Murder on the Orient Express: Part 2 Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

The next interview is with Mrs. Hubbard, the older American woman, who immediately demands to see the person “in authority.” Mrs. Hubbard claims that the murderer was in her room last night. She woke to the presence of a shadowy figure and pretended to be asleep, worrying about “these nasty trains…and all the outrages I’ve read of.” Soon, she gathered the courage to ring the conductor’s bell. After Pierre Michel turned on the lights, they found no one there, which “seemed to Mrs. Hubbard to be a dramatic climax rather than an anticlimax.”

After Pierre Michel checked her cabin and found nothing, Mrs. Hubbard reports that she was frustrated that he kept trying to “soothe” her rather than taking her seriously. She asked him to check the door into Ratchett’s room, which wasn’t bolted. Telling her story, Mrs. Hubbard quickly grows impatient with the investigators’ skepticism. But she offers a piece of evidence, a button from a train conductor’s uniform which she found near her bed, and is gratified when Poirot accepts it, saying “that, madame, I call evidence.”

Poirot asks her whether the door to Ratchett’s room was bolted when she went to sleep, and Mrs. Hubbard says that she had asked the Swedish woman to confirm that it was locked. She couldn’t see the lock herself because she had hung a bag over the lock.

Mrs. Hubbard had spoken to the Swedish woman, who was upset because she had mistakenly entered Ratchett’s room. Ratchett made a cruel sexual joke about her being “too old.”

Poirot then tells Mrs. Hubbard about Ratchett’s connection to the Armstrong case, and while she’s familiar with it, calling Cassetti a “monster,” she doesn’t have a personal connection. He follows up on the scarlet kimono, but she denies owning one. Mrs. Hubbard rises to leave and Poirot suggests she forgot her handkerchief, holding the one with an “H” found in Ratchett’s cabin, but she says that it isn’t hers. She uses less expensive, more practical handkerchiefs.