Агата Кристи - Десять негритят / And Then There Were None

I was born with other traits besides my romantic fancy. I have a definite sadistic delight in seeing or causing death. I remember experiments with wasps – with various garden pests… From an early age I knew very strongly the lust to kill.

But side by side with this went a contradictory trait – a strong sense of justice. It is abhorrent to me that an innocent person or creature should suffer or die by any act of mine. I have always felt strongly that right should prevail.

It may be understood – I think a psychologist would understand – that with my mental makeup being what it was, I adopted the law as a profession. The legal profession satisfied nearly all my instincts.

Crime and its punishment has always fascinated me. I enjoy reading every kind of detective story and thriller. I have devised for my own private amusement the most ingenious ways of carrying out a murder.

When in due course I came to preside over a court of law, that other secret instinct of mine was encouraged to develop. To see a wretched criminal squirming in the dock, suffering the tortures of the damned, as his doom came slowly and slowly nearer, was to me an exquisite pleasure. Mind you, I took no pleasure in seeing an innocent man there. On at least two occasions I stopped cases where to my mind the accused was palpably innocent, directing the jury that there was no case. Thanks, however, to the fairness and efficiency of our police force, the majority of the accused persons who have come before me to be tried for murder, have been guilty.

I will say here that such was the case with the man Edward Seton. His appearance and manner were misleading and he created a good impression on the jury. But not only the evidence, which was clear, though unspectacular, but my own knowledge of criminals told me without any doubt that the man had actually committed the crime with which he was charged, the brutal murder of an elderly woman who trusted him.

I have a reputation as a hanging judge, but that is unfair. I have always been strictly just and scrupulous in my summing up of a case.

All I have done is to protect the jury against the emotional effect of emotional appeals by some of our more emotional counsel. I have drawn their attention to the actual evidence.

For some years past I have been aware of a change within myself, a lessening of control – a desire to act instead of to judge.

I have wanted – let me admit it frankly – to commit a murder myself. I recognized this as the desire of the artist to express himself! I was, or could be, an artist in crime! My imagination, sternly checked by the exigencies of my profession, waxed secretly to colossal force.

I must – I must – I must – commit a murder! And what is more, it must be no ordinary murder! It must be a fantastical crime – something stupendous – out of the common! In that one respect, I have still, I think, an adolescent’s imagination.

I wanted something theatrical, impossible!

I wanted to kill… Yes, I wanted to kill…

But – incongruous as it may seem to some – 1 was restrained and hampered by my innate sense of justice. The innocent must not suffer.

And then, quite suddenly, the idea came to me – started by a chance remark uttered during casual conversation. It was a doctor to whom I was talking – some ordinary undistinguished G. P. He mentioned casually how often murder must be committed which the law was unable to touch.

And he instanced a particular case – that of an old lady, a patient of his who had recently died. He was, he said, himself convinced that her death was due to the withholding of a restorative drug by a married couple who attended on her and who stood to benefit very substantially by her death. That sort of thing, he explained, was quite impossible to prove, but he was nevertheless quite sure of it in his own mind. He added that there were many cases of a similar nature going on all the time – cases of deliberate murder – and all quite untouchable by the law.

That was the beginning of the whole thing. I suddenly saw my way clear. And I determined to commit not one murder, but murder on a grand scale.

A childish rhyme of my infancy came back into my mind – the rhyme of the ten little Soldier boys. It had fascinated me as a child of two – the inexorable diminishment – the sense of inevitability.

I began, secretly, to collect victims…

I will not take up space here by going into detail of how this was accomplished. I had a certain routine line of conversation which I employed with nearly every one I met – and the results I got were really surprising. During the time I was in a nursing home I collected the case of Dr. Armstrong – a violently teetotal sister who attended on me being anxious to prove to me the evils of drink by recounting to me a case many years ago in hospital when a doctor under the influence of alcohol had killed a patient on whom he was operating. A careless question as to where the sister in question had trained, etc., soon gave me the necessary data. I tracked down the doctor and the patient mentioned without difficulty.

A conversation between two old military gossips in my Club put me on the track of General Macarthur. A man who had recently returned from the Amazon gave me a devastating resume of the activities of one Philip Lombard. An indignant mem sahib in Majorca recounted the tale of the Puritan Emily Brent and her wretched servant girl. Anthony Marston I selected from a large group of people who had committed similar offences. His complete callousness and his inability to feel any responsibility for the lives he had taken made him, I considered, a type dangerous to the community and unfit to live. Ex-Inspector Blore came my way quite naturally, some of my professional brethren discussing the Landor case with freedom and vigour. I took a serious view of his offence. The police, as servants of the law, must be of a high order of integrity. For their word is perforce believed by virtue of their profession.

Finally there was the case of Vera Claythorne. It was when I was crossing the Atlantic. At a late hour one night the sole occupants of the smoking-room were myself and a good-looking young man called Hugo Hamilton.

Hugo Hamilton was unhappy. To assuage that unhappiness he had taken a considerable quantity of drink. He was in the maudlin confidential stage. Without much hope of any result I automatically started my routine conversational gambit. The response was startling. I can remember his words now. He said:

«You’re right. Murder isn’t what most people think – giving some one a dollop of arsenic – pushing them over a cliff – that sort of stuff.» He leaned forward, thrusting his face into mine. He said: «I’ve known a murderess – known her, I tell you. And what’s more I was crazy about her… God help me, sometimes I think I still am… It’s Hell, I tell you – Hell – You see, she did it more or less for me… Not that I ever dreamed. Women are fiends – absolute fiends – you wouldn’t think a girl like that – a nice straight jolly girl – you wouldn’t think she’d do that, would you? That she’d take a kid out to sea and let it drown – you wouldn’t think a woman could do a thing like that?»

I said to him:

«Are you sure she did do it?»

He said and in saying it he seemed suddenly to sober up:

«I’m quite sure. Nobody else ever thought of it. But I knew the moment I looked at her – when I got back – after… And she knew I knew… What she didn’t realize was that I loved that kid…»

He didn’t say any more, but it was easy enough for me to trace back the story and reconstruct it.

I needed a tenth victim. I found him in a man named Morris. He was a shady little creature. Amongst other things he was a dope pedlar and he was responsible for inducing the daughter of friends of mine to take to drugs. She committed suicide at the age of twenty-one.