Before the Poison

12

Famous Trials: Grace Elizabeth Fox, April 1953, by Sir Charles Hamilton Morley

Denying the jury and the world at large the opportunity to hear at first hand Grace Fox’s account, in her own words, of what really happened in Kilnsgate House on the night of the 1st of January, 1953, might seem to some an oversight in the extreme, but we must bear in mind that there is no legal requirement for the plaintiff to appear in the witness box, and that the burden is on the prosecution to prove their case against the defendant beyond a reasonable doubt. The placing of the accused in the witness box, thereby bringing the matter of her character into the proceedings and opening her to cross-examination by the Crown, has always been a matter of contention in the circles of criminal law, and perhaps the general opinion of most barristers is that the defendant should definitely not appear in his or her own defence, odd as this may sound to the layperson. Some would argue that putting the defendant in the witness box is a strategy far more often regretted when not done than it is celebrated when done. ‘If only the jury had had the opportunity to see for themselves what an honest, sensitive and upright character my client really is,’ the disappointed barrister may often chide himself after a failure. Yet even the most honest, sensitive and upright among us may tremble, quail and even crack under the strain of a relentless cross-examination by a determined Crown barrister such as Sir Archibald Yorke, QC, and Mr. Sewell knew nothing if he did not know his opponent and his reputation. On the whole, Mr. Sewell put up a valiant effort in Grace’s defence, and he did indeed gain much ground towards the end, but he had too little ammunition at his disposal, and he simply failed to capitalise on his competent destruction of the medical evidence, which was possibly his finest moment. As minor facts are given major significance, as little white lies and omissions loom as large as the shadow of the gallows, as our every word and deed is subject to the most detailed and merciless probing and interpretation – tell me, who among us would not quake at such a prospect? In general principle, then, putting the accused before her accusers is frowned upon because it exposes the character and magnifies all blemishes. Why, then, the gentle reader may ask, would a barrister ever decide to put his client on the stand? Because, on occasion, there is the faintest chance that testimony from the accused may tug at the heartstrings of the jury and may thereby tip the delicate balance of mercy in her favour. The accused’s testimony may create compassion on the part of certain jury members and engender seeds of reasonable doubt which, in the deliberations that follow, may result in the jury being unable to come to a unanimous verdict of twelve, as required by law. Might this have happened in the case of Grace Fox? We will never know. Mr. Sewell had clearly decided that it was not worth the risk of finding out. If the aloofness and lack of interest exhibited by Grace Fox in court were also features of Mr. Sewell’s private meetings with her, then one can only applaud his judgement. Juries may be willing to forgive a contrite and repentant adulteress, but not an arrogant and detached one. Juries want tears, protestations of innocence, much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but Grace Fox had not given them that, and there was no reason to assume that she would be any different in the witness box. So she remained a lonely and forlorn figure in the dock. Mr. Justice Venable’s summing up was as fair and unbiased with regard to matters of law as we have come to expect from the members of our senior judiciary. He apportioned the correct weight to each scrap of evidence presented to the court, and his summary was a model of conciseness and clarity from which we could all learn a great deal. On the other hand, it is perhaps fair to say that the judge demonstrated little sympathy for the characters of Grace Fox and Samuel Porter. If Grace did, as the police and the prosecution contended, administer to her husband a large dose of deadly potassium chloride after first sedating him with chloral hydrate, then this, in itself, Mr. Justice Venables declared, was a devilish plot, which must have taken a great deal of planning and cunning to bring to fruition, evidence in itself of the killer’s determination and cold-blooded premeditation. According to the Crown, Grace Fox had also selected witnesses to her cleverly staged and cynical attempt to revive her husband for show, the judge said, when in fact she wanted him dead. Mr. Justice Venables also alluded to Grace’s capability as a nurse, the knowledge she had gained when she had worked for a spell in a hospital dispensary during her training. She had access to her husband’s surgery, and she clearly knew the properties of the various lethal substances therein. Mr. Justice Venables also spoke at length of the night that Grace and Samuel had spent at Mrs. Compton’s guest house in Leyburn, of the frenzied orgy of sexual intercourse they had clearly experienced there, and asked whether it were not reasonable to assume that a woman under the sway of such a passion would not undertake such a desperate course of action as murder if she found herself under threat of imminent separation from the object of her ardour? The judge also dealt with another important legal matter in his summing up. Not calling the defendant raises its own problems, not the least of which being that the jury assumes the accused, by not standing up and speaking out for herself, has something to hide and must, therefore, be guilty. The judge was careful to discount this. When it came to Grace Fox’s silence, he was quick to remind the jury that, while they had not heard from the accused herself, they were not to take this as any indication whatsoever of her guilt. It was a legal matter, purely, and perfectly within her rights. He also went on to warn them that he could understand why they might have no sympathy for an immoral woman like Grace Fox, but that however much they found her character and actions abhorrent, they should lay this prejudice aside, and this serious defect in her character should not necessarily make them more ready to convict her of the crime, unless they felt compelled to do so by the evidence they had heard. So it ended. The jury was out for one hour and seventeen minutes before returning with a verdict of guilty. Mr. Justice Venables grimaced, called for his black cap and pronounced sentence of death. Grace Fox gripped the rail, and one tear rolled over the lower rim of her left eye and down her cheek. Then she was taken down by the bailiffs.

