Before the Poison

by Peter Robinson

  I am also happy to be reunited with several acquaintances from the ill-fated Kuala, and in the long evenings we sit out on deck and tell each other our stories. The best moments, though, are the ones I spend alone leaning over the railings staring at the moon reflected in the water. I can lose myself in that beauty, and for a few moments at least, let go of my thoughts of poor Brenda, Kathleen, Doris and Stephen, and whatever may have become of them, and let my mind simply float there, like a lily on the moonlit water.

  January 2011

  The bad weather returned in January, after a brief thaw, and when it snows in Kilnsgarthdale, as I had learned in December, nothing much has changed since Grace Fox’s day. Again, schools closed, vehicles were abandoned, and the local authorities ran out of grit after the first day. Train and bus services came to a halt. My lane was blocked for a second time, and I couldn’t leave the house for three days. I couldn’t even get in touch with my friendly farmer, who had gone to the Maldives for a holiday, or so the person who answered the phone told me. Luckily, I had plenty of supplies left over from the holidays, so I wasn’t likely to starve or go thirsty, and there was nowhere I had to be. My guests had all left before the new year, which I had celebrated by a quiet evening at home with Heather. Melissa had told me she liked her, I was pleased to hear, and Jane had said she was glad to see me looking much happier and more relaxed than I had been in a long time.

  It had been wonderful having Dave and Melissa and Jane and Mohammed to stay, but I enjoyed having the house to myself again after they had gone – the silence, the late-night movie marathons, not shaving every morning, wandering around in my dressing gown and slippers, Heather stopping over for the night. I didn’t think Jane would have disapproved of our sleeping together, though these things can be hard to predict, but Heather had said she would have felt uncomfortable, and I didn’t blame her. It meant we had a lot of making up to do on New Year’s Eve.

  On the second day of my incarceration, I stood by the French windows at the back of the house and looked out. The branches of the trees were heavy with snow, bent under its weight, the woods a bare tangled black and white world. As darkness fell and the shadows deepened, I thought of that night fifty-eight years earlier, when Grace, Ernest, Alice and Jeremy had sat down to dinner and noticed that it would be impossible for anyone to go home. I also thought of the days following the dreadful event, the four of them stuck in the house, this house, with a corpse upstairs.

  As the days drifted into one another and the snow drifted against the French windows, I lost track of the time, sleeping when I felt tired, eating when I was hungry. I kept the log fire burning most of the time, and my supplies of wood grew dangerously low. Mostly I worked on my sonata. ‘Grace’s Theme’, as I suspected, became its emotional and melodic heart, its motif and the basis of variations in all four movements. It still needed a lot more work, especially the final movement, the ‘allegro’, where I was having a lot of trouble with the tempo. But on the whole, I was very happy with what I had done so far.

  The rest of the time, I watched old movies in my den: Sunset Boulevard, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Peeping Tom, The Fallen Idol. The telephone and Internet connection still worked, as they had last time, so I wasn’t completely cut off from the outside world the way Grace and the others had been. I talked to Heather, to Louise, and to Jane in Baltimore and to Dave, back safely in LA. Louise said she would help me track down Billy when I came up with a bit more information. I tried the Internet and, while I found out a great deal about evacuees in general, including one or two interesting personal stories that backed up some of the vague ideas I had been entertaining, I could find nothing about Billy. I did, however, discover that Darlington Library had a large collection of newspaper holdings, including the Northern Despatch, the Northern Echo and the Darlington and Stockton Times. I would have to wait until the weather improved, of course, but I would get to Darlington as soon as I could.

  Try as I might, I could find out nothing else about Kilnsgate House during the war, the Special Operations Executive, or any other group that might have commandeered the place. Neither Nat Bunting nor the foot-and-mouth outbreak were mentioned anywhere. I did find a book about the SOE called Forgotten Voices of the Secret War, though, which I ordered from the Castle Hill Bookshop. I doubted that it would contain any revelations. Wartime was the perfect cover for any number of shabby, secret operations, and the worst of them left no traces in any of the record books. The best you could hope for was an eyewitness with a believable story. I reminded myself that this was a distraction from the main theory I had been forming about Grace and Billy’s meeting, a side street off the main route, however interesting it was.

