Before the Poison

4

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

Grace Elizabeth Hartnell was the daughter of a successful Saltburn bank manager and Alderman. She was a clever girl who attended her local grammar school, where she excelled both in the arts and in the sciences, and was generally regarded as a quiet and reserved child. Grace was nonetheless possessed of an enquiring mind and a kindly disposition, and she demonstrated an inherent gentleness and compassion towards all living creatures. Perhaps the only blot in the copybook of her youth was a broken engagement to a most suitable young man from the nearby town of Redcar, an ambitious young solicitor called Edward Cunliffe, whom her father very much admired, in favour of a far less appropriate paramour. This rejection of her father’s choice of partner showed a certain early rebellious and headstrong element in young Grace’s behaviour, an unwillingness to bend to the will of her father, and a tendency to forsake the duty incumbent upon the daughter of a local dignitary for the fickle will-o’-the-wisp impulse of romantic love. Much of the business still remains shrouded in mystery, as neither Grace nor her parents cared to speak of it in later times. The young man she chose, contrary to her family’s wishes, was an aspiring poet by the name of Thomas Murray, who turned out to be a rake of the most unspeakable order. Thomas soon deserted Grace for another woman, leaving her so distraught that it was thought best she should retire to her Aunt Ethel’s house in Torquay to recover from her attack of nerves. She returned a contrite woman and soon regained her father’s affection, though not that of the broken-hearted young solicitor Edward Cunliffe, who had since taken flight to seek his fortune in Argentina. Thomas Murray later died fighting for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. All this took place in late 1930, when Grace was merely eighteen, and by which time her husband-to-be was already an established GP in Richmond. A short while later, Grace began her training as a nurse, a profession at which she excelled beyond all her father’s misgivings. Grace trained at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, in Newcastle, submitting to the almost nun-like existence of the nurses’ home, with its strict curfews and rules against male visitors, all under the eagle eye of Matron. She soon showed evidence of the three qualities essential to a good nurse – devotion to her patients, technical proficiency and that essential feminine quality of tenderness, or gentleness, that in no way interfered with the efficiency with which she discharged her rigorous duties. Grace qualified as a State Registered Nurse with flying colours in 1935, and only a year later, she met and married Dr. Ernest Fox. The couple soon moved into Kilnsgate House, where everything proceeded as normal for the following three years. When war was declared, Dr. Fox curtailed his duties at the Royal Victoria Infirmary and turned his attention towards the Friarage, in Northallerton, which had recently opened as an emergency medical services hospital to receive casualties in the event of the bombing of Teesside’s civilian population. Throughout late 1939, Grace and Ernest continued to live at Kilnsgate House, tended by loyal maidservant Hetty Larkin. At this time, they also accommodated for several weeks an evacuee from Newcastle, affectionately known as ‘Billy’, until the air raids that had been predicted never materialised, and his parents brought him back home. It was around this time that Grace joined the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Services and went to pursue her training at Netley, in Hampshire. There she learned of the many duties of a military nurse, including running the dispensary, a skill that was to be declared of great significance during the course of her trial. After brief stints in military hospitals around Dover, where she helped nurse survivors of the British Expeditionary Force after Dunkirk, Grace bade farewell to her husband in July, 1940, and spent much of the rest of the war in service overseas. Ernest continued his work at the Friarage, in both a teaching and a practising capacity, throughout the war, even after it became a Royal Air Force Hospital in 1943, and he was also often absent from the practice as he travelled around the country to supervise training programmes and present research papers at various institutions of learning. Hetty Larkin found useful employment in a munitions factory near Darlington. During the war years, Kilnsgate House provided the occasional brief billet for a transferred officer or two, but much of the time it was empty except for Dr. Fox and, once or twice a week, Hetty Larkin. The isolation was partly what made Kilnsgate less attractive to the armed forces, though during one period this played in the house’s favour, when it was used in a top-secret capacity between August, 1940 and July, 1942. Dr. Fox’s own practice continued as best it could. Dr. Nelson’s wife Mary, as usual, handled most of the administrative duties. These were quiet times for the most part in North Yorkshire, and one wonders what thoughts passed through Ernest Fox’s mind as he sat puffing his pipe in front of a crackling fire during the darkest and loneliest days and nights of the war. Grace finally returned to her husband and her family home on the 4th November, 1945. Once back at Kilnsgate House, she left the nursing profession for ever and took up her duties as a housewife. Ernest settled into life as a country GP again, while continuing his various research projects, and almost a year later their only child was born, a son named Randolph, after Grace’s own father, who had died of pneumonia during the war. Grace then appeared to devote herself to motherhood and housekeeping, with the faithful Hetty’s help. As mistress of Kilnsgate House, Grace remained outwardly gracious and courteous, the kind of woman who would do anything to help a friend in need, but close friends also marked a change in her since the war: dark moods, unpredictable outbursts, and grim silences during which she seemed to retreat into some secret place within herself. What ailed her we will never know, as she never spoke of it to anyone. Was it in that dark, lonely place where she first hatched the plot for her husband’s murder? Because according to the Crown, this was far from a crime of passion executed in the heat of the moment, but a coolly thought-out, near-foolproof way of ridding herself of a husband she had ceased to love. Grace merely seized the opportunity of the snowstorm and the witnesses present in Kilnsgate House to put into action a plan she had been long devising. Whether Samuel Porter himself was involved in the plot must also remain within the realm of speculation, for no accusation or proof was ever brought to bear on the matter, and no charges were ever laid against him. So we move now to the 1st January, 1953, as cruel a winter’s night as there had been in Swaledale for many a year.

