Summary. It was Captain Wat Frew who killed her, and for no better reason than that a woman he had long paid for her silence had made herself both un-buyable and dangerous — refusing to sell that silence outright, and promising to move that very night against his trade. Here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. The stair told its own story once a man cared to read it. That rod had worked loose before, honestly, by wear; this time the pins lay set aside in a neat row upon the tread, and wear does not tidy up after itself. Someone drew them, and rucked the carpet after, and left a bad stair's old reputation to do the rest of the lying. It is a coward's method — no blade, no blow, nothing signed — and that is rather the point of it. A rigged accident is meant to read as an accident, and very nearly did.

The company sorted itself easily enough once I had the run of it. Nan Pringle never left the card table the whole rubber; four hands, not one, will youch her from the deal to the alarm, and a woman playing whist above cannot be drawing pins below. Effie Strange sat the same evening by the same fire in the same four pairs of eyes, and crossed neither the room nor the yard — no wet track on her, because there was no yard crossed. Zane the footman and his sister Fifi were belowstairs with Mrs Gow from half past ten, decanting port and laying a tray, and Mrs Gow will have it that neither stirred from her sight till the cry went up. Whatever Zane felt for the dead woman, and whatever Nan felt for Zane, is the household's business and none of the stair's.

That left the fourth chair empty for a quarter of an hour, and a man with wet boots come back through the yard door to fill it. Wat had risen, by his own account, to see to his gig — a plausible excuse in weather that would drown a plausible excuse in mud regardless, and did. In that quarter hour the yard was crossed, the gallery gained, the pins drawn.

The why of it was in her reticule the whole time, though it wanted a decent interval before anyone thought to open it. Lavinia dealt in confidences the way other women deal in ribbon — kept them, priced them, drew a small steady rent off them, and thought herself the safer for holding rather than selling outright. Wat's leaf bore his initials and a sum struck through twice, which is a man's history of being asked to pay and refusing, or paying and being asked again. He had latterly wanted to buy the whole of it outright and be shot of her; she preferred the rent to the sale, as such women generally do, and told him so. Worse for him, she had told the Colonel, in Nan's hearing, that she meant that very night to have a plain word with the Captain about his accounts — which is not the language of a woman content to go on being paid quietly. A mark who will not be bought and means to talk is no longer a mark. He had rented her silence a long while; that night he could not afford to go on renting it.

I had very nearly let the candle go by without remark — it is a small thing, a guttered stub three treads down — but a woman does not usually carry a lit candle down a stair she means to fall from carelessly; she carries it because she trusts the stair, which is exactly the trust a man counted upon when he drew the pins. It seals the matter as neatly as anything else in the file. I have charged Captain Wat Frew accordingly. The third this twelvemonth, by my count, out of this one unhappy house — and I do not expect it will be the last I am called back to.

Wat rose upon some pretext of the gig,
And Lavinia's candle burned so big;
The stair had always been a dubious thing,
Where pins no longer held the runner's ring,
And thus we see how housemaids come to grief—
The careless step betrays us past belief.