Before the Poison (24 page)

November 2010

Over the next few days, the weather took a turn for the worse, with gale-force winds, heavy rains, and hailstones the size of cricket balls. I didn’t go out much, but I did make one quick foray into town when the man from Richmond Books phoned to tell me that he had got hold of the edition of
Famous Trials
I had asked for. He recognised me straight away and brought out the rather tattered old paperback, for which he wanted £3.50, which seemed reasonable to me. I also bought a couple of other books, as my reading material was running low: Alan Sillitoe’s
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
, because I hadn’t read it since I was at school, and Kazuo Ishigura’s
Nocturnes
because I was a sucker for stories with a musical context.

Back at Kilnsgate, with the rain hammering against the French windows, I sat by the fire and spent the rest of the afternoon reading Sir Charles Hamilton Morley’s account of Grace’s trial. When I had finished, I was not much the wiser as regards what made Grace tick, but I did know a lot more about the evidence against her and the way the trial had been conducted.

The prosecution presented a strong case based on very little evidence and a great deal of innuendo, and, to my mind, the defence was lacklustre. The evidence was at best circumstantial, more a matter of absences rather than presences, but the prosecution made a good of job of presenting it in a damning light, and the defence barrister did very little to demolish the house of cards he built except for a few of the more outrageous scientific theories.

I put the volume aside and went up to the old sewing room, where I tracked down on my laptop what I could about the author of the piece: Sir Charles Hamilton Morley. He was born in Edinburgh in 1891, the son of a Scottish banker and an English noblewoman. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he was called to the bar in 1913. After surviving the First World War, in which he was awarded a Military Cross, he enjoyed a distinguished legal career in which he first took silk and was then appointed to the bench in 1936. He retired owing to ill health in 1947, at the age of fifty-six, then turned his talents to writing, producing several potboilers in the John Buchan mould, a three-volume history of the English legal system, and a number of volumes in the
Famous Trials
series. Ill-health or not, he lived to the ripe old age of eighty-three and died peacefully at his country house in Buckinghamshire in 1974. One unusual fact about him emerged: Sir Charles was known for his strong opposition to the death penalty in his later years.

Perhaps I was typecasting Morley, but it wasn’t hard to imagine what a man from such a rigorously disciplined and privileged background as his would make of a woman like Grace Fox. Still, I reminded myself, Morley wasn’t the judge at her trial; he wasn’t the one who sentenced her to death; he was merely the voice that brought it all to life.

Over the following couple of days, I worked on the sonata and made a few minor harmonic breakthroughs, skirting the edges of atonality, but not quite crossing the borderline. Sometimes I spent a little time in the TV room watching old movies:
This Sporting Life, The Go-Between
and
Whistle Down the Wind
, with its haunting theme by Malcolm Arnold. Now there was man who had written plenty of music people listened to. I remembered what Bernard Herrmann had said about there being no such thing as a ‘film composer’, that you were either a composer or you were not. That made me feel a bit better about myself and more confident about the sonata. I was a composer, I told myself.

In the evenings, I lit a fire in the living room and read a story from
Nocturnes
, or reread sections of Morley. The more I read it, the more I became certain that Sam Porter was right, and that the authorities had decided in advance that Grace was guilty, then set out a case to prove it. They hadn’t even bothered to investigate any other lines of enquiry, the possibility that someone else may have done it, or that Ernest Fox may have died of natural causes.

I remember talking to an acquaintance at a party once – a high-profile criminal lawyer who had defended a number of Hollywood celebrities – and he told me what a dangerous tactic it was for the defence to conduct its case by trying to implicate somebody other than the defendant. You certainly couldn’t rely on the kind of witness-box confessions that Perry Mason always seemed to winkle out of some apparently innocent bystander who couldn’t keep his or her mouth shut.

The main problem, my lawyer acquaintance said, was that if you tried to suggest that someone else did it, and you failed, then the jury’s suspicion would inevitably fall back on the only other person involved: the accused. It is also, my acquaintance told me, practically impossible to conduct a two-pronged approach – defence of the client and prosecution of another – without the DA’s, or in this case the Crown’s, resources. Montague Sewell, Grace Fox’s barrister, hadn’t had such resources, so he had simply done the best job he could under the circumstances. As far as I could tell, it wasn’t a very good one, and even Morley seemed to regard him as somewhat of a lightweight.

