And then There Were None Summary of Chapters 13-16

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The group sits in the drawing room. Armstrong seems nervous; he lights many cigarettes with shaky hands. The guests use candles since Rogers isn’t around to use the generator. Vera says she will go make tea and the other four go watch her make it. They agree that nobody will go anywhere at the same time and the other four will stay together.

Later Vera goes to take a shower and she enters her room and suddenly feels like she is at the seashore where Cyril drowned again. She smells the salt water and the wind blows her candle out and she feels something wet touch her throat and screams.

The men rush to her room and find out it was a piece of seaweed hanging from the ceiling. Lombard thinks it was supposed to scare her to death. Blore goes to get a glass of alcohol and they fight over whether he might have poisoned it. Suddenly they notice that Wargrave isn’t with them. They run downstairs and see him sitting in a chair dressed in the red shower curtain that was missing and a gray judge wig made of wool that Emily lost. Armstrong inspects Wargrave and says that he got shot in the head.

Wargrave’s body is carried to his room. Again everyone notices the similarity to the “Ten Little Indians” poem. The four that were left ate canned tongue for dinner and then went to bed. Everyone thinks they know the killer is but nobody accuses anyone out loud. While entering his room Lombard realizes that his revolver is back in his drawer.

Vera lays awake and is tortured by memories of Cyril’s death. She remembers telling him he could swim out to the rock knowing that he would not be able to make it there so he would drown. She wonders if Hugo knows that she did it. Vera notices there is a hook in the ceiling and realizes that the seaweed must have been hanging from it. For some reason the hook fascinates her.

Blore hears a noise outside and he listens at the door and hears it again. Going into the hall he sees a dark figure going downstairs and out the front door. He checks the rooms and finds out that Armstrong isn’t in his room. He wakes up Lombard and Vera and the two men tell Vera to stay in her room and they run outside to investigate.

In her room Vera thinks she hears the sound of glass breaking and then sneaky footsteps in the house. Blore and Lombard return without finding anybody the island is empty and Armstrong vanished. In the house they found a broken window and only three Indian figures left in the dining room.

The three that are left eat breakfast and pass, they feel like a nightmare passed. Lombard starts to make plans to signal the mainland and they discuss Armstrong’s disappearance and Lombard and Blore get into a fight, Blore finds it suspicious that Lombard has his gun again but Lombard refuses to hand it over. Blore says Lombard might be the killer and Lombard asks why he wouldn’t shoot Blore if he was the killer. Vera yells at them for being distracted and she points out the part of the poem that relates to Armstrong’s death. She also thinks Armstrong isn’t really dead and that he tricked them.

Vera, Blore, and Lombard spend the morning on the cliffs and tried to send a signal to the coast by using a mirror but they didn’t get a answer. They decide to stay outside to stay away the dangers of the house but eventually Blore wanted to get something to eat. He is nervous about going by himself but Lombard refuses to give him his gun. When Blore is gone Lombard tries to convince Vera that Blore is the killer. Vera says she thinks Armstrong is still alive. Then she says that the killer could be alien or something supernatural. Lombard thinks this indicates Vera’s troubled conscience so he asked her if she killed Cyril. She denies it at first but when he asked if there was a man involved she was exhausted and admits that there was.

They hear a loud noise from the house and go to look. Blore got smashed by something thrown out of Vera’s window and it was the marble clock that was shaped like a bear on her mantle. Thinking Armstrong might be in the house, the two wait for help. On their way to the cliffs they see something on the beach below them. They climb down to look and they found Armstrong’s dead body.

Vera and Lombard stand over Armstrong’s dead body. Vera looks at Lombard and sees his wolflike face and sharp teeth. Lombard says that the end has come. Vera says they should move the body above the water line. Lombard agrees and when they are finished Lombard realizes something is wrong and turns around to see Vera pointing his gun at him. She took it out of his pocket. He decided to lunge at her so she pulled the trigger and Lombard fell to the ground. He got shot in the heart.

Vera feels relief and she is exhausted. She heads back to the house to get some sleep before help arrives. As she entered the house she sees the three statues on the table and she breaks two of them and picks the third one 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 drowning. At the top of the stairs she dropped the gun without noticing what she did. She feels sure that Hugo is waiting upstairs for her. When she opens the door to her room she sees a noose hanging from the black hook. She saw that Hugo wanted 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 thought she put her head in the noose and kicked the chair away.

Two policeman named Sir Thomas Legge and Inspector Maine discuss the Indian Island case. They reconstructed most of what happened on Indian Island from diaries kept by different guests. It’s clear to them that the killer wasn’t Blore, Lombard, or Vera. When they got there the police found the chair Vera kicked away to hang herself mysteriously set upright against the wall.

We learned that Isaac Morris who hired Lombard and Blore and bought the island in the name of U. N. Owen died of a sleeping pill overdose the night the guests arrived on the island. The police think that Morris was actually murdered. The police know that the people of Stickle haven were instructed to ignore the distress signals from the island and they were told that everything taking place on the island was part of a game being played by the rich owners of the island and their guests.

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