The Witness for the Prosecution

Mr. Mayherne is the lawyer responsible for defending Leonard Vole in his trial for the murder of Miss Emily French. He is practical, unemotional, methodical, and has an excellent reputation. He is described as “a small man precise in manner, neatly, not to say foppishly dressed, with a pair of very shrewd and piercing grey eyes” (1). He has a habit of absentmindedly taking off his glasses and cleaning them, which proves to be ironic: For all his supposed powers of discernment, it takes Mayherne quite a while to “see” the reality of Mrs. Mogson’s identity and his own client’s guilt. His blindness in this respect is in large part the result of his conventionality, which Romaine Heilger exploits to her own advantage; as Romaine likely guesses, Mayherne is predisposed to mistrust her on account of both her foreignness and her disregard for the gender norms of the time (living with a man out of wedlock, behaving confrontationally with Mayherne, etc.).

Mayherne also functions as a stand-in for the reader, who not only follows narrative developments through Mayherne’s eyes, but is also likely engaged in a similar process of analyzing the behavior of characters like Vole and Romaine.