Mr Pettigrew the travelling tailor came to Cruikshank Manor on a wet Tuesday in October, set up his screen and his chalk at the cold end of the long gallery, and required, as he always required, that coats be surrendered entire — pockets and all, for a pocket carried loose alters the hang of a shoulder. The household obliged. The rain obliged too, and came down on the gallery glass with such persistence that conversation at either end of the room went on in happy ignorance of conversation at the other.
At 9:15 Effie Strange was found behind the tailor's screen. She had been struck down with the cavalry sabre from the elephant's-foot umbrella-stand in the hall, and the sabre lay across the pins-tray beside her. The blow had been a single one, delivered from the front. The screen had been knocked from its hinges, one panel split clean along the grain, and a japanned box of chalks lay broken open across the boards, the colours scattered wide. Nobody in the house could account for the noise. The gallery stands at the end of a long corridor, and the rain was loud on the glass.
The sabre had lived in the hall for eleven years, upright in the elephant's foot among the umbrellas, and any member of the household could have lifted it in passing on the way to the gallery. It was not a secret, nor an ornament anybody thought about, which is the condition of most things in a hall.
Effie's own coat hung on the tailor's rail with the others, pockets unemptied as the tailor required. In it were found a pawn-ticket, a chemist's bill unpaid, and a small ruled notebook. The notebook was a ledger of Colonel Cecil Cruikshank's health, kept in Effie's hand across four months: the short breath on the stairs, the physician's visits, the days he took his port and the days he could not. The last entry was a sum totted up in a column, and the column was headed with a date and a question-mark.
Chalk marks were compared in the hall mirror through the evening, the tailor sending each sitter out to look at himself and come back with an opinion. The Colonel's own coat, chalked at 8:30, was found afterwards in the gun-room with the chalk smudged away down the right side and the right cuff damp. Dr Tobias Quill, who is also coroner, set the death between 8:45 and 9:15, the gallery being cold and the body found warm. A decanter of port stood in the gun-room with two glasses, one untouched; Mrs Sib Gow, the Colonel's housekeeper, had carried it in herself at 8:40 and found the room empty.
Effie Strange was the Colonel's heir-presumptive and had spent against it freely. There was the pawn-ticket for a bracelet, the chemist's bill of eleven pounds, and debts at three Cairnholm houses. Twice that month she had asked the Colonel for an advance and been refused; the second refusal was delivered loudly, and before the servants. At 8:30, waiting her turn for the tailor, she asked Dr Tobias Quill in the gallery — not quietly — how long the Colonel's breath would hold out, and whether a man in his condition ought to be signing anything. Nan Pringle heard it. Fifi heard it. Mr Pettigrew heard it and said nothing, having the tradesman's gift. The Colonel came out from behind the screen a moment later with his chalk marks fresh.
The Colonel's solicitor, Mr Dunsire, had been written to that morning and asked to attend at the Manor on Thursday upon a matter of the will. The letter lay on the hall salver, franked but not yet taken to the post. Effie had also twice asked Aziz, at Hartfield House, what his jewel might fetch, and had been told, pleasantly, that it would not be fetching anything. It was still at his throat that evening, and remained there.
The Colonel's temper was the household's weather. In March he had put a chair through a window over a misfiled receipt, and in June broken a barometer he blamed for the rain; Mrs Gow keeps a drawer of glass and hinges against it. He was chalked by the tailor at 8:30 and sent to the hall mirror, and says he went on to the gun-room to wait for Quill and his port. Mrs Gow found the gun-room empty at 8:40. The Colonel was next seen at 9:12, coming up the corridor from the gallery end.
Nan Pringle has been the poor relation at the Manor these nine years: quiet, useful, unthanked, and never in a room anyone remembers being in. If Effie were struck from the reckoning, the Colonel's money would have nowhere else to go but Nan, and the household knows it. She was in the tailor's fitting-chair behind the screen at the far end of the gallery from 8:45, under Mr Pettigrew's chalk without interruption until the cry went up at 9:15. The tailor and Fifi both attest it.
Aziz had come over from Hartfield House with Xerxes on the tailor's account. He wears at his throat a jewel he has never once taken off, given to him and far beyond any means of his own, and he will not have it valued, insured, or spoken of. He was in the hall from 8:40 to 9:15, having his own coat chalked and then standing at the mirror; Zane, who kept the door, saw him there continuously. Xerxes had come for a summer coat and stayed for the mirror, being vain of his shoulders. He was in the hall with Aziz from 8:40 onward and did not leave it.
Lady Lavinia Loveless, who sits weekly for the Colonel's late wife, had come early for a new mourning coat. Effie had been paying her a guinea a week for private sittings since June, and had paid again that morning. Lavinia was below stairs with Mrs Gow from 8:35, taking tea and going over the linen, until the cry went up; Mrs Gow vouches for her the whole while.
Quill is a frightened man who attends the Colonel monthly and dines at the Manor when there is port. He had been supplying Effie with laudanum on a physician's line, and had lately refused to increase it. The rain delayed him: his gig was still on the Kirk road at 8:45 and he did not reach the Manor until 9:05, when Zane took his coat at the door.
Of the rest, the accounting is tedious and complete. Fifi and Zane were in the hall and the corridor through the whole of it, Fifi carrying pins to the tailor and Zane at the front door, and Mrs Gow places them both. Wat was aboard the Kittiwake at the harbour, and the Reverend Simeon Gaunt was at the kirk keeping a vigil; both are vouched for the night. Cousin R sat the whole evening in the library with the door open onto the hall, seen there by Zane at every turn.
In the morning the screen leaned broken against the gallery wall, the chalks lay spilled in their japanned box, and the sabre had been put back, at some point in the night, into the elephant's foot in the hall.