Chapter Sixteen
All right,” Arthur said a couple of hours later from his perch on the arm of the sofa in the drawing room at Radcliffe Hall. “What do we know so far?”
Georgie and Sebastian had returned home after leaving Miss Halifax’s, and had placed a quick telephone call to Arthur, who had materialized within ten minutes, lured in no small part by the promise of a Sunday roast, courtesy of Mrs. Fawcett.
The meal was over now, however, and Papa had retreated to his study, while Abigail vanished upstairs, leaving Georgie, Sebastian, and Arthur to hole up in the drawing room to confer.
Sebastian had charmed his way into being left with an entire tin of biscuits, and he was now munching them happily, hip propped against the bar, legs crossed at the ankles, the very picture of contentment.
Georgie, feeling a bit like a schoolgirl who had been called upon in class, straightened and raised a finger.
“First, we know that Mr. Penbaker had, until recently, a mistress.” A second finger.
“Second, we know that he had a wife who may or may not have been aware of the existence of the mistress.” Another finger.
“And third, we know that there were no witnesses to his sudden heart problems, until his wife returned home—alone—and he died shortly thereafter.”
“Fourth,” Arthur continued, “we know that he was apparently a complete tosser. I can’t believe we let this idiot run our village council for years.”
“No one else on the council had the energy to argue with him, I expect,” Georgie said darkly.
Mr. Penbaker had been a bit of a shock to the village politics when he’d taken up the role of council chairman five years earlier, after the previous, long-serving chairman had stepped down to spend his golden years knitting sweaters for his seven spoiled whippets.
Mr. Penbaker had enthralled the electorate with all his talk of increasing tourism to the village and making it a hot spot for well-heeled Londoners looking to spend a weekend engaging in wholesome countryside pursuits, though in practice his schemes had been considerably more unhinged than promised.
Georgie sighed, rubbing her temples. “The point is, after all we’ve learned, we’re left with one obvious suspect.”
“The wife?” Sebastian asked, polishing off another biscuit.
“Yes.” Georgie shook her head. “Who seems a plausible candidate to have murdered her husband, but we need to somehow prove that he was murdered, which seems a bit of a tall order, since no one else in the village seems remotely concerned by his sudden death.”
“Georgie,” Arthur said, sounding a bit uneasy. “Do you think it’s possible…” He trailed off.
“What?” Georgie asked sharply.
“Well, we don’t know that Penbaker was murdered. You might be looking for a crime where there hasn’t been one.”
“I am aware of that,” Georgie said evenly. “Which is why Sebastian is here, if you’ll recall.”
“But it’s been days—”
“Four days.”
“—and we’ve not uncovered anything to suggest—”
“Mysteries don’t get solved in a day, Arthur!
” Georgie snapped, crossing her arms over her chest and feeling oddly defensive.
“They take work! You should know this—it’s not as if your articles materialize overnight!
If you’re too busy with other stories to help us, that’s fine, but we are going to continue investigating. ”
“I never said I didn’t want to help.” Irritation crept into Arthur’s voice. “But I do have a job to do, and I was just asking—”
“You were just asking if we’re all wasting our time here,” Georgie snapped. “And I don’t like the implication!”
“Georgie,” Sebastian said quietly, “I don’t think Crawley was trying to imply anything.”
“He was,” Georgie insisted, feeling her cheeks heating in the way they only did when she got properly upset.
One of her least favorite traits in herself was the fact that she cried when she was angry; it felt weak and stupid, but it was almost impossible to control, and she could tell by the prickling at the corners of her eyes and the burning at the back of her throat that she was close to tears now.
“But if there’s the slightest chance that there’s something that’s been missed, then it’s our duty to work out who’s behind it—”
“It’s not, though,” Arthur said shortly.
Georgie stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean it’s not our duty. We’re not policemen.”
“But this is important,” Georgie insisted. “It’s our village—our home. We can’t let it turn into a… a crime-ridden cesspool of sin and vice!”
