Before the Poison

24

Extract from the journal of Grace Elizabeth Fox (ed. Louise King), October, 1945. Indian Ocean

Wednesday, 10th October, 1945 The dolphins play alongside us nearly every day now. We are in that still, hot, humid world where the ocean is a blue mirror and everything seems to move slowly, as if through thickened air. I am going home again. I am still not clear why I volunteered to travel out to Singapore again, except perhaps that I needed some sense of coming full circle, of finding some sort of peace with myself. And for all these years, no matter what, I have never been able to get rid of the feeling that it should have been me who died out on that raft, not Brenda. I have carried the guilt of survival around with me through France and Belgium, through a defeated Germany, among the mass graves, the unbearable stench of the huts, and the walking shadows of Belsen, a ruined Berlin full of liberating Russians. Hell on earth. I still have my guilt, and I have not yet found peace. Now I sit on deck after midnight, smoking, and strands of my hair stick to the sweat on my brow and cheeks and neck. Was it a mistake to come back here on the hospital ship after we had won the war in Europe? I don’t think so. Deep inside, I knew it was always Singapore where I really came of age, where I lost what innocence I had. Not to men. I do not mean that kind of innocence. Despite Stephen’s kiss, it was remarkably easy to remain the faithful, responsible married woman while all around me lost their hearts for a night, or a week. I would be lying if I did not admit there were times when I would have liked to shed my inhibitions and everything else and join in, and I came close to that with Stephen. The innocence I lost was of a different sort. Everyone on this hospital ship is from the ‘liberated’ Japanese prison camps on Sumatra, or from Changi, in Singapore, or Stanley, in Hong Kong. Some were among the hordes who arrived after us at Padang, when there were no more ships. They could do nothing but wait there until the Japanese came and took them prisoner. Others had simply been found wandering in the jungle, abandoned by their defeated guards after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan surrendered. Nobody knew what camps they were from. They have all been nursed and given nutrition in local hospitals and are now on their way home. There are no battlefield wounds, no missing limbs, but there are infections. Luckily, we have penicillin. Most are men, but there are also many civilian women and children, and sisters. Most evenings I spend with Kathleen. She never smiles now and does not speak – I suspect as much as anything else that she must be embarrassed by the change in her voice the missing teeth have caused. I should also imagine that her surprising laugh is all but gone now. Our former statuesque beauty is a string bean, weighing only six stone, legs like matchsticks, knees like cricket balls. Her beautiful blonde hair is stringy and lustreless, torn away in patches, her scalp raw. At first, I did not recognise her, nor she me. It took one of the other sisters who had seen how inseparable we were on our first journey all those years ago to reintroduce us. It is hard. Kathleen does not remember very much. She has no passion for life. At night she has frightening dreams – they all do – and she cries out a lot. In the daytime heat she is listless and inert. She has no interest in anything. I try to talk to her about ordinary daily matters, the routine, who is causing trouble, where we are, the dolphins, but it means nothing to her. Kathleen is broken. She hums rambling melodies to herself a lot. I managed to learn from the other sister, whose name is Mary, that Doris died of dysentery in the Stanley camp. She need not have died, but the Japanese withheld all medicines the Red Cross sent, so she could not be treated. Kathleen nursed her until the end. Mary also told me what happened at the hospital in Hong Kong on Christmas Day, 1941. We had heard rumours before, back in Singapore, but the reality was even worse, the sisters subjected to the most vile degradations, then killed, and the men, doctors and patients alike, bayoneted. Stories had also started making the rounds about the Banka Island massacre. Some Australian nurses I had known and watched sail out of Singapore just before us on the Vyner Brooke were bombed and shipwrecked, as we were, but managed to get to Banka Island, where they tried to surrender to the Japanese. When the Japanese patrol came to the beach, they first took all the men around the headland and shot them, then they forced the women to walk out into the sea and machine-gunned them all. One Australian nurse survived – the bullet went straight through her leg without causing any major damage – played dead, and eventually went on to survive a prison camp and tell her story. I asked a number of the officers about Stephen Fawley, but they knew nothing. One thought he had probably been killed in the fighting. Either way, nobody had seen him later, in the camps. But for the few patients who can, and do, talk, the rest are like Kathleen. They have lost their will to live. They are frightened of their own shadows, frightened of what is to come; they live in a perpetual state of fear. Though they have been half starved, they can hardly eat, as their digestive systems have weakened and suffered permanent damage from starvation at the hands of their captors. We feed them as best we can, but for the nightmares we can do nothing at all. Even as I sit here now, in the sultry beauty of the tropical night, feeling the peaceful motion of the ship, the gentle slapping of water against the sides, I cannot fail to be aware of the sound rising up from the depths of the ship’s wards. It is a sound like no other I have ever heard on earth, made up of a thousand nightmares, the dying boys calling for their mothers, the endless wailing from the completely unhinged, and hovering around it all, the terrible silence of those who have lost everything – their voices, even themselves.

