Joyce Reynolds’s murder

Joyce Reynolds’s murder is the killing at the center of the Hallowe’en party mystery: Rowena Drake drowns Joyce in the library while the other guests are occupied with the Snapdragon, then stages a broken-vase accident to account for the water on her clothes. The murder’s solution turns on that water. What first appears to be an incidental mishap provides the means by which Hercule Poirot connects the killing to its perpetrator.

The party and Joyce’s disappearance

Ariadne Oliver recalls that the party ended with the Snapdragon, a burning dish of raisins over which brandy had been poured. After the guests finished the game and began going home, they realized Joyce was missing. Her mother supposed that Joyce had felt tired or unwell and left by herself, but the search did not find her at home or among the departing guests. The delay between the festive gathering and the discovery made the party’s final activity the crucial interval in which the murder had occurred.

The killing in the library

Joyce was found in the library, at the galvanized-iron bucket used for bobbing for apples. She had been kneeling to reach an apple when someone forced her head under the water and held it there until she drowned. The bucket was nearly full; Ariadne Oliver dwells on its weight and recalls wishing the party had used a plastic one, which might have tipped over. Her aversion to apples afterward attaches an ordinary party game to the memory of the killing.

Poirot’s later reconstruction supplies the missing movement between the party and the discovery. As the guests crowded into the dining room for the Snapdragon, Rowena Drake asked Joyce to accompany her to the library. Joyce had no reason to distrust her. Rowena drowned her there, away from the gathering, and in the struggle was necessarily splashed and soaked. The murder therefore created a practical problem for its perpetrator: Rowena had to explain why she was wet.

The staged vase accident

During the Snapdragon, the room became hot, and Elizabeth Whittaker left for the hall. From there she saw Rowena emerge onto the first-floor landing carrying a large vase of autumn leaves and flowers. Rowena paused above the hall, adjusting the awkward, weighty vase as though it contained water, and looked toward the library door. She then appeared to start, released the vase, and fell with it as it crashed downstairs, spilling water over her.

The accident gave Rowena a witness to her wet clothes. She and Elizabeth picked up the broken pieces and flowers, while Rowena complained about losing the vase. In Poirot’s account, the start was feigned and the vase was deliberately allowed to drench her. Rowena also left Elizabeth with the impression that she had seen someone coming from the room where a murder had been committed. Elizabeth accepted the appearance of the incident at first; when she later told Miss Emlyn, Miss Emlyn recognized that the important detail was Rowena’s being wet and urged Elizabeth to tell Poirot.

The clue and the concealed fear

Poirot treats water as the vital clue because anyone who held a vigorous child’s head beneath a full bucket would be bound to get wet. The broken vase offered an apparently ordinary explanation for that otherwise incriminating circumstance. Once he connected the murder’s unavoidable splashing with Rowena’s conspicuous, witnessed soaking, the accident became evidence of planning rather than coincidence, and he knew who had killed Joyce.

The false trail also arose from Rowena’s fear of an earlier crime. She had always suspected that someone was present in Quarry Wood when she and Michael Garfield killed Olga Seminoff. Miranda Butler had told Joyce that she had once seen a murder, but Joyce had never witnessed one at all. Rowena did not know that: she acted on her suspicion that the earlier killing might have been seen, and the mistaken belief that Joyce could be a witness led her to kill her. The party’s staged spectacle of a drowning thus concealed a second fear—the possibility that the past had been observed and could return.