A Pocket Full of Rye: A Miss Marple Mystery (Miss Marple Mysteries) Read online

  Percival said sharply:

  “You can hardly think I would regard my father’s death in that light.”

  “It is not a question of how you regard it, Mr. Fortescue. I’m speaking merely of a question of fact. Your father died before his finances were completely on the rocks.”

  Percival said impatiently:

  “Yes, yes. As a matter of actual fact, you are right.”

  “It was a fortunate occurrence for your whole family, since they are dependent on this business.”

  “Yes. But really, Inspector, I don’t see what you’re driving at . . .” Percival broke off.

  “Oh, I’m not driving at anything, Mr. Fortescue,” said Neele. “I just like getting my facts straight. Now there’s another thing. I understood you to say that you’d had no communication of any kind with your brother here since he left England many years ago.”

  “Quite so,” said Percival.

  “Yes, but it isn’t quite so, is it, Mr. Fortescue? I mean that last spring when you were so worried about your father’s health, you actually wrote to your brother in Africa, told him of your anxiety about your father’s behaviour. You wanted, I think, your brother to combine with you in getting your father medically examined and put under restraint, if necessary.”

  “I—I—really, I don’t see . . .” Percival was badly shaken.

  “That is so, isn’t it, Mr. Fortescue?”

  “Well, actually, I thought it only right. After all, Lancelot was a junior partner.”

  Inspector Neele transferred his gaze to Lance. Lance was grinning.

  “You received that letter?” Inspector Neele asked.

  Lance Fortescue nodded.

  “What did you reply to it?”

  Lance’s grin widened.

  “I told Percy to go and boil his head and to let the old man alone. I said the old man probably knew what he was doing quite well.”

  Inspector Neele’s gaze went back again to Percival.

  “Were those the terms of your brother’s answer?”

  “I—I—well, I suppose roughly, yes. Far more offensively couched, however.”

  “I thought the inspector had better have a bowdlerized version,” said Lance. He went on, “Frankly, Inspector Neele, that is one of the reasons why, when I got a letter from my father, I came home to see for myself what I thought. In the short interview I had with my father, frankly I couldn’t see anything much wrong with him. He was slightly excitable, that was all. He appeared to me perfectly capable of managing his own affairs. Anyway, after I got back to Africa and had talked things over with Pat, I decided that I’d come home and—what shall we say—see fair play.”

  He shot a glance at Percival as he spoke.

  “I object,” said Percival Fortescue. “I object strongly to what you are suggesting. I was not intending to victimize my father, I was concerned for his health. I admit that I was also concerned . . .” he paused.

  Lance filled the pause quickly.

  “You were also concerned for your pocket, eh? For Percy’s little pocket.” He got up and all of a sudden his manner changed. “All right, Percy, I’m through. I was going to string you along a bit by pretending to work here. I wasn’t going to let you have things all your own sweet way, but I’m damned if I’m going on with it. Frankly, it makes me sick to be in the same room with you. You’ve always been a dirty, mean little skunk all your life. Prying and snooping and lying and making trouble. I’ll tell you another thing. I can’t prove it, but I’ve always believed it was you who forged that cheque there was all the row about, that got me shot out of here. For one thing it was a damn bad forgery, a forgery that drew attention to itself in letters a foot high. My record was too bad for me to be able to protest effectively, but I often wondered that the old boy didn’t realize that if I had forged his name I could have made a much better job of it than that.”

  Lance swept on, his voice rising. “Well, Percy, I’m not going on with this silly game. I’m sick of this country, and of the City. I’m sick of little men like you with their pinstripe trousers and their black coats and their mincing voices and their mean, shoddy financial deals. We’ll share out as you suggested, and I’ll get back with Pat to a different country—a country where there’s room to breathe and move about. You can make your own division of securities. Keep the gilt-edged and the conservative ones, keep the safe two percent and three percent and three and a half percent. Give me father’s latest wildcat speculations as you call them. Most of them are probably duds. But I’ll bet that one or two of them will pay better in the end than all your playing safe with three percent Trustee Stocks will do. Father was a shrewd old devil. He took chances, plenty of them. Some of those chances paid five and six and seven hundred percent. I’ll back his judgment and his luck. As for you, you little worm. . . .”

