It rained upon Cairnholm that Friday in November, as it does, and the weekly sitting for the late Mrs Cruikshank convened in the long gallery of Cruikshank Manor at nine o'clock, as it has every Friday since the Colonel's bereavement. Two years of Fridays is a considerable expenditure of evenings, and the Colonel had paid for every one of them.
Dr Tobias Quill was found at 9:20 at the foot of the service stair, laid out neatly upon the flags, his neck broken. There was no other mark upon him. His hat was still on his head and his gloves still upon his hands, which gave him the look of a man who had been leaving the house rather than moving about in it — a punctilious departure, interrupted.
The service stair is a short and unlovely flight of stone descending from the gallery landing, and it is not the way a guest leaves Cruikshank Manor. The front stair lies twelve paces further on and is carpeted throughout. Guests use it. Quill, that evening, had not.
His medical bag stood upright and closed at the top of the landing, four steps from where he went over, as tidy as a bag left by a man who means to pick it up again. Nothing in it was disturbed. Within lay a stoppered blue bottle of the sleeping draught he compounds for Xerxes Hartfield, full and unbroken.
The landing runner was rucked into a fold at its near end. Mrs Sib Gow, the Colonel's housekeeper, had smoothed that runner herself at eight o'clock and would swear to it before any bench in Scotland.
The door of the little cedar closet off the gallery landing stood two inches ajar, its key still in the lock on the outside. The closet holds coats and hat-boxes and is customarily kept shut. Quill's left glove had a smear of cedar dust across the palm; the same dust lay upon the closet's inner door-handle. His spectacles were found on the third step from the top, unbroken and folded shut.
In the gallery, the sitting had begun at 9:00. Lady Lavinia Loveless sat at the round table with the Colonel, Cousin R, Nan and Effie Strange, hands joined and the lamps down, and the circle was not broken until the noise on the stair. Quill had been offered his usual chair and had declined it, saying he would look in again on his way home. He left the gallery at about 9:10.
Aziz, who had come with Xerxes and does not sit at séance tables, was not in the gallery during the sitting. Mrs Gow saw him at 8:55 going up with a pot of tea for Xerxes, who keeps a room at the Manor for his business evenings and had been at his ledgers there since eight o'clock. Aziz attends him there and nowhere else in the house. Between 9:05 and 9:20 nobody can speak for him; he had come down to the gallery landing at some point before the fall.
There was no cry. Fifi, polishing glass in the passage below, heard a single soft thud and nothing before it — no argument, no scuffle, no voice raised.
Quill had attended the Manor on Friday evenings for years, nominally to look at the Colonel's gout, in practice for the port; and he carried Xerxes's sleeping draught to whatever house Xerxes was sitting in, Xerxes being an incurable insomniac who will not send a servant for it. On the Tuesday preceding, Quill had been called to the Manor by day and had gone up to the gallery landing to hang his coat. He came down white, took no port, and left within the quarter-hour. Nan remarked upon it; she thought he had had a turn.
Since Tuesday he had written twice to Xerxes Hartfield, letters marked private, delivered by hand, unanswered. On Thursday he asked Mrs Gow, twice and in a roundabout way, who besides the family held keys to the upstairs cupboards. He was a frightened man by constitution. Mrs Gow says he had taken to arriving early and leaving by the back way, and that on Friday afternoon he had enquired whether the Reverend Simeon Gaunt ever came to the house, as he wished to speak to a clergyman.
The cedar closet off the gallery landing is not the Colonel's. It has stood locked these six weeks, and its key hangs in Xerxes Hartfield's room, not in Mrs Gow's board of keys.
Aziz wears at his throat, always, a jewel of a size and water that no companion's wages would reach. He has never been known to take it off, and he has twice refused offers for it. Nobody at the Manor has ever thought to ask how he came by it.
Of the circle: the Colonel's temper with Quill ran to bullying rather than to fear — he had called him a poultice and a rabbit in company, and settled his bills late, and Quill had never once contradicted him. Nan, the poor relation and quietly indispensable, was the one person in the house who talked to Quill freely; he brought her lozenges and stayed for port. Lavinia takes a preparation before a sitting to steady herself; Quill compounded it for her in the spring and never spoke of it to anyone, having no interest in her business. Effie Strange's account with the dispensary is settled monthly by the Colonel and was renewed without difficulty on Tuesday; Quill made no complaint of it, and that same evening promised her a further bottle within the week.
Others were variously elsewhere. Captain Wat Frew went out on the Thursday tide and is not expected before Monday; Gaunt was at the mission house in Leith all Friday, taking a service at eight and lodging there overnight; Zane was belowstairs from half past eight, cleaning plate under Mrs Gow's eye, and never went above. Mrs Gow's own account is accepted by everyone as it stands: she was in the passage below the service stair from nine o'clock, counting linen, and saw nobody come down it before Quill did.
The lamps in the long gallery were brought back up. The circle at the round table sat with their hands still joined, having been told not to break it, and beyond them the cedar closet stood two inches open with its key in the lock, and nobody in the room went to shut it.