Diminishing number of Indian boys

The ten little china Indian figures that stood on a circular glass stand in the center of the dining-room table were not merely decorative. They were a grim, premeditated scoreboard, a physical manifestation of the nursery rhyme that hung framed in every guest's bedroom. From the moment the guests first noticed them at dinner on the night of their arrival, the figures were linked to the rhyme's fatalistic progression. Vera Claythorne immediately connected them to the framed poem in her room, and the other guests confirmed that identical verses were displayed in their own bedrooms. The figures were, from the start, an ominous piece of stagecraft.

The First Disappearances

The pattern of the figures' disappearance began on the very first night. After Anthony Marston choked and died from potassium cyanide poisoning, Rogers, clearing the dining room, noticed that there were only nine figures left. He muttered to himself, "That's a rum go! I could have sworn there were ten of them." The next morning, after Mrs. Rogers was found dead in her sleep, Rogers reported to Dr. Armstrong that the count had dropped again. "There's only eight, sir! Only eight!" he said, his face working with terror. The rhyme's verses—"One choked his little self and then there were nine" and "One overslept himself and then there were eight"—had been enacted with chilling precision. Philip Lombard and Dr. Armstrong immediately grasped the implication: the deaths were not coincidences but a deliberate, pattern-driven scheme.

A Relentless Tally

As the murders continued, the figures continued to vanish in lockstep with the victims. After General Macarthur was found dead, struck on the back of the head, Vera Claythorne went to the dining room and confirmed there were only seven figures. Following the murder of Rogers, who was killed with a chopper while chopping sticks, the count fell to six. When Emily Brent died from a cyanide injection, a smashed fifth china figure was found outside the dining-room window, discarded alongside the hypodermic syringe used to kill her. The murderer was not only killing according to the rhyme but was also physically removing the figures, leaving the survivors to confront the dwindling tally at every meal.

The Final Count

The pattern held through the final, desperate hours. After the staged death of Justice Wargrave and the disappearance of Dr. Armstrong, a pane in the dining-room window was found smashed, and only three little Indian boys remained on the table. Vera Claythorne, now one of the last three survivors, recognized the rhyme's next line: "A red herring swallowed one and then there were three." She argued that Armstrong's disappearance was a deliberate deception, a "red herring." After Blore was crushed by a marble bear—the rhyme's "A big bear hugged one"—and Vera shot Philip Lombard, she was left alone. She picked up the last remaining figure, saying, "You can come with me. We've won, my dear! We've won!" But as she entered her bedroom and saw the noose hanging from the hook, she understood the final verse: "He went and hanged himself and then there were none." The last figure fell from her hand and broke against the fender. The tally was complete.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The diminishing number of Indian boys is the novel's central structural device, transforming a nursery rhyme into a death warrant. The figures are not passive symbols; they are active agents of terror, forcing the survivors to confront their own impending doom with each meal. The pattern also provides the crucial clue that the murders are the work of a single, methodical mind, not a series of accidents or suicides. In his posthumous confession, Justice Wargrave reveals that he adhered to the rhyme as a matter of aesthetic principle, finding it "pleasing" to follow the doggerel as closely as possible. The figures thus become the signature of a mad artist, the physical evidence of a crime that, for a time, seems to have no solution. The police, finding the bodies and the broken figures, are left with an unsolvable puzzle, a testament to Wargrave's theatrical genius.