It rained upon Cairnholm all that Tuesday, and Colonel Cecil Cruikshank, being denied the terrace, proposed the magic lantern instead. Twenty minutes of India, he said, would improve the company. The lamps were put out at 9:00, the lantern hissed and warmed, and one slide after another slid across the sheet — ghats, elephants, a bridge, a regiment squinting in the glare of a sun the drawing-room could only take on trust. Xerxes Hartfield sat through the whole of it and was heard to comment on every third slide, which is a good deal of commentary for twenty minutes. The lamps were relit at 9:20. Zane was afterwards found in the gun-room passage, shot once at close range with a pistol, lying tidily on his side with the lamp still lit above him.
Dr Tobias Quill was sent for the body, having been the nearest medical man and the least willing. He had spent the lecture at the front with his glass, where Lavinia and Nan both had him in view when the shot was heard.
The Colonel's Sunday pistols are a matched pair, kept in a rosewood case in the gun-room, and much admired by persons who admire such things. One of the two lay upon the passage floor, discharged. The case stood open, and its lid was split — struck, plainly, against something harder than itself. On the gun-room threshold a brass candlestick from the hall table was found bent. Nothing was taken from the gun-room, and nothing from Zane's pockets, which held his keys and eleven shillings.
At the foot of the lantern table lay a blue-and-white slide of the Bombay waterfront, in pieces, ground under a heel. Mrs Gow, the Colonel's housekeeper, swept it into a dustpan without being asked, and observed while she did so that the Colonel had been shouting before the lamps went out. She had heard the shot from the servants' stair and put it at about a quarter past nine.
Zane wore his second-best livery, brushed, with a sprig of dried lavender in the buttonhole. The same lavender grows in a bowl in Lady Lavinia Loveless's blue guest-room upstairs. Lavinia herself sat in the drawing-room throughout the twenty minutes, between Dr Quill and Mrs Gow's tea-tray, and both place her in her chair when the shot came. She takes her sittings on Fridays and considers Tuesdays a day of no consequence.
Nan Pringle sat in the chair beside the Colonel's for the whole twenty minutes, where Cousin R and Dr Quill both place her, being a poor relation who sits where she is put. She said the Colonel's chair stood empty for part of the dark; she put her hand to the seat and found it cold; and she said that when he came back he was breathing hard. Cousin R was at the lantern table the entire while, changing slides, his hands full at 9:15 by the Colonel's own account and by Nan's. Cousin R has been at the Colonel's elbow all week. He collects other people's histories and never spends them, and had lately been copying out an old parish register entry concerning two children christened Swann. To Dr Quill he had remarked that Zane Swain was the finest piece of construction in the house, and that he intended to watch it a good while longer.
Zane Swain had been footman at Cruikshank Manor eleven years, and the Colonel was fond of holding him up as the model of a servant who knows his place.
On the afternoon of the lecture, Fifi told the boot-boy that her brother had been seen coming down from the blue guest-room in his shirtsleeves, at an hour when no footman has business upstairs. The boot-boy carried this into the gun-room at six o'clock, where the Colonel was cleaning his pistols. At dinner the Colonel spoke at length, and twice, upon the impertinence of a servant who forgets what he is, and could not be turned to the subject of India. Fifi carries a man's hat about the house and tells everybody's business but her brother's; from 9:00 she was belowstairs in the scullery with Mrs Gow, and the shot brought them both up the servants' stair together.
Aziz, companion to Xerxes, had come up from Hartfield House on business and wore his fez against the wet. He has been in Cairnholm four months and had never before that evening been above the ground floor at Cruikshank Manor; he had not met Zane until that night, and had asked Mrs Gow which of the twins he was. At 9:05 he was in the gun-room passage, fetching Xerxes's umbrella, five minutes before the shot. Mrs Gow met him coming back with it, and he sat in the drawing-room from 9:07 in her sight.
Effie Strange and Captain Wat Frew passed the evening at the Cormorant on the quay, in company. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt was at a vigil in St Barnabas from eight until dawn with two curates, who agree. Nothing was stolen from the house that night, and no door was forced.
The lantern stood warm upon its table long after; the Bombay slide had gone into the dustpan; and in the gun-room the rosewood case lay open with one pistol in it.