Page 72 of And Then There Was the One
Mrs. Penbaker nodded. “He didn’t realize his mistake; immediately after he drank his tea, he was positively gloating about how clever his plan was. I gather in some of the detective novels he’d taken to reading, there were dramatic confessions from the villains, and he couldn’t resist the opportunity to try his hand at it. He wanted to pin the poisoning on me.”
Sebastian shook his head, tutting. “Usually in the novels, the confession is made to the detective—or at least to someone else while the detective is unknowingly within earshot. Seems a bit of a waste to make a dramatic confession to his wife alone.”
Georgie shot him a repressive look. His eyes widened innocently. “What? I’m a man with an appreciation for dramatic flair, and I can’t bear to see shoddy work.”
“Why did he want you to be blamed, though?” Georgie asked, still not entirely understanding all the forces at play here. “Why did he need to poison himself at all?”
“Because,” Mrs. Penbaker said matter-of-factly, “I’d figured out that he was the one orchestrating all the murders—and I knew that he’d killed Mr. Marble himself, and I confronted him.”
Georgie and Sebastian exchanged a startled look. “Mr. Penbakerkilled Mr. Marble?” Georgie ventured; the revelations were coming so thick and fast at this point that she could scarcely keep up with them.
“I wouldn’t have thought of it if I hadn’t had a conversation with Mrs. Marble the week before her husband died. She was complaining of mice in her kitchen, and how she didn’t want to poison them because she was afraid to keep arsenic in her house—apparently someone died of an accidental arsenic poisoning in her village when she was a girl, and she’s been nervous about it ever since.” She shook her head. “So when her husband died of arsenic-laced wine, and my husband had been round to visit them the evening before, and I suddenly discovered that our bottle of arsenic was missing… well, it seemed obvious to me.” She shrugged. “I’d already had my suspicions, over the previous months—something about all the cases seemed too convenient—and once the Murder Tourists started showing up, it just seemed to perfectly align with what my husband wanted for the village, and I started paying closer attention.
“Once I started looking more closely into his comings and goings, I learned of his affair with Miss Halifax, but at that point I wasn’t going to make any sort of accusation that might put him on his guard around me, so I simply pretended to not notice. Men are terribly eager to believe that their long-suffering wives are somehow competent enough to manage an entire household and know the location of every single item they have misplaced around the house at the drop of a hat, all while simultaneously being so innocent and naive that it would never occur to them that their husbands might seek pleasure outside the marital bed. Inother words, it wasn’t difficult to keep him from realizing I’d worked it out.”
“Bad form,” Sebastian said, shaking his head. “It never does to let one’s spouse know there’s a bit of horizontal refreshment on the side.”
Georgie regarded him stonily. “I would try not to sound likesuchan expert on the matter if I were you.”
“Well,” Mrs. Penbaker said, “I foolishly thought that if I confronted my husband with my suspicions, he’d… I don’t know. Confess? Turn himself in to the police?” She shook her head again. “I just didn’t want anyone else to die. I thought that if he knew that I suspected him, he’d be too frightened to continue. So I told him that I knew, the day before he died. Naturally, his reaction was simply to laugh at me—he was so convinced that no one would take me seriously, not when it was my word against his. But, just for good measure, he decided to stage a poisoning with tea thatIwould presumably have prepared for him, to ensure that I was sent to jail and he could stay here and reap the rewards.” She looked more irritated than sad. “He even made sure that I was the one to collect his packet of herbs from Dr. Severin that morning, so it would look as though I’d had the perfect opportunity to poison him, and then he waited until I came home that afternoon to brew the tea. But then he gave himself a fatal dose of monkshood instead.”
“And you summoned Dr. Severin,” Georgie said. “But it was too late.”
