Before the Poison (9 page)
Authors: Peter Robinson
‘Like what?’
‘It was just a figure of speech.’
‘Were there any rumours?’
‘There are always rumours. There’ll be a few about you soon enough, you wait and see.’
‘Like what?’
‘Orgies, dancing naked in the woods, black masses, sacrificing virgins . . .’ He laughed and showed yellowing, crooked teeth.
‘Were there any rumours like that about the Foxes?’
‘I’m pulling your leg, lad. No, there weren’t. Not that I heard.’
‘Did it surprise you when Grace was charged with murder?’
‘I should say so. Shocked the whole town. See, it had been more than a week since he died, in the storm, like. First they couldn’t get to Kilnsgate House to bring out the body because the snow had drifted so high, then the first post-mortem turned up nothing unusual. Seemed he’d simply died of a heart attack. They’d had some friends over for dinner the night it happened, and young Hetty Larkin, the cook and maidservant, was there, too, and they all said Dr Fox took poorly at the dinner table. Terrible indigestion. He took a powder and went to bed early. It was during the night that it happened. They all got stranded there, of course, and the telephone wires were down. Trapped in a big old house with a dead body. Very Agatha Christie. Must have been pretty gruesome.’
‘Was this Hetty Larkin a regular maidservant?’
‘Yes. She lived up Ravensworth way. Used to bicycle back and forth. Funny sort of lass, as I remember. Not quite all there, if you follow my drift. Worked at Kilnsgate House for quite a long time, too. I think she was there right from the start, when they came, before the war. Lost her brother at the D-Day landings, poor cow. She used to stop over sometimes, too, if they had a fancy dinner or something, like. The Foxes had a room set aside for her. The rest of the time she’d come for the day and take care of the washing and cooking and such. That night she had no choice. She had to stop.’
‘What became of her?’
‘She died years ago, poor lass. Car accident, fog on the A66. Only in her forties, she was. Not much older than Grace herself was when she died.’
‘What made the police suspect Grace in the first place?’
‘They didn’t. Not at first. It was because of the boyfriend. Sam Porter. He was only nineteen, nearly the same age as me, lucky bastard.’
‘So Grace had been seeing this Porter for some time?’
‘Apparently they’d been having secret trysts going on for six months or more by then. Somebody talked.’
‘Who?’
‘Landlady of a guest house in Leyburn. She said she’d rented them a room once. According to Sam Porter, she approached him and demanded money to keep quiet. Well, Sam had no money, had he, and he’d got too much pride to go to Grace Fox and ask her for any, I’ll give him that, so he told the woman to sod off. Which she did. Right to the police. That’s partly what got Sam off the hook, you see – not that he was charged, but you know what I mean. If he’d thought there was something to worry about, he’d have got Grace to pay her the money, wouldn’t he? Stands to reason. She could afford it. It was because he told the woman to stuff it that the police got suspicious. I mean, when they found out Grace had a much younger lover, they started to dig a bit more deeply.’
‘You sound as if you knew Sam Porter.’
‘I did. Like I said, we were about the same age. He was part of the crowd sometimes. We’d drink in the pubs occasionally. You know what kids are like. But he was always on the fringes. The quiet one. The rebel. Bit of an innocent, really. Always had to be just a little different.’
‘What did he do? I heard he was an artist or a musician, and a bit of a ne’er-do-well.’
Wilf raised his eyebrows. ‘“Ne’er-do-well?” I wouldn’t exactly describe Sam Porter that way. He might not have been rich or titled or anything, but he worked hard, and he had talent. He was an artist. That’s why he had no money. But he was no scrounger. He made a living, did odd jobs around town, a bit of drystone wall work, carpentry and the like. Lived in a small flat off the market square. He was pretty good with cars and mechanical stuff, too. I think that’s how he first met Grace, when her motorbike went on the fritz. He also did a bit of painting and decorating on the side. Jack of all trades, really. Hardly a ne’er-do-well.’
‘Grace rode a motorcycle?’
‘Learned in the war, apparently. Sometimes you’d think she had a death wish, the speed she went tearing up and down those country lanes.’
‘Was Porter any good as an artist?’
‘Aye. Good enough to make a decent living in addition to his odd jobs. Back then he did a nice line in local watercolour landscapes for the tourists, but he got more abstract as time went on.’
