Before the Poison (27 page)

‘Aha,’ I said. ‘You really are demonstrating excellent detective skills.’

‘Thank you, Watson.’ Heather slugged back some wine. ‘Anyway, it must have been quite an upheaval for him. My parents moved from Harrogate to Richmond when I was twelve, and that was traumatic enough. Imagine starting a new school in another country at that age, with a funny accent.’

‘He got picked on, bullied?’

‘Apparently he gave as good as he got, and he soon managed to fit in. The family never mentioned their lives in England, and Grace Fox was never discussed. Taboo. To all intents and purposes, Randolph put his birth parents right out of his head. Felicity and Alfred became his mum and dad. The only interruption to their new life was when a reporter found out who they were and came bothering them around the time they banned hanging over here in the sixties.’

‘Wait a minute. You got all this from Michael Simak?’

Heather arched her eyebrows. ‘I cannot reveal my sources.’

‘Come on, just for me.’

‘Oh, all right. One of the retired associates visited Ralph over in Australia several times. First on estate business, then they became close friends, so he’d go over for his holidays, take his wife along. Most of it he got from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. The rest I either figured out for myself or got from Mr G.’

‘Mr G?’

‘Google. You’d be surprised what’s out there, if you know where to look.’

‘Carry on. What did they do when someone found them?’

‘They changed their name and moved out to Perth for a while. Alfred’s firm had a branch there. They were very understanding and gave him a job.’ She took another sip of wine. ‘I get the impression that there are a lot of people in Australia with something to hide, whether it’s something personal or a dodgy family history. Anyway, nobody objected or asked any questions. After this, the family name became Webster, and Randolph became Ralph. He’d always hated Randolph, anyway.’

‘Ralph Webster. I see. And Kilnsgate?’

‘It was held in trust for him. When he turned twenty-one it became his. That would be in 1967. He had little interest in it, but he was dead set against selling. Mike said he didn’t know why, just that it was well known around the firm. Of course, they did what they could, used one of those cottage rental agencies, but as you know, Kilnsgate is hardly a cottage. Far too big. Much of the time it was unoccupied and in a state of disrepair. Some hippy squatters moved in for a while in the early seventies and started a commune, but they didn’t last long. At least they were the peaceful kind and didn’t wreck the place. Once in a while, someone would come in and have a go with it, give it a lick of paint and a bit of a facelift, but they would never last long, either. Ralph can’t have made much income from it, in fact it probably cost him money in the upkeep, but he was doing well enough himself by then. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. When Ralph was eighteen,
before
he inherited Kilnsgate, the family moved back to Melbourne after a few years in Perth. Arthur and Felicity made sure Ralph got a good university education, and he ended up as a civil servant in the Victoria parliament, quickly making his way up through the ranks.’

‘Did he ever return to Kilnsgate?’

‘Only once,’ Heather said. ‘But that was later. That part of his life was effectively over and done with. Except he owned Kilnsgate House. As far as we know, he had no contact with anyone back in Yorkshire other than his solicitors. He got married to a woman called Mette Koenigsfeldt in 1980, a Danish immigrant. He was thirty-four at the time, and she was thirty. They bought a house in Brighton, a suburb of Melbourne by the sea. There was a daughter, Louise, born in 1986, and that was it as far as children were concerned. The couple split up in 1994, and Louise went to live with her mother Mette in a small town near Brisbane. Still following?’

‘Just about.’ I poured the last of the wine. During the brief break in Heather’s narrative, I once again noticed we were in a busy restaurant, people chatting all around us, music in the background. More music that nobody listened to.

‘Everything’s pretty much ticking along quietly after that for the next few years. Ralph throws himself into his work at the legislature. Never remarries. Life goes on.’

‘And in the small town near Brisbane?’

‘Ah. Things are a bit more interesting up there. Mette marries a man who turns out to be an abusive alcoholic, and when she finds out he’s also abusing Louise, she gives him his marching orders. It’s the usual sad story, probably even more common in some of the isolated areas like where they lived. Court orders, restraining orders, appearances before the magistrate, but in the end, he goes out there one day and blows her head off with a twelve-gauge shotgun, then turns it on himself.’

I felt a chill down the back of my neck. ‘And Louise?’

‘At school, thank God. But she found them.’

‘What happened after that?’

