The palm-house at Hartfield House was repotted that October, and the business of it displaced the entire evening. Great tubs were hauled out onto the terrace, gardeners went about requesting room in the tone of men who expect to be given it, and the guests were obliged all evening to pass between the drawing-room and the dining-room by the narrow side passage behind the pantry — a mean little corridor lit by a single bracket lamp, and that evening gritty underfoot with spilt potting soil tracked in from the terrace by everybody who used it, which was everybody. No one afterwards could read a single set of prints from it, the floor having been walked to a uniform brown.
The gardeners' brass-bound potting mallets, a pair of them, had stood by the terrace door since four o'clock in plain view of all who passed.
At half past nine the Reverend Simeon Gaunt was found in the side passage, lying face down some six feet from the pantry door. He had been struck once on the back of the head with a heavy object, in the dark. His collar and coat were undisturbed, and nothing whatever had been taken from his pockets. One of the brass-bound mallets lay against the wainscot a little way off; its fellow was still outside among the pots.
The bracket lamp had been turned down to a bead. Xerxes's houseman swore, and swore steadily, that he had trimmed and lit it full at eight o'clock, as he did every evening of his life. The key was found turned down but not out, and the wick was still warm — so that whoever had turned it had done so shortly before the blow, and had not troubled to touch it afterwards.
Beneath the body lay a man's hat: a plain low-crowned black one, of the sort worn by half the men in the house. Gaunt's own hat was on the stand in the hall, precisely where he had left it. The hat under him was afterwards claimed by nobody at all. Two of the men in the house own its like, and neither had missed one.
Gaunt had passed the quarter hour before nine in the library with his half-sister, Lady Lavinia Loveless, the medium, and had left her saying that he would speak to somebody before he went home, and that it would not keep till Sunday. He was a tall man, and walked that passage every week when he came to visit her; in the dark he would not have stooped, and he would not have turned for a servant's step behind him.
Dr Tobias Quill, who sat as coroner, put the death between nine o'clock and half past nine, and observed that the blow had come from behind and slightly below — from someone shorter than Gaunt. Quill himself had been at the infirmary until he was summoned, and did not enter Hartfield House before ten o'clock. Colonel Cecil Cruikshank and Nan Pringle had passed the whole evening at Cruikshank Manor over the accounts, were abed by eleven, and were vouched for by that household entire. Mabel, Xerxes's cheetah, was chained in the morning-room all evening on account of the gardeners, and was heard by three people to be sulking there at the hour in question.
Gaunt had spent that week making enquiries in the town concerning the conduct of servants in great houses. On the Thursday he had told his churchwarden that he had a duty to write to a mistress about a maid, and that he would do it before the week was out. It is understood below stairs in Cairnholm, and requires no explaining there, that a lady's maid put out of a place for loose conduct, with a clergyman's letter following her, does not get another.
Fifi had been lent to Hartfield House for the week to dress Lavinia for the repotting supper, her own household having spared her. She is small and quick, and known in the town for a free way of conducting herself. She had been seen twice that week in the town in circumstances she would not have cared to explain, and once by a man in a black hat who had stopped in the street to look at her. Between nine and half past she was fetching and carrying between Lavinia's room and the linen press, which lie at either end of the side passage. Nobody vouches for her for that half hour. She says she met no one in it.
Her twin, Zane, the footman, was lent with her. He is a punctilious rule-abider, and had for some months been conducting a quiet attachment to Lavinia — a thing Gaunt did not know, Lavinia having told nobody and Zane having told nobody but his sister, who has never in her life repeated anything her brother told her. Zane carried the decanters up from the cellar and stood at the dining-room sideboard from ten minutes to nine until twenty minutes past ten, in continuous sight of Xerxes, Aziz and two guests.
Aziz, companion to Xerxes and a Moroccan exile who wears the fez and keeps close to his host, was in the dining-room from before nine, decanting and at the sideboard beside Zane, and did not quit it until the body was found. Nothing was known at Hartfield House of Xerxes's private arrangements beyond what the household saw daily, and Gaunt had made no remark whatever about the house's master in anyone's hearing.
Cousin R, a guest of unplaceable origin who collects other people's secrets and never asks anything for them, had said at table that the Reverend Simeon Gaunt was the most interesting man in Cairnholm and that he hoped to know him a great deal better. He had been observed watching Gaunt over the fish. From a quarter to nine he was on the terrace among the tubs with a gardener, who worked beside him without a break until the alarm was raised.
Effie Strange was at the piano in the drawing-room from five minutes to nine until the alarm, with six people in the room and the playing audible throughout the hall. She is in debt, and takes laudanum, and Gaunt had twice written to her guardian about her habits. Captain Wat Frew, who had come up from the harbour with a consignment and who trades in what he knows about people, the clergy included, was in the butler's pantry from ten minutes to nine, arguing over a bill with the houseman, who kept him there till the cry went up.
The tubs stood out on the terrace all night with the gardeners' second mallet among them, and in the morning the palms went back in, and the side passage was swept clean of its soil.