October 2010

The following morning I took my first walk around Kilnsgarthdale. I turned right outside the gate and carried on by the side of the beck for about a couple of hundred yards, where the dale seemed to end at a drystone wall. I saw when I got closer that it was actually two walls enclosing a track, with a stile for access on my side. The track ran over the hill south, towards Richmond, and in the other direction it seemed to come to an end by the two overgrown lime kilns on the slope. After this, the track was obscured by shrubbery and grass, the remains of the wall just a pile of stones. Beyond the second wall lay the woods.

I retraced my steps and crossed the little packhorse bridge outside Kilnsgate House, then walked up the opposite daleside to the lime kiln I could see from my bedroom window. I hadn’t had a really good look at it close up, and now I knew what it was I paused to do just that. It was certainly a creepy place, like a half-buried drystone dome or egg, its eye half obscured by weeds. I bent and peered in as deep as I could, but could see no trace of the grates over which the layers of limestone and coal were laid, or the ashes of the fire below. I scrambled around the back, higher up the hillside, and saw that the top was covered with sod. To think it had squatted there unused, useless, for over a hundred and fifty years. What comings and goings had that fixed eye seen during that time?

I walked on through the fields and the small plantation beyond, emerging finally on the long grass of Low Moor, the site of the old Richmond racecourse. Since finding out about the lime kiln, I had bought a book at the Castle Hill Bookshop and read up a bit on local history. Richmond racecourse had been in use from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, until horses had become too strong and fast for its tight turns. Now it was a vast tract of open moorland above the town, its bridle path used for occasional training gallops.

I passed the derelict stone grandstand, imagining what a fine building it must have been in its heyday, and paused to admire the view in all directions. It was a clear day, and I could see as far as the North Yorkshire Moors and Sutton Bank, rising from the plain of York, in the south-east, and more directly east, Darlington and the Teesside conurbation of Middlesbrough and Stockton beyond. The book said you could see as far as the east coast, but I couldn’t make out the shoreline.

I hadn’t seen a soul on my walk so far, but now I encountered a number of people walking their dogs. Most of them said hello and made some comment on the weather. When I remarked to one fellow what a lovely day it was, he agreed, but added with a typical Yorkshire nose for the downside that the sun had actually gone behind some clouds for a while not so long ago, and that it might well do so again soon.

I had been thinking about Grace Fox a lot since my talk with Ted Welland had provoked the sudden memory of my schooldays, and as I walked along across the grassy field that bright windy morning, shirtsleeves rolled up and jacket tied around my waist, I thought about her again. Had she trod this very same path? Had she enjoyed solitary walks, wondered about the magnificent ruin of the grandstand? What had she thought about? How had marriage to Ernest Fox become so unbearable to her that she saw murder as her only way out? Where was the edge, and what had pushed her over it? Perhaps, as Ted had hinted, times were so different then that a woman seeking to escape a suffocating marriage for a young lover might have no recourse but to murder. I doubted it, though. I couldn’t help but think that there had to be more to it than that. The fifties may have been a more sexually uptight era than our own, but it was hardly the Victorian age. Surely the war must have shaken morality up a bit?

