Murder by the Clock

Lieutenant Valcour

Valcour arrives at the Endicott estate to find a dead man, a forged postscript, and a household of people performing innocence badly. He is methodical rather than theatrical, cataloguing a broken fingernail and a bruise beneath chiffon while a letter from a woman named Marge sits in his pocket. What unsettles him is not the evidence but a recurring presentiment of menace — the sense that the criminal and the weapon are still somewhere in the house, and that his theory might be wrong.

Mrs. Endicott

Mrs. Endicott walks into the investigation already bruised, already lying about small things, and already certain her husband's Latin-eyed mistress is the sort who would kill. She speaks of Herbert with a mixture of contempt and love so tangled that Valcour cannot separate them. Her confession that she loved him — even when she wished to kill him — makes her the emotional centre of the early case, and the question of what she actually did in the attic that afternoon hangs over every interview.

Thomas Hollander

Hollander is the friend Lieutenant Valcour calls in to sit with the recovering Endicott, a man whose soft accent and easy manner make him seem like comfort itself. But in the sickroom his right hand moves with unnatural rigidity toward a spot above Endicott's heart, and the conversation turns from sympathy to threat in a whisper. He is the novel's most immediate danger — a visitor whose presence at the bedside transforms a locked-room mystery into something far more intimate and lethal.

Dr. Worth

Dr. Worth is the kind of doctor Nurse Murrow dreams about — unmarried, distinguished, never snappish — but his eagerness has long since faded into the puffy chains of sleep. He attends Endicott through the night, is astonished by every new development, and moves through the house with the slightly damp bewilderment of a man who did not expect his quiet practice to become a murder investigation. His medical judgment and his presence in the house make him both a witness and a quiet suspect.

Herbert Endicott

Herbert Endicott is dead before the novel properly begins, but he dominates it through the testimony of everyone who knew him. His wife describes a man who talked elaborately only when lying, who kept weekly impromptu reunions at the Yale Club that were neither impromptu nor at the Yale Club, and who was found dressed for outdoors without his hat. His weakness, his cruelty, and his refusal to be understood made him a target long before anyone pulled a trigger — and the question of who finally did is the engine of the whole case.

Roberts

Roberts is the household employee who knows too much and admits it too late — she fetched her own revolver from a locked trunk during the confusion after the shooting, and by the time she returned it, silence had become the only safe option. Her testimony against Mrs. Endicott is relentless and precise, yet her suggestion that Hollander be the one to sit with the dying Endicott is a contradiction Valcour cannot let go. She is the case's most self-incriminating witness, and her bitterness makes her both credible and suspect.