Book Name : Death
on the Nile
Author
: Christie, Agatha
No. of Pages
: 347
Summary :
(Taken from Wikipedia)
The Setup
While dining out in London one evening, Hercule Poirot notices a young woman, Jacqueline de Bellefort, dining and dancing with her fiancé, Simon Doyle. Poirot also notices that Jackie (a nickname given to her and used by intimates; short for Jacqueline) is very much smitten and is in love with Simon. The next day, Jacqueline takes Simon to meet her best friend, wealthy young heiress Linnet Ridgeway, in the hopes that Linnet will offer Simon a job. Three months later, Simon has broken off his engagement to Jacqueline and married Linnet.
Poirot happens to encounter the couple on their honeymoon to Egypt, where he himself is on holiday. At their shared hotel in Cairo, Poirot sees an apparent chance meeting between the Doyles and Jacqueline. Afterwards, Linnet approaches Poirot and confides that Jacqueline has been stalking them since they were married, which is antagonizing both of them. Poirot says the Doyles have no legal recourse, but tries to reason with Jacqueline in private, urging her to let go of her attachment to Simon and not "open [her] heart to evil." Jacqueline refuses to listen, confiding that she has been dreaming of killing Linnet.
Attempting to give Jacqueline the slip, the Doyles plan an extended stay in Cairo, while secretly booking passage on the same Nile river cruise as Poirot. To their rage, Jacqueline learns their plans and appears on board with them. Other passengers include:
- American erotica novelist Salome Otterbourne and her daughter, Rosalie;
- Mrs. Allerton and her son, Tim;
- Linnet's American trustee, Andrew Pennington, who happened to run into her in Egypt;
- Linnet's maid, Louise Bourget;
- American socialite Marie Van Schuyler and her younger cousin, Cornelia Robson;
- Miss Van Schuyler's nurse, Miss Bowers;
- A young traveler named, Mr. Ferguson, an outspoken Socialist;
- Archaeologist, Signor Richetti;
- A diffident young man named James Fanthorp;
- An Austrian physician named Dr. Bessner.
- A husband of an Egyptian native Fleetwood;
While taking a tour of some ancient ruins, a boulder falls from a cliff, narrowly missing Linnet and Simon. They suspect Jacqueline at first, but find out she was on the boat the whole time and could not have done it.
Poirot meets his friend Colonel Race, who is joining everyone on the boat for the return trip. Race tells Poirot that one of the passengers is a deadly criminal who has murdered several other people, only Race has not yet identified him.
That night on the boat, Jacqueline gets into a drunken rage, takes out a pistol, and shoots Simon in the leg, then breaks down in a hysterical state of remorse. At Simon's insistence, the two other persons present, Cornelia and Mr. Fanthorp, help Jacqueline back to her cabin, and then fetch Dr. Bessner to see to Simon's wound. Nurse Bowers stays in Jacqueline's room all night. Later, Fanthorp tells Bessner the gun is missing.
The Crime
The next day, Linnet is found dead with a bullet in her head. Race takes charge of the situation and asks Poirot to handle the investigation. Several clues seem to incriminate Jacqueline – a "J" written in blood on the wall above Linnet's head, for instance – but Miss Bowers assures Poirot that Jacqueline never left her cabin that night. Dr. Bessner also assures Poirot that Simon's leg wound completely incapacitated him, and so he could not have moved from his bed, even if he wanted to.
Race and Poirot theorize that Linnet had some other enemy among the passengers, who took advantage of the scene in the lounge to murder her and implicate Jacqueline. Poirot also notices that Linnet's pearl necklace is missing from her room.
Poirot then interviews all the passengers. Several of them heard a splash shortly after midnight, and Miss Van Schuyler claims that she looked out her window and saw Rosalie Otterbourne throw something overboard. But Rosalie denies this. A short time later, the murder weapon is recovered from the Nile – Jacqueline's pistol, wrapped in Miss Van Schuyler's missing velvet stole. To Poirot this makes no sense, when someone wanting to incriminate Jacqueline would have left her pistol behind to incriminate her.
Louise Bourget is interviewed in Dr. Bessner's cabin, while Bessner is ministering to Simon. She says she saw nothing on the night of the murder, but would have done "if" she had left her cabin. This choice of words sounds strange to Poirot.
When Race announces that the cabins will be searched for the missing pearls, Miss Bowers returns them, confiding that Miss Van Schuyler took them from Linnet's cabin, being a secretkleptomaniac. But Poirot examines the string and finds it is a fake, meaning the real necklace was stolen sometime earlier.
Poirot eventually realizes that Salome Otterbourne is a secret alcoholic, and what Rosalie was throwing overboard was her mother's hidden cache of spirits. Rosalie admits this, but firmly denies seeing anyone leaving Linnet's cabin on the night of the murder.
