74 pages • 2-hour read
Marble Hall Murders
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Chapters 25-31Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and graphic violence.
Chapter 25 Summary: “Twelve”
In Pund’s Last Case, Frederic locates the pharmacy where the aconitine was purchased; it’s close to the Werner-Waysmith gallery. He interviews the pharmacist with Atticus and James. They discover that the pharmacist doesn’t always wear his glasses and struggles to see without them. He remembers the customer smelled like surgical spirits, had white hair, and a walking cane. He only remembers the time because a woman asked the white-haired customer what time it was. The customer’s name in the register is illegible but written in turquoise ink.
Afterward, the three men get coffee. Frederic talks about his wife and son, who live in a nearby city. He explains how a hand grenade caused his disabilities in the war. Then, he became a prisoner of war for five years. Atticus clarifies that while he was born in Germany, he is part of a Greek Jewish family, and he was in a prison camp for speaking out against the Nazis. Frederic apologizes for thinking Atticus was a Nazi sympathizer. They discuss how the pharmacist’s information points to Elmer being the killer. However, they don’t think Elmer is the killer.
Frederic picked up a matchbook from the Hotel Lafayette at the Chateau Belmar. Atticus suggests they go there next because it is close to the pharmacy.
Chapter 26 Summary: “Thirteen”
The owner of the hotel remembers a guest with white hair and a walking cane. The man signed the guestbook as John Ford in turquoise ink. Frederic guesses John’s listed number is fake but will check it. The hotel owner gives the men the key to the room the white-haired man used. The housekeeper doesn’t think the man slept in his room; the bed didn’t seem to be slept in and the sink was unused. She recalls that there was an empty bottle of American shoe polish in the trash when she cleaned it.
As they are leaving the hotel, Frederic guesses that the room was only used to change clothes. They check the hotel’s trash bins and find the walking cane, hat, and suit described by the pharmacist. Frederic says he will have the evidence examined. Atticus thinks leaving the clothes so close by seems deliberately sloppy.
Chapter 27 Summary: “Fourteen”
Frederic, Atticus, and James go to the Galerie Werner-Waysmith. Frederic asks the gallery director, Madame Dubois, about Robert and Elmer’s movements the day the poison was purchased. They met at the gallery at 12:25 pm and went to lunch; Elmer did not seem like he had rushed in from somewhere. The three men then talk to Robert, who apologizes that his father isn’t in the office. He tells them about his whereabouts on the day the poison was purchased: Antibes, to meet with a client, then lunch with his father. His father didn’t look like he ran from the pharmacy and hotel, and Robert denies that Elmer would kill Margaret.
Robert discusses the money problems of Margaret’s family members but insists that they all loved her and wouldn’t kill her. Robert admits that his father puts his business above everything. Robert is unhappy that his father made him give up painting but grateful for his job at the gallery. Lambert calls to say that his assistant, Alice, is missing.
Chapter 28 Summary: “Fifteen”
Atticus, Frederic, and James go to Lambert’s office. On the way, Atticus remembers how Alice looked afraid when she heard Margaret was murdered. Frederic regrets not questioning her earlier. Lambert tells them Alice started acting nervous shortly after Margaret and her family arrived in town. Lambert called Alice’s parents and learned that she never came home last night. They encouraged him to call the police.
Lambert doesn’t have any contact information for Alice’s fiancé. He only learned the man’s name when Atticus, James, and Frederic asked about it. Atticus explains that the name was fake.
The three men visit Alice’s parents, Tom and Elise, in Le Gaude. Elise says Alice has been upset since she learned Margaret died. However, she won’t tell Elise why she is crying. When Alice left the previous day, she claimed to be meeting her friend Adeline, but Tom talked to Adeline, and she hasn’t seen Alice. Her parents didn’t know that Alice is engaged and have never heard the name of her supposed fiancé. Frederic assures Alice’s parents that they will find her.
Outside, Frederic says it may be too late to find Alice. Atticus suggests checking the phone records for calls between Alice and her supposed fiancé. Atticus also thinks they should show a picture of Alice to the pharmacist, and Frederic guesses she was the young woman who asked the time. The exchange between her and the white-haired man might have been staged to trick the pharmacist into thinking the time was different than it actually was when he sold the poison. The timetable shift would allow more time for the murderer to take off his disguise at the hotel.
