Before the Poison

by Peter Robinson

  I passed the derelict stone grandstand, imagining what a fine building it must have been in its heyday, and paused to admire the view in all directions. It was a clear day, and I could see as far as the North Yorkshire Moors and Sutton Bank, rising from the plain of York, in the south-east, and more directly east, Darlington and the Teesside conurbation of Middlesbrough and Stockton beyond. The book said you could see as far as the east coast, but I couldn’t make out the shoreline.

  I hadn’t seen a soul on my walk so far, but now I encountered a number of people walking their dogs. Most of them said hello and made some comment on the weather. When I remarked to one fellow what a lovely day it was, he agreed, but added with a typical Yorkshire nose for the downside that the sun had actually gone behind some clouds for a while not so long ago, and that it might well do so again soon.

  I had been thinking about Grace Fox a lot since my talk with Ted Welland had provoked the sudden memory of my schooldays, and as I walked along across the grassy field that bright windy morning, shirtsleeves rolled up and jacket tied around my waist, I thought about her again. Had she trod this very same path? Had she enjoyed solitary walks, wondered about the magnificent ruin of the grandstand? What had she thought about? How had marriage to Ernest Fox become so unbearable to her that she saw murder as her only way out? Where was the edge, and what had pushed her over it? Perhaps, as Ted had hinted, times were so different then that a woman seeking to escape a suffocating marriage for a young lover might have no recourse but to murder. I doubted it, though. I couldn’t help but think that there had to be more to it than that. The fifties may have been a more sexually uptight era than our own, but it was hardly the Victorian age. Surely the war must have shaken morality up a bit?

  As I walked on, mulling over all this, a question formed in my mind, and I couldn’t push it away: What if she hadn’t done it? Innocent people got hanged all the time. Look at Timothy Evans, who was executed for the murders John Christie committed at 10 Rillington Place, or Derek Bentley, who had murdered no one, had simply shouted the famous and ambiguous words ‘Let him have it, Chris’. As Ted had mentioned, there was even some doubt these days that Dr Crippen – such a monster that he’d been standing in Madame Tussaud’s for years – was innocent of his wife’s murder. So it was certainly within the bounds of possibility.

  What if Grace Fox hadn’t done it? Why had no one considered that? Or had they? I realised how little I knew. Somehow, the idea of proving Grace’s innocence excited me. I quickened my pace as the breeze whipped up, hardly pausing now to stop and gaze at the view of the town spread out below me as I carried on down the hill past the Garden Village development at the old army barracks, surrounded by its high stone wall and narrow entrance. The hill was called Gallowgate, I noticed. Gallowgate. What irony! There was a lot I needed to know, and the first thing I had to find out was where to look.

  One of the shops built into the south walls of what used to be Trinity Church, in the market square, was the second-hand bookshop Ted Welland had mentioned, Richmond Books, and it was there that I started my search. Unfortunately, the owner didn’t have a copy of the edition of Famous Trials that dealt with Grace’s case, though he said he would ask around and try to locate one for me. I left my address and telephone number with him. I thought of what Ted Welland had said of tracking down the newspaper accounts, too. They would be on microfiche somewhere. I decided to wait for the book and then see whether I felt I needed more detail.

  The owner did, however, point me in the direction of Wilf Pelham, a retired local schoolteacher, who had been eighteen when Grace Fox was hanged, and apparently still had the memory of an elephant. At this time of day, the bookseller said, glancing at his watch, I was as likely to find Wilf propping up the bar in the Castle Tavern as anywhere else. A free pint would go a long way towards loosening Wilf’s tongue and sharpening his memory, he added.

  There weren’t many people in the Castle Tavern at that time of day, and only one of them was standing at the bar. I stood beside him, and as the barman pulled my pint, I asked him whether he was Wilf Pelham.

  ‘And who wants to know?’ he replied.

  I introduced myself and noticed him frown. His hair was greasy, he was overweight, and he had a three-day stubble, but his blue eyes were as lively and intelligent as they had probably always been.

  ‘So you’ll be the new owner of Kilnsgate House?’ he said, turning towards me and showing interest.

