At Cruikshank Manor the shooting-party breakfast keeps its old order: the guns are out of the gun-room at first light, the party scatters across the coverts all the grey morning, and at noon it reassembles for the count. Dr Tobias Quill, being no shooting man, had been given the small blue bedroom off the east passage, and was to have joined the reassembly. He did not.
They found him in the blue bedroom, lying abed with the covers drawn to his chin and his hands composed at his sides, quite still. He had not risen for the count. There was no mark upon him and no disorder in the room; his nightshirt was still buttoned. He had been smothered in his sleep. A second pillow lay square upon the bed beside his head, its slip a little crushed — the one untidy thing in a room that was otherwise as neat as a made bed.
On the washstand stood a small brown medicine bottle, near empty, labelled in Quill's own hand as a sleeping draught, and his notebook lay open beside it. The house had always held that Quill's draughts were a mercy and never a danger; he dosed himself from his own bottle and slept hard. His port glass from the night before stood rinsed and dry on the tray by the door — whatever he had drunk, he had drunk hours before he slept.
The open page bore three lines in his cramped hand, dated the previous evening: the name 'Loveless', the word 'trance — pupils', and beneath, underlined twice, 'not the spirits'. Quill was coroner as well as physician, given to noting what he observed and to assaying anything that puzzled him; the household knew his notebook was always in his pocket. Into its spine he kept a small folded chemist's paper — a pinch of dark powder he had, by his last line, meant to have assayed. It was gone. Only the empty paper remained.
Mrs Gow, the Colonel's housekeeper, reckoned the doctor a poor riser and had left him undisturbed; his door was unlocked, as the guest doors are through the morning while the maids work the passage. The blue bedroom shares no view; the east passage is served only by the maids' round and by whoever lodges along it. Lavinia's room opens on the same passage.
As to the household. The Colonel — Colonel Cecil Cruikshank, the host, an inheritance-minded old soldier who disapproves of impropriety and keeps port for the doctor's visits — had led the guns from the gun-room at first light and walked the far coverts all morning; his loader and two beaters kept him in sight from the off until the noon count. Nan, his poor relation, who counted the doctor among her few easy friendships, kept the breakfast room and the still-room through the morning, laying the cold table; Mrs Gow and the kitchen maids had her in view without a gap.
Xerxes, the nabob, come out from town on business with the Colonel and a poor sleeper by night, arrived at the Manor only at half past eleven, his carriage logged at the lodge; he was walking up from the gates as the guns came in. Aziz, his companion, had travelled out in the same carriage, logged at the lodge at half past eleven with him; both were still at the gates when the doctor was found missing.
Fifi, a housemaid, worked the east passage and the linen-room through the morning with the under-maid, both vouched by Mrs Gow; she did not enter the blue bedroom. Zane, a footman, was out with the party the whole morning as a loader, carrying and keeping the second gun; the Colonel and the beaters had him at the butts from dawn to the count. Captain Wat Frew, a smuggler who trades in other men's fears and buried things, had come up for the shooting and walked the near covert; his beater lost sight of him for perhaps a quarter hour when the line reset before ten.
Cousin R, an unplaceable guest who orbits the Colonel and collects the household's secrets, did not shoot, but sat the morning in the library with the door ajar, seen there at intervals by the maids crossing the hall, though not continuously. Effie Strange, the Colonel's bright heir-presumptive, who takes a laudanum the doctor supplied, rose late and breakfasted alone at ten, then sat the morning-room with her letters; a maid brought her tea at eleven and found her there.
Lady Lavinia Loveless, the medium who sits weekly for the Colonel's late wife and had lodged at the Manor overnight, said she kept her room the whole morning with a headache. Her trances are her weekly business at the Manor, and the household is used to her keeping to her rooms by day, curtains drawn. No servant's round placed her there, and the east passage lay a short turn from her door. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt, for his part, was not at the Manor at all that morning; he kept a penitential vigil at his own chapel across the city, attended by his verger, and did not travel.
The party stood assembled at noon with the birds laid out in rows and one place at the count unfilled. Upstairs the small blue room lay tidy as a made bed, the second pillow square, the notebook open at a name and an underlined line, and one folded paper emptied of its powder.