February 2011

Kilnsgate House was waiting for me like an old friend when I got out of the taxi I’d taken from Darlington railway station. A pile of mail awaited me inside, scattered over the floor below the letterbox. It was mostly bills and junk. Nobody writes letters any more in these days of emails and texts. I wondered whether the collected emails of John Keats would have been half as interesting as his letters. I doubted it. The medium does make a difference.

I dumped my bag in the hall, turned up the central heating and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. It was late afternoon, and I had been awake all night on the plane from Cape Town and spent most of the day getting home from Heathrow, my patience with the train system definitely wearing thin. There was no excuse. It hadn’t even been snowing.

I had spent my last day in Cape Town wandering the waterfront cafes and shops. I had bought a wrap-around summer dress of beautiful patterned material at the market for Heather. I didn’t know whether it was the kind of thing she would wear or not, but at least she might appreciate the design and the African colours and use it as a wall hanging. I thought she would look good in it, at any rate. I had also bought a few CDs of local musicians for myself – Judith Sephuma, Abdullah Ibrahim, Wanda Baloyi, Pops Mohamed – finding that the record shop I had discovered on my previous visit was still thriving.

When my tea was ready, I carried it through to the living-dining room and sat by the fire. I would probably light it later. It was early February, and the snow had all gone, but that all-permeating Yorkshire chill was in the air, making it seem colder, especially after the South African sun. The temperature outside was six degrees Celsius, and the sky was grey and threatening rain. The woods beyond my back garden seemed dreary and forbidding. I put some Abdullah Ibrahim jazz piano on, then settled in my comfortable armchair to sort out the post. As I had thought, it turned out to be bills and circulars. The only letter of any interest was an invitation to speak at a film festival at London’s South Bank Centre in May. I decided I would probably go. It could be fun.

Next I checked the messages on my phone. There were two sales calls – BT and double-glazing – and a welcome-home message from Heather. She said to give her a ring. I checked my watch. It was ten to four and already getting dark. I was too tired for company tonight, too tired for anything, really, except a final bit of research I needed to do online.

There was also a message from Mother, asking me in her inimitable way whether I was still alive. I immediately felt guilty. With all the excitement of finding Louise and then Billy Strang, I had forgotten about Mother. I rang back and listened to her complain about the weather for about fifteen minutes, then promised to come and visit her as soon as I could, and hung up.

Next I phoned Heather, and we agreed to meet in a couple of days, when I had caught up on my sleep. Next, I had a couple of important phone calls to make. I had had plenty of time since my afternoon with Billy Strang to think things over, and I believed that after all my floundering around in the dark I now knew the truth about what happened on that first of January 1953, here at Kilnsgate. Louise King and Samuel Porter deserved to know before anyone else, so I picked up the phone.

The following morning, still dragging my feet a little, I carried a spade up the hill to the lime kiln and surveyed the tangled mess of weeds inside. I attempted a couple of thrusts, but soon realised it was no good; I couldn’t do this by myself. I didn’t feel confident enough to call in the authorities at this stage, but there was only one way to find out whether I was right, and that was to dig.

I went back to the house and phoned Tony Brotherton. When I explained my theory, he clearly thought I was crazy, but I reminded him of his grandfather’s concerns, and in less than half an hour he arrived with Jill and two strong farm labourers.

