Before the Poison (48 page)

I thought for a moment, then nodded. ‘I wasn’t sure for a while – it seemed to knock all my theories for six – but yes, I think it was.’ I told her about the Porton Down connection and what Billy had said about seeing Ernest Fox there, the letter, the job offer and all.

When I had come to the end of that part of the story, Heather paused and said, ‘I see what you mean about it all tying together with Kilnsgate during the war, in a way, though there was no real practical connection, was there?’

‘Except for Ernest’s involvement,’ I said. ‘I should imagine Grace heard rumours, had her suspicions. She was very strong on war crimes. I remember Sam Porter telling me how she got along with Laura Knight like a house on fire. That was the artist who painted a series of scenes from the Nuremberg trials. Anyway, Grace would probably have heard about Nat Bunting and the foot-and-mouth, most likely from Hetty, though she probably didn’t put two and two together until she talked to Billy.’

‘So not only does she have to leave her lover, but her husband’s going off to make nerve gas and give people anthrax. Is that why she did it?’

‘That was the first thing I thought when I heard Billy’s story. It changed all my suppositions.’

‘Yes, I remember that crazy theory you dreamed up about Ernest Fox being a paedophile.’

I recalled how I had felt the moment after I had expounded my paedophile theory to Billy Strang, and he had told me how far off beam it was. The ground had opened up under my feet. ‘Even though I was wrong, it wasn’t any more crazy than the story about him going to Porton Down to work on chemical weapons,’ I said. ‘It was certainly a possibility worth considering. I knew there was something. I was just searching for some sort of revelation about Ernest Fox, something that would make Grace
need
to kill him and not end up being entirely unsympathetic. You have to admit, if he were a paedophile, that would certainly be the case. Perhaps if he were going to be a merchant of death, it would be, too. It made sense that Billy had come back to see Grace and tell her something important like that.’

‘Is it enough, though?’

‘Enough for what?’

‘A motive.’

‘You’ve read the journal, haven’t you?’

Heather shook her head slowly. ‘It’s . . . unbelievable . . . incredible. That anyone can go through all that.’

‘Well, given what Grace saw at the chateau, and given her reaction to finding out what her husband was
really
going to be doing in this “hospital near Salisbury”, and that because of this she would have to leave Sam and spend her mornings sipping coffee with women whose husbands did much the same thing as hers, I’d say it probably is, yes.’

‘So you now think that’s why she did it? The job, Sam, everything?’

We’d finished our main course, so I took away the plates and replenished our wineglasses. The cheeses had been sitting on the table for a while, so they had come to room temperature. Neither of us was particularly hungry at the moment, though, so we took a break and just worked on the wine. Susan Graham had finished, and Annie Fischer’s Beethoven piano sonatas played in the background. ‘Remember at first,’ I said, ‘when I got interested in the whole story and got to know a little about Grace, I became convinced that she couldn’t have done it?’

‘Yes. Then you changed your mind. Then you changed it again. You were back and forth like a yo-yo. In the end, you believed that she probably
had
done it, but that she had a more noble motive than toyboys and money. Well, isn’t what you’ve just told me more noble? Grace obviously couldn’t persuade her husband against taking the chemical warfare job, and it would have done no good her telling the authorities. Who would she tell? Maybe some people, like Grace herself, were against that sort of thing, but Ernest Fox was just going to do valuable top-secret government work as far as most people were concerned, and the less they knew about it, the better. Nothing wrong in that.’

‘Unless, like Grace, you’ve come across a cellar full of the dead people as a result of Nazi experiments with nerve agents, no. But you’re right. He was only doing his patriotic duty. It’s just that it’s the kind of duty the government likes to keep quiet about, and whenever anyone blows a whistle, they say we’re only defending ourselves. And Ernest Fox was only one man. By stopping him, Grace couldn’t hope to have achieved very much. She must have known that. She wasn’t even a political or environmental activist. She probably voted Conservative. That’s why it would have made more sense if he was a paedophile, and then she could certainly have stopped him from getting his hands on any more children. At Porton Down, he would have been part of a team, and they could go on without him. He was expendable. But kill just one paedophile, and you make a whole lot of children’s lives safer.’

