Chapter Two #2
A moment of silence fell as all three of them contemplated this—mad, unworkable, entirely unlikely to succeed—idea.
Delacey Fitzgibbons was a legend—the most famous private detective in all of England.
He’d been a police officer long ago but had abandoned Scotland Yard after a public falling-out with the police commissioner, and had struck out on his own, solving one high-profile case after another.
The man himself was as famous as his detective feats—he was known to always wear the same tweed jacket and cap, no matter the season or the weather, and had a monocle that he was very fond of holding up to one eye to stare at whichever witness he was interrogating.
He also had a very bushy mustache, and no hair on his head at all.
He was curt and impatient, but undeniably brilliant.
There was no chance, none whatsoever, that Delacey Fitzgibbons would come to Buncombe-upon-Woolly.
“Worth a shot?” Lexington asked, after several seconds more of thoughtful silence had elapsed.
“Why not!” Arthur said cheerfully, knocking back his ginger beer.
Georgie cast another irate glance at the table of Murder Tourists, who were now laughing uproariously at something in the latest issue of The Deathly Dispatch.
“Come on, George,” Arthur wheedled. “Think how good it would be for the Register if we found out something spectacular and I had the scoop. It would be nice to remind everyone that the Register is a real paper employing actual journalists covering legitimate news, and worth considerably more than some anonymously authored vehicle for conspiracy theories.”
Georgie pressed her lips together, and then Lexington said, without looking up from his glass, “I expect if there is something to be uncovered here, and we were able to prove that Penbaker was murdered, Chief Constable Humphreys would be absolutely humiliated.”
This, ultimately, was all the convincing Georgie needed.
“All right,” she said, draining the last of her cider.
“I’ll write to Fitzgibbons as soon as I get home tonight, inviting him to come stay at Radcliffe Hall—but,” she added, raising a hand, “I think it’s best not to get our hopes up.
What could we possibly have to offer someone as famous as Fitzgibbons? ”
“Murders in a cozy setting,” Arthur said wisely. “People love when murders feel cozy, you know. He won’t be able to resist.”
Annoyingly, Arthur was right.
“I told you,” he said triumphantly. “I told you that no one can resist the allure of a grisly crime in a cozy village setting!”
“Yes, yes,” Georgie muttered, returning her gaze to the letter in her hand, as if the contents would have changed at some point in the past thirty seconds. The neatly typed words on the page remained the same, however:
Russell Square, Bloomsbury
7 June
Dear Miss Radcliffe,
I was pleased to receive your letter detailing the unusual circumstances in your village—I had read one of the Times articles on the subject some months back—and appreciate your invitation to come investigate the untimely death of your village council chairman.
Unfortunately, my own caseload at this juncture is so full that I am unable to manage a visit to Gloucestershire, but my assistant, Mr. Sebastian Fletcher-Ford, would be delighted to travel in my stead, and to keep me apprised of any developments.
Mr. Fletcher-Ford has my utmost trust, and you may confide in him as you would in me personally.
He’s arranged to arrive on the noon train on Thursday the 14th, and looks forward to meeting you at that time.
Best wishes,
Delacey Fitzgibbons
“I can’t believe he responded,” she said, shaking her head at Arthur, who was looking so pleased with himself that it was practically… well, criminal. “Don’t say ‘I told you so’ again, or I’ll personally see to it that you are the next homicide in the village.”
“Perhaps we should be investigating you, then,” Arthur shot back; just then, there was a dramatic clearing of the throat, and they glanced up in unison, recalled from the exciting contents of their letter to their current surroundings.
They were seated on a blanket on the village green, where the locals had gathered for the monthly fete.
This event, which—rather ambitiously (or at least damply)—took place rain or shine, was organized by the ladies’ club at St. Drogo’s, the village church, to raise funds for local families in need; it was considered the height of entertainment in Buncombe-upon-Woolly.
Georgie couldn’t precisely argue with this assessment of the program, though she often thought that the sort of entertainment she and Arthur derived from it was not precisely what the organizers intended.
She hadn’t been certain it would take place this month, given recent events, but the prevailing attitude seemed to be that nothing—not even the untimely demise of the council chairman—should stand in the way of the monthly fete.
They were the only village in the county with such an event—all the other municipalities contented themselves with a more traditional annual summer fair, and nothing more frequent than that—and so they could not allow anything to get in the way of this tradition.
They had carried on during the war, after all; there was no reason that the death of one man should disrupt their plans.
Georgie couldn’t decide whether she found this attitude to be admirably stoic, unsettlingly grim, or both.
Mrs. Pennywhistle, the head of the ladies’ club, was standing before the benches at the edge of the green, which was the closest thing the fete had to a stage.
She was a sweet-faced woman in her sixties who was fond of brightly colored cardigans.
“This month’s fete,” she said, in a loud, carrying voice, “will be commenced by Miss Abigail Radcliffe, who will be regaling us with”—she consulted her notes—“a poem.”
This was uttered the way someone might have announced an intent to entertain the assembled crowd with a spot of pornography; Georgie suspected that, to Mrs. Pennywhistle, poetry and pornography were not dissimilar.
There was a round of enthusiastic applause as Abigail rose to her feet from her spot on a blanket with some of her friends; she was wearing a tea dress of white cotton gauze, and her golden hair curled around her shoulders in careful waves, a slender white headband keeping it swept away from her lovely face.
Abigail was popular among the villagers and always had been—the girls’ mother had died when Abigail was very young, which had inspired a great deal of sympathetic tut-tutting among the matrons of Buncombe-upon-Woolly, who regarded her with a maternal, protective eye.
She was pretty enough that she’d always attracted her fair share of admirers among the village boys, and she’d had a wide circle of friends at school.
