Manuscript confession (bottle)
The manuscript confession, sealed in a bottle and cast into the sea by Lawrence John Wargrave, is the final document that reveals the complete truth behind the Indian Island murders. It explains that Wargrave, a retired judge with a sadistic love of killing and a fanatical sense of justice, orchestrated the entire event to execute ten people he deemed guilty of crimes the law could not touch, and it details his methods, his motives, and the psychological satisfaction he derived from his perfect crime.
Origin and Purpose
Wargrave wrote the confession shortly before his own death, enclosing it in a bottle and throwing it into the sea. He acknowledged the act as a romantic childhood fantasy, noting that the practice of casting a bottle with an important document into the waves had always thrilled him. He admitted a pitiful human wish for recognition, confessing that no artist can be satisfied with art alone and that he wanted someone to know just how clever he had been. The confession was later found by the master of the fishing trawler Emma Jane and sent to Scotland Yard.
Psychological Confession
Wargrave described himself as a mass of contradictions from earliest youth, possessing both an incurably romantic imagination and a definite sadistic delight in seeing or causing death. He recalled experiments with wasps and various garden pests, and from an early age he knew very strongly the lust to kill. Alongside this ran a contradictory trait: a strong sense of justice. He adopted the law as a profession, which satisfied nearly all his instincts, and he enjoyed presiding over a court of law, taking exquisite pleasure in seeing a wretched criminal squirming in the dock as his doom came slowly nearer. He insisted that he took no pleasure in seeing an innocent man there and that he had always been strictly just and scrupulous in his summing up. For some years past he had been aware of a change within himself, a lessening of control, a desire to act instead of to judge. He recognized this as the desire of the artist to express himself, and he determined to commit a murder that must be no ordinary murder but a fantastical crime, something stupendous and out of the common.
The Selection of Victims
The idea for the crime came from a chance remark by a doctor who mentioned how often murder must be committed which the law was unable to touch, instancing the case of an old lady whose death was due to the withholding of a restorative drug by a married couple. Wargrave suddenly saw his way clear and determined to commit not one murder but murder on a grand scale, inspired by the childhood rhyme of the ten little Indian boys. He began secretly to collect victims, using a routine line of conversation to gather information. He collected the case of Dr. Armstrong from a teetotal sister in a nursing home who recounted a case of a doctor operating under the influence of alcohol. A conversation between two old military gossips in his club put him on the track of General Macarthur. A man who had recently returned from the Amazon gave him a devastating résumé of the activities of Philip Lombard. An indignant mem sahib in Majorca recounted the tale of Emily Brent and her servant girl. Anthony Marston he selected from a large group of people who had committed similar offences, considering his complete callousness made him a type dangerous to the community. Ex-Inspector Blore came his way through professional brethren discussing the Landor case. The tenth victim was Isaac Morris, a shady little creature and a dope pedlar responsible for inducing the daughter of friends of his to take to drugs, leading to her suicide. The case of Vera Claythorne came from a young man called Hugo Hamilton, who, in a maudlin confidential stage after considerable drink, told Wargrave that he had known a murderess and that she had done it more or less for him, taking a kid out to sea and letting it drown.
The Execution of the Plan
Wargrave detailed the order of death, which he had subjected to special thought and care, deciding that those whose guilt was the lightest should pass out first and not suffer the prolonged mental strain and fear that the more cold-blooded offenders were to suffer. Anthony Marston and Mrs. Rogers died first, the one instantaneously from potassium cyanide slipped into his glass, the other in a peaceful sleep from chloral hydrate added to her brandy. General Macarthur met his death painlessly from a blow to the back of the head. Wargrave then selected Dr. Armstrong as an ally, pretending to concur in his suspicions against Lombard and hinting at a scheme to trap the murderer. He killed Rogers while the man was chopping sticks, and during the confusion he slipped into Lombard's room and abstracted his revolver. At breakfast he slipped his last dose of chloral into Miss Brent's coffee, then later injected her with a strong solution of cyanide. He then staged his own fake death, using red mud on his forehead, a red curtain, and grey wool to appear as a murdered man, with Armstrong acting as his accomplice. He then lured Armstrong to the edge of a cliff and pushed him into the sea. After Blore and Lombard had gone after Armstrong, Wargrave returned to the house, retrieved the revolver, and later, from a window, dropped a heavy marble clock onto Blore, killing him. He then watched from the shadow of a wardrobe as Vera Claythorne, after shooting Lombard, hanged herself in her bedroom, a result he had anticipated as an interesting psychological experiment.
Final Clues and Suicide
Wargrave left three clues for the police: that Edward Seton was guilty, meaning the one person on the island who was not a murderer must logically be the murderer; that the seventh verse of the nursery rhyme, with its "red herring," indicated that Armstrong was deceived and sent to his death, which should point to Wargrave as the only person likely to inspire his confidence; and the symbolic manner of his own death, with a mark on his forehead representing the brand of Cain. He described his own suicide, using an elastic cord attached to his eyeglasses and a revolver, so that he would be found laid neatly on his bed, shot through the forehead, with the revolver on the floor and the cord hanging innocently from the eyeglasses. He concluded by stating that when the sea went down, boats and men would come from the mainland and find ten dead bodies and an unsolved problem on Indian Island.