  ‘Word gets around.’

  ‘Especially if you’ve got nowt much else to do but listen to gossip,’ he said.

  ‘Can I buy you a drink and ask you a few questions?’ I offered.

  ‘I don’t see why not. Terry, give us another pint of bitter, will you, lad?’

  While Terry poured the pint, I suggested that Wilf and I sit down. He didn’t object, and we found a quiet table away from the bar. He smacked his lips and sipped his beer. ‘Aren’t you something to do with Hollywood?’ he asked me.

  I told him what I did for a living, and he seemed genuinely interested. He gave a little chuckle when I said I wrote the music nobody listened to. ‘That must be hard to take sometimes,’ he said. ‘No matter how much they pay you.’

  ‘You get used to it. But, yes . . . I’d like to make something more memorable.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’

  ‘I’m giving it a try.’

  ‘Good for you, lad. Just don’t be writing any of the atonal drivel or that cacophony that passes for music these days. I’m all for experiment and progress, but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.’

  ‘Where would you draw it?’

  Wilf thought for a moment. ‘Schoenberg.’

  ‘Well, that’s pretty liberal,’ I said. ‘There are many would draw it a long time before him, and before Mahler, Bruckner or Wagner.’

  ‘Like I said, I don’t mind experimentation, up to a point, and I’m rather partial to a bit of Mahler once in a while. How do you do it, write film music?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Do you watch the film first?’

  ‘Good Lord, no. You start well before the film’s finished, usually towards the end of shooting. But it all depends, really, on what sort of relationship you have with the director.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Well, if you work often with one particular director, then you’ll be involved in the project right from the start.’

  ‘Like Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  My eyebrows must have shot up. Wilf grinned, with a twinkle in his eye. ‘I’m not as thick as I look, you know. I was a music teacher once upon a time, centuries ago.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ I said. I was starting to warm to Wilf Pelham. ‘Believe me, I knew you weren’t thick when you mentioned Schoenberg.’

  ‘Is there anyone you work with often? Forgive my ignorance, but I don’t follow the cinema as much as I used to do.’

  ‘That’s all right. Can’t say I blame you. There’s a director I’ve worked with a few times. He’s called David Packer.’ David was also my best friend and had been a rock during my period of deepest despair after Laura’s death.

  ‘I’ve heard the name,’ said Wilf. ‘But how do you know what it’s all about, then? Do you work from the script?’

  ‘Nope. Never even read them. You can shoot a script a million different ways. I need something visual, so I usually work from rough cuts and pray for inspiration.’

  ‘Sounds like a hell of a job. Anyway, I don’t suppose you came here to be interviewed. What is it you want to know? It’s about the Foxes who used to live at Kilnsgate, I should imagine, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. The man in the bookshop said you were around at the time of the trial and you might know something about what happened.’

  ‘Oh, I was around, all right. Ernest Fox was our family GP. Can’t say as I ever took to him, mind you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You have to un
derstand, doctors back then, they were like bloody lords of the manor, and he played the part to the hilt. Ernest Fox, stuck-up pillock. Treated his patients like pieces of meat. Didn’t like the NHS. Never a kind word to say for Nye Bevan. Brought him a lower class of patient, you see.’ Wilf leaned forward and breathed some beery fumes in my direction. ‘Let me tell you, lad, I once went to him with an ingrown toenail turned septic – bastard games master at school made me play rugger in boots a size too small, and my feet have never been the same since – anyway, what he does, Dr Fox, is he takes a pair of scissors and he cuts the nail right down the side – blood and pus everywhere. Doesn’t bat an eyelid. No painkiller, no warning, no nothing. Then he gives me a dusting of boracic powder and a prescription for more and sends me home. Never once even looks me in the eye. Cold-hearted bastard. Lucky my mum was waiting in the surgery. I couldn’t have walked back home by myself, I was in such agony. I was hobbling around for weeks. But doctors were gods back then, lad. Got away with murder. Well, this time it was the doctor’s wife, only she didn’t get away with it, did she?’

