‘Yes. I was finishing my training at Catterick. I found her telephone number and she agreed to meet me. We went for a walk around the castle walls. It was a lovely day for the time of year, I remember.’
‘You were seen together by several people. It came out in the police investigation, though it was never mentioned at her trial.’
Billy frowned. ‘Why would it be? I mean, I don’t understand.’
‘As evidence that she was promiscuous, a loose woman. That’s what the prosecution worked so hard to prove. She had a lover, a young artist. They said that was why she plotted to kill her husband.’
‘I find that hard to believe,’ Billy said. ‘But the alternative is . . . surely it can’t have been because of me?’
‘I think it might have been,’ I said. It was time to take the plunge. ‘I know it must be difficult for you to talk about it, but I think you arranged to meet Grace that day to tell her that Ernest Fox had abused you while you were an evacuee at Kilnsgate House, didn’t you? Maybe you’d only just remembered, or maybe it had been bothering you for a while, and this was your opportunity to unload the burden before you went off to war. The mind plays strange tricks. But I think when you told her, she believed you. She must have had her own suspicions by then, noticed little things, and I think she also did it partly to protect her own son. He was seven at the time, your age when you were there in 1939. People didn’t talk about those sorts of things back then. Nobody would have believed her, anyway. She couldn’t live with it, with him and what he’d done, what he was no doubt going to do again, so she poisoned him.’
Billy sat staring at me open mouthed. He was amazed, I supposed, that somebody had worked it out after all these years. I drank the last of the wine, and he reached for his soda. His hand was trembling slightly. The silence stretched until he finally said, ‘That’s a very interesting theory, Mr Lowndes, very interesting indeed, but I have to tell you that it’s nothing more than a load of bollocks. Quite frankly, you’re not much of a detective. You’re so far off target they’d have to send out a search party for the truth.’
23
Extract from the journal of Grace Elizabeth Fox (ed. Louise King), July, 1944. Normandy
Tuesday, 4th July, 1944
We have moved to a stretch of apple orchard between Caen and Bayeux that is known as Harley Street because of the concentration of hospitals and medical staff. The accommodation is not much better than before, though, and we are still in tents. With all the confusion of the move, I did not see Lt. Maddox for two days after the incident at the chateau, though I puzzled and puzzled about what could have possibly been going on there. Dorothy and I discussed it, too, and we came to the conclusion that poison of some kind – possibly this ‘sarin’ – had been used on those poor men. There had been plenty of rumours of biological warfare, and we still carry gas masks, though fortunately we have not had cause to use them. Anyway, I was determined to find out what Lt. Maddox knows. He is a good doctor, and something of an intellectual, always with his nose in a book, if he isn’t repairing some poor boy’s spleen or sewing up a chest cavity.
I found him leaning against a tree smoking his pipe beside his tent, and when he saw me, he stiffened and asked me what I wanted. I said I would like him to tell me what his thoughts were about the other day. He did not want to talk about it at first, but I could tell that he had been dwelling on the incident, just as Dorothy and I had been.
He took me by the arm and led me away from the tent, towards the trees. Normally I would have been wary of such an action, but I knew that he simply wanted to avoid being overheard.
He did not know who Meers was, he said, but suspected he was connected with Porton Down. When I asked what that was, he told me it was a top secret military establishment in Wiltshire where they do experiments with chemical and biological weapons. So at least part of what Dorothy and I had worked out was true, I thought.
Lt. Maddox told me that the chateau had clearly been used for such experiments. Sarin and tabun, he told me, were nerve agents that the Germans had developed but had not used yet. Meers was clearly looking for evidence of any further experiments and inventions, or refinements they might have come up with more recently. When I asked if this was because he wanted to put a stop to it or find an antidote, Lt. Maddox just stared at me, then laughed harshly. He said that was very unlikely. Far more likely, he said, was that Meers wanted as much information as he could get in order to duplicate the experiments at Porton Down, to develop something just as powerful, or more so, to be used against the Germans. We wanted the same capabilities as they had. Then he told me that it would be best if I said nothing more about this business to anyone, and walked off, leaving a trail of sweet pipe smoke to vanish in the night air.
