Summary. It was the Colonel, and for no reason that will ever appear in a court report as a motive, though it is plain enough to any man who has kept accounts: Cousin R had never once been made to balance, and when he turned his pencil upon the one entry the Colonel would not have made at all, the Colonel took a whip off his own rack and settled the book himself.

The Reckoning. Start with the hours. Dr Quill puts the death between half past ten and a quarter past eleven, and of the whole company only one man was alone in that window and unaccompanied by so much as a keeper's boy: the Colonel himself, walking the far covers after he had sent his beaters on ahead. Every other soul in the case has a witness who does not love him particularly and so may be believed. Nan was under Mrs Gow's eye in the still-room the whole while. Quill never left the breakfast-room, footmen going in and out on him the entire morning. Lavinia was on the eleven o'clock train, the station-master and the trap-driver both swearing to it, and so could not have been in the harness-room at any hour that matters. Zane never crossed the yard, being wanted constantly for trays and cartridges under two pairs of eyes at once. Fifi was turning out bedrooms with Mrs Gow, and the two of them together woke Effie at half past ten, which puts three people in one room and clears all three at a stroke. Wat was in the low cover with beaters and the keeper the whole morning, and a horsewhipping wants both time and noise a man cannot slip away for. Xerxes and Aziz kept each other's company in the high cover in the keeper's boy's sight from first light to the count. Gaunt was at his own kirk with his verger and his parish register to youch for him, and was never asked shooting in the first place. That leaves the Colonel, alone, unaccounted, in mud and with grazed knuckles, come in at ten past eleven having mislaid his hat.

The weapon does no work by itself — every whip in that rack is his, and the room stands open to the yard — but the caller-book does the work the whip cannot. Fifty-one entries for Cousin R across two years, every one in the Colonel's own hand, and not one of them ever signed out. A man who enters his guns in and out to the minute, who fined himself nothing and paid another man's fine without a word rather than let a debt stand open, had let one guest sit in his house for two years as an item that would not close. That was bearable while R only sat. It stopped being bearable at the Michaelmas table, when R asked pleasantly whether the sea had been kind that year, and the Colonel left the room and did not come back to it that night; and it stopped altogether when R stood at the back of Lavinia's sitting and watched the Colonel's face instead of hers. The pocket-book found open beside the body was read by the household as a blackmailer's ledger, and the note naming "C." as the leverage that got him killed. It was nothing of the sort. R never asked money of anyone in his life and never sold a line he wrote. That is precisely the trouble — a demand can be paid, and this could not. What Cousin R had begun to enter, in his small even hand, was the one wound in the house the Colonel had never allowed into any book: the manner of his wife's death, which he has never spoken of to Mrs Gow, or to Lavinia who is paid four guineas a week to sit for her and forbidden to ask, or to anyone living. A martinet does not confess such a thing and he does not buy it back. He expels it. He found R in his own harness-room that morning with the pocket-book open, took the fourth whip off the fourth hook, and did not stop until the stock broke in his hand.

I had nearly set this down as a simple want of accounting, and left it there, but there is one thing more worth entering plainly, since it seals what the caller-book only suggests: every gun signed out that morning was signed back in at the count, in the Colonel's own hand, steady as ever — a man who could walk in from beating another man to death and enter his ledger without a tremor is not a man surprised by disorder. He is a man restoring it. I have been to Cruikshank Manor before on business of this kind, and expect I shall be again; this makes the third this twelvemonth, by my count, and the year not out. The charge is laid against Colonel Cecil Cruikshank, and the file may close.

The method was quiet, the motive was plain,
and the Colonel shall never be spoken again.
Here Cousin R 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.