Dr Tobias Quill was the coroner for Cairnholm, and the most frightened man in it. This was not held against him. A coroner may be permitted his nerves; and Quill's other office — respectable dispenser of laudanum to the high town and half the low — required nerve of a different sort, together with a ruled pocket-book, in which he set down who had what, and how often, in a small upright hand that never blotted.
On a wet Tuesday evening in the winter of 1884, the standing whist rubber at Cruikshank Manor wanted a fourth, and the port was kept ready for the doctor, as it always was.
Effie Strange arrived at eight with a dish of glazed sugared almonds for the Colonel, and made the fourth. She is the merriest company in Cairnholm, and nobody quite counts her hours; beneath the sparkle she is quick enough to keep three conversations and a hand of cards going at once, which is more than the Colonel manages with one. Captain Wat Frew came at half past eight, as he does when the cellar wants replenishing, and stayed to watch the table. Cousin R sat at the fire and did not play, by long habit, having lately taken to observing the doctor's nerves with interest. Lady Lavinia Loveless, engaged on Fridays to sit for the Colonel's late wife, had come on the Tuesday only to collect her fee, and had stayed for supper; she reads a room's griefs the way other people read a bill. Zane Swain served, correctly, as he does everything.
At dinner Dr Quill had made an announcement. He made it plainly and without heat, as a man reports the weather: he had made up his mind to reduce two of his patients, and to stop a third altogether, and he would answer for it to the Medical Society if need be. He did not say which patients. Effie asked him twice, lightly, and he did not answer.
The dish of almonds sat on the card-table all evening. Effie ate from it herself, freely, in front of the table.
At 9:40 the doctor rose, pleading a headache, and went along to the library to sit alone with his port. The rubber went on without him, the Colonel taking the dummy hand. At 9:45 Mrs Sib Gow, the housekeeper, carried in the decanter and one glass, saw him settled, and shut the door. She was in the passage or the still-room from then until the discovery, and she says the library door was opened twice: once at about ten o'clock, and once nearer eleven.
At ten o'clock Effie left the table, saying she wanted air in the passage, and returned before the hand was played out. At about ten Cousin R went up to the long gallery to look at the Colonel's Indian prints, and was seen there from the stair by Fifi at twenty past ten and again by Nan at eleven o'clock. The rubber broke up at half past ten. Wat then went down to the cellar with Mrs Gow to count bottles against the Colonel's list, and was with her from a quarter past ten until eleven o'clock. Zane went to the pantry with the plate and the tally-book, and Mrs Gow had him in her sight or her hearing from ten o'clock onward, the pantry door standing open onto her passage. Lavinia had been with the Colonel and Nan in the small drawing-room from nine o'clock over her account, and was at supper with them from half past ten; Nan and the Colonel both vouch for her without a gap. Effie, after the rubber, was found in the morning-room with the Colonel's newspapers when the alarm was raised.
Elsewhere in the town, Xerxes had business papers out at Hartfield House and passed the evening there with Aziz; the Reverend Simeon Gaunt was at the mission hall in the Cowgate until midnight before a dozen witnesses; and Fifi and Nan were about the Manor's upper floors on household business, Nan with Lavinia and the Colonel from nine o'clock.
At 11:20 the library was opened, and Dr Quill was found in the wing-chair. He had been smothered with a cushion where he sat, having first been rendered insensible by laudanum taken in his port. The cushion lay neatly across his face. His hands were folded in his lap. His glass of port stood on the table at his elbow, drained, and his spectacles had been placed beside it, folded.
The decanter was untouched but for the one glass poured. The dregs of that glass, when tasted, carried the bitter-sweet flavour of laudanum, and rather more of it than a man would put in his own port.
Nobody in the house had been struck, cut, or shot at. There was no disorder in the library at all. The rug lay straight; the doctor's chair had not shifted on the boards. The cushion was one of a pair from the window-seat, and its fellow had been put back on the seat, plumped and square, the window-seat itself perfectly tidy.
On the library table lay the pocket-book, open, and in it a fresh page ruled into a list of names, with a column of dates and quantities against each. Two lines had been scored through. The topmost line was headed with the initials E. S., and against it, in his own hand, the words "no further."
A small blue bottle, empty and unstoppered, was found in the grate, dropped among the coals but not burnt. The label was the doctor's own dispensary label.
Nobody at Cruikshank Manor keeps laudanum but the doctor himself, who carries a dispensary bottle in his bag, and Effie, who is not supposed to. Effie takes it daily and has done for three years, and has two sources: the dispensary, and whatever Wat lands at the quay. The dispensary was the cheaper of the two, and the one that could be had without a favour owed. Quill had physicked her since she was sixteen and knew her constitution, her habit, and her exact daily measure better than her own maid did. He had written it all down.
Other arrangements existed. Wat had been pressing the doctor for months over a certificate Quill once signed and would rather not discuss; two payments had been made this winter, and a third was promised for Lady Day. The Colonel's will stands in Effie's favour, and Effie's debts in the town stand at rather more than her allowance; the Colonel disapproves of laudanum as he disapproves of most things, and would cut her off entirely if he learned the extent of it. Zane had no quarrel with the doctor and had been physicked by him twice without complaint. Cousin R collects what he learns of people and never asks anything for it.
The dish of sugared almonds was given to Mrs Gow afterward and eaten belowstairs by four people, with no ill effect on any of them.
The library fire burned down to a red seam. In the wing-chair the doctor sat as tidily as a man who had been arranged, the cushion square across his face, his spectacles folded at his elbow, and his pocket-book open on the table at the page where his own hand had written no further.