Before the Poison (49 page)
Authors: Peter Robinson
‘Maybe,’ I agreed. ‘Maybe those few seconds would have made all the difference. Maybe it was her hesitation that killed him, and as I said, she probably wanted him dead. But she
didn’t
kill him. She
couldn’t
. I’m convinced of that.’
‘So you don’t believe that given the right circumstances we’re all capable of murder?’
I couldn’t answer that question. I had killed Laura. I didn’t know whether that technically made me a murderer or not, but that didn’t matter. I had killed. It was what I’d done and why I’d done it that counted for me, and how I came to live with it. I felt that I knew Grace now. Fanciful or not, imagination or supernatural, she had called to me as soon as I entered Kilnsgate House, drawn me in, chosen me, willed me to tell her story, to find the truth. I had half-dreamed I heard her playing the piano. I had seen her in the mirror hesitating, then moving swiftly away to do what had to be done, just as I had seen the young woman who had hanged herself in the mirror at Scarborough. Even if all these things were inventions of my mind, I had still experienced them.
What I saw in the mirror was what I
believed
happened that night at Kilnsgate in 1953, a recreation of what had happened when Ernest had his heart attack. But that sounded crazy. Perhaps Graham would understand, but I wasn’t going to repeat it to Heather. Grace had nursed dying Germans, dressed suppurating wounds, sat up all night cooling the brows of those men who had done such terrible things to her sisters and to the officers she had laughed and danced with. Heather had read about that, too. A woman who had done those things wasn’t going to plan the cold-blooded murder of her husband, as the prosecution had argued, and the judge and jury had believed. Perhaps I needed Grace to be innocent so that I could partake of that innocence, too, as I had realised in Cape Town. But I didn’t believe that Grace could have stood by and watched Ernest die any more than I could have stood by and watched Laura live and suffer any longer. I couldn’t tell Heather that, either.
Heather tossed back the last of her wine. ‘Supposing you’re right?’ she said. ‘What happens now?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It’s all over now.’
‘Really?’
‘What else is there to do? None of it can be proved. The cause of Nat Bunting’s death. What Grace did that night. Besides, it happened nearly sixty years ago. The only people who care, apart from me and you, are Louise, Sam and Wilf, and I’ve already talked to them.’
‘How did they react?’
‘I think they saw the logic of it. Louise sees her grandmother as a heroine now, a martyr, and not as a murderess or a scarlet woman. That can’t be a bad thing after all she’s been through. Wilf didn’t say much. I think he already had his mind made up. And Sam . . . Well, he persists in feeling cheated out of the love of his life, and who can blame him? He’s idealised Grace’s memory, and, in a way, I don’t think it matters to him whether she did it or not. He decided years ago in his heart that she didn’t, so I suppose he might feel vindicated that someone else has dug a bit deeper and come to the same conclusion. As for me, I’m convinced. I don’t need to search any more.’ I paused. ‘This has been thirsty work. How about I open another bottle?’
Heather thought for a moment. ‘Well, only if we can take it upstairs and you let me show off my new dress for you.’
I laughed. ‘It’s a deal.’
As I opened the wine, I reflected how our discussion had made me think perhaps more of my own mystery than that of Grace Fox. Not mystery, so much as the twisted, half-hidden guilt I had confronted after my talk with Billy. I had thought about it more that night out on the balcony with my wine, and I had accepted what I’d done, made the first tentative move towards forgiving myself. In an odd way, getting to know Grace had helped me do that.
While I would cheerfully have given the moon, the planets and the stars not to have had to kill Laura, I knew that it had been the right thing to do. You can’t let someone you love suffer an agony that gets worse every day and has no possibility of ever abating or ending, except in an even more drawn-out and painful death.
Would I tell Heather what I had done? I didn’t know. Those questions were for later. For now, we would go on as we were, playful and easy. I would finish my piano sonata, and perhaps it would even be a success. At least it would be music people listened to. It would have Grace’s name in its title somewhere; I knew that much. Spring would come, the snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils. Then the woods would be full of bluebells; the birds would come back from the south and sing, the swallows would return. A turning point would come for Heather and me eventually, of course – they always do – and decisions would have to be made then. But not yet. Not yet.
Extract from the journal of Grace Elizabeth Fox (ed. Louise King), November, 1945. Netley, Hampshire
Saturday, 3rd November, 1945
This morning, just after our demob, Matron gathered us all together in one of the big cold lecture halls. I could hear the rain pattering against the large sash window beside me, occasionally getting louder, carried on a sudden gust which made the window rattle.
Matron told us first that she had a number of things to say to those of us who were now leaving the service for civilian life. First, she wanted to thank us for all we had done, and she went on to extol the virtues of military nursing, and of the QAs in general. Then she said that we were now about to face probably one of the most difficult tasks and duties of our lives. After all the things we had witnessed, done and suffered, I must admit that we all looked rather askance to hear this. But Matron was a wise woman. We listened.
