August 13th

August 13th is the day the outside world finally reaches Indian Island, discovering the ten dead bodies and confronting a mystery that would remain officially unsolved. It is the date on which the police surgeon examines the corpses and determines that all have been dead for at least thirty-six hours, and it is the day the Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, Sir Thomas Legge, begins his frustrated inquiry into a case that seems to have no living perpetrator.

The Discovery of the Bodies

On the afternoon of August 13th, at the first moment it was possible to run a boat ashore after the storm, Fred Narracott and other men from Sticklehaven landed on Indian Island. They had been alerted by SOS signals seen by a party of boy scouts on the morning of August 11th, but heavy seas had prevented any earlier approach. The rescue party found the house and its occupants dead. The police surgeon who arrived with them examined every corpse. His report listed the causes: Lawrence John Wargrave and Philip Lombard had been shot, the first through the head, the second through the heart; Emily Caroline Brent and Anthony James Marston had died of cyanide poisoning; Ethel Rogers had died of an overdose of chloral; Thomas Rogers' head had been split open; William Henry Blore's head had been crushed in; Edward George Armstrong had died of drowning; John Gordon Macarthur's skull had been fractured by a blow on the back of the head; and Vera Elizabeth Claythorne had been hanged. The surgeon was fairly definite about Armstrong: he must have been in the water for eight to ten hours before his body was washed up, which placed his death during the night of August 10th–11th.

The Official Investigation

Back at Scotland Yard, Sir Thomas Legge, the Assistant Commissioner, found the case incredible. "Ten people dead on an island and not a living soul on it. It doesn't make sense!" he exclaimed to Inspector Maine. The inspector had investigated the accusations made by the gramophone record and found that each victim had indeed been involved in a death that the law could not touch. The Rogerses had been suspected of neglecting an elderly employer; Wargrave had sentenced Edward Seton to death; Vera Claythorne had been the governess of a child who drowned; Armstrong had operated on a woman who died on the table; Emily Brent had turned out a pregnant servant who later drowned herself; Marston had killed two children with his car; General Macarthur had sent his wife's lover to his death in the war; Lombard had abandoned twenty-one men in East Africa; and Blore had committed perjury in the Landor case. The only person who could have been the murderer, the police reasoned, was someone who was not a murderer in any legal sense—and that paradox pointed to Wargrave himself, who had merely done his duty as a judge. But the police had no way to prove this.

The Unsolved Problem

The investigation hit a dead end. The only person who could have arranged the island's purchase and provisioning, Isaac Morris, had died on the night of August 8th from an overdose of sleeping stuff, a death that Legge called "a damned sight too opportune." The police found Vera Claythorne's diary, Emily Brent's notebook, Wargrave's legal notes, and Blore's notebook, all of which tallied in their accounts of the deaths. But the final piece of evidence—the revolver found at the top of the stairs with Vera's fingerprints on it, and the chair in her bedroom placed neatly against the wall after she had been hanged—proved that someone else had been alive on the island after the last death. That someone had tidied up. The police could not explain who it was or how he had vanished. The mystery of Indian Island remained unsolved until the discovery of Wargrave's manuscript confession, cast into the sea in a bottle.