Armstrong house

The Armstrong house was the New York residence of Colonel Armstrong, a decorated British officer and V.C., and his wife Sonia Armstrong, the daughter of the celebrated actress Linda Arden. It was a household of varied nationalities and loyalties, including an Italian chauffeur, Antonio Foscarelli; an English governess, Mary Debenham; a Swedish nurse, Greta Ohlsson; a German lady's-maid, Hildegarde Schmidt; a French nursery-maid, Susanne; and a trained hospital nurse, Stengelberg. Colonel Arbuthnot, the Colonel's best friend from the war, was a frequent visitor. The house was filled with love for the Armstrongs' only child, three-year-old Daisy Armstrong, whom everyone in the household adored.

The Kidnapping and Its Aftermath

The Armstrong house became the scene of an unspeakable tragedy when Daisy Armstrong was kidnapped from her home. The kidnappers, led by Cassetti (later known as Samuel Edward Ratchett), demanded an impossibly high ransom. After the parents paid two hundred thousand dollars, the child's dead body was discovered; she had been dead for at least a fortnight. The shock caused Mrs. Armstrong, who was expecting another baby, to give birth prematurely to a stillborn child, and she herself died. Her broken-hearted husband shot himself. The police, convinced that Susanne the nursery-maid had some knowledge of the crime, refused to believe her hysterical denials; in despair, she threw herself from a window and was killed. It was later proved that she had been absolutely innocent. Cassetti was arrested but, through the enormous wealth he had piled up and the secret hold he had over various persons, was acquitted on a technicality. He changed his name to Ratchett and left America.

The Conspiracy

The Armstrong house was the birthplace of the conspiracy to execute Ratchett. Linda Arden, Mrs. Armstrong's mother, was "just crazy with grief" after the tragedy. The servants were equally devastated. Colonel Arbuthnot, who had been Colonel Armstrong's best friend and who had saved his life in the war, was also present. They decided then and there that the sentence of death that Cassetti had escaped had to be carried out. It was the chauffeur, Antonio Foscarelli, who suggested the method of multiple stabbers. Mary Debenham worked out the details later with Hector MacQueen, whose father had been the district attorney on the case and who had adored Sonia Armstrong. The plan took a long time to perfect. They tracked Ratchett down, got Masterman and MacQueen into his employment, and enlisted Susanne's father, Pierre Michel, a Wagon Lit conductor. The twelve conspirators—representing the varied nationalities and classes that had once filled the Armstrong house—boarded the Orient Express to carry out their sentence.

Narrative Significance

The Armstrong house functions as the story's absent center, a place of love and beauty that was destroyed by a single act of evil. Every detail of the conspiracy—the choice of the Orient Express, the roles each passenger played, the very composition of the "jury of twelve"—is a direct echo of the household that was shattered. The house is not merely a setting for a past crime; it is the moral foundation upon which the entire plot of Murder on the Orient Express rests. The conspirators' loyalty to the memory of the Armstrong family and their shared sense of justice, born in that house, drive the novel's central action and its ultimate, ambiguous resolution.