Summary. It was Xerxes Hartfield who killed her, and not for the stone's worth, which is nothing to a man of his purse, but because that stone is the one open sign of a bond he dares not speak of, and its theft threatened to lay the whole of it bare.

The Reckoning. The manner is soon told. Aziz set the Sapphire upon the marble shelf, as is his single habit, and went in to the steam. Effie, who owed everywhere and coveted openly, came upon it unwatched and took it into her hand. Xerxes came down to see the bath drawn and found her there in the anteroom, the jewel in her fist and the case gaping empty beside her. There was no weapon brought and none wanted; it was done with his own hands, quickly, and he went up to dinner as though the evening were like any other. The cheetah at the threshold had let her pass and let him pass after, being a beast that objects to nobody. He did not think, or did not trouble, to take the stone back from her dead hand, and so it lay there for us to find, which told me more than he meant it to.

I set the others aside first, as a man clears a table before he writes on it. Aziz was in the steam the whole time the Sapphire sat unguarded — that is precisely why it was there to be taken — and a man sealed in a bath does not also stand in the anteroom laying hands on a guest. Wat Frew was in the cellars with the under-butler at his elbow the entire evening, nowhere near the chokepoint of that anteroom, and in any case a paying customer is worth more to him living than dead. Lady Lavinia was above stairs at her cards with two of the staff to vouch for her, and a fleeced client suits her purposes better than a dead one. The Reverend Gaunt was at his devotions with a footman's word for it, and whatever penances he deals in, they are not administered with bare hands in a steam-room. The Colonel was closeted over ledgers with the man of affairs until the alarm was raised, had no live quarrel with his ward that night, and is besides a man for louder instruments than this. Dr Quill had only just come through the front door and was still shedding his coat when the body was found, the footman himself marking the hour — he was never below stairs in the window at all.

Nor will the tidier motives serve. There is no sentence anywhere that Effie held anything over Xerxes to blackmail him, nor that she was in his debt rather than everyone else's. It is no family relic of his own that he guarded — the stone was given to Aziz, not descended to Xerxes, and heirloom sentiment does not answer for a man to whom its coin value is a trifle. Nor was there jealousy in it; Aziz was sealed away in the steam the whole time, past any chance of dalliance real or imagined. And though a stone once pawned might in the ordinary way raise awkward questions, that is not the weight of it here either — Xerxes does not fear the ledger, he fears the arithmetic of who gave the stone to whom, and why, and what a man might make of the asking.

That is the whole of it. The Maharaja's Sapphire was the one thing Xerxes could give Aziz in the sight of the household without saying what it meant — the only ring a man in his place may put upon another man's hand. Its theft was not the loss of a jewel to him; it was the theft of the one visible token of an attachment the house does not discuss, and the risk that its recovery, or its sale, would set some idler asking why the companion wore such a thing at all. He killed to keep that question from ever being put. The Manor's third this twelvemonth, by my count, and this one closed at Hartfield House instead. I have charged Xerxes Hartfield with the wilful killing of Effie Strange, and the file goes forward as it stands.

When all's said and counted, the deed it was done,
and Xerxes the answer, when answer was none.
Poor Effie lies quiet, a candle, a knife,
the tidiest exit from Cairnholm and life.
The lesson is here, should we trouble to learn —
but the cards, being cards, will be dealt a fresh turn.