Death on the Nile door Agatha Christie

1. The main characters

Linnet Ridgeway: A beautiful rich young girl in her twenties.
Jacqueline de Bellefort: She is Linnet’s oldest friend.
Simon Doyle: He is an incredibly simple Simon.
Louise Bourget: Linnet’s personal maid
Hercule Poirot: He is a very clever Belgian detective with an egg-shaped head and a black moustache.
Kolonel Race: He is an old friend of Hercule Poirot. He also works for Linnet’s English lawyers.
Mrs von Schuyler: She is very keen on Linnet’s pearls
Mrs Bowers: She is Mrs von Schuylers personal maid, but she is not happy with it. Her
family has also been ruined by Linnet’s father. She is also a nurse
Mrs. Salomé Otterbourne: She is a novelist and she is very upset that Linnet had taken one of her books wrong.
Rosalie Otterbourne: She is Salomé Otterbourne’s daughter.
Jim Furgeson: He thinks that people with the same number of money as Linnet should be “bumbed off”
Uncle Andrew Pennington: He is Linnet’s American lawyer. He is trying to get control of Linnet’s money.
Ludwig Bessner: He is a German doctor. He runs an institute in Zurich. He is not happy with Linnet’s thoughts he is a quack.
Purser of the Karnak: He always mistakes the identity of his passenger.

2. THE STORY

Linnet Ridgeway is a very rich young woman in her twenties. She is going to her new home, called Wode hall where Jacqueline de Bellefort is waiting for her. Jackie (Jacqueline de Bellefort) is Linnet’s oldest friend but she is absolutely broke. Jackie tells Linnet that she is engaged with Simon Doyle who is very poor. Because Jackie begged Linnet, Simon becomes Linnet’s real estate agent. Linnet and Simon see each other so often that they fall in love. They get married and go to Egypt for their honeymoon.
Louise Bourget is Linnet’s house maid and she fell in love with an Egyptian and wants to marry him. She don’t know anything about him so Linnet got him checked up and he was already married and she had prommissed Louise that she could have her portion as soon as he got divorced.
Jackie really hates Linnet because she married Simon and follows the two of them wherever they go. Whilst in Egypt, Linnet and Simon meet Hercule Poirot, a famous Belgian detective. They tell Hercule Poirot about Jackie and he tries to help them. Poirot tries to convince Jackie to forget about Linnet and Simon and to stop following them but she ignors that and goes on with it. He also tells Linnet and Simon not to worry about it anymore and to go on with their lives. Linnet, Simon and Poirot go on a luxurious Nile cruise on board the steamer, Karnak. Every main character is there, also Jackie, but Simon and Linnet are thinking that she isn’t. In the beginning of an evening Pennington wants Linnet to sign a document so that he can get control of her money. Later that evening when Jackie had many alcoholic drinks and when everybody ( Mrs von Schuyler was making some noise that her stole is gone) except for Rosalie Otterbourne and Jackie and Simon, has left the saloon Jackie got real mad at Simon and she shot him in the leg. Rosalie runs into Jim Furgeson who is going to help Simon to get on the couch. Jackie is very upset about what she has done and Simon tells them that she musn’t be left alone. Rosalie is getting mrs. Bowers to look after her and then she is bringing doctor Bessner to look after Simon. The next morning Louise Bourget finds out that Linnet Doyle is shot in the head and everybody thinks Jackie did it because there is a big J in blood on the wall near her bedside. The crew of the ship has told Race and Poirot to find out who killed Linnet. When they look around the room Poirot finds some strange nailpolish which smells very obvious. That day they are questioning all the passengers if they had seen something. When they are in doctor Bessner’s cabin, where now Simon is sleeping, Louise Bourget came and during her questioning she said: “If I had been unable to sleep, if I had stayed on deck than perhaps I could have seen the murderer enter or leave madame’s cabin” Poirot asks her if she know where Linnet’s pearls are, she sad that they are on her night table but Poirot sad that they aren’t there anymore. Then they realize that Linnet’s pearls are gone.
When Race and Poirot leave Simon they are going to freshen up. And give the ‘little grey cell a rest’
When Poirot is in his bathroom there is a cobra and he send out a S.O.S. to Race next door. Race came as soon as he could and killed the cobra. They where just walking a bit over the deck when they heard some noise of the upper deck, they looked and there was mrs von Schuyler. They started immediately to question her. Some of the questions was about Linnet’s pearls because they knew that she wanted them. Just after they finished their question there is some noise downstairs and a few seconds later the purser came up with mrs von Schuyler’s stole, and in the stole there is a handkerchief, the gun with which Jackie had fired a bullet at Simon and with which Linnet has been killed, and there was also an ash-tray to make it sink to the bottom of the Nile.
Now that Poirot and Race have ‘found’ the gun, there are two things left to find, the pearls and the murderer. They are searching al the cabins and when they are walking along the bar there is mrs Otterbourne, and now they see her they can question her. In the beginning she is her ‘normal’ self, full of romance and passion, but later when they told her that she could have done it she is very down and she wants them to go away.
When they are walking on they hear at the beginning of the corridor a door slam. They are walking back in that direction and in the room of the slamming door, the iceroom where they have putted the body of Linnet. When they are looking at her body again the pearls are back. They are taking the pearls and go search in the last cabin they have to search for something, Pennington’s. They are searching for the paper he needed signed from Linnet. When they look in a drawer they see a gun which is very obvious. After a while he came and he tells them that they have no right to be in his cabin without his knowledge.
When they are on their way to the diningroom for dinner they see Jackie walk around. Poirot asks Race to order him ‘Le Morille’. Race doesn’t understand what he means and thinks it is a fish type. Jackie really want to see Simon. Poirot tells her that he is going to ask doctor Bessner. He said that it is allright and they leave the cabin to go to the diningroom. When Poirot sits on the table with Race it came out that Race has ordered something wrong. ‘Le Morille’ isn’t a fish type but ‘Le Morille’ are mushrooms. Race ordered also a new bottle of wine because the wine of the evening before was moulding. Then he remembers something very important. After a while they see Jackie entering the room, totally out of breath.
While everybody is at dinner one of the crew is giving every cabin a clean towel. When he came at Louise Bourget’s cabin one of the towels is falling on the ground. When he picks it up it totally red of blood. He runs away to fetch somebody. Race and Poirot, who have just finished their dinner, met him at the stairs and following him. They open the door of the cabin and saw that Louise Bourget was killed. They noticed that her throat has been cut.
They found a piece of a thousand franc note in her dead fingers and realized that she was blackmailing the murderer, so they repeated her words she said that afternoon “If I had been unable to sleep, if I had stayed on deck than perhaps I could have seen the murderer enter or leave madame’s cabin” and realized that was precisly what had happenend, she had stayed on deck, she had seen the murderer.
Than Poirot, as an experienced detective, realized that they have been thinking in the wrong direction and that they know almost everything there is to know but what they know seems highly impossible. When they have ordered the crew to take the body to the iceroom Mrs Otterbourne tells them that she had seen the murderer of Louise Bourget. They are walking to the room where Simon is because she wanted him to here it as well. When they tell him that Mrs. Otterbourne knows who killed Louise, doctor Bessner is shouting that his temperature will rise if she told such a thing and than there is a shouting conversation in the room but when she is coming to tell the name of the murderer she’s been shot from the door. When Poirot looked on deck there is no one to see, just Pennington’s gun. Everybody have heard the shot and is coming to the place just outside the cabin. Then Poirot ordered them to go to the saloon in thirty minutes.