Feeling useless, I stood by, leaned on a tree and watched them work. Though it was a chilly February morning, they soon broke sweat as the pile of sod and earth grew beside the kiln. I had no idea how far down they would have to dig, and it was almost an hour later when Jill bent over and said, ‘Good Lord, Chris. You’d better come over here and have a look at this.’

I walked over, and my gaze followed her pointing finger. There, in the bed of soil, was what looked like the skeleton of a human hand. I had no idea of anatomy, of course, and I will admit it could easily have been from a cow or a sheep, but as Jill carefully brushed away the rest of the clinging soil, the form slowly took shape, and by the time she had done the best she could, there was not one of us standing there who was not convinced that we were looking at a human skeleton.

I had just put the lasagne in the oven when Heather arrived for dinner two days later. Across from Kilnsgate, the lime kiln was still mysteriously screened off by canvas, though it was deserted at the moment. After our grim discovery, I had called the police, of course, and they had removed the remains for forensic examination. Their preliminary findings, communicated to me that afternoon by the detective assigned to the case, had borne out my suspicions, but had not determined the cause of death. Perhaps that was too much to ask after all this time.

I had planned a simple meal, entirely home made, accompanied by a Caesar salad – a genuine one, not the kind they serve with cucumber and tomatoes at the local Italian restaurant – topped off by a dish of fruit and a plate of local cheeses from Ken Warne’s.

Heather looked as lovely as ever, dressed simply in black tights and a roll-neck rust-coloured dress that came to just above her knees, her hair tied back with a green ribbon at the nape of her neck.

‘My God,’ she said as I led her through to the living room. ‘You’ve got a suntan and you were only away three days.’

‘I tan quickly,’ I said. Nobody ever noticed in LA. I had, however, developed a distinct Yorkshire pallor since I had been over here, and the tan wouldn’t last long. I gave Heather the dress I had bought her, and she made excited sounds about the colours and the pattern, wrapping it around herself, trying to figure out how she could wear it decently. ‘Maybe we can try a few variations later,’ I suggested.

By the fire, which I had lit before preparing dinner, I poured us each a glass of wine, and we sat down. ‘From what you told me on the phone there’s been more than a little excitement around here,’ Heather said.

‘You could say that.’

‘It all sounds rather gruesome. Bodies in the lime kiln.’

‘One body,’ I said. ‘And it was a skeleton.’

‘Even so.’ She gave a little shiver. ‘To think it’s been out there all that time.’

‘Since 1941 or 1942, to be exact,’ I said. ‘Nat Bunting.’

‘But how do they know?’

‘He had a club foot. It shows on the skeleton.’

‘And what happened to him?’

‘That we don’t know.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I have plenty of theories, but I can’t be certain. At first I thought it was because he might have seen something, found out too much. Tony Brotherton’s grandfather saw Nat inside the wired-off compound at Kilnsgate during the war.’

‘You only thought that at first?’

‘Nat was… challenged,’ I said. ‘He wouldn’t have known it if he had seen something he wasn’t supposed to see.’

‘But they probably didn’t know that.’

‘Ernest Fox did.’

‘So, what, then?’

‘I know it sounds far fetched, but I think he may have died as a result of the experiments they were doing there at Kilnsgate, most likely infected by accident. I did a bit of research, and not much of it is public, but what we do know is that in the Second World War the Porton Down people were doing a lot of experiments with biological weapons. Not so long ago, some War Cabinet committee files were released to the National Archive, and it turns out that they were particularly interested in bacteriological diseases such as typhoid, dysentery and cholera in humans, and anthrax, swine fever and foot-and-mouth in animals.’

‘Animals?’

‘Yes. They produced cattle cakes doctored with anthrax. They were going to drop them over Germany to poison the food supply.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Us, I mean.’

‘Good Lord. That’s crazy. And terrible.’

‘As it turned out, we discovered that cattle are suspicious of new types of food and unlikely to take the bait, so we scrapped that plan. Anyway, there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth at the Brotherton farm. It was dealt with very quickly by the military and hushed up. It never spread beyond the one farm, which is almost unheard of in foot-and-mouth.’

