The Eye of Osiris

John Thorndyke

Thorndyke teaches forensic medicine at St. Margaret's, where his habit of dissecting contemporary newspaper cases in class first draws his students into the Bellingham mystery. He is a man of inexhaustible curiosity and method, equally at home with chemistry, biology, and the trivia of human habit, and he treats each puzzle as a chance to demonstrate that the smallest detail can decide a life. His involvement matters because he alone sees the legal and scientific stakes in a disappearance that others dismiss as mere scandal.

Arthur Jellicoe

Jellicoe is the confidential agent and lawyer for the Bellingham family, a man so cautious he negotiates his own surrender through a window before admitting visitors. He receives Thorndyke and Inspector Badger with stiff courtesy, offering sherry and cigarettes while coolly announcing he has expected this visit since spotting the detective at the Inner Temple gate. His composure and his evident foreknowledge make him a pivotal, unsettling presence in the early investigation, a man whose silences are as telling as his words.

John Bellingham

John Bellingham is the man at the center of the mystery: a well-known collector who came back from Egypt, called on his relative Mr. Hurst at Eltham, and was never seen leaving the house. His disappearance leaves a will in dispute, a brother suddenly impoverished, and a daughter adrift, while the scarab found in the grass becomes the first tangible clue. His absence, more than his presence, drives the novel's early arc, forcing everyone around him to reconstruct a man from fragments.

Godfrey Bellingham

Godfrey Bellingham lives quietly at Woodford with his daughter, his health and fortune both broken, when his brother's disappearance leaves him entangled in legal complications he cannot afford to fight. He tells Berkeley the strange story of the ill-drafted will, revealing a family already strained by money and suspicion before the vanishing. His poverty and his dependence on others make him both sympathetic and suspect, and his testimony is one of the threads Thorndyke must test against the physical evidence.

George Hurst

Hurst is the relative John Bellingham came to visit, a conventional man whose orderly household becomes the stage for an impossible disappearance. He arrives home, passes into his study, and emerges to find his guest gone, with the housemaid certain no one left by the front. His prompt report to Jellicoe and the Bellinghams sets the investigation in motion, and his account of that evening remains one of the case's most puzzling and consequential testimonies.

Miss Bellingham

Ruth lives with her father Godfrey in reduced circumstances, her learning and self-possession setting her apart from the ordinary run of young women Berkeley has known. His growing fascination with her pulls him deeper into the Bellingham affair, and her composure under family disgrace makes her both vulnerable and formidable. She matters because the mystery is not only a puzzle of law and evidence but a human wreckage she must navigate, and because her connection to Berkeley gives the investigation its beating heart.