A Pocket Full of Rye by Agatha Christie

  “Well, madam,” he said rather dubiously, “I don’t know who exactly—”

  Miss Marple helped him out.

  “I have come,” she said, “to speak about the poor girl who was killed. Gladys Martin.”

  “Oh, I see, madam. Well in that case—” he broke off, and looked towards the library door from which a tall young woman had just emerged. “This is Mrs. Lance Fortescue, madam,” he said.

  Pat came forward and she and Miss Marple looked at each other. Miss Marple was aware of a faint feeling of surprise. She had not expected to see someone like Patricia Fortescue in this particular house. Its interior was much as she had pictured it, but Pat did not somehow match with that interior.

  “It’s about Gladys, madam,” said Crump helpfully.

  Pat said rather hesitatingly:

  “Will you come in here? We shall be quite alone.”

  She led the way into the library and Miss Marple followed her.

  “There wasn’t anyone specially you wanted to see, was there?” said Pat, “because perhaps I shan’t be much good. You see my husband and I only came back from Africa a few days ago. We don’t really know anything much about the household. But I can fetch my sister-in-law or my brother-in-law’s wife.”

  Miss Marple looked at the girl and liked her. She liked her gravity and her simplicity. For some strange reason she felt sorry for her. A background of shabby chintz and horses and dogs, Miss Marple felt vaguely, would have been much more suitable than this richly furnished interior décor. At the pony show and gymkhanas held locally round St. Mary Mead, Miss Marple had met many Pats and knew them well. She felt at home with this rather unhappy-looking girl.

  “It’s very simple, really,” said Miss Marple, taking off her gloves carefully and smoothing out the fingers of them. “I read in the paper, you see, about Gladys Martin having been killed. And of course I know all about her. She comes from my part of the country. I trained her, in fact, for domestic service. And since this terrible thing has happened to her, I felt—well, I felt that I ought to come and see if there was anything I could do about it.”

  “Yes,” said Pat. “Of course. I see.”

  And she did see. Miss Marple’s action appeared to her natural and inevitable.

  “I think it’s a very good thing you have come,” said Pat. “Nobody seems to know very much about her. I mean relations and all that.”

  “No,” said Miss Marple, “of course not. She hadn’t got any relations. She came to me from the orphanage. St. Faith’s. A very well-run place though sadly short of funds. We do our best for the girls there, try to give them a good training and all that. Gladys came to me when she was seventeen and I taught her how to wait at table and keep the silver and everything like that. Of course she didn’t stay long. They never do. As soon as she got a little experience, she went and took a job in a café. The girls nearly always want to do that. They think it’s freer, you know, and a gayer life. Perhaps it may be. I really don’t know.”

  “I never even saw her,” said Pat. “Was she a pretty girl?”

  “Oh, no,” said Miss Marple, “not at all. Adenoids, and a good many spots. She was rather pathetically stupid, too. I don’t suppose,” went on Miss Marple thoughtfully, “that she ever made many friends anywhere. She was very keen on men, poor girl. But men didn’t take much notice of her and other girls rather made use of her.”

  “It sounds rather cruel,” said Pat.

  “Yes, my dear,” said Miss Marple, “life is cruel, I’m afraid. One doesn’t really know what to do with the Gladyses. They enjoy going to the pictures and all that, but they’re always thinking of impossible things that can’t possibly happen to them. Perhaps that’s happiness of a kind. But they get disappointed. I think Gladys was disappointed in café and restaurant life. Nothing very glamorous or interesting happened to her and it was just hard on the feet. Probably that’s why she came back into private service. Do you know how long she’d been here?”

  Pat shook her head.

  “Not very long, I should think. Only a month or two.” Pat paused and then went on, “It seems so horrible and futile that she should have been caught up in this thing. I suppose she’d seen something or noticed something.”

  “It was the clothes-peg that really worried me,” said Miss Marple in her gentle voice.

  “The clothes-peg?”

  “Yes. I read about it in the papers. I suppose it is true? That when she was found there was a clothes-peg clipped onto her nose.”

  Pat nodded. The colour rose to Miss Marple’s pink cheeks.

