It rained all that winter evening in Cairnholm, and Hartfield House answered the weather with forced hothouse flowers down the whole length of the dining table, champagne out of the Colonel's cellar, and Mabel the cheetah asleep beneath the cloth like a long spotted rug. It was Effie Strange's birthday. Twelve covers were laid, as the house always lays twelve, with the ordinary blunt-ended table knives that have served Hartfield House through better dinners than this one.
At 10:30 the Colonel rose and toasted Effie, and the presents were opened: a fan; a book of sermons from the Reverend Simeon Gaunt; and from Captain Wat Frew a small flat parcel, which Effie did not unwrap at table but laid in her lap and kept there.
At 10:40 Wat observed to the room that he wished a word with his employer about a cargo, and went out by the corridor door — the door at the foot of the table, by the host's chair, which takes a man out of the room's sight at once, as the hall door does not. Nobody at table saw him alive again.
The corridor behind the dining room is cold, and unlit once the lamps are turned down. It runs from the dining room to the garden door and the back stair. Aziz, who carries the house's keys at night, had locked the garden door at 10:00, as he does every night; it was locked still at 11:15, and the key was on his ring. Mabel had been fed at 10:15, by Aziz, at the hour she is always fed, and had not stirred from under the table since the soup. At 10:50 the kitchen boy brought up the savoury and set it on the sideboard, where it sat. Nobody served it.
At 11:15 Captain Wat Frew was found in that corridor, seated on the window bench with his back against the shutter. He had been stabbed once, from the front, with one of the house's own table knives, and the knife was still in him. There was very little blood on the floor, and a good deal on his waistcoat. His hat lay where it had fallen. His coat was still buttoned over the wound. In his pockets were his notebook, forty-one pounds in notes, and a key; nothing had been taken, and nothing about him had been arranged. The pistol he carried — for Wat was a coward in the particular manner of men who frighten others, and never turned his back on a stranger — was in his coat, and had not been drawn.
Beside him on the bench lay a half-sheet of paper, folded once. It bore four lines of figures in Wat's own hand, and beneath them a single word, CLOSET, and a question mark. There is a closet on the second floor of Hartfield House that is kept locked.
Dr Tobias Quill, who had been at table and is also the coroner, gave the death as between 10:45 and 11:15, and said it would have been quick. He observed that the blow had been delivered close and upward, by a person standing within arm's length and facing Wat, and that Wat had not raised a hand against it. The butler, counting the covers back into the pantry, found the service one short. The knives are ordinary; anybody at table might have palmed one.
Of the household's whereabouts, the table was voluble. Xerxes had been in the room from 10:30 until the alarm, excepting three or four minutes at about 10:50, when he went to the hall to send away a telegram-boy; the boy and the footman at the hall door both saw him there. The Colonel did not leave his chair at all between 10:30 and 11:15 — he carved, he toasted, and from 10:45 Mabel lay across his boots, which the whole table will attest. Effie never left the centre of the table, save to rise at 10:52 and carry the champagne round herself, in the full view of eleven people. Lavinia had gone out by the hall door at 10:38 with a headache, and the parlourmaid sat with her in the morning room from 10:40 until the alarm, loosening her stays and fetching eau de cologne. Gaunt remained at table until 10:55 and then joined his half-sister; the parlourmaid saw him come in, and he was reading aloud when the house was roused. Quill sat on until 11:05, when the footman asked him to look at Lavinia and walked with him to the hall for his bag and back again. And Aziz had risen at 10:42 to see about the savoury, going out by the corridor door — the kitchen is reached by that corridor and the back stair — and had returned to the dining room at 10:58 and poured the port.
When the household gathered, Aziz's hands were steady and his sleeves were clean. But his left cuff, at the wrist, had been turned under and pinned, and the pin was a dinner-napkin pin from the sideboard.
Certain things were known before the soup. Wat ran Xerxes's cargo out of the harbour and kept a notebook of what he carried and for whom. He was also the man from whom Effie bought her laudanum, and she had counted the days to his deliveries for two years. He had twice in six months applied to the Colonel for a loan, in terms the Colonel called impertinent, and had remarked at his club that the proper answer to a rat is a magistrate. He knew of the quarterly sum the Colonel pays Lavinia to bring him word of his late wife, and had lately mentioned it to her at the foot of the stairs; she had not answered him. He had taken to greeting her with a particularity she did not return. Gaunt had preached that month against the men who sell oblivion to the young. Quill had been seen to go white when Wat sat down beside him.
Three weeks before the dinner, a housemaid came upon Wat on the second-floor landing at an hour when he had no business above stairs, and he said he had lost his way. The key to that locked closet is on Aziz's ring. Aziz came to Hartfield House eleven years ago and has not left it for a night since; the household understands, without discussion, that he eats at the table and not below stairs because Xerxes will have it so. He speaks little and watches the door, and at every dinner he sits at Xerxes's left.
On the Tuesday before the birthday, Wat told the harbour clerk, in the hearing of two boatmen, that he had found something in his employer's house worth more than the whole of the next cargo, and that he meant to name his price at the birthday.
Five miles off at Cruikshank Manor, Nan Pringle, Fifi, Zane and Cousin R passed the night — Nan and the two servants abed and vouched for by the household, Cousin R at patience in the smoking room until two with the night-porter in attendance.
Effie's small flat parcel was opened later. It held two months' supply, which was double Wat's usual delivery, and unpaid for.
The dinner service went back into its baize at midnight, one knife short, and Mabel was led out of the dining room by her collar past the open corridor door. Aziz stood at the foot of the table with his left cuff pinned, holding the keys, and did not sit down again.