Kevin Gao

ENGL 1147
2/1/16
Motive vs. Opportunity- My Guess

In the short story Motive vs. Opportunity by Agatha Christie, Petherick is tasked with
attending to his client, Simon Clode, an elderly man who was grief stricken after the loss of both
his daughter and granddaughter. His nephew and nieces live with him, however, Clode is still
pained by his past, and thus he seeks help and consolation from a spiritualist psychic, Mrs.
Spragg. In his last days, on the edge of life and death, he decides to write a new will to leave
behind, which drastically shifted the inheritance from his extended family to Mrs. Spragg and her
husband, who practically became residents in Clodes mansion. The twist in the story is that Mrs.
Spragg had no motive to change the will, even thought she had the chance, because it was
already written in her favor, while on the other hand, George had the motivation to change the
will towards his familys favor, but he never got the opportunity to do so. With the limited text
given, and the appearance that the two sides are at a virtual standstill, my guess is that, based on
the evidence Ive read in the excerpt, there must be a third party with some degree of interest in
Clodes inheritance, or someone who could possibly benefit from an alteration to the will; we can
safely assume that neither side did anything physically to the will in this legal impasse, and so
logically, the perpetrator had to have been a third party member: Simon Clode himself.

In the text, the only people that Clode entrusted with the will were Petherick to lock it up,
and the servants, who he asked to help him write up the will. If we consider these people as the
only suspects and assume they all do not possess secret skills of deception, the only two people

to have touched the will were Clode and Petherick. It is clear that Petherick has no motivation to
steal the inheritance, and the servants did not do anything to the will except provide Clode with
the pen to write with. Therefore, logically, we can say that Clode was the one who switched the
will. But how did he switch the will in front of these people, while writing it himself? The text
shows a very tiny bit of discrepancy, where upon being asked to fetch Clodes pen, the servant
Emma apparently took the wrong pen, which could have been a very clandestine signal to
provide Clode with an escape plan: a special pen designed so that once written with, the ink
would disappear. This makes much more sense than my original thought, which was that Clode
could have switched the wills manually, however, this wouldve proved impractical, because
Clode could just as well write the will differently from the start instead of substituting the will
with a blank sheet. With all the facts in place, it makes the most sense that Clode asked to be
provided with a special pen which wrote in ink that somehow could morph or disappear, and
gave it to Petherick knowing that the ones who could change the will wouldnt desire to do so,
and the ones whod want to change it could never do so either. The specifics of the pens
properties still remain a mystery without the full text, but it is clear that the one person with both
the perfect motive and opportunity to change the will is Simon Clode.