Rain had fallen through the previous night, and the corridors of Cruikshank Manor smelt of damp wool. The household had gathered, as it did each week, after Lady Lavinia's séance for the Colonel's late wife; and the Colonel, as was his custom, had set out port against Dr Quill's routine visit. It was an evening like a good many others, until it declined to be.
Dr Tobias Quill was found in the small morning-room off the east corridor, laid out flat upon the chaise. His hands were folded. A lily, taken from the hall arrangement, had been set upon his breast, and his own scalpel lay beside him. The composition was precise and unhurried — the pose of a man arranged rather than fallen. There was in it none of the disarray one associates with a struggle, but rather the settled tidiness of a thing done with attention.
The observable cause was a single wound from the scalpel. Little else about the room disturbed the eye; nothing was overturned, and the folding of the hands, the placing of the flower, had plainly been accomplished with care, and after the fact. A coroner would afterward observe that the death had been quick and the display slow — that someone had lingered to make the scene look a certain way.
Upon the side table stood the doctor's medical bag, open. Its rolls and phials had been sorted through with some deliberation. Set against Quill's own habitual list, the inventory disclosed a single absence: a bottle of chloroform was gone. Nothing else had been taken.
The morning-room adjoins the corridor that runs beneath the upstairs bedrooms. Nan's room lies almost directly above it; and through the previous night and this one, her cold had made itself heard along the corridor — a heavy, audible snoring that carried down the stair. She had been abed since the rainstorm, dosed and asleep, and Mrs Gow had looked in on her twice. She and Quill had been on easy, fond terms — of the whole company he was her one plain friendship, and she his easiest patient.
The others accounted for themselves variously. The Colonel had been in the smoking-room with Xerxes over the port from a little after ten, and the household vouched for both. Lady Lavinia had sat in the drawing-room after her séance with Effie and Mrs Gow, the three together until the discovery. Rev. Simeon Gaunt was away from Cairnholm on a preaching engagement; the twins Fifi and Zane were belowstairs upon the night's duties, vouched throughout by Mrs Gow; and Aziz had not come out to the Manor at all, but passed the night at Hartfield House.
Cousin R, the Colonel's unplaceable perennial guest, had been about the house all evening, and said he had retired early, troubled by the noise from the upper floor — his rooms lie on the corridor above the morning-room. He keeps a case of insect specimens, which he presses and pins; his method is the setting-board and the pin, and he has never kept or used any killing-jar or gassing agent. His mounts are taken and pressed, not gassed.
Captain Wat Frew, the smuggler, had come to see the Colonel, and was seen in the east corridor near the morning-room about the hour in question; he said he had merely passed by, and had seen someone else there. He and Quill had quarrelled openly of late. Quill had lately taken to supplying Effie's laudanum, and the trade Wat had once had of her had fallen away; the two had exchanged hard words within the week. Yet Wat carries his own stock of every useful substance, and a physician's chloroform is nothing he lacks or wants; and his known way, when he means harm, is the rigged mishap or the blow from behind — never a thing lingered over and arranged.
The lily lay where it had been placed, unwilted, upon the folded hands; upstairs, muffled through the floor, the sound that had troubled the house all night went on, unbroken and unquiet.