  Lance advanced towards his brother, who retreated rapidly, round the end of the desk towards Inspector Neele.

  “All right,” said Lance, “I’m not going to touch you. You wanted me out of here, you’re getting me out of here. You ought to be satisfied.”

  He added as he strode towards the door:

  “You can throw in the old Blackbird Mine concession too, if you like. If we’ve got the murdering MacKenzies on our trail, I’ll draw them off to Africa.”

  He added as he swung through the doorway:

  “Revenge—after all these years—scarcely seems credible. But Inspector Neele seems to take it seriously, don’t you, Inspector?”

  “Nonsense,” said Percival. “Such a thing is impossible!”

  “Ask him,” said Lance. “Ask him why he’s making all these inquiries into blackbirds and rye in father’s pocket.”

  Gently stroking his upper lip, Inspector Neele said:

  “You remember the blackbirds last summer, Mr. Fortescue. There are certain grounds for inquiry.”

  “Nonsense,” said Percival again. “Nobody’s heard of the MacKenzies for years.”

  “And yet,” said Lance, “I’d almost dare to swear that there’s a MacKenzie in our midst. I rather imagine the inspector thinks so, too.”

  II

  Inspector Neele caught up Lancelot Fortescue as the latter emerged into the street below.

  Lance grinned at him rather sheepishly.

  “I didn’t mean to do that,” he said. “But I suddenly lost my temper. Oh! well—it would have come to the same before long. I’m meeting Pat at the Savoy—are you coming my way, Inspector?”

  “No, I’m returning to Baydon Heath. But there’s just something I’d like to ask you, Mr. Fortescue.”

  “Yes!”

  “When you came into the inner office and saw me there—you were surprised. Why?”

  “Because I didn’t expect to see you, I suppose. I thought I’d find Percy there.”

  “You weren’t told that he’d gone out?”

  Lance looked at him curiously.

  “No. They said he was in his office.”

  “I see—nobody knew he’d gone out. There’s no second door out of the inner office—but there is a door leading straight into the corridor from the little antechamber—I suppose your brother went out that way—but I’m surprised Mrs. Hardcastle didn’t tell you so.”

  Lance laughed.

  “She’d probably been to collect her cup of tea.”

  “Yes—yes—quite so.”

  Lance looked at him.

  “What’s the idea, Inspector?”

  “Just puzzling over a few little things, that’s all, Mr. Fortescue—”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I

  In the train on the way down to Baydon Heath, Inspector Neele had singularly little success doing The Times crossword. His mind was distracted by various possibilities. In the same way he read the news with only half his brain taking it in. He read of an earthquake in Japan, of the discovery of uranium deposits in Tanganyika, of the body of a merchant seaman washed up near Southampton, and of the imminent strike among the dockers. He
read of the latest victims of the cosh and of a new drug that had achieved wonders in advanced cases of tuberculosis.

  All these items made a queer kind of pattern in the back of his mind. Presently he returned to the crossword puzzle and was able to put down three clues in rapid succession.

  When he reached Yewtree Lodge he had come to a certain decision. He said to Sergeant Hay:

  “Where’s that old lady? Is she still there?”

  “Miss Marple? Oh, yes, she’s here still. Great buddies with the old lady upstairs.”

  “I see.” Neele paused for a moment and then said: “Where is she now? I’d like to see her.”

  Miss Marple arrived in a few minutes’ time, looking rather flushed and breathing fast.

  “You want to see me, Inspector Neele? I do hope I haven’t kept you waiting. Sergeant Hay couldn’t find me at first. I was in the kitchen, talking to Mrs. Crump. I was congratulating her on her pastry and how light her hand is, and telling her how delicious the soufflé was last night. I always think, you know, it’s better to approach a subject gradually, don’t you? At least, I suppose it isn’t so easy for you. You more or less have to come almost straight away to the questions you want to ask. But of course for an old lady like me who has all the time in the world, as you might say, it’s really expected of her that there should be a great deal of unnecessary talk. And the way to a cook’s heart, as they say, is through her pastry.”

