Rudi Scherz

Rudi Scherz is a Swiss receptionist whose apparent role in the attempted robbery at Little Paddocks masks his actual position: he is an unwitting participant in Charlotte Blacklock’s plan and its first victim. His death initially looks like the conclusion of a staged hold-up, but his past as an orderly at a clinic in Berne explains how Charlotte recognized him—and how she turned that recognition into a fatal trap.

Identity and Background

Scherz is identified by Detective-Inspector Dermot Craddock as a Swiss national employed as a receptionist at the Royal Spa Hotel in Medenham Wells. He has also worked as an orderly at Dr Adolf Koch’s clinic in Berne, where Charlotte Blacklock had undergone an operation for goitre. She was a patient there before Scherz’s time, so she did not know his history or the circumstances under which he had left the clinic.

When Scherz encountered Charlotte at the hotel, he recognized her as a former patient and spoke to her. His approach therefore sprang from a real connection, not from knowledge of her concealed identity or a deliberate attempt to blackmail her. Charlotte later invented a different explanation, claiming he had spoken to her because his father owned a hotel in Montreux. The false story helped conceal the genuine link between them: a chance meeting made dangerous by Charlotte’s secret.

Recruitment into the Hold-Up

Charlotte presented Scherz with a fictional scenario: a party at which a stranger would play the part of a gangster in a sham hold-up. She offered him a generous sum to take the role. His agreement without suspicion helped convince the investigators that he did not believe he possessed leverage over her; he understood the arrangement as paid work for a foolish, moneyed woman, not as a way to exploit someone who feared exposure.

His part was carefully prepared. Charlotte gave him the newspaper advertisement to insert, arranged for him to visit Little Paddocks and learn the house’s layout, and showed him where she would meet him and let him in on the night of the gathering. He was to appear in a black cloak and mask, open the door, brandish a torch, and call for the occupants to put their hands up. Charlotte used the planned performance to give the gathering a convincing apparent intruder, while concealing the actual attack behind it. Dora Bunner knew nothing about the arrangement.

The Shooting and the False Explanation

At the gathering, the masked figure was found wearing a roughly made black hooded cloak, a black mask, and black cotton gloves. The hood had slipped back to reveal fair hair. Colonel Archie Easterbrook examined him and found that he was dead; his immediate conclusion was that he had shot himself. Dora recognized him as the young man from the hotel who had asked Charlotte for money to return to Switzerland, mistaking his earlier visit for part of an attempt to spy on the household.

That mistaken account helped the staged scene seem self-explanatory: Scherz could be treated as the armed intruder who had turned a hold-up into a suicide or accidental death. Jane Marple, however, reasoned that he had been paid to advertise the supposed murder and scout the house, and that he had been told the party incident was a joke. In her reconstruction, he had no revolver. The revolver was Charlotte’s, and the apparently authentic intrusion was the cover for her killing him.

Exposure and Narrative Significance

In the final reconstruction, Charlotte slipped through the previously oiled second door while the lights were out and approached Scherz as he played his assigned role. She fired at him and then close to his body, dropped the revolver beside him, and returned to her place. She also made it appear that she had been wounded, supporting the impression that Scherz had fired at the people in the room. The sequence transformed his paid performance into apparent evidence against him and disguised Charlotte’s movement through the house.

The deception nearly closed the case. Dora’s belief that Scherz had aimed at Charlotte reinforced the impression that Charlotte herself had been shot at; the death might otherwise have been classified as suicide or accidental. The investigation remained open because Craddock was dissatisfied with that explanation, and his discovery that the second door had been tampered with supplied evidence beyond Marple’s theory. Scherz’s role thus carries a double reversal: the man presented as the threatening intruder was actually the hired performer, while his apparent suicide was murder. His former work at the Berne clinic finally connected Charlotte to the identity she had stolen, bringing the concealed history behind the staged hold-up into view.