Sunday, 23rd July, 1944
After Caen fell two weeks ago, we started to get many more German casualties. Most of the ordinary soldiers are glad that the war seems almost over, and happy to be still alive as POWs. We have enough problems, though, that we have had to increase the number of armed guards and sentries around the hospital. The SS officers are especially difficult. They are still devoted to Hitler and cannot accept the possibility of a German defeat. Then there is the Hitler Youth. Because the German army is running short of able-bodied men, so Major Tanner explained to me, it has drafted in a lot of old men and boys to make up the numbers. The old men are quite passive and glad to be cared for, but the boys can be a nuisance. We try to treat them the same as everyone else, and most of the time we succeed, but sometimes our patience wears exceedingly thin.
There was one boy called Dieter who arrived about two days ago. He had been shot in the upper thigh, had lost a lot of blood from the femoral, and was also suffering from some form of infection. He cannot have been more than fifteen or sixteen years old. Right from the start he made it clear he was going to be a nuisance.
In his livelier moments, he would urinate and defecate on the floor near his bed, knock the kidney bowl out of my hands when I approached him, pull out his intravenous lines, and take great delight in telling me what the victorious German soldiers would do to English pig women like me when they had won the war.
I grew to hate Dieter, and I dreaded having to approach him, but he was on my ward, and there was no way around it. Dorothy helped me as best she could, but he made her even more nervous. She shook so much around him that she could not administer an injection.
Last night, while I was on duty, I heard Dieter cry out, and I went over to his bed to see what was the matter. He was burning up with fever, his breath an ominous rattle in his throat. We had known that he had an infection, but we had not known how serious it was, how long he had lain unattended before the stretcher-bearers took him to the field dressing station.
His brow was hot and dry, his eyes unfocused. I made a move to go and get a cool cloth but he grabbed my wrist with a remarkably strong hand and begged me not to leave him. His English was quite good. I explained what I was going to do, and he relaxed his grasp but begged me to come back.
I brought the cloth and sat on a canvas chair beside his bed. It was dark, and the only light came from the few hurricane lamps placed around the marquee tent. The wind was flapping the canvas and making shadows like hand-puppet shows all over the place. Dieter seemed to be hallucinating, lost in a world of memory, or imagination, as I mopped his feverish brow and whispered endearments. I heard the word ‘mutter’ several times and knew he was calling for his mother. So many do when they are dying. All the time he was gripping my wrist like a drowning man hanging on to a raft. Occasionally, his body would go into spasms, and he would cry out, waking some of the other patients and bringing forth a few groans and requests to be quiet.
This seemed to go on for hours. Dorothy took care of the rest of my duties for the night, and I stayed where I was, mopping Dieter’s brow, telling him all would be well in the morning and he would soon be reunited with his mother. Soon, I could see faint daylight breaking through the canvas, the air
outside turning slowly from black to grey. Dieter clung on. I had done all I could for him in the way of medicines and care, though perhaps if we had given him penicillin from the start, instead of the sulphonamides the Germans carry with them, it would have helped. The problem is that penicillin is so expensive, and we have so little of it that we must save it for our own wounded. At least, that is the rule at this hospital.
Dieter’s pulse fluttered under my searching finger, then it slowed down and became so weak that I could no longer feel it. He had one more spasm, then I heard the death rattle in his chest, an unmistakable sound, and he was gone.
I managed to uncurl his fingers from my wrist and gently close his staring blue eyes. I cried and cursed the war then, in that tent in the half-dark with the dead German boy lying before me, made fists and banged them against the mattress impotently. I had hated Dieter, feared him, even, but I hated and feared what had killed him even more.
Now I sit outside my tent exhausted and drink hot coffee and smoke a cigarette in the dismal morning light, the day’s activity starting up all around me. I hear the lonely whistle of the first train leaving Caen for Bayeux. If I do not sleep soon, there will be no sleep for me today. But how am I supposed to sleep after all this?