As I walked on, mulling over all this, a question formed in my mind, and I couldn’t push it away: What if she hadn’t done it? Innocent people got hanged all the time. Look at Timothy Evans, who was executed for the murders John Christie committed at 10 Rillington Place, or Derek Bentley, who had murdered no one, had simply shouted the famous and ambiguous words ‘Let him have it, Chris’. As Ted had mentioned, there was even some doubt these days that Dr Crippen – such a monster that he’d been standing in Madame Tussaud’s for years – was innocent of his wife’s murder. So it was certainly within the bounds of possibility.

What if Grace Fox hadn’t done it? Why had no one considered that? Or had they? I realised how little I knew. Somehow, the idea of proving Grace’s innocence excited me. I quickened my pace as the breeze whipped up, hardly pausing now to stop and gaze at the view of the town spread out below me as I carried on down the hill past the Garden Village development at the old army barracks, surrounded by its high stone wall and narrow entrance. The hill was called Gallowgate, I noticed. Gallowgate. What irony! There was a lot I needed to know, and the first thing I had to find out was where to look.

One of the shops built into the south walls of what used to be Trinity Church, in the market square, was the second-hand bookshop Ted Welland had mentioned, Richmond Books, and it was there that I started my search. Unfortunately, the owner didn’t have a copy of the edition of Famous Trials that dealt with Grace’s case, though he said he would ask around and try to locate one for me. I left my address and telephone number with him. I thought of what Ted Welland had said of tracking down the newspaper accounts, too. They would be on microfiche somewhere. I decided to wait for the book and then see whether I felt I needed more detail.

The owner did, however, point me in the direction of Wilf Pelham, a retired local schoolteacher, who had been eighteen when Grace Fox was hanged, and apparently still had the memory of an elephant. At this time of day, the bookseller said, glancing at his watch, I was as likely to find Wilf propping up the bar in the Castle Tavern as anywhere else. A free pint would go a long way towards loosening Wilf’s tongue and sharpening his memory, he added.

There weren’t many people in the Castle Tavern at that time of day, and only one of them was standing at the bar. I stood beside him, and as the barman pulled my pint, I asked him whether he was Wilf Pelham.

‘And who wants to know?’ he replied.

I introduced myself and noticed him frown. His hair was greasy, he was overweight, and he had a three-day stubble, but his blue eyes were as lively and intelligent as they had probably always been.

‘So you’ll be the new owner of Kilnsgate House?’ he said, turning towards me and showing interest.

‘Word gets around.’

‘Especially if you’ve got nowt much else to do but listen to gossip,’ he said.

‘Can I buy you a drink and ask you a few questions?’ I offered.

‘I don’t see why not. Terry, give us another pint of bitter, will you, lad?’

While Terry poured the pint, I suggested that Wilf and I sit down. He didn’t object, and we found a quiet table away from the bar. He smacked his lips and sipped his beer. ‘Aren’t you something to do with Hollywood?’ he asked me.

I told him what I did for a living, and he seemed genuinely interested. He gave a little chuckle when I said I wrote the music nobody listened to. ‘That must be hard to take sometimes,’ he said. ‘No matter how much they pay you.’

‘You get used to it. But, yes… I’d like to make something more memorable.’

‘Why don’t you?’

‘I’m giving it a try.’

‘Good for you, lad. Just don’t be writing any of the atonal drivel or that cacophony that passes for music these days. I’m all for experiment and progress, but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.’

‘Where would you draw it?’

Wilf thought for a moment. ‘Schoenberg.’

‘Well, that’s pretty liberal,’ I said. ‘There are many would draw it a long time before him, and before Mahler, Bruckner or Wagner.’

‘Like I said, I don’t mind experimentation, up to a point, and I’m rather partial to a bit of Mahler once in a while. How do you do it, write film music?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you watch the film first?’

‘Good Lord, no. You start well before the film’s finished, usually towards the end of shooting. But it all depends, really, on what sort of relationship you have with the director.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Well, if you work often with one particular director, then you’ll be involved in the project right from the start.’

‘Like Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann?’

‘That’s right.’

