Chapter Four
They briefed Fletcher-Ford over an indecent quantity of baked goods.
“You wouldn’t happen to have another slice of that excellent Victoria sponge, would you, madam?
” Fletcher-Ford asked Mrs. Chester, the middle-aged widow who ran the Scrumptious Scone, a tearoom at one end of Buncombe-upon-Woolly’s high street; it had a cozy, lived-in feel to it, with mismatched seat cushions and cups and saucers featuring the occasional chip.
“I certainly would, my dear,” Mrs. Chester said in reply to his cake-related query, beaming down at him; he met her smile with one of his own.
He was seated directly opposite Georgie at the small table, reclining in his seat as though he owned the place.
He had, upon sitting down, rolled up the sleeves of that expensive-looking jumper, displaying golden forearms that Georgie was avoiding looking at, for reasons that she was choosing not to examine.
Mrs. Chester vanished into the kitchen and reappeared within ninety seconds bearing a positively enormous slice of Victoria sponge—an astonishing sight from a woman who, while undoubtedly a skilled baker, was known village-wide to be a bit stingy with her portions.
Fletcher-Ford smiled at her in gratitude, and she blushed.
Georgie cleared her throat loudly, and Fletcher-Ford—with one last wink (wink!) at Mrs. Chester—redirected his attention to his dining companions, offering Georgie a polite smile across the table.
“Now that we’ve procured enough baked goods to supply an entire army, perhaps we might turn our attention to the matter at hand.
” She knew she sounded ill-humored, but she also didn’t care whether this blond, shiny-shoed, jumper-wearing creature from London found her rude.
A few tables away, a pair of young Murder Tourists—including the pretty brunette with freckles whom Georgie had noticed a couple of weeks earlier, on the day Mrs. Marble was arrested—were sharing a pot of tea; did none of these people have anything better to do with their summers than idle them away, hoping someone dropped dead?
“You’ve never attended a boys’ school, Miss Radcliffe,” Fletcher-Ford said amiably, pouring himself a fresh cup of tea, “if you think this sufficient to supply an army. This would barely have been a midnight snack for my roommate and myself at Harrow.”
Georgie didn’t doubt this, given the amount of food she had just witnessed him consume, but she refused to be sidetracked.
“Mr. Fitzgibbons seemed quite confident in your astute observational abilities, so I’m eager to hear how you think we ought to approach this investigation.
” That she herself had the gravest doubts about these alleged abilities went unspoken.
Fletcher-Ford took a sip of tea, and then another, his brow furrowing. “The councillor died last week?”
Georgie nodded. “The day before I wrote to Fitzgibbons. The village doctor ruled it a heart attack, and nothing more has been said about it.”
“I see,” said Fletcher-Ford, which Georgie somehow doubted. “And it’s the fifth sudden death in the village in the past year?”
Constable Lexington cleared his throat. “Last summer was the first murder—the vicar was poisoned by a parishioner. Turned out he’d been blackmailing her about a clandestine love affair.”
“And Miss Radcliffe, I understand, solved that case?” Fletcher-Ford asked, gazing down into his teacup.
“I did,” Georgie said, unable to suppress a faint note of pride. “I spotted the poisonous plant used in the aforementioned parishioner’s kitchen.”
Fletcher-Ford nodded, his eyes still downcast, and then asked, “And after that, it was…?”
“The baker and his wife,” Arthur supplied.
“Killed by their son—he poisoned them but made it look like a boating accident—he’d learned they’d changed their will to leave the bakery to his estranged daughter instead of him.
Georgie here spotted an invasive plant in their garden and worked out that it had been planted to hide something that had recently been buried, which turned out to be the revised will. ”
Fletcher-Ford nodded again and glanced up at Georgie. “Fond of plants, are you, Miss Radcliffe?”
Georgie shrugged, using her teaspoon to scrape the crumbs on her plate into a tidy pile. “I enjoy a bit of gardening.” More than enjoyed, actually, but Sebastian Fletcher-Ford was not the sort of man in whom she’d be confiding her closest-held hopes and dreams anytime soon.
“And the third murder took place at your home, I believe?” Fletcher-Ford continued, still looking at her. His voice had grown a bit less casual as he continued this line of questioning, and Georgie, for a wild moment, wondered if he was perhaps not quite as flighty as he appeared at first glance.
“At Christmas,” she confirmed. “A distant cousin of my father’s, Lady Tunbridge, was visiting us without her lady’s maid, so a woman in the village was hired to help her; turns out, she had recently learned that Lady Tunbridge was the mother who’d abandoned her in an orphanage as a baby. She stabbed her in her bed one night.”
