Chapter Twenty-One #2
“What on earth are you wearing?” she demanded, as soon as he approached the pub; he’d returned to Radcliffe Hall to make a telephone call—and, evidently, to change his outfit.
He glanced down at his attire, his expression wounded. “These are my tennis whites.”
“I see that, thank you. Is there a particular reason you’re dressed for an afternoon of sport when we need to go trick a murderess into confessing?”
“Knees,” he said simply, slipping a pair of sunglasses on to complete the air of glamorous-city-boy-gets-a-spot-of-exercise-in-the-country that was positively thick around him.
A cream-colored summer-weight jumper was tossed casually over his shoulders.
He looked as though he should have appeared in a catalogue.
“Knees,” she repeated now, eyeing him suspiciously and determinedly not eyeing the joints in question.
“Yes,” he said cheerfully. “Ladies love them. You cannot imagine the things I have got up to after the merest glimpse of my knees in my tennis attire.”
“Charming,” she said shrewishly.
He glanced sideways and slipped his arm through hers. “I’m not getting my hopes up for later today, but I do cherish a small dream that the pattern might continue.”
“If you think that I am the sort of woman to allow you to remove my clothing simply because you prance around looking all golden and athletic—”
“You are not doing much to discourage that small dream, Georgie,” he said cheerfully, and tucked her more firmly against his side.
“Be quiet. Do you really think Mrs. Penbaker is going to take one look at your knees and confess her evil plot to us at the drop of a hat?”
“Probably not,” he admitted. “But I’ve learned not to underestimate the allure of a pair of exposed knees on the female brain—or the male one,” he added, with what he clearly considered to be admirable egalitarian spirit.
“Of course not,” she agreed blandly. “I doubt you ever think about much other than knees, in fact.”
He grinned at her and opened his mouth to reply, but at that precise moment, Arthur arrived, Lexington on his heels, preparing to go on an incredibly well-timed and not-at-all-suspicious patrol of the village.
“Hello,” Arthur said, splitting a curious glance between Georgie and Sebastian, who were—she realized belatedly—looking rather cozy. “Ready to go get a confession?”
“Sebastian’s knees are ready, at least,” Georgie said blandly, and then set off at a march down the street, all three men trailing behind her.
Mrs. Penbaker answered the door within a few seconds of Arthur’s knock, her pleasantly curious expression cooling rapidly once she realized who was on her doorstep.
“Oh. Hello.”
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Penbaker,” Arthur said with a nod; he and Georgie had discussed the plan at length and had determined that for their ruse to be convincing, it would be best for him to take the lead.
“I hope you don’t mind giving us a few minutes of your time—I’ve recently learned some information that I imagine you’ll be interested to hear. ”
Mrs. Penbaker visibly paled at this, but otherwise gave no sign of distress, merely hesitating for a long moment before saying, with a bit of reluctance, “All right. Won’t you come in?”
They followed her into the house, and once she’d closed the door behind them, she said, “I’ll just put the kettle on, shall I? If you’d like to wait in the sitting room—”
“I’m happy to join you in the kitchen,” Sebastian said, his voice entirely pleasant but a note of steel present beneath the politeness.
In a further sign that Mrs. Penbaker had some notion of what was afoot, she merely nodded and allowed them to follow her deeper into the house, which was just as obsessively tidy as it had been on Georgie and Sebastian’s previous clandestine visit.
The kitchen was brightly lit and cheerful; there was a blue willow teapot set on the counter, a teacup waiting next to it.
Mrs. Penbaker crossed to the hob and lit it, then turned back to face Georgie, Arthur, and Sebastian, crossing her arms over her chest in a posture that looked instinctively defensive. “What brings you here today?”
Arthur cleared his throat. “We are here because I have received a tip that you are shortly to be arrested for your husband’s murder.”
To Arthur’s credit, he managed to avoid any unnecessary melodrama while leveling this accusation; he stated it simply, without any great fanfare, and it was all the more effective as a result.
Mrs. Penbaker, meanwhile, went very still; she did not move an inch from her position by the stove, her face rather paler than usual.
“Based on what evidence?” she asked, after a moment had passed in which no one said anything, as if all present were trying to gauge where the firmest ground was to place a cautious foot.