‘What was the general consensus about Grace?’
Wilf rattled his glass on the table. I noticed it was empty. Mine was, too, but I had been so busy listening that I hadn’t really been paying attention. I went to the bar and bought another two pints.
‘The general consensus?’ he echoed when I got back.
‘Yes. What did people think about her?’
‘Aye, I know what it means. I’m just trying to gather the pieces together. She was liked, well liked. Maybe envied a bit by some of the townswomen. They were jealous of her beauty and status. And your uppity moral types might have looked down on her. But there was a tenderness about her – she’d been a nurse during the war, you know – and she was always a bit of a mystery to everyone. Reserved. Sad, even. But, as I said earlier, there was a general feeling of shock. You could sense it ripple through the market square the day the verdict came down. Of course, when she was first accused of the crime, there were a few who just tut-tutted as if they’d always suspected something like that would happen, but most of us were stunned even then.’
‘Did anyone believe she hadn’t done it?’
‘I dare say some did, yes. But as the trial went on and the evidence mounted up, they mostly kept their own counsel. I reckon in the end almost everyone believed she’d done it, maybe when her mind was unbalanced or something, but whether they thought she deserved hanging for it was another matter.’
‘And you?’
He gazed at me with his bright eyes. ‘I’ve never been a fan of state-sanctioned murder, let’s just put it that way.’
I nodded. I never had, either, and until recently I’d lived in a state where the death penalty thrived and men languished on death row for years.
‘Mind if I ask you a question?’ Wilf said.
‘Not at all.’
‘Why are you digging all this up now? Why are you interested in Grace Fox?’
I could only shake my head. ‘I don’t really know, Wilf. It’s just . . . living in the house, finding out . . . I feel some sort of connection. There’s a painting of her in the hall, with her husband and child. She looks sad, lost. She . . .’ I was about to tell Wilf that Grace reminded me a bit of my late wife Laura, but I stopped myself. No need to go there. ‘I don’t really know what fascinates me about it all,’ I went on, ‘except it’s not every day you buy a house that belonged to a murderess. Why do you ask?’
‘It’s been a long time since anyone’s asked about the Foxes, that’s all.’
‘Is there anything else you can remember?’
‘Not offhand.’
‘What about her son? There’s a young boy in the portrait. What became of him?’
‘Young Randolph? He went off to live with an aunt and uncle down south after the execution, so I recollect. Grace’s younger sister Felicity. She’d married, but they had no children of their own. Last thing I heard he’d taken their name and the whole lot of them had emigrated to Australia.’
‘When would this have been?’
‘Late fifties. Ten-pound Poms.’
‘So this Randolph could still be alive?’
‘Easily. He’d only be in his sixties by now. They say sixty’s the new forty these days. I wouldn’t know. I’m seventy-seven, myself. He was only a little kid at the time, and he spent most of the trial with his Aunt Felicity and her husband.’
‘Do you know Felicity’s married name?’
‘Sorry. I never met her.’
‘Was Randolph in the house on the night it happened?’
‘Yes. He was in bed, apparently. I shouldn’t imagine the police questioned him very thoroughly, but it seems he was asleep and didn’t hear or see a thing.’ He swigged some more beer. ‘I’ll tell you someone who might know something, though.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘Sam Porter.’
‘Grace’s lover? He’s still alive?’
‘Alive and living in Paris.’
‘Under the same name?’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you know?’
Wilf tapped the side of his nose. ‘I still keep an eye on the papers, and he sells a painting or two every now and then. It’s still considered news in the
Sunday Times
arts section.’
5
Famous Trials: Grace Elizabeth Fox, April 1953, by Sir Charles Hamilton Morley
Kilnsgate House stands, proud in its isolation, close to the end of a rough, unfenced lane about a mile and a half from the nearest road. The house is almost hidden from the laneway by trees and long grass, and it seemed well befitting a successful local GP when Ernest Fox brought his new wife to live there in 1936. By January, 1953, it had been their home for over seventeen years, and their only son, Randolph, had been born there. Tragically, Ernest Fox was soon to die there.
