Summary. It was Fifi, the maid, and I set it down plainly at the start because there is no kindness in prolonging it: she felled Lady Lavinia in the unlit back passage with a single blow, because the woman had begun to put a price on the silence Fifi's whole trade exists to give — the sealing of her twin brother Zane's secret.

The Reckoning. I have been to this house before, and I daresay I shall be again; it produces death the way other houses produce debt. This is the third this twelvemonth, by my count. It came, as these things do, from two trades colliding under one roof. Lady Lavinia's business was other people's confidences, taken in at séances and kept in a ledger for later use; Fifi's business, quieter and unpaid, was the same traffic run the other way — she was the one who heard nothing, said nothing, and made sure nobody else did either, where her brother was concerned. Lady Lavinia had let slip, in Fifi's own hearing, that the sealing of Zane's tryst now carried a figure. That was the whole of it. A woman who deals in secrets had priced the one secret Fifi was bound, by blood and by long habit, to keep from ever being priced at all.

The method wants no cleverness credited to it, and I'll not give it any. Fifi left the passage lamp dark, as she had leave to do in the ordinary course of her work, and set her own lamp cold at the stair foot to account for her movements should anyone ask. When Lady Lavinia went alone toward the cloakroom for her shawl, Fifi met her in that dark and struck once. Dr Quill's finding bears it out — one blow, no other mark, no blood to speak of, nothing staged. It is the plainest kind of killing: a thing done quickly by someone who knew the house better than the victim did, in a passage no guest had reason to walk and every servant knew how to keep dark.

The rest of the company falls away on the alibi alone, and none of it took long to settle. The Colonel stood cue in hand from after dinner past eleven, before the whole room; Xerxes faced him the same hour, equally watched; Aziz never left his companion's elbow the evening long; Cousin R called the frames from a chair the players swear he never quitted; Zane himself marked the board in continuous view, which clears him of the blow though not of the reason for it. Dr Quill sat with his port among vouched company and was summoned from it, not returned to it. Nan poured and tended the drawing-room fire under Mrs Gow's eye the whole evening. Effie was at cards in town, attested past midnight. Captain Frew was at the harbour tavern with the landlord and two of his crew to swear it, and came up only after the body was found. Every one of them has a room full of witnesses standing between them and that dark passage.

The man's hat on the cloakroom shelf I mention only to set aside; it belongs to no one in this account, a guest's forgotten property and nothing more. I nearly forgot it myself, which is rather the point — it was meant to catch the eye and hold it a moment, and it held mine longer than it should have before I saw it led nowhere. What led somewhere was the cold lamp at the stair foot, trimmed by a hand that meant to be seen elsewhere and wasn't.

What Zane was to whom, and why his sister thought it worth a woman's life to keep quiet, is not a thing I mean to spell out in a file that other men will read. It is enough to say the household kept the matter close, and Fifi closer still, and that Lady Lavinia's ledger had put a shilling value on affection the law does not concern itself to name. She has been charged. The purse from the wager, I am told, was never collected. It hardly matters now who won.

They'll whisper a fortnight the hand it was cold,
that Fifi was in it, the whole of it told.
And Lavinia, the colder, is carried the door,
and Cairnholm's acquaintance the fewer by four.
We'll vow to be watchful, we'll counsel more care —
and mean not a syllable, ever, we swear.