‘How could they get to it that quickly?’

‘They couldn’t unless they knew it had happened.’

‘So you think they caused it?’

‘It seems a logical explanation. And I’m not even sure it was foot-and-mouth. It could have been anthrax. That could also have been what killed Nat Bunting. But that’s just speculation on my part.’

‘What else could have happened to him?’

I shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe they actually injected him with anthrax or dysentery and he died, like Ronald Maddison did in 1953 in the sarin experiments. They may even have been playing around with antidotes, vaccinations against these diseases they thought the Nazis were going to unleash. Or maybe, as I said, he came into contact with something by accident, got too close, and they simply buried the body under the lime kiln.’

‘And put quicklime on it?’

‘There wouldn’t be much point. Most people have the wrong idea about using quicklime to get rid of bodies. Quicklime burns the skin it comes into contact with, yes, if you add water, but afterwards it tends to dry out the tissues and cause mummification. Hardly getting rid of the evidence! Anyway, they used it on Brotherton’s cows, mostly because it would kill anthrax spores or foot-and-mouth, but I should imagine the lime kiln was just a handy place to hide a body. As for the full story, what Nat was doing up there, what really happened to him, I doubt we’ll ever know it. I do know that Nat was apparently obsessed with joining up, but no one would have him because of his physical and mental handicaps. Maybe he saw the unit at Kilnsgate and went to ask if he could join up with them. Maybe they had a place for him. I don’t like to think they simply plucked people out of the landscape and shot them full of dysentery or typhus, but if they did, then Nat Bunting was probably a safe bet. There wouldn’t be much of a hue and cry over him. It didn’t even make the papers.’

‘But that’s terrible.’

‘Terrible things happen in war. Look at what Grace witnessed at the chateau in Normandy and, later, in the camps. Look at some of the stories that have come out about Japanese and German medical experiments on POWs and concentration camp victims. Do you think we were that much better?’

‘I do like to think so. Yes. To be honest, it’s sickening to think we were brought down to that level, too. I mean, trying to give cows anthrax or foot-and-mouth is one thing, but…’

‘I’m not saying that was the case. Just that it’s possible. I certainly think they were responsible for the foot-and-mouth outbreak, or whatever it was, at Brotherton’s farm – it doesn’t make any sense otherwise – and however he met his end, Nat Bunting certainly didn’t bury himself. I suppose it’s possible that he got sick and crawled off to die there and his body just got covered up by the elements over time.’

‘Surely there must have been others involved in these experiments?’

‘Probably. Volunteers, or prisoners from the nearby POW camp. But Nat was the one who died, and for whatever reasons nobody else spoke out.’

‘Couldn’t it just have been some wandering maniac?’

‘How many of those are there? Realistically? Besides, Kilnsgate, including the lime kiln, was cordoned off by barbed wire and armed guards when it happened. Wilf said the kids found a gap, which may have been how Nat got in, too, but a wandering maniac as well?’

Heather ran her finger around the rim of her wineglass. ‘Does this have anything to do with what happened later? With Grace Fox and her husband?’

‘I think it does,’ I said.

‘Tell me.’

‘Over dinner.’ I got up to check on the lasagne. It was done and only needed to rest for ten minutes while I made the salad.

‘Bastard,’ Heather said, following me into the kitchen. ‘Making me wait like this.’

She leaned back against the fridge, and I had to open the door to take out the lettuce. As I approached, she didn’t move, just cocked her head sideways and pouted at me. I flashed back on that first dinner here, with Derek and Charlotte, how Heather had got drunk and almost made a pass in exactly the same place. This time I leaned forward and kissed her, and she responded. A lot had changed. I gently eased her out of the way and opened the fridge. ‘You don’t have to bug me while I’m putting dinner together, you know,’ I said. ‘You’re perfectly welcome to go and sit in front of the fire, sip your wine, listen to the music and contemplate life.’

‘Well, I can see exactly how much you missed me,’ Heather said, with a mock pout, and left the kitchen.

