Before the Poison (39 page)

She soon came back with the drinks – I’m not sure what kind of beer mine was, but it was in a pint glass and it tasted all right – and perched on the stool. Heather had said she would try to join us at some point in the evening, and I had given her a rough plan of our route. I kept checking for her out of the corner of my eye, hoping she would make it. I knew she wanted to meet Melissa, and I was looking forward to seeing
her
again.

As it turned out, she walked into the Castle not long after we’d got there, with that way she had, slinky but not overdone, picking me out almost immediately and smiling at me. She obviously knew some of the people at the bar, because she stopped here and there to say hello or wish them a happy new year before she joined us. I suppose in her job you got to know the locals.

There wasn’t much room, so I jumped up, gave her a quick kiss and let her have my spot. I introduced her to Melissa and Dave, then said I’d be back in a minute and went to have a word with Wilf. When Heather saw where I was going, she rolled her eyes, but it was an indulgent roll. Then she leaned forward and started chatting animatedly with Melissa, and I was forgotten. Even before I got to Wilf’s table, the two of them got up and Heather led Melissa over to some people clustered around the far end of the bar. In seconds, they were all chatting away like old friends. Pretty soon Melissa would be best friends with everyone in the pub. She was good like that. Dave, left to his own devices, was talking to the middle-aged couple sitting next to him.

‘Hello, lad,’ said Wilf. ‘Sit yourself down.’

I sat and rested my pint on the table. ‘How are you, Wilf?’

‘Fair to middling. When you get to my age you think every little ache and pain’s a herald of the end.’

‘So you haven’t got cancer?’

‘Not as I know of. Just what they call acid reflux. They stuck that tube down my throat and had a shufti, then gave me a new prescription. Them new pills do the trick.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

‘Isn’t that Melissa Wilde with your friend over there?’

‘I’m surprised you recognise her.’

‘I keep my eyes open and my ears to the ground.’ He gave me a mischievous glance. ‘I went to see
Death Knows My Name
at the Station a while back.’

I groaned and put my head in my hands.

‘Nay, lad, it weren’t so bad. Tha’s no Bernard Herrmann, mind you.’ He studied Melissa, who was talking animatedly with the people Heather had introduced her to. ‘Good Lord, if I was twenty years younger . . .’

I laughed. ‘More like fifty, Wilf.’

‘Hey! None of your lip. I could tell you tales would make your toes curl.’

‘I’ll bet you could. And by the way.’ I pointed to Dave. ‘That’s her husband over there.’

‘Then he’d better keep an eye on her, little bloke like that. Some of those lads up there, their reach exceeds their grasp when they’ve had a few, if you follow my drift.’

‘I don’t think he’s got anything to worry about. Dave can take care of himself.’ So can Melissa, for that matter, I might have added.

‘They’ll be friends of yours, then, from the movie business?’

‘Yes.’ I told Wilf how I had come to know Dave and Melissa through my work, then we made small talk about Christmas for a while. Wilf had spent the holidays with his daughter and son-in-law in Blackpool until their constant bickering had driven him back home. ‘I wouldn’t bother going at all if it wasn’t for the little ’uns,’ he said. ‘But a man can’t ignore his own grandchildren, can he?’

‘No,’ I said, feeling a bit guilty about not seeing my own grandchild this Christmas.

Someone brought Wilf another pint, and he took a long swig and wiped his lips with the back of his gnarly hand. ‘So how’s your investigation going?’

‘It’s not really an investigation,’ I said, feeling rather silly. ‘Anyway, whatever it is, it seems to have stalled.’

‘So where do you go now?’ Wilf asked.

I shook my head. ‘I’ve been reading her journal.’

‘Journal?’

‘Yes.’ I told him about Louise and Grace’s scant possessions. ‘It’s amazing, what she saw, what she did. She was everywhere.’

‘Aye,’ said Wilf. ‘We often forget what role the women played while the men were busy trying to maim and kill each other.’

‘It makes her seem less likely to have killed anyone as far as I’m concerned.’

‘Maybe it was a disgruntled patient,’ Wilf said. ‘I’ve told you what a sadistic bastard Old Foxy was.’

‘So he lacked a good bedside manner. That’s not unusual in a doctor, and it’s hardly a motive for murder.’

‘Depends what he did and to whom.’

‘I’ll take it under advisement.’ I sipped some more beer. ‘I’m still interested in that young lad in uniform who Grace had lunch with in Richmond shortly before it happened.’ I explained about how my original theory had been shot down by Louise Webster’s discoveries.

