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
