Before the Poison

by Peter Robinson

  ‘Do you remember him?’

  ‘Of course I do. I may be old, but I’m not senile. Besides, it’s the short-term memory that goes first. I remember those days as if they were yesterday. We used to play together when we were kids during the war, then we lost touch for a few years, as you do. I spent most of my time up at the farm, and I don’t think we had a book in the house if it wasn’t to do with giving birth to calves. But Wilf’s parents were both teachers, educated, cultured people, and they lived on Frenchgate. Much more middle class, you know. But later, when we were fifteen or sixteen, Wilf was one of the few young town lads I could talk to. He knew about art and music and literature. You’ve no idea how rare that was. I liked him, and I think I actually learned quite a bit from him, even though he was younger than me. I was raw, unformed. Mostly up to that point I’d been sketching cows in a field or trying to capture an interesting landscape. Wilf wasn’t as stupid or as limited in his outlook as the rest. They were just . . . well, you know, sport, sheep and sex, and not necessarily in that order. Wilf had a good eye, but music was his real passion. He and I had the occasional pint together later. He even used to come and help out up on the farm at lambing and shearing times.’

  ‘Didn’t you go to art college?’

  ‘No. Never. Everything I learned, I learned from other artists.’

  ‘Where was the farm?’

  ‘Up Dalton way. I grew up there, but I went to school in Richmond. Farming wasn’t the life for me. I left when I was seventeen, went to live in town in a poky little flat over a hat shop on the market square, but I went back to help out occasionally.’ He sniffed. ‘That was one of the things the press held against me, what made it all so much worse. I was only a farmer’s boy, see. Sort of the equivalent to Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, had it been readily available back then. Funny, isn’t it, but have you thought that the only people who seem to have made a decent movie out of Lady Chatterley are the French? It always seems such an English story.’

  ‘What about Ken Russell?’

  ‘I was never a fan. Women in Love? Maybe. Anyway, I digress. So it was Wilf who told you about me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But how does he know where I live? We haven’t met in sixty years or more.’

  ‘He doesn’t. Once I knew you were still alive, I tracked you down myself through an art dealer colleague. It wasn’t difficult. You do have a public reputation, you know. A good one.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I do.’

  ‘So can you tell me anything?’

  ‘Oh, there’s plenty I can tell you. It’s a matter of knowing where to begin. I suppose I could start by telling you that Ernest Fox wasn’t a nice man.’

  ‘Wilf Pelham said as much.’

  Sam nodded. ‘Fox was an arrogant, cold and cruel bastard.’

  ‘Why did Grace marry him, then?’

  ‘A man’s true face is not always apparent from the start. Besides, he was a friend of the family, Daddy’s ultimatum, a man of substance.’

  ‘It was arranged?’

  ‘Advantageous. We English don’t do arranged marriages. You should know that.’

  ‘Did he abuse Grace?’

  ‘Depends on what you mean. He didn’t hit her, I’m certain of it. She wouldn’t have stood for that. But he did treat her like a chattel, and he was cold towards her. That was the cruellest thing you could do to someone like Grace. She needed . . . she . . . I’m sorry.’ He sipped some more Armagnac and cleared his throat. He wasn’t crying, but it was clear that he had been rather more overcome by emotion than he was used to. I began to feel guilty for putting him through it. And what if he had a heart attack or a stroke? ‘What I meant to say,’ he went on, ‘was that she needed nurturing, tenderness, kindness and passion. Romance. She was damaged. Ernest was insensitive and callous. He shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near another human being in pain.’

  ‘Grace was damaged? How?’

  ‘The war, I think. She never spoke about it, but it was there in her silences, her black moods. It seemed to come out most of all when she was confronted with great beauty. She always used to cry when she looked at a great painting, or when she heard a superb musical performance. She was a Queen Alexandra’s nurse, you know, and she was overseas a lot. Nobody says much about their heroism, but they went through much the same horrors as the fighting men.’

  ‘She never mentioned her wartime experiences?’

  ‘No. But people don’t, do they? They just want to forget, not dwell on it. It’s different when you’re just a kid, though.’

  ‘What sort of experience was it for you?’

