Xerxes had lately built himself a Turkish bath, and being a man who could not enjoy a warmth unshared, he threw it open on a raw afternoon in the autumn of 1884 to whoever in Cairnholm would come. There was a hot chamber, there was a cooling room, and between them ran a corridor lit by lanterns. At the mouth of it stood the disrobing room, where the company gave up its clothes, its pockets and its property into the attendants' baskets, and went in wrapped as the house dictated.
Nobody in the bath wore what they had arrived in. Every guest was in a bath sheet and slippers from the house press; every coat, purse, letter and key was folded into a numbered basket; and the disrobing room, which stands open to the corridor, is attended by nobody at all between the hours of three and five. Mabel, the cheetah, lay across the threshold of the cooling room from four o'clock, fed and disinclined to move, so that all who came and went stepped over her — a thing the household notices, as households do.
At twenty past four the Reverend Simeon Gaunt was found face down on the tiles of the dark corridor, wrapped in a bath sheet, stabbed once from behind. The lamp in that stretch had gone out, and the attendant had not yet been round to relight it. The blade lay two feet from him: a short gutting knife of the sort sold on the Cairnholm quays by the dozen. Xerxes keeps four such in the kitchen, and the fish-man leaves one in every hamper, so that the knife told nobody anything except that somebody had been fishing.
Gaunt had come at Lavinia's asking and had not troubled to hide his disgust with the place. He passed the afternoon in the cooling room with a Bible and a cup of water, declining the hot chamber entirely, and twice rose to say something short to Captain Wat Frew. In his basket, folded inside his coat, was a letter addressed but unposted: to the Collector of Customs at Leith, dated that morning, naming the brig Corbie Ann, her two landings this month at Slaik Cove, and the hour of her next. The police did not open it. There was no need; it was not sealed.
The attendant, Dunnet, had stood at the cooling-room door — that room having one door only, giving onto the lit end of the corridor — from three o'clock until ten past four, when he was sent to the scullery for cold water. He found the corridor lamp burning when he went and dark when he came back. Later, a bath sheet, wet through and smelling of the hot chamber, was discovered stuffed behind the boiler. The house press holds a count of sheets. One more was out than there were bathers.
As to the company. Wat Frew is a coasting master who runs cargo for Xerxes and is owed money by half the county; he does not bathe hot, dislikes being behind anyone, and has a way of knowing what is in other people's pockets. He said he was in the hot chamber from a quarter to four until the alarm. That chamber, too, has one door, and it opens onto the dark corridor. Dunnet saw him go in. Nobody saw him come out until the shouting. It should be set down that Wat cannot swim and has never in his life been known to enter hot water; the crew of the Corbie Ann say he washes in the sea in February and calls a bath an indulgence.
Xerxes, the nabob, a poor sleeper and a bad host to nobody, was in the cooling room from a quarter past three, in full view of Lavinia, Effie and Cousin R, arguing about the price of coal until the body was found. He had spent the morning at his lawyer's, transferring the Corbie Ann out of his own name and into Wat's, and mentioned it at the bath as a small economy. The brig is his vessel on paper and Wat's in practice; Slaik Cove lies four miles north of the harbour and has no customs house.
Lady Lavinia Loveless, medium and resident of the house, was Gaunt's half-sister. He held her savings in trust and doled them to her a quarter at a time with visible satisfaction. Mr Erskine, the solicitor, had explained to her at Whitsun that the trust falls in to her absolutely on the trustee's death — but only on the trustee's death after the funds are released, which Gaunt had not done; upon his dying first, the whole reverts to the parish. She had invited him to the bath, and spent the afternoon in company, disputing about coal she did not care about.
Dr Tobias Quill attended because Xerxes wanted a medical opinion on the heat. He is a nervous man who keeps his bag locked, and he was in the disrobing room and then the scullery with Dunnet from four o'clock, fetching the cold water, until Dunnet came back and the body was found. Gaunt had not spoken to him in eleven years, since the doctor declined to attend a deathbed on a Sunday, and did not know what Quill's bag contained.
Effie Strange, bright and penniless and a guest wherever there is warmth and free tea, was in the cooling room from half past three in view of Xerxes, Lavinia and Cousin R. Gaunt had twice preached at her in public. Her supply comes to her from a source at the harbour and had been laid in for the winter a week before; she had no call on anybody that afternoon and said so cheerfully. Cousin R, a guest of no fixed relation who collects what people let fall and never asks for anything, sat silent in the cooling room from three o'clock.
Three years together, Wat had been paid by Gaunt's parish in small sums to carry coal free to the poorhouse — a courtesy Gaunt ended in August, writing that he would no longer take a service from a man whose trade he meant to see stopped. And Gaunt was known never to take money, never to pay for silence, and to hold that any exposure of his own faults would be a mercy he had not earned. He had said so from the pulpit at St Mungo's within the fortnight.
The others were elsewhere and stayed there. Colonel Cecil Cruikshank and Nan Pringle were at Cruikshank Manor all that day over the accounts, vouched for by the manor household; Aziz had gone to Leith on Xerxes's business and did not return until evening; Fifi and Zane were both in service at the manor and did not leave it.
The bath sheets steam gently on their hooks; the baskets stand in their numbered row, each with a life folded into it; and in one of them a letter lies open to the ceiling, unposted, addressed in a very firm hand.