The Cask

Mr. Georges La Touche

La Touche works the margins of the investigation, paying porters for descriptions and staking his dwindling funds on hunches the official police overlook. His restless night produces the insight that the reward notices have been aimed at the wrong man entirely, and he drafts a circular under a false name to reach the carter's employers. His willingness to spend and dissemble for an accused man's sake makes him the story's quiet engine of alternative inquiry.

Mr. Felix

Felix is the consignee whose name is stencilled on the cask, a designer with a housekeeper conveniently away on holiday when the body travelled. He produces envelopes to prove his identity, signs for the shipment, and disappears for twenty-two hours that the police cannot account for. Whether he is a grieving man, a fugitive, or something stranger, his absence shapes every question the detectives ask in the early and middle chapters.

M. Boirac

Boirac sits at the centre of the case's most obvious motive: a husband who may or may not have known his wife was leaving him for another man. The discovery of a matching cask unpacked in his study briefly hardens suspicion, then dissolves into an explanation that leaves the Chief doubting again. His love, or lack of it, for Annette becomes the pivot on which the whole theory of the crime turns.

M. Lefarge

Lefarge is the steady, methodical half of the investigative pair, the one who remembers that the cask's weight was extraordinary and that the carter's description might be worth fifty francs. He is not afraid to challenge the Chief's narrowing focus, suggesting that someone entirely outside the Felix-Boirac triangle may be responsible. His patient reconstruction of the cask's movements gives the middle chapters their spine.

Inspector Burnley

Burnley is the official mind of the case, cautious with his suspicions and careful with his evidence, refusing to commit himself even to Felix on the walk to the Yard. He supervises the unpacking himself, sifting sawdust through his fingers until the sovereigns give way to something far worse. His disciplined, almost reticent method contrasts with La Touche's gambits and sets the tone for the investigation's slow, granular progress.

Annette Boirac

Annette is known to the reader first as a dress sold in February, then as a name on a hotel register, and only gradually as a woman with a life the detectives must reconstruct from fragments. Her marriage to Boirac, her connection to Felix, and the question of whether she left willingly or was taken become the case's central ambiguity. She never speaks in the passages, yet her choices — or the choices attributed to her — determine who is suspected and why.