried it before my eyes.”
“Let us just reconstruct that little scene.
You were lying in your bunk – so – and you could not see for yourself, you say?”
“No, because of the sponge-bag.
Oh! my, I shall have to get a new sponge-bag.
It makes me feel sick at my stomach to look at this one.”
Poirot picked up the sponge-bag and hung it on the handle of the communicating door into the next carriage.
“Precisement. I see,” he said. “The bolt is just underneath the handle – the sponge-bag masks it.
You could not see from where you were lying whether the bolt was turned or not.”
“Why, that’s just what I’ve been telling you!”
“And the Swedish lady, Miss Ohlsson, stood so, between you and the door.
She tried it and told you it was bolted.”
“That’s so.”