  Eventually, the snow stopped and the sun came out. The view from my bedroom window over the dale was almost too bright to bear. The little stone bridge and the lime kiln were completely buried, mere bumps in the undulating stretches of snow. As far as I could see, in both directions, the landscape was blindingly white.

  Even then, it was another day before I heard the sound of the snowplough making its way down Kilnsgarthdale Lane. Of course, that was only the beginning, I still had to dig out my front path and my car, and that took me the best part of an afternoon, after which I was too exhausted to go anywhere. I phoned Heather, and she came by for dinner with the Indian takeaway I had been craving, and the previous weekend’s papers. She told me that the roads in and around town were still awful, and cars were slipping and sliding all over the place. The police were inundated with accidents, including a huge pile-up on the A1 near Scotch Corner. The A66, the main east–west artery in this part of the world, was, of course, closed.

  For the next few days, the temperature fluctuated around freezing point, which made things even worse, as it had around Christmas. The snow would melt to slush during the day, and then freeze at night into miniature mountain ranges of ice. People slipped on the unshovelled pavements and broke arms and legs. Most stayed at home if they possibly could. Many of the services remained closed, including the libraries.

  I made my way carefully into Richmond for the first time two days after Heather’s visit. I was stir crazy by then, and willing to risk even the roads for the cheer of a pint and a noisy pub. Not to mention Heather’s company for lunch.

  I bought a newspaper and settled down to wait for Heather with my pint of Black Sheep at a table in the dining area of the Black Lion, where a fire crackled in the hearth. It was quieter than I had expected. No tourists, no walkers. Most of the news was still taken up by stories of the weather, an English obsession, I had come to realise, and the rest with the economy – poor pre-Christmas sales, because of the weather, of course – as well as the occasional skirmish or massacre on a distant continent. Nothing newsworthy had happened in the USA, it seemed, except for a major snowstorm on the eastern seaboard, nothing new to Bostonians or New Yorkers.

  Heather came in shivering and warmed herself by the fire before shucking off her long winter coat. Her cheeks had a healthy glow, though I knew she wouldn’t thank me for saying so. She was sensitive about her complexion. She didn’t even like me admiring her freckles. So I said nothing. I went to the bar and got her a vodka and tonic while she studied the menu on the blackboard over the fireplace. In the end she went for the venison sausage, and I decided on lamb chops.

  ‘So how does it feel to be a member of the human race again?’ she asked.

  ‘I was seriously in danger of going crazy up there.’

  ‘A man reverting to his primitive roots. Yes. A frightening thing, indeed. But you’re all right now?’

  ‘Nothing a decent pint couldn’t cure.’

  ‘Have you found your evacuee yet?’

  ‘Billy? No. The library’s still closed. This bloody weather.’

  ‘I still don’t see what you think he’ll be able to tell you.’

  ‘I’ve been working on a theory.’

  ‘Another one?’

  ‘Say Grace did it. Say she killed her husband.�
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  ‘Then I don’t see any point in going any farther. I thought your aim was to prove your precious Grace innocent? I thought you’d already decided that she didn’t do it.’

  ‘I had. It was. It is. But maybe even more so it’s to get at the truth.’

  ‘You don’t think that came out at the trial?’

  ‘Of course it didn’t. I think Louise put it best when she said the jurors all fantasised about Grace and hated themselves for it, so they found her guilty. But I can’t prove it. I can’t prove that Ernest Fox died of natural causes.’

  ‘Then what? The next best thing? Her motives were noble?’

  ‘In a way.’ I lowered my voice. I hardly needed to, as there was nobody else in the dining room and the television was on over the bar, but it wasn’t the kind of thought you voiced out loud. I paused, trying to weigh the words before I said them. ‘What if Ernest Fox had abused the evacuee?’ I said. ‘What if he was a paedophile?’