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 Bronte, 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 precis 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, Musee 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?’

‘’Course I do. We were kids. There was a gang of sorts. It was all a big game to us. Not that anything much ever happened around here.’

‘What about the Messerschmitt crashing?’

Wilf smiled at the memory. ‘Aye, now that was fun. You should have seen us, tiptoeing around it, and when that pilot climbed out… We were off like a shot. Scared the living daylights out of us. A real live German.’

‘He didn’t die in the crash?’

‘No. Funny, you know, the only thing I remember about him is that he looked like my big brother.’

‘What became of him?’

‘No idea. He ran off into the woods. Probably more scared than we were. I suppose they caught him eventually.’

‘Sam said something about a POW camp.’

‘Aye, it was out Reeth way. We used to bicycle out there sometimes and watch them through the fence. There was a bit of fuss between the locals and the military, but guess who usually wins in wartime.’

‘Why the fuss?’

‘Oh, people were worried about escapes and such.’ He laughed. ‘They needn’t have bothered. It was mostly Italians, and they had no desire to go back to the fighting. We got a few Jerries later on, too, and they seemed happy enough to stay there as well. It was hardly Colditz or Stalag 17. I think they lived a pretty good life. Most of the prisoners used to help with the harvest. Some of them ended up marrying local lasses. The Bartolini family still lives up near Marske, and there are Schnells in Grinton. But why the interest?’

‘Nothing, really. Just trying to get a broader picture of the way things were back then. I heard Kilnsgate House was requisitioned by the military for a while?’

‘For a couple of years, yes. It was all very hush-hush, barbed wire, armed guards and all that.’

‘But Ernest Fox still lived there?’

‘I suppose so. I can’t really say I paid much attention to the good doctor’s comings and goings. He was probably well in with them. Typical of him. Nothing he liked better than going around with a smirk on his face as if he knew something nobody else did. Old Foxy had been involved in military matters ever since the first war. Mustard gas and such. His way of doing his bit.’

‘Talking about doing one’s bit, do you remember Nat Bunting, the man who went missing? Sam mentioned him.’

Wilf frowned for a moment, then it dawned on him. ‘Nat. Of course. He was what you’d call a bit slow. Challenged, you’d say, these days, I suppose. Nice enough lad, though. Lived rough, somewhere near Melsonby, as I remember. Did odd jobs. You’d see him walking all over the place with his toolkit slung over his shoulder, like someone out of a Thomas Hardy novel, then one day he was gone.’

‘Anyone ever find out why?’

‘Not as I recall. I’m sure they looked for him, sent out a search party or two, but people didn’t ask too many questions in wartime. The walls have ears and all that. Besides, priorities were different. The individual was rather less important than the state, and the state was the military. We had a country to protect, a war to win.’

‘Sam said he thought this Nat might have joined up.’

‘Well, he did used to go on about it, but I would have thought nobody would have him. He had a gammy leg. Not to mention the… you know. Nat Bunting. Haven’t thought of him in years. Aye, well… I don’t suppose you’ve come to pick my memory about the war?’

‘Not entirely. It’s just interesting, especially to those of us who missed it by a few years. But there are a couple of things I would like to ask you about, if you don’t mind, to clear up some questions I have?’

