Summary. It was Xerxes Hartfield, and for no reason a court would call sudden — here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. Fifi died at five minutes to eight in the plate-room passage, one ball, close range, and nothing about her disturbed after. She had gone up at half past seven happy in herself, having "learned something worth a wage rise," and what she had learned was a torn leaf of a shipping bill, Bombay to Leith, 1879, naming Xerxes Hartfield and one Aziz in a single cabin. She had dusted the small library that afternoon, where the Colonel's venture papers lay open since church. The paper is still in her apron pocket. Nobody took it from her, because nobody needed to; the paper without her mouth is nothing, and it was her mouth that had to be stopped. Fifi held one secret in her life and it was never her own — everything else she knew went round the servants' hall for a shilling within the week, and Captain Frew was already paying her that shilling regular. The moment the passage bill was in her hand, her silence was not a hope but a countdown, and Xerxes was the only man in the house who could not afford to wait out the week.

The method wants little telling. The Colonel's gun-room cabinet stands unlocked off the billiard corridor, nine pistols in it, every guest shown it at one time or another including, at length and often, Xerxes himself. He was seen there at half past seven by Cousin R and next at the dining-room door at eight, dry, unhurried, taking his soup with the same cheerful appetite he has shown at two prior corpses in this house. Between those two sightings lies half an hour nobody else can fill for him, and the plate-room passage is forty seconds' walk from where he stood. He took a pistol, loaded it, walked down, shot her once through the heart, wiped the weapon and left it on the window sill — an ordinary service piece, one of nine identical, telling nothing — and went in to his dinner. He did not search her pocket for the paper because the paper was never the danger. She was.

The rest of the house falls away on plain hours. The Colonel and Cousin R were together in the small library from twenty-five past seven till five-and-fifty, and crossed to dinner together under Mrs Gow's eye — neither was ever near the back passage, and besides, nothing about the body was staged or composed, which a man of the Colonel's theatrical disapproval could not have resisted arranging. Nan Pringle stood beside Mrs Gow in the still-room at the very moment the shot sounded. Captain Frew dried his coat at the kitchen fire from a quarter past, in the sight of the cook and two girls, and had besides no earthly reason to silence a source he was paying weekly and profitably. Lady Lavinia and Dr Quill kept each other honest in the blue drawing room from five-and-thirty, and her own secret — Zane's tryst, not Aziz's parentage — was never the one in Fifi's pocket. Aziz stood in the front hall from twenty past, placed there by both Zane and Mrs Gow, at the far end of the house from the shot. Effie was in her maid's hands the whole half hour, and the reverend was over roof accounts before four churchwardens, which is alibi enough for a roof and rather more than a roof deserved.

That leaves the true grain of it, which I set down without relish. Xerxes's whole standing in this town, his fortune and his safety both, rest on Aziz being taken for a servant and nothing more. What the two men are to one another is their own affair, and I did not put it in this file; what it drove one of them to is mine to report. Two people in Cairnholm have known the truth of it for years and held their peace — Nan and Zane — and the house was safe for exactly as long as Fifi did not. She dusted a table at four o'clock and by five to eight the safety was over, and Xerxes Hartfield, who had turned aside her three public advances with nothing but weary good grace because she knew nothing worth the trouble, found in one afternoon that she knew everything. He is charged accordingly. The fish knives, I am told, were fetched by another girl the next morning.

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