Effie Strange — the bright young thing, heir-presumptive to Colonel Cecil Cruikshank — was found in the small anteroom off Xerxes Hartfield's Turkish bath, laid out neatly upon the tiled floor, her evening slippers still upon her feet, gone before dinner was called. It was a warm evening at the nabob's residence, the household gathered above stairs, while below the bath breathed its steam through the corridors like a guest determined to be everywhere at once.
Beside her, upon the marble shelf, lay an empty velvet slip-case, open, its silk hollow still holding the perfect shape of a great stone that was no longer within it. Where that stone had gone was no mystery of geography, for it had travelled no distance at all: in Effie's closed hand lay the Maharaja's Sapphire, that great Indian jewel, notorious by reputation, its worth plain to any eye that chanced to fall upon it. The lamplight found it, and was not disappointed.
The Sapphire was Aziz's. He had set it aside upon the marble shelf while he took the steam, as was his single exception; he wears it always and is never without it save in the bath. And the bath, one must note, gives onto only the one anteroom — a person leaving the steam room must pass through it, there being no other way to come or go.
On the sill stood a tumbler, half-drunk, smelling faintly of Dr Tobias Quill's poppy draught: Effie's own. And across the corridor threshold lay Mabel, Xerxes's cheetah, entirely at her ease and wholly undisturbed, having let whoever passed her pass.
It was a household that furnished such an evening with characters enough. Effie herself was famously insatiable in her spending and deep in debt — the sort who would take a thing worth taking; her covetous eye for fine stones was a settled joke below stairs. The Sapphire is worth a great fortune, though its value in coin is a trifle to a man of Xerxes's means; Aziz, by contrast, could never on his own have come by such a stone. He has worn it, given him under this roof, since he entered the household, and has never been known to sell it or to pledge it.
Some of the expected company was, conveniently, elsewhere. Nan Pringle and Cousin R had both been looked for at Hartfield House that evening, but sent word that the Colonel's business had detained them at Cruikshank Manor, where they passed the night, vouched for by the manor household; Fifi and Zane, who serve elsewhere, were the whole evening at Cruikshank Manor, abed and accounted for by the staff.
Those under the same roof gave their several accounts. Xerxes, master of the house and moving freely about it, said he had come up from below stairs shortly before the body was found, having gone down to see the bath drawn. Aziz had been in the steam through the whole of the window, the Sapphire upon the shelf without, and had emerged to find the anteroom already occupied. Captain Wat Frew, the smuggler who works for Xerxes and who had lately been Effie's supplier of certain comforts, was in the cellars checking a consignment, the under-butler beside him the whole while. Lady Lavinia Loveless, the medium to whom Effie had lately been a paying client, was in the upstairs drawing room laying out her cards for the evening's sitting, two of the staff attending her at the table. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt, her ascetic half-brother, was at prayer in the small library lent him for his visit, a footman having brought him water and left him to his devotions. The Colonel, come on a matter of business and guardian to Effie, was closeted with Xerxes's man of affairs over the ledgers in the study, unbroken, until the alarm was raised. And Dr Quill, physician and coroner, who supplies Effie's laudanum and had been called to the house that evening, was newly arrived at the front hall and still shaking off his coat when the body was found — the footman vouching the hour of his knock.
The steam still curled from the bath's open door, and on the tiled floor the great blue stone caught the lamplight in Effie's stilled hand, while below the household went in to dinner.