  Heather looked aghast at me. ‘What?’

  ‘It doesn’t sound so strange, does it? This evacuee, Billy. He might have remembered years later. People do bury such secrets, you know, even from themselves. He found himself training in Catterick, close enough that he just had to tell Grace what he had remembered.’

  ‘And she believed him? Just like that?’

  ‘I’ve thought about that, too. If Grace believed him,’ I said, ‘it was because she already had an inkling, but she didn’t want to admit it to herself, that she’d been living with a pervert all those years. And they had a son. He was seven—’

  ‘You’re not saying Ernest Fox abused his own son, too?’

  ‘I’m saying it’s possible. Or that Grace had noticed the way he was starting to treat the boy, or look at him, and it worried her.’

  Heather shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Chris,’ she said. ‘You’ve lost me on this one, I’m afraid. You’re grasping at straws. This is just wild imagination. There’s no evidence at all.’

  ‘Why would there be? But won’t you at least admit it’s possible, as a theory?’

  Our food arrived and we started eating. Heather pushed back her hair. ‘Lots of things are possible,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t mean they happened. I mean, if you’re after way-out theories, you don’t even have to go that far.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Maybe she killed him because he was abusing her. Have you thought of that? Or maybe he committed suicide?’

  ‘But communities covered up things like paedophiles back then. And nobody would suspect a doctor. Ernest Fox was a pillar of the community. They’d had separate bedrooms since Randolph was born.’

  ‘If you’re right, then why didn’t Grace just tell the police?’

  ‘Because they’d never believe her, for a start, because she couldn’t prove it, and even if she succeeded, the shame she’d bring on herself and her son would have been too much to bear.’

  ‘More than the shame of having a father murdered and a mother hanged for his murder? I’m sorry, Chris, but that comes pretty high on my list of shameful things to live with.’

  ‘I doubt she was acting entirely rationally. And she didn’t expect to get caught!’

  ‘Either she was irrational, or she was calculating. You can’t have it both ways.’

  ‘Of course you can. Some people are perfectly rational in their actions when they’re angry or upset.’

  ‘Even so, I think that if you’re coming to the conclusion that Grace Fox did it, anyway, then you should start trying to accept that the jury was right all along and give up on it. Its been obsessing you, taking over your life.’

  ‘Not really. I just want to know. There are one or two more things I can do before the whole thing dries up on me, and I’m going to do them, starting with finding Billy.’

  Heather gave me a look she no doubt kept in reserve for hopeless cases, then she smiled. ‘Well, you’ve certainly got staying power, I’ll give you that. How about another drink?’

  It was business as usual on the A1 two days later when I drove to Darlington, but some of the country and residential roads were still covered in snow and ice and tough to negotiate. It was a grey day with a pale, haloed disc of sunlight trying to burn through from the south, without much success. When I got to the city, there were few people on the streets, and the pavements were still covered in slush over patches of ice. I hadn’t visited Darlington often, and the parking confused me, so I headed for the large, open car park in the city centre. Even there, they hadn’t done a great job of clearing away the deluge, and it was tricky to back my way into a parking spot without slipping.

  The library was an old red-brick building, reminiscent of the provincial schools of the late Victorian era, at the back of the Cornmill Centre. I had phoned ahead the day before and managed to book a microfilm reader. Normally, I was told, there would be a longer waiting period, but things were a little slow owing to the weather. I was glad I had something to thank the weather for.

  Libraries these days are very different places from the ones of my childhood. I used to go nearly every day to the children’s library in Armley, where I grew up, mostly because I was in love with Yvonne, the librarian with the beehive hairdo. There was a special smell about the place, probably a mixture of paper, glue, polish, ink and Yvonne, that I found irresistible. She had a lovely, gentle way of stamping the books out. Today, though, it’s called a One Stop Centre, and more people go there to get advice about housing or benefits, pay their council tax or play games on the Internet than to borrow books. As libraries go, Darlington’s wasn’t bad. There was plenty of old wood, a pleasant, distinctive smell, and Jean, one of the librarians, was very helpful, though she didn’t have a beehive. She showed me to the readers and got me all set up with the Northern Despatch and Northern Echo microfilms.