It didn’t take me long to throw the salad together, and by then the lasagne was ready to cut and serve. I carried the plates through to the dining-room table and Heather came up to join me. The wine and fresh glasses were already there. I poured us each another glass. Susan Graham was singing ‘ Les Nuits d’Ete ’ in the background. It all made for a very sensual atmosphere.

‘Now will you please tell me what you found out?’ Heather said. ‘I promise I’ll just eat my dinner and I won’t interrupt. Promise.’ She cut off a corner of lasagne and put it in her mouth.

‘I found Billy Strang easily enough,’ I said. ‘Fit as a fiddle, he seems. As a matter of fact, he’d just come back from playing tennis. Apparently there’s a young widow at the club he’s chasing.’

‘A dirty old man, then?’

‘No more than I am. Much older, though.’

Heather laughed. ‘And was it all worthwhile? Leaving me here in freezing Yorkshire while you went gallivanting off to parts exotic? And warm.’

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?’

‘Maybe,’ I agreed. ‘Maybe those few seconds would have made all the difference. Maybe it was her hesitation that killed him, and as I said, she probably wanted him dead. But she didn’t kill him. She couldn’t. I’m convinced of that.’

‘So you don’t believe that given the right circumstances we’re all capable of murder?’

I couldn’t answer that question. I had killed Laura. I didn’t know whether that technically made me a murderer or not, but that didn’t matter. I had killed. It was what I’d done and why I’d done it that counted for me, and how I came to live with it. I felt that I knew Grace now. Fanciful or not, imagination or supernatural, she had called to me as soon as I entered Kilnsgate House, drawn me in, chosen me, willed me to tell her story, to find the truth. I had half-dreamed I heard her playing the piano. I had seen her in the mirror hesitating, then moving swiftly away to do what had to be done, just as I had seen the young woman who had hanged herself in the mirror at Scarborough. Even if all these things were inventions of my mind, I had still experienced them.

What I saw in the mirror was what I believed happened that night at Kilnsgate in 1953, a recreation of what had happened when Ernest had his heart attack. But that sounded crazy. Perhaps Graham would understand, but I wasn’t going to repeat it to Heather. Grace had nursed dying Germans, dressed suppurating wounds, sat up all night cooling the brows of those men who had done such terrible things to her sisters and to the officers she had laughed and danced with. Heather had read about that, too. A woman who had done those things wasn’t going to plan the cold-blooded murder of her husband, as the prosecution had argued, and the judge and jury had believed. Perhaps I needed Grace to be innocent so that I could partake of that innocence, too, as I had realised in Cape Town. But I didn’t believe that Grace could have stood by and watched Ernest die any more than I could have stood by and watched Laura live and suffer any longer. I couldn’t tell Heather that, either.

Heather tossed back the last of her wine. ‘Supposing you’re right?’ she said. ‘What happens now?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It’s all over now.’

‘Really?’

‘What else is there to do? None of it can be proved. The cause of Nat Bunting’s death. What Grace did that night. Besides, it happened nearly sixty years ago. The only people who care, apart from me and you, are Louise, Sam and Wilf, and I’ve already talked to them.’

‘How did they react?’

‘I think they saw the logic of it. Louise sees her grandmother as a heroine now, a martyr, and not as a murderess or a scarlet woman. That can’t be a bad thing after all she’s been through. Wilf didn’t say much. I think he already had his mind made up. And Sam… Well, he persists in feeling cheated out of the love of his life, and who can blame him? He’s idealised Grace’s memory, and, in a way, I don’t think it matters to him whether she did it or not. He decided years ago in his heart that she didn’t, so I suppose he might feel vindicated that someone else has dug a bit deeper and come to the same conclusion. As for me, I’m convinced. I don’t need to search any more.’ I paused. ‘This has been thirsty work. How about I open another bottle?’

Heather thought for a moment. ‘Well, only if we can take it upstairs and you let me show off my new dress for you.’

I laughed. ‘It’s a deal.’