  “What you really wanted to talk to her about,” said Inspector Neele, “was Gladys Martin?”

  Miss Marple nodded.

  “Yes. Gladys. You see, Mrs. Crump could really tell me a lot about the girl. Not in connection with the murder. I don’t mean that. But about her spirits lately and the odd things she said. I don’t mean odd in the sense of peculiar. I mean just the odds and ends of conversation.”

  “Did you find it helpful?” asked Inspector Neele.

  “Yes,” said Miss Marple. “I found it very helpful indeed. I really think, you know, that things are becoming very much clearer, don’t you?”

  “I do and I don’t,” said Inspector Neele.

  Sergeant Hay, he noticed, had left the room. He was glad of it because what he was about to do now was, to say the least of it, slightly unorthodox.

  “Look here, Miss Marple,” he said, “I want to talk to you seriously.”

  “Yes, Inspector Neele?”

  “In a way,” said Inspector Neele, “you and I represent different points of view. I admit, Miss Marple, that I’ve heard something about you at the Yard.” He smiled: “It seems you’re fairly well-known there.”

  “I don’t know how it is,” fluttered Miss Marple, “but I so often seem to get mixed-up in the things that are really no concern of mine. Crimes, I mean, and peculiar happenings.”

  “You’ve got a reputation,” said Inspector Neele.

  “Sir Henry Clithering, of course,” said Miss Marple, “is a very old friend of mine.”

  “As I said before,” Neele went on, “you and I represent opposite points of view. One might almost call them sanity and insanity.”

  Miss Marple put her head a little on one side.

  “Now what exactly do you mean by that, I wonder, Inspector?”

  “Well, Miss Marple, there’s a sane way of looking at things. This murder benefits certain people. One person, I may say, in particular. The second murder benefits the same person. The third murder one might call a murder for safety.”

  “But which do you call the third murder?” Miss Marple asked.

  Her eyes, a very bright china blue, looked shrewdly at the inspector. He nodded.

  “Yes. You’ve got something there perhaps. You know, the other day when the AC was speaking to me of these murders, something that he said seemed to me to be wrong. That was it. I was thinking, of course, of the nursery rhyme. The King in his counting-house, the Queen in the parlour and the maid hanging out the clothes.”

  “Exactly,” said Miss Marple. “A sequence in that order, but actually Gladys must have been murdered before Mrs. Fortescue, mustn’t she?”

  “I think so,” said Neele. “I take it it’s quite certainly so. Her body wasn’t discovered till late that night, and of course it was difficult then to say exactly how long she’d been dead. But I think myself that she must almost certainly have been murdered round about five o’clock, because otherwise. . . .”

  Miss Marple cut in. “Because otherwise she would certainly have taken the second tray into the drawing room?”

  “Quite so. She took one tray in with the tea on it, she brought the second tray into the hall, and then something happened. She saw something or heard something. The question is what that something was. It might have been Dubois coming down the stairs from Mrs. Fortescue’s room. It might have been Elaine Fortescue’s young man, Gerald Wright, coming in at the side door. Whoever it was lured her away from the tea tray and out into the garden. And once that had happened I don’t see any possibility of her death being long delayed. It was cold out and she was only wearing her thin uniform.”

  “Of course you’re quite right,” said Miss Marple. “I mean it was never a case of ‘the maid was in the garden hanging up the clothes.’ She wouldn’t be hanging up clothes at that time of the evening and she wouldn’t go out to the clothesline without putting a coat on. That was all camouflage, like the clothes-peg, to make the thing fit in with the rhyme.”

  “Exactly,” said Inspector Neele, “crazy. That’s where I can’t yet see eye to eye with you. I can’t—I simply can’t swallow this nursery rhyme business.”

  “But it fits, Inspector. You must agree it fits.”

  “It fits,” said Neele heavily, “but all the same the sequence is wrong. I mean the rhyme definitely suggests that the maid was the third murder. But we know that the Queen was the third murder. Adele Fortescue was not killed until between twenty-five past five and five minutes to six. By then Gladys must already have been dead.”

  “And that’s all wrong, isn’t it?” said Miss Marple. “All wrong for the nursery rhyme—that’s very significant, isn’t it?”

