Headscratchers / The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

This page will contain unmarked spoilers. If you haven't read the book, turn back now. You've been warned.

Poirot's safety

• How was it safe for Poirot to tell the killer he knows everything and has not told the police yet, without fear of being bumped off himself? Other characters in Agatha Christie who do this always get killed. His line that "It would be most unwise on your part to attempt to silence me as you silenced M. Ackroyd" implies that he has some sort of safeguard, but what was this?
  • "That kind of business does not succeed against Hercule Poirot, you understand", he says. Although not young, he is an experienced Belgian policeman, and it's quite possible that he has an automatic pistol.
  • "Other characters" usually either don't know that they're in danger, or intend to blackmail. This is Hercule Poirot. He's seen those other characters get bumped off. He's smart enough to make contingency plans. He's got connections to the police. He's a world famous detective by this point, whose murder would surely be investigated with all the resources the British police can muster. All of this works in his favor, and Poirot's savvy enough to exploit it all.
  • At very least, he's probably smart enough to write a letter to at least one of his various contacts to be opened in the event of his death that basically says the equivalent of "Hey, if I happen to die mysteriously in the next couple of days, it was probably because X bumped me off because I discovered he murdered Y, and he did it because of Z. Proof can be found here. Kthanxbye."
    • I assume this is what his final words at the gathering imply: the truth goes to Inspector Raglan in the morning. Note he didn't say "I am telling him the truth." That must mean he's left some note that will be read - possibly even sent a letter that will be delivered with morning mail - regardless of whether he's alive or not at the moment.
  • As a tangent / Fridge Brilliance moment, this does explain in part why Poirot (and Miss Marple) is usually so fond of the Summation Gathering: if you're confronting a murderer about their guilt, it's helpful to have witnesses around so the murderer doesn't have the brilliant idea of silencing you.
    • Note also that Poirot has essentially done just that in this case; the conversation with the killer, remember, occurs after a lengthy scene with the principles of the case wherein Poirot has expounded on his various deductions before dramatically revealing that the police will receive the identity of the killer the next day... before he immediately sends everyone away except for the person we later learn is, indeed, the killer. If Poirot turns up dead the next day, the killer was the last key person connected to the case to be alone with him after this moment of drama, and multiple witnesses can testify to this, the immediate conclusion that the killer murdered Poirot and probably murdered Ackroyd is obvious even to the dullest-witted plod on the force.

How come the village doesn't learn whodunit?

• So how is it possible that the whole village doesn't learn the killer's identity? I mean, Poirot publicly promised that Inspector Raglan would learn the truth tomorrow - and precisely at that time there's a suicide (will anybody believe that a professional physician could have taken so much medicine by mistake?). Of course, someone might suspect that Sheppard was a victim, not a killer, but then why doesn't Raglan arrest anybody, since he's supposed to know the truth now? Pretty obvious to everyone, isn't it? And even more so to Caroline - the main person Poirot and Sheppard would like to conceal it from. Just re-read how she reacted to the news of Mrs Ferrars' death. Her first response? She did it deliberately; it was remorse over her husband's murder.
  • I assume that Poirot will convince Inspector Raglan that, since the killer settled accounts themselves, there's no need to make public the truth of what happened since it will never come before a court anyway. The only people who heard Poirot's statement were those who were directly involved in the case, several of whom have their own reasons to keep quiet and not start throwing dirt around about the matter, and it's not like he published it in the local paper or anything, so most people might not even realise a connection. People will probably suspect that there's a link and there will be no doubt a certain amount of gossip, but there's no smoke without fire; with no arrests or trials to confirm anything, people will eventually just move on and think what they want to think.
  • This is also the kind of thing that, to be fair, the murderer should probably have considered before murdering someone. Poirot is no doubt willing to be as discreet as possible, but, well, if people eventually figure out what happened after the dust settles, that's kind of on the murderer, not Poirot. Sheppard didn't have to blackmail someone, drive her to suicide and then murder someone else to cover it up, after all.

