It was a wet Cairnholm autumn, and the household at Cruikshank Manor had gathered for its weekly business with the departed. Lady Lavinia Loveless, born Isolde Marsh and lately of the stage, sat down a little after eight to conduct the Colonel's sitting for his late wife, and the usual company arranged itself about her. Dr Tobias Quill was expected, as he always was, for his glass of port.
He was a familiar and easy guest, was Quill — physician and city coroner both, well liked in the house, and counted a friend by Nan Pringle. He was also held to be the most nervous man in Cairnholm, forever noticing more than was comfortable to him or to anyone near him.
He was found in the small library off the Colonel's study, seated upright in the wing chair kept for his use, his port glass drained and set neatly upon the salver at his elbow. He was quite dead. There was no mark upon him and nothing disordered about him; he had the composed look of a man who had merely finished his glass. He had been poisoned — a swift-acting cardiac drop, taken in the port — and had gone without protest or untidiness of any kind.
The port itself was the Colonel's particular arrangement. The decanter on the library sideboard is kept by Colonel Cecil Cruikshank expressly for Quill's visits, and no one else in the house takes it; that evening it stood two-thirds full and stoppered. Only Quill's glass had been used. It was the last thing he touched.
Beside the chair sat Quill's own medical bag, open. Within it, among the ordered vials, one small bottle of a cardiac tincture — digitalin, a heart-drop lethal in excess — stood with its dropper laid crooked and its level plainly lowered. As coroner, Quill kept and carried such heart-drops among his tinctures, and his bag was familiar to the servants, who had often fetched it and set it by his chair. It was a settled and unremarkable object in that house.
Here the matter grows tidy in an inconvenient way. A doctor's tincture and a poured glass leave the same trace and no other: the port smelt only of port. Whatever emptied the bottle in the bag emptied it into the one glass that was used.
Mrs Sib Gow, the Colonel's housekeeper, carried the port through to the library at half past eight and set it by Quill herself. She marks that he was then alive and complaining of the damp. She had seen the glass poured by the footman — that was Zane — whom she places at the sideboard with the decanter shortly before half past eight. For a poured glass at the Manor passed through the footman's hands between sideboard and guest; this was the custom, and no one thought upon it.
There was, in the fortnight before, a smaller matter. Twice Quill had remarked to the housekeeper that a servant at the Manor was 'not who the wages-book says' — a small puzzle he could not let alone, and one he had lately said he meant to raise with the Colonel. It is worth setting down that Fifi and Zane are twins, taken into service together, and that the household treats them as a matched pair, seldom troubling to tell which is which at a distance.
As to the company, they may be placed with some confidence. The Colonel sat at the séance table from a little after eight, holding Lavinia's sitting, and was vouched by the assembled circle throughout; Nan Pringle sat beside him from eight o'clock, her hands among the unbroken ring. Effie Strange, the Colonel's heir-presumptive, and Cousin R, that unplaceable guest who orbits the Colonel, were likewise seated within the circle, hands joined. Lavinia conducted the whole without pause, and the sitters hold she never left the table nor let a hand go.
Zane, having poured and carried the glass, waited at the séance table thereafter. His sister Fifi attended the séance room and the fire, in and out under Mrs Gow's eye both below stairs and above.
The others need only a word. Xerxes Hartfield had come by that afternoon on a matter of business and stayed to dinner with Aziz; the two passed the evening together in the drawing room, each vouching the other, and Mrs Gow looked in on them twice. Captain Wat Frew, smuggler and caller, arrived late and stayed in the billiard room over brandy with a groom until well after nine; the groom and Mrs Gow both place him there across the window. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt was away at his own parish that night, at prayers and vouched by his sexton; he did not come to the Manor at all.
So there it remained: the port decanter stoppered and two-thirds full; the single drained glass upon the salver; and the open bag beside the chair, one heart-drop bottle lower than it should be, its dropper laid crooked among the ordered vials.