Colonel Cecil Cruikshank had thrown a birthday dinner for Effie Strange, his heir-presumptive, on a raw autumn evening, and the thing was done handsomely: champagne, a table heaped with presents, and the bright young thing the centre of every eye. The company sat late over the cake before dispersing to cards, to the smoking-room, and to the cold garden. Nan Pringle, the poor relation of the house, kept to the edges of the gathering, as she does.
A little after eleven o'clock she was found in the small morning-room off the main hall, seated in a low chair. A single narrow incision had been made to her wrist, and she was found to have bled out. A physician's lancet — one of a cased set — lay on the carpet by her hand.
There was no disorder about her. No furniture overturned, no cloth torn, nothing broken. A single glass of champagne stood untouched on the side-table, gone flat.
The lancet was no household object. It belonged to the fitted medical case that Dr Tobias Quill carries, and which he had left open in the hall alcove upon entering. Any hand passing through the hall might have taken it up.
On Nan's lap lay her own account-book, open, its final entry a fresh column of figures in her hand, the ink not yet fully dry when she was found. Tucked in the book's spine was a folded slip of paper, addressed in Nan's hand to Dr Quill; it named a sum, a date some weeks past, and the two words 'the draught'.
It was Mrs Sib Gow, the Colonel's housekeeper, who fixed the hours. She had passed the morning-room at half past ten and seen Nan alive and writing; she found her at a little after eleven. Between those times the hall stood empty of servants, the whole staff being belowstairs clearing the dinner.
Nan and Dr Quill had known one another since childhood, before either had become what they now were; among the household they were reckoned easy and unguarded together, as with no one else. Nan, as poor relation, kept the Colonel's small accounts, and had lately taken to keeping private figures of her own in the book she carried everywhere. She was also the other claimant to the Colonel's fortune — for Effie's mounting debts to a certain supplier were an open secret, and the birthday and the inheritance both hung over the evening. Some weeks past, one of Effie's friends had fallen gravely ill after a sleeping-draught prescribed in the house; the matter had been hushed, and the physician had signed it a natural misfortune.
Lady Lavinia had of late grown short with Nan, muttering that the poor relation 'saw too much'; Nan, for her part, had let fall that she knew where certain trysts were kept.
The evening's absentees were quickly told. Xerxes Hartfield and his companion Aziz dined in town and never came to the Manor; Captain Wat Frew was aboard his vessel in the harbour; the Reverend Simeon Gaunt kept a night vigil at his own chapel. Fifi and Zane Swain, the house's twin servants, were belowstairs with Mrs Gow the whole evening, vouched for by the staff. Cousin R sat apart in the library the length of the party, seen there by two guests.
Of those in the house, the reckoning went thus. Dr Quill had arrived before dinner, his open case in the alcove all evening; a nervous man, present as a matter of social routine, for whom the Colonel keeps port. After the cake he had stepped out of the dining-room alone 'for air', and could not be placed by anyone between half past ten and eleven o'clock. Lady Lavinia Loveless, the medium who keeps a weekly sitting for the Colonel's late wife, had been at the card-table in the drawing-room from ten o'clock onward, partnered through every hand; the Colonel and two guests vouch she never rose. Effie had been the centre of the party throughout; from ten until past eleven she was opening presents before the whole company, never once alone. And the Colonel himself presided in the drawing-room over the presents and the cards, in continuous company from ten o'clock.
The small morning-room, then: tidy as a made bed. A flat glass of champagne, an open account-book with its ink still drying, and a physician's lancet on the carpet where a hand had let it fall.