Mrs. Penbaker nodded, looking at Georgie directly. “He was horribly dizzy and nauseated at first—I think he plannedto phone the police to pin the blame on me, but he was too ill to manage any such thing. I wasn’t certain what to do, initially—I didn’t ring for Dr. Severin at once, thinking Bertie would recover. But then I looked in the kitchen and spotted a few extra of the leaves that he’d used for the tea. Since I was the one who organized the planting of the poison garden, I recognized them immediately as monkshood. I rang Dr. Severin to say that my husband was unwell, but by the time he arrived, Bertie was dead. And I…” Here, she trailed off. “I didn’t know that anyone would believe my account. So I tossed the leaves in the rubbish bin and allowed Dr. Severin to believe it was a heart attack—it just seemed easiest. I had no way to prove my suspicions regarding Mr. Marble’s death, after all, and it seemed best to let things lie—I was worried that if anyone started investigating Bertie, his death might get a second look and I might be blamed after all. And then, in the village hall the other day, I heard you speaking about the distinctive key on the typewriter used for one of the letters, and realized that therewassomething linking Bertie and myself to the crimes after all, and I… well, I panicked a bit. As I said, I didn’t think the police would believe me.”
She looked, suddenly, rather exhausted—but also a bit lighter for having told her tale. “But now… whatever evidence the police think they have, I’m happy to tell them this entire story—though I daresay it might go easier for me if you believed me, too, and were willing to support me.”
Georgie glanced quickly at Sebastian as Mrs. Penbaker turned back to the counter, pouring cups of tea, then asking, casually, over her shoulder, “Milk? Sugar?”
Georgie held Sebastian’s eyes for a second longer, a quick, silent conversation passing between them, before Sebastian broke her gaze, turned back to Mrs. Penbaker, and said, “Both, if you please.”
He accepted his cup from her, and—despite the fact that, not five minutes earlier, they’d more or less accused her of killing her husband with a poisoned cup of tea—took a long, deliberate sip.
So Georgie supposed that answered her question. “The police know nothing,” she said frankly, laying all her cards on the table as she reached out to accept her teacup from Mrs. Penbaker. “We were bluffing—hoping to trick you into making a confession.”
Mrs. Penbaker’s eyebrows rose slightly. She glanced back out the window. “Then Constable Lexington—”
“A coincidence,” Georgie said hastily, not wanting any word of Lexington’s role in this to make it back to his superiors and somehow get him in trouble. She could see that he and Arthur were now standing very close together in the shadow of Mrs. Penbaker’s kitchen wall, nearly out of sight, their heads bent toward each other, deep in conversation. Georgie watched them for a moment, then shook her head and looked away. “But we’ve not told anyone of our suspicions, so you won’t be in any trouble. And since no one thought there was anything suspicious about your husband’s death in the first place, I suppose we could let things lie… except there’s the matter of Mrs. Marble.”
“I wonder,” Sebastian said, his brow slightly furrowed, “if we could perhaps… plant a bit of evidence.”
Georgie crossed her arms and leaned against the kitchen counter, considering. “The typewriter,” she said, snapping her fingers. “If we could forge a note from Mr. Penbaker, some sort of confession…”
“Do you think that would work?” Mrs. Penbaker asked uncertainly.
“Perhaps,” Georgie said, exchanging a glance with Sebastian. “It’s worth a shot, though. I mean, unless he kept a journal where he confessed all his crimes, which would obviously be the most—”
Here, Georgie broke off, her mind racing.
“You’re very lovely when you’re thinking,” Sebastian said, his eyes on her, and she refused to find this romantic, despite the fact that a small voice was informing her that this might be the most romantic thing anyone had ever said—to her, or anyone else.
Instead, she turned to Mrs. Penbaker, her eyes wide. “Can we use your telephone? We need to ring Miss Halifax.”
Mrs. Penbaker’s eyebrows rose. “Miss Halifax,” she repeated. “The woman who was having an affair with my husband.”
“The woman,” Georgie corrected, “who introduced your husband to Mrs. Christie’s novels in the first place—and the woman to whom he gave a draft of a novel he was writing.”
“You don’t think… he based it on the truth?” Sebastian said, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth.
