walking. The plan was to stay at Kilnsgate House that night, to go there after dark, but the heavens opened and we got caught in Leyburn after the last bus had gone. We debated what to do and decided in the end to stop the night at a guest house as nobody was expecting Grace at Kilnsgate anyway. Just somewhere we picked at random, out of the way, we thought. Enter Mrs bloody Compton. I thought I recognised her from a job I’d done in Richmond, some wall repairs, but Grace said I was imagining things. It was a dreadful place. Cold, dour, plain, uncomfortable. Threadbare carpets. Inadequate blankets. Bibles and religious pamphlets all over the place. Biblical quotes in needlework framed on the walls. Methodist. All work and no play. It gave me the bloody creeps. She wasn’t going to let us stay at first. Didn’t believe we were married. So I paid over the odds. That made it all right. Damn foolish of us, when you think back on it. Leyburn was far too close to home. But we didn’t have a lot of choice, and who knew that Ernest Fox was going to die in a little over a month’s time? Oh, maybe I should have just gone to Grace and asked her for the money to pay the old witch off. It wasn’t that much. Grace would have given it me, if it meant peace for us.’
‘She would only have come back for more,’ I said. ‘Blackmailers usually do.’
Sam rubbed his forehead. ‘I suppose so. It was just the damn nerve of the woman that riled me. And the hypocrisy. I’m afraid I lost my temper, and that really set her against us. She even had the gall to make up things she said she’d overheard. Outright lies.’
‘What were they?’
‘The lies she repeated in court. That she’d overheard Grace whispering about getting rid of Ernest for his money, poisoning him, then the two of us running off together.’
‘And you never did talk like that, not even in private?’
‘Never. We may have fantasised about what life would be like if we were free, able to be together always. Grace may even have imagined out loud how it would be if Ernest were dead and we could go away together. Paris. Rome. Perhaps we even said we’d be happy to be rid of him. But nobody ever mentioned poison or killing him. Grace and I may have both had a touch of the bohemian in us, and Lord knows we were flying in the face of conventional morality, but we had our heads screwed on the right way, and we weren’t killers. Nor were we stupid enough to think that we could murder Ernest and get away with it. We never even thought about it. The best we could hope for was that he would tire of Grace and kick her out, but he enjoyed tormenting and controlling her too much.’
‘Do you think that’s why she killed him?’
Sam gave me a stern, questioning glance. ‘What makes you think she killed him?’ he asked.
I was dumbstruck for a second, and it must have showed. The question of Grace’s guilt was one I had been deliberately avoiding. Luckily, at that moment the waiter delivered our starters, along with the Sancerre, which he opened, let Sam taste, then poured. He then put the bottle in an ice bucket on a stand beside the table, covered it with a white linen napkin and left.
‘I’m trying to keep an open mind,’ I said in response to Sam’s question, once we had sampled our starters and praised them to the skies. Enough people had already accused me of setting out to prove Grace’s innocence that I was trying to sound as neutral as I possibly could. I should have known that, if anyone would, Sam Porter would certainly believe her to be so.
Sam pointed his fork at me. ‘Good. So let me tell you something before we go any farther. Neither Grace nor I ever once spoke or dreamed of murdering Ernest Fox. I mean, we just weren’t killers. It’s not something we ever discussed or considered. I know everyone says it was my response to the interfering old landlady that got me off, showed I wasn’t guilty, that if I’d had anything to hide I wouldn’t have been so foolish as to send her away with a flea in her ear – that I’d have paid her off or murdered her, too.’
‘Did you tell the police that she had come to blackmail you?’
‘Of course I did.’
‘And what did they do?’
‘They laughed in my face.’
‘What did they think of your role in general?’
‘They thought I was involved, of course. Especially after the other woman came forward. Some of them knew me, and they were already a bit dubious about the farmer’s boy who’d left the farm to become an artist and made his living patching up walls and fences and fixing broken-down cars or motorbikes. Questioned me for hours. Beat me about a bit. That bastard Dettering and his cronies. But they’d no evidence.’
‘What other woman?’
‘Landlady of a pub in Barnard Castle said she’d overheard us talking about “getting rid” of somebody.’
‘It wasn’t true?’
‘Of course it bloody wasn’t true. We were nowhere near Barnard Castle that day. We were in Leyburn, all right, but we never set foot in Barnard Castle. Oh, she was discredited before it went to trial as just an attention- seeker – apparently she’d done that kind of thing before – but the damage was done by then as far as the police were concerned. Besides, they were coming out of the woodwork by then.’
‘Who were?’
‘The town gossips, rumour-mongers. People who said they’d seen us together or overheard us plotting. People wanting to get in the limelight. People who said they’d seen other men coming and going from Kilnsgate House when Dr Fox was out. The Compton woman started it, spreading poison to anyone would listen. In chapel, at Bible class, wherever the moral lanterns burned brightly. Everything Grace had said and done over the past six months or more came under scrutiny. And who among us could stand that? They twisted and misinterpreted everything she had said and done. If the piano tuner had been to Kilnsgate, for example, there would be someone to say she saw a man coming out of Grace’s house when she was supposed to be alone there. It was all rubbish, of course, and mostly easy to shoot down, but it did do some damage. Someone saw her down on Castle Walk talking to a young man in uniform a few days before the murder, and that became a big talking point for the gossips, then someone else thought she lingered too long talking to a young shopkeeper a day or so later. It was ridiculous. They tried to make a big thing out of all that, tried to make out she was a tart and I was only one of her many conquests.’
‘Who said this?’
‘The townsfolk. The police.’
‘Who was the young man in uniform? Who were they talking about? Do you know?’
‘No idea. I didn’t see Grace after the middle of December. Randolph was home from school, and she was busy with Christmas. I spent most of the time until Christmas Eve staying with my uncle in Leeds while I was fixing up a few local bangers to make enough money to buy presents. Then I went up to the farm for the holidays. I could never find enough work in Richmond to keep me in paint and canvas.’
‘Did Grace’s husband know about the affair?’
‘If he did, he never said anything to her, or she never said anything to me.’
‘I see.’ I paused for a moment to let everything he had said sink in. ‘But the police didn’t charge you with anything, even after all this?’
‘No. They couldn’t prove anything. How could they? They had nothing but innuendo. I may have had as strong a motive as Grace in their eyes, but I had neither the means nor the opportunity. I was snowed in up at the farm with my mum and dad when the murder happened. The best they could have got me on was conspiracy, and that would have been pushing it.’
‘Did you testify to that in court?’
‘I didn’t get to testify. I mean, not to say what I really wanted. I was a witness for the prosecution. What do they call that on Perry Mason? A hostile witness? Adverse, I think they said. I don’t remember. But if they thought I was going to help them hang Grace they had another thought coming.’
‘What did you tell them?’
‘The truth, whenever I could get a word in. But all the prosecutor wanted to know about was my affair with Grace, my young age, how could we, where did we do it, that sort of thing. To establish her motive, since they hadn’t been able to charge me. It was a morality show. No matter what I said, the jury was against me. If I tried to defend Grace, they just assumed I was lying to get her off because I loved her. Admirable, but not quite good enough. But no matter what the bastard inferred, or however much he bullied me, I wouldn’t speak out against Grace, so in the end they gave up on me. You know, he even suggested that I’d been very clever in arranging things so that Grace took all the blame, that I knew my denial of the old woman’s demands would result in the investigation into Grace’s actions and, subsequently, in her arrest. I was basically told I was lucky not to be on trial
