Page 3 of And Then There Was the One
Egg blinked at her. Georgie decided to take this as a show of emotional support, and reached out to pat her head.
Beagles, Georgie thought, were much better company than humans.
CHAPTER TWO
Two weeks later, the council chairman did, in fact, keel over.
“I really don’t think this is normal,” Georgie said to Arthur as they sat in the Shorn Sheep, Georgie’s favorite pub—of, admittedly, only two—in Buncombe-upon-Woolly. News of Mr. Penbaker’s death had spread the afternoon before, when his wife had returned home to find him complaining of chest pains; by the time Dr. Severin had arrived, he was dead. Mr. Penbaker had always seemed quite energetic, as evidenced by the amount of time he spent working up elaborate and increasingly unwieldy schemes to draw tourists to the village; everyone appeared shocked by his sudden demise.
This evening, the pub was packed with locals and tourists alike, and Mr. Penbaker’s death was the topic of most of the conversations around Georgie. She and Arthur were seated at the bar, nursing a cider (Georgie) and a ginger beer (Arthur,who had sworn off strong drink in the wake of a particularly ill-advised night of revelry a couple of years earlier).
“What isn’t?” Arthur asked, casting an interested glance at Harry, the barman; Georgie had her own suspicions as to why, precisely, her teetotaling friend was so eager to continue patronizing the local pub. Harry had been a few years ahead of them in school, and had taken over the day-to-day operations of the Shorn Sheep after his father’s health began to decline. He was a man of few words but particularly fine forearms—a fact that Georgie was fairly certain Arthur had noted.
“Mr. Penbaker’s death!” Georgie said impatiently. “He wasn’t that old!”
“He died in his own bed of an apparent heart attack,” Arthur said. “That’s hardly unheard of.”
“He’d never so much as taken a sick day before,” Georgie insisted.
“Have you become so obsessed with murder that you can’t see a death from natural causes and not suspect some sort of foul play?”
“I’m notobsessed,” she protested. “But after this many murders, I can’t help but think that the unexpected death of a member of local government might be due a second look.”
“I agree, Miss Radcliffe,” said a voice from behind her. She turned in time to see Constable Lexington, the only member of the county constabulary with whom she had a remotely positive relationship, set down a pint glass on the bar next to her and take a seat. He was in his early thirties, with reddish-brown hair that he kept combed neatly back from his face. He always had a vaguely melancholy air about him; he’d also never beenanything other than scrupulously polite to Georgie, unlike certain other members of the county police force. As the village bobby, he’d been involved in rounding up the suspects in all of the murder cases over the past year, though these efforts had been hampered by the hapless detective inspector he’d had to work with, a man named Harriday from the neighboring village of Bramble-in-the-Vale.
“See!” Georgie said triumphantly to Arthur, before turning back to Constable Lexington. “Do the police intend to investigate, then?”
“Ah.” Lexington cleared his throat. “No. You’ll note that I saidIagree, singular.We, as in the Gloucestershire constabulary more generally, do not.”
“Whyever not?” Georgie demanded. “Have they all suffered head injuries?”
“I couldn’t say,” Lexington said diplomatically, causing a fleeting grin to flash across Arthur’s face.
“You agree with Georgie’s paranoia then, Lexington?” Arthur asked, a slightly eager note in his voice; no doubt, Georgie thought uncharitably, he was considering how many more articles he could write if Mr. Penbaker had, in fact, been murdered.
“I do not believe it is paranoia,” Lexington said a bit stiffly. His and Arthur’s relationship was somewhat strained, in large part due to Arthur’s less-than-charitable articles focusing on the police’s efforts to solve the various murders, despite the fact that Lexington himself had never been mentioned by name. “I’ll admit that I see nothing unusual in Penbaker’s death on the surface, but after so many recent murders… it might be worth investigating.”
“Well,” Georgie said decisively, “what are we going to do about it, then?”
Lexington blanched. “I don’t know that there’s much wecando, Miss Radcliffe. Chief Constable Humphreys—”
Georgie ground her teeth at the sound of the chief constable’s name; Humphreys had been barely tolerant of her involvement in three of the past year’s murder cases, so she could not imagine that he would welcome any perceived interference from her in a matter that he didn’t even consider tobea case.
“Regardless of the chief constable’s feelings on the matter,” she said determinedly, “I cannot sit idly by and watch a possible murder go unsolved inmyvillage.” She paused for a moment, wistfully contemplating her resolution, just two weeks earlier, to stop involving herself in murder investigations. “The Radcliffes of Radcliffe Hall have lived in Buncombe-upon-Woolly for over three hundred years,” she added. “It is nothing less than my duty to ensure that the village doesn’t gain a reputation for anything… unsavory.”
“I think it’s too late for that,” Arthur murmured, casting a glance toward a corner booth, where a group of men and women who looked to be approximately Georgie’s age—none of whom Georgie had ever seen before, and all of whom were stylishly clad and well-coiffed—were conferring eagerly over a round of drinks. They had a broadsheet spread on the table before them, and Georgie would have bet money that it was the latest issue ofThe Deathly Dispatch. Even though it had been more than a fortnight since Mrs. Marble’s arrest, the broadsheet was continuing to publish multiple issues a week offeringgrisly details on the nature of her husband’s death (a poisoned bottle of wine) and wild theories about her mental instability, citing unnamed sources.
Georgie frowned. “Not again.”
“Again,” Arthur confirmed, handing his empty bottle to Harry, who whisked it away and, moments later, replaced it with a fresh bottle of ginger beer. “Nothing like a jolly little holiday to the scene of a crime.”
The tourists had begun to arrive in earnest at Christmas. By that time, there had been two murders in Buncombe-upon-Woolly in a six-month window of time—an unusual enough occurrence to catch the attention of the London papers.The Timeshad run a lengthy article on the odd series of events (making heavy use of Arthur’s reporting, as he would remind anyone who sat still long enough); the article had noted the village’s many charms that seemed so at odds with cold-blooded murder, which had excited no small amount of pride among its residents—the prevailing sentiment seemed to be that if they had to have a skyrocketing crime rate, they might at least be appreciated for their finer qualities, too. When the third murder took place at Radcliffe Hall on Christmas Eve, while the initial crop of Murder Tourists were present in the village, it had turned the stream of visitors into a proper rush. They came clutching copies of popular crime novels and were prone to loud discussions of the merits of the police investigations.
On a couple of occasions, they’d made it to Radcliffe Hall, only to have Mrs. Fawcett meet them at the door with a steely gleam in her eye and an evidently convincing threat to lob a frying pan at their heads.
“Agatha Christie has a lot to answer for,” Georgie said darkly, still gazing at the group in the corner.
“Have you ever read one of her novels?” Arthur asked.
