forgotten by posterity. I’m afraid she got short shrift in the famous murderers department.’ He gave a nervous laugh.
‘Do you know if there’s a written account?’
‘I do believe it was written up in Famous Trials. You might be able to find a copy in a second-hand bookshop somewhere. One of those old green-covered Penguins that turn to dust when you open them. Try that second-hand place in the market square. Richmond Books. I’d imagine it would be long out of print by now. There’d be newspaper accounts, too, somewhere.’
‘You mentioned Armley Gaol a while back. I used to live near there. Do you remember what this woman’s name was?’
‘Yes. She was called Fox. Grace Fox.’
I did know about Grace Fox. Of course I knew about her. I’d just pushed her name to the back of my mind, like the rest of the country. Still, I had an excuse. Thirty-five years of Hollywood murders will do that for you. But as soon as Ted Welland told me where she had been hanged, I remembered, and I felt an odd surge of excitement, of connection.
You see, in a strange, oblique sort of way, I was there. I was a part of it. Not when it happened, of course. I was only three then. But before Kilnsgate House, before this return to England, even before Hollywood, Grace Fox was already a part of my personal mythology.
My old junior school, Castleton, which I attended between the years of 1958 and 1961, stood right next to Armley Gaol, which towered over us like an old medieval fortress. One of its rough stone walls also formed the wall of our playground. We played cricket against it, chalked wickets on it, bounced tennis balls off it, kicked footballs against it. I even, on one occasion, smashed the school bully’s head on it and made him bleed and run crying to the teacher.
We used to imagine murderers escaping, climbing down knotted ropes into the playground and running amok, foaming at the mouth. But the wall also stood as a warning: if we didn’t behave ourselves, the headmaster told us at the beginning of each term, we would end up behind it, and we could only imagine what sort of world lay waiting there.
They used to hang people in Armley Gaol, and one of the people they hanged there was Grace Fox.
I glanced at my watch. Only 9.30 p.m. It would be an hour later in Angouleme, where my brother Graham lived, but I was certain he would still be awake. Graham always was a night person. Sure enough, he answered the phone on the fourth ring.
‘ Allo? ’
‘Graham? It’s me. Chris.’
‘Chris! How are you, little brother? It’s been a long time.’
It was true that Graham and I had not been in touch as often as we should have been over the years, but we had the kind of familiar closeness that can easily survive a little time and distance. Laura and I had spent some very happy vacations at his farmhouse, enjoyed the local food and wine with him and his wife Siobhan, and they had visited us in LA. The last time I had seen them was at Laura’s funeral eleven months ago, and I had noticed how old and tired Graham was looking. He had been pleased to hear that I was moving back to England.
‘I’m well,’ I said. ‘Settling in. And Siobhan?’
‘Thriving. Heard from Mother lately?’
‘I dropped by to see her a couple of weeks ago. She’s doing fine.’
‘Excellent. Something I can do for you?’
‘I want to pick your brains, your memory.’
‘You’re welcome to what’s left of it. Some days I can’t even remember what I had for breakfast by lunchtime.’
‘It’s longer ago than breakfast.’
‘There’s a much better chance, then. Fire away.’
‘Grace Fox.’
‘Grace Fox. Now, there’s a blast from the past. What do you want to know about her for?’
I explained about looking into the history of Kilnsgate House and finding out there was a murder there. Then Grace Fox’s name came up. Graham listened, and when I had finished there was a brief silence. I could hear his breathing and some French voices in the background. It sounded like a news programme. Television or radio.
‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘I can see why you’d be interested.’
‘You were there that day, weren’t you, at school?’
‘I was. I was ten at the time.’
‘Do you remember it?’
‘Like yesterday. Better. I told you all about it. Scared the pants off you. Don’t you remember?’
‘Why would I? If you were ten, I was only three. Humour me. Tell me again.’
Graham sighed. ‘Word had got around, of course. Hanging a woman was rare then, you see, and Grace Fox was what the redtops today would call quite a “stunna”. She was a very beautiful woman. Long dark wavy hair, full lips, pale skin, lovely figure. Of course, that didn’t mean a great deal to me at the age of ten. I was far too caught up in cricket and football to be very concerned about female pulchritude. But boys will be boys. We knew even by then that there was some mysterious thing about women’s bodies we were supposed to desire, even if we’d rather collect frogspawn or keep toads in a jar. It was all a little vague and smutty. There was even a rhyme, I remember, that we used to chant in the playground. A bit of doggerel.’ Graham cleared his throat and recited: ‘Gracie Fox, poor Gracie Fox They stretched her neck And put her in a box, Stretched her neck And put her in a box. And now the worms eat Gracie Fox.’
‘Charming,’ I said.
‘Children can be very cruel and insensitive. There was a lot of anticipation. It was April, I remember, not long after Easter, and a lovely morning. Breath of spring in the air. I walked to school with Kev and Barry, as usual, and we were excited, even a bit scared. We knew something terrible was going to happen that morning. It had been in all the papers, and we’d heard our parents talking about it.’
‘When did you find out?’
‘We were in morning assembly, standing in silence. Old Masterson had just walked on the stage to begin. It would have been nine o’clock, just after, and we heard the bell toll. That’s when we knew it had happened, that she was dead. Terrible fast was that Pierrepoint.’ Graham paused, then went on, ‘I can still remember the silence after the bell had tolled, as if all the air was sucked out of the room. And you could hear the fading reverberations, though I’m sure that was just fanciful on my part. I had a tight feeling in my chest. Even old Masterson seemed a bit choked. Then we sang “To Be a Pilgrim”. I won’t forget that morning in a hurry.’
I felt myself give a little shiver as he told me. We moved on to talk of other things, and I promised to get over to see him and Siobhan before Christmas. Finally, I hung up the phone and made myself a cup of tea. When it was ready, I took it into the living room, where I put some logs on the fire, set my iPod in the speaker dock to Alfred Brendel’s The Farewell Concerts and sat down to think about everything I’d heard that night.
In a very strange and roundabout way, through my older brother, I had become close to Grace Fox without even knowing what she looked like. Now I stood in the vestibule before the painting and realised that it must be Grace and her family. She wore a bolero jacket with puffed shoulders over a silk blouse and a long skirt, her long wavy hair done in a Veronica Lake style, with a deep side parting. She was smiling with her mouth, but her eyes looked faraway, her expression distracted. In an odd way, I was surprised to find, she reminded me of Laura, though Laura had been a natural blonde. It was something about the lips and the eyes. The man, her husband Ernest, I assumed, stood erect, hands clasped in front, his chest puffed out, his suit and waistcoat tight, straining at their buttons, looking very much like the proud owner of the entire scene. He was rather portly, with a ruddy complexion and a bristly moustache. The child between them seemed uncomfortable in his Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit.
I walked through to the living room and sat in my armchair. I must have remembered Grace somewhere deep in my mind, I realised, because when I grew up and cast aside childish things, such as football, cricket and frogspawn, for the charms, wiles and torments of the opposite sex, the mysteries of which Graham had spoken, she was still there, somewhere in the vaults of my memory, in a way that only a lovesick teenager addled with romance and chivalry and a vague grasp of Keats can understand. The idea of wantonly destroying such beauty, any beauty, at the end of a rope was unthinkable to me, no matter what crime she had committed.
