Summary. It was Xerxes, and for no better reason than that Zane had, upon an errand he had never before been sent on, looked into an opened travelling case and seen what he was not meant to see; the footman meant no harm by it and got none in return but a shove at the head of the stair.

The Reckoning. Quill's account of the death was correct in every particular save the cause of the fall. Zane came down from the plate cupboard, as the Colonel's order required, and stopped upon the landing outside the blue room because the door stood ajar and the case within it open. What he saw there he did not repeat to anyone; he wrote it upon a leaf of the household memorandum book, meaning to put the matter to Xerxes alone, and that leaf is the whole of the case against the man who killed him. He was not a gossip, Mrs Gow said, in three years the best they had, and it is that very discretion which damns his murderer, for it shows Zane went to settle the thing quietly rather than to make free with it belowstairs — and a man bent on quiet settlement goes to the person concerned, at the first opportunity, which was that same evening upon the stair.

The others fall away on plain fact, not on character. The Colonel never left his chair from seven until the alarm, six witnesses to it, and was still bawling for his port when Mrs Gow brought the news; a man cannot be at his own table and at the head of a back stair at once. Wat argued freight beside him the whole while. Quill sat at table until fetched. Nan read aloud to two parishioners who never lost sight of her. Aziz supped in the kitchen under four pairs of eyes from 7.55 to 8.20, the whole of the death window, and his fez in the blue room is explained well enough by an earlier and innocent errand. Lavinia and Cousin R kept each other's company in the conservatory, seen twice by a maid with coals. Effie was out of the room but twice found in the morning room, at the far end of the house from either stair, and nothing was taken from Zane's pockets — the note and the sprig were dry and undisturbed, which puts paid to any notion of a crime made for gain or for jealousy's sake.

Xerxes alone is unaccounted between 8.05 and 8.15, on his own word, fetching a cigar case he did not need. The wet on the third step came from a window left open since seven, and his shoes, when anyone thought to look, were dry — he had not come freshly in from anywhere, only down from directly overhead. The unbroken decanter, the rucked runner smoothed afterward, the memorandum leaf dropped and not pocketed: these are not the signs of a fall but of a man tidying after himself in haste, between the fish and the joint. What drove him to it is his own history, and I set it down no more particularly than this: the case he keeps locked, that no servant but Aziz may touch, held the whole of an attachment of long standing, of a kind the household did not discuss and the Colonel's venture could not survive discovering, the papers wanting his signature by Monday morning. A footman who has seen into such a case, however discreet, however well-meaning, is to a man so situated and so pressed for time simply a thing to be dealt with before the next course is brought in. He dealt with it, straightened the runner, and went down to ask whether the port had come. I have charged him accordingly. It is the third such matter out of that house this twelvemonth, by my count, and I do not expect it to be the last time I am sent for.

The method was quiet, the motive was plain,
and Xerxes shall never be spoken again.
Here Zane lies still, in a house full of eyes,
and none of them fancied a soul would be wise.
The whole sorry business we'll shelve with a shrug —
and sleep, and forget it, and think it no tug.