It rained all that Sunday in Cairnholm, and stopped a little before eight, which is a thing worth remembering about the weather and nothing else. The household of Hartfield House came home from church in good order, shook out its umbrellas, and sat down to the long table, which was lit and crowded and observed from every side. Mabel, Xerxes's cheetah, arranged herself under the table among the boots and did not stir.
The company was as it usually was on a Sunday, with additions. Colonel Cecil Cruikshank had come to dinner upon business, and Nan Pringle had come because she goes where the Colonel goes. Captain Wat Frew was there, who runs Xerxes's cargoes and takes his money. Cousin R sat playing patience, a guest of no fixed origin who collects other people's secrets and is not known to have sold one. Aziz, Xerxes's companion of eleven years, Moroccan and exiled, sat where he always sat. Lady Lavinia Loveless, the medium, who lives at Hartfield on Xerxes's charity, sat beside her half-brother, the Reverend Simeon Gaunt, who dines at Hartfield most Sundays after his own service and has preached against the house for its idleness. Dr Tobias Quill had been invited to dine and to bring Xerxes his sleeping draught. And Effie Strange had come on the Sunday invitation, arriving from church with the rest — the bright young thing, heir-presumptive to the Colonel, and a good deal cleverer than she advertised.
Fifi and Zane were at Cruikshank Manor the whole of that day, kept at their work from morning to bed, and the household there vouches for both.
The champagne was poured at table by Zane's usual understudy among the footmen and carried round. Xerxes's glass was filled at 9:10, at the table, in front of everyone, and he carried it out himself. At 9:15 he rose and went alone to the small blue sitting room off the dining room, as he did every Sunday, to be quiet a half hour before the card tables were set out. A dish of glacé cherries and sugared almonds stood at his place; he ate none of them. Effie ate several and pushed the dish away.
Between 9:15 and 10:00 the dining table was continuously occupied, and each person at it was in view of the others. Effie left at 9:20, saying she wanted air, and came back at 9:50 with her hair damp. It had not rained after eight.
At 10:00 the Reverend Simeon Gaunt went to fetch Xerxes for cards. He found the sitting room door shut, knocked, got no answer, and did not go in. He returned within two minutes and said the master was asleep.
At half past ten Aziz found him. Xerxes Hartfield sat in the armchair in the small blue sitting room, quite dead, with a cushion of worked fringe-work lying across his knees and his champagne glass standing empty on the table at his elbow.
Dr Tobias Quill, who is also the city's coroner and had been at the table until 10:00 and in the billiard room with the Colonel after, examined him at once and was unhesitating. It was laudanum in the wine, and a great deal of it; and the smothering had come after, upon a man already insensible. There were no marks of struggle whatever. The room was in perfect order, which Quill remarked upon twice.
The cushion was the room's own, off the settle. Threads of its fringe were found caught at the corner of Xerxes's mouth.
The blue sitting room has two doors. One opens to the dining room and was in view of the table all evening. The other opens to the back passage by the still-room, and was not.
The still-room lies at the end of that passage and may be reached from the garden door without passing the dining room at all. The garden door was found unbolted. Upon the still-room shelf, beside the place where Mabel's meat had lain, stood a small blue phial, empty, of the sort Dr Tobias Quill dispenses. Quill keeps a case of such phials. He had brought one that evening, corked and full, for Xerxes's sleeplessness, and had left the case in the hall upon arriving at eight, where it sat until he took it up again at eleven. Anyone crossing the hall might have opened it, and three people said so at once.
Mabel is fed at nine each night by whoever is nearest the still-room. On Sunday the meat had been cut already and left waiting on the shelf, and by half past nine it was gone. She slept through the whole of it.
Xerxes was a poor sleeper and took a draught most nights at eleven. He never took one before bed-time, and never in wine.
There were other matters, of the kind that come out afterwards. Aziz wears at his throat, always, a large Indian sapphire in a plain gold setting. He wore it at church that morning and he wore it at dinner, and when the body was found the stone was still at his throat. It was a gift from Xerxes, made in the second year Aziz was in the house; it is worth some thousands of pounds, far past any wage Aziz has ever drawn, and he has never taken it off nor been asked how he came by it. On Saturday afternoon, at the tea table and in Effie's hearing, Xerxes told the Colonel that he had written to the jeweller Struan to have Aziz's stone reset, and that until it came back the setting would be kept under lock with the rest of his India things.
The velvet slip-case in which Xerxes kept the loose Maharaja's Sapphire — the stone from his India years — was found in his desk drawer, open and empty, its catch unforced. Nobody could say when the stone had last been in it. Effie's dress was searched by nobody, and no stone was found upon anyone that night.
Effie owes three hundred and twelve pounds about the town, and on Friday her chemist refused her further credit until the account was cleared. On Saturday she asked Xerxes, in the library, for a loan. The footman heard him say no, twice, pleasantly. She has more than once been observed to take up another person's manner for an evening — the Colonel's bark, Lavinia's hush — and to do it well, though never quite exactly.
The Colonel had that week proposed a buyout of the Bengal venture and been refused; the partnership stands as it was, paying both men. He sat at the dining table without interruption from 9:00 until the body was found, in the view of six people, with Nan beside him in continuous view the whole while. Wat left the table at 9:05 for the harbour, where the tide-clerk at the Kirk Wynd steps timed him aboard the Merle at 9:35 and ashore again at 10:20; he had a cargo of Xerxes's on the tide and stood to be paid out of it on Monday. Cousin R did not leave the table from 9:00 to 10:30, and the patience was witnessed. Aziz was in the dining room until 9:40 and thereafter in the front hall with Lavinia, who had left the table at the same moment and was with him unbroken until they found the body at 10:30. Gaunt sat at table until 10:00, went to the door, and came back. He has never, by his own account or anyone else's, been told what the closet at the head of the stairs contains.
The card tables were set out and were never used. Under the dining table Mabel slept on with her supper eaten. And at a man's throat, all the evening long, a sapphire nobody had thought to look at twice.