Before the Poison Page 6

  ‘You mentioned Armley Gaol a while back. I used to live near there. Do you remember what this woman’s name was?’

  ‘Yes. She was called Fox. Grace Fox.’

  I did know about Grace Fox. Of course I knew about her. I’d just pushed her name to the back of my mind, like the rest of the country. Still, I had an excuse. Thirty-five years of Hollywood murders will do that for you. But as soon as Ted Welland told me where she had been hanged, I remembered, and I felt an odd surge of excitement, of connection.

  You see, in a strange, oblique sort of way, I was there. I was a part of it. Not when it happened, of course. I was only three then. But before Kilnsgate House, before this return to England, even before Hollywood, Grace Fox was already a part of my personal mythology.

  My old junior school, Castleton, which I attended between the years of 1958 and 1961, stood right next to Armley Gaol, which towered over us like an old medieval fortress. One of its rough stone walls also formed the wall of our playground. We played cricket against it, chalked wickets on it, bounced tennis balls off it, kicked footballs against it. I even, on one occasion, smashed the school bully’s head on it and made him bleed and run crying to the teacher.

  We used to imagine murderers escaping, climbing down knotted ropes into the playground and running amok, foaming at the mouth. But the wall also stood as a warning: if we didn’t behave ourselves, the headmaster told us at the beginning of each term, we would end up behind it, and we could only imagine what sort of world lay waiting there.

  They used to hang people in Armley Gaol, and one of the people they hanged there was Grace Fox.

  I glanced at my watch. Only 9.30 p.m. It would be an hour later in Angoulême, where my brother Graham lived, but I was certain he would still be awake. Graham always was a night person. Sure enough, he answered the phone on the fourth ring.

  ‘Allo?’

  ‘Graham? It’s me. Chris.’

  ‘Chris! How are you, little brother? It’s been a long time.’

  It was true that Graham and I had not been in touch as often as we should have been over the years, but we had the kind of familiar closeness that can easily survive a little time and distance. Laura and I had spent some very happy vacations at his farmhouse, enjoyed the local food and wine with him and his wife Siobhan, and they had visited us in LA. The last time I had seen them was at Laura’s funeral eleven months ago, and I had noticed how old and tired Graham was looking. He had been pleased to hear that I was moving back to England.

  ‘I’m well,’ I said. ‘Settling in. And Siobhan?’

  ‘Thriving. Heard from Mother lately?’

  ‘I dropped by to see her a couple of weeks ago. She’s doing fine.’

  ‘Excellent. Something I can do for you?’

  ‘I want to pick your brains, your memory.’

  ‘You’re welcome to what’s left of it. Some days I can’t even remember what I had for breakfast by lunchtime.’

  ‘It’s longer ago than breakfast.’

  ‘There’s a much better chance, then. Fire away.’

  ‘Grace Fox.’

  ‘Grace Fox. Now, there’s a blast from the past. What do you want to know about her for?’

  I explained about looking into the history of Kilnsgate House and finding out there was a murder there. Then Grace Fox’s name came up. Graham listened, and when I had finished there was a brief silence. I could hear his breathing and some French voices in the background. It sounded like a news programme. Television or radio.

  ‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘I can see why you’d be interested.’

  ‘You were there that day, weren’t you, at school?’

  ‘I was. I was ten at the time.’

  ‘Do you remember it?’

  ‘Like yesterday. Better. I told you all about it. Scared the pants off you. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘Why would I? If you were ten, I was only three. Humour me. Tell me again.’

  Graham sighed. ‘Word had got around, of course. Hanging a woman was rare then, you see, and Grace Fox was what the redtops today would call quite a “stunna”. She was a very beautiful woman. Long dark wavy hair, full lips, pale skin, lovely figure. Of course, that didn’t mean a great deal to me at the age of ten. I was far too caught up in cricket and football to be very concerned about female pulchritude. But boys will be boys. We knew even by then that there was some mysterious thing about women’s bodies we were supposed to desire, even if we’d rather collect frogspawn or keep toads in a jar. It was all a little vague and smutty. There was even a rhyme, I remember, that we used to chant in the playground. A bit of doggerel.’ Graham cleared his throat and recited:

  ‘Gracie Fox, poor Gracie Fox

  They stretched her neck

  And put her in a box,

  Stretched her neck

  And put her in a box.

