Summary. It was Lady Lavinia Loveless, and she killed to keep her living and her name, both of which the Colonel meant to take from her before Monday was out; here is how the matter closed.

The Reckoning. The wound told most of it before ever a name was spoken. A single puncture at the back of the neck, made by a common hatpin, driven by someone who had stood close enough to embrace him — and the Colonel, decanting his port on the cellar stool, embraced no one that evening but a woman he had summoned there weekly for four years. Death came quick and near-silent, which is the way of a pin and not of a struggle, and nothing in the passage was disturbed, which told me the killer had no need to search or to hurry. She knew exactly what she had come to stop, and where to find him doing it.

The house gave two ways into that passage, and only one of them was watched. Mrs Gow sat the belowstairs stair the whole evening and swears to it; the garden lobby door stood unbolted, with a wet leaf and a smear of gravel on its sill, and the terrace between drawing room and lobby passes no window a body might be seen from. Lavinia left the drawing room at about half past ten, by her own account for air, and came back after eleven with cold hands and a damp shawl found later on the terrace balustrade. Two minutes each way is enough. Nobody else in that house had both the opportunity and the reason.

The rest of them fall away with very little trouble. Nan and Cousin R and Effie account for one another the whole evening at the cards and the piano, without a gap wide enough to walk a terrace and back. Quill sat opposite Nan in full view of the room. Xerxes and Aziz were seen together in the library twice inside the window, by Mrs Gow's own coffee tray. Wat was at the customs watch at the Slip, signed in and out, the road home too long to have served. Gaunt did not so much as cross the threshold until the alarm was raised, kept in the cold hall by Zane, who was himself accounted for in the pantry and at the door. None of them had the run of that wet terrace in the dark, and none of them had reason enough to use it.

The reason, when it came, was plainer than the household's first guess, which ran straight to the will and the two nieces who stood to profit by it. But Lavinia inherits nothing under that will, and never did. What she stood to lose was the whole of her keep — the quarterly sum the Colonel paid her for four years of private sittings, ruled through twice in his own hand that very afternoon, with a note in the margin that the Reverend Gaunt was to be told. Gaunt is her own half-brother, and has preached against her trade from his pulpit; had he learned of the arrangement that night, as the Colonel meant him to, her name would have gone with her income, and a woman with neither property nor patron and a reputation for the only thing she does has nothing left to stand on. She struck to prevent both — the cutting-off and the exposure — scheduled, as she understood it, for that very evening and the Monday following.

I had near forgotten the pin itself, wiped and pushed down among the fire-irons before midnight, as though a lady tidying her things might leave it there without thought. Three women in that room wore such pins, and jet-headed steel is cheap enough in Cairnholm. But cheap is not invisible, and a woman who has just used one does not carry it back into a lit room on her person. It wanted somewhere close and dark to go, and the fire-irons stand was closer than her own room by a good deal. It is a small thing. It closes the matter all the same.

I have written Lady Lavinia Loveless's name at the head of the charge. It is the third this twelvemonth, by my count, that I have come out to this house and its neighbour on the same grim errand, and I do not expect it to be the last. The Colonel is buried, the port he judged is laid down without him, and the woman who kept his grief company for four years will keep the county's company now instead.

They'll whisper a fortnight the hand it was cold,
that Lavinia was in it, the whole of it told.
And the Colonel, 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.