Summary. It was Lady Lavinia, and for her roof over her head, not for love nor for gain in the ordinary way; here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. She lodged three doors off, in the small chamber given to her sittings, and had nothing else in the world. The Colonel's money stopped in August. The lease at Marine Terrace was given up in July. Aziz had told the housekeeper on Friday that she was to be out by Christmas, in the kindest way a servant can deliver such news, and on Saturday the one sum that might have bought her another roof — the annuity, the Marine Terrace money itself — was put by Xerxes's own hand into a deed settling it on Aziz for his life. She read the notice of her own lease sale on Saturday's Herald and marked the sum owing in her own ink. That is motive enough for most men I have buried this twelvemonth. But there was a second thing, and it is the uglier of the two, though I shall not dress it in its true name: at that evening's sitting she had been made to understand, by his watching rather than his words, that Aziz had seen she knew what passed between himself and his master — what the two of them were to one another, which is their own affair, not mine, save that it gave her the one lever in that house worth holding. With Aziz gone and the secret unspoken by him to anyone, she alone would hold it, and a woman holding such a thing in a household like that need never be put out of it. It wanted only that he not live to tell Xerxes she had read the door, and that he not live to see her put out before he could.

The method was quiet, as her methods generally are. She retired at a quarter past ten and let the house settle. The brandy on the gallery sill was her excuse for being on the boards, left there untouched because she never meant to drink it. Xerxes's dressing room, which adjoins her own chamber and stood open that night because Aziz was in and out of it on his master's business, gave her the blue phial of Quill's draught without need of any key but the dead man's own habits. Aziz's door was unbolted, as it always was when Xerxes slept under the same roof; she measured the draught into his water glass, and he being the soundest sleeper in that house, by everyone's account, never stirred to notice it. She then took the pillow from beside him and held it until it was done, and set the pillow back neat at his head, and straightened what little the struggle had disturbed. She touched nothing else. The Sapphire stayed at his throat because a theft would have made it a thief's crime, and brought men with lanterns into every room in the house, including hers. Mabel did not cry out because Mabel knows her step as well as she knows the housekeeper's, and a woman who has lodged there since July is not a stranger on the boards.

The household first read it as the Tangier business, on the strength of two questions Aziz put to Gaunt at table that the minister would not answer, and I do not fault them for it — a flagellant minister with a buried history makes a tidy villain on paper. But the sexton at St Mungo's had Gaunt in the vestry from eleven until half past twelve, writing Monday's notices under the man's own eye, and walked him to the manse door after; the death falls square inside that window, and Cairnholm is not so small that a man can be in two parishes at once. The second reading was the jewel, with Effie's debts behind it, but the Sapphire never left the dead man's throat, and a woman in Effie's circumstances, got that far into the room, does not leave the one thing worth having. She was in any case set down at Cruikshank Manor at half past ten with the Colonel and with Nan, and none of the three returned. Xerxes himself I cleared on the plainest ground there is: the deed enriching Aziz was his own instruction, wanting only his signature, and a man does not smother the fellow he has just resolved to make comfortable for life; besides which the groom found him at his desk with the lamp lit at one in the morning. Wat was in the boot-room with the boot-boy past two, the boy awake with his tooth the whole while, and Wat besides is not a man who leaves a king's ransom in stone lying on a corpse. Quill was delivering a child in Fish Street from ten until past four, which covers the window entire, and the phial in the room was not his hand at work that night but his draught from six o'clock, taken by another. The Colonel was shouting at his own barometer at eleven, by his household's testimony, and had no more use for Aziz's death than for the shipping partnership it does nothing to touch. Nan does not act with her hands; she watches and she tells, and a pillow held at a bedside is not her manner of harm. Cousin R was aboard the Leith packet by eight that evening, his name entered in the harbour clerk's book, and was off Cairnholm water hours before the thing was done.

That left only the three doors off the east corridor, and of the three, only one had no one to vouch for her between a quarter past ten and morning, and a motive that wanted no imagining. I have been to Hartfield House before on worse business than this and expect, Lord help me, to be sent again; this makes the third killing in Cairnholm this twelvemonth, by my reckoning, though the almanac may differ with me. Lady Lavinia Loveless is charged with the wilful murder of Aziz, and the file, such as it is, is closed.

Lavinia tucked the brandy glass away from sight,
While Aziz slept softly through the night.
The blue draught waited by the bed,
And the household praised the quiet dead.
The moral, we vow to lock each door,
Then leave the very same unlocked as before.