Before the Poison

by Peter Robinson

  ‘Did you tell the police that she had come to blackmail you?’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  ‘And what did they do?’

  ‘They laughed in my face.’

  ‘What did they think of your role in general?’

  ‘They thought I was involved, of course. Especially after the other woman came forward. Some of them knew me, and they were already a bit dubious about the farmer’s boy who’d left the farm to become an artist and made his living patching up walls and fences and fixing broken-down cars or motorbikes. Questioned me for hours. Beat me about a bit. That bastard Dettering and his cronies. But they’d no evidence.’

  ‘What other woman?’

  ‘Landlady of a pub in Barnard Castle said she’d overheard us talking about “getting rid” of somebody.’

  ‘It wasn’t true?’

  ‘Of course it bloody wasn’t true. We were nowhere near Barnard Castle that day. We were in Leyburn, all right, but we never set foot in Barnard Castle. Oh, she was discredited before it went to trial as just an attention-seeker – apparently she’d done that kind of thing before – but the damage was done by then as far as the police were concerned. Besides, they were coming out of the woodwork by then.’

  ‘Who were?’

  ‘The town gossips, rumour-mongers. People who said they’d seen us together or overheard us plotting. People wanting to get in the limelight. People who said they’d seen other men coming and going from Kilnsgate House when Dr Fox was out. The Compton woman started it, spreading poison to anyone would listen. In chapel, at Bible class, wherever the moral lanterns burned brightly. Everything Grace had said and done over the past six months or more came under scrutiny. And who among us could stand that? They twisted and misinterpreted everything she had said and done. If the piano tuner had been to Kilnsgate, for example, there would be someone to say she saw a man coming out of Grace’s house when she was supposed to be alone there. It was all rubbish, of course, and mostly easy to shoot down, but it did do some damage. Someone saw her down on Castle Walk talking to a young man in uniform a few days before the murder, and that became a big talking point for the gossips, then someone else thought she lingered too long talking to a young shopkeeper a day or so later. It was ridiculous. They tried to make a big thing out of all that, tried to make out she was a tart and I was only one of her many conquests.’

  ‘Who said this?’

  ‘The townsfolk. The police.’

  ‘Who was the young man in uniform? Who were they talking about? Do you know?’

  ‘No idea. I didn’t see Grace after the middle of December. Randolph was home from school, and she was busy with Christmas. I spent most of the time until Christmas Eve staying with my uncle in Leeds while I was fixing up a few local bangers to make enough money to buy presents. Then I went up to the farm for the holidays. I could never find enough work in Richmond to keep me in paint and canvas.’

  ‘Did Grace’s husband know about the affair?’

  ‘If he did, he never said anything to her, or she never said anything to me.’

  ‘I see.’ I paused for a moment to let everything he had said sink in. ‘But the police didn’t charge you with anything, even after all this?’

  ‘No. They couldn’t prove anything. How could they? They had nothing but innuendo. I may have had as strong a motive as Grace in their eyes, but I had neither the means nor the opportunity. I was snowed in up at the farm with my mum and dad when the murder happened. The best they could have got me on was conspiracy, and that would have been pushing it.’

  ‘Did you testify to that in court?’

  ‘I didn’t get to testify. I mean, not to say what I really wanted. I was a witness for the prosecution. What do they call that on Perry Mason? A hostile witness? Adverse, I think they said. I don’t remember. But if they thought I was going to help them hang Grace they had another thought coming.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘The truth, whenever I could get a word in. But all the prosecutor wanted to know about was my affair with Grace, my young age, how could we, where did we do it, that sort of thing. To establish her motive, since they hadn’t been able to charge me. It was a morality show. No matter what I said, the jury was against me. If I tried to defend Grace, they just assumed I was lying to get her off because I loved her. Admirable, but not quite good enough. But no matter what the bastard inferred, or however much he bullied me, I wouldn’t speak out against Grace, so in the end they gave up on me. You know, he even suggested that I’d been very clever in arranging things so that Grace took all the blame, that I knew my denial of the old woman’s demands would result in the investigation into Grace’s actions and, subsequently, in her arrest. I was basically told I was lucky not to be on trial for my life, too.’