‘She went back to live with her father in Brighton, obviously traumatised. Things were apparently a bit chilly at first, but they soon grew close again. That’s about it, really.

‘Ralph Webster died last year in Brighton at the ripe young age of sixty-five. Lung cancer. He was a lifelong smoker. He left Kilnsgate House to his daughter Louise. She saw no reason to keep it in the family any longer. It didn’t mean anything to her, and she could use the money. She put it up for sale, then you came along, Mr Bountiful, and paid the exorbitant asking price.’

‘And you told me I’d got a bargain.’

‘Ah, well, we know how to play you rich, gullible Americans. There’s one born every minute.’

I laughed. ‘What about Alfred and Felicity?’

‘Alfred’s long gone. Heart attack in the mid-eighties. Felicity’s in an old folks’ home. She must be about ninety now. Gaga.’

‘Did Louise know about Kilnsgate’s history, about Grace?’

‘Not until Ralph was on his deathbed. The poor girl must have been devastated. Think about it. First she finds her mother and stepfather dead in a pool of blood, then a few years later she discovers that her grandmother was a notorious poisoner who killed her grandfather and got hanged. What a recipe for a fucked-up life.’

‘And is she? A fuck-up?’

‘Apparently she ran a bit wild for a while in her late teens. Now? I don’t know.’ Heather glanced at her watch. ‘My source tells me she’s a bit of an activist. You know, anti Iraq and Afghanistan wars, stop clubbing baby seals to death, stop global warming and the rest of it. A
Guardian
reader, no doubt. Come on, Chris, if you hurry up and pay the bill here, then we’ll just have time to slip in and see
Death Knows My Name.
My treat.’

‘I don’t know. It’s not very good.’

‘Come on.’ She took me by the arm. ‘Don’t be a spoilsport.’

‘Well,
I
enjoyed it,’ said Heather as we made our way out of the tiny cinema with the crowd.

‘I’m glad for you.’

‘Misery guts. What’s wrong with it?’

‘Nothing, I suppose,’ I said. ‘It’s just not one of my finest. Too clichéd, too derivative.’

‘That scene where they kiss for the first time, the music there, it’s unexpected, lush and romantic, yes, but it’s also dark and foreboding, those creepy cellos and that clarinet.’

‘Bassoon.’

‘Whatever. Then you find out what happens to him, who she really is. Does your music often do that?’

‘What?’

‘Foreshadow.’

‘I suppose it does. I suppose that’s part of the function of good film music. Like when you hear a certain theme, you associate it with a specific character, or you expect something to happen, and you can put different spins on it, variations, to match different moods and twists.’

‘You’re a bloody genius, you are.’

I laughed. We got into the main station area again. ‘Coffee?’ I suggested.

‘I shouldn’t, really.’ Heather paused. ‘But what the hell.’ She sounded edgy.

‘Is something wrong?’

She shook her head. ‘Nothing for you to concern yourself with. Let’s have that coffee.’

We nursed our cappuccinos and discussed the film. Heather remained genuine in her enthusiasm, and I was just as genuine in my disdain, though I toned it down for her sake. She didn’t know that I’d written most of the music by rote in a haze of alcohol, pills and self-loathing after Laura’s death, and she didn’t need to know.

‘Thanks very much for digging up all that information you gave me earlier,’ I said, as we finished our coffees and prepared to leave.

‘It’s nothing,’ Heather said. ‘I found it a very interesting story. Tragic, but interesting. What terribly hard lives some people lead.’

‘What amazes me is that they survive,’ I said. ‘Not only that, but some of them never even complain. They put up with it all, the abuse, pain, poverty, humiliation, betrayal, serious illness, and they always have a kind word for everyone and a smile to face the world.’

‘I know. Doesn’t it make you sick? My sister’s like that,’ said Heather. ‘Nothing but boyfriends from hell, husbands from even worse places, thankless children, never enough money, one soul-destroying job after another, and she even lost her foot to diabetes. Never once complains and never stops bloody smiling.’

‘Is this like your brother in Scunthorpe?’

‘Dorchester.’ Heather smiled. ‘Hell, no. Kirsty really
is
like that.’

‘And you?’

‘Me?’ We finished our coffees and walked out into the rain. ‘I’m a moaner.’