  Inspector Neele shrugged his shoulders.

  “It’s probably splitting hairs. The deaths fulfil the conditions of the rhyme, and I suppose that’s all that was needed. But I’m talking now as though I were on your side. I’m going to outline my side of the case now, Miss Marple. I’m washing out the blackbirds and the rye and all the rest of it. I’m going by sober facts and common sense and the reasons for which sane people do murders. First, the death of Rex Fortescue, and who benefits by his death. Well, it benefits quite a lot of people, but most of all it benefits his son, Percival. His son Percival wasn’t at Yewtree Lodge that morning. He couldn’t have put poison in his father’s coffee or in anything that he ate for breakfast. Or that’s what we thought at first.”

  “Ah,” Miss Marple’s eyes brightened. “So there was a method, was there? I’ve been thinking about it, you know, a good deal, and I’ve had several ideas. But of course no evidence or proof.”

  “There’s no harm in my letting you know,” said Inspector Neele. “Taxine was added to a new jar of marmalade. That jar of marmalade was placed on the breakfast table and the top layer of it was eaten by Mr. Fortescue at breakfast. Later that jar of marmalade was thrown out into the bushes and a similar jar with a similar amount taken out of it was placed in the pantry. The jar in the bushes was found and I’ve just had the result of the analysis. It shows definite evidence of taxine.”

  “So that was it,” murmured Miss Marple. “So simple and easy to do.”

  “Consolidated Investments,” Neele went on, “was in a bad way. If the firm had had to pay out a hundred thousand pounds to Adele Fortescue under her husband’s will, it would, I think, have crashed. If Mrs. Fortescue had survived her husband for a month that money would have had to be paid out to her. She would have had no feeling for the firm or its difficulties. But she didn’t survive her husband for a month. She died, and as a result of her
death the gainer was the residuary legatee of Rex Fortescue’s will. In other words, Percival Fortescue again.

  “Always Percival Fortescue,” the inspector continued bitterly. “And though he could have tampered with the marmalade, he couldn’t have poisoned his stepmother or strangled Gladys. According to his secretary he was in his city office at five o’clock that afternoon, and he didn’t arrive back here until nearly seven.”

  “That makes it very difficult, doesn’t it?” said Miss Marple.

  “It makes it impossible,” said Inspector Neele gloomily. “In other words, Percival is out.” Abandoning restraint and prudence, he spoke with some bitterness, almost unaware of his listener. “Wherever I go, wherever I turn, I always come up against the same person. Percival Fortescue! Yet it can’t be Percival Fortescue.” Calming himself a little he said: “Oh, there are other possibilities, other people who had a perfectly good motive.”

  “Mr. Dubois, of course,” said Miss Marple sharply. “And that young Mr. Wright. I do so agree with you, Inspector. Wherever there is a question of gain, one has to be very suspicious. The great thing to avoid is having in any way a trustful mind.”

  In spite of himself, Neele smiled.

  “Always think the worst, eh?” he asked.

  It seemed a curious doctrine to be proceeding from this charming and fragile-looking old lady.

  “Oh yes,” said Miss Marple fervently. “I always believe the worst. What is so sad is that one is usually justified in doing so.”

  “All right,” said Neele, “let’s think the worst. Dubois could have done it, Gerald Wright could have done it (that is to say if he’d been acting in collusion with Elaine Fortescue and she tampered with the marmalade), Mrs. Percival could have done it, I suppose. She was on the spot. But none of the people I have mentioned tie up with the crazy angle. They don’t tie up with blackbirds and pockets full of rye. That’s your theory and it may be that you’re right. If so, it boils down to one person, doesn’t it? Mrs. MacKenzie’s in a mental home and has been for a good number of years. She hasn’t been messing about with marmalade pots or putting cyanide in the drawing room afternoon tea. Her son Donald was killed at Dunkirk. That leaves the daughter, Ruby MacKenzie. And if your theory is correct, if this whole series of murders arises out of the old Blackbird Mine business, then Ruby MacKenzie must be here in this house, and there’s only one person that Ruby MacKenzie could be.”