Before the Poison

by Peter Robinson

  ‘Well, Laura, my love,’ I said as I picked up my teacup and held it in the air in an imaginary toast. ‘Here we are. Home at last.’

  2

  Famous Trials: Grace Elizabeth Fox, April 1953, by Sir Charles Hamilton Morley

  In his 1946 essay ‘The Decline of the English Murder,’ Mr. George Orwell noted several common elements of the type of murder that provides the greatest amount of entertainment and satisfaction for the English public. In particular, he identified domestic life, sexual passion, paltry amounts of money, and the fear of scandal. While the murder of Ernest Fox does contain a number of these elements, it performs a subtle alchemy on them and presents us with something far more complex and substantial.

  Nothing about the Fox affair was what it seemed. Ostensibly a reserved, educated and considerate wife and mother, Grace Fox was, in fact, in the throes of a passionate adulterous liaison with a man – nay, a boy – young enough to be her own son. On the surface a devoted wife, she did, according to the evidence presented against her at her trial, poison her husband not only once, but twice. What kind of woman could do such a thing? Well may you ask.

  We must, however, put ourselves in the jury’s place and ask ourselves, on the basis of the witness testimony and evidence presented, whether indeed Grace Fox was the monster depicted by the prosecution, or was she, in fact, a decent woman driven to an extreme act of evil by a cold, cruel and uncaring husband, and by the unexpected passion and hope unleashed in her by her young lover Mr. Samuel Porter? Our interest in a crime lies not so much in what is abnormal about it, but in those elements we may share with the criminal. Can any one among us, especially those members of the fairer sex, say that Grace Fox was so different from the rest, that she was set apart by anything other than her desperation, her impulses and her poor judgement?

  Most murders may well be sordid and commonplace affairs, but once in a while a murder grips the imagination of the public owing to the characters of those involved and their heightened circumstances in life and within the communities they inhabit. This is just such a murder. While the details may well be vulgar, even gruesome, the ordinary human tragedy they reveal is what truly grips the audience.

  It is not that Grace Fox used some hitherto unknown or exotic manner of dispatch; she did not; she used poison. It is not that she showed unusual cunning or intelligence in her planning; on the contrary, she was quite easily apprehended. It is not even that she demonstrated anything unique as regards motive. The age-old love triangle lay at the heart of it all.

  But as Grace Fox sat in court day after day, silent and unmoving as the witnesses for the prosecution were paraded before her, never flinching as the cruellest and most intimate details of her thoughts and feelings were laid bare in the cold light of the courtroom, we felt that we were in the presence of a great enigma. For there she sat, beautiful in the simplest of clothes, the dark waves of her hair tied back from her pale, expressionless face. Was this, we wondered, the face of a cold-blooded killer?

  October 2010

  My grief is a sharp blade. It pricks me when I least expect it, digs deep into me, stabs and twists, on and on like a cat worrying a bird. I might be shopping in a supermarket or eating a meal in a restaurant, and my eyes begin to burn with tears, my chest constricts. Once or twice, concerned shop assistants have worried that I was having a heart attack and offered to call an ambulance. Perhaps, in a way, I was.

  That first night at Kilnsgate House, it was a dream of Laura that woke me. At least I think it was. Not a recurring dream; I don’t have those. And it wasn’t a nightmare, either, except that the emotions associated with its simple images shook me the way nightmares do.

  Laura was laughing over a board game with her brother Clayton – Monopoly, I think – while I was in the next room with the door open, sorting through my things. I had to leave for ever that day and would never see Laura again, though I had no idea why, or even whose idea it was, and I didn’t know what to take with me and what to leave behind. Their unfeeling laughter penetrated me to the core. I was staring at an old black and white photograph of me and a school friend whose name I couldn’t remember. In the photo, I was sitting proudly on my brand-new sledge, and he was standing by me. We both wore mitts and woolly hats with pompoms. I remembered that my father had made that sledge for me, remembered trudging around the scrap-metal yards with him searching for the runners. It had gone like the clappers until I ran it into a tree one day and was lucky to escape with a broken arm. The sledge wasn’t so lucky. Perhaps it was all a bit Citizen Kane, but there I was in the dream looking at this old photograph, crying my eyes out, my life in tatters for no reason I could understand, while my wife and her brother were laughing in the other room over who was buying Madison Avenue. I awoke with a sense of guilt and panic that soon turned into deep sadness and vague anxiety. The digital clock said it was 4.24.

