Before the Poison (15 page)

To my surprise, Sam was waiting in a little alcove, quite sheltered from the rest of the restaurant, reading a
Special Suspense
series thriller. You could probably seat about six people at the table, at a pinch, but tonight there were only the two of us, and it seemed roomy enough. Impressionist landscapes in gilt frames hung on the walls.

Sam put his book down and half stood to shake my hand before I sat. Tonight he was wearing a white linen jacket, mauve shirt and a tie that looked as if it had been painted by Jackson Pollock. He had a glass of milky liquid beside him. Pernod, Ricard or some such aperitif, I guessed. I declined his offer of the same.

He helped me with the menu and I settled on langoustines to start, followed by sole
meunière
. Sam went for oysters and sea bream. ‘The
bouillabaisse
is magnificent here,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid my appetite doesn’t quite stretch that far these days. It’s very filling.’ He studied the wine list and settled on a bottle of Sancerre to start. When we got our ordering out of the way – accomplished by Sam in what sounded to me like perfect French – he raised his glass and said, ‘
Salut
. You’ve given me a lot to think about, my musical friend. I looked you up on the Internet. Quite the career. I must say, I’m impressed. I’ve even seen some of your films.’

‘So that’s why you wanted to leave our talk until later? So you could check me out?’

He inclined his head slightly. ‘Partly,’ he said. ‘Trust doesn’t always come so easily when you’ve lived as long as I have and experienced some of the things I’ve known happen. But your sudden and dramatic appearance at my door did rather take me by surprise, and it did kick me back through the years with astonishing speed. I needed a little time to collect my thoughts, too, and to focus. Sure you won’t have an aperitif?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Thanks. To be honest, I’ve always hated the smell and taste of aniseed since my schooldays. I think I nearly choked on an aniseed ball one day.’

Sam chuckled. ‘Good Lord, aniseed balls. I’d forgotten all about them. Gobstoppers, too, that changed colour as you sucked them, and knobbly liquorice sticks like bits of wood that you chewed.’

‘Probably all disappeared now,’ I said. ‘Are these paintings genuine?’ I asked, nodding towards the walls.

‘Most of them. They’re not forgeries, if that’s what you mean, though they’re often “in the style of”. Pupils’ work. That sort of thing.’ He shrugged. ‘One or two are quite valuable. Most aren’t.’

‘It’s a beautiful restaurant,’ I said.

‘Indeed. A bit of old Paris. And just wait till you taste the sole.
C’est magnifique
. Anyway, I’m sure there must be lots of questions you want to ask me, so do go ahead. What is it you want to know?’

I hadn’t really sketched out an approach, unsure as to what Sam would either remember or would wish to talk about. Instead, I had envisaged a free-ranging conversation in as relaxed a tone as possible. I certainly didn’t want to appear to be interrogating him in any way.

‘Were you ever inside Kilnsgate?’

‘On occasion,’ Sam said, with a sly smile. ‘We had to be very careful, of course, very discreet. We hardly ever exchanged notes or letters, for example, and if we did we were careful to destroy them. “Eat this message”. That was our joke. Each time we met we would arrange a different time and place for our next meeting, with a back-up plan in case one of us couldn’t make it. And I only ever gave her one present – a silver cigarette case that used to belong to my grandmother. She took it, said she would manage to keep it somehow, but not to buy her anything else. It all sounds a bit cloak-and-dagger now, I suppose, but we felt it necessary at the time. Ernest did go out of town on occasion, sometimes overnight, or even for longer. Naturally, if Randolph was away at school and Hetty wasn’t due, we’d take advantage of that if we could. I’d hide my bicycle in the garden shed at the back. I don’t need to tell you how out of the way Kilnsgate House is, so I’m sure you know it wasn’t very difficult to be discreet there. Most of the time we were making do with barns, haystacks, fields, whatever. It was all right in summer, but when autumn came, then winter . . . well, you can imagine.