  ‘Me?’ Sam laughed. ‘Well, in my case there’s nothing to talk about. Oh, it was all very exciting at the time, though we tended to be quite away from it all up on the farm. I mean, we didn’t get the bombing raids or anything. Mostly it was the usual stuff. Missing sheep, a foot-and-mouth scare, a bad harvest, dealing with ministry officials and government directives about how much to grow of what.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘Lived in a world of make-believe. Pretended I was a soldier, or a spy. I had my fighter and bomber identification charts, my Mickey Mouse gas mask and my steel helmet. My father even put an Anderson shelter in the garden. We grew vegetables on top of it. We heard a doodlebug once, miles away, and sometimes the German bombers passed overhead on Teesside raids. Once a Messerschmitt crashed in a field near Willance’s Leap. That was as exciting as it got. Of course, we still got plenty of local gossip from town.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Blackout violations, bossy Home Guards, and one of the ARP slipping it to someone else’s wife. That one ended in a big showdown. The whole town came out for it. We had the occasional house fire, shortages, a row about the POW camp being too close, a missing person.’

  ‘Who went missing?’

  ‘A young lad called Nat Bunting. Bit of a local character.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Don’t know. He simply disappeared off the face of the earth. Never seen again. He wasn’t quite all there, if you know what I mean, but he was always going on about joining up, doing his bit. Maybe he did join up and went off to war, got killed. He could have got lost in a cave or fallen down a pothole. Anything. Or maybe he just moved on. He didn’t have any family as far as anyone knew. I only remember him because he used to come by the farm sometimes and my father would give him a few scraps of food. I’d talk to him sometimes. He was about my age, mentally, when I was about six or seven.’

  ‘But Grace missed all this?’

  ‘From what I could gather. I didn’t know her then.’ He paused. ‘They called her a cradle-snatcher, but she wouldn’t snatch as young as an eight- or nine-year-old boy.’ He smiled to himself then turned to me again and sighed. ‘No, Grace didn’t talk about the war. Look, I’m still rather tired. As I said, I have no objection to carrying on this conversation, but perhaps we could eat dinner together this evening?’

  ‘I’d like that,’ I said.

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  I told him.

  ‘Then let’s meet at Le Dome. It’s right on the corner of the Boulevard Montparnasse and Rue Delambre, just down the street from your hotel. You can’t miss it. Marcel will find us a quiet corner. Mention my name. Don’t worry, I’ll be there. Say eight o’clock?’

  I knocked back the rest of my Armagnac and stood up. ‘Eight o’clock it is,’ I said. ‘Don’t get up. Please. I’ll find my own way out.’

  He nodded, and I walked down the hall to the front door, then down the stairs and out into the street.

  I must confess that I had a brief nap myself when I got back to my hotel. I’m not seventy-eight, but the years are definitely catching up with me. Or perhaps it was the wine and the Armagnac. Gone were my days of two-martini-and-a-bottle-of-wine lunches followed by late nights in smoky bars lingering over the fifth single malt Scotch. The bars aren’t even smoky any more.

  Just before eight,
feeling a little refreshed, I set off down the Boulevard Raspail towards the bright lights of Montparnasse, past a couple of cafés and a fitness centre, where dedicated members were still running the treadmills and riding the exercise bikes, pouring sweat. I felt guilty. I hadn’t had a good workout in ages. But not that guilty. When I reached the broad, busy intersection, I spotted Le Dome easily on the corner just to my left.

  I could see the waiter sizing me up with a surly, truculent expression on his face as I walked in and deciding at which of the Siberian tables he should seat me. As Sam Porter had told me to, I mentioned his name, and suddenly it was all smiles and ‘Oui, oui, monsieur. Suivez-moi.’

  It was a large split-level restaurant which gave the impression of being divided into several distinct areas. No doubt the waiter knew the pecking order. I took in the thirties art deco ambience as I followed him up the stairs and around a corner by the bar. It was all fabric-covered light fixtures, paintings on the walls, shiny brass rails, mirrors, plush red velvet banquettes and polished wood. Probably the kind of place Hemingway or Scott and Zelda used to eat when they were flush. Same waiters, too.