  I was lucky that I already knew Billy had arrived in Richmond in September 1939, and it took me no more than about ten minutes to find the little story tucked away in the Northern Despatch between a report on the Post Office coating the tops of its pillar boxes with yellowish gas-detecting paint, and warnings of stiffer penalties for blackout violations. Even better, there was a photograph, poor-quality black and white, but it was the same boy Grace had been photographed with in the garden of Kilnsgate, the same pinched, suspicious features and blond fringe.

  There’s a new addition to the household of Dr. Ernest Fox at Kilnsgate House, near Richmond. This is seven-year-old William ‘Billy’ Strang, officially the first evacuee to be billeted in the charming Yorkshire town. At Kilnsgate, Billy will take up residence with Dr. and Mrs. Fox and will no doubt enjoy the attentions, not to mention the famous pies and cakes, of maidservant and cook Hetty Larkin, of nearby Ravensworth. ‘He’s a lovely lad,’ said young Hetty. ‘The poor mite misses his mum and dad something cruel already, but Dr. and Mrs. Fox do their best to make him feel at home. We all do.’

  ‘We’re only doing our duty,’ said Dr. Fox, with characteristic modesty. ‘It’s nothing to make a fuss about. If we can do anything to save these poor children from the bombing that is sure to be directed against Tyneside and the nation’s other industrial and shipbuilding regions, then we should do so.’

  The doctor’s wife, Mrs. Grace Fox, added, ‘We’re more than happy to have him. He’s a delightful child. Polite, well-mannered and no bother at all.’

  As for young Billy himself, what does he have to say about all this upheaval? When asked by our reporter, he remarked that he found the countryside interesting, full of all sorts of flowers and animals he had never seen before, and that if by stopping away from home for a short while he was helping the soldiers to fight that monster Hitler, then he was pleased to do his bit. That’s the spirit, Billy!

  And that was it. I have to confess, I was more than a little disappointed. Apart from the fact that his name was Billy Strang and that he came from Newcastle, the article gave me little more information to go on than I already had. It wasn’t much more than a propaganda piece,
really. Still, I could add to that what Wilf had told me about the boy’s father managing a shoe shop in Newcastle High Street, and it might get me somewhere. Strang also sounded like a reasonably unusual name.

  I browsed through a few more stories but found nothing else related to Billy. I wondered if the Echo or the Despatch had done a follow-up when he left, so I checked the newspapers around Christmas and early January 1940, but again I came up empty handed. It appeared that it was only his arrival as the first evacuee in the area that was deemed newsworthy. I had to hope that, little as it was, it would be enough for Louise to work her magic.

  While I was there, I also had a quick scan through the microfiches for 1941 and 1942 for anything related to an outbreak of foot-and-mouth or the disappearance of Nat Bunting. Perhaps I scanned too quickly and missed something, but it seemed to me as if neither incident had made it even as far as the local newspaper. I thought again of trying to find the newspaper accounts of Grace’s trial, which would probably be in Leeds reference library, but I decided I didn’t really need them after reading Morley’s account. Besides, it wasn’t so much the trial I was interested in any more, it was Grace herself.

  On my way back from Darlington, I decided to pay a call on my neighbours, the Brothertons. Wilf had said they might know something about Kilnsgate during the war, and they were hardly out of my way. I pulled up at the end of their short drive and made my way across the frozen mud of the farmyard to the house. Two collies stood barking at me, their tails wagging. It wasn’t a large farmhouse, but there were quite a few outbuildings, barns, byres and the like, along with a chicken coop. I could hear cows mooing and smell that farmyard smell.