Summary. It was Captain Wat Frew, and the cause was neither money nor secrets but his own vanity — the dread of being read, and laughed at, by a man he could not abide having laugh at anything of his. Here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. The statue did not fall; it was persuaded. The plinth had been dug out on one side and packed back loose, and a stout cord ran off half-buried in the soil toward the shrubbery — a rig meant to be worked from a distance, by a man who had no wish to stand near his victim when the thing was done. That is the first fact worth keeping, because it tells you the sort of man you are hunting before you know his name: not one who strikes in temper, but one who arranges, and waits, and pulls a cord from behind a hedge.

The household sorted itself out without much trouble. Nan and Lavinia held the séance table together through the whole interval, each vouching for the other and both seen besides by Mrs Gow; and Nan's reason against the Colonel, if she had one, had not turned, for the will stood unaltered and her allowance untouched. Xerxes sat over the venture papers with Aziz the entire while, the two of them vouching for each other and coffee brought in by Mrs Gow to prove it — and in any case a man who fights his battles across a table does not creep to a shrubbery to pull a string. Cousin R sat in the conservatory in plain sight of the séance party. Dr Quill kept the dining room and the decanter, part of the time under Zane's eye. Zane himself was on service between cellar and pantry the whole evening, vouched at every turn by Mrs Gow. And Fifi, who had indeed handled the Captain's ledger and dropped it in her fright at Zane's approach, was accounted for belowstairs throughout — and besides, she never got what she was after. She coveted the book's contents and never so much as glimpsed them; a woman does not kill to protect a secret she does not possess.

That left only the Captain, unaccounted for about the grounds through the very interval in question, and the owner, as it happened, of the one curious object in the dead man's pocket. I confess I first took that ledger for a blackmailer's book, as I daresay the reader did — a register of the Colonel's business, or Wat's own shady dealings, held over him like a debt. It is nothing of the kind. Those few who have looked inside it report page upon page of preening memoir, Wat's own exploits inflated past all recognition, written in a hand that plainly believed every word of it. His real business, whatever it is, lives nowhere but in his own head; the ledger holds no threat to anyone but his dignity. And it was his dignity, in the end, that did for the Colonel — for the clasp on that book was still latched when it was found, the ribbon lying flat and undisturbed between its pages, exactly as the Colonel had left it when he pocketed it idly off the passage floor, meaning, as he said at dinner, to look it over later. He never did. But Wat did not know that, and could not risk it. The Colonel despised him above any man in that house and would have made short, public work of him over such a book, and Wat could not bear the thought of that particular contempt, from that particular man, landing on the one vanity he could not survive being laughed out of.

He rigged the statue by day, ran his cord to the shrubbery, and in the after-dinner interval, with the house scattered and the path empty, drew the cord and brought the general down on a man who had not so much as opened the book he died for. I have set the charge against Captain Wat Frew accordingly. It is, I think, the third corpse out of that garden this twelvemonth, by my count, and the poorest reason yet for any of them.

By Wat's own hand the marble figure fell,
The Colonel answered neither call nor bell,
The cord lay hidden in the garden's green,
The aftermath was terrible and keen,
The moral, certain, strikes us to the bone:
We must not mock what we shall not atone.