gentle or give me anything to ease the pain. It was almost as if he enjoyed it.’
‘Causing pain?’
‘Yes. But that’s probably being fanciful, in retrospect. I didn’t know so much at the time.’
‘What didn’t you know?’
‘He never hit me or anything, if that’s what you mean.’
‘And you liked Grace?’
‘I adored her.’ He paused to remember for a moment, then frowned. ‘I often wonder what became of her. Do you know?’
I stared at him, open mouthed. ‘You mean, you don’t… you haven’t…?’
‘What? No. Nothing. I lost touch completely after… oh, it must have been near Christmas 1952, just before I got sent to Kenya. I never went back. Never heard anything again. You tend to lose touch with the rest of the world out here.’
I could see the waves crashing on the rocks way below through his picture window, the rolling hills stretching all along the bay. How was I going to play this? There was no way I could avoid giving Billy an unpleasant shock. I studied him closely and decided that he was the kind who took life straight up, as it came at him. He had to be to survive the kind of life he’d lived. But I still just couldn’t simply blurt it out. ‘Maybe I will have that drink, after all, if you don’t mind?’
He gave me a knowing smile. ‘Of course. What’ll it be?’
‘Red wine, if you have any.’
He went over to the cocktail cabinet and poured me a glass from a decanter. It was silky smooth and had an aroma of blackcurrant, and a hint of tobacco. ‘I take it you have something difficult to tell me, or you wouldn’t be procrastinating in this way,’ he said, tilting his head to one side, bird-like.
‘Am I so transparent?’
‘I’ve had a lot of practice.’
‘Grace Fox died in April 1953,’ I said.
‘So soon,’ he whispered. ‘So young. That wasn’t long after I saw her. She seemed fit and well enough. How did it happen? Accident?’
Now came the hard part. I took a swallow of wine. When I was sure it had all gone down the right way, I said, ‘She was hanged for poisoning her husband.’
Billy’s eyes opened wide in astonishment. ‘No. She can’t have…’
I leaned forward. ‘I’ve been thinking the same thing,’ I hurried on. ‘That she didn’t do it. Can’t have done it. But I’m not so sure now. It could have been natural causes, but we’ll never know that for certain one way or the other. I think she might have done it, but not for the reasons everyone assumed, not for reasons that got her hanged, and if they’d known the truth they might have gone a bit easier on her. That’s really why I came to see you. I think you can help me shed some light on it.’
‘I can’t believe…’ Billy just shook his head. ‘She just couldn’t have.’
‘You visited her in Richmond between Christmas and the new year in late 1952, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. I was finishing my training at Catterick. I found her telephone number and she agreed to meet me. We went for a walk around the castle walls. It was a lovely day for the time of year, I remember.’
‘You were seen together by several people. It came out in the police investigation, though it was never mentioned at her trial.’
Billy frowned. ‘Why would it be? I mean, I don’t understand.’
‘As evidence that she was promiscuous, a loose woman. That’s what the prosecution worked so hard to prove. She had a lover, a young artist. They said that was why she plotted to kill her husband.’
‘I find that hard to believe,’ Billy said. ‘But the alternative is… surely it can’t have been because of me?’
‘I think it might have been,’ I said. It was time to take the plunge. ‘I know it must be difficult for you to talk about it, but I think you arranged to meet Grace that day to tell her that Ernest Fox had abused you while you were an evacuee at Kilnsgate House, didn’t you? Maybe you’d only just remembered, or maybe it had been bothering you for a while, and this was your opportunity to unload the burden before you went off to war. The mind plays strange tricks. But I think when you told her, she believed you. She must have had her own suspicions by then, noticed little things, and I think she also did it partly to protect her own son. He was seven at the time, your age when you were there in 1939. People didn’t talk about those sorts of things back then. Nobody would have believed her, anyway. She couldn’t live with it, with him and what he’d done, what he was no doubt going to do again, so she poisoned him.’
Billy sat staring at me open mouthed. He was amazed, I supposed, that somebody had worked it out after all these years. I drank the last of the wine, and he reached for his soda. His hand was trembling slightly. The silence stretched until he finally said, ‘That’s a very interesting theory, Mr Lowndes, very interesting indeed, but I have to tell you that it’s nothing more than a load of bollocks. Quite frankly, you’re not much of a detective. You’re so far off target they’d have to send out a search party for the truth.’
23
Extract from the journal of Grace Elizabeth Fox (ed. Louise King), July, 1944. Normandy
Tuesday, 4th July, 1944 We have moved to a stretch of apple orchard between Caen and Bayeux that is known as Harley Street because of the concentration of hospitals and medical staff. The accommodation is not much better than before, though, and we are still in tents. With all the confusion of the move, I did not see Lt. Maddox for two days after the incident at the chateau, though I puzzled and puzzled about what could have possibly been going on there. Dorothy and I discussed it, too, and we came to the conclusion that poison of some kind – possibly this ‘sarin’ – had been used on those poor men. There had been plenty of rumours of biological warfare, and we still carry gas masks, though fortunately we have not had cause to use them. Anyway, I was determined to find out what Lt. Maddox knows. He is a good doctor, and something of an intellectual, always with his nose in a book, if he isn’t repairing some poor boy’s spleen or sewing up a chest cavity. I found him leaning against a tree smoking his pipe beside his tent, and when he saw me, he stiffened and asked me what I wanted. I said I would like him to tell me what his thoughts were about the other day. He did not want to talk about it at first, but I could tell that he had been dwelling on the incident, just as Dorothy and I had been. He took me by the arm and led me away from the tent, towards the trees. Normally I would have been wary of such an action, but I knew that he simply wanted to avoid being overheard. He did not know who Meers was, he said, but suspected he was connected with Porton Down. When I asked what that was, he told me it was a top secret military establishment in Wiltshire where they do experiments with chemical and biological weapons. So at least part of what Dorothy and I had worked out was true, I thought. Lt. Maddox told me that the chateau had clearly been used for such experiments. Sarin and tabun, he told me, were nerve agents that the Germans had developed but had not used yet. Meers was clearly looking for evidence of any further experiments and inventions, or refinements they might have come up with more recently. When I asked if this was because he wanted to put a stop to it or find an antidote, Lt. Maddox just stared at me, then laughed harshly. He said that was very unlikely. Far more likely, he said, was that Meers wanted as much information as he could get in order to duplicate the experiments at Porton Down, to develop something just as powerful, or more so, to be used against the Germans. We wanted the same capabilities as they had. Then he told me that it would be best if I said nothing more about this business to anyone, and walked off, leaving a trail of sweet pipe smoke to vanish in the night air.
Sunday, 23rd July, 1944 After Caen fell two weeks ago, we started to get many more German casualties. Most of the ordinary soldiers are glad that the war seems almost over, and happy to be still alive as POWs. We have enough problems, though, that we have had to increase the number of armed guards and sentries around the hospital. The SS officers are especially difficult. They are still devoted to Hitler and cannot accept the possibility of a German defeat. Then there is the Hitler Youth. Because the German army is running short of able-bodied men, so Major Tanner explained to me, it has drafted in a lot of old men and boys to make up the numbers. The old men are quite passive and glad to be cared for, but the boys can be a nuisance. We try to treat them the same as everyone else, and most of the time we succeed, but sometimes our patience wears exceedingly thin. There was one boy called Dieter who arrived about two days ago. He had been shot in the upper thigh, had lost a lot of blood from the