  ‘But why on earth would you do that to someone you loved?’

  ‘Exactly what I said. The courts don’t take a particularly romantic view of love. They thought she did it for the money. Grace wasn’t interested in money.’

  ‘Didn’t Grace’s barrister question you?’

  ‘Of course, but what he could do? The damage was already done. And what could I say, anyway? That I loved her? Yes, it was true. That we’d been having an affair? That was also true. That her husband was a misogynistic bully? That would have gone down really well coming from a farmer’s son. I think even the judge belonged to the same golf club or hunt. Fox had connections, you know, worked at them. All I could tell anyone was that Grace and I were two lost souls in love, and that neither of us would ever dream of hurting anyone. And who would believe that? It just wasn’t enough.’

  As Sam spoke, his eyes welled with tears and he had to pause to check the emotion. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I had no idea, after all this time, how angry and how sad it still makes me to talk about those days. Such a waste. Grace was a gentle, loving creature. I honestly can’t believe that she murdered anybody.’

  ‘So you think she was hanged in error?’

  ‘She wouldn’t be the first one. Or the last.’

  ‘Did you visit her in gaol?’

  Sam looked down at his plate and shook his head. ‘I couldn’t face her, and she asked me not to come, said that she was accepting her fate and that seeing me again would be too hard for her to bear. It would tear her apart. I never saw her again after mid-December, apart from that day in court. We wrote once or twice. Even that was hard enough. She’d told them in her statement that I had nothing to do with what happened, you know, and that I had no knowledge of her husband’s death. That helped with my case, too.’

  ‘But she didn’t confess to murder, herself?’

  ‘No. She never did. She always maintained that he had a heart attack, and she went to help him, but she was too late. And I believe her.’

  ‘It would seem an obvious conclusion. But what did happen? How was she supposed to have poisoned him?’

  ‘Potassium. Apparently it mimics the symptoms of a heart attack.’

  ‘What did Grace say in her letter?’

  ‘She told me to forget her, to get on with my life.’

  I swallowed. That was close to what Laura had said to me when she knew she was dying. ‘Did Grace ever actually protest her innocence to you, tell you that she didn’t do it?’ I asked.

  Sam frowned at me over his fork. ‘She didn’t need to.’

  ‘But what about the evidence?’

  Sam snorted. ‘What evidence? Grace was convicted on her morality and on the status of her husband. That she was having an affair with a much younger man, a mere farmer’s son at that, only made her husband appear more the victim and gained him more sympathy from the jury.’

  ‘Do you think you had a chip on your shoulder?’

  ‘Damn right I did.’ He let himself relax for a moment, shot me a sharp glance and emphasised it by pointing his fork at me again. ‘I still do. You should understand, given your background. How many times have you been judged and found wanting the moment you opened yo
ur mouth? It even made you run away to America.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘the girls over there certainly do love an English accent. Any English accent. I didn’t know you could find out so much about me on the Internet.’

  Sam poured more wine and managed a crooked smile. ‘You’d be surprised.’

  ‘Did no one else know what sort of person Ernest Fox was?’ I asked.

  Sam sniffed. ‘Oh, I’m sure they did. But in that, I wouldn’t say he was a lot different from anyone else of his social standing. A pretty wife was a feather in his cap, something to hang on his arm, if I can mix my metaphors. So nobody said anything. And I wasn’t even given the opportunity. The prosecutor tried to lead me in that direction a couple of times, into slagging off Fox, the clever bastard, but Grace’s barrister was at least sharp enough to know how much more damage it would do if I attacked the character of Ernest Fox in court. Nobody wanted to go there. It’s all a game, a delicate balance. Basically they tried to make out that Grace was the cold one, that they had separate rooms because of her, because she couldn’t bear her husband touching her and denied him his conjugal rights.’

  ‘And that wasn’t the case?’

  ‘No. They’d had separate rooms ever since the sixth month of Grace’s pregnancy with Randolph, and after the boy’s birth Ernest decided he liked it that way. She’d given him his heir. He never touched her again.’

