Xerxes Hartfield had gathered a small company to dinner earlier that evening, and by the small hours of a still autumn night the guests had gone or retired, and Hartfield House lay dark. It was gone two o'clock — that hour when every household believes itself entirely abed — when the arrangement of the place was disturbed.
Zane, the footman, was found dead inside Aziz's bedchamber, in the far wing of the house. This was not his own quarters, and indeed no place a footman had any cause to be. He lay half-dressed: trousers and stockings, but no shirt, and his coat and shirt were nowhere in the room. His neck had been broken — a single efficient blow, no struggle. He was laid quite straight.
It wanted only a small survey to establish what had not happened. Nothing in the house had been taken. No plate, no jewel, no cash was missing; Aziz's rooms were undisturbed, and every drawer stood shut. Nor had any door been forced or window broken; in the morning every lock and latch of Hartfield House was found sound. The man had come and gone through nothing.
He had, however, come from somewhere. A trail of his passage — a dropped stud, a smear upon a bannister, a rug rucked at a turning — ran not from any outer door but inward, back through the house, from the direction of Lavinia's wing.
Aziz had been asleep in the bed when it happened, and woke only at the noise; he had heard and seen nothing before it. Xerxes gave his account calmly and without heat. He had come upon an intruder in Aziz's room in the night and had dealt with him. He named the dead man a burglar, and did not waver.
Of the man himself little ill could be said. Zane was reckoned the model servant — contained, correct, giving no offence and keeping every confidence; no one in the house owned a grievance against him. He was, moreover, a footman of another household, in the house only infrequently and never on ordinary business. Lavinia, for her part, lives at Hartfield House at Xerxes's charity. Xerxes is devoted to Aziz above all things, and has ever been sharp and fearful of anything that might touch him.
The household could be accounted for with tolerable ease. Fifi, Zane's twin sister, and Nan Pringle passed that night at Cruikshank Manor, abed and vouched for; Cousin R, Dr Tobias Quill, and Effie Strange were each elsewhere in the town that evening and did not come to Hartfield House at all. Mabel, Xerxes's cheetah, lay chained and drowsing in the hall through the night and gave no cry.
Xerxes himself, a notorious poor sleeper, was awake and abroad in his halls in the small hours, as is his habit; by his own account he came upon the dead man and killed him there. Lavinia had been in her own wing. Questioned, she supported the account of a burglar — but grew distressed and unsteady when pressed on particulars, and could not keep her story level. Captain Wat Frew had been in the servants' passage and the cellars until late on Xerxes's errands, vouched by two of the staff as below-stairs across the whole of the death window. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt, Lavinia's half-brother, had taken supper with her and departed before midnight, seen out at the gate by the night porter and not admitted again. Colonel Cecil Cruikshank, come on business earlier, had left after dinner and passed the night at Cruikshank Manor, vouched for by his own household.
So the house stood at dawn: every lock sound, nothing gone, a shirtless man laid straight in a room not his own, and the master of the house calm as still water — while the medium in the far wing could not keep her hands from shaking.