  ‘Did you know her?’

  ‘Grace? Yes, I knew her. I was just a baby when she first arrived in town, but she was always around while I was growing up. I suppose I was about fifteen or so before I first talked to her. Believe it or not, I was quite the classical music buff, even back then, in the late forties and early fifties, and Grace was a member of all the local musical societies. I used to see her at the subscription concerts in the King’s Arms assembly rooms. Liszt played there once, you know. Before my time, of course. We were more likely to get Phyllis Sellick. Anyway, I also heard Grace sing at Operatic Society productions, and I heard her play piano a couple of times at Amateur Music Society evenings. I even worked with her when she was music director for the Richmond High School’s Dido and Aeneas. That’d be 1949, a few years before . . . well, you know. Did you know that Purcell wrote that for a girls’ school? I just helped with the sets, mind, a bit of carpentry, but once I heard Grace sing “When I am laid in earth”, to show Wendy Flintoff, who was playing Dido and who was my girlfriend at the time, how it should be sung. I’ll never forget it. You know the song, I suppose?’

  ‘Indeed I do.’

  ‘I remember as if it were yesterday. The smell of sawdust and paint, Grace standing by the piano, her eyes closed, and that voice pouring out. I don’t think I breathed throughout the whole song. Made me tingle all over, especially when she got to the “Remember me, remember me” bit. I could never listen to it again after, you know, without thinking of her. She was very good. Even then, she sounded as if she understood it. The feeling. I don’t know.’ Wilf took a long swig of beer. ‘She was a fine figure of a woman. Always very stylish, I remember – had her hair done at the Georgian House, bought her clothes in Harrogate. She had the walk, too, the confidence, elegance. She reminded me a bit of Audrey Hepburn or Elizabeth Taylor. One of those film stars, anyway. A lot of the women’s fashion back then put an emphasis on a narrow waist, and Grace Fox had the waist to carry it off. But she had no side to her. She wasn’t stuck up or cruel like her husband. I think all us lads – I was eighteen at the time it all happened – were secretly in love with her, and none of us could imagine why she’d married him. He was twenty years older than she was, to start with.’

  ‘Lots of men marry younger women.’

  ‘Oh, aye, I know that. My Valerie was ten years younger than me. And I’m not criticising it, not as a practice, that is. It’s just that when you’re eighteen it seems . . . well, such a waste. Especially when it’s a jumped-up arrogant wanker like Ernest Fox.’

  I laughed. ‘Jealousy, then? But Grace must have been how old, when it all happened?’

  ‘Forty, or thereabouts, I reckon. But, as I said, she was a fine figure of a woman, any adolescent boy’s wet dream.’

  ‘Did you know much about their life together?’

  ‘No. Except what came out at the trial. Kilnsgate House suited Dr Fox’s lord of the manor status, he thought. Somewhere to look down on us all from. Could have got up to all sorts out there, for all I know, and nobody would have been any the wiser.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘It was just a figure of speech.’

  ‘Were there any rumours?’

  ‘There are always rumours. There’ll be a few about you soon enough, you wait and see.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Orgies, dancing naked in the woods, black masses, sacrificing virgins . . .’ He laughed and showed yellowing, crooked teeth.

  ‘Were there any rumours like that about the Foxes?’

  ‘I’m pulling your leg, lad. No, there weren’t. Not that I heard.’

  ‘Did it surprise you when Grace was charged with murder?’

  ‘I should say so. Shocked the whole town. See, it had been more than a week since he died, in the storm, like. First they couldn’t get to Kilnsgate House to bring out the body because the snow had drifted so high, then the first post-mortem turned up nothing unusual. Seemed he’d simply died of a heart attack. They’d had some friends over for dinner the night it happened, and young Hetty Larkin, the cook and maidservant, was there, too, and they all said Dr Fox took poorly at the dinner table. Terrible indigestion. He took a powder and went to bed early. It was during the night that it happened. They all got stranded there, of course, and the telephone wires were down. Trapped in a big old house with a dead body. Very Agatha Christie. Must have been pretty gruesome.’

