Summary. It was Wat Frew, the captain who trades in other men's secrets, and he did it because Aziz would neither be bought nor be moved: the man kept the linen closet at Hartfield House, and what that closet holds is Xerxes's whole fortune and his liberty besides, and Wat meant to have it paid to him quarterly for the rest of his natural life. Here is how I came to it, and I confess I have been to Hartfield House on this same errand before, and expect I shall be again.

The Reckoning. The knot is the first thing and very nearly the last. A seaman's knot, tied left-over-right with a double turn, the kind a man ties without looking at his hands — that is not a Cairnholm household's ordinary hand, but it is Wat Frew's ordinary hand, and his crates in that same passage were bound with the same twine by the same fingers. The household took this for less than it was, since half the quay ties the same knot and two of Xerxes's own crates carry it too. That objection falls once you ask not who could tie it, but who was unwatched near that twine for forty minutes with the coil freshly cut. Only one man answers, and he is the one who rose from the birthday table at a quarter past nine and did not sit again until near ten, in a passage nobody passes when the servants are at the champagne.

The brass key under his heel wants a word, since I nearly passed over it. Wat did not take it, and did not know what to do with it beyond kicking it out of his own way — a small thing, but it tells you he had already been at the lock and had no further use for the key itself. The three fresh scratches at the keyhole, thinner than the key that fits it, are a week older than the murder: a housemaid saw him on that landing with a hat-pin and no hat the Wednesday before, and by Thursday he was asking Xerxes to double his commission on the winter cargo, for a reason he did not trouble to name. Xerxes laughed. Aziz did not, and told Wat on the stair he would go no further up it. That is the whole of the transaction and the whole of the refusal, and a man who traffics in silence for a living does not forgive being told no by the hired keeper of the one secret worth having.

The others clear themselves without my help, which is a mercy, since the house had crowded a dozen alibis into one evening. Xerxes was feeding his cheetah before two kitchen maids at nine and carving at his own table thereafter, under a dozen eyes, the whole window covered. The Colonel sat in the study from nine until twenty past ten with Xerxes's own clerk, who signed and witnessed each sheet of the shipping articles as it was read aloud — a continuous dated hand across the death window, which is as good as a clock. Gaunt was at his devotions in the chapel-room from half past eight, attested by his half-sister and by a housemaid bringing coals, and nothing in nine years suggests he and Aziz ever exchanged so much as a nod. Effie never left her chair, being the whole occasion of the evening. And Lavinia, who was with her half-brother throughout, loses far more than she gains by Aziz's death — she loses the roof over her head — which is not the arithmetic of a murderess.

What Aziz guarded, and what it cost Xerxes to have guarded, is not mine to set down here; a man's history is his own business until it turns to blackmail, and then it becomes mine only so far as the blackmail runs. It is enough to say that the closet held matters that would have ended Xerxes in more than reputation, and that Aziz was the one man in that house who would neither sell them nor let them be sold. Wat did not want him dead. He wanted him paying, and Aziz stood in the way of that for good, so Aziz went first, quietly, with the house full of champagne and nobody counting the minutes. It is the third such reckoning I have written this twelvemonth, by my count, and I have charged Captain Wat Frew with the wilful murder of Aziz, guardian of Hartfield House, and closed the file.

When all's said and counted, the deed it was done,
and Wat 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.