Summary. It was Aziz, and he did it because Fenella Swain was the loosest tongue under that roof and had that very morning come upon a secret certain to travel the instant she held it — so the man charged with keeping it stopped her mouth before it opened. Here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. The wound and the hour gave me the frame before I had a name to put in it. Dr Quill's half-hour — half past eleven to noon, one close blow, no cry heard in a passage full of dogs and baskets — meant the killer had to be a body loose from the line at that time and near enough the gun-room to walk there and back inside it. That narrowed the party considerably, and it narrowed it before I had troubled myself with motive at all.

Lavinia I set aside first, and gladly, for she never left the morning-room; the Colonel had her over the accounts the whole while, and Mrs Gow carried the tea in twice to prove it. Effie stood the far gun in the beech spinney under the eyes of a loader and two beaters from before eleven to the count, and the spinney is ten minutes' walk from where the girl died — ten minutes she did not have. Quill himself walked the near hedge in company the whole morning and came to the body only when it was found, which is a poor position for a murderer to arrange for himself. Zane, who might have had cause enough as her own brother, never left the yard and the kennelman will swear to it. The rest — the clergyman on the coast, the cousin with his newspapers, the sick girl abed, the boatman at the harbour — were none of them within a mile of the cover, and I did not trouble them long.

That left the two turns from the line itself, and only one of them was unaccounted. Xerxes never left the Colonel's sight; the Colonel is a precise man about his guests as he is about his guns, and I believed him. Aziz did leave it — turned back alone shortly before eleven on the excuse of a fouled gun, and was not seen again by the two beaters who marked him going until he came up at the noon count, easy and unhurried, as a man comes up who has done nothing all morning but walk. That gap was his, and his alone, and it sat exactly across the half-hour Quill had given me.

The knife wanted no explaining once I had the man — a gralloching blade off the board in the gun-room, the same board any of the shooting party passed a dozen times that morning, taken up and put back and telling me nothing of whose hand had held it. Nor did the handkerchief signify what I first took it for. I had thought, seeing it folded so neat against the wound, that I was looking at a signature — some declaration left behind by a hand that wished the dead girl tended even in the killing of her. I put that notion down in the end. It was no plainer than any gentleman carries in his own coat, unmarked, and told me only that whoever left it there could not bear to leave her lying open. That is not evidence of affection for the dead; it is only evidence of a man not wholly a stranger to feeling, which is a different thing, and convicted no one by itself.

The why of it I had from Mrs Gow, who heard the girl say before the guns went out that she'd "seen a thing in the guest's papers she oughtn't," and meant to ask about it — Fifi having lingered, by Mrs Gow's account, over Xerxes's travelling desk while laying the fires that morning, the desk left unlocked as such things are left by men who do not expect servants to read. The household knew Fifi for a girl who could not sit a fortnight on anything she'd learned; she carried news the way other girls carry parcels, and set it down wherever there was an ear to take it. What she had found in that desk was not mine to go looking for, nor is it now, and I did not look further than I needed. What Xerxes was to Aziz, and Aziz to Xerxes, is their own affair, of long standing and no one else's business; what the fear of its coming out drove Aziz to is mine, and it drove him to a knife off a board and a girl silenced in a cold passage before she could carry what she'd seen any further than the fires she'd been sent to lay.

I had near forgot the small thing that closes it, though it is small only until you set it beside the rest. The two beaters who marked Aziz turning back both gave the same reason for remembering it at all — that a fouled gun is common enough on a wet morning, but a man who mends one himself, unassisted, in eleven minutes, and comes up to the count with his piece cleaner than when he left, is a thing a beater notices without knowing why he has noticed it. He had time enough for the passage and time enough for the gun, and not much more than that. It is not much of a fact to hang a man on, but it did not need to hang him; it only needed to close the door I had already found open. I have charged him, and the file goes to the Fiscal. The third this twelvemonth, by my count, and the year not out.

Aziz turned back alone, alleging some disgrace,
While Fifi crossed the larder with baskets to her place.
A close and civil stroke was dealt, then all was still,
The household counted noon and found the luncheon bill.
We'll learn that guarded secrets are safer when kept deep,
Then lose them over coffee before the servants sleep.