A Pocket Full of Rye (Miss Marple 7)

“Percival Fortescue?” Inspector Neele spoke almost imploringly, but he knew as he spoke that he was wrong. The picture of the man that Miss Marple had built up for him had no resemblance to Percival Fortescue.

“Oh, no,” said Miss Marple. “Not Percival. Lance.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I

“It’s impossible,” said Inspector Neele.

He leaned back in his chair and watched Miss Marple with fascinated eyes. As Miss Marple had said, he was not surprised. His words were a denial, not of probability, but of possibility. Lance Fortescue fitted the description: Miss Marple had outlined it well enough. But Inspector Neele simply could not see how Lance could be the answer.

Miss Marple leaned forward in her chair and gently, persuasively, and rather in the manner of someone explaining the simple facts of arithmetic to a small child, outlined her theory.

“He’s always been like that, you see. I mean, he’s always been bad. Bad all through, although with it he’s always been attractive. Especially attractive to women. He’s got a brilliant mind and he’ll take risks. He’s always taken risks and because of his charm people have always believed the best and not the worst about him. He came home in the summer to see his father. I don’t believe for a moment that his father wrote to him or sent for him—unless, of course, you’ve got actual evidence to that effect.” She paused inquiringly.

Neele shook his head. “No,” he said, “I’ve no evidence of his father sending for him. I’ve got a letter that Lance is supposed to have written to him after being here. But Lance could quite easily have slipped that among his father’s papers in the study here the day he arrived.”

“Sharp of him,” said Miss Marple, nodding her head. “Well, as I say, he probably flew over here and attempted a reconciliation with his father, but Mr. Fortescue wouldn’t have it. You see, Lance had recently got married and the small pittance he was living on, and which he had doubtless been supplementing in various dishonest ways, was not enough for him anymore. He was very much in love with Pat (who is a dear, sweet girl) and he wanted a respectable, settled life with her—nothing shifty. And that, from his point of view, meant having a lot of money. When he was at Yewtree Lodge he must have heard about these blackbirds. Perhaps his father mentioned them. Perhaps Adele did. He jumped to the conclusion that MacKenzie’s daughter was established in the house and it occurred to him that she would make a very good scapegoat for murder. Because, you see, when he realized that he couldn’t get his father to do what he wanted, he must have cold-bloodedly decided that murder it would have to be. He may have realized that his father wasn’t—er, very well—and have feared that by the time his father died there would have been a complete crash.”

“He knew about his father’s health all right,” said the inspector.

“Ah—that explains a good deal. Perhaps the coincidence of his father’s Christian name being Rex together with the blackbird incident suggested the idea of the nursery rhyme. Make a crazy business of the whole thing—and tie it up with that old revenge threat of the MacKenzies. Then, you see, he could dispose of Adele, too, and that hundred thousand pounds going out of the firm. But there would have to be a third character, the ‘maid in the garden hanging up the clothes’—and I suppose that suggested the whole wicked plan to him. An innocent accomplice whom he could silence before she could talk. And that would give him what he wanted—a genuine alibi for the first murder. The rest was easy. He arrived here from the station just before five o’clock, which was the time when Gladys brought the second tray into the hall. He came to the side door, saw her and beckoned to her. Strangling her and carrying her body round the house to where the clotheslines were would only have taken three or four minutes. Then he rang the front doorbell, was admitted to the house, and joined the family for tea. After tea he went up to see Miss Ramsbottom. When he came down, he slipped into the drawing room, found Adele alone there drinking a last cup of tea and sat down by her on the sofa, and while he was talking to her, he managed to slip the cyanide into her tea. It wouldn’t be difficult, you know. A little piece of white stuff, like sugar. He might have stretched out his hand to the sugar basin and taken a lump and apparently dropped it into her cup. He’d laugh and say: ‘Look, I’ve dropped more sugar into your tea.’ She’d say she didn’t mind, stir it and drink it. It would be as easy and audacious as that. Yes, he’s an audacious fellow.”

Inspector Neele said slowly:

“It’s actually possible—yes. But I cannot see—really, Miss Marple, I cannot see—what he stood to gain by it. Granted that unless old Fortescue died the business would soon be on the rocks, is Lance’s share big enough to cause him to plan three murders? I don’t think so. I really don’t think so.”

“That is a little difficult,” admitted Miss Marple. “Yes, I agree with you. That does present difficulties. I suppose . . .” She hesitated, looking at the inspector. “I suppose—I am so very ignorant in financial matters—but I suppose it is really true that the Blackbird Mine is worthless?”

Neele reflected. Various scraps fitted together in his mind. Lance’s willingness to take the various speculative or worthless shares off Percival’s hands. His parting words today in London that Percival had better get rid of the Blackbird and its hoodoo. A gold mine. A worthless gold mine. But perhaps the mine had not been worthless. And yet, somehow, that seemed unlikely. Old Rex Fortescue was hardly likely to have made a mistake on that point, although of course there might have been soundings recently. Where was the mine? West Africa, Lance had said. Yes but somebody else—was it Miss Ramsbottom—had said it was in East Africa. Had Lance been deliberately misleading when he said West instead of East? Miss Ramsbottom was old and forgetful, and yet she might have been right and not Lance. East Africa. Lance had just come from East Africa. Had he perhaps some recent knowledge?

