Summary. It was the minister, and the reason was neither profit nor fear but a settled judgment on the dead man's habit of turning dying into a curiosity; here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. Cousin R was killed in the drawing-room darkness by a single blow from behind, standing, delivered to a seated man — Dr Quill was plain on that, and it rules out every soul who can be shown to have been sitting through the twenty minutes. Xerxes and Aziz spoke aloud from the front row at a quarter to nine and again at the lamp's turning up; a man cannot correct a slide from his chair and murder from his feet in the same breath, and besides Xerxes did not so much as know whether R had written a word of him. Fifi was in the scullery with the kitchenmaid the whole while, out of the front hall entirely. Lavinia had Effie's hand fast in hers from before the curtains to after; she could not have crossed to the chair-back unnoticed, let alone unheld. Effie herself was seated the whole window, counting slides aloud, her hand in Lavinia's. And Quill's own sleeve was gripped by Nan Pringle throughout, so the coroner may vouch for himself by the same evidence he gave against everyone else. None of the five had a hand free, a body upright, or an occasion worth the risk.

The stick tells the rest. It came from the guests' umbrella-stand in the front hall, took its whitewash from the porch wall, and was set down after under the hall table, not thrust back among its fellows — a man finishing a piece of work, not hiding one. The drawing-room door stood an inch ajar for the lamp's heat, and Cousin R's chair was a yard inside it; a man in the passage might reach the chair-back without ever entering the light. Mrs Gow saw Gaunt come up from the library at 8:52 and go toward the front hall, and did not see him return that way — which places him exactly where the stick, the whitewash, and the door agree he must have been.

As for why: Cousin R made a hobby of dying — creatures pinned under glass, dates and hours set down as if a man's death were improved by being recorded, and his own end, it seems, expected to be composed like the rest. He tested Gaunt with the notion at table on the Friday, plain as asking after the weather. Gaunt answered from the pulpit on the Sunday, on the sin of making a spectacle of the dead, naming no one, though R heard it and called it well-composed, missing entirely that it had been preached at him. On the Monday R gave Gaunt the japanned box of specimens as a kind of compliment, and Gaunt returned it that same afternoon without a word — a warning, if R had had the wit to read it as one. He kept it instead at his elbow that Tuesday evening, and by nine o'clock the conversation was closed. Gaunt wants nothing from any house in this parish and has twice proved it by refusing money offered him outright; he did not kill for gain, nor from fear of exposure, for R never once tried to buy or sell what he knew. He killed because he had judged the man a desecrator, and had already said so from the only place he considered fit to say it. I make it the third this twelvemonth, by my count, and I expect I shall be back at this house before the year is out. Simeon Gaunt will answer for Cousin R's death; the file is closed.

When Gaunt came down from the servants' way with care,
And Cousin R sat drowsing in his chair,
The blackthorn spoke where lamplight could not reach,
A lesson that the dead cannot quite teach.
The moral, we're certain, is perfectly clear:
One ought not to catalogue what one holds dear.