The Yorkshire Dales is an area well known for its natural, if somewhat rugged, beauty, and in addition to the major dales, valleys carved in the landscape by the retreating glaciers many thousands of years ago, there are numerous small, hidden dales, many scarcely inhabited. Such was Kilnsgarthdale, where Kilnsgate House was built by Sir John Metcalfe in 1748, and inhabited by his family until their fortunes dwindled in the 1850s.
After that time, a succession of owners took possession, but nobody remained there for long. Perhaps the remoteness drove them away, though Richmond was easily accessible, either by road or by country footpaths. Dr. Ernest Fox certainly never let the isolation restrict his social existence. He rode with the local hunt, was an active member of the golf club, socialised regularly at the many public houses in the area, drove every day to his practice in town, where he often lunched with the mayor and other local dignitaries, and made house calls among the many Swaledale villages. Dr. Fox was a very busy man about the dale, and beyond.
Though Grace Fox was a keen member of the Richmond Operatic Society and was renowned for her sweet mezzo-soprano, she perhaps led a more lonely existence after giving up nursing, especially when Randolph was sent to boarding school at the age of five, and the strain of boredom on one whose nerves were already somewhat frayed may have been a contributing factor to her subsequent behaviour.
Whatever the reason, in July of 1952, Grace Fox took as her lover a young local odd-job man and would-be artist by the name of Samuel Porter, then aged nineteen, and as inappropriate a companion for his social standing as for his youth. Thus began the endless round of deception, sin, secrecy and guilt that was to end, as such things inevitably do end, in tragedy. Grace Fox was thirty-nine then, yet there was no doubt regarding her youth and beauty. With her long dark hair, her hourglass figure, and her beguiling eyes, Grace Fox was a remarkably attractive woman, with perhaps the only blemish on her appearance being a slight coarseness of complexion, apparently the result of overexposure to sunlight during her nursing duties overseas. This, however, was easily obscured with a little cosmetic powder.
We must not forget what part Kilnsgarthdale’s isolation, and the dreadful weather of that January, played in our tragedy. On the fatal night, a winter snowstorm of such magnitude blew in so quickly from the north that the snow drifted to heights of six feet or more. Roads soon became impassable, and going out on foot was a sure invitation to a cold and icy death.
As four people sat to eat, warm and sheltered in the dining room of Kilnsgate House, celebrating the new year, a fire crackling in the hearth, protected from the wind howling and snow blowing all about them outside, little could they know that one among their number would seize the moment to put into effect a dastardly plan that had been forming in her mind for some time now.
October 2010
If I wanted to find out any more about Grace Fox, I realised, I could always go to Paris and talk to Sam Porter. But was I willing to go that far, to expend that much time and money for a passing interest in a long-dead murderess? Some people would probably think I was crazy, but that didn’t really bother me. The money wasn’t a problem, either, but what about my piano sonata and my life at Kilnsgate? Well, I thought, the one would benefit from a little travel and fermentation, and the other was a long-term matter. A brief absence would do no harm. I had already promised Graham that I would visit him and Siobhan in Angoulême before Christmas, and it would be no problem to stop off in Paris on my way. In fact, it would be a genuine pleasure. There was no reason why I shouldn’t simply drop in on Sam Porter while I was there.
Bernie Wilkins, a London art dealer, worked as a consultant on one of the films I scored a few years ago about an art forgery ring. He had never been to California before, so the studio flew him over, and I showed him around Hollywood, even introduced him to a couple of minor movie starlets I knew over lunch at the Ivy, in Beverly Hills, and judging by the smile on his face the following morning, he got lucky. I thought I knew him well enough to call on him for a favour. He would know where I could find Sam Porter. But first, there was the dinner party.
On Saturday morning I drove into town and parked at the Co-op because the open-air market had taken over most of the square. As it was the third Saturday in the month, the farmer’s market was there, too, so I was able to buy fresh local meat, cheeses and vegetables for the evening’s dinner. There would be no mahimahi – not that I could find any in Richmond, anyway – but a hearty game pie with roasted root vegetables.
After I had picked up the fresh food, I called at the local bakery and found some crusty baguettes, then I bought my stack of newspapers at Mills’s, picked up a few staples, such as tea, cream, chocolate, wine, bread and coffee, at the Co-op, and headed home. I was able to spend some of the afternoon sitting out in my back garden sipping chilled Pinot Grigio, listening to the birds in the trees and reading through the various news and arts sections until it was time to prepare the meal.