  And now the worms eat Gracie Fox.’

  ‘Charming,’ I said.

  ‘Children can be very cruel and insensitive. There was a lot of anticipation. It was April, I remember, not long after Easter, and a lovely morning. Breath of spring in the air. I walked to school with Kev and Barry, as usual, and we were excited, even a bit scared. We knew something terrible was going to happen that morning. It had been in all the papers, and we’d heard our parents talking about it.’

  ‘When did you find out?’

  ‘We were in morning assembly, standing in silence. Old Masterson had just walked on the stage to begin. It would have been nine o’clock, just after, and we heard the bell toll. That’s when we knew it had happened, that she was dead. Terrible fast was that Pierrepoint.’ Graham paused, then went on, ‘I can still remember the silence after the bell had tolled, as if all the air was sucked out of the room. And you could hear the fading reverberations, though I’m sure that was just fanciful on my part. I had a tight feeling in my chest. Even old Masterson seemed a bit choked. Then we sang “To Be a Pilgrim”. I won’t forget that morning in a hurry.’

  I felt myself give a little shiver as he told me. We moved on to talk of other things, and I promised to get over to see him and Siobhan before Christmas. Finally, I hung up the phone and made myself a cup of tea. When it was ready, I took it into the living room, where I put some logs on the fire, set my iPod in the speaker dock to Alfred Brendel’s The Farewell Concerts and sat down to think about everything I’d heard that night.

  In a very strange and roundabout way, through my older brother, I had become close to Grace Fox without even knowing what she looked like. Now I stood in the vestibule before the painting and realised that it must be Grace and her family. She wore a bolero jacket with puffed shoulders over a silk blouse and a long skirt, her long wavy hair done in a Veronica Lake style, with a deep side parting. She was smiling with her mouth, but her eyes looked faraway, her expression distracted. In an odd way, I was surprised to find, she reminded me of Laura, though Laura had been a natural blonde. It was something about the lips and the eyes. The man, her husband Ernest, I assumed, stood erect, hands clasped in front, his chest puffed out, his suit and waistcoat tight, straining at their buttons, looking very much like the proud owner of the entire scene. He was rather portly, with a ruddy complexion and a bristly moustache. The child between them seemed uncomfortable in his Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit.

  I walked through to the living room and sat in my armchair. I must have remembered Grace somewhere deep in my mind, I realised, because when I grew up and cast aside childish things, such as football, cricket and frogspawn, for the charms, wiles and torments of the opposite sex, the mysteries of which Graham had spoken, she was still there, somewhere in the vaults of my memory, in a way that only a lovesick teenager addled with romance and chivalry and a vague grasp of Keats can understand. The idea of wantonly destroying such beauty, any beauty, at the end of a rope was unthinkable to me, no matter what crime she had committed.

  Later, at university, when I became interested in Thomas Hardy after seeing John Schlesinger’s Far From the Maddi
ng Crowd, I was at first shocked to find that Hardy was an aficionado of public executions, because I was very much against capital punishment. But when I read his erotic description of the hanging of a woman called Martha Browne, it was Grace Fox I pictured, a vague but beautiful dark-haired female shape hanging there on the blasted heath, the gallows creaking with the weight, her body twisting languorously in the wind. The features were blurred, of course – this was simply someone my brother had mentioned to me years ago – but my imagination had no problem in supplying the female form under the clinging wet shift. It could have come from any one of the magazines I was hiding under my mattress at the time. I won’t say that the image excited me – I have never been drawn to necrophilia or sado-masochism – but I had to admit that there was a certain grim sensual and erotic aesthetic in it all, which Hardy, bless his soul, had grasped at once.

