Before the Poison

by Peter Robinson

  The audience applauded and a trio of stand-up bass, soprano saxophone and piano struck up, then a young woman in a long black gown walked into the spotlight and the applause grew louder. She was about thirty, with beautiful chocolate satin skin and glossy black curls, and she had a deep, slightly husky voice that seemed to be caressing me with each warm, undulating syllable. She started to sing Billie Holiday’s ‘I’ll Look Around’ and I was hers for the rest of the set.

  7

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

  After Hetty Larkin had cleared the table of the remains of the rhubarb pie and custard, she delivered the port and Stilton. Ernest Fox and Jeremy Lambert lit cigars at the dinner table while their wives adjourned back to the hearthside in the living room and Hetty Larkin busied herself with the clearing up. About ten minutes later, according to Jeremy Lambert, Ernest Fox complained of heartburn, a painful condition to which he was apparently no stranger, and the two of them stubbed out their cigars and went through to join the women. Dr. Fox there suffered for some time, then excused himself from the company and said he would take himself to bed. Grace promised to follow with a glass of whisky and milk and a preparation of the stomach powder he sometimes took for relief, as she had done on previous occasions. This she did, then promptly returned to the living room, where she assured her guests that her husband was resting comfortably, and remained by the hearth chatting with the Lamberts about local matters until they, too, decided it was time to retire.

  It was now close to midnight. Young Randolph was fast asleep. Hetty Larkin had finished clearing up and taken herself off to her room near the back of the house some time ago and was also asleep, no doubt dreaming of some strapping young farmer lad. The Lamberts had just retired and were preparing themselves for bed. Ernest Fox, everyone assumed, was sleeping soundly, having taken the stomach powder his wife had prepared for him.

  It was another half an hour before Alice Lambert, who lay reading, unable to fall immediately asleep, heard Grace come up the stairs to bed. What she had been doing during the interceding time we shall never know, for in her initial statement to the police, Grace said that she had simply been sitting there in front of the fire, thinking, occasionally walking over to the window to watch the snow falling outside. Who was to gainsay her?

  According to Grace, it was about an hour after she had retired that she thought she heard a noise from her husband’s bedroom. She had been reading, she said, finding it difficult to get to sleep, and had been a little worried by his earlier symptoms. Nobody else heard a sound, all being fast asleep by then. Grace said that she crossed the gallery to Ernest’s room and found him sitting up in bed clutching his left arm and grimacing with pain. He was dripping with perspiration, she said, and he complained of a burning tightness like a hot iron band around his chest, making it impossible for him to breathe. Grace had worked as a Queen Alexandra’s nurse during the war, as we have already learned, and she understood the symptoms of a heart attack every bit as well as her doctor husband.

  Loosening his clothes and leaving him there, she hurried as fast as she could to his downstairs study, where he kept his doctor’s bag, the one he always carried with him on his rounds, and returned upstairs with it. Though Ernest Fox had no history of heart disease, he was, like many doctors, inclined to neglect himself the kind of rigorous regular medical check-ups that he urged on all his patients, and several people had lately noticed the increased incidences of indigestion and heartburn and a certain shortness of breath in the doctor, all possible symptoms of cardiac problems.

  Following her training, Grace Fox told the coroner that she searched her husband’s bag for nitroglycerine, often effective in curtailing the onset of angina pectoris – and placed a tablet under her husband’s tongue. By this time, though, she feared she was too late, as her husband now seemed listless, and she could find only a weak and fluttery pulse.

  Loath to leave him again, she went on, she had no recourse but to dash down to the telephone, which stood on a stand in the large vestibule area. But as soon as she started to dial 999 and heard only silence, it became clear that the telephone wires were down. Grace told the police that she then returned to her husband, and prepared an injection of digitalis, the nitroglycerine having had no effect. She then waited and sat by him at the bedside with her finger on his pulse as the digitalis entered his system, but it was to no avail. His poor heart fluttered like a dying bird in a cage, and finally gave up the ghost.