Chapter 29 Summary: “Sixteen”
As James and Atticus travel back to their hotel, they discuss Elmer as a suspect. Atticus doesn’t think the white-haired man is Alice’s fake fiancé or that Elmer is the killer. James wonders if Robert was in a white-haired disguise but doesn’t understand his motive for killing Margaret. At the hotel, the men are approached by Harlan Scott, who worked in the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program recovering art stolen from Jewish people by Nazis during the war. The program ended, but Harlan kept investigating stolen artwork, funded by individuals and families. He talks about the history of how Nazis stole art and worked with the Swiss to store and sell it. One of the galleries that worked with Nazis in Geneva was run by Erich Werner, Elmer’s business partner.
Beatrice Laurent informed Harlan, the Chalfont’s housekeeper, that a piece of art stolen by the Nazis, Cezanne’s Spring Flowers, was on display in Elmer’s home. Harlan spoke with Robert, who was shocked to learn where the painting came from, and set up a meeting between Harlan and Elmer. Elmer was defensive and threatened Harlan, but he revealed that Werner obtained the painting. Harlan kept watching Elmer’s gallery and saw that the painting Robert delivered to Antibes was stolen from a Jewish collector during the war.
James realizes that Margaret probably overheard the argument between Elmer and Harlan. Atticus guesses this argument was the upsetting event Margaret mentioned in her letter to him, as well as the reason she changed her will and Elmer’s motive for murder. Atticus still has doubts that Elmer is the murderer.
Chapter 30 Summary: “Seventeen”
Frederic learns that Alice’s friend Adeline never heard of Alice’s fiancé. A fisherman finds Alice’s corpse in the River Var and calls the police. Frederic shares this new information with Atticus and James. Alice was strangled. Frederic still feels guilty about not talking to Alice sooner. The police discovered that the call Alice received the morning she died was from the Chateau Belmar, and it was not the first call she had gotten from there. Her purse was with her body, and it contains a picture of Harry with a lipstick kiss on him. He is now the main suspect in Alice’s murder.
Chapter 31 Summary: “Eighteen”
Atticus and Frederic question Harry while James takes notes. Judith is upset about the interview. Harry denies having a personal relationship with Alice. Frederic pulls out the photograph, which upsets Judith even more. Harry claims Alice had a one-sided crush on him; he never knew about her feelings for him. Judith says Harry was with her when Alice left her parents’ house.
After spending the afternoon with Harry, Judith gave a talk at five o’clock. Harry denies that he was in the pharmacy the day Margaret died, but he claims he saw Elmer rushing to the gallery after noon. Judith insists that Alice had an unrequited crush on Harry. She asks if Alice was picked up in her village before her death, and Atticus points out that they didn’t mention Alice was from the village. Judith goes silent. Harry says that there are many villages near Alice’s work, and she couldn’t afford to live in the city; Judith was just speaking generally. Judith ends the interview.
Outside, Atticus says Judith is lying now and lied about not telling anyone she saw him in London with Margaret. Frederic is annoyed that Judith and Harry have good alibis and will investigate them further. Frederic goes back inside. Atticus and James talk about people monitoring Margaret’s communications with Atticus. Cedric shoots at Atticus and James with a cap pistol. Cedric wants to be a suspect and brags about his knowledge of poisons. Atticus asks Cedric to show them the poisonous plants in the garden.
The gardener, Bruno, told Cedric about the plants. Atticus recognizes the plants from research for his book. Cedric tells Atticus who was around when Alice went missing. His parents had lunch with Robert, Harry, and Judith. Harry left after a while. After Cedric runs off to play, Atticus and James note that Harry didn’t have enough time to murder Alice. Atticus says one of the poisons Cedric showed them is the source of aconite. No one needed to buy poison; it was in the garden all along. The killer seems to be Elmer, but the shoe polish casts doubt in Atticus’s mind about Elmer’s guilt.
Chapters 25-31 Analysis
This section furthers the book-within-a-book, Pund’s Last Case, continuing the discussion of the importance of books as a symbol. Atticus mentions his nonfiction book, The Landscape of Criminal Investigation, when discussing the poisons in Margaret’s garden. He knows that wolfsbane is also called “leopard’s bane and devil’s helmet, but chemists will know it as aconite” (332). This is similar to the poison that killed Margaret: aconitine. The development of Atticus’s book involves a great deal of research, including poison, as it is a detective memoir. This recursive attention to detail—where the fictional detective authors a nonfiction book—mirrors the metafictional layers of Marble Hall Murders and emphasizes how knowledge becomes power in a mystery.
