Judge's suicide

Lawrence John Wargrave, the retired judge who masterminded the entire Indian Island massacre, stages his own death as a fake murder before committing suicide in a final, meticulously planned act that he intends to leave as an unsolvable mystery. His suicide is the culmination of a lifelong conflict between a sadistic lust to kill and a powerful sense of justice, a conflict he resolved by becoming an artist in crime. The manner of his death, a self-inflicted gunshot to the forehead, is the last piece of a grand, theatrical performance designed to baffle the police and satisfy his own craving for recognition.

The Artist's Final Performance

Wargrave's suicide is not a simple act of self-destruction but the final scene of a carefully choreographed drama. After ensuring that Vera Claythorne hanged herself and that he had shot Philip Lombard through the heart, he set the stage for his own exit. He retrieved the revolver from the top of the stairs, where Vera had dropped it, and was careful to preserve her fingerprints on it. He then went to his room and laid himself down on the bed. To his eyeglasses, he attached what seemed to be a length of fine black cord, but which was actually an elastic cord. He planned to lay the weight of his body on the glasses, loop the cord around the door-handle, and attach it, not too solidly, to the revolver. His hand, protected with a handkerchief, would press the trigger. The revolver, pulled by the elastic, would recoil to the door, be jarred by the door-handle, detach itself from the elastic, and fall. The elastic, released, would hang down innocently from the eyeglasses on which his body was lying. A handkerchief lying on the floor would cause no comment. He calculated that by the time the bodies were examined, times of death could not be stated with any accuracy. He would be found, laid neatly on his bed, shot through the forehead, appearing to be the ninth victim of the unknown murderer.

The Psychology of the Killer

Wargrave's suicide is the logical endpoint of a personality he describes as a mass of contradictions. From his earliest youth, he recognized a definite sadistic delight in seeing or causing death, a lust to kill that he compared to experiments with wasps and garden pests. Yet, side by side with this went a strong sense of justice, making it abhorrent to him that an innocent person should suffer. He adopted the law as a profession, which satisfied nearly all his instincts. He enjoyed presiding over a court of law, watching a wretched criminal squirm in the dock as his doom came slowly nearer. For some years past, he had been aware of a change within himself, a desire to act instead of to judge. He recognized this as the desire of the artist to express himself. He must commit a murder, and it must be no ordinary murder but a fantastical crime, something stupendous and out of the common. He wanted something theatrical, impossible. The idea came to him from a chance remark by a doctor about how often murder must be committed which the law was unable to touch. He determined to commit not one murder, but murder on a grand scale, using the childhood rhyme of the ten little Indian boys as his blueprint.

The Final Message and the Brand of Cain

Before his suicide, Wargrave wrote a full confession, enclosing it in a bottle and casting it into the sea. He did this because, as an artist, he could not be satisfied with art alone; he had a pitiful human wish that some one should know just how clever he had been. He acknowledged that the police might be cleverer than he thought, pointing to three clues: that Edward Seton was guilty, meaning one of the ten people on the island was not a murderer and must logically be the murderer; that the seventh verse of the nursery rhyme, about a red herring, indicated that Armstrong was deceived and sent to his death by someone he trusted; and the third clue was symbolical—the manner of his own death, marking him on the forehead with the brand of Cain. He signed his confession, Lawrence Wargrave, and cast it into the waves, leaving behind ten dead bodies and an unsolved problem on Indian Island. His suicide was the final, perfect stroke of a master criminal who had become judge, jury, and executioner, and who ultimately passed sentence on himself.