  Insomnia was hardly a novelty for me since Laura’s death, especially with the added confusion of my new surroundings, the wind howling outside, the rain lashing against the windowpanes, the water dripping from a broken gutter on to a hollow, echoing surface. The house itself, like Caliban’s island, was full of noises. Creaks in the old wood. An eerie whistling sound. A window rattling in its frame. A groan. A sigh. What sounded like anxious footsteps pacing up and down the corridor outside my bedroom. Lying there, unable to sleep, I began to feel quite scared, the way you do at 4.24 a.m. in an eerie old house, imagining all kinds of terrible creatures of darkness on the prowl. I could hear the soundtrack in my mind, a low-budget horror movie I had scored in my early days, all edgy strings, shrieking brass and staccato percussion. I remembered Heather Barlow and our talk of ghosts.

  My anxiety persisted, and in the end, when I thought I could hear the sound of a child crying, I knew that waiting for sleep was futile, so I slipped out of bed, got dressed and headed for the stairs. I think I even searched under the bed first. There was nothing there, of course, nor was there anybody in the corridor, and only my own footsteps made the ancient floorboards creak. No crying child. No abandoned governess hanging from the rafters. Nothing. Too much M. R. James. Or was it Henry James?

  It had been my intention, when I first got up, to go down to the kitchen to make myself a pot of tea, then perhaps sit and read for a while until I felt tired again, but I was so edgy by the time I got downstairs that I changed my mind. I knew I shouldn’t, but instead of putting the kettle on for tea, I poured myself a stiff tumbler of duty-free Highland Park, something to take the edge off, to calm my nerves.

  I had reconnoitred the downstairs of the house very quickly the previous evening after Heather’s visit, so I knew that the television room was on the eastern side, the opposite side of the vestibule from the kitchen. Perhaps I was risking the wrath of the television licence people, as I hadn’t sorted that out yet – perhaps they had a van lurking down the lane right now – but I didn’t care.

  I flipped through the DVDs I had bought in London, mostly old British classics, some I had seen in my youth, or later, and a few others I hadn’t seen at all but had always wanted to watch. The TV set was a good one – I had chosen a brand name I knew I could rely on – and its fifty-inch plasma screen fitted comfortably on the far wall. The picture was excellent, the BluRay player and surround sound ideal. I settled with my whisky into the reclining armchair, which was the perfect distance away to recreate being in a cinema, only I didn’t have to put up with obnoxious people talking behind me, texting on their mobiles, crinkling cellophane bags, or with my feet crunching popcorn and sticking to the cola-flooded floor.

  In the end, I decided on Brief Encounter. For many years it had been one of my favourite films, and as it began, I sipped my whisky, snug in my armchair, a blue and white striped blanket I’d found in one of the cupboards wrapped around me, legs propped up on the footrest. The wind raged outside, the bumps and creaks continued within, and I tried to push the sense of uneasiness from my mind as Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson played out their
tragic and so-very-English little drama in the old Carnforth railway station against Rachmaninov’s lush romantic piano concerto.

  I awoke in the armchair with a stiff neck at about nine o’clock in the morning, the heavy curtains blocking out any early sunlight there might be. When I shuffled to my feet and flung them open, I saw that last night’s wind and rain had washed and scrubbed the landscape clean. It was all blue sky, green grass and silver limestone again, all planes, curves and angles like an abstract landscape, autumn leaves drifting across. A David Hockney Yorkshire Dales, perhaps. Even better than I had imagined it would be.

  The TV screen was still showing the menu for Brief Encounter with a snippet of Rachmaninov playing over and over again. I couldn’t recall getting to the end of the film. Half my whisky was still in the glass on the arm of the chair. I walked into the vestibule, expecting to find a newspaper jammed in the letterbox and letters all over the floor, but there was nothing, only the refracted light through stained glass dancing on the walls and carpet.