  8

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

  The snow finally stopped falling, and on the morning of Sunday, 4th January, 1953, over two full days after the tragic events at Kilnsgate House, a local snow removal vehicle was able to clear the lane. The telephone wires were still down, so no communication had been possible between the house and the outside world. In no time at all, though, once the situation had been explained, an ambulance arrived, but there was nothing to be done for Ernest Fox except to remove his body to the mortuary. Grace had left him in his bed and covered him with a clean white sheet. She had let the fire burn out in his bedroom and had not relit it, so that the winter chill had provided a natural preserving effect, ensuring that no unpleasant decay occurred in the body.

  It is difficult for anyone who was not there to imagine the tension, the despair and the horror of the four people marooned in Kilnsgate House for two days while the storm raged and the snow deepened. When help, therefore, finally arrived, the Lamberts and Hetty Larkin especially were no doubt grateful to find themselves homeward bound after spending two days trapped with a corpse and a grieving widow. What the grieving widow felt, we cannot know.

  There was, at this time, no possible reason to suspect foul play, and therefore there was no immediate police search of the house. Because of the amount of time that had passed between Dr. Fox’s death and the ‘discovery’ of his body, however, and the need to determine an official cause of death, a coroner’s inquest was ordered. Grace Fox described the actions she had taken on discovering that her husband was suffering a heart attack. The medical evidence was presented, and the pathologist who carried out the perfunctory post-mortem noted that Dr. Fox had, indeed, died of natural causes – of a myocardial infarction – and the certificate of death was duly registered to that effect. The inquest was adjourned, the loss of the doctor was mourned by the whole community, and the funeral was planned for Friday, 9th January. Grace’s sister Felicity and her husband Alfred drove up to Kilnsgate as soon as they could after hearing of Ernest Fox’s death.

  That should have been the end of the matter.

  However, on 8th January, the local superintendent of CID, Kenneth Dettering, received a disturbing message from one Mrs. Patricia Compton, who ran a boarding house in Leyburn, to the effect that Grace Fox had been ‘carrying on’ there with a local artist and odd-job man by the name of Samuel Porter, that Mr. Porter was, in her own words, ‘nobbut a boy’, and that she had overheard the two of them in her guests’ lounge planning to rid themselves of Mrs. Fox’s husband by poison and run away together. Samuel Porter was in financial distress, of course, and without access to Ernest Fox’s money, the two lovers would soon have found themselves in a pretty pass. And Grace Fox was known to have rather extravagant and expensive tastes. She might want to run off with a younger man, Detective Superintendent Dettering concluded, but she would want to do it with her husband’s money.

  On making discreet enquiries in the area, Detective Superintendent Dettering learned from some of the local shopkeepers and innkeepers that Grace Fox most certainly had been seen with the Porter boy in Leyburn that day, and that they had also been seen together in other places. He also learned of the new job prospect to which Dr. Fox had alluded at the New Year’s dinner, which would take not only the good doctor, but also his wife Grace, away from Richmond and, more important, away from Grace’s lover Samuel Porter. Suspecting that this threat of separation was the final straw for Grace Fox, Detective Superintendent Dettering immediately informed the coroner of his suspicions, and after a brief legal skirmish, the funeral was postponed, a second post-mortem was ordered, the inquest reconvened and a police investigation into the death, now termed ‘suspicious’, was ordered to commence immediately.

  October 2010

  After coffee and rich chocolate desserts, Sam brushed aside all my offers to pay and asked me whether I would care to join him for a nightcap back at his apartment. It was still early, not much past ten, and a very pleasant evening for strolling the boulevards of Paris, so I said I would be happy to do so.

  We walked up the narrow Rue Delambre, past the closed poissonerie, where you could still catch a whiff of the day’s deliveries on the wet pavement. Sam wore a panama hat and carried a stick with a lion’s-head handle, which he used more as a prop than as a necessary aid to walking. He walked slowly, but with a straight back, and without any noticeable shortness of breath. We waited for the lights to change at the Boulevard Edgar Quinet, by the dark cemetery.