In unison, Arthur and Sebastian craned their heads around to take in their cozy surroundings, the worn furniture, the lingering smell of recently baked biscuits.
There was a wireless tucked on a shelf, playing the BBC; a couple of windows were open, letting in the fresh air, late-evening sunlight spilling in and casting their surroundings in a golden glow.
The smell of roses wafted in from the back garden.
Faintly in the distance, Ernest could be heard baaing.
Still in unison, they turned back to look at Georgie, who waved her hand impatiently.
“All right, I’ll grant you that it’s not exactly Whitechapel,” she admitted. “But still!” She glared at Arthur accusingly. “I thought you of all people would be just as eager to get to the bottom of this—you’re certainly building quite a reputation for yourself based on all your articles!”
“I never said I wasn’t,” Arthur said. “Especially seeing as…” He trailed off, looking suddenly a bit shifty in a way that Georgie recognized, given that she’d known him since he was five years old, and had known him to commit more than one minor crime over the course of their childhood.
“Seeing as what?” she asked suspiciously.
“Seeing as,” he said, “I’ve had a job offer in London… but I don’t want to take it, not until we’ve finished with this investigation.”
Georgie felt as though she’d been struck in the chest, all the air knocked from her lungs. “A job offer in London,” she repeated.
Arthur nodded. “With The Times. It’s not a terribly glamorous position—they need a new reporter on the courts beat, and they’ve been impressed by the articles I’ve written on the murders.”
“So you’ve already accepted?” Georgie asked.
Arthur shook his head. “Not yet. I’ve asked for a few days to think.”
“And when were you planning on telling me about this?”
“I just have,” he pointed out.
“Only because it came up!” Georgie said. “I don’t suppose you would have even mentioned it otherwise? I’d have just popped round to yours one day and found your bags packed?”
“If you keep haranguing me about it, that prospect sounds more and more appealing,” he shot back.
“Not to butt in,” Sebastian said as Georgie and Arthur glowered at each other. “But I think everyone here cares about this case. So if we could perhaps focus on the matter at hand? Mrs. Penbaker?” he prompted.
“Right.” Georgie sighed, running a hand through her hair, which was doubtless already in quite a state. “I don’t think we can show up to ask her more questions—not when we’ve already done so once. She’ll get suspicious.”
“If you would like me to ply her with my masculine wiles,” Sebastian said brightly, “I’d be more than happy to.” He looked it, too. A little too happy, in Georgie’s opinion.
“No,” she said shortly, refusing to interrogate the tiny thread of jealousy working its way through her. “I think we need to be a bit sneakier.”
Arthur frowned. “What do you have in mind?”
“I think,” Georgie said, her mind racing, “that we need to do a wee bit of breaking and entering.”
Arthur’s jaw dropped. “You want to break into Mrs. Penbaker’s house?”
“Well, think about it!” Georgie said crossly. “If there’s any sort of evidence connecting her to her husband’s death, that’s where it’s likely to be!”
“I expect it wouldn’t be that difficult to break in,” Sebastian said around a mouthful of biscuit.
“This seems like the sort of village where no one locks their doors. That’s always where crimes take place, you know,” he added, with a wise nod.
“The sort of place where someone says, ‘We never thought it would happen here!’ ”
“And we know she’s out of the house at predictable times, because she runs the exhibition at the village hall!” Georgie said excitedly.
“So, what? You’re just going to stroll up to the front door and let yourself in?” Arthur asked, raising a skeptical brow.
“Well, no,” Georgie said patiently. “We will be subtle. Sneaky. We’re professionals.”
“We’re not, actually.”
“Perhaps we could ask Constable Lexington for some tips? Although I don’t expect he’d condone us breaking and entering.”
Arthur laughed darkly. “I wouldn’t think so, considering he’s got a giant stick wedged up his arse.”
Georgie blinked. “Did you have something to share, Arthur?”
He was frowning now, too, his arms crossed. “No. Just had an annoying interaction with our favorite officer of the law.”
“ ‘Favorite’ might be an overly generous assessment,” Georgie said. “More like, ‘the only one who isn’t completely useless and vaguely malicious,’ perhaps?”