January 2011
It was my turn to look gobsmacked, and no doubt I did. I certainly felt as if the earth had shifted underneath my feet, and I couldn’t find purchase any more. I was wrong. The knowledge left me dizzy and empty, treading space the way you tread water in the deep end. All these weeks I had believed that Grace Fox couldn’t have murdered her husband, then I had reluctantly accepted that she may have done, but that if she had, she had a very good reason, a reason that, for me, at any rate, partly exonerated her. Now all this had been swept away by a couple of sentences out of Billy Strang’s mouth. I had been so sure.
I could see Billy’s lips moving, but I couldn’t hear a word he was saying. It was like looking down on the waves and not hearing them. I had the sensation that my ears were blocked, the way I used to feel every time in a plane at takeoff or landing. Finally, I heard his words as if from a great distance. ‘Are you all right? You’ve turned very pale. Would you like a drop of brandy or something?’
I shook my head. I was still vaguely aware that I had to get back to my hotel somehow, and the last thing I wanted was to get lost in Khayelitsha or fall foul of the South African police over a drink-driving charge. ‘No,’ I managed. ‘I’m all right. Just a bit of jet lag, I suppose. I wouldn’t mind a cup of tea or something.’
‘I gave up tea years ago, but I can do you a decent cup of coffee.’
‘Thanks. Just black. No sugar.’
While he went to make it, I stood by the window staring down at the silent waves, the rocks, the beach, cars speeding by on the main coast road. It all suddenly seemed so alien, and the searing ache of missing Laura cramped my heart so hard I thought I was going to collapse. Was this what my life had become? The pursuit of an illusion? Ghosts and whispers and shadows. It was as close to fainting as I had ever come. I was wrong. Wrong about Grace. Wrong about everything. What would I say to Louise? To Heather? To Wilf? To Sam? I began to feel as if Grace herself had somehow let me down, taken me in with her heroic, enigmatic beauty and silence.
Billy came back with the coffee. ‘You certainly seem to have had a bit of a shock,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you sit down again? Do you want to know the real story? I guarantee you’ll find it even more interesting than the one you made up.’
I found that hard to believe, but I took the coffee and sat. ‘Yes. I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t usually behave so foolishly. You must think I’m crazy.’
‘Not at all. I don’t know if it will help, but let me tell you the truth. Let me tell you why I really went to talk to Grace Fox that day.’
‘Have you ever heard of an establishment called Porton Down?’
Indeed I had, many times over the years, and I had also seen it mentioned quite recently, in Grace’s war journal. ‘Yes,’ I said, frowning.
‘Well, then,’ said Billy, ‘you’ll know it’s not exactly on a par with Watership Down. It’s a collection of ugly buildings near Salisbury, owned by the military, by the Ministry of Defence, actually. Been around since about 1916, probably at first as a response to the Germans using chemical warfare in the First World War, mustard gas and the like. A top-secret scientific research establishment. It kept pace with the times. It was the secret everybody knew, though nobody outside really knew what went on in there, not even the government, if we’re to believe what they say. But it’s also the sort of place most people have heard of, these days, and most know it’s a pretty sinister establishment connected with chemical warfare, nerve gas, anthrax and the like, and not without a few skeletons in its cupboards. The sort of secret we’d rather have swept under the carpet. The sort of things other countries do, and we react with moral outrage.’
‘I’ve heard of it,’ I told him. ‘And Grace mentioned it in her journal.’
Billy gave me a sharp glance. ‘Did she now? She never told me that.’
I told him about the visit to the mysterious chateau with Meers and Maddox and Dorothy and the corporals. ‘It’s not surprising she didn’t say anything to you, though,’ I added. ‘Apparently she didn’t talk about her war service at all. If you read the journal, you can understand why.’
‘My God,’ said Billy. ‘I never knew. Poor Grace.’ He looked at me with new understanding. ‘So when I mentioned it to her . . .’
‘It would have rung a bell, yes. A loud one. According to the journal, the whole incident distressed her. But I still don’t understand.’
Billy got up and walked over to the window, stared down at the ocean for a while in silence, then came back. His expression was grim. ‘I never knew, believe me. I had no idea what she did during the war, that she’d come across such things.’
‘Like I said, she never talked about it. She was a Queen Alexandra’s nurse. Served in Singapore when it fell and in Europe right up to the end.’
