Hartfield House kept a birthday on a wet November evening in 1884, and kept it handsomely. The long dining room was got up with hothouse lilies, which scented the whole of the ground floor, and beneath this there ran the faint tar of the boot-room, where Captain Wat Frew's landed goods sat in crates awaiting the customs man's convenience. Xerxes carved and poured at the head of the table. Effie Strange, being the occasion, sat in the middle of it and opened presents to applause, from half past eight until eleven, watched throughout by a dozen people who had nothing better to watch. Mabel, the cheetah, had been given her mutton at nine o'clock in the kitchen court by Xerxes himself, before two kitchen maids, and had thereafter come in and gone to sleep under the table, as was her custom.
Aziz left the table at a quarter past nine. He said he would see to the boot-room door, which had been found unbarred twice that week. Nobody remarked on it. Aziz had come to Cairnholm with Xerxes from no part of India at all — he was Moroccan, and exiled, and had lived in the house these nine years — and he kept the upper landing, the linen closet, and Xerxes's hours, which were late and ill-slept.
At ten minutes past eleven he was found in the boot-room passage, seated upright against a crate, with a length of tarred twine about his throat. He had been strangled with it, drawn from behind and made fast at the nape. There was no blood anywhere in the room, and nothing in the passage was overturned. His fez was straight upon his head.
The knot repaid looking at. It was a seaman's knot, tied left-over-right and finished with a double turn — the sort of thing a man makes in the dark, without consulting his hands. Dr Tobias Quill, who is also the coroner, was fetched from a lying-in in the town at half past eleven, and gave it as his opinion that death had come between nine o'clock and half past ten.
The twine was of a piece with the twine binding Wat's crates in that same passage; a coil of it lay open on the crate nearest the body, its cut end fresh. This was less conclusive than it sounded. Wat's twine and Wat's knots are known to every man on the Cairnholm quay, any sailor's boy can tie the same, and two of Xerxes's own crates in the boot-room are bound with the identical twine by the identical hand.
Aziz wore, as he always wore, a fez and a single emerald ring. The ring was still on his hand, and his purse untouched.
Under his heel lay a small brass key. It opens the linen closet on the upper landing, and Aziz carried it on his person; the household understood, without ever having been told, that the closet was Aziz's to keep and nobody else's to open. The lock of that closet bore three fresh scratches at the keyhole, made by something thinner than its key. Nothing inside was missing.
It should be said of Captain Wat Frew that he keeps a ledger of other men's business and sends bills for his silence, and that three households in Cairnholm pay him quarterly. On the Tuesday before the birthday his crates were shifted from the cellar to the boot-room passage, which put him for the first time on the upper stair, by the linen closet. A housemaid saw him on that landing on the Wednesday with a hat-pin in his hand and no hat. On the Thursday he told Xerxes that his commission on the winter cargo would want doubling, and named no reason for it. Xerxes laughed at him. Aziz did not laugh, and was heard to tell Wat on the stair that he would go no further up it.
Wat sat at the birthday table for the champagne and rose from it more than once. He was gone from the room from a quarter past nine for some forty minutes, and said he had been checking the boot-room bar. No one sat with him in that time. The passage itself lies between the kitchen stair and the garden door, and a person going to it from the dining room passes nobody at all if the servants are at the champagne. The servants were at the champagne.
The rest of the house is soon accounted for. Xerxes was in the kitchen court at nine before his maids, and afterwards at the head of his own table, carving and pouring, until the body was found. Colonel Cecil Cruikshank had come for the birthday of his heir-presumptive and to have a paper signed, and sat in the study with Xerxes's clerk from nine until twenty past ten over the articles of the shipping venture, the clerk signing and witnessing each sheet as it was read. The Colonel has said in company that what passes at Hartfield House is Xerxes's own affair, and that a partner does not meddle in a partner's household. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt was in the chapel-room with his half-sister from half past eight until the alarm, at his devotions; Lavinia and a housemaid bringing coals both attest he did not leave it, and Lavinia was there with him the whole time. Gaunt was at a mission at Tangier in 1871, in the year of the plague, where Aziz was a gravedigger; in nine years of Cairnholm evenings neither man has given the smallest sign of knowing the other's face. Effie never left her chair. Nan and Cousin R passed the evening at Cruikshank Manor over cards, with Fifi and Zane abed there, all four vouched for by that household.
So Aziz sits against the crate with the tarred twine at his throat and his fez straight upon his head, the brass key beneath his heel, while in the dining room above them Effie is given a third glass and Mabel does not wake.