Summary. It was Cousin R, and not to silence him but to succeed him; here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. Wat Frew died where he was found, in the carved chair at the end of the long gallery, strangled from behind with a length of his own waxed sail-twine — a plain, seamanlike means, and nothing of the ordinary manner of the man who used it. He had said too much at dinner, but that was not the cause. He had said, further, that he sailed Thursday for a year and meant to settle every account first. That was the cause. Wat traded the town's secrets for money and was about to sell off the whole stock of them before he went; Cousin R had spent years merely collecting and keeping the same stock, the way another man keeps pressed flowers, and would not see it stripped and liquidated in a week. He set down his fork over the herring story and did not take it up again. That was the moment the thing was decided.

The night itself explains what a look at the pocket-book cannot. Nothing was taken — all seven entries survive untouched, which clears at once the notion that this was a blackmail victim silencing his tormentor. A man silencing a blackmailer takes the ledger, or burns it, or at least reads it. Cousin R did none of these things. He swept the floor and carried off the sweepings, brushed the coat, squared the boots, combed the hair damp, opened his own third flower-frame for six primroses and laid them in a fan with the stems turned one way, and pinned a label in his own cataloguing hand giving the date and the dead man's name and town. That is not concealment. That is a collector mounting a specimen he had always privately thought too coarse for the case, and finding at last, in a whole bolted night with nobody to interrupt him, the leisure to do it properly.

The rest of the house falls away on plain hours. Xerxes took his draught at half ten and Aziz sat with him till morning without once leaving the room. Lavinia sat her circle in the blue room from ten till past one with Gaunt attending the whole while, and the pair parted at their own doors after — neither of them ever in the gallery wing, which the night's work required entire. Effie was handed into her lodgings in Ferry Street at half past nine, an hour before the killing and a mile or so short of it. Quill drove on from there to a confinement at the fisher-cottages and sat with two women in the room until four. None of them had the hours, and the hours are the whole of this case, because the tableau could not have been built in minutes.

Cousin R alone had them. He alone was lodged in the gallery wing; he alone took the last glass with Wat there; nobody saw him again till breakfast, and the bolt was found shot from the inside, the key hanging untouched in the pantry where it always hangs. I had nearly set the matter down at that, and then remembered the primroses — his own frame, his own glass left unlatched, his own hand on the label. A man may borrow a knife. He does not often borrow another man's flowers to finish a murder he means to call his own work. I have charged him accordingly. It is the third this twelvemonth, by my count, and I do not expect it to be the last I carry out of that house.

Cousin R took his glass with a gentleman's air,
And Wat was discovered quite still in his chair.
The gallery shone, and the candles burned low,
While six little blossoms were set in a row.
The lesson, we think, is to leave things alone,
But breakfast was served on the customary tone.