Discovery of Bodies by Police

The Discovery of Bodies by Police is the culminating event of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, in which the authorities arrive on Indian Island to find ten corpses and no living soul, confronting an apparently insoluble mystery. The event transforms the novel's closed circle of suspicion into a public enigma, forcing Scotland Yard to reconstruct a sequence of deaths that seems to have no surviving perpetrator.

Causes and Background

The island had been isolated since the storm that began on the evening of August 8th. Fred Narracott, the boatman who had ferried the guests to Indian Island, had been instructed by Isaac Morris to ignore any appeals for help, as part of a supposed experiment or bet about living on a desert island. However, Narracott was struck by how normal and quiet the party was—"not at all like Mr. Robson's parties"—and when SOS signals were seen by a party of boy scouts on the morning of August 11th, he and other men prepared to go out. There was no possibility of reaching the island that day due to the heavy seas; they finally landed on the afternoon of August 12th, at the first moment it was possible to run a boat ashore. All witnesses were positive that nobody could have left the island before they arrived, as the sea was too rough for swimming and the cliffs were watched.

What Happens

When the rescue party reached the house, they found a scene of complete carnage. The police surgeon, who arrived early on the morning of August 13th, examined the bodies and determined that all had been dead at least thirty-six hours, and probably longer. The deaths were catalogued in a grim inventory: Lawrence John Wargrave had been shot through the head; Philip Lombard had been shot 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 had been killed by a blow that split his head open; William Henry Blore's head had been crushed in; Edward George Armstrong had drowned; John Gordon Macarthur's skull had been fractured by a blow to the back of the head; and Vera Elizabeth Claythorne had been hanged. The house itself was a modern structure with no dark corners or hidden panels, yet it held ten dead bodies and no explanation. The only clue to the pattern was the framed nursery rhyme in each bedroom and the diminishing number of china Indian figures on the dining table.

Consequences and Aftermath

The discovery left Scotland Yard baffled. Assistant Commissioner Sir Thomas Legge declared the whole thing "incredible" and "fantastic," demanding to know who had killed them. Inspector Maine reported that all investigations into the victims' pasts had confirmed the substance of the accusations made by the gramophone record: each had been involved in a death that the law could not touch, from the Rogerses' neglect of Jennifer Brady to Justice Wargrave's vindictive summing-up of Edward Seton, from Vera Claythorne's drowning of Cyril Hamilton to Philip Lombard's abandonment of twenty-one men. The only possible solution—that the murderer was one of the ten—seemed impossible because the final three deaths (Lombard shot, Blore crushed, Vera hanged) could not be arranged as suicides or accidents by any single survivor. The chair in Vera's room had been neatly placed against the wall after her death, and the revolver found at the top of the stairs bore only her fingerprints. The mystery remained unsolved until the discovery of a manuscript confession sealed in a bottle and cast into the sea by the master of the fishing trawler Emma Jane. That confession revealed that Lawrence John Wargrave, the hanging judge, had orchestrated the entire affair, faking his own death, manipulating Dr. Armstrong into helping him, and then killing Armstrong before engineering the final deaths and his own suicide by a carefully rigged elastic cord and revolver. The confession explained that Wargrave had long felt the desire to commit a murder himself, restrained only by his sense of justice, and had chosen victims whose crimes were beyond the reach of the law. The discovery of the bottle provided the final, posthumous solution to the case, confirming that the murderer had indeed been one of the ten—and that he had died by his own hand after completing his "artistic" masterpiece.