  To my surprise, Sam was waiting in a little alcove, quite sheltered from the rest of the restaurant, reading a Special Suspense series thriller. You could probably seat about six people at the table, at a pinch, but tonight there were only the two of us, and it seemed roomy enough. Impressionist landscapes in gilt frames hung on the walls.

  Sam put his book down and half stood to shake my hand before I sat. Tonight he was wearing a white linen jacket, mauve shirt and a tie that looked as if it had been painted by Jackson Pollock. He had a glass of milky liquid beside him. Pernod, Ricard or some such aperitif, I guessed. I declined his offer of the same.

  He helped me with the menu and I settled on langoustines to start, followed by sole meunière. Sam went for oysters and sea bream. ‘The bouillabaisse is magnificent here,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid my appetite doesn’t quite stretch that far these days. It’s very filling.’ He studied the wine list and settled on a bottle of Sancerre to start. When we got our ordering out of the way – accomplished by Sam in what sounded to me like perfect French – he raised his glass and said, ‘Salut. You’ve given me a lot to think about, my musical friend. I looked you up on the Internet. Quite the career. I must say, I’m impressed. I’ve even seen some of your films.’

  ‘So that’s why you wanted to leave our talk until later? So you could check me out?’

  He inclined his head slightly. ‘Partly,’ he said. ‘Trust doesn’t always come so easily when you’ve lived as long as I have and experienced some of the things I’ve known happen. But your sudden and dramatic appearance at my door did rather take me by surprise, and it did kick me back through the years with astonishing speed. I needed a little time to collect my thoughts, too, and to focus. Sure you won’t have an aperitif?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Thanks. To be honest, I’ve always hated the smell and taste of aniseed since my schooldays. I think I nearly choked on an aniseed ball one day.’

  Sam chuckled. ‘Good Lord, aniseed balls. I’d forgotten all about them. Gobstoppers, too, that changed colour as you sucked them, and knobbly liquorice sticks like bits of wood that you chewed.’

  ‘Probably all disappeared now,’ I said. ‘Are these paintings genuine?’ I asked, nodding towards the walls.

  ‘Most of them. They’re not forgeries, if that’s what you mean, though they’re often “in the style of”. Pupils’ work. That sort of thing.’ He shrugged. ‘One or two are quite valuable. Most aren’t.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful restaurant,’ I said.

  ‘Indeed. A bit of old Paris. And just wait till you taste the sole. C’est magnifique. Anyway, I’m sure there must be lots of questions you want to ask me, so do go ahead. What is it you want to know?’

  I hadn’t really sketched out an approach, unsure as to what Sam would either remember or would wish to talk about. Instead, I had envisaged a free-ranging conversation in as relaxed a tone as possible. I certainly didn’t want to appear to be interrogating him in any way.

  ‘Were you ever inside Kilnsgate?’

  ‘On occasion,’ Sam said, with a sly smile. ‘We had to be very careful, of course, very discreet. We hardly ever exchanged notes or letters, for example, and if we did we were careful to destroy them. “Eat this message”. That was our joke. Each time we met we would arrange a different time and place for our next meeting, with a back-up plan in case one of us couldn’t make it. And I only ever gave her one present – a silver cigarette case that used to belong to my grandmother. She took it, said she would manage to keep it somehow, but not to buy her anything else. It all sounds a bit cloak-and-dagger now, I suppose, but we felt it necessary at the time. Ernest did go out of town on occasion, sometimes overnight, or even for longer. Naturally, if Randolph was away at school and Hetty wasn’t due, we’d take advantage of that if we could. I’d hide my bicycle in the garden shed at the back. I don’t need to tell you how out of the way Kilnsgate House is, so I’m sure you know it wasn’t very difficult to be discreet there. Most of the time we were making do with barns, haystacks, fields, whatever. It was all right in summer, but when autumn came, then winter . . . well, you can imagine.

  ‘We loved the east coast most of all in late summer and early autumn: Staithes, Whitby, Robin Hood’s Bay, though we didn’t have occasion to go there very often. We did have some of our most wonderful days there, though, just walking on the clifftop paths, eating fish and chips from newspaper. So many memories. It wasn’t all mad passionate sex, you know. We spent hours just talking about art and music or walking along quietly, just happy in each other’s company, hand in hand. Some days I’d paint and Grace would sit or lie on the grass watching me, dozing off, dreaming. We thought we’d gone far enough afield that day we spent at the guest house in Leyburn to get out of the rain in November, but that damn Bible-thumping old bitch remembered us.’

