Before the Poison

by Peter Robinson

  ‘No,’ I said, feeling a bit guilty about not seeing my own grandchild this Christmas.

  Someone brought Wilf another pint, and he took a long swig and wiped his lips with the back of his gnarly hand. ‘So how’s your investigation going?’

  ‘It’s not really an investigation,’ I said, feeling rather silly. ‘Anyway, whatever it is, it seems to have stalled.’

  ‘So where do you go now?’ Wilf asked.

  I shook my head. ‘I’ve been reading her journal.’

  ‘Journal?’

  ‘Yes.’ I told him about Louise and Grace’s scant possessions. ‘It’s amazing, what she saw, what she did. She was everywhere.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Wilf. ‘We often forget what role the women played while the men were busy trying to maim and kill each other.’

  ‘It makes her seem less likely to have killed anyone as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘Maybe it was a disgruntled patient,’ Wilf said. ‘I’ve told you what a sadistic bastard Old Foxy was.’

  ‘So he lacked a good bedside manner. That’s not unusual in a doctor, and it’s hardly a motive for murder.’

  ‘Depends what he did and to whom.’

  ‘I’ll take it under advisement.’ I sipped some more beer. ‘I’m still interested in that young lad in uniform who Grace had lunch with in Richmond shortly before it happened.’ I explained about how my original theory had been shot down by Louise Webster’s discoveries.

  Wilf scratched his stubbly chin. ‘All this raking up the past has had me feeling quite nostalgic these past few weeks. You said you got the impression this was an old friend and that he would have been a young lad when the war started?’

  ‘Yes. If she’d had a child in, say, 1931, he would have been about eight then and twenty-one in 1952.’

  ‘But she didn’t.’

  ‘No. I was wrong about that.’

  ‘Well, there were lots of young men in uniform then. What with National Service, and the garrison being so close by.’

  ‘Someone from her past? Someone she met during the war, perhaps? The person who saw them mentioned that he had an odd sort of birthmark on his hairline.’

  Wilf gave me sharp glance. ‘Are you sure about that? You didn’t mention that before.’

  ‘Is it important?’

  Wilf nodded over towards Heather and Melissa. ‘I’d keep an eye on them two, if I were you. Yon Frankie Marshall’s well over the limit, and he’s moving in a bit close to Miss Wilde for comfort.’

  ‘They can take care of themselves. What did you mean asking me if I was sure?’

  ‘Billy,’ Wilf said.

  ‘The evacuee?’

  ‘That’s the one. They took him in just after the war started. The government started shipping them down from Tyneside pretty soon that September. He’d have been about seven or eight then. Stopped with the Foxes until around Christmas, then his parents took him back home again.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No reason. It was the “Bore War”. Not much happening. Lots of parents took their kids back. Then, of course, after April 1940, when the Germans marched on Norway and Denmark, well . . . things heated up again. Then there was Dunkirk. Anyway, I remember Billy because he came to our school for a while and we used to play with him sometimes. Nice enough lad, but a fish out of water. City boy. Couldn’t seem to get a grasp on our country ways. I think his dad managed a shoe shop in Newcastle High Street or something. I remember he had a Geordie accent, and most of us couldn’t understand him. Some of the kids used to tease him mercilessly, but he took it all in good sport. He was well enough built, so if he’d wanted to, he could have given one or two of the worst a good thumping, but it wasn’t as if they tried to bully him or anything. He was a quiet kid, mostly, as I remember, a bit passive. Very nice lad, though. Nicely dressed. Clean. He must have been very unhappy underneath it all.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The teasing, the strangeness, being so far from home – or so it must have felt – missing his mum and dad. Not that he let his feelings show. Besides, I can’t see being stuck out at Kilnsgate with old misery-guts Fox could have been a lot of fun, can you?’

  ‘Surely Grace would have been there? And Hetty?’

  ‘I suppose so. Some of the time. Still . . .’

  ‘What happened at Kilnsgate during the war? I seem to be picking up all kinds of bits and pieces, and I can’t help but find myself wondering if it had anything to do with what happened later.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just the way things seem to connect. Grace meeting this Billy shortly before her husband’s death. I mean, she probably hadn’t seen him since 1939, when he was only seven. Grace being away overseas for quite a while. You said before that the house was taken over by the military for a while, very hush-hush.’

