Page 9 of And Then There Was the One
“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 observationalabilities, 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 thanenjoyed, 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 notquiteas 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 thatthreemurders 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 preferredthe 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 therightimpression, of course.” He winked. “But old Fitzy never turned down an invitation to a leisurely lunch, I can promise you.”
