barbed wire and armed guards when it happened. Wilf said the kids found a gap, which may have been how Nat got in, too, but a wandering maniac as well?’
Heather ran her finger around the rim of her wineglass. ‘Does this have anything to do with what happened later? With Grace Fox and her husband?’
‘I think it does,’ I said.
‘Tell me.’
‘Over dinner.’ I got up to check on the lasagne. It was done and only needed to rest for ten minutes while I made the salad.
‘Bastard,’ Heather said, following me into the kitchen. ‘Making me wait like this.’
She leaned back against the fridge, and I had to open the door to take out the lettuce. As I approached, she didn’t move, just cocked her head sideways and pouted at me. I flashed back on that first dinner here, with Derek and Charlotte, how Heather had got drunk and almost made a pass in exactly the same place. This time I leaned forward and kissed her, and she responded. A lot had changed. I gently eased her out of the way and opened the fridge. ‘You don’t have to bug me while I’m putting dinner together, you know,’ I said. ‘You’re perfectly welcome to go and sit in front of the fire, sip your wine, listen to the music and contemplate life.’
‘Well, I can see exactly how much you missed me,’ Heather said, with a mock pout, and left the kitchen.
It didn’t take me long to throw the salad together, and by then the lasagne was ready to cut and serve. I carried the plates through to the dining-room table and Heather came up to join me. The wine and fresh glasses were already there. I poured us each another glass. Susan Graham was singing ‘ Les Nuits d’Ete ’ in the background. It all made for a very sensual atmosphere.
‘Now will you please tell me what you found out?’ Heather said. ‘I promise I’ll just eat my dinner and I won’t interrupt. Promise.’ She cut off a corner of lasagne and put it in her mouth.
‘I found Billy Strang easily enough,’ I said. ‘Fit as a fiddle, he seems. As a matter of fact, he’d just come back from playing tennis. Apparently there’s a young widow at the club he’s chasing.’
‘A dirty old man, then?’
‘No more than I am. Much older, though.’
Heather laughed. ‘And was it all worthwhile? Leaving me here in freezing Yorkshire while you went gallivanting off to parts exotic? And warm.’
I thought for a moment, then nodded. ‘I wasn’t sure for a while – it seemed to knock all my theories for six – but yes, I think it was.’ I told her about the Porton Down connection and what Billy had said about seeing Ernest Fox there, the letter, the job offer and all.
When I had come to the end of that part of the story, Heather paused and said, ‘I see what you mean about it all tying together with Kilnsgate during the war, in a way, though there was no real practical connection, was there?’
‘Except for Ernest’s involvement,’ I said. ‘I should imagine Grace heard rumours, had her suspicions. She was very strong on war crimes. I remember Sam Porter telling me how she got along with Laura Knight like a house on fire. That was the artist who painted a series of scenes from the Nuremberg trials. Anyway, Grace would probably have heard about Nat Bunting and the foot-and-mouth, most likely from Hetty, though she probably didn’t put two and two together until she talked to Billy.’
‘So not only does she have to leave her lover, but her husband’s going off to make nerve gas and give people anthrax. Is that why she did it?’
‘That was the first thing I thought when I heard Billy’s story. It changed all my suppositions.’
‘Yes, I remember that crazy theory you dreamed up about Ernest Fox being a paedophile.’
I recalled how I had felt the moment after I had expounded my paedophile theory to Billy Strang, and he had told me how far off beam it was. The ground had opened up under my feet. ‘Even though I was wrong, it wasn’t any more crazy than the story about him going to Porton Down to work on chemical weapons,’ I said. ‘It was certainly a possibility worth considering. I knew there was something. I was just searching for some sort of revelation about Ernest Fox, something that would make Grace need to kill him and not end up being entirely unsympathetic. You have to admit, if he were a paedophile, that would certainly be the case. Perhaps if he were going to be a merchant of death, it would be, too. It made sense that Billy had come back to see Grace and tell her something important like that.’
‘Is it enough, though?’
‘Enough for what?’
‘A motive.’
‘You’ve read the journal, haven’t you?’
Heather shook her head slowly. ‘It’s… unbelievable… incredible. That anyone can go through all that.’
‘Well, given what Grace saw at the chateau, and given her reaction to finding out what her husband was really going to be doing in this “hospital near Salisbury”, and that because of this she would have to leave Sam and spend her mornings sipping coffee with women whose husbands did much the same thing as hers, I’d say it probably is, yes.’
‘So you now think that’s why she did it? The job, Sam, everything?’
We’d finished our main course, so I took away the plates and replenished our wineglasses. The cheeses had been sitting on the table for a while, so they had come to room temperature. Neither of us was particularly hungry at the moment, though, so we took a break and just worked on the wine. Susan Graham had finished, and Annie Fischer’s Beethoven piano sonatas played in the background. ‘Remember at first,’ I said, ‘when I got interested in the whole story and got to know a little about Grace, I became convinced that she couldn’t have done it?’
‘Yes. Then you changed your mind. Then you changed it again. You were back and forth like a yo-yo. In the end, you believed that she probably had done it, but that she had a more noble motive than toyboys and money. Well, isn’t what you’ve just told me more noble? Grace obviously couldn’t persuade her husband against taking the chemical warfare job, and it would have done no good her telling the authorities. Who would she tell? Maybe some people, like Grace herself, were against that sort of thing, but Ernest Fox was just going to do valuable top-secret government work as far as most people were concerned, and the less they knew about it, the better. Nothing wrong in that.’
‘Unless, like Grace, you’ve come across a cellar full of the dead people as a result of Nazi experiments with nerve agents, no. But you’re right. He was only doing his patriotic duty. It’s just that it’s the kind of duty the government likes to keep quiet about, and whenever anyone blows a whistle, they say we’re only defending ourselves. And Ernest Fox was only one man. By stopping him, Grace couldn’t hope to have achieved very much. She must have known that. She wasn’t even a political or environmental activist. She probably voted Conservative. That’s why it would have made more sense if he was a paedophile, and then she could certainly have stopped him from getting his hands on any more children. At Porton Down, he would have been part of a team, and they could go on without him. He was expendable. But kill just one paedophile, and you make a whole lot of children’s lives safer.’
‘Do you believe Grace actually thought that way?’
‘Not in so many words, no, but I’ll bet it went through her mind. She couldn’t stop Porton Down, but it was personal for her. It wouldn’t only damage lives, it would change hers for the worse.’
‘And she could do her little bit for good?’
‘Something like that.’ I hadn’t told Heather about the reflection in the wardrobe mirror. Nor had I told her Graham’s story about the similar incident in the Scarborough boarding house. I hadn’t wanted her to think I was crazy. It was bad enough having her worried about me being obsessed by Grace Fox, in love with a ghost, as she put it. Perhaps one day I would tell her it all, along with the truth about what I had done to Laura, but not yet. We hadn’t reached that level of confidence yet. Somehow, I had to find a way of telling Heather that I knew what had happened on the night of Ernest Fox’s death without telling her exactly why or how I knew.
‘What about now? Do you still believe she didn’t do it?’
‘Yes and no.’
‘That’s no answer.’
‘Hear me out. I still thought she did it when I heard Billy’s story. Billy, too, when I told him what happened to Grace. He blamed himself. I thought she had done it for exactly the motives we were just talking about, to stop Ernest from taking the job at Porton Down. But the truth dawned on me during the flight home, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t get it out of my head. It was going round and round and