  “That’s what made me so very angry, if you can understand, my dear. It was such a cruel, contemptuous gesture. It gave me a kind of picture of the murderer. To do a thing like that! It’s very wicked, you know, to affront human dignity. Particularly if you’ve already killed.”

  Pat said slowly:

  “I think I see what you mean.” She got up. “I think you’d better come and see Inspector Neele. He’s in charge of the case and he’s here now. You’ll like him, I think. He’s a very human person.” She gave a sudden, quick shiver. “The whole thing is such a horrible nightmare. Pointless. Mad. Without rhyme or reason in it.”

  “I wouldn’t say that, you know,” said Miss Marple. “No, I wouldn’t say that.”

  Inspector Neele was looking tired and haggard. Three deaths and the press of the whole country whooping down the trail. A case that seemed to be shaping in well-known fashion had gone suddenly haywire. Adele Fortescue, that appropriate suspect, was now the second victim of an incomprehensible murder case. At the close of that fatal day the assistant commissioner had sent for Neele and the two men had talked far into the night.

  In spite of his dismay, or rather behind it, Inspector Neele had felt a faint inward satisfaction. That pattern of the wife and the lover. It had been too slick, too easy. He had always mistrusted it. And now that mistrust of his was justified.

  “The whole thing takes on an entirely different aspect,” the AC had said, striding up and down his room and frowning. “It looks to me, Neele, as though we’ve got someone mentally unhinged to deal with. First the husband, then the wife. But the very circumstances of the case seem to show that it’s an inside job. It’s all there, in the family. Someone who sat down to breakfast with Fortescue put taxine in his coffee or on his food, someone who had tea with the family that day put potassium cyanide in Adele Fortescue’s cup of tea. Someone trusted, unnoticed, one of the family. Which of ’em, Neele?”

  Neele said dryly:

  “Percival wasn’t there, so that lets him out again. That lets him out again,” Inspector Neele repeated.

  The AC looked at him sharply. Something in the repetition had attracted his attention.

  “What’s the idea, Neele? Out with it, man.”

  Inspector Neele looked stolid.

  “Nothing, sir. Not so much as an idea. All I say is it was very convenient for him.”

  “A bit too convenient, eh?” The AC reflected and shook his head. “You think he might have managed it somehow? Can’t see how, Neele. No, I can’t see how.”

  He added: “And he’s a cautious type, too.”

  “But quite intelligent, sir.”

  “You don’t fancy the women. Is that it? Yet the women are indicated. Elaine Fortescue and Percival’s wife. They were at breakfast and they were at tea that day. Either of them could have done it. No signs of anything abnormal about them? Well, it doesn’t always show. There might be something in their past medical record.”

  Inspector Neele did not answer. He was thinking of Mary Dove. He had no definite reason for suspecting her, but that was the way his thoughts lay. There was something unexplained about her, unsatisfactory. A faint, amused antagonism. That had been her attitude after the death of Rex Fortescue. What was her attitude now? Her behaviour and manner were, as always, exemplary. There was no longer, he thought, amusement. Perhaps not even antagonism, but he wondered whether, once or twice, he had not seen a trac
e of fear. He had been to blame, culpably to blame, in the matter of Gladys Martin. That guilty confusion of hers he had put down to no more than a natural nervousness of the police. He had come across that guilty nervousness so often. In this case it had been something more. Gladys had seen or heard something which had aroused her suspicions. It was probably, he thought, some quite small thing, something so vague and indefinite that she had hardly liked to speak about it. And now, poor little rabbit, she would never speak.

  Inspector Neele looked with some interest at the mild, earnest face of the old lady who confronted him now at Yewtree Lodge. He had been in two minds at first how to treat her, but he quickly made-up his mind. Miss Marple would be useful to him. She was upright, of unimpeachable rectitude and she had, like most old ladies, time on her hands and an old maid’s nose for scenting bits of gossip. She’d get things out of servants, and out of the women of the Fortescue family perhaps, that he and his policemen would never get. Talk, conjecture, reminiscences, repetitions of things said and done, out of it all she would pick the salient facts. So Inspector Neele was gracious.