“Potato, potahto,” Arthur said with a careless wave of the hand.
“He disapproves of my perspective on the local police, and accused me of trying to discredit the entire police force with the article I’m writing about the Dispatch .
When I told him I’d got confirmation from a second officer—off the record, naturally—that Chief Constable Humphreys was looking the other way about Detective Inspector Harriday’s leaks to the Dispatch, however, he shut up in a hurry.
Needless to say, he wasn’t feeling so smug and clever after that. ”
“It is nice,” Sebastian offered at this juncture, “to see the warmth of the bonds of community in such a wholesome, bucolic setting.”
“Arthur,” Georgie said, “it might be helpful if the one police officer who is remotely inclined to take us seriously didn’t start despising us instead.”
Arthur shot a withering glance at her. He was looking, Georgie noticed, distinctly frazzled; his dark hair looked as though his hands had been run through it repeatedly, there were ink stains on his cuffs, and his glasses were ever so slightly askew.
“He doesn’t despise me. We’re simply suffering from a… difference of opinion.”
“Well.” Georgie crossed her arms. “If you could perhaps see to it that you smooth his feathers a bit tomorrow, that would be brilliant. And it would be helpful if you could distract him between the hours of, say…”
She looked at Sebastian without intending to, and he said, quite promptly, “Nine and noon. Those are the hours I’ve noticed Mrs. Penbaker is at the exhibition.”
“Thank you,” Georgie said, and glanced back at Arthur.
“Noted,” Arthur said, straightening his glasses.
“I wonder, though,” Sebastian said, his voice turning serious, before trailing off.
“Wonder what?” Georgie asked.
Sebastian grinned at her. “Georgie, I’m flattered. You didn’t even express astonishment that I have sufficient mental capacity to wonder at anything.”
“Sebastian, so help me God—”
“I wonder if we ought to let the Murder Tourists help us somehow,” he finished hastily.
“Not Miss de Vere and Miss Singh?”
“It’s only—well, they were useful yesterday, and they seem quite desperate to be involved.”
“They’ve been involved,” Georgie said. She was still slightly irked that Murder Tourists, of all people, had rescued them from the cellar.
“I know,” he agreed. “But I ran into them after church this morning—they were lurking outside as everyone was leaving, eavesdropping and taking notes in that notebook of theirs. After yesterday’s experience, they seem absolutely desperate to uncover another crime.”
“Dear God,” Georgie muttered, rubbing her hands through her hair, no doubt worsening its already (always) disheveled state.
“How long are they staying for?” Arthur asked. “It’s not as though there’s exactly a laundry list of sights to see in Buncombe-upon-Woolly, and they’ve been here for days already.”
“They were oddly shifty when I asked them that very question,” Sebastian said thoughtfully. He shook his head. “But if we could—I don’t know—tell them we need them to be our eyes and ears around the village, perhaps? Give them some sort of task? I think they’d get a thrill from it.”
“And we know how much you love giving ladies thrills,” Georgie said.
Arthur didn’t even bother trying to disguise his laugh as a cough as he rose to his feet. “Why don’t you send them to the murder exhibition?” he asked. “To ensure Mrs. Penbaker doesn’t take a fancy to run home unexpectedly while you’re searching her house?”
It wasn’t the worst idea. If the Murder Tourists kept Mrs. Penbaker occupied, and Arthur kept Constable Lexington blissfully ignorant, then she and Sebastian could search the house in peace. “All right,” she agreed.
“We can speak to them first thing in the morning,” Sebastian said. “They’re staying at the Sleepy Hedgehog—we can pop round there to find them.”
Georgie eyed him narrowly. “You’re just hoping to weasel a second breakfast out of this excursion.”
He flashed that maddening, winning smile at her. “And this, dear Georgie, is how you have come to have a career that even Miss Marple would envy. Look at those powers of deduction at work!”
Georgie reached for the tin of biscuits and proceeded to lob one at Sebastian’s head.