‘Do you believe Grace actually thought that way?’

‘Not in so many words, no, but I’ll bet it went through her mind. She couldn’t stop Porton Down, but it was personal for her. It wouldn’t only damage lives, it would change hers for the worse.’

‘And she could do her little bit for good?’

‘Something like that.’ I hadn’t told Heather about the reflection in the wardrobe mirror. Nor had I told her Graham’s story about the similar incident in the Scarborough boarding house. I hadn’t wanted her to think I was crazy. It was bad enough having her worried about me being obsessed by Grace Fox, in love with a ghost, as she put it. Perhaps one day I would tell her it all, along with the truth about what I had done to Laura, but not yet. We hadn’t reached that level of confidence yet. Somehow, I had to find a way of telling Heather that I
knew
what had happened on the night of Ernest Fox’s death without telling her exactly why or how I knew.

‘What about now? Do you still believe she didn’t do it?’

‘Yes and no.’

‘That’s no answer.’

‘Hear me out. I still thought she did it when I heard Billy’s story. Billy, too, when I told him what happened to Grace. He blamed himself. I thought she
had
done it for exactly the motives we were just talking about, to stop Ernest from taking the job at Porton Down. But the truth dawned on me during the flight home, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t get it out of my head. It was going round and round and round, then it suddenly all fell into place, the pattern I’d been looking for.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Nothing happens just like that when you’ve been working at it for months already. Not a musical composition, not a theory about a past crime. It only seems that way sometimes. That’s what people call inspiration, the results of weeks or months of confusion, hard slog and sweat. But it’s the only
logical
way I can make all the elements fit.’

Heather frowned and swirled the wine in her glass. ‘Do tell.’

‘First off, you have to realise that Ernest Fox was ill. His heart was in poor condition. The pathologist admitted as much, and Alice Lambert mentioned that he’d been taken poorly on previous occasions.’

‘With indigestion.’

‘But the symptoms of indigestion are very similar to those of a heart attack. Any doctor will tell you.’

‘And the potassium?’

‘Dr Masefield, the pathologist, also admitted that the body releases a lot of potassium into the system when a person dies of a heart attack, and he certainly didn’t convince me that there was any evidence that Grace injected Ernest with potassium chloride. None was found in the house. Dr Fox didn’t carry it in his bag.’

‘Yes, but she could have got hold of some and destroyed the remains later.’

‘There’s no proof. It all depended on the jury believing what the pathologist said. No trace of potassium was ever found. The only potassium discovered was in Ernest Fox’s body, and that could easily have been explained by the heart attack. It was present naturally. But the jury believed Dr Masefield. Why reach for a more complicated explanation when the simplest one’s the most likely?’

‘Because of Sam and Grace.’

‘That’s exactly right. The only reason Grace Fox went to trial was because of her affair with Samuel Porter. That’s the one constant, and the thing I’ve believed all along. Everything else that happened, all the evidence against Grace, stemmed from that affair, from the discovery of that night in Leyburn. Take her young lover out of the equation, and it soon becomes clear that it was fifties morality that killed Grace Fox, pure and simple. The defence was right about a lot of things; there was just no passion in it and not a great deal of skill. And I don’t think calling Grace herself to the box would have made a scrap of difference. She wasn’t the kind of person to appeal to a jury of middle-class morally self-righteous men. You could see from Morley’s account how much damage Sam Porter did just by appearing in the witness box. Christ, even ten years later you had the judge in the
Lady Chatterley
trial asking the jury if it was the kind of book they would like to find their wives or servants reading. We’re talking about class here, too, with a throwback to Victorian morals. Judge Venables, the doddering old privileged, fox-hunting upholder of tradition and morality. To judge and jury alike, Grace Fox was a loose woman, a slut, a tart, a trollop. A hundred years earlier she would have had a red “A” branded on her forehead, and a hundred years before that she would have been burned at the stake as a witch.’

