wanted.’
‘But I set things in motion.’
‘Ernest himself did that with all the help he gave them over the years. No doubt he invited them to commandeer Kilnsgate House for a while during the war, too, and Grace may have known something about that. Or maybe it started earlier. He treated mustard gas victims in the first war. Who knows? It doesn’t really matter. One way or another, you were only a catalyst. I’d guess Grace already had her suspicions that something wasn’t quite right. She wasn’t stupid. And she’d have found out soon enough if they had gone to Salisbury.’
As it happened, I didn’t have to leave my car and stay in Simon’s Town. After a couple of hours’ more conversation and a cup or two more of Billy’s strong coffee, I felt that I was perfectly fit to drive. I wanted to get away, needed to get back to the anonymous grandeur of the Cape Grace and think.
I was hungry, but I went up to my room first to shower and change. I’d caught enough heat to bring me out in a sweat, despite all the air-conditioning, and after my walk down by the sea earlier, I felt as if I still had sand in my hair. There were no phone messages waiting for me and no one I wanted to call right now. All I had was an email from Heather saying she missed me. I fired off a quick reply telling her all was well, that I had found Billy and would tell her everything when I got back.
After I had dried myself off, I put on my bathrobe and stood on the balcony for a while in the warm evening air looking out over the harbour, the city centre lights, the reflections rippling in the water, and the massed shapes of Signal Hill and Table Mountain against the darkening, crimson-streaked sky. The expensive boats in the marina creaked as they bobbed up and down, and their cables rattled and rang. Seagulls squealed as they searched for shoals of fish. I went back inside, put on some fresh clothes and took the elevator down to the hotel dining room.
My head was still in a whirl from my talk with Billy, my emotions unsettled, so I ordered a Beefeater martini, straight up, with olives, and picked a bottle of Glen Carlou estate red blend to drink later with dinner. If I didn’t finish it, I could take the rest of the bottle up to my room and get quietly pissed on the balcony. I wasn’t going anywhere tonight. I ordered fresh oysters to start and springbok loin for my main.
The restaurant was hushed and dim. I didn’t have much of a view, only the other diners and a mural of Signal Hill on the wall, but that was fine with me. I was in a mood for thinking, for contemplation, not for sightseeing. After the shock of Billy Strang’s tale, I had a lot of broken pieces to rearrange into some sort of new order. Perhaps I had been wrong about Grace’s innocence, but I was convinced that the court had been wrong about her motives. It might not have mattered to them, had they even known. They could well have taken the establishment’s side against Grace and treated her more like some sort of foreign agitator than the humanitarian she was. I thought that perhaps if they had known her real reasons, though, and learned something of what she had experienced during the war, the judge, at least, might have shown some mercy.
I tried to picture that final argument in my mind’s eye, what was said. Kilnsgate on a wintry day, with the wind howling in the chimney and sparks spitting from the fire, snowflakes slithering down the windows as they melted. There was a job offer at a hospital near Salisbury, Ernest had said. He had decided to take it, and that was that. After her talk with Billy, Grace must have told Ernest that she knew the truth about this job, and they weren’t going anywhere. Ernest had probably told her to mind her own business and not pry into his affairs. Perhaps he knew about Sam and taunted her about having to leave her lover, whether she liked it or not. Perhaps he threatened her, hit her, even. But that wasn’t her motive. Ernest was dragging her to the monsters, to the dark side, whether he saw it that way or not.