Wilf scratched his stubbly chin. ‘All this raking up the past has had me feeling quite nostalgic these past few weeks. You said you got the impression this was an old friend and that he would have been a young lad when the war started?’

‘Yes. If she’d had a child in, say, 1931, he would have been about eight then and twenty-one in 1952.’

‘But she didn’t.’

‘No. I was wrong about that.’

‘Well, there were lots of young men in uniform then. What with National Service, and the garrison being so close by.’

‘Someone from her past? Someone she met during the war, perhaps? The person who saw them mentioned that he had an odd sort of birthmark on his hairline.’

Wilf gave me sharp glance. ‘Are you sure about that? You didn’t mention that before.’

‘Is it important?’

Wilf nodded over towards Heather and Melissa. ‘I’d keep an eye on them two, if I were you. Yon Frankie Marshall’s well over the limit, and he’s moving in a bit close to Miss Wilde for comfort.’

‘They can take care of themselves. What did you mean asking me if I was sure?’

‘Billy,’ Wilf said.

‘The evacuee?’

‘That’s the one. They took him in just after the war started. The government started shipping them down from Tyneside pretty soon that September. He’d have been about seven or eight then. Stopped with the Foxes until around Christmas, then his parents took him back home again.’

‘Why?’

‘No reason. It was the “Bore War”. Not much happening. Lots of parents took their kids back. Then, of course, after April 1940, when the Germans marched on Norway and Denmark, well . . . things heated up again. Then there was Dunkirk. Anyway, I remember Billy because he came to our school for a while and we used to play with him sometimes. Nice enough lad, but a fish out of water. City boy. Couldn’t seem to get a grasp on our country ways. I think his dad managed a shoe shop in Newcastle High Street or something. I remember he had a Geordie accent, and most of us couldn’t understand him. Some of the kids used to tease him mercilessly, but he took it all in good sport. He was well enough built, so if he’d wanted to, he could have given one or two of the worst a good thumping, but it wasn’t as if they tried to bully him or anything. He was a quiet kid, mostly, as I remember, a bit passive. Very nice lad, though. Nicely dressed. Clean. He must have been very unhappy underneath it all.’

‘Why?’

‘The teasing, the strangeness, being so far from home – or so it must have felt – missing his mum and dad. Not that he let his feelings show. Besides, I can’t see being stuck out at Kilnsgate with old misery-guts Fox could have been a lot of fun, can you?’

‘Surely Grace would have been there? And Hetty?’

‘I suppose so. Some of the time. Still . . .’

‘What happened at Kilnsgate during the war? I seem to be picking up all kinds of bits and pieces, and I can’t help but find myself wondering if it had anything to do with what happened later.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just the way things seem to connect. Grace meeting this Billy shortly before her husband’s death. I mean, she probably hadn’t seen him since 1939, when he was only seven. Grace being away overseas for quite a while. You said before that the house was taken over by the military for a while, very hush-hush.’

‘Oh, aye. Off limits. You couldn’t even get through Kilnsgarthdale from one end to the other. They were tough, surly buggers, too.’

‘How do you know?’

Wilf grinned. ‘Well, you don’t think we didn’t try, do you? Most of the time if kids went prowling around, they understood it was a harmless enough game. I mean, most of the soldiers weren’t that much older. It wasn’t so long ago they’d been up to the same mischief themselves. They’d usually send you off with a few choice words and a smile on their faces. But not this lot. They were older. And harder. We found a weak spot in the barbed wire once and the sentry found us and pretty much marched us off at gunpoint. I don’t think he would have actually shot us, but it was frightening enough.’

‘Any idea who it was?’

‘No. A lot of these units were top secret. They’d come and go, and no one even knew their names, or acronyms, if they had any. As far as I know, none of them came into town to socialise like the regular troops billeted up here.’

‘But there must have been some speculation?’

‘Oh, aye. We all assumed it was Special Operations Executive. A bit James Bond. In fact, I think Ian Fleming even had something to do with them.’

That was what Ted Welland had told me, I remembered. ‘But nobody actually
knew
, or said that was what it was?’

‘No.’

‘And what were they doing here?’

Wilf shrugged. ‘No idea. Training. Planning. Like I said, you couldn’t get near the place.’

‘Would Billy know anything about it?’