‘OK,’ said Heather, holding up her hand. ‘I get the outrage and the working-class angst. But what
happened
? What about the chloral hydrate? They found that in his system, all right, and it wasn’t produced naturally.’

‘He took it himself. Why not? He’d taken it before when he had problems sleeping. If his heartburn was bothering him that much, he might have thought sleep would be a blessing.’

‘But they didn’t find any in the house.’

‘So what? That doesn’t prove that Grace got rid of it. Maybe it was his last dose. If it had been wrapped in paper, it could have got cleaned up along with the paper from the stomach powder. Either way, it would have ended up on the fire. Or it could have been in tablet form. It could have been loose in his pocket. The point is, again, that there is
no evidence
that Grace dosed her husband with chloral hydrate. It’s all highly circumstantial.’

‘So what
did
she do?’

I paused. ‘I think it’s what she
didn’t
do that matters.’

‘I don’t understand. You’re talking in riddles.’

‘Not at all. Grace was a trained nurse. Don’t forget that. More than that, even, she was a Queen Alexandra’s nurse, and they were the cream of the crop. I’ve read a bit about them. I imagine they drove some of the doctors crazy with their set ways of doing things, but they were damn good. When faced with an emergency, any emergency, Grace would revert to her training. All this stuff about her knowing her way around poisons because she was a nurse was smoke and mirrors. The main thing, the thing that everyone forgot, or ignored, is that nurses are trained to help the sick. To bring comfort. You’ve read her journal. She sat up all night comforting a dying German boy she hated, for crying out loud. But it wasn’t just her job; it was
who she was
. That was what I missed before. Grace herself.
Who
she was, beyond the lover, before the poison.’

‘But there are nurses who’ve been convicted of murder.’

‘I’m not saying that nurses never kill. Of course they do. But I think that if you examine the evidence you’ll find they usually do it out of some mental imbalance or delusion. There’s no evidence that Grace was unbalanced or delusional in any way. Far from it. Even if she
had
done what the prosecution claimed she did, her acts were represented as cold and premeditated by the prosecution and the judge, the products of a clever and calculating mind. That wasn’t Grace. She didn’t have a cold, clever, calculating mind. And Grace may have been angry and concerned, but she wasn’t mentally ill, either.’

‘You still haven’t answered my question.’

I poured the last of the wine. ‘OK. I believe that Ernest Fox had a heart attack that night. A massive one. The pain woke him, even from his drugged sleep, and he called out for help.’ I pointed towards the hall. ‘Grace went across the landing, just up there, and into his room. That’s where I think things get a bit murky. I’ll not deny that relations were bad between Grace and Ernest. Maybe she hated him. There were years of neglect and coldness, perhaps even cruelty. They hadn’t shared a room or a bed since Randolph was born. Then there was their argument about the Porton Down job. And there was Sam.’

‘So what did she do in the room?’

‘What I think happened is that she
hesitated
. Simple as that. All this went through her mind as she stood in the doorway, all the reasons she might have had for wanting Ernest dead, and I’ll bet she contemplated, just for a moment, how easy it would be to stand there and do nothing and let him die. It would be the perfect solution to all her problems. And for a while, I thought that was exactly what she had done, then I realised that the missing factor in all of this was Grace herself, her character.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘When I read her journal, I think I understood some of it. As the woman she was, she
couldn’t
just stand there and watch Ernest die. Much as she would have liked to, it went against her every impulse, every aspect of her being. So she stood there watching him for a few seconds, perhaps fully intending to let him die. But she couldn’t. She snapped to her senses and acted with her instincts, her compassion. It was not so much
that
she was a nurse, but
why
she was a nurse. She dashed downstairs and got his medical bag. Treatments for heart attacks were pretty limited back then. There were no CPR or defibrillators or anything. It was pretty much nitroglycerine, which she gave him first, or digitalis, which she gave him later when the nitro didn’t work. That didn’t work, either, and he died. I’ll never be able to prove it, but I know it now as sure as I know day is day that Ernest Fox died of natural causes.’

‘What if she’d reacted sooner?’