‘So you arranged to talk to Grace?’ I said.
‘Yes. I just thought she should know, that’s all, so I got in touch with her. I didn’t know anything about her lover or her war experiences. I was at Catterick Garrison then, not far away. I must admit, I was surprised at what a profound effect what I had to say had on her, much more than I would have expected. She didn’t lose control or anything, but there were tears in her eyes when she left me. Then two days later she rang me at the barracks and asked to meet again.’
‘You met for a second time?’
‘Yes. In Darlington. The day before New Year’s Eve. We met for a cup of tea at a café in town, and she showed me a letter. I think she partly wanted me to verify that it was to do with what I’d told her, and partly to show me I was right.’
‘What was in it?’
‘It was from the Ministry of Defence. I can’t remember all the details, but it seemed very formal. It thanked Ernest for all his work on special projects and research over the years, for a lifetime of dedication and invaluable experience. It made some special mention of Kilnsgate House in 1941, and invited him to become a member of the permanent staff at Porton Down. There was a passing reference to his having already signed the Official Secrets Act, and a reminder that the establishment’s work was still of a highly top-secret nature and that he should not discuss either it, or the job offer, with anyone.’
‘A hospital near Salisbury,’ I said.
‘Come again?’
‘Oh, sorry. It’s what he told everyone, where he was going. The police thought it was Grace’s real motive for poisoning Ernest, because he’d got a job at a hospital near Salisbury, and it meant she would have to leave her lover.’
‘Good God,’ said Billy.
‘What on earth made you tell her in the first place? I mean, you hardly knew her. You’d only spent four months at Kilnsgate nearly fourteen years earlier.’
Billy paused for a moment, then said, ‘I suppose I was young and foolhardy, a bit zealous perhaps, once I found out what was going on. I asked around a bit, picked up a few rumours about the place and what went on there. Mrs Fox had always been good to me. It was a difficult time in my life, the first time away from home, and I remembered her kindness. You do. Like I said, my time at Kilnsgate was a happy time. The sun shone every day. I didn’t want her to have anything to do with what went on at Porton Down. I suppose you could say I was being protective. I also hoped that she might be able to dissuade her husband from working there. I never imagined for a moment there could be such tragic consequences.’
‘You couldn’t know,’ I said. ‘What did Grace say?’
‘She was quiet for a while, deep in thought, then she folded the letter carefully, put it away and thanked me. She gave me a going-away present. She must have got it that very day in Darlington, before we met.’
‘What was it?’
He held up his index finger then disappeared into another room for a few moments, returning with a silver pocket watch and chain, which he handed to me. ‘Go safely wherever you may go’ was inscribed on the back, along with ‘Remember me’ and Grace’s name. There was a dent near the edge on one side. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.
Billy smiled. ‘I had it with me in Kenya. Top pocket. It deflected a Mau Mau bullet. Doc told me it would have entered my heart for certain, but I got off lucky. I must admit, it didn’t feel that way at the time. I was laid up for a month with infections and drains and what have you, nearly lost my arm, but even so . . .’
‘Now there’s a story,’ I said. ‘Did Grace say anything more?’
‘Yes. Just before we parted company, she touched my arm and assured me that she would do whatever she could to talk Ernest out of going to work at Porton Down. I assumed she was going to lay down the law to him. You know, once they get their feet dug in, in my experience, certain women usually get their way, and I thought Grace was probably one of them. Seems I was wrong about that, too.’
‘They rowed about it,’ I told him, remembering Hetty Larkin’s testimony, ‘but I don’t think he listened to her. She certainly didn’t get her way.’ The letter that Hetty referred to could only have been the one Billy had just mentioned. Ernest must have discovered it was missing while Grace was in Darlington talking to Billy and showing it to him, and when she got back, he confronted her. She told him what she thought of his plans, that she wasn’t going, and probably that if he had any conscience and humanity left in him, he wouldn’t go either, but he no doubt laughed in her face and brushed aside all her objections.
‘So what I told her destroyed her,’ Billy said.
‘No, Billy,’ I said. ‘What her husband was destroyed her. She put up with him for years, made excuses, perhaps even turned a blind eye. But when she had to face the truth, she wasn’t going to go and live in Salisbury with a man who worked at a place like Porton Down. That wasn’t Grace. It was against all her sense of humanity. She’d seen what those people did. Meers. The Germans. That wasn’t the world she subscribed to, the life she wanted.’
‘But I set things in motion.’
‘Ernest himself did that with all the help he gave them over the years. No doubt he invited them to commandeer Kilnsgate House for a while during the war, too, and Grace may have known something about that. Or maybe it started earlier. He treated mustard gas victims in the first war. Who knows? It doesn’t really matter. One way or another, you were only a catalyst. I’d guess Grace already had her suspicions that something wasn’t quite right. She wasn’t stupid. And she’d have found out soon enough if they had gone to Salisbury.’
As it happened, I didn’t have to leave my car and stay in Simon’s Town. After a couple of hours’ more conversation and a cup or two more of Billy’s strong coffee, I felt that I was perfectly fit to drive. I wanted to get away, needed to get back to the anonymous grandeur of the Cape Grace and think.
