Death of Justice Wargrave

The death of Justice Lawrence Wargrave is the central theatrical deception of the Indian Island murders. It is not a genuine killing but a meticulously staged performance by the judge himself, who, having secretly orchestrated the entire sequence of deaths, fakes his own murder to vanish from suspicion and become an invisible agent of his own plan. This event marks the point at which the murderer, having already killed six of his ten victims, transforms himself into a ghostly presence within the house, able to move freely and complete his work without being detected.

The Staging of the Death

On the evening of August 10th, after the death of Emily Brent, Wargrave put into action a scheme he had prepared with Dr. Armstrong. The judge had earlier taken a red oilsilk curtain from a bathroom and a quantity of grey knitting wool that had belonged to Miss Brent. He now arranged himself in a high-backed chair in the drawing-room, robed in the scarlet curtain and wearing the grey wool as a judge's wig. Two candles burned on either side of him. A small plaster of red mud on his forehead simulated a bullet wound. When the other guests, drawn upstairs by Vera Claythorne's screams over a seaweed scare, returned to the drawing-room, they found Wargrave sitting motionless in this macabre tableau. Dr. Armstrong, who was party to the deception, examined the figure and pronounced him dead from a gunshot wound to the head. The others accepted the verdict without close inspection, the flickering candlelight and their own terror preventing any scrutiny. Vera Claythorne identified the grey wool as Miss Brent's missing knitting wool, and Blore recognized the scarlet curtain. The revolver that had been stolen from Philip Lombard's room was assumed to be the murder weapon, though it was not found at the scene.

The Purpose of the Deception

Wargrave's motive for staging his own death was twofold. First, he needed to remove himself from the pool of suspects so that he could move about the house and island undetected, spying on the remaining guests and selecting his next victims. Second, the fake death was designed to rattle the real murderer—whom Wargrave himself was—by making it appear that the killer was still at large and had claimed another victim. In his later confession, Wargrave wrote that he had selected Dr. Armstrong as his ally because Armstrong was gullible and could not conceive that a man of Wargrave's standing could be a murderer. The judge hinted to Armstrong that he had a scheme to trap the killer, and Armstrong eagerly cooperated, believing he was helping to expose a madman.

The Aftermath: Armstrong's Fate and the Final Killings

After the fake death, Wargrave kept a rendezvous with Armstrong outside the house at a quarter to two in the morning. He led the doctor to the edge of a cliff, pretending to have spotted the mouth of a cave below. When Armstrong leaned over to look, Wargrave pushed him into the heaving sea, drowning him. This act fulfilled the nursery rhyme's line about a red herring swallowing one of the Indian boys. Wargrave then returned to the house, his footfall heard by Blore, who glimpsed a figure going out the front door. The judge re-entered through the dining-room window, which he had left open, and later broke the glass to suggest an intruder. He then returned to his bed and resumed his pose as a corpse. The next day, with only three people left alive—Blore, Lombard, and Vera Claythorne—Wargrave watched from the house windows. When Blore came up to the house alone, the judge dropped a heavy marble bear clock from Vera's window onto his head, killing him. From the same window, he witnessed Vera shoot Lombard dead on the shore. Finally, Wargrave entered Vera's bedroom and set the stage for her suicide: he arranged a rope with a noose hanging from a hook in the ceiling and placed a chair beneath it. The psychological pressure of her guilt and the shock of having just killed a man drove Vera to hang herself, exactly as the nursery rhyme prescribed.

The Final Act: Wargrave's Own Death

With all ten victims dead, Wargrave completed his own suicide. He wrote a full confession, sealed it in a bottle, and cast it into the sea. He then lay down on his bed, placed his eyeglasses beneath his body, and attached an elastic cord from the glasses to the trigger of the revolver, looping the cord around the door handle. When he pressed the trigger, the recoil pulled the revolver to the door, where it detached and fell to the floor. The elastic cord, released, hung innocently from the eyeglasses. He was found shot through the forehead, the brand of Cain upon him, the final piece of his unsolvable puzzle.

Thematic Significance

Wargrave's fake death and subsequent suicide are the culmination of his lifelong obsession with justice and death. In his confession, he wrote that from his earliest youth he had felt a strong lust to kill, combined with an equally strong sense of justice. The legal profession satisfied both instincts, but as he aged, the desire to act rather than judge grew overwhelming. He wanted to commit a murder that was fantastical, impossible, and theatrical—a crime that no one could solve. The fake death allowed him to become both judge and executioner, to preside over a court of his own making, and to deliver a verdict that the law could not. The manner of his own death, with the bullet through his forehead, was a symbolic mark of Cain, the brand of the first murderer. It was also, he believed, the final clue that might allow a clever investigator to solve the mystery: the one person among the ten who was not a murderer in any legal sense was, paradoxically, the only one who could have been the killer.