  I wandered into the kitchen and checked the cupboards, but I soon realised with a sinking feeling that there was no coffee-maker. Heather Barlow had brought me a vacuum pack of Douwe Egberts filter roast, and the previous owner may have left me a grandfather clock, a grand piano and any number of other odds and ends, but no one had left me a coffee-maker, alas, not even a simple Melitta filter or Bodum cafetière.

  Starting to panic a little – I can’t function without my morning coffee – I tried desperately to think of a solution. There was roll of kitchen paper, which looked strong enough to work as a filter, so I put the kettle on and doubled up a piece. When the kettle had boiled, I spooned what I thought was enough coffee on to the paper and tried to hold its edges over a cup with one spread hand, while I poured, slowly and carefully, with the other. It didn’t work very well, and the soggy paper dropped to the bottom of the cup, though fortunately it didn’t burst open. I left it there for a few minutes then used a spoon to try to fold it and lift it out and drop it in the rubbish. The result in the cup tasted a bit like metallic dishwater, but it was better than nothing.

  As I sipped the dreadful liquid, I realised that I was hungry. Despite all the food Heather Barlow had brought me, I hadn’t actually eaten anything but a chocolate digestive since the previous lunchtime. Luckily, I’m a fair cook – Laura and I often had to share cooking duties owing to the vagaries of our respective jobs – so it was no great chore for me to whip up a plate of bacon, a cheese and mushroom omelette, and toast. After that, I felt much better and decided I needed a cup of tea to take away the taste of the coffee. Morning sunlight streamed in through the east-facing window and bathed the kitchen in gold. I decided I liked it the way it was and wouldn’t make any changes there. I wasn’t too sure about the rest of the house. It was time to make my daylight inspection.

  I carried my tea with me and walked through the door beside the stairs into the living and dining area at the back of the house. It was big enough to hold a society ball. The grand piano at its centre was an old Steinway, its black lacquered surface chipped in places, ivory keys worn over the years, and stained yellow, like English teeth. It looked as if a dog had been chewing at the legs. It didn’t take me more than a few notes to realise that Heather Barlow had been right about finding a piano tuner.

  At the eastern end of the room, to the right of the piano as I faced the back windows, the tan three-piece suite was arranged in a spacious semicircle around the glass-topped table in front of a huge stone fireplace. I found myself mentally claiming the chair on the right, angled so that it showed the view, with just enough flat space on the arm to rest a glass without its falling off.

  At the western end stood another fireplace and a simple, sturdy dining table with eight chairs, though there was space enough for more, a large mirror hanging on the wall and a swing door leading through to the kitchen on the left. Perhaps I would throw large dinner parties when I got to know a few people. I loved to cook for company. The walls were painted in light earth, terracotta and desert shades, all a bit Santa Fe, but I saw no reason to change that. I had always liked Santa Fe. I guessed that the room had probably once been divided into two, perhaps even three, but I liked the openness, the sense of light and space. A hangover from life in southern California, perhaps.

  This was the back of the house, facing the dale’s northern slope, and it had no side windows. There were, however, two large picture windows, one by the dining area and another by the three-piece suite. At the centre, between them, French windows led from the room into the garden, where an ornate circular wrought-iron table with six matching chairs stood on a stone patio under the shade of a copper beech. A perfect spot for a barbecue, another item to add to my list.

  I went outside. Though there was a definite autumn chill in the air, it was pleasant enough to sit for a while in my sweater, sip my tea and watch the leaves fall. Other than the slight rustling or scratching sound they made as they fell, it was quite silent. There was a little garden shed, and on inspection I found the usual tools, weedkiller, spiders and plant pots. Perhaps I would take up gardening. There was no wall at the back. The garden simply sloped up from the patio through long grass to the treeline. I imagined sitting outside in spring and summer enjoying morning coffee, toast and marmalade, reading the papers, watching the flycatchers and warblers, robins, finches and thrushes flit from tree to tree, listening to the blackbird’s song. How my father would have loved it. How Laura would have loved it.