Georgie, who—while she knew she was admired and respected by the villagers, and who had always had a loyal friend in Arthur—had never inspired the widespread adoration that Abigail received, always watched her sister waft about the village, getting whatever she wished merely by producing one of her angelic smiles, with something bordering on bemusement.
Abigail gave an absurd little curtsy upon taking her place before the crowd, and then announced, “I am going to recite ‘The Lady of Shalott.’ ”
Next to Georgie, Arthur stifled a groan. “Not that one.”
“She loves Tennyson,” Georgie said gloomily. “She’s been practicing for the past three days—it’s enough to make me never want to get into a boat again.”
“It’s rather maudlin, don’t you think?” Arthur said; Georgie personally found this a bit rich from a man she had personally witnessed shed a tear while reading “O Captain! My Captain!”—when he wasn’t even American.
“On either side the river lie,” Abigail began, clapping a dramatic hand to her breast; Georgie, gazing idly around at the assembled crowd to distract herself from having to listen to this yet again, frowned slightly when she noticed Dr. Severin watching Abigail with a rapt expression.
He was, she thought consideringly, extremely handsome—it was no wonder Abigail was so taken with him.
He was about Georgie’s age, newly arrived in the village as of last autumn, having just finished medical school in Edinburgh.
The way he was gazing at Abigail made Georgie vaguely uneasy—Abigail’s infatuation would surely fade, especially once Georgie had convinced her to accept their aunt’s invitation to come for a lengthy stay in London this summer, but if there was any reciprocal feeling on Dr. Severin’s part, this would undoubtedly make matters more difficult.
Georgie added this to her ongoing mental list of worries—between repeated homicides, a lovestruck sister, and an aging dog who had, somewhat alarmingly, vomited twice this week (though Georgie suspected this was simply because of Egg’s fondness for drinking the cream from the tea service when no one was looking), this list was growing long indeed—and refocused on the performance before her, which Abigail was just wrapping up with a dramatic, “Draw near and fear not, this is I, the Lady of Shalott.”
Georgie and Arthur joined in the hearty applause, though Georgie’s was largely the relieved clapping of someone who never had to hear that poem ever again.
No sooner had Abigail returned to her seat—with a last, delighted wave to her fellow villagers—than Harry the barman shuffled to the front of the crowd and produced a concertina.
“I’d no idea he could play the concertina,” Georgie said as he commenced a surprisingly rollicking sea shanty.
“Not much opportunity for it, I suppose, when he’s always behind the bar,” she added, nodding her head in time.
She glanced sideways at Arthur. “You might try to look a bit less openly lustful, you know,” she said slyly, and was rewarded with a scornful look on Arthur’s part.
“I’m not lustful,” he objected. “I’m… appreciative.”
“If that’s what you want to call it,” Georgie said doubtfully, and then broke off, noticing that Constable Lexington was weaving his way through the crowds in their direction, murmuring apologies as he went. “Hello,” she said. “It’s good you stopped by.”
“Why’s that?” he asked, lowering himself to the edge of their blanket. He was not wearing his police uniform, but instead had on a pair of carefully pressed trousers and a shirt and tie.
“We heard back from Fitzgibbons,” she said, and handed him the letter, which he quickly scanned.
“Interesting,” he said, returning the missive to Georgie.
“Bit disappointing we couldn’t get Fitzgibbons himself,” Arthur said. “Think of the articles I could have written!”
“But perhaps for the best,” Lexington said, and Georgie looked at him curiously.
“Why?”
He cleared his throat, looking uncomfortable. “The county police are, er, quite pleased with themselves, at the resolution of the Marble murder.”
“Of course they are,” she muttered with some disgust.
“I believe”—and here, his voice took on a vaguely apologetic tone—“that they are particularly pleased to have solved it without your assistance, Miss Radcliffe, and are eager to bask in the glory for a bit, so they’ve…” He trailed off, looking at Arthur.
“What?” Arthur asked suspiciously.
“Well,” Lexington said, “they’ve arranged for some sort of interview with The Deathly Dispatch.”
“What!” Arthur demanded, sitting up straighter. “How the devil are they going to do that? No one even knows who writes the Dispatch.”
“I believe the interview is going to be conducted via the post.”
“That’s not real journalism,” Arthur balked.
“I don’t know if the man who recently wrote a two-page feature on Ernest the village sheep really ought to be casting stones about ‘real journalism,’ ” Georgie noted, nodding at the ram in question, who was munching contentedly on a patch of grass at the edge of the green.
“The point is,” Lexington continued, “I don’t think they’d take kindly to any rumors of unsanctioned detective work…
so it’s probably for the best that Fitzgibbons himself isn’t coming.
It would put Chief Constable Humphreys in a terrible mood, so if you could try to keep this assistant of Fitzgibbons’s from drawing too much attention, it would certainly make my job easier. ”
Georgie shook her head. “This is probably going to make us seem like rank amateurs; it will be a miracle if this Fletcher-Ford doesn’t hop on the next train back to London.”
“Please,” Arthur said, waving a dismissive hand. “This is an assistant to Delacey Fitzgibbons—his protégé! He’s not going to turn away from an intriguing case. I bet he’ll have things sorted in a trice.”
“I don’t know,” Georgie said dubiously. “It’s going to be fairly difficult to investigate a crime that may or may not have happened, with a man whom no one is meant to realize is here.”
“You worry too much,” Arthur said. “Trust me, Georgie—this time on Thursday, you’ll be prostrate at my feet with gratitude for my insistence that you send that letter.”
“Somehow, I doubt that,” Georgie muttered.
And, as it happened, she was entirely correct.