Summary. It was Aziz, the Colonel's — no, Xerxes Hartfield's own man, who did it, and not for coin nor for his own skin but for his master's. Wat Frew had found what the house kept locked on the second floor and meant to put a price on it that night, to Xerxes or against him, and Aziz stopped him before the price could be named. Here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. The wound settles the manner before anything else is asked. Dr Quill called it one blow, close and upward, delivered by a man facing his victim, and Wat never raised a hand to it. Wat Frew was no fool about danger — he kept a pistol in his coat and never in his life turned his back on a stranger, and that pistol was found undrawn. A man does not sit still and unguarded before an enemy. He sits still before someone he has no reason to fear. That narrows the household a good deal, and it was the first thing that turned my eye from the obvious candidates to the quiet one.

The hours do the rest of the work, and I confess I am tired of totting up hours in that dining room — this makes the third such evening this twelvemonth, by my count, and the year not done. The Colonel never left his chair, with Mabel lying across his boots from 10:45 to vouch for him better than any footman could. Xerxes was absent only three or four minutes, at the hall door, under two witnesses, at the wrong end of the house entirely. Lavinia went out the hall door, not the corridor door, and sat under the parlourmaid's eye from 10:40 to the alarm. Gaunt stayed at table until 10:55 and was reading aloud thereafter with two women for company — and besides, Wat would hardly have sat unmoved before the cleric who had lately preached against his trade from the pulpit. Quill never left the footman's side. And Effie, for all that Wat held her leash tighter than anyone's, found her parcel that night doubled rather than cut off — a man does not murder the hand that has just given him more, not less, of what he wants.

That leaves the one man who left the room by the corridor door — the only door that puts a man out of sight at once — at 10:42, and returned at 10:58, sixteen minutes unaccounted for on an errand he never ran. The savoury he claimed to be seeing about came up from the kitchen at 10:50 and sat untouched on the sideboard; he never went near the kitchen at all. A knife was gone from the cleared covers, ordinary enough that anyone at table might have taken it, but it was Aziz who was out of the room when it mattered, and it was Aziz whose left cuff came back to the table turned under and closed with a napkin pin from the sideboard — the small vanity of a tidy man covering a stain he had no time to wash out before pouring the port.

As to why — the household had read Wat Frew as everyone's trouble and no one man's enemy, a blackmailer with half the table in his book, and had settled on the Colonel or the Reverend as the likeliest to have turned on him. But the Colonel's quarrel with Wat was a matter of money, and money does not explain a man killed within arm's reach by someone he trusted. The true grievance ran elsewhere. That locked closet on the second floor holds the proof, such as proof is kept, of what Aziz is to Xerxes Hartfield and has been these eleven years — a place at the family table by the master's will alone, a key that answers to no one else, a man who has not slept a night outside that house in over a decade. What the two of them are to one another is their own affair, and I have set none of it down here beyond what the case requires; what it drove Aziz to is mine to report. Wat had found the closet and meant to use it, one way or the other, against the man who kept Aziz there. Aziz did not wait to learn which way. He went out by the corridor door, stopped the threat with a kitchen knife, pinned his sleeve, and came back to pour the port before the soup had gone cold on the sideboard.

He has made a full statement and the charge is laid. The closet, I am told, will now be opened by nobody but Mr Hartfield, and that is as it should be.

Aziz spoke with Wat in the hush of the hall,
And Wat, quite untroubled, expected no fall.
The blood on the cuff was concealed with a pin,
The household went on as though nothing had been.
The moral is simple: keep clear of a snare,
But we shall not mention the snare on the stair.