Death On The Nile

Poirot explains that he and Race began their investigation with the assumption that Linnet’s murder was spontaneous rather than planned: “[s]omebody wished to remove Linnet Doyle and had seized their opportunity to do so at a moment when the crime would almost certainly be attributed to Jacqueline de Bellefort” (387). Therefore, the murderer must have witnessed Jackie shooting Simon in the saloon and then stolen the pistol after everyone had left.

However, this was the wrong assumption. The murder was in fact thoroughly worked out in advance.

As Poirot has been indicating, Jackie’s discarded pistol is the key clue. Poirot recalls that Linnet’s gunshot wound indicated that she had been shot point-blank; there were burns around the point of entry. However, when the pistol was recovered later, it was wrapped in a velvet stole, through which it had been fired. If the pistol had been wrapped in the stole when Linnet was murdered, there would have been no burns on her skin around the gunshot wound. Therefore, the killer did not wrap the gun in the stole to kill Linnet, nor was the gun wrapped up when Jackie shot Simon. This means that a third shot was fired, with the gun wrapped in the stole.

Poirot explains that Simon and Jackie worked together to kill Linnet. They drugged Poirot’s wine so that he would not hear anything and staged the uncomfortable scene in the saloon, complete with Cornelia as a witness. That scene was designed to escalate until Jackie “shot” Simon; but, in fact, she did not actually shoot him. Rather, Jackie fired the pistol without hitting Simon and Simon collapsed onto a chair and held a red-stained handkerchief over his leg to make it look as if he were bleeding. (The same handkerchief, stained pink by the remnants of the red ink Poirot had found in Jackie’s room, was later found wrapped around the discarded pistol.) While Simon was left alone in the saloon, he retrieved Jackie’s pistol from under the sofa, ran to Linnet’s cabin, killed her, and returned to the saloon.

Simon had hidden Miss Van Schuyler’s velvet stole ahead of time. Having killed his wife, he wrapped the stole around the gun to muffle the shot and shot himself in the leg. He collapsed into a chair near a window and threw the pistol, wrapped in the stole and handkerchief, into the river.

The murder was very carefully designed: Jackie and Simon had never stopped being lovers, and they combined their talents (her cool resourcefulness and planning and his physical agility and speed) to create a perfect murder in which both had alibis. Simon married Linnet for her money, and he and Jackie devised a plan to kill her. Jackie would not be held responsible, since she was drugged and under supervision at the time of Linnet’s murder, and Simon would not be a suspect because he was supposedly lying immobile in the saloon at the time. Since Poirot always drinks wine, it was easy to slip a sleeping draught into the bottle; this was why he went to bed early and slept so heavily on the night of the murder.

Poirot explains that he came to suspect Simon and Jackie due to some “lapses” (396) in the performance. Simon’s tirade about possessive women was clearly genuine, but he was talking about Linnet rather than Jackie. Moreover, Simon was excessively affectionate toward Linnet in public, and a reserved Englishman would not have acted in such a way. When Jackie claimed that someone had overheard the conversation with Poirot in which she expressed her desire to shoot Linnet in the head, Poirot had not noticed anyone listening; in fact, nobody was there, and Jackie simply wanted to plant the idea of an unknown person who had overheard the conversation and would later attempt to frame her.

The one unforeseen circumstance was Louise Bourget’s seeing Simon leave Linnet’s cabin. Her odd words, “[n]aturally, if I had been unable to sleep, if I had mounted the stairs, then perhaps I might have seen this assassin” (390), were intended not for Race or Poirot, but for Simon, who was in the room while they questioned Louise. His response, “I’ll look after you” (393), was his assurance that he would pay for her silence. It was Simon she had seen leaving Linnet’s cabin; she had tried to blackmail him.

Immediately after Louise’s statement, Simon asked to see Jackie in Bessner’s room. He told Jackie about Louise’s attempt to blackmail him, and Jackie took one of Dr. Bessner’s surgical knives from the room, went to meet Louise, and killed her. However, Mrs. Otterbourne saw Jackie, and when she came to tell Race and Poirot, Simon shouted at her in order to alert Jackie, who grabbed Pennington’s revolver and shot Mrs. Otterbourne. Jackie’s cabin was just two doors down from Bessner’s, so she quickly ran inside and pretended to have been there all along.