Summary. It was Fifi Swain, the parlour-maid at Cruikshank Manor, who killed Cousin R, and she killed him not for gain, nor for any quarrel the house ever knew of, but to keep herself from being looked at closely by the one man in it who made a study of looking; here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. She left the gallery at ten past nine on the plainest of errands, to fetch a hot iron for the drapery, an errand that put the weapon honestly into her hand before she had any notion of using it. Down the back stair she found Cousin R in the linen-room with the old laundry books untied before him, and struck him once from behind. She set the iron down cold upon the board, folded her cap and apron there — she had put them off for the tableaux, and had them over her arm already — and went out not by the servants' hall, where Mrs Gow sat the whole evening with the kitchenmaid and swears no one passed, but by the second door, through the still-room passage, back to the gallery. She was posed as Charity again by twenty-five past nine, and stood so a long while after, arms out and empty, while the house was told nothing.

The Reverend Gaunt falls away first, and easily: he was on the gallery floor from seven o'clock to the alarm, arranging his statuary by hand, with the Colonel, Lavinia and four hired girls to watch him do it. He never left that floor, and the linen-room is two flights and a passage distant. Quill goes next: from the quarter hour, the very minute Cousin R quitted the gallery, Gaunt held him motionless upon the first plinth as the Roman, with Lavinia and two girls at his elbow until the alarm was raised. He had no interval in which to reach the back stair, let alone return from it composed. Effie is cleared plainer still: she was shut in the study with Colonel Cruikshank from nine o'clock over the matter of her allowance, and the Colonel — a witness with no cause to shield her — vouches for the whole of it, the study lying at the far end of the house from where the body was found.

The motive sits at a narrower point than any of the household's small resentments. Fifi and her brother came into service eleven years ago as parish orphans, and the parish register gives their name not as Swain but as Swann. They took the one for the other at eleven years old and have kept it eleven years since, and no one at the Manor has ever remarked upon it aloud. Cousin R was the one guest in the house who watched rather than talked — who collected what he heard and spent none of it — and he had asked Mrs Gow, mildly, which year the twins had come; had remarked at table, before Fifi serving the fish, that a name is the one property a person cannot be robbed of, only surrender; and on the last evening of his life rose from his plinth to go and read the very papers that would have named her. Whatever shame lies behind the changing of that name at eleven years old is the family's own, and I have not gone digging for it beyond what the case required. It is enough to say that her whole safety in the world lay in never being singled out, and that Cousin R, that hour, was about to single her out for good.

I had nearly set this aside as sealed by the iron and the folded apron alone, but there is one thing more, small and worth noting before I close the book. His pocket-book, found in his coat, held a note of the hour and beneath it a single word, written in his own hand not ten minutes before he died: Swann. He had found what he went looking for. He simply did not live to read it twice.

Fifi Swain is charged accordingly — the third such matter I have carried out of that house this twelvemonth, by my count, and I do not expect it to be the last.

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