Pocket Full of Rye - Agatha Christie [34]
“It sounds rather cruel,” said Pat.
“Yes, my dear,” said Miss Marple, “life is cruel, I’m afraid. One doesn’t really know what to do with the Gladyses. They enjoy going to the pictures and all that, but they’re always thinking of impossible things that can’t possibly happen to them. Perhaps that’s happiness of a kind. But they get disappointed. I think Gladys was disappointed in café and restaurant life. Nothing very glamorous or interesting happened to her and it was just hard on the feet. Probably that’s why she came back into private service. Do you know how long she’d been here?”
Pat shook her head.
“Not very long, I should think. Only a month or two.” Pat paused and then went on, “It seems so horrible and futile that she should have been caught up in this thing. I suppose she’d seen something or noticed something.”
“It was the clothes-peg that really worried me,” said Miss Marple in her gentle voice.
“The clothes-peg?”
“Yes. I read about it in the papers. I suppose it is true? That when she was found there was a clothes-peg clipped onto her nose.”
Pat nodded. The colour rose to Miss Marple’s pink cheeks.
“That’s what made me so very angry, if you can understand, my dear. It was such a cruel, contemptuous gesture. It gave me a kind of picture of the murderer. To do a thing like that! It’s very wicked, you know, to affront human dignity. Particularly if you’ve already killed.”
Pat said slowly:
“I think I see what you mean.” She got up. “I think you’d better come and see Inspector Neele. He’s in charge of the case and he’s here now. You’ll like him, I think. He’s a very human person.” She gave a sudden, quick shiver. “The whole thing is such a horrible nightmare. Pointless. Mad. Without rhyme or reason in it.”
“I wouldn’t say that, you know,” said Miss Marple. “No, I wouldn’t say that.”
Inspector Neele was looking tired and haggard. Three deaths and the press of the whole country whooping down the trail. A case that seemed to be shaping in well-known fashion had gone suddenly haywire. Adele Fortescue, that appropriate suspect, was now the second victim of an incomprehensible murder case. At the close of that fatal day the assistant commissioner had sent for Neele and the two men had talked far into the night.
In spite of his dismay, or rather behind it, Inspector Neele had felt a faint inward satisfaction. That pattern of the wife and the lover. It had been too slick, too easy. He had always mistrusted it. And now that mistrust of his was justified.
“The whole thing takes on an entirely different aspect,” the AC had said, striding up and down his room and frowning. “It looks to me, Neele, as though we’ve got someone mentally unhinged to deal with. First the husband, then the wife. But the very circumstances of the case seem to show that it’s an inside job. It’s all there, in the family. Someone who sat down to breakfast with Fortescue put taxine in his coffee or on his food, someone who had tea with the family that day put potassium cyanide in Adele Fortescue’s cup of tea. Someone trusted, unnoticed, one of the family. Which of ’em, Neele?”
Neele said dryly:
“Percival wasn’t there, so that lets him out again. That lets him out again,” Inspector Neele repeated.
The AC looked at him sharply. Something in the repetition had attracted his attention.
“What’s the idea, Neele? Out with it, man.”
Inspector Neele looked stolid.
“Nothing, sir. Not so much as an idea. All I say is it was very convenient for him.”
“A bit too convenient, eh?” The AC reflected and shook his head. “You think he might have managed it somehow? Can’t see how, Neele. No, I can’t see how.”
He added: “And he’s a cautious type, too.”
“But quite intelligent, sir.”
“You don’t fancy the women. Is that it? Yet the women are indicated. Elaine Fortescue and Percival’s wife. They were at breakfast