Why hadn’t Grace spoken out? That was the one thing that still bothered me in all the accounts I had come across so far – Wilf Pelham’s, Sam Porter’s, Sir Charles Hamilton Morley’s. Grace’s silence. Why hadn’t she stood up there, in court, in the police station, in the street, on the rooftops, and shouted it out for all to hear, ‘I am innocent! I didn’t do it! I did not murder my husband!’

No doubt she had her reasons, but still her silence, easily mistaken for indifference, bothered me. Maybe Grace had felt confident that the whole world would see she was innocent and set her free, at least during the early stages of the trial. She hadn’t gone in pleading not guilty and expecting to be hanged, but her attempts to prove her own innocence had been half-hearted, to say the least. I understood the arguments Morley had laid out against the defendant entering the witness box and exposing herself to questions of character from the prosecution, but surely, I thought, Grace’s presence in front of the jury, her honesty, directness, beauty and tenderness, might have played on their heartstrings, helped convince the twelve people good and true that she wasn’t a murderess? We would at least have heard her voice, heard her story, and not been left with only this troubling silence.

On the other hand, as Morley suggested, her appearance might have had quite the opposite effect if she had come across as either cold and detached, the way she seemed to be acting in court, or as a hard-headed seductress, libertine, corrupter of young men such as Samuel Porter. That was exactly the way she did appear to the jury, as it turned out. They were seeing a scarlet woman who had been fornicating with a young man half her age. Who can fathom human nature?

There were still a number of little things that nagged away at me, including my own mysterious visitor and the young man in uniform with whom Grace had walked and talked shortly before her husband’s death. Perhaps he was as much a figment of malicious gossip as anything else.

Wilf Pelham might be worth another chat, I thought, now that I was armed with a bit more information. I decided that I would go down to town when the weather improved – I had to go shopping, anyway – and bribe him with another pint or two.

I also thought about Heather a lot during my brief self-imposed exile, but I didn’t make any attempt to contact her; nor did she try to get in touch with me. I wondered whether perhaps she, too, had come too close for comfort the other night and realised that she had to back off now, before it was too late. I didn’t know whether she would come through with the vendor’s name or not, but it probably didn’t matter. It was only idle curiosity on my part, I realised. And perhaps an excuse to see her again. Why did it matter whether Grace’s son had sold the house to me through a firm of solicitors? He would hardly know anything more about the events at Kilnsgate House all those years ago, when he was a mere child, and if he did, he probably wouldn’t tell me. Why should he? I had no authority or power to change the past.

About a week after Bonfire Night, after the best night’s sleep I’d had in ages, I awoke around nine o’clock to a misty scene, the trees still and dripping, the lime kiln like the eye of some monstrous kraken awoken from the depths. Mixed with the mist was a heavy drizzle, the sort of weather they call ‘mizzling’ in Yorkshire, where they have a special language for all things wet and grey.

I dressed, showered and went downstairs to make coffee. By the time I had finished my second cup and eaten my toast and marmalade, the drizzle was starting to ease off a bit. I sat at the piano and played through what I had written so far, making notes when I came to unsatisfying transitions or sagging lyric passages.

I knew that I was favouring the Schubertian long melodic line, and I tried to split up some of them, slip in more variations, tempos and even key changes. I didn’t want to sound dazzlingly contemporary, but nor did I want to sound like a pale imitation of the Master. I took out the sheet music again and studied Grace’s notations on the Schubert
Impromptus
. Scanning the tiny, neat hand, I remembered the paintings and drawings Sam Porter had shown me, then thought of the image Morley presented of Grace in court, her drab clothing, pale face, hair tied back in a bun. What was going through her mind? Did she realise that all was lost sooner than I imagined she did? Had she already given up?

Laura had, of course. Given up. That was why she came home from the hospital; she wanted to die at home, in familiar surroundings, with me by her side, holding her hand. And that was exactly how it happened. At least she hadn’t ended her days at the end of a hangman’s rope. I shuddered.