I was hungry, but I went up to my room first to shower and change. I’d caught enough heat to bring me out in a sweat, despite all the air-conditioning, and after my walk down by the sea earlier, I felt as if I still had sand in my hair. There were no phone messages waiting for me and no one I wanted to call right now. All I had was an email from Heather saying she missed me. I fired off a quick reply telling her all was well, that I had found Billy and would tell her everything when I got back.
After I had dried myself off, I put on my bathrobe and stood on the balcony for a while in the warm evening air looking out over the harbour, the city centre lights, the reflections rippling in the water, and the massed shapes of Signal Hill and Table Mountain against the darkening, crimson-streaked sky. The expensive boats in the marina creaked as they bobbed up and down, and their cables rattled and rang. Seagulls squealed as they searched for shoals of fish. I went back inside, put on some fresh clothes and took the elevator down to the hotel dining room.
My head was still in a whirl from my talk with Billy, my emotions unsettled, so I ordered a Beefeater martini, straight up, with olives, and picked a bottle of Glen Carlou estate red blend to drink later with dinner. If I didn’t finish it, I could take the rest of the bottle up to my room and get quietly pissed on the balcony. I wasn’t going anywhere tonight. I ordered fresh oysters to start and springbok loin for my main.
The restaurant was hushed and dim. I didn’t have much of a view, only the other diners and a mural of Signal Hill on the wall, but that was fine with me. I was in a mood for thinking, for contemplation, not for sightseeing. After the shock of Billy Strang’s tale, I had a lot of broken pieces to rearrange into some sort of new order. Perhaps I had been wrong about Grace’s innocence, but I was convinced that the court had been wrong about her motives. It might not have mattered to them, had they even known. They could well have taken the establishment’s side against Grace and treated her more like some sort of foreign agitator than the humanitarian she was. I thought that perhaps if they had known her real reasons, though, and learned something of what she had experienced during the wa
r, the judge, at least, might have shown some mercy.
I tried to picture that final argument in my mind’s eye, what was said. Kilnsgate on a wintry day, with the wind howling in the chimney and sparks spitting from the fire, snowflakes slithering down the windows as they melted. There was a job offer at a hospital near Salisbury, Ernest had said. He had decided to take it, and that was that. After her talk with Billy, Grace must have told Ernest that she knew the truth about this job, and they weren’t going anywhere. Ernest had probably told her to mind her own business and not pry into his affairs. Perhaps he knew about Sam and taunted her about having to leave her lover, whether she liked it or not. Perhaps he threatened her, hit her, even. But that wasn’t her motive. Ernest was dragging her to the monsters, to the dark side, whether he saw it that way or not.
Of course, Grace wouldn’t have to do the work he was going to do, but how could she stand at his side and be his loyal wife when she knew what he was doing? And who would their friends be? Others who did the same work, no doubt, having nice dinner parties and pretending all was well while they injected people with anthrax and sprayed them with VX nerve agent and tried to concoct even more gruesome ways of debilitating and disposing of their fellow men. Never admitting what they really did, that they were seeking methods of mass murder. A life of lies, evasions. How could she let him do it after all she had been through in South-East Asia, seen at the chateau in Normandy, after the things Billy had told her about? Perhaps she already suspected that her husband was a monster because of his coldness, his absences, his research, his secret war work? Perhaps she knew it had been building up to something like this. Maybe people had even told her what had gone on at Kilnsgate during the war, while she was in Singapore. All I knew was that what had seemed to me earlier to be an interesting side street off the main route – Kilnsgate’s war history, the foot-and-mouth outbreak, Nat Bunting’s disappearance – had now become the main route. After the letter and Grace’s talk with Billy, she had reached a watershed. She couldn’t go on any longer the way things were, whether she had harboured earlier suspicions or not. Now she knew. Things had reached breaking point. She had to do something.
Ernest wouldn’t have listened to her. He would have dismissed her as a foolish romantic woman, told her she didn’t understand the necessities of modern life, that sometimes you had to do things that were unpleasant. For your country. For a way of life you believe in. He would have said she was an idealist, a dreamer. Well, perhaps she was, she argued back, but it was better than being a monster. Ernest had scolded her for taking the letter. Grace had realised that all her protests were falling on deaf ears, and in the meantime, Billy went off to fight the Mau Mau, unaware of the storm he had unleashed back at Kilnsgate.
My main course arrived shortly after I had finished the half-dozen excellent Namibian oysters, the springbok perfectly pink and tender to the knife. I poured a glass of red and started to eat, gazing around. A young couple, on their honeymoon by the looks of them, sat to my left. Opposite was an elderly colonial type, complete with brick-red complexion and white handlebar moustache, who was probably complaining to his stout wife about the natives. One rather noisy group was celebrating a birthday or anniversary at the far end, and the only other person within my field of vision was another lone diner, like myself, reading a book on his iPad.