  Alice Lambert, a light sleeper at the best of times, had heard the dashing up and down stairs and left her bedroom to see what was happening. The door to Grace’s room stood wide open, the covers of her bed thrown back in disarray, and Grace herself appeared in the doorway of her husband’s bedroom opposite. She seemed surprised to see Alice standing there, but shook her head slowly and said, ‘He’s gone, Alice. He’s gone.’

  Alice knelt by Ernest Fox’s bedside and felt for a pulse. She found none; nor did the small mirror Grace brought from her room mist over with breath when placed near his mouth. Alice could see the bottle of sublingual nitroglycerine quite clearly on the bedside table, and she also noticed the paper in which the stomach powder had been wrapped, along with the syringe from which Grace had administered the digitalis. These objects were not in evidence two days later when the police and the mortuary van were able to get through the snowdrifts and examine the room. They were, in fact, never seen again, and nobody thought anything more of them until the arrest and trial. The fire in the hearth burned almost constantly throughout those two days, however, as it remained bitterly cold outside, and the grate was full of ashes.

  October 2010

  I made my way through the crowds at the Gare du Nord, accosted by panhandlers all the way, and jumped into a taxi. My train journey had been uneventful. I had simply sat back and watched the French landscape roll by, listening to the beginnings of my piano sonata, which I had managed to get from my computer on to my iPod, scribbling down notes and ideas as I went along. I prefer to compose in the old-fashioned way, with a piano and music notation paper, but I do love gadgets, and I have no objection to using one every now and then. I found the rolling green countryside and the train’s rhythm conducive to such work.

  Once again, the city crowds came as a shock, even after London. The taxi took a route that had me lost within minutes, zigzagging along narrow side streets, crossing vast tree-lined boulevards, past cafés and brasseries with rows of tables outside where people sat smoking and chatting, or just watched the world go by.

  The receptionist at my hotel on the Boulevard Raspail spoke English better than I spoke French, and she seemed quite happy to do so. I was on the sixth floor, right at the top, and the lift was tiny. You’d maybe get two people and a suitcase in it, at most. Luckily, I had it to myself.

  My room turned out to be a tiny suite. Put the studio and the bedroom together and it would probably be about as big as the room I’d had in Hazlitt’s, which wasn’t saying much. Still, it meant that I could spread out and avoid that cooped-up feeling. Being on the top floor helped, too. The studio was fitted with French windows that opened on to a small balcony overlooking the Metro station at the intersection of Boulevard Raspail and the Boulevard Edgar Quinet. When I glanced through the bedroom window, I noticed that it had a fine view of the Cimitière du Montparnasse, one of those large Parisian cemeteries with elaborate tombs, where famous people are buried. Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, Man Ray, and Camille Saint-Saëns, among others, lay just below my bedroom window. Maybe I would overhear their ghosts deep in conversation throughout the night? I decided I would try to find time to have a walk around tomorrow morning.

  For the moment, though, my main objective was to track down Samuel Porter, who, according to the address Bernie had given me, didn’t live too far away from where I was staying. I wondered whether he also had a view of the cemetery, and whether it made him think of Grace Fox. It made me thin
k of Laura. I can’t say that Paris was ever our city, but we did visit it together on more than one occasion. Laura’s French was excellent, and she loved to poke around the bookstalls along the Left Bank and go for long elaborate meals at fine restaurants. We would walk for miles and sit outside at boulevard cafés watching the people walk by. I remember once we walked all the way out to Père Lachaise and saw Oscar Wilde’s tombstone covered in lipstick kisses, and a crowd of kids smoking pot around Jim Morrison’s grave. They were so young they were not even born when the Lizard King was in his heyday.