  ‘Oh, aye. Off limits. You couldn’t even get through Kilnsgarthdale from one end to the other. They were tough, surly buggers, too.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Wilf grinned. ‘Well, you don’t think we didn’t try, do you? Most of the time if kids went prowling around, they understood it was a harmless enough game. I mean, most of the soldiers weren’t that much older. It wasn’t so long ago they’d been up to the same mischief themselves. They’d usually send you off with a few choice words and a smile on their faces. But not this lot. They were older. And harder. We found a weak spot in the barbed wire once and the sentry found us and pretty much marched us off at gunpoint. I don’t think he would have actually shot us, but it was frightening enough.’

  ‘Any idea who it was?’

  ‘No. A lot of these units were top secret. They’d come and go, and no one even knew their names, or acronyms, if they had any. As far as I know, none of them came into town to socialise like the regular troops billeted up here.’

  ‘But there must have been some speculation?’

  ‘Oh, aye. We all assumed it was Special Operations Executive. A bit James Bond. In fact, I think Ian Fleming even had something to do with them.’

  That was what Ted Welland had told me, I remembered. ‘But nobody actually knew, or said that was what it was?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And what were they doing here?’

  Wilf shrugged. ‘No idea. Training. Planning. Like I said, you couldn’t get near the place.’

  ‘Would Billy know anything about it?’

  ‘I can’t imagine why. It was after Billy’s time. Tell you what, have a word with old Bert Brotherton. No, sorry, he can’t help you, he’s long gone now, along with his son Fred. Sometimes I forget. Talk to his grandson. He might know something.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Wilf?’

  ‘Your neighbours, the farm down the lane, over the hill. It’s still in the family, far as I know.’

  I realised with a guilty start that I hadn’t even been and introduced myself to my neighbours yet. Still, they hadn’t come to see me, either.

  ‘What do they know?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, but it was their farm that had an outbreak of foot-and-mouth in 1942, and old Bert always blamed the folks at Kilnsgate. Still, he was a bit of a cantankerous old devil. Always going on about them. Blamed them for Nat Bunting’s disappearance, too, apparently. But that’s Bert for you.’

  Nat Bunting, I remembered, was the mentally challenged young man who had disappeared from the area during the war. What on earth could he have to do with anything? ‘Did he say how or when?’

  ‘No. He tended to ramble a bit, even then, did old Bert Brotherton.’

  ‘Do you happen to know Billy’s second name?’

  ‘Can’t say as I remember. We just called him Billy. But I do remember the birthmark. Most of the time he kept his hair in a fringe so nobody could see it, but the first week of school – clean or not – there was an outbreak of nits, maybe from some of the rougher evacuees in the area, so we all had to have our heads shaved, and the school nurse rubbed lethane on to get rid of them. Smelled something vile, it di
d. Anyway, with his hair short, you could see the birthmark, like when he had a military haircut years later, I suppose, when someone saw him with Grace. But Billy was really embarrassed by it and took to wearing a cap most of the time, till the nits had gone and his hair grew back. I’ll bet it was Billy, all right.’

  I reached into my inside pocket for my iPhone. I had managed to download the photos and text Louise had given me, and I turned to the photo of Grace and the young boy standing in the garden of Kilnsgate. I showed it to Wilf. ‘Is that Billy?’

  He stared at the iPhone in admiration. ‘That’s a clever gadget,’ he said. ‘Aye, that’s Billy, all right. By the looks of the weather and all it must have been taken shortly after he got there, before school started. September 1939. Lovely long summer. That’s Billy. And that’s Grace. But you know that already.’

  ‘What would Billy want with Grace after all those years?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Maybe he was just in the area and he dropped by to say hello and happy new year? He was in uniform, you say, so the odds are he was at Catterick, maybe doing his National Service. Perhaps they were sending him off to war and he came to say goodbye.’

  ‘What war?’

  ‘There’s always a war. Korea. Kenya. I was in Cyprus, myself.’

  ‘Will there be records? You know, official records?’

