In the year and a half before his death, Rex had seemed a changed man. Mrs MacKenzie said that it was her husband's mine, and she was convinced that Rex was responsible for his death. Mr MacKenzie had died while there, and Rex had come back saying that the mine was worthless. Many years before the events of the novel, Rex had gone to Africa with Mr MacKenzie, to survey the Blackbird Mine. According to Inspector Neele, he had certain connections with the black market and put through a few questionable deals, but they had always been just inside the law.
He was in the habit of wearing "loosely cut country tweeds in his city office". Rex was a "large flabby man with a gleaming bald head". His father hailed from Central Europe and had been named Fontescu. He had met her at Brighton, where she had been a manicurist. His second wife was thirty years younger than him. He has three children from his first marriage: Percival, Lancelot and Elaine Fortescue. Always a business man of questionable ethics, his judgement was becoming equally questionable, to the damage of his company, until somebody saw fit to get him out of the way - permanently.
Rex Fortescue was the thoroughly unpleasant patriarch of the Fortescue family and the first victim to die in A Pocket Full of Rye.
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