Of course, Grace wouldn’t have to do the work he was going to do, but how could she stand at his side and be his loyal wife when she knew what he was doing? And who would their friends be? Others who did the same work, no doubt, having nice dinner parties and pretending all was well while they injected people with anthrax and sprayed them with VX nerve agent and tried to concoct even more gruesome ways of debilitating and disposing of their fellow men. Never admitting what they really did, that they were seeking methods of mass murder. A life of lies, evasions. How could she let him do it after all she had been through in South-East Asia, seen at the chateau in Normandy, after the things Billy had told her about? Perhaps she already suspected that her husband was a monster because of his coldness, his absences, his research, his secret war work? Perhaps she knew it had been building up to something like this. Maybe people had even told her what had gone on at Kilnsgate during the war, while she was in Singapore. All I knew was that what had seemed to me earlier to be an interesting side street off the main route – Kilnsgate’s war history, the foot-and-mouth outbreak, Nat Bunting’s disappearance – had now become the main route. After the letter and Grace’s talk with Billy, she had reached a watershed. She couldn’t go on any longer the way things were, whether she had harboured earlier suspicions or not. Now she knew. Things had reached breaking point. She had to do something.
Ernest wouldn’t have listened to her. He would have dismissed her as a foolish romantic woman, told her she didn’t understand the necessities of modern life, that sometimes you had to do things that were unpleasant. For your country. For a way of life you believe in. He would have said she was an idealist, a dreamer. Well, perhaps she was, she argued back, but it was better than being a monster. Ernest had scolded her for taking the letter. Grace had realised that all her protests were falling on deaf ears, and in the meantime, Billy went off to fight the Mau Mau, unaware of the storm he had unleashed back at Kilnsgate.
My main course arrived shortly after I had finished the half-dozen excellent Namibian oysters, the springbok perfectly pink and tender to the knife. I poured a glass of red and started to eat, gazing around. A young couple, on their honeymoon by the looks of them, sat to my left. Opposite was an elderly colonial type, complete with brick-red complexion and white handlebar moustache, who was probably complaining to his stout wife about the natives. One rather noisy group was celebrating a birthday or anniversary at the far end, and the only other person within my field of vision was another lone diner, like myself, reading a book on his iPad.
Perhaps Grace had poisoned her husband. I had to accept that I may have been wrong about that. I was certainly way off beam with my paedophile theory. Everything she had experienced and had been told to forget had no doubt burst back into her consciousness after her talk with Billy and her discovery of the letter offering a job at Porton Down. She couldn’t be party to any of that. She was a nurse, Ernest was a doctor; they were supposed to save lives, not take them. Besides, she would have remembered the sinister Meers and his thuggish corporals; rightly or wrongly, they were the kind of people she associated with Porton Down.
In a way, if Grace had been responsible for her husband’s death, that made us birds of a feather. Perhaps I had wanted to prove her innocent because I wanted, in some odd, vicarious way, to partake of that innocence myself? But it had turned out all wrong. My plan had backfired on me.
Oh, there were plenty of differences, certainly. Ernest probably had a few good years left in him, despite his dicky heart, whereas Laura wasn’t dying quickly enough, and her agony increased with every moment. Grace had done humanity a favour; I had done Laura a favour. She had begged me and begged me, and every time I refused, my heart broke a little more. In the end, I could stand neither her pain nor my own any longer. A little extra morphine wasn’t such a difficult thing to manage at home, and if our doctor suspected, as he probably did, then he clearly thought it as much of a mercy as I did. I held her hand and watched her die, looked into her eyes and saw the life go out of them, took her in my arms, felt the spirit depart, leaving in its wake something like the silence at the end of a magnificent symphony. The only difference was, you could play the music again and again; a life plays only once.
I told myself that I had done Laura a favour, and I knew in my heart that it was true, but I had still killed her. Did that make me a murderer? Did it make me a monster? Grace, too? I don’t know. Sometimes I think so. Sometimes I feel that the guilty knowledge of what I have done, my shabby, heartbreaking secret, separates me from the rest of humanity, from the others there in the dining room that night. Maybe that is why I sought such solitude at Kilnsgate. But there I met Grace Fox, and if I had ever wondered why on earth I became obsessed with her, as I had many times on my quest, then I knew now.
Taking another look around the room, I finished my glass of wine and carried the rest of the bottle back up to my room, where I sat outside and drank on the balcony in the warm African night, listening to the cables thrum in the marina and the breeze rustling the palms below until the birds began to sing and the sun began to rise and its tentative rays silhouetted Signal Hill and Table Mountain.
24
