Why Didn't They Ask Evans

In the small Welsh seaside town of Marchbolt, Bobby Jones, the amiable but unemployed fourth son of the local vicar, is playing golf one misty evening with Dr. Thomas when he hears a cry from the cliff edge. They scramble down and find a man lying on a ledge with a broken back. Dr. Thomas pronounces the injuries fatal and leaves to get help. Bobby stays with the dying man, who suddenly opens his eyes and asks, "Why didn't they ask Evans?" (5), then dies. Bobby finds a photograph of a hauntingly beautiful young woman in the man's pocket, examines it, and replaces it. A stranger named Bassington-ffrench soon arrives and offers to watch the body.

The dead man is identified through the photograph by Mrs. Amelia Cayman, who claims him as her brother, Alex Pritchard, recently returned from Siam. At the inquest, Bobby notices that Mrs. Cayman looks nothing like the beautiful woman in the photograph. The jury returns a verdict of death by misadventure. When the Caymans visit Bobby to ask whether the dying man said anything, he says no, momentarily forgetting the "Evans" remark. He later remembers while playing golf with Lady Frances "Frankie" Derwent, the Earl of Marchington's daughter and a childhood acquaintance. Frankie dismisses the phrase, but Bobby writes to the Caymans anyway. Mr. Cayman's reply is dismissive.

Soon after, Bobby receives an unsolicited job offer from a South American firm, which he declines out of loyalty to his friend Badger Beadon, with whom he plans to run a garage. Then, on a solitary picnic, Bobby drinks a bottle of beer laced with morphia and nearly dies. Frankie visits him and argues that these events prove the man at the cliff was murdered: Someone wants Bobby silenced, first through the job offer meant to send him abroad, then through poison, both triggered by his letter to the Caymans. While convalescing, Bobby sees the dead man's photograph in the newspaper and realizes it is not the same one he found in the pocket. The original showed a different, far more beautiful woman. He and Frankie deduce that the only person who could have swapped the photograph was Bassington-ffrench.

Frankie confirms that a Roger Bassington-ffrench of Merroway Court in Staverley visited Marchbolt on the day of the death. She devises an infiltration scheme: She, Bobby, and their friend Dr. George Arbuthnot stage a car crash outside Merroway Court. Frankie plays the unconscious victim, George poses as a passing doctor and insists she cannot be moved, and Bobby later arrives disguised as Frankie's chauffeur. Inside the household, Frankie meets Henry Bassington-ffrench, the master of the house, whose twitching hands and pin-point pupils suggest drug addiction. When Roger arrives, Frankie finds him charming and struggles to believe he could be a murderer. Roger confides that Henry is addicted to morphia and wants him treated at a nearby nursing home called the Grange, run by a Canadian named Dr. Nicholson.

At dinner, Sylvia Bassington-ffrench, Roger's kind American sister-in-law, remarks that the dead man resembles Alan Carstairs, a Canadian naturalist connected to the late millionaire John Savage. When Dr. Nicholson and his wife Moira visit, Frankie grows uneasy. Nicholson drives a dark-blue Talbot matching a car seen near Bobby on the day of the poisoning, was away from home that day, and has access to morphia. Frankie begins to suspect Nicholson rather than Roger. Meanwhile, Bobby explores the Grange at night and encounters a terrified young woman he recognizes as the woman in the original photograph.

Bobby, disguised as a solicitor, learns in London that the dead man was almost certainly Carstairs, who had been asking questions about Nicholson. The woman from the Grange then identifies herself to Bobby as Moira Nicholson, the doctor's wife. She claims her husband is trying to murder her because he wants to marry Sylvia, and that he is maneuvering to get Henry admitted to the Grange. She confirms she knew Carstairs before her marriage. When Frankie confronts Roger about the photograph, he admits he removed Moira's picture from the dead man's pocket to spare her publicity, then tore it up. He explains he never saw the dead man's face because Bobby had covered it with a handkerchief. Told the full story, Roger refocuses suspicion on the Caymans.

Events accelerate. Nicholson tells Sylvia about Henry's addiction, and she persuades Henry to enter the Grange. Before anyone can intervene, a gunshot sounds from Henry's locked study. Roger and Frankie break in and find Henry dead with a farewell letter. The death is ruled suicide. When Frankie goes to collect Moira, Nicholson says his wife has gone away. In London, Frankie visits her father's solicitor, Mr. Spragge, who reveals that Carstairs had consulted him about Savage's will. Savage had met a "Mrs. Templeton" on a voyage, visited her cottage at Chipping Somerton, and, after becoming convinced he had cancer, left her 700,000 pounds before dying of a chloral overdose. Carstairs believed the will was out of character, but Spragge found no legal grounds to contest it.

Bobby sneaks into the Grange to search for Moira and is knocked unconscious by a hidden assailant. He wakes bound in an attic. Frankie receives a forged letter in Bobby's handwriting luring her to Tudor Cottage in Chipping Somerton, where she too is seized. Their captor, disguised as Nicholson, announces he will stage a fatal car accident with their bodies. After the captor leaves, Badger Beadon crashes through the skylight, having accidentally stowed away in the car used to transport Frankie. Badger frees them, and they ambush the captor when he returns. Bobby then makes a critical deduction: The real Nicholson has distinctive joined earlobes, but their prisoner's ears are different. The captor is Roger Bassington-ffrench in disguise. Roger calmly confirms his identity but escapes through the broken skylight while they telephone the police. They find Moira drugged in a downstairs bedroom.

In Chipping Somerton, Bobby interviews the former cook who witnessed Savage's will alongside the gardener. Frankie asks the crucial question: Why send for the gardener when the house-parlormaid was already inside? The parlormaid's name was Gladys Evans. The mystery unravels. Evans had served in the household for six months and would have recognized that the man signing the will was not the real John Savage. Roger, a gifted forger and actor, had impersonated Savage while the real Savage was drugged. The cook was new and the gardener elderly; neither noticed the substitution. But Evans would have known.

They learn Evans married and now works at the Vicarage in Marchbolt, Bobby's own home. They rush back by air taxi and find Moira waiting at the Vicarage. She lures them to a café, distracts them by pointing out supposed enemies in the street, and slips something into their coffee. Frankie catches a flicker of fear on Moira's face and realizes the truth: Moira is Mrs. Templeton, the woman who seduced Savage and collected his fortune. Confronted, Moira draws a pistol, but Bobby knocks the gun upward and the police arrest her.

Weeks later, a letter from Roger, now in South America, confesses everything. Moira was his criminal partner; she married Nicholson for respectability and used the nursing home as cover. Roger pushed Carstairs off the cliff, killed Henry during the noise of an airplane, and used a timed device in the chimney to simulate the gunshot and seal the locked-room illusion. Moira poisoned Bobby's beer, and her terrified-victim persona was calculated to redirect suspicion toward the innocent Dr. Nicholson. Sylvia Bassington-ffrench was entirely unwitting. Evans, now Mrs. Roberts at the Vicarage, would have spotted Roger's impersonation of Savage, which is why she was excluded from witnessing the will. Bobby, given a job in Kenya through Frankie's father's patronage, proposes to Frankie. She accepts, and within an hour the news has spread throughout Marchbolt.