  I wasn’t hungry, but I was in Paris and I felt like a drink, so I took my map and guidebook down to the bistro next door, sat outside and ordered a pichet of red wine from the waiter. It was from Languedoc, and it tasted good. Sometimes I think French wine tastes better just because you are in France. I was surrounded by young people in animated conversations, the girls nervously pushing back their hair from their eyes, the boys gesticulating, all smoking. I had expected the familiar whiff of Gauloises to come my way, but from what I could smell, and see of the packets on the tables, most people were smoking Marlboro Lights these days.

  I pinpointed Sam Porter’s address on my map. It wasn’t far away, somewhere in the narrow maze of streets on the other side of the cemetery. I hadn’t wanted to phone him first because I knew there was a chance that it might scare him off, that he might wish to avoid talking about the past and would refuse to see me. But if I just got my foot in the door, I was certain that I could convince him I wasn’t a sensation seeker, a reporter or a true-crime writer, and maybe he would talk to me.

  When I had finished my wine, it was a little after 4.30, which I thought was as good a time as any to call on an ageing artist. I cut through the cemetery on a marked path that led between family tombs, some quite ornate, with carved angels, cherubim and seraphim. At the other side, I crossed Rue Froidevaux and found the narrow street of five-storey tenements. Sam’s building was next to a small patisserie, bicycles chained to the lamp-posts outside. I had intended to wait until someone came in or left to get in the main door, but it turned out to be unlocked. He lived on the fourth floor, and there was no lift. With a sigh, I started climbing. The building seemed quite grand and well appointed, but then this was hardly a run-down area of the city. Old, perhaps, but moneyed.

  I made it to the fourth floor without running out of breath, paused for a moment to collect my thoughts, then knocked on Samuel Porter’s door.

  At first I thought he must be out. The inside of the flat was silent when I put my ear to the door and nobody answered my first three knocks. It wasn’t the end of the world. I could come back later. But just as I turned back to the staircase, I heard the sound of footsteps, then the click of a lock turning. The door opened, and there he stood. ‘Bonjour, monsieur. Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you.’

  ‘You’re English.’ He stretched and rubbed his eyes. ‘It’s all right. I was just having my little siesta. You need them at my age. It was time to get up, anyway. Do please come in.’

  The Samuel Porter I saw before me shattered all my preconceptions. I had supposed, in my imagination, that he was a dishevelled, dissolute, shrunken, whiskered and disagreeable old man, but he was not at all like that. Even though I had just woken him from his slumber, he had the erect posture of a much younger man, was slim but not scrawny, clean shaven, with a lined face, a full head of neatly cut grey hair and lively, slightly rheumy eyes behind silver-rimmed glasses. He was dressed casually in jeans and a mauve-and-white striped shirt, but they didn’t look as if they had come from the local charity shop. No paint stains, no reek of alcohol.

  The flat itself was a revelation, too. I had known by now not to expect a garret, but I hadn’t expected anything quite so large – it must have covered most of the floor on that side of the building – or so immaculate, so clean, neat and tidy. Every surface shone. Every book was in its place. There were paintings hanging on the walls, mostly large, colourful abstracts. I didn’t know who the artists were, but I guessed they were all originals. I had to learn not to cling to stereotypes about artists. After all, I was a musician, myself, and hardly wild haired and drug addled. A bit untidy, perhaps, but clean.

  He led me to the spacious living room, which had French windows, like my hotel room, and looked out on the tops of the buildings opposite. In the distance, just behind the low-pitched rooftops, I could see the massive monolith of the Montparnasse tour sticking up high into the clear blue sky.

  ‘Look at me,’ he said, ‘inviting you into my home when I don’t even know who you are. I don’t often get visitors from England here. You could be a burglar or a murderer, for all I know. Or worse. A critic.’

  ‘I’m not,’ I assured him. ‘Actually, I’m a musician. A composer.’

  ‘Would I have heard of you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps. I compose film music. My name’s Christopher Lowndes.’