‘How terrible it must have been for her. She had such a sweet nature when I knew her. I must admit, later she seemed sadder, more distant, but I put that down to the times, to age, and to life with that miserable husband of hers.’
‘You were telling your story. Porton Down.’
‘Yes, sorry. I . . . well, it was a few weeks earlier, actually, around the end of November 1952. Word had got around camp that if you volunteered for a week at this special place – we were told it was a common-cold unit, and they were doing research into curing colds – then you’d be given two bob a day and a three-day pass. I knew I’d be going overseas soon, so I thought I’d volunteer.’
‘What happened?’
‘I was one of the lucky ones. At that time, I found out later, they were mostly researching nerve agents, like VX, biological agents, anthrax and the like, and riot control tactics, like CS gas. Mostly, I just lay around in bed and had various tests, just a lot of needles, really, but one day they took me to another hut, full of little chambers, like showers. But it wasn’t water that came out, it was a stream of gas. I must have passed out, because when I woke up I was back in bed and when I tried to breathe I felt as if my lungs were on fire. My throat was raw, as if I had a coil of barbed wire caught in it, and my face was stinging like I’d been whipped with nettles.’
‘And you say you were lucky?’
‘Oh yes. For that I got my two bob a day and a three-day pass. I had no idea what it was at the time, but looking back, it was probably some form of CS gas, the stuff the French used against the students in the ’68 riots. The effects were temporary, and there was no permanent damage to my respiratory system. Other poor sods weren’t so fortunate. Some got given LSD and felt their bodies crawling with spiders, and ended up in padded cells, or they got injected with bubonic plague, anthrax, smallpox and what have you. Plenty of people who volunteered like I did ended up with chronic bronchitis, various cancers, paralysis, nervo
us disorders, brain tumours, you name it. Not long after I was there, there were rumours of a man, Ronald Maddison, I found out much later, who was tested with sarin in 1953 and died. They covered it up, of course, until his relatives and friends got a second inquest granted in 2004, which found his death to be unlawful. Sarin was one of the nerve agents we took from the Germans late in the war. They’d been testing that and others like it for years on prisoners in the research hospitals, concentration camps and POW camps. Our scientists didn’t even know they existed at that time. That would probably be what the man Grace mentioned in her journal would have been after.’
‘Meers. Yes. Grace mentioned sarin and tabun. You seem to know quite a bit about it.’
‘I made it my business to find out.’
‘And Grace? How does she fit into all this?’
Billy sighed and turned away. He picked up his glass, noticed it was empty and went to refill it with soda water. I took a refill of wine, too. This afternoon was turning out to be far more traumatic than I had expected. If the worst came to the worst, I’d leave the car parked at Billy’s and get a hotel in Simon’s Town for the night.
‘I told her all about it. See, I saw him there. Her husband. Dr Fox. He didn’t recognise me, of course. Wouldn’t have, even if he’d noticed me, which he didn’t. I’d grown up a bit since I was seven. But he hadn’t changed much. I saw him wandering around with one of the head honchos, a reptile of a man called Smeaton, and he seemed quite at home. Very much at home, in fact. He didn’t seem like part of the staff – he never wore a white coat, for one thing – but he knew his way around, like he’d been there before. I only overheard one snippet, but I’m sure Smeaton said to him, “Of course, when you come to work here . . .”’
Suddenly it became clear to me. The new job. A hospital near Salisbury. The wartime absences, the secrecy surrounding Kilnsgate in the early 1940s, barbed wire and sentries, Fox’s qualifications in neurology and microbiology, his neglect of the general practice later. All the little bits and pieces that meant nothing in themselves until the magnet underneath made a pattern of the iron filings. Ernest Fox was deeply involved with whatever went on at Porton Down, had probably been connected ever since his First World War experience with mustard gas, but certainly since the Second World War. It wasn’t the Special Operations Executive at Kilnsgate, or if it was, they were working hand in glove with the Porton Down boffins. Ernest Fox had consulted, worked on special projects, kept it all secret, of course, and finally they had offered him a permanent, full-time position. His reward? Or perhaps they really needed his experience and knowledge. It was the beginning of the Cold War, and chemical warfare research and development were really coming into their own, a hot commodity at Porton Down.
Before the Poison Page 36