  “It’s uncommonly good of you to have come here, Miss Marple,” he said.

  “It was my duty, Inspector Neele. The girl had lived in my house. I feel, in a sense, responsible for her. She was a very silly girl, you know.”

  Inspector Neele looked at her appreciatively.

  “Yes,” he said, “just so.”

  She had gone, he felt, to the heart of the matter.

  “She wouldn’t know,” said Miss Marple, “what she ought to do. If, I mean, something came up. Oh, dear, I’m expressing myself very badly.”

  Inspector Neele said that he understood.

  “She hadn’t got good judgement as to what was important or not, that’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

  “Oh yes, exactly, Inspector.”

  “When you say that she was silly—” Inspector Neele broke off.

  Miss Marple took up the theme.

  “She was the credulous type. She was the sort of girl who would have given her savings to a swindler, if she’d had any savings. Of course, she never did have any savings because she always spent her money on most unsuitable clothes.”

  “What about men?” asked the inspector.

  “She wanted a young man badly,” said Miss Marple. “In fact that’s really, I think, why she left St. Mary Mead. The competition there is very keen. So few men. She did have hopes of the young man who delivered the fish. Young Fred had a pleasant word for all the girls, but of course he didn’t mean anything by it. That upset poor Gladys quite a lot. Still, I gather she did get herself a young man in the end?”

  Inspector Neele nodded.

  “It seems so. Albert Evans, I gather, his name was. She seems to have met him at some holiday camp. He didn’t give her a ring or anything so maybe she made it all up. He was a mining engineer, so she told the cook.”

  “That seems most unlikely,” said Miss Marple, “but I dare say it’s what he told her. As I say, she’d believe anything. You don’t connect him with this business at all?”

  Inspector Neele shook his head.

  “No. I don’t think there are any complications of that kind. He never seems to have visited her. He sent her a postcard from time to time, usually from a seaport—probably 4th Engineer on a boat on the Baltic run.”

  “Well,” said Miss Marple, “I’m glad she had her little romance. Since her life has been cut short in this way—” She tightened her lips. “You know, Inspector, it makes me very, very angry.” And she added, as she had said to Pat Fortescue, “Especially the clothes-peg. That, Inspector, was really wicked.”

  Inspector Neele looked at her with interest.

  “I know just what you mean, Miss Marple,” he said.

  Miss Marple coughed apologetically.

  “I wonder—I suppose it would be great presumption on my part—if only I could assist you in my very humble and, I’m afraid, very feminine way. This is a wicked murderer, Inspector Neele, and the wicked should not go unpunished.”

  “That’s an unfashionable belief nowadays, Miss Marple,” Inspector Neele said rather grimly. “Not that I don’t agree with you.”

  “There is an hotel near the station, or there’s the Golf Hotel,” said Miss Marple tentatively, “and I believe there’s a Miss Ramsbottom in this house who is interested in foreign missions.”

  Inspector Neele looked at Miss Marple appraisingly.

  “Yes,” he said. “You’ve got something there, maybe. I can’t say that I’ve had great success with the lady.”

  “It’s really very kind of you, Inspector Neele,” said Miss Marple. “I’m so glad you don’t think I’m just a sensation hunter.”

  Inspector Neele gave a sudden, rather unexpected smile. He was thinking to himself that Miss Marple was very unlike the popular idea of an avenging fury. And yet, he thought that was perhaps exactly what she was.

  “Newspapers,” said Miss Marple, “are often so sensational in their accounts. But hardly, I fear, as accurate as one might wish.” She looked inquiringly at Inspector Neele. “If one could be sure of having just the sober facts.”

  “They’re not particularly sober,” said Neele. “Shorn of undue sensation, they’re as follows. Mr. Fortescue died in his office as a result of taxine poisoning. Taxine is obtained from the berries and leaves of yew trees.”

  “Very convenient,” Miss Marple said.

  “Possibly,” said Inspector Neele, “but we’ve no evidence as to that. As yet, that is.” He stressed the point because it was here that he thought Miss Marple might be useful. If any brew or concoction of yewberries had been made in the house, Miss Marple was quite likely to come upon traces of it. She was the sort of old pussy who would make homemade liqueurs, cordials and herb teas herself. She would know methods of making and methods of disposal.