I laughed. ‘There is just one more thing. You mentioned earlier on that Ralph Webster had returned to Kilnsgate just once. When was that? Why?’

‘It was in 1982,’ said Heather. ‘They were building an extension at Armley Gaol and they had to move all the graves. The people they’d hanged and buried there within the prison grounds.’

‘They moved Grace Fox’s grave?’

‘Yes. Reburied somewhere on the coast near where she grew up. Ralph was there for the reinterment. Now I really must go.’

‘Wait. Lift?’

‘Not tonight. I’ve got my own car. See you.’

Then she was off, umbrella up, slipping away into the darkness. ‘Goodnight,’ I whispered to the disappearing shadow. ‘And thank you again.’

The garden gate was open at Kilnsgate. I clearly remembered shutting it, as I always did, and the latch was strong enough that the wind couldn’t blow it open. So what, or who, had opened it? I glanced behind me but could make out no one by the lime kiln.

The house didn’t look any different from the outside. The lights I had left on were still visible, and no others shone. I did a quick check around the perimeter and saw no sign of broken windows or forced doors. Once inside, I had no sense of any alien presence, either, or that someone had been there in my absence.

I shrugged it off, went upstairs, got out of my wet clothes, then dried myself, put on a dressing gown and went into the living room to light a fire. I felt unusually aware of the empty rooms above and around me. It was true that Kilnsgate was far too big for me, and the sense of space was very different from that in California. There, the space was all bright, open and airy. Here, it was dim, shadowy and claustrophobic, full of other presences just beyond my reach. Or so it seemed. Sometimes I heard them and caught fleeting glimpses on the landing at night, but mostly I could just sense their presence. I told myself that the isolation was getting to me, or the stupid film I’d just seen, which was about a serial killer in a remote coastal village in northern California. A bit like Hitchcock, the way my music was a lot like Bernard Herrmann’s.

I had enjoyed my visit to the cinema with Heather, I had to admit. I didn’t go to the movies much these days, which must sound odd coming from someone in my profession. I used to love going when I was young – that love was what accounts for what I do today, after all – but it was a habit I had got out of over the years. There were enough private screening rooms available to me in LA that I never needed to go to a public cinema. I did occasionally, of course – sometimes I just had to experience the big screen and the blast of
my
music with a live audience – but I became quite happy with the home theatre alternatives.

All through my adolescence in Leeds, I had watched my favourite cinemas turned into bingo halls, carpet warehouses, Sikh temples or mosques – the Lyric, Lyceum, Clifton, Clock, Western, Crown and Palace, all gone. It seemed hardly a week went by without one of them disappearing for good. Darkened auditoriums where I had stolen my first kisses, dared to put my hand under a girl’s blouse, where I’d captained missions to outer space and fought bug-eyed monsters with Flash Gordon, ridden the western plains under a hot sun with Hopalong Cassidy, fought the Germans on land, air and sea with John Mills or Jack Hawkins, the Japanese with John Wayne and Audie Murphy, and visited that gloomy castle high on its hill, lightning flashing all around, while the mad Vincent Price pursued his obsession of the moment, or Christopher Lee sought yet another victim’s blood. The magic had stayed with me, but the channel of its power had changed. Still, tonight had been good.

As the fire crackled to life, I poured myself a small single malt and put on Marvin Gaye’s
What’s Going On
. I was in a mood for something other than classical music, and Marvin Gaye fitted the bill. I even turned up the volume. There were no neighbours to hear it. Instead of going up to work in my study, which tonight seemed even more than ever filled with Grace’s spirit and her absence, I brought the MacBook down with me and sat by the fire, my feet propped on a stool.

Heather was right. Mr G knew a hell of a lot more than most of us gave him credit for, if we knew where to look for it, and as I typed up notes from what she had told me, I went on little Internet excursions here and there to fill in as much detail as I could. I didn’t know what it all meant, but I certainly had a fuller picture than I’d had before at the end of a couple of hours, by which time Marvin Gaye had long finished, and my eyes were starting to close. I thought that what I had learned was leading me somewhere, but I didn’t know where. I didn’t even know whether I wanted to go there.

There was a small armchair in the corner of my study, and when I took the MacBook back up, I could have sworn for a moment there was a figure sitting in it, a woman. But when I looked again, I saw that it was empty.