Student Question
In chapter 13 of And Then There Were None, why might the murderer have put seaweed in Miss Claythorne's room?
Quick answer:
The murderer in Agatha Christie's murder-mystery And Then There Were None likely put the seaweed in Miss Vera Claythorne's room to frighten her and to remind her of the death of young Cyril Hamilton, who died while under Vera's care.
That morning, they found the body of the butler, Rogers, in the wash-house across the yard from the mansion. He had been chopping sticks as kindling for the fire to cook breakfast.
Seven little Indian boys chopping up sticks;
One chopped himself in halves and then there were six.
They found Miss Emily Brent sitting in the dining room where they left her. She said she was feeling a little "giddy" after breakfast, and she let the others clear the table while she stayed behind to rest for a moment.
While they were out of the room, she thought she heard buzzing in her ears, then saw the bee on the window pane. She hallucinated that she felt Beatrice Taylor in the room with her, and the last thing she remembered was the bee sting on her neck.
Armstrong's attention was riveted on a mark on the right side of...
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the neck.
He said: "That's the mark of a hypodermic syringe."
Vera remembered another part of the old nursery rhyme:.
Six little Indian boys played with a hive;
A bumblebee stung one and then there were five.
Vera was sitting huddled in the chair, dazed, terrified, unable to move. She was getting increasingly annoyed with herself for being so cowardly, and when the clock struck five, she had an excuse to get out of the chair.
"Does any one—want tea?"
Vera made tea, with everyone watching her—no one trusted anyone else by now—and they all returned to the sitting room, and Vera returned to her chair, where she sat until twenty past six, when she decided to go to her room to throw some cold water on her head and temples to ease her headache.
Vera opened her door and she smelled the sea. More specifically, she smelled the sea as it smelled at St. Tredennick, with the seaweed drying on the rocks in the sun.
She was reminded of what the accusing voice on the recording said after dinner on her first day on Indian Island:
Vera Elizabeth Claythorne, that on the 11th day of August, 1935, you killed Cyril Ogilvie Hamilton.
Vera protested that the Coroner had exonerated her for Cyril's death. Cyril simply swam out too far, and she couldn't reach him to save him. Vera didn't mention that she had encouraged Cyril to swim out to the rocks, even though she knew he couldn't swim that far, and she didn't mention that she didn't really try very hard to save him.
Cyril wasn't really strong. A puny child—no stamina. The kind of child, perhaps, who wouldn't live to grow up.
The seaweed hanging from the ceiling in the middle of Vera's room was meant to remind her of Cyril's death. Vera's screams when her candle blew out and she walked into the seaweed and it felt to her like a cold, clammy hand trying to strangle her was meant to be a distraction.
Everyone except Mr. Justice Wargrave instantly came running to Vera's bedroom. In time, Vera recovered from the shock, with the help of some brandy, and she asked after Justice Wargrave. In all the excitement, nobody noticed that he hadn't come upstairs to Vera's bedroom with them, so they all went back downstairs to find him.
They found him in the drawing room, "sitting in his high-backed chair at the end of the room" in a scarlet robe made from the bathroom curtains with a judge's wig on his head. Dr. Armstrong raised the wig to reveal the neat, round bullet hole in the very middle of Justice Wargrave's high, bald forehead.
Captain Philip Lombard summed it up:
"Five little Indian boys going in for law; one got in Chancery and then there were four." That’s the end of Mr. Bloody Justice Wargrave.