‘We loved the east coast most of all in late summer and early autumn: Staithes, Whitby, Robin Hood’s Bay, though we didn’t have occasion to go there very often. We did have some of our most wonderful days there, though, just walking on the clifftop paths, eating fish and chips from newspaper. So many memories. It wasn’t all mad passionate sex, you know. We spent hours just talking about art and music or walking along quietly, just happy in each other’s company, hand in hand. Some days I’d paint and Grace would sit or lie on the grass watching me, dozing off, dreaming. We thought we’d gone far enough afield that day we spent at the guest house in Leyburn to get out of the rain in November, but that damn Bible-thumping old bitch remembered us.’

‘It’s true, then? Is that how the investigation got started?’

‘Yes. If it hadn’t been for her . . . who knows?’ He shook his head slowly. ‘One stupid mistake. Ernest was away in Salisbury at some medical institute or other for a few days, and Randolph was at boarding school. We were out walking. The plan was to stay at Kilnsgate House that night, to go there after dark, but the heavens opened and we got caught in Leyburn after the last bus had gone. We debated what to do and decided in the end to stop the night at a guest house as nobody was expecting Grace at Kilnsgate anyway. Just somewhere we picked at random, out of the way, we thought. Enter Mrs bloody Compton. I thought I recognised her from a job I’d done in Richmond, some wall repairs, but Grace said I was imagining things. It was a dreadful place. Cold, dour, plain, uncomfortable. Threadbare carpets. Inadequate blankets. Bibles and religious pamphlets all over the place. Biblical quotes in needlework framed on the walls. Methodist. All work and no play. It gave me the bloody creeps. She wasn’t going to let us stay at first. Didn’t believe we were married. So I paid over the odds. That made it all right. Damn foolish of us, when you think back on it. Leyburn was far too close to home. But we didn’t have a lot of choice, and who knew that Ernest Fox was going to die in a little over a month’s time? Oh, maybe I should have just gone to Grace and asked her for the money to pay the old witch off. It wasn’t that much. Grace would have given it me, if it meant peace for us.’

‘She would only have come back for more,’ I said. ‘Blackmailers usually do.’

Sam rubbed his forehead. ‘I suppose so. It was just the damn nerve of the woman that riled me. And the hypocrisy. I’m afraid I lost my temper, and that really set her against us. She even had the gall to make up things she said she’d overheard. Outright lies.’

‘What were they?’

‘The lies she repeated in court. That she’d overheard Grace whispering about getting rid of Ernest for his money, poisoning him, then the two of us running off together.’

‘And you never did talk like that, not even in private?’

‘Never. We may have fantasised about what life would be like if we were free, able to be together always. Grace may even have imagined out loud how it would be if Ernest were dead and we could go away together. Paris. Rome. Perhaps we even said we’d be happy to be rid of him. But nobody ever mentioned poison or killing him. Grace and I may have both had a touch of the bohemian in us, and Lord knows we were flying in the face of conventional morality, but we had our heads screwed on the right way, and we weren’t killers. Nor were we stupid enough to think that we could murder Ernest and get away with it. We never even thought about it. The best we could hope for was that he would tire of Grace and kick her out, but he enjoyed tormenting and controlling her too much.’

‘Do you think that’s why she killed him?’

Sam gave me a stern, questioning glance. ‘What makes you think she killed him?’ he asked.

I was dumbstruck for a second, and it must have showed. The question of Grace’s guilt was one I had been deliberately avoiding. Luckily, at that moment the waiter delivered our starters, along with the Sancerre, which he opened, let Sam taste, then poured. He then put the bottle in an ice bucket on a stand beside the table, covered it with a white linen napkin and left.

‘I’m trying to keep an open mind,’ I said in response to Sam’s question, once we had sampled our starters and praised them to the skies. Enough people had already accused me of setting out to prove Grace’s innocence that I was trying to sound as neutral as I possibly could. I should have known that, if anyone would, Sam Porter would certainly believe her to be so.

Sam pointed his fork at me. ‘Good. So let me tell you something before we go any farther. Neither Grace nor I ever once spoke or dreamed of murdering Ernest Fox. I mean, we just weren’t killers. It’s not something we ever discussed or considered. I know everyone says it was my response to the interfering old landlady that got me off, showed I wasn’t guilty, that if I’d had anything to hide I wouldn’t have been so foolish as to send her away with a flea in her ear – that I’d have paid her off or murdered her, too.’

‘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?’