5 November 1931

November 5, 1931, is the date fixed by the gramophone accusation for Emily Caroline Brent's responsibility in the death of Beatrice Taylor. The accusation, delivered by the disembodied Voice during the dinner party on Indian Island, charged that on that date Emily Brent was responsible for the death of Beatrice Taylor. This date anchors the second of the ten indictments, linking a specific autumn day to a moral crime that the law could not touch.

The Accusation and Its Context

The Voice, emanating from a gramophone record hidden in an adjoining room, declared: "Emily Caroline Brent, that upon the 5th November, 1931, you were responsible for the death of Beatrice Taylor." The charge was delivered without preamble, in the same flat, penetrating tone that named each guest and their alleged crime. Emily Brent, who had been reading her Bible before dinner and who sat upright and unmoved during the accusation, later refused to offer any explanation when the others demanded one. She said only, "I have nothing to say," and "There is no question of defence. I have always acted in accordance with the dictates of my conscience." Her silence and her rigid self-righteousness set her apart from the other guests, who all protested their innocence or offered justifications.

The Story of Beatrice Taylor

Later, alone with Vera Claythorne on the summit of the island, Emily Brent recounted the events behind the accusation. Beatrice Taylor had been in service with her—a girl who "had nice manners and was very clean and willing." Emily Brent discovered that Beatrice was "in trouble," pregnant and unmarried. She dismissed the girl immediately, saying, "Naturally I did not keep her an hour under my roof. No one shall ever say that I condoned immorality." Beatrice Taylor's parents, described by Emily Brent as "decent folk," did not condone her behaviour either. The abandoned girl, as Emily Brent put it, "not content with having one sin on her conscience, committed a still graver sin. She took her own life." She threw herself into a river. When Vera asked, "What did you feel like when you knew she'd done that? Weren't you sorry? Didn't you blame yourself?" Emily Brent drew herself up and replied, "I? I had nothing with which to reproach myself." She insisted that it was Beatrice's own sin that drove her to it, and that if she had behaved like a decent modest young woman, none of it would have happened.

The Unyielding Conscience

Emily Brent's response to the accusation and to the story of Beatrice Taylor reveals a character encased in an armour of virtue. She felt no remorse, no unease. Vera, listening to her, realized that the little elderly spinster was no longer slightly ridiculous—she was terrible. Emily Brent's diary, written after the death of General Macarthur, shows her conviction that the murderer was one of the guests, and that she alone knew who it was. In a moment of mental exhaustion, her pencil wrote, "THE MURDERER'S NAME is BEATRICE TAYLOR," but she scored through the sentence, saying to herself, "Did I write that? Did I? I must be going mad." The ghost of Beatrice Taylor haunted her last hours: she dreamed of the girl pressing her face against the window, moaning, asking to be let in. On the morning of her own death, Emily Brent felt giddy and heard a buzzing bee; she was found dead in the dining-room chair, killed by an injection of cyanide administered by the murderer, who had arranged a bumblebee at the window to echo the nursery rhyme: "A bumblebee stung one and then there were five."

Thematic Significance

The date November 5, 1931, marks a crime of omission and moral cruelty rather than a direct act of violence. Emily Brent did not kill Beatrice Taylor with her own hands; she turned her out, and the girl drowned herself. The law could not touch Emily Brent for this. The murderer, Lawrence John Wargrave, selected her as a victim precisely because her offence was one that the legal system could not punish. In his confession, he wrote that he had collected the case of Emily Brent from an indignant mem sahib in Majorca who recounted the tale of the Puritan and her wretched servant girl. The date anchors the second death in the sequence of the nursery rhyme, and it underscores the novel's central theme: that there are crimes beyond the reach of human justice, and that a fanatic may take it upon himself to execute a moral sentence that the courts cannot deliver.