Pocket Full of Rye - Agatha Christie [64]
“Your brother told me so.”
“He did, did he? With enthusiasm?”
Inspector Neele endeavoured to conceal a smile.
“The enthusiasm was not marked,” he said gravely.
“Poor Percy,” commented Lance.
Inspector Neele looked at him curiously.
“Are you really going to become a City man?”
“You don’t think it’s likely, Inspector Neele?”
“It doesn’t seem quite in character, Mr. Fortescue.”
“Why not? I’m my father’s son.”
“And your mother’s.”
Lance shook his head.
“You haven’t got anything there, Inspector. My mother was a Victorian romantic. Her favourite reading was the Idylls of the King, as indeed you may have deduced from our curious Christian names. She was an invalid and always, I should imagine, out of touch with reality. I’m not like that at all. I have no sentiment, very little sense of romance and I’m a realist first and last.”
“People aren’t always what they think themselves to be,” Inspector Neele pointed out.
“No, I suppose that’s true,” said Lance.
He sat down in a chair and stretched his long legs out in his own characteristic fashion. He was smiling to himself. Then he said unexpectedly:
“You’re shrewder than my brother, Inspector.”
“In what way, Mr. Fortescue?”
“I’ve put the wind up Percy all right. He thinks I’m all set for the City life. He thinks he’s going to have my fingers fiddling about his pie. He thinks I’ll launch out and spend the firm’s money and try and embroil him in wildcat schemes. It would be almost worth doing just for the fun of it! Almost, but not quite. I couldn’t really stand an office life, Inspector. I like the open air and some possibilities of adventure. I’d stifle in a place like this.” He added quickly: “This is off the record, mind. Don’t give me away to Percy, will you?”
“I don’t suppose the subject will arise, Mr. Fortescue.”
“I must have my bit of fun with Percy,” said Lance. “I want to make him sweat a bit. I’ve got to get a bit of my own back.”
“That’s rather a curious phrase, Mr. Fortescue,” said Neele. “Your own back—for what?”
Lance shrugged his shoulders.
“Oh, it’s old history now. Not worth going back over.”
“There was a little matter of a cheque, I understand, in the past. Would that be what you’re referring to?”
“How much you know, Inspector!”
“There was no question of prosecution, I understand,” said Neele. “Your father wouldn’t have done that.”
“No. He just kicked me out, that’s all.”
Inspector Neele eyed him speculatively, but it was not Lance Fortescue of whom he was thinking, but of Percival. The honest, industrious, parsimonious Percival. It seemed to him that wherever he got in the case he was always coming up against the enigma of Percival Fortescue, a man of whom everybody knew the outer aspects, but whose inner personality was much harder to gauge. One would have said from observing him a somewhat colourless and insignificant character, a man who had been very much under his father’s thumb. Percy Prim in fact, as the AC had once said. Neele was trying now, through Lance, to get at a closer appreciation of Percival’s personality. He murmured in a tentative manner:
“Your brother seems always to have been very much—well, how shall I put it—under your father’s thumb.”
“I wonder.” Lance seemed definitely to be considering the point. “I wonder. Yes, that would be the effect, I think, given. But I’m not sure that it was really the truth. It’s astonishing, you know, when I look back through life, to see how Percy always got his own way without seeming to do so, if you know what I mean.”
Yes, Inspector Neele thought, it was indeed astonishing. He sorted through the papers in front of him, fished out a letter and shoved it across the desk towards Lance.
“This is a letter you wrote last August, isn’t it, Mr. Fortescue?”
Lance took it, glanced at it and returned it.
“Yes,” he said, “I wrote it after I got back to Kenya last summer. Dad kept it, did he? Where was it—here in the office?”
“No, Mr. Fortescue, it was among your father’s papers in Yewtree Lodge.”
The inspector considered it speculatively as it lay on the desk