  ‘Was this Hetty Larkin a regular maidservant?’

  ‘Yes. She lived up Ravensworth way. Used to bicycle back and forth. Funny sort of lass, as I remember. Not quite all there, if you follow my drift. Worked at Kilnsgate House for quite a long time, too. I think she was there right from the start, when they came, before the war. Lost her brother at the D-Day landings, poor cow. She used to stop over sometimes, too, if they had a fancy dinner or something, like. The Foxes had a room set aside for her. The rest of the time she’d come for the day and take care of the washing and cooking and such. That night she had no choice. She had to stop.’

  ‘What became of her?’

  ‘She died years ago, poor lass. Car accident, fog on the A66. Only in her forties, she was. Not much older than Grace herself was when she died.’

  ‘What made the police suspect Grace in the first place?’

  ‘They didn’t. Not at first. It was because of the boyfriend. Sam Porter. He was only nineteen, nearly the same age as me, lucky bastard.’

  ‘So Grace had been seeing this Porter for some time?’

  ‘Apparently they’d been having secret trysts going on for six months or more by then. Somebody talked.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Landlady of a guest house in Leyburn. She said she’d rented them a room once. According to Sam Porter, she approached him and demanded money to keep quiet. Well, Sam had no money, had he, and he’d got too much pride to go to Grace Fox and ask her for any, I’ll give him that, so he told the woman to sod off. Which she did. Right to the police. That’s partly what got Sam off the hook, you see – not that he was charged, but you know what I mean. If he’d thought there was something to worry about, he’d have got Grace to pay her the money, wouldn’t he? Stands to reason. She could afford it. It was because he told the woman to stuff it that the police got suspicious. I mean, when they found out Grace had a much younger lover, they started to dig a bit more deeply.’

  ‘You sound as if you knew Sam Porter.’

  ‘I did. Like I said, we were about the same age. He was part of the crowd sometimes. We’d drink in the pubs occasionally. You know what kids are like. But he was always on the fringes. The quiet one. The rebel. Bit of an innocent, really. Always had to be just a little different.’

  ‘What did he do? I heard he was an artist or a musician, and a bit of a ne’er-do-well.’

  Wilf raised his eyebrows. ‘“Ne’er-do-well?” I wouldn’t exactly describe Sam Porter that way. He might not have been rich or titled or
anything, but he worked hard, and he had talent. He was an artist. That’s why he had no money. But he was no scrounger. He made a living, did odd jobs around town, a bit of drystone wall work, carpentry and the like. Lived in a small flat off the market square. He was pretty good with cars and mechanical stuff, too. I think that’s how he first met Grace, when her motorbike went on the fritz. He also did a bit of painting and decorating on the side. Jack of all trades, really. Hardly a ne’er-do-well.’

  ‘Grace rode a motorcycle?’

  ‘Learned in the war, apparently. Sometimes you’d think she had a death wish, the speed she went tearing up and down those country lanes.’

  ‘Was Porter any good as an artist?’

  ‘Aye. Good enough to make a decent living in addition to his odd jobs. Back then he did a nice line in local watercolour landscapes for the tourists, but he got more abstract as time went on.’

  ‘What was the general consensus about Grace?’

  Wilf rattled his glass on the table. I noticed it was empty. Mine was, too, but I had been so busy listening that I hadn’t really been paying attention. I went to the bar and bought another two pints.

  ‘The general consensus?’ he echoed when I got back.

  ‘Yes. What did people think about her?’

  ‘Aye, I know what it means. I’m just trying to gather the pieces together. She was liked, well liked. Maybe envied a bit by some of the townswomen. They were jealous of her beauty and status. And your uppity moral types might have looked down on her. But there was a tenderness about her – she’d been a nurse during the war, you know – and she was always a bit of a mystery to everyone. Reserved. Sad, even. But, as I said earlier, there was a general feeling of shock. You could sense it ripple through the market square the day the verdict came down. Of course, when she was first accused of the crime, there were a few who just tut-tutted as if they’d always suspected something like that would happen, but most of us were stunned even then.’