  Then two large magpies flapped across the garden, and the moment was gone, the spell broken.

  I was planning to work on a non-film project, a piano sonata I had been thinking about since Laura’s death. This was to be a major, long-term project, music people would listen to, I hoped, and even remember me by. Even though I had the grand piano, I would still need a study, somewhere I could park my laptop, send emails, check websites and contemplate the fruits of my labours. One of the spare upstairs bedrooms, I thought, would suit me perfectly.

  The obvious choice was the other corner bedroom at the front of the house, but that, I decided, would make an excellent guest bedroom. It was the same size as the one I had chosen and also had en suite facilities. There was a double bed, bedside tables with lamps, and a large oak wardrobe, the heavy, old kind with a full-length mirror on the door. For some reason, it gave me a shiver up my spine. Perhaps I had once imagined monsters hiding in an old wardrobe and emerging when the lights went out? I gave it a wide berth. The cornices on the ceiling were elaborate bacchanalian swirls of grapes and laurels, as in my own bedroom.

  I found myself drawn to one of the smaller back rooms – there were four of them in all, opening off the corridor that split the upstairs back half of the house into two, ending in a leaded-glass casement window looking out over the back garden.

  The room I chose was a plain, small room right at the back, perhaps at one time a sitting room, study or sewing room, with nothing much to recommend it on the surface, except that it had windows at the back and side. But there was something about the atmosphere, a feeling, a tingling sensation in my spine, something I couldn’t put my finger on, that drew me to it and made the decision for me.

  It bothered me because I don’t usually get feelings like that. I suppose I consider myself to be a fairly rational being – for a musician, that is – an atheist with no particular belief in life beyond the grave, or in a spirit world. But nor had I ever been the sort of person who pooh-poohed anything beyond the merely solid, physical and concrete. I had met enough gurus and religious freaks in LA, and I knew that the inexplicable happened, and that science and logic didn’t have an explanation for everything. I had no idea where my inspiration for music came from, for example, but that didn’t stop me from grabbing it and working on it. Whatever decided me, the small back room it was, and I was happy with my choice.

  The walls were a pleasant, nondescript shade of pale blue, and a small oil painting of the folly across the dale, looking rom
antic and somewhat sinister in the moonlight, hung over the tiny fireplace. There was a worn armchair that had probably been there since the house was built, and beside it stood a small oval table inlaid with mother-of-pearl, on a level with the chair arms, where someone might rest a cup of tea, a book or a nightcap alongside a candle or small shaded lamp.

  Most important as far as I was concerned, there was a chair and a wobbly roll-top escritoire, made of walnut, which was just about big enough for my laptop. The inside contained a number of pigeonholes and a little drawer. All empty. I wondered whether there was a secret compartment, as I had seen so often in movies, but I searched everywhere and found nothing. All I had to do to make it stable temporarily was wedge a folded sheet of paper under the guilty leg. Then, when I acquired some suitable tools, I could set about putting it right permanently. The top would be suitable for keeping a row of reference books handy.

  There was also an old glass-fronted wooden bookcase filled with several shelves of coverless Everyman editions, poetry by Keats, Shelley, Byron and Wordsworth, Lamb’s essays, novels by Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, along with a number of cheap, ancient, musty-smelling hardcovers by writers nobody has ever heard of, the kind with no dust jackets, water damage and bent edges that you can buy by the boxful at charity shops like Oxfam or Sue Ryder.

  When I opened the glass door and smelled the old books, I was immediately transported to the huge bookshop I had discovered in Milwaukee many years ago, a warehouse of a place, floor after floor and room after room of dusty books piled everywhere, torn and stained covers, a smell of mould and damp sawdust. Laura and I had spent an hour there and had come out with two carrier bags full – everything from old sixties paperback editions of Updike, Roth and Nabokov with lurid covers, to a tattered bicycle repair manual and a pocket Japanese dictionary. We had laughed all the way back to the restaurant, mostly because, if we really thought about it, that hour we had spent in the musty old bookshop was literally our first date. I had asked her to lunch with me the night before, and we had stumbled across the place on our way there.