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

Pat looked puzzled.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No, my dear. But perhaps you will, someday. If I might venture to advise, if anything ever—goes wrong in your life—I think the happiest thing for you would be to go back to where you were happy as a child. Go back to Ireland, my dear. Horses and dogs. All that.”

  Pat nodded.

  “Sometimes I wish I’d done just that when Freddy died. But if I had”—her voice changed and softened—“I’d never have met Lance.”

  Miss Marple sighed.

  “We’re not staying here, you know,” said Pat. “We’re going back to East Africa as soon as everything’s cleared up. I’m so glad.”

  “God bless you, dear child,” said Miss Marple. “One needs a great deal of courage to get through life. I think you have it.”

  She patted the girl’s hand and, releasing it, went through the front door to the waiting taxi.

  II

  Miss Marple reached home late that evening.

  Kitty—the latest graduate from St. Faith’s Home—let her in and greeted her with a beaming face.

  “I’ve got a herring for your supper, miss. I’m so glad to see you home—you’ll find everything very nice in the house. Regular spring cleaning I’ve had.”

  “That’s very nice, Kitty—I’m glad to be home.”

  Six spider’s webs on the cornice, Miss Marple noted. These girls never raised their heads! She was none the less too kind to say so.

  “Your letters is on the hall table, miss. And there’s one as went to Daisymead by mistake. Always doing that, aren’t they? Does look a bit alike, Dane and Daisy, and the writing’s so bad I don’t wonder this time. They’ve been away there and the house shut up, they only got back and sent it round today. Said as how they hoped it wasn’t important.”

  Miss Marple picked up her correspondence. The letter to which Kitty had referred was on top of the others. A faint chord of remembrance stirred in Miss Marple’s mind at the sight of the blotted scrawled handwriting. She tore it open.

  Dear Madam,

  I hope as you’ll forgive me writing this but I really don’t know what to do indeed I don’t and I never meant no harm. Dear madam, you’ll have seen the newspapers it was murder they say but it wasn’t me that did it, not really, because I would never do anything wicked like that and I know as how he wouldn’t either. Albert, I mean. I’m telling this badly, but you see we met last summer and was going to be married only Bert hadn’t got his rights, he’d been done out of them, swindled by this Mr. Fortescue who’s dead. And Mr. Fortescue he just denied everything and of course everybody believed him and not Bert because he was rich and Bert was poor. But Bert had a friend who works in a place where they make these new drugs and there’s what they call a truth drug you’ve read about it perhaps in the paper and it makes people speak the truth whether they want to or not. Bert was going to see Mr. Fortescue in his office on Nov. 5th and taking a lawyer with him and I was to be sure to give him the drug at breakfast that morning and then it would work just right for when they came and he’d admit as all what Bert said was quite true. Well, madam, I put it in the marmalade but now he’s dead and I think as how it must have been too strong but it wasn’t Bert’s fault because Bert would never do a thing like that but I can’t tell the police because maybe they’d think Bert did it on purpose which I know he didn’t. Oh, madam, I don’t know what to do or what to say and the police are here in the house and it’s awful and they ask you questions and look at you so stern and I don’t know what to do and I haven’t heard from Bert. Oh, madam, I don’t like to ask it of you but if you could only come here and help me they’d listen to you and you were always so kind to me, and I didn’t mean anything wrong and Bert didn’t either. If you could only help us. Yours respectfully,

  Gladys Martin.

  P. S.—I’m enclosing a snap of Bert and me. One of the boys took it at the camp and give it me. Bert doesn’t know I’ve got it—he hates being snapped. But you can see, madam, what a nice boy he is.

  Miss Marple, her lips pursed together, stared down at the photograph. The pair pictured there were looking at each other. Miss Marple’s eyes went from Gladys’s pathetic adoring face, the mouth slightly open, to the other face—the dark handsome smiling face of Lance Fortescue.

  The last words of the pathetic letter echoed in her mind:

  You can see what a nice boy he is.

  The tear rose in Miss Marple’s eyes. Succeeding pity, there came anger—anger against a heartless killer.

  And then, displacing both these emotions, there came a surge of triumph—the triumph some specialist might feel who has successfully reconstructed an extinct animal from a fragment of jawbone and a couple of teeth.

  About the Author

  Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Her books have sold more than a billion copies in English and another billion in a hundred foreign languages. She is the author of eighty crime novels and short-story collections, nineteen plays, two memoirs, and six novels written under the name Mary Westmacott.

