A Pocket Full of Rye (Miss Marple 7)

“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?”