The long gallery at Cruikshank Manor was laid for the sitting as it had been laid every Friday for three years: the round table, twelve candles, the curtains drawn against a rain that had set in at teatime and showed no inclination to leave. Lady Lavinia Loveless, the medium, took her chair at a quarter past nine and asked for the lamps to be put out. They were put out. The Colonel had kept these Fridays for his late wife and paid four guineas a week for the privilege, which sum was settled in advance each Friday morning and had been settled that morning; a fortnight since there had been a quarrel over it, loud on the Colonel's side, and it had ended with him paying.
The company was the usual one, with additions. Nan Pringle, the Colonel's poor relation, sat where she always sat, having lately written to her cousin that she thought the whole business a swindle. Cousin R attended, as he attends every sitting, and said nothing during it, as he says nothing during any of them; he had, however, asked Lavinia before the company at an earlier hour what she charged for a private sitting. Dr Tobias Quill was present. Xerxes Hartfield had come to the Manor on the Bengal shipping business and stayed for the sitting, and Aziz had come with him and had no business of his own in the house. Aziz attended and said nothing throughout.
Twice during the sitting Lavinia broke off and asked, in her own voice and not in another's, whether anyone present knew of a locked room at Hartfield House that was never opened to servants. The Colonel said he did not. Nobody else answered her at all.
The sitting broke up at 10:20, which was earlier than usual and remarked upon. Lavinia said she was tired, and that she would rest a half hour in the little ante-room off the gallery, and that her carriage might be called for eleven o'clock.
Fifi carried in the tea tray at 10:55 and found her in the ante-room chair, quite still. She had been strangled by hand. There was no cord, no scarf, no mark of any instrument; the bruising was the plain print of fingers.
Dr Quill, being in the house, examined her at once and put the death between 10:20 and 10:55. He observed that the hands had been strong and the thing quickly done, and that nothing in the room had been arranged, posed, or tidied afterwards. Nothing was taken. Her rings were on her fingers, her purse was by her, and the silver-cased watch she kept in her sleeve was in her sleeve.
On the table at her elbow lay her sitting-book, open. It was her practice to write in it whatever she had sensed, whether or not she had spoken it aloud, and she had lately told the Colonel that the book would be worth reading one day. The last entry of the evening read: “The lady again will not speak of the wife. She speaks instead of the shut room at Hartfield House, of the second man in it, and asks why the master keeps the key upon his own person.”
There is indeed a room at Hartfield House that is kept locked. The servants are not sent to it. Xerxes carries its key himself and does not leave it on the ring with the others. Lavinia had taken three private sittings at Hartfield House within the past month, at Xerxes's own invitation, on account of his sleeplessness; on the last of them she had asked to be shown the whole of the upper floor, and was not.
The geography of the first floor is unobliging to the imaginative. The ante-room has one door, which gives on the gallery, and one window, fastened from within. The gallery runs the length of the floor with a stair at either end: the west stair passes the smoking-room, the east stair passes the service passage. Mrs Sib Gow, the Colonel's housekeeper, stood at the foot of the east stair from 10:20 until the alarm was raised, sorting the night linen, and says that nobody came down or went up by it in all that time save Fifi with the tea tray at 10:55.
The smoking-room, at the foot of the west stair, was empty and cold that night. The fire had not been lit. The cigarette-box was found full and the ash-tray clean.
As to where everyone had got to: the Colonel went to the library with Xerxes at 10:25, the two of them over the Bengal shipping accounts, and each vouches for the other until the alarm. Nan remained in the gallery from the breaking-up until 10:50, clearing the candles and the chairs, with Cousin R beside her the whole while, snuffing; she had him in view throughout and he her. Fifi was belowstairs in the kitchen passage from 10:25, where Mrs Gow had her at the linen and the tray, and went up the east stair at 10:55. Zane stood at the carriage-yard door from 10:30, waiting on Dr Quill's trap and Lavinia's carriage, with the coachman and the yard boy having him in sight the whole half hour. Dr Quill left the gallery at 10:20 for the Colonel's port in the morning-room, where the butler poured for him and stayed by him until the alarm. Aziz says he went down the west stair at about half past ten to the smoking-room for a cigarette, and sat alone there until the alarm. Xerxes was in the library from 10:25; neither he nor the Colonel saw him. No one vouches for Aziz between 10:20 and 10:55.
Of the Manor's wider circle, three were elsewhere beyond dispute. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt kept a vigil in his own church across the town. Captain Wat Frew lay aboard his vessel in the roads, held by the weather. Effie Strange passed the evening at the Assembly Rooms in company and was seen there till past midnight.
Two small matters were afterwards set down. Zane, who had laid out the hats at nine and is exact in such things, was certain that a small dark-red fez — Aziz's — had not then been on the hall table; it was there among the hats later. And it was recalled, without anyone making much of it, that Zane had twice this month been seen walking with Lavinia in the shrubbery, and that Fifi had twice been made to wait upon her in the ante-room without thanks.
Aziz has lived at Hartfield House as Xerxes's companion for six years. He has no money of his own and no family in Scotland; his place in the house is Xerxes's gift, and the plain gold ring he wears on a chain was Xerxes's too.
The twelve candles out, the rain on the gallery windows, and the sitting-book still open on the ante-room table with the ink gone dry upon its last line.