On Caroline

• Didn't she notice that her brother began to receive large sums of money? Well, suppose she didn't because he spent everything on buying the shares. But Dr. Sheppard wasn't modest at all in telling not only Major Blunt (known for his reticence), but also his own neighbor he knew little of at the moment about his non-existent legacy - all while commenting on how his sister possesses a unique ability to learn the content of every conversation held in the village. Something seems to be not quite right...
  • Sheppard is using a certain degree of hyperbole in describing his sister's ability to learn the content of every conversation that goes around; she's nosy, but she's not a psychic. She doesn't literally know every little secret in the village, and even the nosiest/most observant of us have our blind-spots. There could also have been a bit of willful blindness going on — she wouldn't be the first person to notice some worrying changes in the lives of someone close to her, but decide to ignore them because she didn't want to know the truth. And considering that of the two people we know Sheppard mentioned his 'legacy' to, one is by your own description incredibly reticent and taciturn, and the other famously prides himself on being discreet, the fact that neither might have mentioned it to her is probably not that much of a headscratcher.
    • Sheppard, however, didn't know anything yet about that famous discreetness when he was talking about 'legacy', so it still seems incredibly reckless on his part. And if by any chance he actually knew who he was talking to, then it's not even reckless but straight Too Dumb to Live.
    • Perhaps, but we can then perhaps simply chalk this up to a slip of the tongue or hasty excuse that Sheppard may have later come to regret making. I'm reminded by this conversation of a bit in The Hound of the Baskervilles, where Sherlock Holmes later notes that he came to the solution of the case in part because the murderer accidentally let something slip that he shouldn't have and must have been later kicking himself over. It could be that Sheppard was privately kicking himself over being a little bit more indiscreet than he should have been, or not thinking up a more convincing reason when put on the spot, or unnecessarily blurting out a bit more than he should have, but didn't mention that in his manuscript for obvious reasons. It just never really came back to bite him.
  • On a related note — and it's been a while since I've read it, so admittedly I'm not 100% sure — are we certain that Sheppard is lying about the legacy? Could it not be that Sheppard was telling the truth about the legacy, but lost more than he claims to others on the unwise investment and was actually blackmailing Mrs. Ferrars to recoup his losses?
    • No, Poirot explicitly says "I have been unable to discover any trace of a legacy."
    • In that case, I cheerfully stand corrected. We presumably have to just go with "Sheppard used the first plausible-seeming explanation that came to mind" as an explanation.
    • The thing is, it was not like Poirot noticed that Sheppard had spent a lot of money and asked for an explanation. Sheppard himself began to talk about his legacy, almost out-of-the-blue. The dialogue went as follows:
    Poirot: You can figure to yourself, monsieur, that a man may work towards a certain object, may labour and toil to attain a certain kind of leisure and occupation, and then find that, after all, he yearns for the old busy days, and the old occupations that he thought himself so glad to leave?
    Sheppard: 'Yes', I said slowly. ‘I fancy that that is a common enough occurrence. I myself am perhaps an instance. A year ago I came into a legacy - enough to enable me to realize a dream. I have always wanted to travel, to see the world. Well, that was a year ago, as I said, and - I am still here.’
    • The "hasty excuse" still works there, however, even if as it turns out he's not using it to try and throw Poirot off the scent of an investigation. In fact, it arguably works even better. He's commiserating with Poirot feeling frustrated at his plans and dreams not turning out the way he hoped and, in the moment, offers an example from his own life in an attempt to sympathise, since he was probably feeling something similar regarding what happened with Mrs. Ferrars (especially after having gone to all that trouble only to end up right back where he started). But, since he's hardly going to admit to a complete stranger that he actually got a whole bunch of money after blackmailing a murderer but blew it on the stock market, he just says it was all down to a 'legacy' as a plausible-at-the-moment-seeming reason for why he might have had a bunch of money to spend at one point. He's not aware that Poirot's a detective, is not anticipating Poirot ever being in a position where he might feel inclined to investigate Sheppard's past, is banking on Poirot either not remembering it or not feeling it worth bringing up again and as far as he's concerned is just making an off-the-cuff comment in a conversation that's probably never going to come up again in an attempt to make a connection with a relative stranger. This even might add an element of tragedy to it, since after all his wrongdoing and scheming Sheppard ends up being done in by part after a well-meaning attempt to sympathise with someone else that royally backfired on him in a way he couldn't have possibly foreseen. As for Major Blunt, I can't remember exactly when he mentions the 'legacy' to him, but if it was after he'd mentioned it to Poirot he probably only mentioned it because he was already trapped into that lie and counted on the Major's taciturnity for it to not come up again.
