Hartfield House gave its orchid gala on a night of no particular distinction, and the hothouse was kept at that punishing heat which the orchids require and which the company endured with champagne. The glass sweated. The palms dripped. Along the borders beyond the flowering benches stood the poison collection, each pot labelled in Latin upon its little brass plate, and the guests admired these as one admires a well-kept regiment: from a courteous distance, and without touching.
By eleven o'clock the gala had thinned. The company drifted out of the heat and into the long drawing-room for the singing, where Lavinia sat at the piano from 10:50 and accompanied them before eleven other persons, none of whom had cause to look away from her. Xerxes stood at the drawing-room door from 10:50, receiving the last arrivals, and remained in the sight of the room until the alarm.
Aziz went out to the conservatory alone at about ten minutes past eleven o'clock, as he did most nights, to shut the vents. He had taken no wine and had eaten nothing since noon.
He was found at 11:20, face-down in the long orchid trough at the conservatory's east end, the peat pressed into a shallow hollow about his face. He had been smothered — held down in the damp peat until he stopped. There was no wound upon him of any kind, and no blood anywhere in the glasshouse.
His fez lay a yard off in the gravel walk. One sleeve was black to the elbow with wet peat. Three orchid pots had gone over, and nobody had righted them.
The struggle had been brief and ungainly. The gravel walk was scuffed; a hyacinth was trodden; a brass label had been knocked from its stake and lay where it fell. Nothing had been arranged, or posed, or set to rights.
The poison border stood untouched. Every pot was in its place, no leaf stripped, no cutting taken. Nobody had gone near it.
Upon a cord at Aziz's throat there hung a large emerald in a plain gold mount. It had not been taken. It had been given him by Xerxes; it is worth more than a servant earns in a lifetime; he wore it always, waking and sleeping, and had refused three offers for it.
Dr Tobias Quill's black bag stood open upon a bench four paces from the trough, its instruments in order and nothing gone from it. When the company assembled, his cuffs were wet to the wrist and stained brown.
At the conservatory door lay Mabel, Xerxes's cheetah, chained and fed there from 10:00 onward. She would let nobody by that door thereafter without a great deal of noise. She made none.
Aziz had lived at Hartfield House since Xerxes came home from India, and kept the rooms at the head of the west stair, next to Xerxes's own. On the west landing there is a locked closet to which Xerxes and Aziz alone hold keys. Whenever anyone lingered in that passage, Aziz stood before the door; he had twice turned back a housemaid with the tea things. That week he had spoken sharply to several of the household about the west landing, and the servants had it among themselves that he had grown watchful past all reason.
On Tuesday last, Quill came up the west stair with Xerxes's draught and mistook his landing. Aziz took him by the arm at the closet door and put him back down the stair, and said, before two servants, that a man who wandered in this house would be carried out of it. Quill dropped the bottle on the step. Since Tuesday he has twice sent the draught up by a boy rather than bring it himself, and has asked Mrs Frew at the apothecary whether the law could touch a man for what he had not yet done. He is a physician and a coroner, and he startles at doors; his hands are never quite steady when he sets down a bottle. He left the drawing-room at 10:55, saying the heat had turned him, and was not seen again until he came in at 11:18 to say that Aziz was lying in the orchid trough.
Captain Wat Frew had been at Hartfield House four days, pressing Xerxes for a larger share of the Malabar freight, and had been refused. He ships the cargoes and takes his tea in the servants' passage, collecting what he hears there and selling it afterward; but he had asked the footmen only about the cargo and the tides. From 10:40 to 11:15 he was in the wine cellar with the butler, counting cases against the manifest, and both signed the tally sheet at 11:15.
Lavinia is resident at Hartfield House at Xerxes's expense, and had lately been pressing him for a longer term of hospitality, and had been refused twice. Her séances were held in the yellow parlour; she had never been given the run of the west stair. She asked Aziz in June what lay behind the landing door, and was told it was linen.
Gaunt, her half-brother, holds the house to be a sink of luxury and had refused Xerxes's champagne twice that evening; he had exchanged no word with Aziz in two years. From 10:45 he was in the porter's lodge, arguing scripture with the porter, who let nobody out that way, and he was there still when the alarm was raised.
Of the wider connection, nothing troubling can be reported. Colonel Cecil Cruikshank, Nan Pringle, Cousin R and Effie Strange were all at Cruikshank Manor that night for the reading of a venture prospectus, and sat down together to a late supper at eleven o'clock; Fifi and Zane were abed in the Manor's attics, vouched for by the household.
The glasshouse cooled. The vents stood still open, three pots lay on their sides, and the emerald rested on the dead man's chest with the lamplight going green in it.