  ‘It’s true, then? Is that how the investigation got started?’

  ‘Yes. If it hadn’t been for her . . . who knows?’ He shook his head slowly. ‘One stupid mistake. Ernest was away in Salisbury at some medical institute or other for a few days, and Randolph was at boarding school. We were out walking. The plan was to stay at Kilnsgate House that night, to go there after dark, but the heavens opened and we got caught in Leyburn after the last bus had gone. We debated what to do and decided in the end to stop the night at a guest house as nobody was expecting Grace at Kilnsgate anyway. Just somewhere we picked at random, out of the way, we thought. Enter Mrs bloody Compton. I thought I recognised her from a job I’d done in Richmond, some wall repairs, but Grace said I was imagining things. It was a dreadful place. Cold, dour, plain, uncomfortable. Threadbare carpets. Inadequate blankets. Bibles and religious pamphlets all over the place. Biblical quotes in needlework framed on the walls. Methodist. All work and no play. It gave me the bloody creeps. She wasn’t going to let us stay at first. Didn’t believe we were married. So I paid over the odds. That made it all right. Damn foolish of us, when you think back on it. Leyburn was far too close to home. But we didn’t have a lot of choice, and who knew that Ernest Fox was going to die in a little over a month’s time? Oh, maybe I should have just gone to Grace and asked her for the money to pay the old witch off. It wasn’t that much. Grace would have given it me, if it meant peace for us.’

  ‘She would only have come back for more,’ I said. ‘Blackmailers usually do.’

  Sam rubbed his forehead. ‘I suppose so. It was just the damn nerve of the woman that riled me. And the hypocrisy. I’m afraid I lost my temper, and that really set her against us. She even had the gall to make up things she said she’d overheard. Outright lies.’

  ‘What were they?’

  ‘The lies she repeated in court. That she’d overheard Grace whispering about getting rid of Ernest for his money, poisoning him, then the two of us running off together.’

  ‘And you never did talk like that,
not even in private?’

  ‘Never. We may have fantasised about what life would be like if we were free, able to be together always. Grace may even have imagined out loud how it would be if Ernest were dead and we could go away together. Paris. Rome. Perhaps we even said we’d be happy to be rid of him. But nobody ever mentioned poison or killing him. Grace and I may have both had a touch of the bohemian in us, and Lord knows we were flying in the face of conventional morality, but we had our heads screwed on the right way, and we weren’t killers. Nor were we stupid enough to think that we could murder Ernest and get away with it. We never even thought about it. The best we could hope for was that he would tire of Grace and kick her out, but he enjoyed tormenting and controlling her too much.’

  ‘Do you think that’s why she killed him?’

  Sam gave me a stern, questioning glance. ‘What makes you think she killed him?’ he asked.

  I was dumbstruck for a second, and it must have showed. The question of Grace’s guilt was one I had been deliberately avoiding. Luckily, at that moment the waiter delivered our starters, along with the Sancerre, which he opened, let Sam taste, then poured. He then put the bottle in an ice bucket on a stand beside the table, covered it with a white linen napkin and left.

  ‘I’m trying to keep an open mind,’ I said in response to Sam’s question, once we had sampled our starters and praised them to the skies. Enough people had already accused me of setting out to prove Grace’s innocence that I was trying to sound as neutral as I possibly could. I should have known that, if anyone would, Sam Porter would certainly believe her to be so.

  Sam pointed his fork at me. ‘Good. So let me tell you something before we go any farther. Neither Grace nor I ever once spoke or dreamed of murdering Ernest Fox. I mean, we just weren’t killers. It’s not something we ever discussed or considered. I know everyone says it was my response to the interfering old landlady that got me off, showed I wasn’t guilty, that if I’d had anything to hide I wouldn’t have been so foolish as to send her away with a flea in her ear – that I’d have paid her off or murdered her, too.’