  Now here I was, forty years later, living in Grace Fox’s house. What of it? I asked myself. It was certainly a coincidence, though not a great one; in reality, it was more like one of those ‘small world’ stories. But after Ted Welland’s tale and my talk with Graham, I felt a certain frisson when darkness fell upon Kilnsgate House that night. When the wailing and creaking woke me from my sleep once again and sent me downstairs for whisky and forgetfulness, I found myself standing at the top of the landing for a few extra moments, looking down the corridor in the dark, looking for Grace.

  4

  Famous Trials: Grace Elizabeth Fox, April 1953, by Sir Charles Hamilton Morley

  Grace Elizabeth Hartnell was the daughter of a successful Saltburn bank manager and Alderman. She was a clever girl who attended her local grammar school, where she excelled both in the arts and in the sciences, and was generally regarded as a quiet and reserved child. Grace was nonetheless possessed of an enquiring mind and a kindly disposition, and she demonstrated an inherent gentleness and compassion towards all living creatures.

  Perhaps the only blot in the copybook of her youth was a broken engagement to a most suitable young man from the nearby town of Redcar, an ambitious young solicitor called Edward Cunliffe, whom her father very much admired, in favour of a far less appropriate paramour. This rejection of her father’s choice of partner showed a certain early rebellious and headstrong element in young Grace’s behaviour, an unwillingness to bend to the will of her father, and a tendency to forsake the duty incumbent upon the daughter of a local dignitary for the fickle will-o’-the-wisp impulse of romantic love.

  Much of the business still remains shrouded in mystery, as neither Grace nor her parents cared to speak of it in later times. The young man she chose, contrary to her family’s wishes, was an aspiring poet by the name of Thomas Murray, who turned out to be a rake of the most unspeakable order. Thomas soon deserted Grace for another woman, leaving her so distraught that it was thought best she should retire to her Aunt Ethel’s house in Torquay to recover from her attack of nerves. She returned a contrite woman and soon regained her father’s affection, though not that of the broken-hearted young solicitor Edward Cunliffe, who had since taken flight to seek his fortune in Argentina. Thomas Murray later died fighting for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.

  All this took place in late 1930, when Grace was merely eighteen, and by which time her husband-to-be was already an established GP in Richmond. A short while later, Grace began her training as a nurse, a profession at which she excelled beyond all her father’s misgivings.

  Grace trained at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, in Newcastle, submitting to the almost nun-like existence of the nurses’ home, with its strict curfews and rules against male visitors, all under the eagle eye of Matron. She soon showed evidence of the three qualities essential to a good nurse – devotion to her patients, technical proficiency and that essential feminine quality of tenderness, or gentleness, that in no way interfered with the efficiency with which she discharged her rigorous duties. Grace qualified as a State Registered Nurse with flying colours in 1935, and only a year later, she met and married Dr. Ernest Fox. The couple soon moved into Kilnsgate House, where everything proceeded as normal for the following three years.

  When war was declared, Dr. Fox curtailed his duties at the Royal Victoria Infirmary and turned his attention towards the Friarage, in Northallerton, which had recently opened as an emergency medical services hospital to receive casualties in the event of the bombing of Teesside’s civilian population.

  Throughout late 1939, Grace and Ernest continued to live at Kilnsgate House, tended by loyal maidservant Hetty Larkin. At this time, they also accommodated for several weeks an evacuee from Newcastle, affectionately known as ‘Billy’, until the air raids that had been predicted never materialised, and his parents brought him back home.

  It was around this time that Grace joined the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Services and went to pursue her training at Netley, in Hampshire. There she learned of the many duties of a military nurse, including running the dispensary, a skill that was to be declared of great significance during the course of her trial. After brief stints in military hospitals around Dover, where she helped nurse survivors of the British Expeditionary Force after Dunkirk, Grace bade farewell to her husband in July, 1940, and spent much of the rest of the war in service overseas. Ernest continued his work at the Friarage, in both a teaching and a practising capacity, throughout the war, even after it became a Royal Air Force Hospital in 1943, and he was also often absent from the practice as he travelled around the country to supervise training programmes and present research papers at various institutions of learning. Hetty Larkin found useful employment in a munitions factory near Darlington.

