The glasshouse at Hartfield House had done its duty by the season, and on a raw autumn evening in the early 'eighties the household gathered to dispose of the result. Oranges and lemons came in by the barrow-load, pale and cold-skinned, and were weighed, wrapped in tissue, and laid in baskets, each basket to be paired with a visiting card bearing the name of a friend of the house. Xerxes sat at the head of the bench inscribing the cards himself, in his own hand, with Aziz at his elbow and two servants beside them; the fez bent over the scale-pan as the fruit went on and off. Mabel, the cheetah, lay the whole evening at her master's feet by the card table, fed early and perfectly content, and the servants marked her there as one marks a familiar piece of furniture. Fruit that would not do — bruised, split, marked — was set apart in a crate by the potting bench, to be carried off and forgotten.
Captain Wat Frew was in and out of all this. He ran cargo for Xerxes and was worth a good deal to him living, and he carried himself that evening with the air of a man whose fortunes were improving. Wat made his living in secrets quite as much as in freight; it was understood, without ever being said at table, that he was in the habit of pressing the household for money against what he had learned of its members, and that several of those present had felt the weight of his good memory. Earlier that day he had been overheard — low, and pleased with himself — telling Fifi that he had lately learned a thing worth more than the Captain's usual trade, and that it concerned the brother, not the sister.
Fifi and her twin brother Zane are not regular staff at Hartfield House. They had been lent out for the harvest evening only, as extra hands for the heavy work of wrapping, and they seldom come otherwise. Fifi, a lady's maid, is quick-handed and quick-tempered and free with other people's business; she was in and out of the conservatory all evening carrying baskets, and no one could place her during the quarter-hour in which the corridor lamp went dark. Zane, a footman of careful and rule-abiding habits who keeps some standing private arrangement in the household and guards it closely, was laying the supper table in the dining room across the house, where the butler and two maids had him in sight from half past eight until the body was found.
The rest of the house was variously occupied. Lavinia was upstairs in the drawing room giving a sitting to Effie from eight o'clock; the maid brought up tea and found them both there at nine. Nan was in the front morning room with the Colonel, going over venture papers, the footman in continuous attendance. Cousin R sat alone in the library cataloguing the fruit-cards by hand, and rang twice for fresh ink, the bell being answered each time. Of the gentlemen one might have expected, three were elsewhere altogether: Colonel Cecil Cruikshank detained at Cruikshank Manor with Nan until their late arrival in the morning room, Dr Tobias Quill at a confinement across the city, and the Reverend Simeon Gaunt at vigil in his own chapel — each vouched for where he was.
Wat was found in the unlit service corridor between the conservatory and the back stair. He had been struck down by a single heavy blow to the head, and no weapon was left behind. He lay among scattered lemons, which had gone a surprising distance; a gift-basket he had evidently been carrying lay overturned beside him. His pocketbook was untouched and full of notes, and nothing whatever had been taken from the body, which the household agreed was at least a point in somebody's favour.
The corridor lamp had been turned down to nothing. That passage is kept lit of an evening as a matter of course, so whoever last went along it had lowered the wick before going.
The basket at Wat's side bore no visiting card. Every other finished basket on the bench carried one, pinned and legible; but in the conservatory a single card lay face-down upon the floor, trodden flat, its name smudged past all reading. Among the rejected specimens in the crate, set apart with the spoiled, were three good lemons with no blemish at all — sound fruit filed with the ruined, as though swept there in haste. Beneath the potting bench lay a man's hat, brim turned toward the corridor; it was not Wat's own, his hanging as usual by the garden door. It matched none of the gentlemen present, being one of those loose hats kept by the garden door for errands, that any servant might catch up on going out into the cold.
No instrument was found anywhere. The brass counterweight from the fruit-scales, which weighs near two pounds and sits always on the bench, where anyone passing the conservatory might lift it and set it back, was not in its cradle.
The lemons rolled a little in the draught from the opened door, pale in the dark; the scales stood crooked above the overturned basket, one pan dipped and empty, and the card that should have named a friend lay trodden and blank.