  ‘This may sound like an odd question,’ I said, ‘but was anything bothering Grace when you last saw her? Did she seem upset, worried, unusually depressed, anything on her mind?’

  ‘Not when I last saw her,’ said Sam. ‘But you have to remember, that was three weeks before her husband’s death, and our relationship wasn’t like that. We lived in our own world, a fantasy world, if you like. Grace didn’t tell me about her domestic problems, if she had any. Most of the time I didn’t really know what she was thinking. She loved art, music, books, and that’s what we talked about when we weren’t making love. We cared nothing for money and the material world. For Grace, I think, our relationship was an escape, time out of time. She would have tired of me before long, I’m certain. There was a restlessness to her nature. I couldn’t fathom her, didn’t know what she was searching for.’

  ‘Was she religious?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say so. Certainly not in the ordinary way. She said she’d lost her faith, though she never amplified on why, but I think it was something she still struggled with. I think she was a deeply spiritual person. You know, with some people, you think they can go either way, become complete atheists or Catholic converts. Grace liked Graham Greene. He was one of her favourite novelists. That tells you something about her, I think.’

  ‘Greene was a Catholic convert.’

  ‘Yes, but it always seemed a bit of a struggle for him. Grace went to church for the sake of appearances. Most people of her social standing did attend back then. But she probably thought more about God than many who professed to be believers. The only thing that made church bearable for her was the music. She sang in the choir and played organ from time to time. She loved Bach and Handel. I mean, I’m an atheist, but it doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate Michelangelo or Giotto.’

  ‘Did she never talk about her problems or her feelings about her husband?’

  ‘Oh, she told me about the separate rooms. But that was because I got jealous and started telling her how I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else touching her, m
aking love to her, especially him. She rushed to assure me that nobody did, not even her husband. And she mentioned her little day-to-day problems now and then, but she never overburdened me with them. They weren’t part of our relationship. I wasn’t there to comfort her over Randolph’s scraped knee or his getting into trouble at school, that sort of thing. She was quiet sometimes, distracted, even moody, but mostly, as I said, we inhabited a kind of idealised, romantic world. Other people didn’t exist for us – until one burst into our haven with a vengeance. It was a very fragile, rarefied sort of affair. No, she didn’t say anything else about how her husband treated her. I only inferred his coldness and cruelty from certain moods she had and things she alluded to.’

  ‘If you loved each other so much and didn’t care about money, why didn’t Grace just divorce Ernest and the two of you run away together? Surely people did that, even back in the fifties?’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course they did. Sometimes. But it was more difficult and had far more stigma attached. Ernest Fox wouldn’t have allowed it, for a start. I couldn’t imagine a man like him accusing his wife of adultery and being branded a cuckold in public. People like him swept these things under the carpet, came to some sort of arrangement, carried on with their private cruelties and presented a civilised veneer to the world. He’s the kind of man who would have dragged her back home if she dared to desert him, just to prove his power.’

  ‘From what I can gather, though, Grace had always been a bit of a rebel, headstrong, a bit unconventional, wasn’t she? She rode a motorbike, for one thing. That must have been unusual back then?’

  Sam regarded me with a sad smile. ‘The Vincent. Yes. It was a bit of an affectation, really. She learned to ride during the war and found she quite enjoyed it. But that hardly meant she was the kind of woman who’d just abandon her husband and child, not to mention the status and comforts of her life. She wasn’t that much of a rebel. Oh, we might have done it eventually, run away, had the relationship lasted, but we didn’t, and then it was too late. If anyone overheard us saying anything, it would have been indulging in fantasies about running away together. But whatever we felt in each other’s company, perhaps we both knew, when we were apart, that it wasn’t going to happen. That we didn’t have the courage, or whatever it took. Sometimes dreamers are only dreamers. And there was the child, don’t forget. She wouldn’t have abandoned Randolph to Ernest, and we could hardly have taken him with us. There was no room for a child in our fantasy world. God knows, Ernest didn’t particularly like the boy, but if we had taken Randolph, he would have hunted us to the ends of the earth to get back his rightful heir.’