Peter Robinson - Before the poison

January 2011

The bad weather returned in January, after a brief thaw, and when it snows in Kilnsgarthdale, as I had learned in December, nothing much has changed since Grace Fox’s day. Again, schools closed, vehicles were abandoned, and the local authorities ran out of grit after the first day. Train and bus services came to a halt. My lane was blocked for a second time, and I couldn’t leave the house for three days. I couldn’t even get in touch with my friendly farmer, who had gone to the Maldives for a holiday, or so the person who answered the phone told me. Luckily, I had plenty of supplies left over from the holidays, so I wasn’t likely to starve or go thirsty, and there was nowhere I had to be. My guests had all left before the new year, which I had celebrated by a quiet evening at home with Heather. Melissa had told me she liked her, I was pleased to hear, and Jane had said she was glad to see me looking much happier and more relaxed than I had been in a long time.

It had been wonderful having Dave and Melissa and Jane and Mohammed to stay, but I enjoyed having the house to myself again after they had gone – the silence, the late-night movie marathons, not shaving every morning, wandering around in my dressing gown and slippers, Heather stopping over for the night. I didn’t think Jane would have disapproved of our sleeping together, though these things can be hard to predict, but Heather had said she would have felt uncomfortable, and I didn’t blame her. It meant we had a lot of making up to do on New Year’s Eve.

On the second day of my incarceration, I stood by the French windows at the back of the house and looked out. The branches of the trees were heavy with snow, bent under its weight, the woods a bare tangled black and white world. As darkness fell and the shadows deepened, I thought of that night fifty-eight years earlier, when Grace, Ernest, Alice and Jeremy had sat down to dinner and noticed that it would be impossible for anyone to go home. I also thought of the days following the dreadful event, the four of them stuck in the house, this house, with a corpse upstairs.

As the days drifted into one another and the snow drifted against the French windows, I lost track of the time, sleeping when I felt tired, eating when I was hungry. I kept the log fire burning most of the time, and my supplies of wood grew dangerously low. Mostly I worked on my sonata. ‘Grace’s Theme’, as I suspected, became its emotional and melodic heart, its motif and the basis of variations in all four movements. It still needed a lot more work, especially the final movement, the ‘allegro’, where I was having a lot of trouble with the tempo. But on the whole, I was very happy with what I had done so far.

The rest of the time, I watched old movies in my den: Sunset Boulevard, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Peeping Tom, The Fallen Idol . The telephone and Internet connection still worked, as they had last time, so I wasn’t completely cut off from the outside world the way Grace and the others had been. I talked to Heather, to Louise, and to Jane in Baltimore and to Dave, back safely in LA. Louise said she would help me track down Billy when I came up with a bit more information. I tried the Internet and, while I found out a great deal about evacuees in general, including one or two interesting personal stories that backed up some of the vague ideas I had been entertaining, I could find nothing about Billy. I did, however, discover that Darlington Library had a large collection of newspaper holdings, including the Northern Despatch, the Northern Echo and the Darlington and Stockton Times. I would have to wait until the weather improved, of course, but I would get to Darlington as soon as I could.

Try as I might, I could find out nothing else about Kilnsgate House during the war, the Special Operations Executive, or any other group that might have commandeered the place. Neither Nat Bunting nor the foot-and-mouth outbreak were mentioned anywhere. I did find a book about the SOE called Forgotten Voices of the Secret War, though, which I ordered from the Castle Hill Bookshop. I doubted that it would contain any revelations. Wartime was the perfect cover for any number of shabby, secret operations, and the worst of them left no traces in any of the record books. The best you could hope for was an eyewitness with a believable story. I reminded myself that this was a distraction from the main theory I had been forming about Grace and Billy’s meeting, a side street off the main route, however interesting it was.

Eventually, the snow stopped and the sun came out. The view from my bedroom window over the dale was almost too bright to bear. The little stone bridge and the lime kiln were completely buried, mere bumps in the undulating stretches of snow. As far as I could see, in both directions, the landscape was blindingly white.

Even then, it was another day before I heard the sound of the snowplough making its way down Kilnsgarthdale Lane. Of course, that was only the beginning, I still had to dig out my front path and my car, and that took me the best part of an afternoon, after which I was too exhausted to go anywhere. I phoned Heather, and she came by for dinner with the Indian takeaway I had been craving, and the previous weekend’s papers. She told me that the roads in and around town were still awful, and cars were slipping and sliding all over the place. The police were inundated with accidents, including a huge pile-up on the A1 near Scotch Corner. The A66, the main east-west artery in this part of the world, was, of course, closed.

For the next few days, the temperature fluctuated around freezing point, which made things even worse, as it had around Christmas. The snow would melt to slush during the day, and then freeze at night into miniature mountain ranges of ice. People slipped on the unshovelled pavements and broke arms and legs. Most stayed at home if they possibly could. Many of the services remained closed, including the libraries.

I made my way carefully into Richmond for the first time two days after Heather’s visit. I was stir crazy by then, and willing to risk even the roads for the cheer of a pint and a noisy pub. Not to mention Heather’s company for lunch.

I bought a newspaper and settled down to wait for Heather with my pint of Black Sheep at a table in the dining area of the Black Lion, where a fire crackled in the hearth. It was quieter than I had expected. No tourists, no walkers. Most of the news was still taken up by stories of the weather, an English obsession, I had come to realise, and the rest with the economy – poor pre-Christmas sales, because of the weather, of course – as well as the occasional skirmish or massacre on a distant continent. Nothing newsworthy had happened in the USA, it seemed, except for a major snowstorm on the eastern seaboard, nothing new to Bostonians or New Yorkers.

Heather came in shivering and warmed herself by the fire before shucking off her long winter coat. Her cheeks had a healthy glow, though I knew she wouldn’t thank me for saying so. She was sensitive about her complexion. She didn’t even like me admiring her freckles. So I said nothing. I went to the bar and got her a vodka and tonic while she studied the menu on the blackboard over the fireplace. In the end she went for the venison sausage, and I decided on lamb chops.

‘So how does it feel to be a member of the human race again?’ she asked.

‘I was seriously in danger of going crazy up there.’

‘A man reverting to his primitive roots. Yes. A frightening thing, indeed. But you’re all right now?’

‘Nothing a decent pint couldn’t cure.’

‘Have you found your evacuee yet?’

‘Billy? No. The library’s still closed. This bloody weather.’

‘I still don’t see what you think he’ll be able to tell you.’