As I opened the wine, I reflected how our discussion had made me think perhaps more of my own mystery than that of Grace Fox. Not mystery, so much as the twisted, half-hidden guilt I had confronted after my talk with Billy. I had thought about it more that night out on the balcony with my wine, and I had accepted what I’d done, made the first tentative move towards forgiving myself. In an odd way, getting to know Grace had helped me do that.

While I would cheerfully have given the moon, the planets and the stars not to have had to kill Laura, I knew that it had been the right thing to do. You can’t let someone you love suffer an agony that gets worse every day and has no possibility of ever abating or ending, except in an even more drawn-out and painful death.

Would I tell Heather what I had done? I didn’t know. Those questions were for later. For now, we would go on as we were, playful and easy. I would finish my piano sonata, and perhaps it would even be a success. At least it would be music people listened to. It would have Grace’s name in its title somewhere; I knew that much. Spring would come, the snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils. Then the woods would be full of bluebells; the birds would come back from the south and sing, the swallows would return. A turning point would come for Heather and me eventually, of course – they always do – and decisions would have to be made then. But not yet. Not yet.

Extract from the journal of Grace Elizabeth Fox (ed. Louise King), November, 1945. Netley, Hampshire

Saturday, 3rd November, 1945 This morning, just after our demob, Matron gathered us all together in one of the big cold lecture halls. I could hear the rain pattering against the large sash window beside me, occasionally getting louder, carried on a sudden gust which made the window rattle. Matron told us first that she had a number of things to say to those of us who were now leaving the service for civilian life. First, she wanted to thank us for all we had done, and she went on to extol the virtues of military nursing, and of the QAs in general. Then she said that we were now about to face probably one of the most difficult tasks and duties of our lives. After all the things we had witnessed, done and suffered, I must admit that we all looked rather askance to hear this. But Matron was a wise woman. We listened. She went on to say that the transition from war to civilian life is always a difficult one, but that it would be especially difficult for us because we were women. Not only that, but we had lived close to the battlefields, close to the fighting men themselves, not in hospitals miles away, where the guns could not even be heard. We had heard guns. Some of us had even felt their sting. We had been bombed, sniped at, shelled, shipwrecked, and worse. Many of us had also suffered great physical and mental privations in the camps or under life-threatening conditions in the wild. In order to survive, Matron told us, we had had to exist, and to act, in ways that were not always ladylike, and some of us may have been stigmatised by our experiences. Then Matron urged us to think of our families, present or future. Their world was not our world, she said, but it was a world we had fought for; there was not one point of contact between those at home and those who had done what we had done, but we had done it for them. There was nothing they could understand about what we had been through and how it had affected us. If she was about to tell us not to talk about our experiences, I thought, then she had no need to bother. I think most of us would rather not. But it was more than that. Whatever our war experiences, Matron concluded, it was now our God-given duty to be young ladies, housewives, sweethearts and mothers again, not unrecognisable figures slithering around in the mud and blood of a casualty clearing station, or lying in the filth and squalor of a Japanese POW camp. Our loved ones did not want to hear or know about these things. If they did, they would never look at us in the same way again; we would become pariahs. We had a role and a duty to perform in society, and in order to do so, we had to put the last five years behind us and mould ourselves into the image of the feminine again: the wife, the mother. That was what our world needed now, and that was our role in it. The men would get all the glory, as usual, Matron said, to knowing smiles all around, and this time we should let them have it. I glanced at Dorothy beside me, and she rolled her eyes. I smiled. It was all a bit too much, I supposed, but at bottom, Matron was right. Later, after the farewells and the promises to write, clutching my small suitcase in one hand and my travel pass in the other, I walked through the park in the rain towards the railway station. Raindrops dripped from the bare branches. What a very English November day it was, I thought, and I felt a great surge of love for my country, for the future. Perhaps Matron was right. We needed to lock the memories away and get on with our lives. We needed to rebuild, to look forward, not behind. The train stood waiting at the platform, puffing steam into the drizzle. I settled back in my seat to watch the landscape go by and opened my journal. In a few hours I will arrive at Darlington. Ernest will be waiting for me at the station. We will get into the car and drive back to Kilnsgate, to home. There, my future will begin.