I knew that I was feeling restless when I found myself constantly checking the weather through the window. By early afternoon, the mist had gone, dispersed partly by the wind, which was also tearing gaps in the charcoal clouds for the sun to lance through. I would get nowhere hanging around here waiting for things to improve, so I got in the car and drove to Richmond.

There were plenty of free parking spots in the marketplace, and the wind nearly took my car door off when I got out. I made a quick dash for the Castle Tavern and was surprised not to see Wilf Pelham propping up the bar. The bartender remembered me.

‘Looking for Wilf again?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘He’s poorly. Off his food. Hasn’t been in for a couple of days.’

‘Nothing serious, I hope?’

‘Shouldn’t think so. Strong as an ox, is old Wilf.’

‘Do you know where I can find him?’

‘He’ll be at home, that new sheltered housing just up the road.’

I knew where he meant. He gave me a street and a number. ‘I’d like to take him a little something,’ I said. ‘Any ideas?’

‘He likes his bitter best, but when it comes to bottles, Wilf’s strictly a Guinness man.’

‘Thanks.’ I bought a couple of bottles of Guinness, jumped back in the car and drove up to Wilf’s house. He answered my ring after a short wait, seemed a bit surprised to see me, but stood aside and bade me enter.

‘If it’s not the man who writes music nobody listens to,’ he said.

‘I’m trying to put that right,’ I said. I handed him the Guinness.

‘Glad to hear it. Sit down. And thank you. I won’t have any just now, if you don’t mind.’ He touched his stomach. ‘Bit of a tummy upset. Cup of herb tea?’

‘Perfect.’

The small living room was spick and span, its surfaces free of dust, just a few books scattered here and there, newspapers, a half-empty mug, a couple of empty beer bottles, the place of a man of limited means comfortable living by himself. Wilf collected up most of the books and returned them to the bookcase, then went to make the tea. I studied his library while he was gone. I have always found it fascinating to discover people’s tastes in music or literature. Wilf definitely favoured the serious stuff, mostly classics: Dickens, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James and Thomas Hardy were all accorded prominent space, many in handsome Folio Society editions, along with a few European writers in translation – Zola, Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy and Proust, with a smattering of Mann, Camus and Sartre. And they all looked as if they had been read. An old edition of Grove filled one shelf, and biographies and history filled up the rest of the space. Wilf also had a collection of old vinyl, mostly classical, some jazz, that would have been the envy of many an audiophile.

Wilf came back with the tea and a plate of chocolate biscuits on a tray and plonked it down on the table.

‘How are you?’ I asked. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, touching his lower chest. ‘I’ve been having a lot of heartburn, acid reflux, the doc calls it. Probably cancer. They’re going to stick a tube down my throat soon as they can arrange an appointment at the hospital. Who knows when that might be, the way the NHS is these days? In the meantime, I’ve got some pills. They help a bit. Sometimes. Anyway, you don’t want to hear about my health problems. I suppose you came to ask me more questions?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘That’s all right, lad. I don’t get a lot of company these days. And you did come bearing gifts.’ He poured the tea and glanced at me expectantly.

I gave him a précis of what I had done and found out since we had last talked, withholding any conclusions I might have come to in the meantime.

‘You certainly do get around, don’t you? I’ve been to Paris a few times, myself. Lovely city. I visited once or twice with school groups. The Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, Napoleon’s tomb, Notre Dame. The cultural and historical highlights. But that’s not why you were there, is it?’

‘No. I was on my way to visit my brother in Cognac, and I stopped in to talk to Sam Porter on the way.’

‘Sam? So you found him all right? How is he?’

‘I found him. It wasn’t difficult. He’s fine. He seems to be doing well for himself. Says hello.’

‘Hooked up with some pretty young artist’s model, is he?’

‘I don’t know about that. He seems to be living alone. To be honest, I don’t think he ever got over Grace and what happened all those years ago.’ I sipped some tea. It was a pleasant surprise. Vanilla and blackcurrant, or something along those lines. ‘Sam said the two of you used to play together during the war. Do you remember that?’