  • Something else that might help; remember that Sheppard admits that he was writing his manuscript as a rather gloating attempt to try and record one of Poirot's failures. He presumably was a bit over-confident and underestimated Poirot sufficiently to assume that Poirot wouldn't look particularly far into it.
    • Yeah, but then again, if we work under assumption that Sheppard never lies to us readers, he admits that he thought Poirot was a retired hairdresser at the moment he was telling him about the 'legacy'. Though his overconfidence might be the very reason why he stayed so calm after he realized his blunder.
    • The overconfidence especially works if he thinks Poirot is a hairdresser at that point, though, since he's hardly anticipating that a hairdresser is ever going to feel compelled to look into his financial history in any meaningful detail. Especially since, having quickly reread that section of the book just now, Sheppard's description and discussion of Poirot in general practically drips with indulgent condescension.
    • It's not excess curiosity of the hairdresser Sheppard should have feared, but rather that he would eventually talk to Caroline (they're neighbors, after all). The hypothetical dialogue could easily go like "Oh, your brother told me about his large legacy - must have been a pleasant surprise for you at the time, wasn't it?"
    • Well, in that case — again, assuming that Poirot did turn out to just be an immigrant hairdresser, did happen to remember Sheppard's off-the-cuff remark and was interested/curious enough to bring it up with Caroline — I assume that Sheppard simply thought that any resulting conversation with Caroline would just go something like this:
    Caroline: James, that French chap who lives next door mentioned that you told him you received a legacy last year. What was he talking about?
    Sheppard: A legacy? Me? No, he must have misunderstood something or confused me with something someone else told him. You know what these foreigners are like.
    Caroline: Oh... well, I suppose that makes sense.
    Sheppard: Hmmm. I'll set him straight later. More tea? [Rapid changing of the topic commences]
    • It's only that Caroline is too inquisitive to just leave it at that, so she'd likely try to undertake some measures of her own to find out what the "hairdresser" was talking about... though judging by the whole novel, she's unlikely to believe that her brother could really be somehow involved, so you've definitely got a point.
    • A fair point, but ultimately Caroline is just a bit of a nosy gossip, not a master detective. To the extent that he is thinking things through and not just making an off-the-cuff comment, Sheppard's probably confident that he's covered his trails enough to ensure that even if Caroline learns about and does look further into his 'legacy', she's not going to find enough to raise any awkward questions. He's pretty meticulous and careful about covering his own tracks. Or he could just make some kind of excuse to her (like, he won some money gambling on a horse but then lost it on the stock market and didn't want to reveal it to her).
    • The second part of that actually fits with the story he'd been giving, that he lost the "legacy" to bad investments elsewhere. Which may or may not be the actual truth of what happened to the money he'd been extracting from his blackmail scheme.
  • I would also assume that, initially at least, Sheppard kept things small enough to not raise any eyebrows about why he was suddenly flush with cash in a way that he couldn't easily explain away to Caroline as a particularly generous patient or a bit of an upswing in business or something. IIRC part of the problem is that he gets greedy and tries to press Mrs Ferrars for more, which leads to her suicide and the events of the novel. It's possible, even likely, that to begin with he wasn't squeezing Ferrars for enough that Caroline would notice as being suspiciously large, and when he started demanding larger sums he didn't have as much time to collect. He also probably made a point of concealing the money somewhere where even Caroline wouldn't snoop (with his patient records or something).
    • On am ordinary day, maybe, but one can't help thinking that the news of Mrs Ferrar's death called for just a little bit of reticence...
    • Re-reading the novel between the lines, it seems that Mrs Ferrar's death is clearly playing on Dr Sheppard's mind for what, in hindsight, are pretty obvious reasons. While the situation might call for reticence, if the issue is bouncing around Sheppard's skull then he might accidentally blurt out something that later comes to be incriminating without fully intending to, simply because he's mentally dwelling on it and it comes to mind quickly.
  • On re-reading the novel, the explanation seems to me to be a combination of both Sheppard's over-confidence coupled with the fact that, frankly, he's not quite as clever as he thinks he is. Throughout the story, he's got a tendency to play with Exact Words a little bit; for example, when asked if he handled the corpse when discovering it, he comments "Beyond making certain life was extinct — an easy matter — I have not disturbed the body in any way." — which is a very cute little way of putting it when you learn that he's the one who made certain that Roger Ackroyd's life was extinct in the first place, which would make it very easy for him to make certain on 'discovering' the body. At times, it's almost like he's secretly gloating a little bit, like he's enjoying his little secret and leading all these people in the wrong direction. So his little lie to "Mr Porrott" is just an extension of this; a smug, superior little hint to someone who, as far as he's concerned, will never pick up on it. However, he also has a tendency to get blindsided by various discoveries and questions that Poirot poses that he wasn't anticipating; many of his Watsonish "by jove, I didn't think of that!" moments may as well have, in hindsight, a little asterisk next to them leading to a footnote that simply reads "Oh shit, I wish I had." For example, he later admits that for all his clever little game with moving the chair to hide the dictaphone, he probably should have anticipated that a butler might notice the furniture being rearranged because it's his whole job to keep an eye out for that sort of thing. In short, he's overconfident and superior but isn't as smart as he likes to think and doesn't fully think things through until it's too late.
