Summary. It was Cousin R, and for neither the jewel nor the secret nor any price at all, but for the look of the thing itself; here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. The death was a smothering, plain and quiet — a folded linen from the bath's own stack, held over the face of a man lying at his ease in the heat, no wound, no struggle, nothing broken or disarranged. That plainness is itself a fact. A thief in haste does not damp a furnace to make a room comfortable to stand in. A blackmailer paid or refused does not stay to set a fez straight and lay a cut flower across a dead man's breast. Whoever did this stayed. He had time, and he used it on arrangement, not on gain. The sapphire at the throat and the empty case beside it told the household robbery; they told me the opposite. Nothing was taken. What was left was left with care — the fez brushed and upright, the tassel drawn straight, the orchid cut clean with a blade that was not the gardener's shears, which hung untouched on their nail. A thief does not trouble himself with tassels.

The window was half past nine to eleven, and against it the house very nearly cleared itself. Nan and the Colonel sat at cards together the whole while, four witnesses apiece, and the Colonel besides had no reason on earth to kill the one man whose signature his shipping venture required — the papers went home unsigned in his own pocket. Wat fed the cheetah, then sat in the servants' hall over cards until the alarm, and it was Wat who had announced to half the gala that Xerxes bathed alone and unlocked at nine — no man broadcasts the hour and manner of a killing he means to commit that same evening. Lavinia gave her séance before eleven sitters with the doors shut for effect, then took brandy with the same party; she was never out of company. Her brother Gaunt sat the séance out in the front row, loudly, and stood after with the vicar's people — and in any case a smothered man dressed up with a flower is no penance for anything, which is the only coin Gaunt deals in. Effie read her Latin labels to a knot of witnesses until a quarter past ten and then lost at cards to the Colonel until the alarm — covered at both ends of the window. Quill was in the billiard room from ten until the alarm, four witnesses, and his own sleeping draught came down undrunk in Aziz's hands at ten past eleven — nothing of his trade was used. Aziz was seen twice by staff about the still-room and the passage, came down with that same untouched draught, and left the sapphire he cases every night sitting plainly at the throat — a man does not neglect his own routine and then decline to take the one thing that routine exists to guard. Fifi and Zane were abed at Cruikshank Manor by ten, vouched for by the housekeeper, three counties away from a conservatory neither of them entered that night — and the orchid, remember, was cut in that conservatory.

That leaves Cousin R, seen in the conservatory at half past nine and not again until eleven, admiring the tiled chambers aloud, twice, as the finest setting in Cairnholm and a waste that no one was ever seen in them. He holds the secret of the Swains' true name and has held it eleven years without asking a farthing of it, which told me early that he is not a man who trades in what he knows. He is a man who arranges what he sees. Xerxes laid straight on his own marble, in his own famous heat, the fez set right, a token of some old attachment left at his throat, a flower cut and placed across him — it is a composition, made and left for the house to come upon, and no part of it was for sale. What R wanted was not the jewel, not the name behind the Swains, not even the secret closet two others in Cairnholm keep silent on and will go on keeping silent, for it is no part of this file and no part of his crime. He wanted the picture. He made it, and stood back, and let the house walk in on it at ten past eleven, as he meant them to.

I had very nearly closed my notebook on it when I recalled the shears again, hung untouched on their nail while the stem stood cut with a blade of another kind — a small thing, but it is the small things that hold a file together, and it fixed a pocket-knife, and a hand that troubled to use its own. Cousin R is charged accordingly, the third such matter to cross my desk this twelvemonth, and I do not expect it to be the last.

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