October 3rd

October 3rd fixes the date of Alan Carstairs’s death at the cliffs of Marchbolt and anchors the novel’s central photographic misidentification. What first appears in public as a straightforward identification by a dead man’s photograph becomes a clue that the image used by the authorities was not the one Carstairs had carried.

The Date and the Discovery

When Bobby Jones later recounts the discovery to Moira Nicholson, he places it about a month earlier and gives October 3rd as the exact date. He and Dr Thomas had found Carstairs after his fall from the cliffs at Marchbolt. Bobby confirmed that the man was dead, covered his face with a handkerchief, and noticed a photograph that had been drawn from the dead man’s pocket. He glimpsed a young woman’s face before carefully returning the photograph to its place.

The Public Identification and the Discrepancy

The newspaper account announced that the dead man had been identified as Alex Pritchard, the brother of Amelia Cayman, by means of a photograph he carried. Later, Bobby recognized that the blurred image printed in the Marchbolt Weekly Times was not the photograph he remembered seeing beside the body. The distinction turns October 3rd from a simple date of death into the starting point of an evidentiary puzzle: the official identification rested on an image that had been substituted after Bobby last saw the original.

The Photograph’s Later Meaning

When Frankie Derwent questioned the inspector, he confirmed that the police had recorded only one photograph and had relied on it to identify the body; he also described the identification as providential. Bobby and Frankie reasoned that if there had been only one photograph, someone must have removed the one Bobby saw and put another in its place. Their suspicion fell on Roger Bassington-ffrench, who had been present after the fall. Later, when Bobby told Moira that Carstairs had died on October 3rd and carried her photograph, she recognized the connection to Alan and confirmed that the image had been his. The date thus links the initial discovery to the concealed identity and to the personal history hidden inside the photograph.