  During the war years, Kilnsgate House provided the occasional brief billet for a transferred officer or two, but much of the time it was empty except for Dr. Fox and, once or twice a week, Hetty Larkin. The isolation was partly what made Kilnsgate less attractive to the armed forces, though during one period this played in the house’s favour, when it was used in a top-secret capacity between August, 1940 and July, 1942.

  Dr. Fox’s own practice continued as best it could. Dr. Nelson’s wife Mary, as usual, handled most of the administrative duties. These were quiet times for the most part in North Yorkshire, and one wonders what thoughts passed through Ernest Fox’s mind as he sat puffing his pipe in front of a crackling fire during the darkest and loneliest days and nights of the war.

  Grace finally returned to her husband and her family home on the 4th November, 1945. Once back at Kilnsgate House, she left the nursing profession for ever and took up her duties as a housewife. Ernest settled into life as a country GP again, while continuing his various research projects, and almost a year later their only child was born, a son named Randolph, after Grace’s own father, who had died of pneumonia during the war. Grace then appeared to devote herself to motherhood and housekeeping, with the faithful Hetty’s help.

  As mistress of Kilnsgate House, Grace remained outwardly gracious and courteous, the kind of woman who would do anything to help a friend in need, but close friends also marked a change in her since the war: dark moods, unpredictable outbursts, and grim silences during which she seemed to retreat into some secret place within herself. What ailed her we will never know, as she never spoke of it to anyone.

  Was it in that dark, lonely place where she first hatched the plot for her husband’s murder? Because according to the Crown, this was far from a crime of passion executed in the heat of the moment, but a coolly thought-out, near-foolproof way of ridding herself of a husband she had ceased to love. Grace merely seized the opportunity of the snowstorm and the witnesses present in Kilnsgate House to put into action a plan she had been long devising. Whether Samuel Porter himself was involved in the plot must also remain within the realm of speculation, for no accusation or proof was ever brought to bear on the matter, and no charges were ever laid against him. So we move now to the 1st January, 1953, as cruel a winter’s night as there had been in Swaledale for many a year.

&nb
sp; October 2010

  The following morning I took my first walk around Kilnsgarthdale. I turned right outside the gate and carried on by the side of the beck for about a couple of hundred yards, where the dale seemed to end at a drystone wall. I saw when I got closer that it was actually two walls enclosing a track, with a stile for access on my side. The track ran over the hill south, towards Richmond, and in the other direction it seemed to come to an end by the two overgrown lime kilns on the slope. After this, the track was obscured by shrubbery and grass, the remains of the wall just a pile of stones. Beyond the second wall lay the woods.

  I retraced my steps and crossed the little packhorse bridge outside Kilnsgate House, then walked up the opposite daleside to the lime kiln I could see from my bedroom window. I hadn’t had a really good look at it close up, and now I knew what it was I paused to do just that. It was certainly a creepy place, like a half-buried drystone dome or egg, its eye half obscured by weeds. I bent and peered in as deep as I could, but could see no trace of the grates over which the layers of limestone and coal were laid, or the ashes of the fire below. I scrambled around the back, higher up the hillside, and saw that the top was covered with sod. To think it had squatted there unused, useless, for over a hundred and fifty years. What comings and goings had that fixed eye seen during that time?

  I walked on through the fields and the small plantation beyond, emerging finally on the long grass of Low Moor, the site of the old Richmond racecourse. Since finding out about the lime kiln, I had bought a book at the Castle Hill Bookshop and read up a bit on local history. Richmond racecourse had been in use from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, until horses had become too strong and fast for its tight turns. Now it was a vast tract of open moorland above the town, its bridle path used for occasional training gallops.