  She first tried her hand at detective fiction while working in a hospital dispensary during World War I, creating the now legendary Hercule Poirot with her debut novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles. With The Murder in the Vicarage, published in 1930, she introduced another beloved sleuth, Miss Jane Marple. Additional series characters include the husband-and-wife crime-fighting team of Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, private investigator Parker Pyne, and Scotland Yard detectives Superintendent Battle and Inspector Japp.

  Many of Christie’s novels and short stories were adapted into plays, films, and television series. The Mousetrap, her most famous play of all, opened in 1952 and is the longest-running play in history. Among her best-known film adaptations are Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and Death on the Nile (1978), with Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov playing Hercule Poirot, respectively. On the small screen Poirot has been most memorably portrayed by David Suchet, and Miss Marple by Joan Hickson and subsequently Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie.

  Christie was first married to Archibald Christie and then to archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, whom she accompanied on expeditions to countries that would also serve as the settings for many of her novels. In 1971 she achieved one of Britain’s highest honors when she was made a Dame of the British Empire. She died in 1976 at the age of eighty-five. Her one hundred and twentieth anniversary was celebrated around the world in 2010.

  www.AgathaChristie.com

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  THE AGATHA CHRISTIE COLLECTION

  The Man in the Brown Suit

  The Secret of Chimneys

  The Seven Dials Mystery

  The Mysterious Mr. Quin

  The Sittaford Mystery

  Parker Pyne Investigates

  Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?

  Murder Is Easy

  The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories

  And Then There Were None

  Towards Zero

  Death Comes as the End

  Sparkling Cyanide

  The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories

  Crooked House

  Three Blind Mice and Other Stories

  They Came to Baghdad

  Destination Unknown

  Ordeal by Innocence

  Double Sin and Other Stories

  The Pale Horse

  Star over Bethlehem: Poems and Holiday Stories

  Endless Night

  Passenger to Frankfurt

  The Golden Ball and Other Stories

  The Mousetrap and Other Plays

  The Harlequin Tea Set

  The Hercule Poirot Mysteries

  The Mysterious Affair at Styles

  The Murder on the Links

  Poirot Investigates

  The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

  The Big Four
/>   The Mystery of the Blue Train

  Peril at End House

  Lord Edgware Dies

  Murder on the Orient Express

  Three Act Tragedy

  Death in the Clouds

  The A.B.C. Murders

  Murder in Mesopotamia

  Cards on the Table

  Murder in the Mews and Other Stories

  Dumb Witness

  Death on the Nile

  Appointment with Death

  Hercule Poirot’s Christmas

  Sad Cypress

  One, Two, Buckle My Shoe

  Evil Under the Sun

  Five Little Pigs

  The Hollow

  The Labors of Hercules

  Taken at the Flood

  The Underdog and Other Stories

  Mrs. McGinty’s Dead

  After the Funeral

  Hickory Dickory Dock

  Dead Man’s Folly

  Cat Among the Pigeons

  The Clocks

  Third Girl

  Hallowe’en Party

  Elephants Can Remember

  Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case

  The Miss Marple Mysteries

  The Murder at the Vicarage

  The Body in the Library

  The Moving Finger

  A Murder Is Announced

  They Do It with Mirrors

  A Pocket Full of Rye

  4:50 from Paddington

  The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side

  A Caribbean Mystery

  At Bertram’s Hotel

  Nemesis

  Sleeping Murder

  Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories

  The Tommy and Tuppence Mysteries

  The Secret Adversary

  Partners in Crime

  N or M?

  By the Pricking of My Thumbs

  Postern of Fate

  Credits

  Cover illustration and design by Sara Wood

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  AGATHA CHRISTIE® MARPLE® MISS MARPLE® A POCKET FULL OF RYE™. Copyright © 2011 Agatha Christie Limited (a Chorion company). All rights reserved. A Pocket Full of Rye was first published in 1953.

  A POCKET FULL OF RYE © 1954. Published by permission of G.P. Putnam’s Sons, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780062113658

  ISBN 978-0-06-207365-5

  11 12 13 14 15 DIX/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  About the Publisher

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

  25 Ryde Road (P.O. Box 321)

  Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia

  www.harpercollins.com.au/ebooks

  Canada

  HarperCollins Canada

  2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor

  Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada

  http://www.harpercollins.ca

  New Zealand

  HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited

  P.O. Box 1

  Auckland, New Zealand

  http://www.harpercollins.co.nz

  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  77-85 Fulham Palace Road

  London, W6 8JB, UK

  http://www.harpercollins.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  10 East 53rd Street

  New York, NY 10022

  http://www.harpercollins.com