Student Question
Does the epilogue of And Then There Were None suggest someone else was on the island?
Quick answer:
When considering whether or not you think that someone else was on the island in And Then There Were None, consider that it would not be particularly ingenious to have an eleventh person hiding somewhere on the island or perhaps in a submarine nearby. Therefore, unless you can think of a really satisfying solution involving an eleventh person as the murderer, the Sticklehaven people must be right and the Assistant Commissioner must be mistaken.
This question appears to presume that you have read the whole of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, except the manuscript document sent to Scotland Yard by the Master of the Emma Jane fishing trawler. You are therefore following Assistant Commissioner Sir Thomas Legge and Inspector Maine in the epilogue as they try to piece together the crime and deduce who could have killed the ten people found dead on Indian Island.
The Assistant Commissioner begins by agreeing with Inspector Maine that the murderer must be one of the ten. They then go through a number of possible scenarios involving the last few survivors, according to what they know about the times of death. You already know that Vera Claythorne was the last person to die, and that she hanged herself after shooting Philip Lombard. The new information in the epilogue is that the chair beneath the rope...
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that Vera used to hang herself was placed tidily against the wall. Who could have done this? It could not have been Dr. Armstrong or Mr. Blore, since Vera and Philip found their corpses before Vera shot Philip.
The reader is expecting a satisfying solution to the puzzle, and this particular solution is one of Christie's most ingenious. This statement does not answer the question of the murderer's identity, but it does answer the question you have been asked here. Consider whether you would be satisfied with a solution that there was an eleventh person who was the killer. U.N. Owen was hiding on the island all the time and picked off all his victims, tidying up the scene before departing in a submarine. This clearly is not an ingenious solution. You would feel that the author had cheated if you were told that this is how the murders were committed. Therefore, from a literary perspective, the Sticklehaven people must be right, and the murderer must be one of the ten people on the island, unless, that is, you can think of a satisfying solution which involves an external murderer. If you can, you should probably try writing an alternative ending for the book.