  ‘Probably. It was quite a major operation, the evacuation, but it was a bit chaotic, too. It was supposed to be organised, and they had local “dispersal centres”, where they tried to keep friends, brothers and sisters and school parties together, but it didn’t always work out that way.’ Wilf sipped some beer. ‘Someone said it was a bit like an old Roman slave market in some places. You know, the farmers would come along and pick the strong, sturdy lads who could help out on the land, and the town families picked young girls who could give a hand around the house. The local bigwigs opted for the clean, nicely dressed kids, of course. Records? I don’t know. There’d have been a local billeting officer, for example. But I think you’d have a job on your hands tracking any records down after all this time, don’t you?’

  ‘I know someone who could help,’ I said, almost to myself. I noticed Heather glance over at me and frown. Was she annoyed that I had been talking to Wilf for so long, or were things getting a bit difficult over there? I smiled at her. She made a face and went back to talking to Melissa and the crowd that surrounded them.

  ‘You know, you could do a lot worse than the local papers,’ Wilf said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘As it happened, Billy was the area’s first evacuee. I don’t mean he came by himself or anything, there was a trainload or more, but it was just announced that way, officially, like, to make a bit of a story. Dr Fox and his wife wanted to set an example, see, be the first to take in a city evacuee. I think Old Foxy saw it as a mark of his status, or something like that, and of course the billeting officer was a patient of his. I’d imagine he could have found himself on the receiving end of a big nasty needle if he hadn’t gone along with it. Needless to say, they could have taken twenty or more, that big house of theirs, or yours, now, but the good doctor only wanted the one. A nice one, of course. And the first. He got Billy. Anyway, it wasn’t such a terrible mismatch, as so many were. If Old Foxy hadn’t had a bit of influence, he might have got stuck with half a dozen slum kids, and who knows what would have happened to Billy. Anyway, there was a story about Billy in one of the papers. Photo and everything. It might be of some help.’

  ‘Which paper?’

  ‘Can’t say for certain, but it would have been the Northern Despatch or the Northern Echo, most likely. Those were the papers we took back then.’

  ‘What was the date?’

  ‘I don’t know, do I? It was seventy years ago, for Christ’s sake. It was early September, though, I remember that, not long after war was declared. That doesn’t give you a lot of ground to cover.’

  I heard a grunt of pain and a glass break over by the bar.

  ‘I told you there’d be trouble,’ Wilf said.

  I turned in time to see Melissa twisting Frankie Marshall’s tattooed arm up his back, his face pressed down on the wet bar towel. A glass had tipped over and rolled to the floor. The young barman was torn between doing something and fear of getting involved. Melissa leaned forward and whispered something in Frankie’s ear. He nodded as best he could for a man in his position, and she let him go. He shook himself off, scowled, picked up his jacket and stormed out of the pub. One or two of his mates laughed when the door closed behind him. Before anything else was said, Dave hauled himself over to the bar and bought a round of drinks for the house. That brought cheers, and the incident was quickly forgotten, the glass was swept up and everyone returned to their evening of fun. Nobody bothered Melissa or Heather again, and some of the lads even started to regard her with a certain expression of awe. She broke a few hearts that night, and Dave was probably the envy of the town. I remember him once asking me, not so long ago, ‘What on earth does she see in a short, fat, balding Jewish guy like me?’ I couldn’t answer him then, and I can’t now. Put it down to the mysteries of love.

  We didn’t stay much longer. The incident took some of the wind out of our sails, and we’d all had more than enough to drink. The pub-crawl idea quickly lost much of its appeal, as I had suspected it would. I thanked Wilf for our little chat, wished him a happy new year, and set off with Dave, Heather and Melissa to get a taxi outside the Green Howards Museum.

  ‘What was all that about?’ I asked Melissa as we walked carefully up the cobbled square, keeping an eye out, just in case Frankie Marshall had gone to seek reinforcements.

  ‘He grabbed my tit,’ she said. ‘Wanted to know if it was real.’

  ‘He wouldn’t be the first,’ said Dave.

