Colonel Easterbrook’s revolver

Colonel Easterbrook’s revolver is the missing household weapon that Edmund Swettenham takes for the staged hold-up at Little Paddocks. Its movement from the Colonel’s drawer to the shooting links a seemingly playful imitation of a robbery to Rudi Scherz’s death, and its absence later helps expose the staging behind the witnesses’ conflicting accounts.

Identity and Disappearance

The revolver belongs to Colonel Archie Easterbrook, who had shown it to his wife, Laura Easterbrook. When he later checks the drawer where he kept it, the weapon is gone. Laura remembers that it was there when she saw it on Saturday the 30th, the day after the hold-up at Little Paddocks. Her recollection anchors the disappearance to a specific point in the chronology: the gun was still in its usual place after the shooting, rather than having been taken beforehand.

That distinction becomes important when the investigation establishes that the revolver used in the hold-up was not Rudi Scherz’s. Miss Marple notes that the police have not traced the weapon and asks who in Chipping Cleghorn owned a revolver. Bunch Harmon identifies Colonel Easterbrook as a local owner and says that he kept it in his collar drawer. The household detail supplies a concrete lead where the investigation had lacked one.

Use in the Staged Hold-up

Edmund takes Colonel Easterbrook’s revolver and arranges the business with Rudi as what Edmund presents as a joke. During the blackout, Edmund slips out of the drawing-room through the carefully oiled second door, fires at Letitia Blacklock, and kills Rudi. He then returns to the room and clicks his lighter, helping sustain the impression that the event unfolded as the witnesses later described it.

The weapon’s use depends on the staged scene’s conditions, not simply on its presence. The hall and landing are dark; the intruder’s flashlight is directed into the room, leaving those inside unable to see the figure clearly at the time. Their later descriptions of a masked man with a revolver therefore combine what they thought they saw in the moment with what became visible after the lights came on. The gun seems to confirm the familiar pattern of an armed robbery, while the lighting and the later reconstruction show how little the witnesses could actually have observed.

Evidence and Investigation

The preliminary medical report establishes that the revolver was discharged at close range, but could not determine whether the shot was accidental or deliberate. Investigators were left to question the witnesses carefully, although, as Detective-Inspector Craddock observes, each may have seen something different. The weapon’s physical evidence alone could not settle how the shooting happened; the investigation had to test testimony against the room’s lighting and movements.

The search for the gun’s ownership provides a separate line of inquiry. After Miss Marple and Bunch connect the untraced revolver to Colonel Easterbrook, the later accusation against Edmund supplies the missing sequence: he took the Colonel’s gun, used it in the staged attack, and returned to the drawing-room after killing Rudi. The revolver thus shifts from an apparently incidental household possession to evidence that challenges the account of the shooting as a robbery carried out by the dead intruder.

Narrative Significance

The revolver’s disappearance and use make it a material link between domestic life and the murder plot. It is kept among ordinary household belongings, yet its removal depends on access to a familiar local home and its storage places. In a village where neighbors enter one another’s houses to leave food and other goods, the movement of objects is not automatically conspicuous; the same everyday informality that enables exchanges also makes the weapon’s disappearance harder to notice immediately.

As a clue, the revolver also marks the difference between seeing an object and understanding its role. Witnesses recall the conventional signs of a hold-up, but the weapon’s true significance emerges only when the police examine what the darkness allowed them to perceive, establish that it was not Rudi’s, and trace it back to Colonel Easterbrook. Its path reveals that the apparent robber was not the person who controlled the scene: Edmund used the gun to help manufacture that appearance.