Hardman admires Susanne.

Cyrus Hardman, the brash American detective who posed as a typewriter-ribbon salesman on the Orient Express, carried a hidden romantic attachment to Susanne, the French nursery-maid whose suicide followed the Armstrong kidnapping tragedy. This unconfessed love—never stated outright but betrayed by a single, involuntary emotional response—was the thread that pulled a professional operative with no prior connection to the Armstrong household into the elaborate conspiracy to execute Samuel Edward Ratchett. Hardman's presence among the twelve executioners was not born of family loyalty or personal grievance, but of a private grief he could not acknowledge in words.

Identity and Background

Hardman presented himself to the other passengers as a loud, gum-chewing commercial traveler in a check suit and pink shirt, but his passport was a bluff. He was in fact an operative of the McNeil Detective Agency, one of the best-known private detective firms in New York. He had come to Europe trailing a pair of crooks, a chase that ended in Constantinople. When Poirot confronted him with the possibility that he might have been the Armstrong family's gardener or butler, Hardman replied flatly that the Armstrongs "didn't have a garden" and that he lacked "the fancy manners" for a butler's post. He had never set foot in the Armstrong house. Yet when Poirot, testing a theory, spoke of the charm of foreign women—"the French or the Belgian girl, coquettish, charming"—Hardman turned away abruptly to peer out at the snow, blinking as though the light hurt his eyes. "Perhaps you're right, M. Poirot," he said. "But I guess every nation likes its own girls best." The tears he blinked away were not from the snow's dazzle; they were the only public sign of a private wound.

The Hidden Connection

That wound was Susanne. She had been the nursery-maid in the Armstrong household, a pretty, laughing French girl devoted to little Daisy Armstrong. After the kidnapping, the police, convinced she 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 of any complicity. Hardman, Poirot deduced, had been in love with her. The detective's own words, when he later propounded his second solution, made the inference explicit: "Then there was Hardman. He seemed quite definitely not to belong to the Armstrong household. I could only imagine that he had been in love with the French girl." The emotional logic was confirmed by Linda Arden herself, who, in her final confession, listed the conspirators and noted that Susanne's father, Pierre Michel, was over in France, but that the others—eleven of them—had first gathered in New York. Hardman was among them. He had tracked Ratchett down, a task that required months of patient work, and he had done it for a girl who could never know.

Role in the Conspiracy

Hardman's official role in the plot was to provide a false narrative that would steer suspicion away from the passengers. He told Poirot that Ratchett had hired him to guard against a "small man—dark—with a womanish kind of voice," a description that conveniently matched no one on the train and could apply equally to a man or a woman. This story, Poirot concluded, was "a lie, of course, from beginning to end." Hardman also claimed to have kept watch all night from his compartment, No. 16 at the far end of the coach, and swore that no stranger had passed. That testimony, though false in its premise, served a crucial purpose: it drew "a clear circle round the Stamboul-Calais carriage," ensuring that any investigation would focus on the passengers themselves rather than on an outside intruder. Hardman's presence at the extreme end of the corridor also meant that he could vouch for the impossibility of an external assassin, thereby reinforcing the very closed-circle logic that made the conspiracy so difficult to unravel.

The Emotional Core

Hardman's attachment to Susanne was never spoken aloud among the conspirators. It was a private grief that needed no words. When Linda Arden recounted the planning of the murder, she said simply: "We decided then and there (perhaps we were mad—I don't know) that the sentence of death that Cassetti had escaped had got to be carried out. There were twelve of us—or rather eleven; Susanne's father was over in France, of course." Hardman was the twelfth, the one who had no blood tie, no professional duty, no old friendship to bind him to the Armstrongs. He had only the memory of a girl who had thrown herself from a window, and the knowledge that the man who had set that tragedy in motion was still alive, still wealthy, still traveling the world under a false name. That was enough.

Narrative Significance

Hardman's hidden love for Susanne is the emotional hinge that makes the conspiracy complete. Without him, the plan would have lacked a professional detective to track Ratchett's movements and to provide the false testimony that insulated the other passengers. His presence also deepens the novel's moral complexity: he is not a wronged family member or a loyal servant, but a man acting on a grief that has no social standing, no public claim to justice. His tears, disguised as a reaction to the snow, are the only acknowledgment the narrative gives to a love that was never requited and could never be avenged through legal means. In the final accounting, Hardman's role is the quietest and most poignant—a professional killer of criminals who became, for one night, an amateur executioner for the sake of a girl who had laughed and died before he could tell her what she meant to him.