My eyebrows must have shot up. Wilf grinned, with a twinkle in his eye. ‘I’m not as thick as I look, you know. I was a music teacher once upon a time, centuries ago.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ I said. I was starting to warm to Wilf Pelham. ‘Believe me, I knew you weren’t thick when you mentioned Schoenberg.’

‘Is there anyone you work with often? Forgive my ignorance, but I don’t follow the cinema as much as I used to do.’

‘That’s all right. Can’t say I blame you. There’s a director I’ve worked with a few times. He’s called David Packer.’ David was also my best friend and had been a rock during my period of deepest despair after Laura’s death.

‘I’ve heard the name,’ said Wilf. ‘But how do you know what it’s all about, then? Do you work from the script?’

‘Nope. Never even read them. You can shoot a script a million different ways. I need something visual, so I usually work from rough cuts and pray for inspiration.’

‘Sounds like a hell of a job. Anyway, I don’t suppose you came here to be interviewed. What is it you want to know? It’s about the Foxes who used to live at Kilnsgate, I should imagine, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. The man in the bookshop said you were around at the time of the trial and you might know something about what happened.’

‘Oh, I was around, all right. Ernest Fox was our family GP. Can’t say as I ever took to him, mind you.’

‘Why not?’

‘You have to understand, doctors back then, they were like bloody lords of the manor, and he played the part to the hilt. Ernest Fox, stuck-up pillock. Treated his patients like pieces of meat. Didn’t like the NHS. Never a kind word to say for Nye Bevan. Brought him a lower class of patient, you see.’ Wilf leaned forward and breathed some beery fumes in my direction. ‘Let me tell you, lad, I once went to him with an ingrown toenail turned septic – bastard games master at school made me play rugger in boots a size too small, and my feet have never been the same since – anyway, what he does, Dr Fox, is he takes a pair of scissors and he cuts the nail right down the side – blood and pus everywhere. Doesn’t bat an eyelid. No painkiller, no warning, no nothing. Then he gives me a dusting of boracic powder and a prescription for more and sends me home. Never once even looks me in the eye. Cold-hearted bastard. Lucky my mum was waiting in the surgery. I couldn’t have walked back home by myself, I was in such agony. I was hobbling around for weeks. But doctors were gods back then, lad. Got away with murder. Well, this time it was the doctor’s wife, only she didn’t get away with it, did she?’

‘Did you know her?’

‘Grace? Yes, I knew her. I was just a baby when she first arrived in town, but she was always around while I was growing up. I suppose I was about fifteen or so before I first talked to her. Believe it or not, I was quite the classical music buff, even back then, in the late forties and early fifties, and Grace was a member of all the local musical societies. I used to see her at the subscription concerts in the King’s Arms assembly rooms. Liszt played there once, you know. Before my time, of course. We were more likely to get Phyllis Sellick. Anyway, I also heard Grace sing at Operatic Society productions, and I heard her play piano a couple of times at Amateur Music Society evenings. I even worked with her when she was music director for the Richmond High School’s Dido and Aeneas. That’d be 1949, a few years before… well, you know. Did you know that Purcell wrote that for a girls’ school? I just helped with the sets, mind, a bit of carpentry, but once I heard Grace sing “When I am laid in earth”, to show Wendy Flintoff, who was playing Dido and who was my girlfriend at the time, how it should be sung. I’ll never forget it. You know the song, I suppose?’

‘Indeed I do.’

‘I remember as if it were yesterday. The smell of sawdust and paint, Grace standing by the piano, her eyes closed, and that voice pouring out. I don’t think I breathed throughout the whole song. Made me tingle all over, especially when she got to the “Remember me, remember me” bit. I could never listen to it again after, you know, without thinking of her. She was very good. Even then, she sounded as if she understood it. The feeling. I don’t know.’ Wilf took a long swig of beer. ‘She was a fine figure of a woman. Always very stylish, I remember – had her hair done at the Georgian House, bought her clothes in Harrogate. She had the walk, too, the confidence, elegance. She reminded me a bit of Audrey Hepburn or Elizabeth Taylor. One of those film stars, anyway. A lot of the women’s fashion back then put an emphasis on a narrow waist, and Grace Fox had the waist to carry it off. But she had no side to her. She wasn’t stuck up or cruel like her husband. I think all us lads – I was eighteen at the time it all happened – were secretly in love with her, and none of us could imagine why she’d married him. He was twenty years older than she was, to start with.’