Wilf crossed his legs. ‘I don’t mind. I can’t promise to be of any use, but I don’t mind.’

‘I’ve been reading the trial account, and it seems that Dr Fox had received a job offer from a hospital near Salisbury around the time he died.’

Wilf scratched the side of his nose. ‘I do remember hearing something about that. I think it was a fairly recent thing, though, hadn’t quite done the gossip circuit before… well, you know. Why? Does it matter?’

‘I think so. The prosecution put it forward as another motive for Grace to get rid of her husband. The job would take him a long way away from Richmond, and therefore take Grace away from Sam. But it seems to me an indication of Sam’s lack of involvement.’

‘Come again.’

‘Sam can’t have known about the job offer. Not if it came as late in the day as it apparently did. He was in Leeds for a while, then up at his parents’ farm over Christmas and New Year. He hadn’t seen or talked to Grace since mid-December, so he couldn’t possibly have known about her moving away until it was raised at the trial.’

‘True,’ said Wilf. ‘But it hardly matters, does it? Sam wasn’t on trial. Grace was.’

‘But it does mean that if Grace killed Ernest, she did it completely off her own bat, so to speak, without even any certain knowledge that Sam would go off with her. He might have been appalled by what she’d done.’

‘Unless they hatched the plan together earlier?’

‘But they didn’t know about the job then, neither of them. It seems to me that’s rather an important point, especially as this job was put forward as one of the major motives, and Hetty Larkin said she’d heard Grace and Ernest arguing about a letter a few days before the dinner. Mrs Compton’s testimony has Sam and Grace talking about getting rid of Ernest in late November, long before there was any letter or hint of a job offer that would split them apart. Don’t you find that a bit strange?’

‘Now that you mention it, I suppose I do,’ said Wilf.

‘The trial account mentions that Grace was seen walking and talking with a young man in uniform on Castle Walk shortly before her husband’s death. Nothing more was ever said about it.’

‘I certainly heard nothing,’ Wilf said, ‘but you have to understand that some people were saying all sorts of things about Grace then, spreading rumours, blackening her character. I should imagine that was part of the campaign. Luckily, none of it got to court.’

‘But there must have been some truth in it, surely? I don’t necessarily agree with anything people might have read into it, but the event itself probably happened. It could be relevant. I don’t believe that whoever she was talking to was a lover or anything like that, but the meeting itself could have been important to Grace’s state of mind, even a trigger for her subsequent actions. Surely the police must have followed up on it? Who was he? What were they talking about?’

‘The police?’ Wilf snorted. ‘They already had their minds made up, and they were probably no different then than they are today. They decided Grace had done it, and that was that as far as they were concerned. Whatever evidence fitted that theory went in, whatever didn’t, they ignored. And once the ball got rolling, it wasn’t too hard to get people to speak against her. These things have a habit of snowballing.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I hated that vicious, mean-spirited, holier-than-thou attitude all this business stirred up, the hypocrisy, the things some people said, even people who were supposed to have been her friends. It brought out the worst in some people. And Alice Lambert was no better than the rest.’

‘Alice? What did she say?’

‘Oh, she didn’t say anything in court, she stuck to the facts there, appeared for the defence, for her friend, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, but word soon got around about the Foxes having separate bedrooms and Grace being a bit cold hearted towards her husband. Alice always did have a soft spot for Ernest Fox. It was him she met first, you know, not Grace. They were old friends. And then she goes telling everyone she’d always thought Grace was a bit too free and easy in her manner with the opposite sex, especially younger men, that sort of thing. Innuendo, fuel for the fire they wanted to burn Grace on.’

‘Is this true about Alice Lambert and Ernest Fox?’

‘That she had a soft spot for him?’

‘Yes.’

‘You could see it clearly when you saw them together. Like you and that estate agent woman.’

I almost choked on my tea. ‘What? Heather? How do you… I mean…?’

Wilf laughed. ‘Oh, don’t get so flustered. You look like a schoolboy caught with his hand over the tuck shop counter. I’ve seen you chatting in the market square once or twice, that’s all. The body language. I’ve told you what small towns are like. I’d watch it, if I were you.’

‘We’re just friends. She helped me get set up at Kilnsgate.’

His eyes twinkled. ‘If you say so.’

‘Oh, knock it off, Wilf. Was there anything in it, Alice Lambert and Ernest Fox?’