  • As for Major Blunt, however, it's notable that in that particular case, he only reveals his "legacy" after Blunt has admitted that he both gained and lost money under similar circumstances, having been asked to question Blunt about some details of the case. In that particular case, he could claim that he was just spinning a yarn to gain Blunt's confidence.
  • While Shepherd didn't know that Poirot was a discreet person by nature, perhaps he sensed it based on his first impressions of him, or at least sensed that he wasn't overtly gregarious.
  • Having done a word search for the words legacy and inheritance on the kindle version of the book. Nowhere where they pop up does it explicitly state or strongly imply that Caroline is in the dark about her brothers so-called legacy. He could have potentially told her it came from a former patient who'd moved away and died (possibly even a real patient who did die, but didn't actually give him a legacy and/or someone who'd moved away), or something else to that affect.
    • Word search is hardly a reliable method of proof here. Anyway, concerning a possible Sheppard's excuse concocted for Caroline - remember that we're talking about a small village in pre-WWII era. Any long-distance communication as important as that would probably have to be at least partially in writing and thus available for inspection for any person living in the same house as the recipient - and that's not even taking into account Caroline's famous curiosity, who probably used to personally know all Sheppard's long-time patients. Moreover, it wasn't a one-time thing which could be explained away as a lucky racing bet - it seems that Sheppard regularly extorted money from Mrs Ferrar.
    • Shepherd could have done a similar trick to the fake telephone call he arranged for the murder and typed up a fake letter from a solicitor (perhaps on someone else's typewriter) and then arranged for a patient going out of town to mail it for him, for Caroline's benefit.
    • That's possible, but had such an elaborate trickstery been involved, chances are Sheppard would have mentioned it in his final confession.
    • Not necessarily; his manuscript is a confession of how he committed murder, not how he kept secrets from his annoyingly nosy sister. He might have done some elaborate little trick like posting letters to himself to keep Caroline off the scent only to leave it out of his confession because it's not really relevant to how he committed the murder and Poirot probably doesn't care.
    • Originally his manuscript is a veiled exercise in vanity, and once there's no need to hide anything, it's unlikely he would conceal something which makes him come across as a clever man. Likewise, there's literally nothing pertaining to the case at hand which Poirot wouldn't care for (for instance, recall the very ending of Peril at End House).
    • The final chapter implies that he's been hurrying to finish his manuscript, and that he's short on time to put any other affairs in order—at the start of the chapter, it's 5 AM, so he's got only a scant couple of hours before the police know what Poirot knows, and if he doesn't finish himself by then, things will go very poorly for him. He probably wouldn't waste time on anything not relevant to the case. He might not have reason to conceal anything else, but he might not have time to reveal more than necessary. Further, it might not even be necessary—Caroline Sheppard may be no Jane Marple in terms of deductive ability, but she's clearly not stupid, and if she learns about how Dr. Sheppard deceived her this time, it would likely lead her to question other cases of a convenient letter or phone call backing up the doctor's story.
    • Well, Poirot hints that Caroline will learn nothing - from him. The question whether the suicide itself is enough for her to guess everything...
    • Also, his manuscript might start as an exercise in vanity, but it ends as a confession to murder. By the time Sheppard is revealing all, he knows full well that he's essentially writing a legal document to Poirot and, by extension, the police, to explain what happened. Even if Poirot has a passing interest in the details of how he tricked his sister, the latter almost certainly don't give a single brass shit about how clever-clever Sheppard thinks he is or any cute little tricks he played on Caroline if they're not directly pertinent to the actual murder he committed. And since he's no longer feeling very smug about his intelligence by that point, having been thoroughly bested, he's less inclined to try and show off about it. He's keeping to the point and only focussing on the immediate essentials by that time, basically.
  • Why would we assume he didn't tell Caroline about the inheritance? He probably lied to her as well. And if he would say it was from an old patient of his, or from a close friend from college who died relatively young, she probably would buy it. But, since it happened long before the beginning of a novel, we just don't see it.
    • OK, that's for the first time. What about all the following ones? Former patients dying like flies, all eager to leave something to nobody else but former doctor?