Perhaps Grace had poisoned her husband. I had to accept that I may have been wrong about that. I was certainly way off beam with my paedophile theory. Everything she had experienced and had been told to forget had no doubt burst back into her consciousness after her talk with Billy and her discovery of the letter offering a job at Porton Down. She couldn’t be party to any of that. She was a nurse, Ernest was a doctor; they were supposed to save lives, not take them. Besides, she would have remembered the sinister Meers and his thuggish corporals; rightly or wrongly, they were the kind of people she associated with Porton Down.
In a way, if Grace had been responsible for her husband’s death, that made us birds of a feather. Perhaps I had wanted to prove her innocent because I wanted, in some odd, vicarious way, to partake of that innocence myself? But it had turned out all wrong. My plan had backfired on me.
Oh, there were plenty of differences, certainly. Ernest probably had a few good years left in him, despite his dicky heart, whereas Laura wasn’t dying quickly enough, and her agony increased with every moment. Grace had done humanity a favour; I had done Laura a favour. She had begged me and begged me, and every time I refused, my heart broke a little more. In the end, I could stand neither her pain nor my own any longer. A little extra morphine wasn’t such a difficult thing to manage at home, and if our doctor suspected, as he probably did, then he clearly thought it as much of a mercy as I did. I held her hand and watched her die, looked into her eyes and saw the life go out of them, took her in my arms, felt the spirit depart, leaving in its wake something like the silence at the end of a magnificent symphony. The only difference was, you could play the music again and again; a life plays only once.
I told myself that I had done Laura a favour, and I knew in my heart that it was true, but I had still killed her. Did that make me a murderer? Did it make me a monster? Grace, too? I don’t know. Sometimes I think so. Sometimes I feel that the guilty knowledge of what I have done, my shabby, heartbreaking secret, separates me from the rest of humanity, from the others there in the dining room that night. Maybe that is why I sought such solitude at Kilnsgate. But there I met Grace Fox, and if I had ever wondered why on earth I became obsessed with her, as I had many times on my quest, then I knew now.
Taking another look around the room, I finished my glass of wine and carried the rest of the bottle back up to my room, where I sat outside and drank on the balcony in the warm African night, listening to the cables thrum in the marina and the breeze rustling the palms below until the birds began to sing and the sun began to rise and its tentative rays silhouetted Signal Hill and Table Mountain.
24
Extract from the journal of Grace Elizabeth Fox (ed. Louise King), October, 1945. Indian Ocean
Wednesday, 10th October, 1945
The dolphins play alongside us nearly every day now. We are in that still, hot, humid world where the ocean is a blue mirror and everything seems to move slowly, as if through thickened air. I am going home again.
I am still not clear why I volunteered to travel out to Singapore again, except perhaps that I needed some sense of coming full circle, of finding some sort of peace with myself. And for all these years, no matter what, I have never been able to get rid of the feeling that it should have been me who died out on that raft, not Brenda. I have carried the guilt of survival around with me through France and Belgium, through a defeated Germany, among the mass graves, the unbearable stench of the huts, and the walking shadows of Belsen, a ruined Berlin full of liberating Russians. Hell on earth. I still have my guilt, and I have not yet found peace.
Now I sit on deck after midnight, smoking, and strands of my hair stick to the sweat on my brow and cheeks and neck. Was it a mistake to come back here on the hospital ship after we had won the war in Europe? I don’t think so. Deep inside, I knew it was always Singapore where I really came of age, where I lost what innocence I had. Not to men. I do not mean that kind of innocence. Despite Stephen’s kiss, it was remarkably easy to remain the faithful, responsible married woman while all around me lost their hearts for a night, or a week. I would be lying if I did not admit there were times when I would have liked to shed my inhibitions and everything else and join in, and I came close to that with Stephen. The innocence I lost was of a different sort.
Everyone on this hospital ship is from the ‘liberated’ Japanese prison camps on Sumatra, or from Changi, in Singapore, or Stanley, in Hong Kong. Some were among the hordes who arrived after us at Padang, when there were no more ships. They could do nothing but wait there until the Japanese came and took them prisoner. Others had simply been found wandering in the jungle, abandoned by their defeated g
uards after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan surrendered. Nobody knew what camps they were from. They have all been nursed and given nutrition in local hospitals and are now on their way home. There are no battlefield wounds, no missing limbs, but there are infections. Luckily, we have penicillin. Most are men, but there are also many civilian women and children, and sisters.
Most evenings I spend with Kathleen. She never smiles now and does not speak – I suspect as much as anything else that she must be embarrassed by the change in her voice the missing teeth have caused. I should also imagine that her surprising laugh is all but gone now. Our former statuesque beauty is a string bean, weighing only six stone, legs like matchsticks, knees like cricket balls. Her beautiful blonde hair is stringy and lustreless, torn away in patches, her scalp raw.
At first, I did not recognise her, nor she me. It took one of the other sisters who had seen how inseparable we were on our first journey all those years ago to reintroduce us. It is hard. Kathleen does not remember very much. She has no passion for life. At night she has frightening dreams – they all do – and she cries out a lot. In the daytime heat she is listless and inert. She has no interest in anything. I try to talk to her about ordinary daily matters, the routine, who is causing trouble, where we are, the dolphins, but it means nothing to her. Kathleen is broken. She hums rambling melodies to herself a lot.
Before the Poison Page 37