“How astonishing,” he murmured.
“It is,” she agreed, feeling gratified. “To think that three murders should take place within the span of six months, in a village of this size—”
“Oh.” Fletcher-Ford raised a hand to stop her. “That too, I suppose. But I primarily find it astonishing that you have been so intimately involved in all of them, Miss Radcliffe.” He blinked at her inquiringly. “Frightful bad luck, don’t you think?”
Georgie narrowed her eyes at him. “Indeed,” she said through gritted teeth. “I can assure you that I vastly preferred the first twenty-four years of my life, in which there were precisely zero murders in Buncombe-upon-Woolly, rather than the last one.”
Fletcher-Ford nodded thoughtfully. “It’s very odd,” he said, taking a generous bite of Victoria sponge while still managing to make the gesture look elegant somehow. This was ridiculous. What were they teaching them at Harrow?
“Perhaps,” he added, setting down his fork, “you might consider giving me a tour of the village?”
Georgie blinked. “A tour?”
Fletcher-Ford smiled brightly, as though he were a simple holidaymaker. “A tour,” he agreed. “It would be nice to get the lay of the land, so to speak. Learn who the possible suspects are. Meet the village characters. Perhaps we could arrange some lunches.”
“Lunches,” Georgie repeated.
“Dinners might seem a bit too romantic,” he explained. “Wouldn’t want to give the wrong impression—unless it was the right impression, of course.” He winked. “But old Fitzy never turned down an invitation to a leisurely lunch, I can promise you.”
Georgie stared at him, incredulous. “You want to go out to lunch to conduct a murder investigation?” Surely, surely this was not all that a trusted associate of the much-lauded Delacey Fitzgibbons could contribute to their investigation.
“Well,” Fletcher-Ford said, taking a sip of tea, “we did pass another tearoom on the walk here, and it might be nice to taste their biscuits, to compare them to Mrs. Chester’s.”
A brief, stunned silence fell at this; seeing that Georgie was temporarily at a loss for words, Arthur attempted to come to her aid.
“I was thinking,” he said, “that I might write about your investigation, Fletcher-Ford. Offer an inside look at how a famous detective—or, rather, his assistant—does his work.”
“You’re a reporter?” Fletcher-Ford asked, appearing intrigued.
“For The Woolly Register,” Arthur confirmed. “It’s a, er, local outlet, but with a growing readership.” He paused expectantly, as if the young detective would immediately spring forward with more sensible suggestions for what to investigate first, but instead, Fletcher-Ford merely smiled.
“I don’t think you’ll want to be too obvious, Crawley. If we’re meant to be keeping our heads down, it might seem a bit strange to have a reporter dogging our heels.”
Arthur cleared his throat. “Naturally, I plan to be discreet. Nothing will be revealed until I publish my article.”
“Capital.” Fletcher-Ford’s smile widened. “Then perhaps in the meantime we might make it seem as though Miss Radcliffe invited me personally to visit, rather than writing to old Fitzy? And now I’m here, it simply transpires that I happen to have a certain expertise—”
Georgie snorted.
“—and am willing to assist an old family friend?”
“We aren’t friends,” Georgie said, nettled.
“But you’re a Radcliffe of Radcliffe Hall,” Lexington pointed out; Arthur grinned, clearly enjoying himself. “Your father went to Cambridge. Surely Mr. Fletcher-Ford is the sort of person your family would rub elbows with.”
This tended to be how Georgie’s family was spoken of among the villagers.
It was the reason she had found herself involved in the first murder to begin with—people trusted the Radcliffes with their problems, as they’d been the local landed gentry for as long as anyone could remember, even though none of the villagers were their tenants any longer.
And Georgie was undoubtedly the most useful of the current crop of Radcliffes to consult in a crisis.
(There were, admittedly, only three of them, so it wasn’t saying much.)
“I’m a Cambridge man myself,” Fletcher-Ford said cheerfully.
Of course he was. She could just picture him rowing in the Oxford-Cambridge race, or cycling across an ancient college lawn, or doing something else similarly athletic and English.
“As are all the men of my family. It’s the perfect solution. ”
“I don’t think…” Georgie began, but Arthur tapped his chin thoughtfully.
“It does make a certain amount of sense, Georgie,” he said. “If we put it about that you and Fletcher-Ford have some sort of personal connection, no one will find it odd to see you together, or think that you’re up to anything beyond poking around the village.”
“But as soon as we start asking questions, surely they’ll realize?” Georgie pointed out.