Summary. It was Xerxes, master of the house, who did it — not for the trust money, not to silence a blackmailer, but because a moralist had that afternoon learned the whole of his past and could not be bought, allied with, or waited out. Here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. Cause of death was strangulation by picture-cord, a coil taken from the room itself where a print had lately come down off the wall, knotted once and left, no staging beyond folded hands that were a kindness and nothing more. The whole business fell into the quarter-hour between the church-return and the gong, when the house was fullest and least watched, and the book-room lies a dozen steps from where everyone sat. That narrowed the matter at once to whoever was moving in that passage and could not be placed elsewhere for the full stretch of it. Lavinia's maid had her laced into her gown the entire time; she could not have come down the stair unseen, and so the household's first thought — the resented trustee, the savings ledger, decades of being doled her own money — falls on opportunity alone. The Colonel's carriage is logged at the door after Gaunt was already found dead, three servants swearing he had not yet entered; Nan rode with him and is logged the same. Wat was at the harbour steps until well past the gong, two boatmen and the tide-clerk to answer for him, and in any case Gaunt was the one man his trade could not touch — you cannot blackmail a man who wants to be exposed. Aziz never left the dining room, the cheetah at his feet and the company's eyes on him the whole quarter-hour. Quill and Effie sat together in the drawing room throughout, each the other's alibi, and the manner of the killing was in any case nobody's signature — plain household cord, ordinary knot, convicting no one by its style.

That leaves the man who was alone in the passage between cellar and dining room, decanting the wine, for stretches long enough. Xerxes had spent no small part of his life managing the people around him — Wat is bought, the Colonel is an ally worth keeping, Nan is a woman he reckoned he could simply outlast. None of that management answers a man like Gaunt, who had that afternoon sat with Lavinia over old family papers and understood, by his own unfinished sentence, the whole of it — some old business from Xerxes's years in India, which the house had kept shut in a closet and which is nobody's affair now but the dead man's and the guilty man's. A moralist wants no money and strikes no bargain; he wants only to be right, publicly, and ruin whoever he judges. That is a threat with no back door. Xerxes did not wait to see whether Gaunt meant to speak that evening or the next morning; he took the cord that was to hand, in the room that was to hand, and finished the matter before dinner was called. He then went back to the wine. It is, I think, the fourth time I have stood in that house over a body, though I make it the third this twelvemonth by my own count, and I daresay I shall be sent back before the year is out. The charge is murder, and I have laid it against him.

The method was quiet, the motive was plain,
and Xerxes shall never be spoken again.
Here Gaunt 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.