Pocket Full of Rye - Agatha Christie [32]
They consisted for the most part of cheap and rather pathetic finery. There was little that was durable or of good quality. The elderly Ellen, whom he had called upon to assist him, had not been helpful. She didn’t know what clothes Gladys had or hadn’t. She couldn’t say what, if anything, was missing. He turned from the clothes and the underclothes to the contents of the chest of drawers. There Gladys kept her treasures. There were picture postcards and newspaper cuttings, knitting patterns, hints on beauty culture, dressmaking and fashion advice.
Inspector Neele sorted them neatly into various categories. The picture postcards consisted mainly of views of various places where he presumed Gladys had spent her holidays. Amongst them were three picture postcards signed “Bert.” Bert, he took to be the “young man” referred to by Mrs. Crump. The first postcard said—in an illiterate hand: “All the best. Missing you a lot. Yours ever, Bert.” The second said: “Lots of nice-looking girls here but not one that’s a patch on you. Be seeing you soon. Don’t forget our date. And remember after that—it’s thumbs up and living happy ever after.” The third said merely: “Don’t forget. I’m trusting you. Love, B.”
Next, Neele looked through the newspaper cuttings and sorted them into three piles. There were the dressmaking and beauty hints, there were items about cinema stars to which Gladys had appeared greatly addicted and she had also, it appeared, been attracted by the latest marvels of science. There were cuttings about flying saucers, about secret weapons, about truth drugs used by Russians, and claims for fantastic drugs discovered by American doctors. All the witchcraft, so Neele thought, of our twentieth century. But in all the contents of the room there was nothing to give him a clue to her disappearance. She had kept no diary, not that he had expected that. It was a remote possibility. There was no unfinished letter, no record at all of anything she might have seen in the house which could have had a bearing on Rex Fortescue’s death. Whatever Gladys had seen, whatever Gladys had known, there was no record of it. It would still have to be guesswork why the second tea tray had been left in the hall, and Gladys herself had so suddenly vanished.
Sighing, Neele left the room, shutting the door behind him.
As he prepared to descend the small winding stairs he heard a noise of running feet coming along the landing below.
The agitated face of Sergeant Hay looked up at him from the bottom of the stairs. Sergeant Hay was panting a little.
“Sir,” he said urgently. “Sir! We’ve found her—”
“Found her?”
“It was the housemaid, sir—Ellen—remembered as she hadn’t brought the clothes in from where they were hanging on the line—just round the corner from the back door. So she went out with a torch to take them in and she almost fell over the body—the girl’s body—strangled, she was, with a stocking round her throat—been dead for hours, I’d say. And, sir, it’s a wicked kind of joke—there was a clothes-peg clipped on her nose—”
Chapter Thirteen
An elderly lady travelling by train had bought three morning papers, and each of them as she finished it, folded it and laid it aside, showed the same headline. It was no longer a question now of a small paragraph hidden away in the corner of the papers. There were headlines with flaring announcements of Triple Tragedy at Yewtree Lodge.
The old lady sat very upright, looking out of the window of the train, her lips pursed together, an expression of distress and disapproval on her pink and white wrinkled face. Miss Marple had left St. Mary Mead by the early train, changing at the junction and going on to London, where she took a Circle train to another London terminus and thence on to Baydon Heath.
At the station she signalled a taxi and asked to be taken to Yewtree Lodge. So charming, so innocent, such a fluffy and pink and white old lady was Miss Marple that she gained admittance to what was now practically a fortress in a state of siege far more easily than could have been believed