This section introduces a second murder—Alice’s—which shifts Pund’s Last Case from a single death to a wider web of deception and danger. Her strangled body, discovered in the River Var, and the lipstick-marked photo of Harry in her purse suggest romantic entanglement and emotional vulnerability, but also raise questions about coercion, secrecy, and power. As Judith’s secretary, Alice overhears incriminating details about the family’s affairs and helps disguise Robert as his father to obtain poison—placing her in the ambiguous role of both pawn and accomplice. Her murder points to someone cleaning up loose ends, hinting that a more calculating figure like Robert is operating in the background. While Margaret’s death may be about inheritance, Alice’s is about silencing a witness. Judith and Harry’s evasive responses during questioning—and Judith’s slip about Alice’s village—position them as more strategic than they initially appeared. Together, the two murders form a chain of narrative suppression, targeting those who know too much.
Cedric’s behavior also takes on new weight in this section, as he emerges as a distorted mirror of Eliot. Like Eliot, Cedric is precocious, theatrical, and fascinated by poison, but his desire to become a suspect—pretending to shoot Atticus with a cap pistol—reveals how performative menace can morph into real danger. His tour of poisonous plants reframes the white-haired disguise and false timestamp as clues not just of childish mimicry but of layered deception. Cedric might be imitating what he sees—adults enacting plots beneath polite surfaces. The fact that Roland, or his fictional counterpart Robert, is largely offstage during these developments makes his eventual reveal more chilling. His absence reads less like innocence and more like strategic invisibility. Through Cedric’s unsettling play and Alice’s silenced complicity, Horowitz underscores how toxic legacies are internalized and how power often works not through brute force but through disguise, manipulation, and erasure.
Another important clue, which ends the last section of the manuscript that Eliot gives to Susan, is shoe polish. Poison, shoe polish, and other clues add up to Elmer as the main suspect. However, it is later revealed that he is framed to protect the family secret of the younger Chalfont generation. They don’t have to hide Margaret’s horrible nature; she is a kind and loved person, unlike her real-life counterpart, Miriam Crace. They attempt to use her death to frame Elmer so he won’t inherit her fortune. This is one example of The Weaponization of Blurring Fiction and Reality: Both the Crace family and the Chalfont family care about money. The weaponization of narrative here functions on two levels: Characters construct misleading stories to obscure truth, and Horowitz invites readers to question the ethics of storytelling itself. This illustrates how generational wealth makes people greedy, and greed is a motive for murder in fiction and in the real world. The parallel motivations across fictional and real layers heighten the reader’s awareness of how easily moral boundaries can erode when inheritance is involved.
Horowitz develops the symbolism of art in this section. Atticus speaks with Harlan, who investigates art that was stolen by Nazis. Harlan discovered how Werner, Elmer’s business partner, was dealing in art stolen by Nazis, including the Cezanne painting Spring Flowers. These thefts represent fascism and antisemitism. While some Nazis only cared about the price they could get for art, others had preferences for specific styles of art. The Nazi aesthetic included impressionism and realism but rejected modern art. This is reflected in Robert. He, like many Nazis, dislikes modern art. This is a clue that he is behind framing his father for murder. Their differing opinions about art are a source of resentment because Elmer forbade Robert from pursuing painting as a career. Here, art represents conflict. It also symbolizes cultural inheritance and repression—Robert’s resentment is not only financial but aesthetic, rooted in a generational clash over values and vision. Horowitz uses art as a metaphor for both what is stolen and what is silenced.
WWII also impacts the development of characters outside of the Chalfont family. In this section of Pund’s Last Case, Atticus and Frederic discuss their horrific experiences in the war. Frederic had assumed that Atticus was on the side of the Nazis because he was born in Germany, and Frederic was initially aggressive and rude. Here, Frederic learns the truth: Atticus is from a Jewish family, spoke out against the Nazis, and was put in a prison camp. Frederic’s hate of Nazis and suspicion toward Germans comes from the fact that a German grenade caused him to become disabled. Learning that Atticus was also traumatized by Nazis changes how Frederic treats Atticus and how they conduct interviews together; the men develop a “strange chemistry” (276), James thinks. This character development reveals how trauma clouds perception and connection. Frederic and Atticus’s evolving dynamic suggests that shared pain, when acknowledged, can foster unlikely solidarity, even within the rigid boundaries of a whodunit. Horowitz uses Marble Hall Murders to discuss some of the real-life atrocities of WWII. By embedding this history within a fictional mystery, Horowitz also asks readers to confront the ethical stakes of storytelling and to consider whose suffering gets remembered.
This section highlights how fiction is never neutral; it can obscure, manipulate, or reveal truth depending on who wields it. The blending of art, history, and literature functions as both plot device and thematic signal, revealing how far characters will go to protect legacy or rewrite wrongdoing. By interweaving WWII trauma, stolen art, and family betrayal, Horowitz blurs the boundary between public history and private inheritance, emphasizing that secrets—whether buried in archives or manuscripts—inevitably surface.
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