A Pocket Full of Rye Read Online Free Page B

deal in grain?”
    â€œOh no. He was expecting the Asiatic Oil people this afternoon. And the President of the Atticus Building Society . . . No one else.”
    â€œOh well—” Neele dismissed the subject and Miss Grosvenor with a wave of the hand.
    â€œLovely legs she’s got,” said Constable Waite with a sigh. “And super nylons—”
    â€œLegs are no help to me,” said Inspector Neele. “I’m left with what I had before. A pocketful of rye—and no explanation of it.”

Chapter Four
    M ary Dove paused on her way downstairs and looked out through the big window on the stairs. A car had just driven up from which two men were alighting. The taller of the two stood for a moment with his back to the house surveying his surroundings. Mary Dove appraised the two men thoughtfully. Inspector Neele and presumably a subordinate.
    She turned from the window and looked at herself in the full-length mirror that hung on the wall where the staircase turned . . . She saw a small demure figure with immaculate white collar and cuffs on a beige grey dress. Her dark hair was parted in the middle and drawn back in two shining waves to a knot in the back of the neck . . . The lipstick she used was a pale rose colour.
    On the whole Mary Dove was satisfied with her appearance. A very faint smile on her lips, she went on down the stairs.
    Inspector Neele, surveying the house, was saying to himself:
    Call it a lodge, indeed! Yewtree Lodge! The affectation of these rich people! The house was what he, Inspector Neele, would call a mansion. He knew what a lodge was. He’d been brought up in one! The lodge at the gates of Hartington Park, that vast unwieldy Palladian house with its twenty-nine bedrooms which had now been taken over by the National Trust. The lodge had been small and attractive from the outside, and had been damp, uncomfortable and devoid of anything but the most primitive form of sanitation within. Fortunately these facts had been accepted as quite proper and fitting by Inspector Neele’s parents. They had no rent to pay and nothing whatever to do except open and shut the gates when required, and there were always plenty of rabbits and an occasional pheasant or so for the pot. Mrs. Neele had never discovered the pleasure of electric irons, slow combustion stoves, airing cupboards, hot and cold water from taps, and the switching on of light by a mere flick of a finger. In winter the Neeles had an oil lamp and in summer they went to bed when it got dark. They were a healthy family and a happy one, all thoroughly behind the times.
    So when Inspector Neele heard the word Lodge, it was his childhood memories that stirred. But this place, this pretentiously named Yewtree Lodge was just the kind of mansion that rich people built themselves and then called it “their little place in the country.” It wasn’t in the country either, according to Inspector Neele’s idea of the country. The house was a large solid red-brick structure, sprawling lengthwise rather than upward, with rather too many gables, and a vast number of leaded paned windows. The gardens were highly artificial—all laid out in rose beds and pergolas and pools, and living up to the name of the house with large numbers of clipped yew hedges.
    Plenty of yew here for anybody with a desire to obtain the raw material of taxine. Over on the right, behind the rose pergola, there was a bit of actual nature left—a vast yew tree of the kind one associates with churchyards, its branches held up by stakes—like a kind of Moses of the forest world. That tree, the inspector thought, had been there long before the rash of newly built red-brick houses had begun to spread over the countryside. It had been there before the golf courses had been laid out and the fashionable architects had walked round with their rich clients, pointing out the advantages of the various sites. And since it was a valuable