The Cruikshank-Hartfield billiards match is contested once a year for a purse so modest that the ceremony attending it must be understood as compensation. There is a formal dinner, a formal reading of the terms, a scorer appointed aloud, and a footman detailed to the decanters; and at the end of it all, some small coins change hands with the solemnity of a treaty. The Colonel has never seen the joke in this, and neither has Xerxes, which is precisely why the thing endures.
Dinner that evening was distinguished by a letter. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt had declined to come to the Manor at all, keeping to his own lodgings, but had sent his opinions ahead of him, and they were read aloud before the soup: that his estranged half-sister's séances were a swindle practised upon a widower's mourning, and that the Colonel was being emptied of his money by a woman who traded in his wife's voice. The Colonel went rigid at the table, held his silence for the length of a course, and afterwards said only that the game would begin at nine.
Lady Lavinia Loveless — the name is a stage one, and she wore it as such — took the reading with the composure of a professional. She had sat weekly for the Colonel these two years, bringing him word of his late wife, and she had lately begun to keep a private ledger of what was confided to her while she did it. She had not troubled to conceal this. The household spoke of it in the days before: that the book existed, and that Lady Lavinia had let it be known she meant to be paid for holding certain of its entries rather than releasing them.
Among the confidences she had let slip she held was the matter of Zane's tryst. She had named it aloud, days earlier, in Fifi's hearing, and had observed — pleasantly, as one might mention the price of coal — that the sealing of such a thing now carried a figure. Fifi went on trimming the lamp she was trimming and said nothing at all.
There was one further peculiarity of Lady Lavinia's, and she spoke of it herself without embarrassment: she was long-sighted, and in dim light she could not tell the twins apart. More than once she had greeted Fifi as Zane in a shadowed hall, and laughed at her own eyes when the error was pointed out.
The match went on. The Colonel stood to the table with his cue from the after-dinner hour onward, in the view of every guest in the room; Xerxes faced him as challenger, equally visible; Aziz stayed at his companion's elbow, fetching cue-chalk and standing where the chalk was wanted. Cousin R had the scoring, and called the frames aloud from a chair the players say he never quitted. Zane decanted and marked the board and was seen there without interruption. Dr Quill sat by the port, which the Colonel keeps for him, and drank it. In the drawing room Nan kept the fire and poured, in sight of the seated company all evening, with Mrs Gow passing through twice to vouch for it. Effie was in town at a card party, attested by her company into the small hours. Captain Wat Frew was at the harbour tavern until near midnight, vouched by the landlord and two of his crew, and came up to the Manor only afterwards.
Fifi was said to have been trimming and carrying lamps about the ground floor and the back passage, belowstairs and above by turns, as the work required. She was not fixed at the table with anybody.
At some point Lady Lavinia rose and said she was cold and would fetch a shawl from the cloakroom by the servants' stair. She went alone. The back passage that runs between the billiard room and that stair is a servants' way; guests seldom use it, and everyone in the house knew perfectly well which of its lamps were lit and which were left dark. That night the passage lamp had been left unlit.
She was found gone at eleven o'clock in the unlit back passage, struck down by a single blow. Quill, called at once from his port, gave the plain finding: one blow, and no other mark upon her; there was no blood to speak of. Nothing of the medium's own trade had been disturbed and nothing was arranged for effect. The scene was quite plain — a thing done quickly in the dark, and then left.
A maid's lamp was afterwards found at the foot of the stair, trimmed but cold. On the cloakroom shelf, where Lady Lavinia had been going, lay a man's hat. It was not the Colonel's.
The wager's small purse still lay uncounted on the green baize while the company stood in the doorway of a passage no guest had cause to walk, its lamp cold, the medium who heard the dead now silent in it.