‘I can’t imagine why. It was after Billy’s time. Tell you what, have a word with old Bert Brotherton. No, sorry, he can’t help you, he’s long gone now, along with his son Fred. Sometimes I forget. Talk to his grandson. He might know something.’

‘What are you talking about, Wilf?’

‘Your neighbours, the farm down the lane, over the hill. It’s still in the family, far as I know.’

I realised with a guilty start that I hadn’t even been and introduced myself to my neighbours yet. Still, they hadn’t come to see me, either.

‘What do they know?’

‘I’ve no idea, but it was their farm that had an outbreak of foot-and-mouth in 1942, and old Bert always blamed the folks at Kilnsgate. Still, he was a bit of a cantankerous old devil. Always going on about them. Blamed them for Nat Bunting’s disappearance, too, apparently. But that’s Bert for you.’

Nat Bunting, I remembered, was the mentally challenged young man who had disappeared from the area during the war. What on earth could he have to do with anything? ‘Did he say how or when?’

‘No. He tended to ramble a bit, even then, did old Bert Brotherton.’

‘Do you happen to know Billy’s second name?’

‘Can’t say as I remember. We just called him Billy. But I do remember the birthmark. Most of the time he kept his hair in a fringe so nobody could see it, but the first week of school – clean or not – there was an outbreak of nits, maybe from some of the rougher evacuees in the area, so we all had to have our heads shaved, and the school nurse rubbed lethane on to get rid of them. Smelled something vile, it did. Anyway, with his hair short, you could see the birthmark, like when he had a military haircut years later, I suppose, when someone saw him with Grace. But Billy was really embarrassed by it and took to wearing a cap most of the time, till the nits had gone and his hair grew back. I’ll bet it was Billy, all right.’

I reached into my inside pocket for my iPhone. I had managed to download the photos and text Louise had given me, and I turned to the photo of Grace and the young boy standing in the garden of Kilnsgate. I showed it to Wilf. ‘Is that Billy?’

He stared at the iPhone in admiration. ‘That’s a clever gadget,’ he said. ‘Aye, that’s Billy, all right. By the looks of the weather and all it must have been taken shortly after he got there, before school started. September 1939. Lovely long summer. That’s Billy. And that’s Grace. But you know that already.’

‘What would Billy want with Grace after all those years?’

‘I’ve no idea. Maybe he was just in the area and he dropped by to say hello and happy new year? He was in uniform, you say, so the odds are he was at Catterick, maybe doing his National Service. Perhaps they were sending him off to war and he came to say goodbye.’

‘What war?’

‘There’s always a war. Korea. Kenya. I was in Cyprus, myself.’

‘Will there be records? You know, official records?’

‘Probably. It was quite a major operation, the evacuation, but it was a bit chaotic, too. It was supposed to be organised, and they had local “dispersal centres”, where they tried to keep friends, brothers and sisters and school parties together, but it didn’t always work out that way.’ Wilf sipped some beer. ‘Someone said it was a bit like an old Roman slave market in some places. You know, the farmers would come along and pick the strong, sturdy lads who could help out on the land, and the town families picked young girls who could give a hand around the house. The local bigwigs opted for the clean, nicely dressed kids, of course. Records? I don’t know. There’d have been a local billeting officer, for example. But I think you’d have a job on your hands tracking any records down after all this time, don’t you?’

‘I know someone who could help,’ I said, almost to myself. I noticed Heather glance over at me and frown. Was she annoyed that I had been talking to Wilf for so long, or were things getting a bit difficult over there? I smiled at her. She made a face and went back to talking to Melissa and the crowd that surrounded them.

‘You know, you could do a lot worse than the local papers,’ Wilf said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘As it happened, Billy was the area’s first evacuee. I don’t mean he came by himself or anything, there was a trainload or more, but it was just announced that way, officially, like, to make a bit of a story. Dr Fox and his wife wanted to set an example, see, be the first to take in a city evacuee. I think Old Foxy saw it as a mark of his status, or something like that, and of course the billeting officer was a patient of his. I’d imagine he could have found himself on the receiving end of a big nasty needle if he hadn’t gone along with it. Needless to say, they could have taken twenty or more, that big house of theirs, or yours, now, but the good doctor only wanted the one. A nice one, of course. And the first. He got Billy. Anyway, it wasn’t such a terrible mismatch, as so many were. If Old Foxy hadn’t had a bit of influence, he might have got stuck with half a dozen slum kids, and who knows what would have happened to Billy. Anyway, there was a story about Billy in one of the papers. Photo and everything. It might be of some help.’