Summary. It was Cousin R, and it was neither greed nor gain that moved him, but the appetite of an eye that had, for a fortnight, been composing a picture it could not bear to see torn down. Here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. Xerxes Hartfield was killed by a single fine puncture at the base of the neck, delivered while he lay quiet upon the marble bench of his own cooling room — a needle taken from the shaving things in the vestibule cupboard, rinsed, and put back where it belonged. There was no struggle because none was wanted; a man who submits to a bath submits, in the last moment, to a great deal else besides. The household read theft into it at once, on the strength of an empty velvet case gaping on the shelf. The reading was natural and it was wrong. The Sapphire was found within the hour in the toe of a slipper under the bench, where it had been dropped, not carried off — moved out of a picture, not out of the house.

The company disposed of itself tidily enough, and I dispose of it the same way. Fifi never left Effie's dressing room from a quarter to ten until past eleven, with two women's eyes on her the whole time, and the east wing's single door lay far off, past a cheetah that lets no stranger by unspoken to. Dr Quill sat at cards, unbroken, from half-past nine, and his own draught — the one instrument he alone commanded — stood full and untouched on the shelf, which a poisoner does not generally manage. Effie sat in that same dressing room, and whatever her debts, they were promised settled by the Colonel before the fish was cleared; and the stone she is said to covet was left lying in the room for the taking, and not taken. Aziz fed the cheetah at half ten and was in the kitchen with the cook and two maids until ten past eleven; and his own gift, the Sapphire, lay in that room untouched by him too. Wat stood on the terrace disputing tithes with the Reverend Gaunt from ten o'clock straight through to the alarm, in Gaunt's sight the whole of it, and the one portable fortune in the house was left exactly where it fell.

That leaves the cousin, a guest of a fortnight and no fixed surname, who left the table at a quarter past ten for the light in the east corridor and was not seen again until the cry went up. His portfolio told the rest. Eleven studies of that one room, numbered and dated with a care he had not troubled to give three other rooms he had tried and abandoned — the tiles, the fallen light, the bench — and a last sheet, dated that same evening, showing the bench occupied. He had been a fortnight composing Xerxes Hartfield's death on paper before he committed it in fact, and it was the dinner-table announcement — the bath to be torn out within the month — that turned a composition into a deadline. He refuses commissions and takes no fee for anything; he has never in his life asked payment for a secret, only the keeping of it. What he wanted from this house was not the stone at the dead man's throat but the picture the stone, the steam, and the man together made, and he could not let it be dismantled unmade. He went in past the cheetare, who had known him a fortnight and let him by for a word; he took his needle, made his single precise mark, folded a towel beneath the head because even a killing composition wants tidying, and could not leave the empty case sitting ugly on the shelf — so the stone went into a slipper, out of the frame, and he walked out clean. It is the third such closing of a file in this house in a twelvemonth, by my count, and I do not expect it to be the last. Cousin R is charged with the wilful killing of Xerxes Hartfield, and the matter, so far as this office is concerned, is closed.

When all's said and counted, the deed it was done,
and Cousin R the answer, when answer was none.
Poor Xerxes 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.