Summary. It was the lodging-maid, Fifi Swain, and she killed not for gain but to stop a mouth that had already cost her brother his place once, and meant to cost the family name a second time; here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. The clock gives the hour. It stopped at 9:20, broken by the blow that threw Lady Lavinia forward against the mantel-shelf, and chipped it. That fixes the murder to a narrow window, and against that window every account in the house may be measured. Xerxes Hartfield was at billiards with Captain Frew from a quarter past nine, and the under-footman found them both at the table at half past — he could not have struck the blow and been back at his cue in five minutes with a flat-iron to dispose of besides. The Reverend Gaunt, Aziz, and Cousin R sat the whole evening at the sorting-table under one another's eyes, and the full saucers of blue and gilt and rim-pieces are the evening's honest record of it; a man cannot sort china and brain a woman with a flat-iron in the same ten minutes without somebody noticing an gap in the heap. Dr Quill was at the Fever Hospital from seven until half past ten, his name and the hour entered in the porter's book, and the street door had been locked since eight in any case. Captain Frew himself was seen at the lock before the quarter and at the billiard table after it, and besides — a debtor dead pays nothing, which is a poor motive for the man she owed money to, rather than the reverse.

That leaves Fifi, who left the table at nine on the stated errand of hot water and was, by her own account, alone in an empty scullery from then until the alarm — which is to say, nobody can place her there at all. The back stair from the laundry-room comes up within six feet of the breakfast-room door, and one of the three flat-irons kept there was found cold upon the hearth, carried up and set down by whoever used it. The letter-case had been opened with a knife, not a key — the key hung still round the dead woman's neck — because the one person in that house with no claim upon the key had urgent need of what was inside it. The bowler on the sideboard, too large for any gentleman present and perfectly dry though the rain had not stopped since eight, was bought at a quayside chandler's, of a kind sold by the dozen, and Fifi had been seen carrying such a parcel from the Sailors' Rest, where her brother lodges. It is not a signature, that hat. It is a lie set down in haste by somebody who wanted the house thinking of an intruder off the quay, and who had, I noticed, trodden hearth-ash clean across the carpet in her hurry to be done and gone before the others came back from admiring the mended jug.

As to the why of it, the two women kept the same trade from opposite ends. Lavinia was told things, in confidence, at her sittings, and banked them in that morocco case against the day they might be spent; Fifi's whole discipline, in service and out of it, has been that what passes about her brother goes no further. She had reason to know the banking was not idle. Three weeks before, Zane Swain was turned off from Cruikshank Manor without a character, on the strength of an anonymous letter naming a night and a room correctly, and what Zane was doing in that room, and with whom, is his own affair and none of this office's — I will only say it was of a kind neither the Colonel nor the servants' hall would have let pass quietly, and that Lavinia had attended the Manor's sittings all that summer with Zane at the door, and had twice remarked in company that a footman out of his own quarters at eleven was a footman with a private appointment. The Tuesday note, asking that Fifi be lent over for the porcelain evening, and adding that she had something of her brother's to put to her, was not an invitation. It was notice that the rest of what Lavinia held was about to be spent as the first part had been. Fifi struck once, cut the ribbons, burned what the case held before she or anyone else could read it twice, and went back down to an empty scullery to wait for the house to find the body without her.

It is a plain motive dressed in an unhappy family's trouble, and no more romantic than that. I have charged her, and the papers are gone past recovering, which is a mercy to nobody now. The third this twelvemonth, by my count, and the year not out — I had rather hoped, going up the drive, that this house had used its share.

Fifi moved quietly, primly, and slow,
While Lavinia watched the white fragments below;
The iron came down with a modest dull sound,
And the clock lost its temper and stopped at the round.
We vow that discretion is better than talk—
Then carry the scandal the length of the walk.