  “And Mrs. Fortescue?”

  “Mrs. Fortescue had tea with the family in the library. The last person to leave the room and the tea table was Miss Elaine Fortescue, her stepdaughter. She states that as she left the room Mrs. Fortescue was pouring herself out another cup of tea. Some twenty minutes or half hour later Miss Dove, who acts as housekeeper, went in to remove the tea tray. Mrs. Fortescue was still sitting on the sofa, dead. Beside her was a tea cup a quarter full and in the dregs of it was potassium cyanide.”

  “Which is almost immediate in its action, I believe,” said Miss Marple.

  “Exactly.”

  “Such dangerous stuff,” murmured Miss Marple. “One has it to take wasps’ nests but I’m always very, very careful.”

  “You’re quite right,” said Inspector Neele. “There was a packet of it in the gardener’s shed here.”

  “Again very convenient,” said Miss Marple. She added, “Was Mrs. Fortescue eating anything?”

  “Oh, yes. They’d had quite a sumptuous tea.”

  “Cake, I suppose? Bread and butter? Scones, perhaps? Jam? Honey?”

  “Yes, there was honey and scones, chocolate cake and swiss roll and various other plates of things.” He looked at her curiously. “The potassium cyanide was in the tea, Miss Marple.”

  “Oh, yes, yes. I quite understand that. I was just getting the whole picture, so to speak. Rather significant, don’t you think?”

  He looked at her in a slightly puzzled fashion. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes were bright.

  “And the third death, Inspector Neele?”

  “Well, the facts there seem clear enough, too. The girl, Gladys, took in the tea tray, then she brought the next tray into the hall, but left it there. She’d been rather absentminded all the day, apparently. After that no one saw her. The cook, Mrs. Crump, jumped to the conclusion that the girl had gone out for the evening without telling anybody. She based her belief, I think, on the fact that the girl was wearing a good pair of nylon stockings and her best shoes. There, however, she was proved quite wrong. The girl had obviously remembered suddenly that she had not taken in some clothes
that were drying outside on the clothesline. She ran out to fetch them in, had taken down half of them apparently, when somebody took her unawares by slipping a stocking round her neck and—well, that was that.”

  “Someone from outside?” said Miss Marple.

  “Perhaps,” said Inspector Neele. “But perhaps someone from inside. Someone who’d been waiting his or her opportunity to get the girl alone. The girl was upset, nervous, when we first questioned her, but I’m afraid we didn’t quite appreciate the importance of that.”

  “Oh, but how could you,” cried Miss Marple, “because people so often do look guilty and embarrassed when they are questioned by the police.”

  “That’s just it. But this time, Miss Marple, it was rather more than that. I think the girl Gladys had seen someone performing some action that seemed to her needed explanation. It can’t, I think, have been anything very definite. Otherwise she would have spoken out. But I think she did betray the fact to the person in question. That person realized that Gladys was a danger.”

  “And so Gladys was strangled and a clothes-peg clipped on her nose,” murmured Miss Marple to herself.

  “Yes, that’s a nasty touch. A nasty, sneering sort of touch. Just a nasty bit of unnecessary bravado.”

  Miss Marple shook her head.

  “Hardly unnecessary. It does all make a pattern, doesn’t it?”

  Inspector Neele looked at her curiously.

  “I don’t quite follow you, Miss Marple. What do you mean by a pattern?”

  Miss Marple immediately became flustered.

  “Well, I mean it does seem—I mean, regarded as a sequence, if you understand—well, one can’t get away from facts, can one?”

  “I don’t think I quite understand.”

  “Well, I mean—first we have Mr. Fortescue. Rex Fortescue. Killed in his office in the city. And then we have Mrs. Fortescue, sitting here in the library and having tea. There were scones and honey. And then poor Gladys with the clothes-peg on her nose. Just to point the whole thing. That very charming Mrs. Lance Fortescue said to me that there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason in it, but I couldn’t agree with her, because it’s the rhyme that strikes one, isn’t it?”