  Melissa shoved him playfully. ‘Yeah, but he didn’t do it in a nice way.’ She linked arms with Heather and they started singing ‘Love Is Teasin” as we got into the waiting taxi. Dave and I quietened them down, though the taxi driver was one of those types who has seen it all. As long as we didn’t vomit all over his upholstery, which the sign said would cost us a £50 soiling fee, he didn’t much care what we did or said. ‘Most of your friends were real gentlemen,’ Melissa said to Heather. ‘I had a really good time.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ said Heather, clearly thrilled at Melissa’s approval. But she didn’t want to come back to Kilnsgate, not with Jane and Mohammed staying there. I could understand that. We made arrangements to meet in a couple of days and dropped her off at the Convent. As the taxi headed for Kilnsgate, Melissa dozed on Dave’s shoulder, and I thought about what Wilf Pelham had just told me. I should have a chat with my neighbour, for one thing. Then there was the evacuee. Billy. I couldn’t see how yet, but maybe he was the missing piece in all this. I prayed he was still alive and able to tell me why he had met Grace shortly before her husband’s death.

  21

  Extract from the journal of Grace Elizabeth Fox (ed. Louise King), February–March, 1942. Sinkep Island, Sumatra

  Saturday, 28th February, 1942

  They told me later that a fishing boat found us, the three of us who were left. They thought we were dead, but they took us on board anyway. I have only very hazy memories of what followed, but I now know we are in a Dutch hospital in the town of Daboh on Sinkep Island, just off the east coast of Sumatra.

  The doctor visited me yesterday morning, as usual, and he said the Japanese would be here very soon, and if I wanted to have any hope of escaping, I must make the journey to Padang, on the west coast of Sumatra, where I might possibly find a British ship. He told me that he thought I was well enough to travel, as my heat stroke was not too severe, though my friends from the raft, two civilian women whose husbands had remained behind in Singapore, were not well enough to accompany me. I must keep out of the sun, he told me, and keep myself covered at all times, as I had suffered terrible sunburn, and even now my skin is peeling.

  Though I was loath to
leave my fellow survivors, the doctor insisted that it would be foolish to wait any longer, and so, feeling as guilty as a deserter, I slunk off, travelling with some Dutch and Australian nurses who were also anxious to escape the Japanese atrocities we had been hearing so much about back in Singapore.

  It was a long journey, over three hundred miles, and we travelled mostly by road and riverboat. Some members of the Dutch Home Guard, who were bravely on their way to face the invading Japanese forces, gave us a lift over the final range of mountains.

  When we finally got to Padang, the harbour was crowded with troops and civilians, the whole scene so chaotic that my heart sank. There was not a ship in sight. We slept on the docks that night, and I had terrible nightmares of rolling into the water.

  Sunday 1st March, 1942

  Amidst rumours of Japanese landings in Java, and even as close as the east coast of Sumatra, this morning I saw three ships come sailing in, and of course, I could not keep the song out of my head, though it was not Christmas, and I am no longer a Christian. Some may have taken the arrival of the three ships as a miracle, but for me it was pure luck, or good timing. At any rate, they were able to take the entire harbourful of refugees. I was fortunate enough to be one of the small company of women on one of the Royal Navy vessels, here to refuel and replenish its stocks of food and water after a big battle in the Java Sea. We sailed as soon as darkness fell. She is heading for Bombay, where I can report to a hospital unit and arrange to be shipped home.

  Tuesday 3rd March, 1942

  Though water is still rationed, at least we have some, and we eat very well. When I told the captain I was a QA, he put me to work immediately in the sick bay. There are many wounded soldiers from the recent sea battle, with dressings to be changed and drips to be attended to, and one or two with severe infections. We also have on board a number of civilians suffering from dehydration, heat stroke or exhaustion. I am happy to be working again, even though I tire easily and often feel far from well, myself.

  The Australian nurses I work with are wonderful girls. They have all suffered so much, like me, shipwreck and near-capture, but they manage to maintain a devil-may-care spirit and hold their heads high in the face of tragedy. I wish I could be more like them. Some were in Hong Kong just before it fell, and they have terrible stories to tell of Japanese atrocities. I fear even more for Kathleen and Doris, and worry that the Japanese probably slaughtered Stephen along with the other men.