When Louise Bourget is found murdered in her cabin, clutching a large-denomination banknote, Race and Poirot deduce that she had seen the real murderer leave Linnet's cabin, and was trying to blackmail him or her.
Poirot and Race enter Dr. Bessner's cabin and tell the doctor and Simon what happened. Salome Otterbourne enters and says she knows who killed Linnet and Louise, because she saw that person enter and leave Louise's cabin. Simon yells at her to tell him. Before she can finish her story, a shot is fired from the deck outside, killing her. Before Poirot and Race can get outside, the shooter is gone, having dropped a gun that Poirot recognizes from Andrew Pennington's luggage.
Poirot announces that he has solved the case; for him the most salient clues were:
- the fact that Poirot only drinks wine with dinner, while his two usual dinner companions, the Allertons, drink something else;
- two bottles of nail polish in Linnet's room, one labelled "Cardinal" (a deep, dark red) and the other "Rose" (pale pink), but both of which contain red coloring;
- the fact that Jacqueline's gun was thrown overboard; and
- the circumstances of Louise and Mrs. Otterbourne's deaths.
The Solution(s)
Before explaining his solution to the crime, Poirot decides to clear away some of the lesser mysteries first, by interviewing several of the passengers in turn:- Andrew Pennington admits that he has speculated, illegally, with Linnet's holdings; he was hoping to replace the funds before she came of age, but upon her marriage she gained full control of her estate; on learning of her marriage, Pennington rushed to Egypt to stage a "chance" encounter with Linnet and dupe her into signing legal documents that would exculpate him; he abandoned the plan when he found that Linnet was a shrewd woman who read anything she was asked to sign in detail; in desperation, he tried to kill her by dropping the boulder on her, but that is as far as he went, and he swears that he did not murder her;
- Fanthorp is revealed to be a young attorney with Linnet's British solicitors, who sent him to Egypt to spy on Pennington, suspicious of his intentions;
- Tim is exposed as a society jewel thief, working in partnership with his cousin, a down-on-her-luck socialite. Tim stole the pearls from Linnet's cabin that night and substituted the fake string for them, but, likewise, swears he didn't kill her; he does not know if Linnet was already dead when he entered her cabin; Rosalie admits that she saw Tim enter and leave Linnet's cabin, but she has come to love Tim, and was trying to protect him; Poirot clears Tim of the murder and agrees not to report his thievery to the police; Tim promises to reform and happily asks Rosalie to marry him, to the delight of his mother.
- Signor Richetti is exposed as the foreign agent and criminal Race is after, after Race hears of a telegram Richetti received, using a code that Race recognizes;
Poirot finally explains the real mystery to Race, Miss Robson, and Dr. Bessner. Their first idea, that the murder was conceived on the spur of the moment after the scene in the lounge, was mistaken; in fact, the murder was planned months in advance – by Jacqueline and Simon.Jacqueline used Cornelia Robson as a witness and pretended to shoot Simon in the leg. Simon faked being wounded with red ink, hidden in Linnet's nail polish bottle. While Cornelia Robson left to get Jacqueline back to her cabin and Jim Fanthorp called Dr. Bessner, Simon picked up the gun, ran to Linnet's cabin, shot her, and then came back to the lounge and shot himself in the leg, using the velvet stole as a muffler. He reloaded two bullets back into the gun, wrapped it in the stole and threw the bundle overboard before anyone came back. Dr. Bessner then examined him and confirmed that his wound left him unable to have left the lounge.Before the murder, Jacqueline or Simon drugged Poirot's usual bottle of wine, ensuring that he would sleep through the night so he will not participate in the event.All is not well, for Louise Bourget, the maid, saw Simon enter and leave Linnet's cabin. She blackmailed Simon and demanded money for hushing her up. But Simon told Jacqueline about it privately. Jacqueline entered Louise's cabin and stabbed her. However, Mrs. Otterbourne saw Jacqueline entering the maid's door. She came to Simon and Poirot to tell what she saw, but Simon yelled at Mrs. Otterbourne in a voice loud enough for Jacqueline to hear it – who acted quickly and shot Mrs. Otterbourne.Confronted, Simon and Jacqueline confess to the plot. Jacqueline says that she and Simon have always been in love, and Simon never cared for Linnet, even when she tried to steal him away from Jacqueline. Jacqueline tells Poirot that the idea of murdering Linnet for her money was Simon's, but she planned it, knowing Simon was not smart enough to pull it off by himself.As the passengers are disembarking, Jacqueline reveals a second pistol, which she hid in Rosalie Otterbourne's cabin, and kills both Simon and herself, sparing them both from more gruesome and humiliating deaths. Poirot confesses that he knew about the second pistol, and wanted to give Jacqueline the chance to take a more humane way out.In addition to Tim and Rosalie, there is another unexpected love match: Cornelia Robson accepts Dr. Bessner's proposal, to the stupefaction of Mr. Ferguson, who had been courting her, in his own uncouth way, during the whole trip.
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