Summary: Chapter XV
The remaining three eat breakfast. The storm is gone,
and they feel as though a nightmare has passed. Lombard begins to
make plans to signal the mainland. They discuss Armstrong’s mysterious
disappearance, and Lombard and Blore get into an argument: Blore
finds it sinister that Lombard has his revolver again, but Lombard
refuses to give it up. Blore suggests that Lombard may be the killer,
and Lombard asks why he wouldn’t simply shoot Blore if he were the murderer.
Vera scolds them for being distracted. She points out the verse
in the rhyme that applies to Armstrong’s death: “A red herring swallowed
one and then there were three.” A “red herring” is a term for a
false lead or a decoy, and she thinks that Armstrong is not really
dead and that he has tricked them somehow. Blore points out that
the next line is about a zoo, which the murderer will have a difficult
time enacting on their island, but Vera says impatiently that they
are turning into animals.
Vera, Blore, and Lombard spend the morning on the cliffs
trying to signal a distress message to the coast using a mirror,
but they get no answer. They decide to stay outside to avoid the
danger of the house, but eventually Blore wants to fetch something
to eat. He is nervous about going alone, but Lombard refuses to
lend him the revolver. When Blore is gone, Lombard tries to convince
Vera that Blore is probably the killer. Vera says she thinks Armstrong
must still be alive. She then suggests that the killer could be
alien or supernatural. Lombard thinks this mention of the supernatural
indicates Vera’s troubled conscience and asks her if she did kill
Cyril. She vehemently denies it at first, but when he asks if a
man was involved, she feels exhausted and admits that there was
a man involved. They hear a faint crash from the house and go to
investigate. Blore has been crushed by something thrown from Vera’s
window: the bear-shaped marble clock that stood on her mantle. Thinking
that Armstrong must be inside the house somewhere, the two go to
wait for help. On their way to the cliffs, they see something on
the beach below. They climb down to look and there find Armstrong’s
body.
Summary: Chapter XVI
Vera and Lombard, dazed, stand over Armstrong’s body.
Vera looks at Lombard and sees his wolflike face and sharp teeth.
Lombard nastily says that the end has come. Vera suggests they move
the body above the water line. Lombard sneers at her, but agrees.
When they are finished, Lombard realizes something is wrong and
wheels around to find Vera pointing his revolver at him. She has
picked it from his pocket. He decides to gamble and lunges at her;
she automatically pulls the trigger and Lombard falls to the ground,
shot through the heart.
Vera feels an enormous wave of relief and severe exhaustion.
She heads back to the house to get some sleep before help arrives.
As she enters the house, she sees the three statues on the table.
She breaks two of them and picks the third up, trying to remember
the last line of the poem. She thinks it is “He got married and
then there were none.” She begins to think of Hugo, the man she
loved but lost as a result of Cyril’s drowning. At the top of the
stairs she drops the revolver without noticing what she does. She
feels sure that Hugo is waiting for her upstairs. When she opens
the door of her bedroom, she sees a noose hanging from the black
hook that previously held the seaweed. She sees that Hugo wants
her to hang herself, and then she remembers the real last line of
the poem: “He went and hanged himself and then there were none.”
Without a second thought she puts her head in the noose and kicks
away the chair.
Analysis: Chapters XV–XVI
The apparent end of the novel is calculated to leave us
in a state of utter confusion. Since we have no idea that Wargrave
is still alive, it seems that the murderer must either be Vera or
Lombard. Yet we are left with no idea how either one could possibly
have killed Blore, whose death takes place while the two are together
by the sea, or, for that matter, how either could have killed Armstrong,
since both of them are asleep in the house when he goes outside.
Additionally, there is the matter of the Indian figurines, which
continue to disappear like clockwork even when the house is apparently
empty.
When all of these facts are considered, the only possible
conclusion is the correct one—namely, that someone else is still
alive on the island. Yet all the evidence that the novel has provided
thus far suggests that this is impossible. In their final confrontation,
both Vera and Lombard accept it as a given that they are alone on
Indian Island, and each assumes that the other is the killer. In
a way, their behavior is irrational, since they should know that
neither one of them could possibly have killed Blore. This kind
of perfect rationality, however, may be too much to ask of a pair
of human beings who have endured such a strange and terrible sequence
of events. In the end, both Lombard and Vera accept the logic of
the poem, and they assume that everyone who seems to have died really
is dead. A careful examination of the evidence is beyond their capabilities.