‘Lots of men marry younger women.’

‘Oh, aye, I know that. My Valerie was ten years younger than me. And I’m not criticising it, not as a practice, that is. It’s just that when you’re eighteen it seems… well, such a waste. Especially when it’s a jumped-up arrogant wanker like Ernest Fox.’

I laughed. ‘Jealousy, then? But Grace must have been how old, when it all happened?’

‘Forty, or thereabouts, I reckon. But, as I said, she was a fine figure of a woman, any adolescent boy’s wet dream.’

‘Did you know much about their life together?’

‘No. Except what came out at the trial. Kilnsgate House suited Dr Fox’s lord of the manor status, he thought. Somewhere to look down on us all from. Could have got up to all sorts out there, for all I know, and nobody would have been any the wiser.’

‘Like what?’

‘It was just a figure of speech.’

‘Were there any rumours?’

‘There are always rumours. There’ll be a few about you soon enough, you wait and see.’

‘Like what?’

‘Orgies, dancing naked in the woods, black masses, sacrificing virgins…’ He laughed and showed yellowing, crooked teeth.

‘Were there any rumours like that about the Foxes?’

‘I’m pulling your leg, lad. No, there weren’t. Not that I heard.’

‘Did it surprise you when Grace was charged with murder?’

‘I should say so. Shocked the whole town. See, it had been more than a week since he died, in the storm, like. First they couldn’t get to Kilnsgate House to bring out the body because the snow had drifted so high, then the first post-mortem turned up nothing unusual. Seemed he’d simply died of a heart attack. They’d had some friends over for dinner the night it happened, and young Hetty Larkin, the cook and maidservant, was there, too, and they all said Dr Fox took poorly at the dinner table. Terrible indigestion. He took a powder and went to bed early. It was during the night that it happened. They all got stranded there, of course, and the telephone wires were down. Trapped in a big old house with a dead body. Very Agatha Christie. Must have been pretty gruesome.’

‘Was this Hetty Larkin a regular maidservant?’

‘Yes. She lived up Ravensworth way. Used to bicycle back and forth. Funny sort of lass, as I remember. Not quite all there, if you follow my drift. Worked at Kilnsgate House for quite a long time, too. I think she was there right from the start, when they came, before the war. Lost her brother at the D-Day landings, poor cow. She used to stop over sometimes, too, if they had a fancy dinner or something, like. The Foxes had a room set aside for her. The rest of the time she’d come for the day and take care of the washing and cooking and such. That night she had no choice. She had to stop.’

‘What became of her?’

‘She died years ago, poor lass. Car accident, fog on the A66. Only in her forties, she was. Not much older than Grace herself was when she died.’

‘What made the police suspect Grace in the first place?’

‘They didn’t. Not at first. It was because of the boyfriend. Sam Porter. He was only nineteen, nearly the same age as me, lucky bastard.’

‘So Grace had been seeing this Porter for some time?’

‘Apparently they’d been having secret trysts going on for six months or more by then. Somebody talked.’

‘Who?’

‘Landlady of a guest house in Leyburn. She said she’d rented them a room once. According to Sam Porter, she approached him and demanded money to keep quiet. Well, Sam had no money, had he, and he’d got too much pride to go to Grace Fox and ask her for any, I’ll give him that, so he told the woman to sod off. Which she did. Right to the police. That’s partly what got Sam off the hook, you see – not that he was charged, but you know what I mean. If he’d thought there was something to worry about, he’d have got Grace to pay her the money, wouldn’t he? Stands to reason. She could afford it. It was because he told the woman to stuff it that the police got suspicious. I mean, when they found out Grace had a much younger lover, they started to dig a bit more deeply.’

‘You sound as if you knew Sam Porter.’

‘I did. Like I said, we were about the same age. He was part of the crowd sometimes. We’d drink in the pubs occasionally. You know what kids are like. But he was always on the fringes. The quiet one. The rebel. Bit of an innocent, really. Always had to be just a little different.’

‘What did he do? I heard he was an artist or a musician, and a bit of a ne’er-do-well.’

