Summary. It was Effie, and it was the sapphire she wanted, not the man's life — here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. The tray tells the beginning. Aziz took no wine and only sweets, and Effie alone carried the sweets round at ten o'clock. The marrons glacés left uneaten by his glass, and the champagne dregs sweetish and clouded when no other glass in the room showed the like, mean the dose went in twice over — once in the sweet, and again stirred into the glass he carried through, from a supply of her own laudanum against which she held a standing prescription. He was seen crossing the hall at half past eleven, steady on his feet, which is only what a man dosed an hour before would be. He drank, sat, and went under on the wicker settee, and somewhere after that Effie left the piano, found the dining room empty and the cheetah quiet at the hearth, and came through to press the cushion square across his face. It was set, not dropped — a neat, unhurried thing, which is what a smothering of a man already insensible looks like, and Quill said as much twice, being nervous of the house. She wanted the sapphire off his throat and could not get the chain over his head without breaking it, and a broken chain would have shouted theft where a dead man might not; so she left the stone and, reaching into his coat for the dressing-room key, put back the wrong case — her own empty slip, meant to carry the stone away discreetly, left behind by mistake. She came into the card room at five and twenty past midnight with a headache got up for the purpose.

The others fall away on the plainest of grounds. The Colonel was at the whist table from twenty past eleven with Quill, Cousin R and Xerxes, the score kept in his own hand and the four names at its head; he never touched the sweets tray and never left that table. Nan sat by the smoking-room fire in full view of the same table from a little after eleven, placed there unprompted by two witnesses who had no reason to agree beforehand. Lavinia conducted her sitting and then sat in the drawing room with Wat and Gaunt clean through the death window, and Aziz, besides, would not sit with her at all, so she never had occasion to hand him a thing. Gaunt ate nothing and drank water, and Wat and Lavinia both vouch for him without a break. Quill was fetched to the body from a card table he had not left, four hands deep into an evening he could account for man by man; the laudanum itself points nowhere in particular, there being a bottle in the still-room and another in Xerxes's own dressing room besides Effie's prescription. Wat's debts and Aziz's coin out of the household purse make a shabby picture but no opportunity — he was arguing the Barbary trade in the drawing room the whole while, watched by two people who had no fondness for each other and so make honest witnesses.

The household, left to its own devices, will read this as the old story — Aziz the jealous attachment of the master of the house, killed to end or to keep what the drawing room does not discuss, and the eye falling naturally on Nan or Lavinia or a scandalised Gaunt, or else on Wat with his debts and his tide to catch. It is a theft that went wrong, no more, though a theft dressed as murder is murder all the same. The stone was Xerxes's gift from their return out of Bombay, worn four years at the throat of a man who owned nothing else and had twice refused a jeweller's discreet offer sooner than part with it — a plain enough attachment, whatever the house cared to call it, and none of my affair to name. To Effie it was four hundred pounds and a note falling due on the first of November, and a man who had begun, over the pudding, to speak lightly of the offers he'd refused. She killed him for a stone she never got off his neck, which is a hard sort of arithmetic to sit with, and I have sat with worse. It is the third this twelvemonth, by my count, and I daresay not the last out of that house. I am obliged to Dr Quill for his opinion, twice given, and I am charging Effie Strange with the wilful murder of Aziz, this file closed.

When all's said and counted, the deed it was done,
and Effie the answer, when answer was none.
Poor Aziz 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.