She went on to say that the transition from war to civilian life is always a difficult one, but that it would be especially difficult for us because we were women. Not only that, but we had lived close to the battlefields, close to the fighting men themselves, not in hospitals miles away, where the guns could not even be heard. We had heard guns. Some of us had even felt their sting. We had been bombed, sniped at, shelled, shipwrecked, and worse. Many of us had also suffered great physical and mental privations in the camps or under life-threatening conditions in the wild. In order to survive, Matron told us, we had had to exist, and to act, in ways that were not always ladylike, and some of us may have been stigmatised by our experiences.
Then Matron urged us to think of our families, present or future. Their world was not our world, she said, but it was a world we had fought for; there was not one point of contact between those at home and those who had done what we had done, but we had done it for them. There was nothing they could understand about what we had been through and how it had affected us. If she was about to tell us not to talk about our experiences, I thought, then she had no need to bother. I think most of us would rather not. But it was more than that.
Whatever our war experiences, Matron concluded, it was now our God-given duty to be young ladies, housewives, sweethearts and mothers again, not unrecognisable figures slithering around in the mud and blood of a casualty clearing station, or lying in the filth and squalor of a Japanese POW camp. Our loved ones did not want to hear or know about these things. If they did, they would never look at us in the same way again; we would become pariahs.
We had a role and a duty to perform in society, and in order to do so, we had to put the last five years behind us and mould ourselves into the image of the feminine again: the wife, the mother. That was what our world needed now, and that was our role in it. The men would get all the glory, as usual, Matron said, to knowing smiles all around, and this time we should let them have it. I glanced at Dorothy beside me, and she rolled her eyes. I smiled.
It was all a bit too much, I supposed, but at bottom, Matron was right.
Later, after the farewells and the promises to write, clutching my small suitcase in one hand and my travel pass in the other, I walked through the park in the rain towards the railway station. Raindrops dripped from the bare branches. What a very English November day it was, I thought, and I felt a great surge of love for my country, for the future. Perhaps Matron was right. We needed to lock the memories away and get on with our lives. We needed to rebuild, to look forward, not behind.
The train stood waiting at the platform, puffing steam into the drizzle. I settled back in my seat to watch the landscape go by and opened my journal. In a few hours I will arrive at Darlington. Ernest will be waiting for me at the station. We will get into the car and drive back to Kilnsgate, to home. There, my future will begin.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Of the numerous books I read while researching the background for this novel, I would first like to single out Nicola Tyrer’s invaluable
Sisters in Arms: British Army Nurses Tell Their Story.
This was my starting point, and it set me on my course to Brenda McBryde’s
Quiet Heroines
and
A Nurse’s War
, Angela Bolton’s
The Maturing Sun: An Army Nurse in India 1942-45
, and to
Grey and Scarlet: Letters from the War Areas by Army Sisters on Active Service
, edited by Ada Harrison. From these books I gained whatever insight I have into the lives of the Queen Alexandra’s nurses during the Second World War, and I have incorporated the details of many of their experiences into Grace’s journal. I am also grateful to
White Coolies
, by Betty Jeffrey, and
All this Hell: U.S. Nurses Imprisoned by the Japanese
, by Evelyn M. Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee, and to
Singapore Burning
, by Colin Smith.
As regards local history, I owe thanks to
The History of Richmond, in the County of York; Including a Description of Other Remains of Antiquity in the Neighbourhood
by Christopher Clarkson,
A New and Complete History of the County of York
by Thomas Allen,
Robinson’s Guide to Richmond
by W.R. Robinson,
Richmond at the Start of the 21st Century: An Architectural History
, by Mark Whyman,
Richmond North Yorkshire From Low Up in the Air
, by Audrey Carr, and
The History of Richmond, North Yorkshire: From Earliest Times to 2000
, by Jane Hatcher.
I would like to thank Sheila Halladay for reading the manuscript in such a short time and coming up with so many useful comments and suggestions. At Hodder & Stoughton, my thanks go to Carolyn Mays, Francesca Best, Kerry Hood, Jaime Frost, Lucy Hale, Auriol Bishop and Jamie Hodder-Williams; at William Morrow, to Carolyn Marino, Wendy Lee, Michael Macmillan and Sharyn Rosenblum; and at McClelland and Stewart, to Dinah Forbes, Doug Pepper, Ellen Seligman and Ashley Dunn. I would also like to thank my agents Dominick Abel and David Grossman for their continued support.
I must also thank Carlton Boyce for arranging for me to talk to the prisoners and for giving me the grand tour of HMP Leeds. And many thanks to Chris Wade for the loan of the cottage in Staithes. These acknowledgements wouldn’t be complete without also thanking Anika Ibrahim and Jonathan Ball for their wonderful hospitality in South Africa, Anne Michel and the team from Albin Michel in Paris, and the ladies at Dymocks, in Melbourne, for answering my questions.
About the Author
Peter Robinson grew up in Yorkshire, and now divides his time between Richmond and Canada.
Before the Poison
is his third standalone novel. He has also written two collections of short stories, and nineteen books in his bestselling Inspector Banks series. The critically acclaimed crime novels have won numerous awards in Britain, the United States, Canada and Europe, and are published in translation all over the world.
Visit Peter Robinson’s website at
www.inspectorbanks.com
.