3. RECONSTRUCTION

When everybody was in the saloon, Poirot began to tell everybody, everybody’s motive.
Then he started to tell special things of the evening before: his ‘moulding’ wine, that he had been sleeping different that night, the softly running feet Race had heard, the scorching round Linnet’s wound, the gap in mrs von Schuylers stole and the strange smelling nailpolish which wasn’t nailpolish but red ink. He explained why they know that their had been two bullets fired from the gun, those two hadn’t been through the stole and that’s why he knew there was a third shot. He lay stress on the strange words Louise was using: “If I had been unable to sleep, if I had stayed on deck than perhaps I could have seen the murderer enter or leave madame’s cabin” and the fact of the piece of a thousand franc note they found. That where the facts they knew that she must had known something about Linnet’s murderer. Poirot told them that she was hinting to the murderer, so he had to be present at the same time. The only one who was present ( except for Louise Bourget, Race and Poirot) was Simon. That was how he found out that Simon killed Linnet.
It was hard to believe that Simon did it because he had been shot in his leg, but Jackie had deliberately missed him and the bullet hit the leg of the chair he was sitting on. Because Simon pretended to be shot, he was then able to kill Linnet without anyone suspecting him. Afterwards he shot himself in the leg and got back to his chair to make his alibi totally believable. “He picks up the pistol from under the sofa, slips out of his shoes, runs like a hare silently along the starboard side, enters his wife’s cabin, creeps up to her as she lies asleep, shoots her through the head, puts the bottle that has contained the red ink on her washstand (it mustn’t be found on his), runs back, gets hold of mrs Von Schuyler’s stole, which he has quietly stuffed down the side of a chair, muffles it round the pistol and fires a bullet into his own leg. His chair into which he falls is by a window. He lifts the window and throws the pistol, the handkerchief, the stole and an ash-tray into the Nile.’ Nobody could believe that Simon planned that, Poirot confirmed that by telling them that not Simon but Jackie had planned al that.
‘Than the plan began to go wrong, Louise saw Simon leaving Linnet’s cabin, she blackmailed him. Simon noticed that Louise saw him, and as soon as he had the opportunity to tell Jackie, he did. She killed Louise with one of doctor Bessner’s knifes, she changed for dinner and came quickly and out of breath in the dinning room. When we heard from mrs Otterbourne that she saw who killed Louise we were wondering why Simon was shouting at mrs Otterbourne but actually he was shouting a warning to Jackie and she acted immediately by running to Pennington’s cabin, getting his pistol and shooting mrs Otterbourne”.
In the beginning Simon and Jackie are denying but later when Poirot was sitting next to the table where they had putted al the evidence stuff to show everyone Jackie was walking to the table to talk to Poirot. Everyone was listening to their conversation and no one noticed that Jackie had taken a gun. She walked to Simon and she sits next to him to tell him that she loved him. Then she shot him and a few seconds later she shot herself.
The next day when they are back on the land mrs von Schuyler and mrs Bowers are the first persons o leave the boat because mrs von Schuyler thinks that the boat is beginning to look like a mortuary. Then mrs Bowers tels her that she is going to be there herself for not to long.