“My source did not have all the details,” Arthur said, “but this source seemed very certain that you had been responsible for poisoning your husband with some herbs that he acquired from the doctor to use as pain relief. This was, evidently, a known habit of his, and it would have been easy enough to poison him by adding something toxic to the blend.”
A flicker of something in Mrs. Penbaker’s expression, gone before Georgie could identify it.
“If that hunch is all that the police have to go on,” she said, injecting a note of forced bravado into her voice, “then I hardly think—”
As if on cue (because it more or less was), Lexington suddenly came into view outside the kitchen window, walking up the narrow lane that abutted the house on one side.
The back entrance to the house, via the kitchen garden and door, was accessed through a small gate in the wall on this side of the house.
“I say,” Sebastian said, sounding mildly interested, as though the events playing out in the Penbaker kitchen were merely a somewhat diverting amateur theatrical, “isn’t that Lexington now?”
“By Jove, you’re right!” Arthur said eagerly, reaching into his pocket for his notebook. “Well spotted, Fletcher-Ford. I just need to run and see if I can get a quote from him first….”
With that, he was out the kitchen door and hurrying through the garden.
Knowing that their time was short—there was, after all, only so long that Mrs. Penbaker would believe that Arthur would delay a police officer on his way to make an arrest, before coming to realize that Lexington was not en route to any such task—Georgie turned back to Mrs. Penbaker.
“If there is anything you would wish us to know,” she said carefully now, drawing Mrs. Penbaker’s gaze back to her from where it was stuck, horror-struck, on the events transpiring outside the window, “now would be the time to speak. Based on my previous experience with the local constabulary, once they have a suspect in mind, they are… unreceptive to any information that might contradict it.”
“You don’t say,” Mrs. Penbaker said bitterly. “I sent them an anonymous note telling them that they’d got the wrong person when they arrested Mrs. Marble for her husband’s murder, but nothing came of it.”
“And how,” Georgie asked, trying to suppress her eagerness, “did you know that they’d arrested the wrong person?”
“Because I knew who the culprit was,” Mrs. Penbaker said simply, shrugging.
She eyed Georgie for a moment, her expression difficult to read.
Georgie had the distinct impression that she was being sized up, her character being judged.
She straightened her spine, met Mrs. Penbaker’s eyes directly, and waited.
“Mrs. Marble did not kill her husband,” Mrs. Penbaker said at last, still looking at Georgie with some complicated mixture of resignation, admiration, and…
amusement? Georgie didn’t understand it—something here did not make sense, up to and including Mrs. Penbaker’s present manner.
“She didn’t kill her husband,” she repeated, her voice firmer now, “just as I did not kill mine.”
“Then who did?” Georgie asked, raising an eyebrow skeptically. She suddenly understood Fitzgibbons’s fondness for his decorative monocle; she wished she had something to lift to her eye in keen speculation right now.
“My husband,” Mrs. Penbaker said simply, and then turned to quickly take the kettle off the hob as it began to boil.
“Your husband… killed himself?” Georgie repeated blankly, feeling significantly less intelligent than usual.
Mrs. Penbaker nodded, as though pleased that a pupil had finally wrapped their head around a particularly tricky new concept.
She spooned tea leaves into the pot, then poured the boiling water in, behaving for all the world as if this were merely an ordinary teatime visit.
“Correct. It wasn’t intentional—I promise you, Bertie thought far too highly of himself to ever take his own life—but he also, in a similar vein, thought he was somewhat cleverer than he actually was. ”
“Do you mean to say that he added poison to his own tea?” Georgie asked incredulously; this was too stupid to be countenanced.
Mrs. Penbaker pressed her lips together, almost as if she were suppressing a smile, which did very little to convince Georgie that she wasn’t a murderess. “You might have noticed, Miss Radcliffe, that my husband was not terribly knowledgeable about herbs and plants.”
Georgie very nearly rolled her eyes at this understatement. “That’s certainly true,” she agreed, rather than voice her full thoughts.
“He did a bit of research, I understand—wanted an herb that would make him ill but not actually kill him… something that would prove to the police that his tea had been poisoned, but not something that would result in death.”
Georgie frowned. “What did he choose?”
“Well.” Mrs. Penbaker laced her hands together. “He chose foxglove, because he read an Agatha Christie book in which people at a dinner party were poisoned by foxglove but lived.”
“Yes,” Georgie said slowly. “The leaves will make you very ill, but it’s not usually fatal unless you extract the digitalis.”