Wilf raised his eyebrows. ‘“Ne’er-do-well?” I wouldn’t exactly describe Sam Porter that way. He might not have been rich or titled or anything, but he worked hard, and he had talent. He was an artist. That’s why he had no money. But he was no scrounger. He made a living, did odd jobs around town, a bit of drystone wall work, carpentry and the like. Lived in a small flat off the market square. He was pretty good with cars and mechanical stuff, too. I think that’s how he first met Grace, when her motorbike went on the fritz. He also did a bit of painting and decorating on the side. Jack of all trades, really. Hardly a ne’er-do-well.’

‘Grace rode a motorcycle?’

‘Learned in the war, apparently. Sometimes you’d think she had a death wish, the speed she went tearing up and down those country lanes.’

‘Was Porter any good as an artist?’

‘Aye. Good enough to make a decent living in addition to his odd jobs. Back then he did a nice line in local watercolour landscapes for the tourists, but he got more abstract as time went on.’

‘What was the general consensus about Grace?’

Wilf rattled his glass on the table. I noticed it was empty. Mine was, too, but I had been so busy listening that I hadn’t really been paying attention. I went to the bar and bought another two pints.

‘The general consensus?’ he echoed when I got back.

‘Yes. What did people think about her?’

‘Aye, I know what it means. I’m just trying to gather the pieces together. She was liked, well liked. Maybe envied a bit by some of the townswomen. They were jealous of her beauty and status. And your uppity moral types might have looked down on her. But there was a tenderness about her – she’d been a nurse during the war, you know – and she was always a bit of a mystery to everyone. Reserved. Sad, even. But, as I said earlier, there was a general feeling of shock. You could sense it ripple through the market square the day the verdict came down. Of course, when she was first accused of the crime, there were a few who just tut-tutted as if they’d always suspected something like that would happen, but most of us were stunned even then.’

‘Did anyone believe she hadn’t done it?’

‘I dare say some did, yes. But as the trial went on and the evidence mounted up, they mostly kept their own counsel. I reckon in the end almost everyone believed she’d done it, maybe when her mind was unbalanced or something, but whether they thought she deserved hanging for it was another matter.’

‘And you?’

He gazed at me with his bright eyes. ‘I’ve never been a fan of state-sanctioned murder, let’s just put it that way.’

I nodded. I never had, either, and until recently I’d lived in a state where the death penalty thrived and men languished on death row for years.

‘Mind if I ask you a question?’ Wilf said.

‘Not at all.’

‘Why are you digging all this up now? Why are you interested in Grace Fox?’

I could only shake my head. ‘I don’t really know, Wilf. It’s just… living in the house, finding out… I feel some sort of connection. There’s a painting of her in the hall, with her husband and child. She looks sad, lost. She…’ I was about to tell Wilf that Grace reminded me a bit of my late wife Laura, but I stopped myself. No need to go there. ‘I don’t really know what fascinates me about it all,’ I went on, ‘except it’s not every day you buy a house that belonged to a murderess. Why do you ask?’

‘It’s been a long time since anyone’s asked about the Foxes, that’s all.’

‘Is there anything else you can remember?’

‘Not offhand.’

‘What about her son? There’s a young boy in the portrait. What became of him?’

‘Young Randolph? He went off to live with an aunt and uncle down south after the execution, so I recollect. Grace’s younger sister Felicity. She’d married, but they had no children of their own. Last thing I heard he’d taken their name and the whole lot of them had emigrated to Australia.’

‘When would this have been?’

‘Late fifties. Ten-pound Poms.’

‘So this Randolph could still be alive?’

‘Easily. He’d only be in his sixties by now. They say sixty’s the new forty these days. I wouldn’t know. I’m seventy-seven, myself. He was only a little kid at the time, and he spent most of the trial with his Aunt Felicity and her husband.’

‘Do you know Felicity’s married name?’

‘Sorry. I never met her.’

‘Was Randolph in the house on the night it happened?’

‘Yes. He was in bed, apparently. I shouldn’t imagine the police questioned him very thoroughly, but it seems he was asleep and didn’t hear or see a thing.’ He swigged some more beer. ‘I’ll tell you someone who might know something, though.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Sam Porter.’

‘Grace’s lover? He’s still alive?’

‘Alive and living in Paris.’

‘Under the same name?’

‘Yes.’

‘How do you know?’

Wilf tapped the side of his nose. ‘I still keep an eye on the papers, and he sells a painting or two every now and then. It’s still considered news in the Sunday Times arts section.’