  ‘I’ve seen the name. I must say, I have always found music to be one of the most essential elements of film, so I do tend to notice these things. Of course,’ he went on, sitting down and bidding me do likewise, ‘I don’t get out to the cinema quite as often as I used to do, but I occasionally watch DVDs.’ His English was precise and mannered, rather posh, in fact, and there was no way of guessing he was a farmer’s son from North Yorkshire.

  I noticed a slight grimace of pain as he bent his knees to sit and wondered whether he had arthritis or rheumatism. Perhaps that was why it had taken him so long to answer the door. It was hard to believe, but I had to keep reminding myself that he was in his late seventies. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I seem to be forgetting my manners. Can I offer you something? A drink, perhaps?’

  I didn’t really feel like a drink, but I thought it might be the kind of thing that would break the ice.

  ‘I usually take a small Armagnac, myself, around this time of day. Purely medicinal, of course. The French doctors are far more understanding about alcohol than their English counterparts. Would you mind? My legs aren’t what they used to be.’ He gestured towards a cocktail cabinet by the door.

  I could see glasses and several bottles. ‘Of course.’ I went over and poured us each a small measure of Armagnac and passed him a glass.

  He took a sip and smacked his lips. ‘Mm. I used to be a cognac man, you know, but once I tasted this . . . Nectar of the gods.’ I smiled and we clinked glasses. ‘So,’ he went on, a curious and suspicious glint appearing in his eye. ‘What brings the composer of music for films to visit the ageing doodler of pictures?’

  I swirled the Armagnac in my glass, inhaling its scent. ‘It’s a rather delicate matter, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘I’ll quite understand if you don’t want to talk about it.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Now you do have my attention. But in order to know whether I wish to talk about it or not, I need to know what it is.’

  Now I was here, I felt nervous and embarrassed. I didn’t know how to explain my interest in Grace Fox to him other than as a prurient one, though I remained convinced it wasn’t that. There was nothing for it but to take the plunge. ‘It’s about Grace,’ I said. ‘Grace Fox.’

  His expression didn’t change. In fact, he sat there frozen, drink halfway to his mouth, staring beyond me. I couldn’t read him. I didn’t know whether he was remembering the past or simply stunned by my audacity. I shifted nervously, sipped some more Armagnac. Too much; it made me cough.

  After what seemed like hours, he turned back to me and said, ‘It was a very long time ago, but I don’t see any reason not to talk about Grace, so long as you are who you say you are.’ He paused. ‘You know, the day Grace died, a part of me died with her. It’s still difficult.’

  ‘But you’re still here, still painting, a success.’

  ‘A fluke. What was it Beckett wrote? “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Story of my life.’

  ‘Story of most of our lives, if truth be
told,’ I said, thinking about Laura. There was something else Beckett had written that had always stuck in my memory, too, from my student days: ‘They give birth bestride a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more’. But, oh, I thought, that instant, and the things we do to fill it, the way we try to grasp who we are, why we are, the love we give and the cruelties we inflict. That instant is a lifetime. For some reason, I remembered the young jazz singer at Ronnie Scott’s the previous evening, how she brought ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ to life, how she made it new. If she had gone on singing for ever, I would have been listening for ever, and that would have been the instant between darkness and darkness. But life is made of many moments like that.

  Sam grunted an end to the philosophy. ‘It’s an awful long way to come just to talk about a long-forgotten incident.’

  ‘I don’t quite see it like that,’ I said, ‘but I’m on my way to visit my brother in Angoulême, so I thought I’d take the opportunity of calling on you on my way.’

  ‘Well, would you at least satisfy an old man’s curiosity and tell me why you want to talk about it?’

  I tried to explain to him as best I could about how I had been drawn into the whole Grace Fox business through moving into Kilnsgate House, how finding out about the murder and the hanging had stimulated my interest, along with the family portrait, my brother’s memory of the day of Grace’s execution, and my conversation with Wilf Pelham.

  ‘Wilf Pelham? Now there’s a name to conjure with. So he’s still alive, is he?’