‘Like what?’

‘You know what I’m getting at. Were they having an affair? Did Alice’s husband know?’

‘Surely you’re not…? Not Alice Lambert?’

‘I was thinking more of Jeremy Lambert.’

‘Jeremy Lambert? You must be joking. He wouldn’t say boo to a goose.’

‘You knew him?’

‘Of course. He was the local schools inspector, even after I started teaching. Nice, cushy job in those days. Maybe not so much now, if they still have them. You’d be likely to risk getting knifed or shot. But Jeremy Lambert, a murderer?’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t see it.’

‘Alice?’

‘Look at your own reasoning, and you’ll find she doesn’t have a motive.’

‘Sometimes it takes a lot of digging to uncover a motive.’

‘Even so…’

‘Everyone focused on Grace and her affair with Sam. But what about Ernest Fox? He must have had plenty of opportunities to put it about. Were there any rumours? Anything about him bedding any of the lovely ladies of Swaledale?’

‘Not as I recall. At least, I never heard owt about him chasing women. But he was away a lot. I mean, he could have got up to anything then, couldn’t he?’

‘I thought he was supposed to be a local GP?’

‘He was, but he did a lot of consulting. Travelled a lot. To be honest, during the war and after, Dr Nelson carried the practice.’

‘Can you think of anyone else who might have wanted Ernest Fox dead?’

‘Plenty. But none of them were at Kilnsgate House on the night he died.’

‘What was Dr Nelson like?’

‘Cliff Nelson? He was a steady, dependable, dedicated sort, a bit dull, if truth be told. But he was a gentleman, and full of common sense. Lived down by the green. As I said, he practically carried the practice through the war, and after, for that matter. You never saw his wife Mary much. She worked behind the scenes, doing the books, keeping house, taking care of the kids.’

‘They had children?’

‘Three boys.’

‘There were no rumours, no gossip?’

‘Dr Fox and Mary? No. I’m afraid you’re barking up the wrong tree there.’

‘It wouldn’t be the first time. What about Grace and Dr Nelson?’

‘What about them?’

‘Their relationship.’

‘They got on well, as far as I know. Cliff used to play piano a little, too, so he and Grace had that musical connection. They were friends. I think she also felt she could talk to him. He and her husband weren’t always on the best of terms.’

‘Why not?’

‘I should think because most of the burden fell on Cliff Nelson’s shoulders. One thing,’ Wilf went on, ‘I don’t know if it would have made any difference, but Dr Nelson told me not long after the whole business that he had offered to appear as a character reference for Grace at her trial. He was convinced she was innocent.’

‘What happened?’

‘He was told that the defence didn’t plan on using any men as character witnesses. That it wouldn’t look good.’

‘I suppose they had a point. Did Grace actually have many female friends?’

‘Not as I recall. There was Alice, and Mary, I suppose, and one or two ladies from the Operatic Society. But she was more of a man’s woman – and I don’t mean that in a bad way.’

‘Was she really as free and easy as people said?’

‘Free and easy? Depends what you mean, and how you construe it. Grace didn’t walk around town with her nose stuck in the air like some, and maybe as some would have expected from a doctor’s wife. Like I said, she’d even pass the time of day with the likes of me at a subscription concert, while the rest of them ignored anyone they felt beneath their social standing. I’m not saying Grace wasn’t a snob in some ways – she certainly appreciated her place in society – but not when it came to people. She had a big heart. She’d help anyone, talk to anyone. If that’s free and easy.’

‘Sleep with anyone?’

‘No. It was nothing but scurrilous nonsense,’ Wilf said indignantly. ‘A load of bollocks. Grace Fox was not a whore. She may have been many things, including an adulteress and a murderer, but she was not a whore. Grace and Sam had an affair, OK, but that wasn’t a symptom of bad character. He wasn’t a notch on her bedpost. They were in love, for crying out loud.’

‘Did you ever have an affair with Grace, Wilf?’

‘Me? Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Were you in love with her?’

Wilf turned away and fell silent. He grimaced and put his hand to his stomach. ‘Thanks for the Guinness,’ he said, ‘but I think you’d better leave now. I’m feeling a bit poorly.’

Well done, Lowndes, I said to myself on the way out. Now you’ve managed to piss off one of the only two people you’ve met who actually knew Grace Fox.