Suddenly with a click another piece fitted into the inspector’s puzzle. Sitting in the train, reading The Times. Uranium deposits found in Tanganyika. Supposing that the uranium deposits were on the site of the old Blackbird? That would explain everything. Lance had come to have knowledge of that, being on the spot, and with uranium deposits there, there was a fortune to be grasped. An enormous fortune! He sighed. He looked at Miss Marple.

“How do you think,” he asked reproachfully, “that I’m ever going to be able to prove all this?”

Miss Marple nodded at him encouragingly, as an aunt might have encouraged a bright nephew who was going in for a scholarship exam.

“You’ll prove it,” she said. “You’re a very, very clever man, Inspector Neele. I’ve seen that from the first. Now you know who it is you ought to be able to get the evidence. At that holiday camp, for instance, they’ll recognize his photograph. He’ll find it hard to explain why he stayed there for a week calling himself Albert Evans.”

Yes, Inspector Neele thought, Lance Fortescue was brilliant and unscrupulous—but he was foolhardy, too. The risks he took were just a little too great.

Neele thought to himself, “I’ll get him!” Then, doubt sweeping over him, he looked at Miss Marple.

“It’s all pure assumption, you know,” he said.

“Yes—but you are sure, aren’t you?”

“I suppose so. After all, I’ve known his kind before.”

The old lady nodded.

“Yes—that matters so much—that’s really why I’m sure.”

Neele looked at her playfully.

“Because of your knowledge of criminals.”

“Oh no—of course not. Because of Pat—a dear girl—and the kind that always marries a bad lot—that’s really what drew my attention to him at the start—”

“I may be sure—in my own mind,” said the inspector, “but there’s a lot that needs explaining—the Ruby MacKenzie business for instance. I could swear that—”

Miss Marple interrupted:

“And you’re quite right. But you’ve been thinking of the wrong person. Go and talk to Mrs. Percy

.”

II

“Mrs. Fortescue,” said Inspector Neele, “do you mind telling me your name before you were married.”

“Oh!” Jennifer gasped. She looked frightened.

“You needn’t be nervous, madam,” said Inspector Neele, “but it’s much better to come out with the truth. I’m right, I think, in saying that your name before you were married was Ruby MacKenzie?”

“My—well, oh well—oh dear—well, why shouldn’t it be?” said Mrs. Percival Fortescue.

“No reason at all,” said Inspector Neele gently, and added: “I was talking to your mother a few days ago at Pinewood Sanatorium.”

“She’s very angry with me,” said Jennifer. “I never go and see her now because it only upsets her. Poor Mumsy, she was so devoted to Dad, you know.”

“And she brought you up to have very melodramatic ideas of revenge?”

“Yes,” said Jennifer. “She kept making us swear on the Bible that we’d never forget and that we’d kill him one day. Of course, once I’d gone into hospital and started my training, I began to realize that her mental balance wasn’t what it should be.”

“You yourself must have felt revengeful though, Mrs. Fortescue?”

“Well, of course I did. Rex Fortescue practically murdered my father! I don’t mean he actually shot him, or knifed him or anything like that. But I’m quite certain that he did leave Father to die. That’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

“It’s the same thing morally—yes.”

“So I did want to pay him back,” said Jennifer. “When a friend of mine came to nurse his son I got her to leave and to propose my replacing her. I don’t know exactly what I meant to do . . . I didn’t, really I didn’t, Inspector, I never meant to kill Mr. Fortescue. I had some idea, I think, of nursing his son so badly that the son would die. But of course, if you are a nurse by profession you can’t do that sort of thing. Actually I had quite a job pulling Val through. And then he got fond of me and asked me to marry him and I thought, ‘Well, really that’s a far more sensible revenge than anything else.” I mean, to marry Mr. Fortescue’s eldest son and get the money he swindled Father out of back that way. I think it was a far more sensible way.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Inspector Neele, “far more sensible.” He added, “It was you, I suppose, who put the blackbirds on the desk and in the pie?”

Mrs. Percival flushed.

“Yes. I suppose it was silly of me really . . . But Mr. Fortescue had been talking about suckers one day and boasting of how he’d swindled people—got the best of them. Oh, in quite a legal way. And I thought I’d just like to give him—well, a kind of fright. And it did give him a fright! He was awfully upset.” She added anxiously, “But I didn’t do anything else! I didn’t really, Inspector. You don’t—you don’t honestly think I would murder anyone, do you?”

Inspector Neele smiled.

“No,” he said, “I don’t.” He added: “By the way, have you given Miss Dove any money lately?”

Jennifer’s jaw dropped.

“How did you know?”

“We know a lot of things,” said Inspector Neele and added to himself: “And guess a good many, too.”

Jennifer continued, speaking rapidly:

“She came to me and said that you’d accused her of being Ruby MacKenzie. She said if I’d get hold of five hundred pounds she’d let you go on thinking so. She said if you knew that I was Ruby MacKenzie, I’d be suspected of murdering Mr. Fortescue and my stepmother. I had an awful job getting the money, because of course I couldn’t tell Percival. He doesn’t know about me. I had to sell my diamond engagement ring and a very beautiful necklace Mr. Fortescue gave me.”