Page 71 of And Then There Was the One
“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 asomewhat 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 thatheadded 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.”
“Right.” Mrs. Penbaker looked at Georgie expectantly, as if waiting for her to put the pieces together.
“Ah.” That was Sebastian, suddenly, looking around the room idly until his gaze at last landed on Mrs. Penbaker. “What did he mistake for foxglove, then?”
Mrs. Penbaker gave him a thin smile. “Monkshood.”
Georgie’s mind suddenly flicked to the poison garden at the village hall—and to the stakes she had switched so that they labeled the correct plants. “They were mislabeled!” she said excitedly, feeling the rush that came with working out a thorny knot in a case. “In the poison garden at the exhibition—foxglove and monkshood were directly next to each other, and they were mislabeled! I switched the stakes myself when I noticed last week.”
Mrs. Penbaker shook her head. “His own fault—he was the one who insisted that we needed those ridiculous stakes that looked like knives in the poison garden. He switched out all the labels himself; I suppose I should have checked to ensure he’d done it correctly.”
“So he clipped a bit of monkshood,” Georgie said, “thinking it was foxglove, and… added it to tea?”
