The Wimbledon Poisoner

by Nigel Williams

  Nigel Williams is the author of sixteen novels, including the bestselling Wimbledon Trilogy. His stage plays include Class Enemy and a dramatization of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. He wrote the screenplay for the Emmy and Golden Globe award-winning Elizabeth I, starring Helen Mirren. His BBC Radio 4 comedy series HR (featuring Jonathan Pryce and Nicholas le Prevost) is now in its fourth series. He has lived in Putney for thirty years.

  Also by Nigel Williams

  Novels

  My Life Closed Twice

  Jack Be Nimble

  Johnny Jarvis

  Charlie

  Star Turn

  Witchcraft

  Black Magic

  Charlie (based on his teleplay)

  The Wimbledon Poisoner

  They Came from SW19

  East of Wimbledon

  Scenes from a Poisoner’s Life (short stories)

  Stalking Fiona

  Fortysomething

  Hatchett & Lycett

  Unfaithfully Yours

  Plays

  Marbles

  Double Talk

  Class Enemy

  Easy Street

  Line ’em

  Sugar and Spice

  Trial Run

  The Adventures of Jasper Ridley

  W.C.P.C.

  My Brother’s Keeper

  Country Dancing

  As it Was

  Consequences

  Breaking Up

  Nativity

  Lord of the Flies (adapted from the novel by William Golding)

  The Last Romantics

  Harry and Me

  MyFace

  HR (radio series, currently in its fourth season on BBC Radio 4)

  Non-fiction

  Two and a Half Men in a Boat

  From Wimbledon to Waco

  The Wimbledon Poisoner

  Nigel Williams

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Faber and Faber Limited 1990

  This edition published by Corsair,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2013

  Copyright © Nigel Williams, 1990

  The right of Nigel Williams to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-47210-676-6 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-47210-684-1 (ebook)

  Typeset by TW Typesetting, Plymouth, Devon

  Printed and bound in the UK

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Illustration by Tom Gauld; Design by Chris Callard

  For Suzan

  PART ONE

  Innocent Enjoyment

  ‘When a felon’s not engaged in his employment

  Or maturing his felonious little plans,

  His capacity for innocent enjoyment,

  Is just as great as any honest man’s!’

  W. S. Gilbert, Pirates of Penzance

  1

  Henry Farr did not, precisely, decide to murder his wife. It was simply that he could think of no other way of prolonging her absence from him indefinitely.

  He had quite often, in the past, when she was being more than usually irritating, had fantasies about her death. She hurtled over cliffs in flaming cars or was brutally murdered on her way to the dry cleaners. But Henry was never actually responsible for the event. He was at the graveside looking mournful and interesting. Or he was coping with his daughter as she roamed the now deserted house, trying not to look as if he was glad to have the extra space. But he was never actually the instigator.

  Once he had got the idea of killing her (and at first this fantasy did not seem very different from the reveries in which he wept by her open grave, comforted by young, fashionably dressed women) it took some time to appreciate that this scenario was of quite a different type from the others. It was a dream that could, if he so wished, become reality.

  One Friday afternoon in September, he thought about strangling her. The Wimbledon Strangler. He liked that idea. He could see Edgar Lustgarten narrowing his eyes threateningly at the camera, as he paced out the length of Maple Drive. ‘But Henry Farr,’ Lustgarten was saying, ‘with the folly of the criminal, the supreme arrogance of the murderer, had forgotten one vital thing. The shred of fibre that was to send Henry Farr to the gallows was—’

  What was he thinking of? They didn’t hang people any more. They wrote long, bestselling paperback books about them. Convicted murderers, especially brutal and disgusting ones, were followed around by as many paparazzi as the royal family. Their thoughts on life and love and literature were published in Sunday newspapers. Television documentary-makers asked them, respectfully, about exactly how they felt when they hacked their aged mothers to death or disembowelled a neighbour’s child. This was the age of the murderer. And wasn’t Edgar Lustgarten dead?

  He wouldn’t, anyway, be known as the Wimbledon Strangler, but as Henry Farr, cold-blooded psychopath. Or, better still, just Farr, cold-blooded psychopath. Henry liked the idea of being a cold-blooded psychopath. He pictured himself in a cell, as the television cameras rolled. He wouldn’t moan and stutter and twitch the way most of these murderers did. He would give a clear, coherent account of how and why he had stabbed, shot, strangled, gassed or electrocuted her. ‘Basically,’ he would say to the camera, his gestures as urgent and incisive as those of any other citizen laying down the law on television, ‘basically I’m a very passionate man. I love and I hate. And when love turns to hate, for me, you know, that’s it. I simply had no wish for her to live. I stand by that decision.’ Here he would suddenly stare straight into the camera lens in the way he had seen so many politicians do, and say, ‘I challenge any red-blooded Englishman who really feels. Who has passion. Not to do the same. When love dies, it dies.’

  Hang on. Was he a red-blooded Englishman or a cold-blooded psychopath? Or was he a bit of both? Was it possible to combine the two roles?

  Either way, however he did it (and he was becoming increasingly sure that it was a good idea), his life was going to be a lot more fun. Being a convicted murderer had the edge on being a solicitor for Harris, Harris and Overdene of Blackfriars, London. Even Wormwood Scrubs must have more to offer, thought Henry as he rattled the coffee machine on the third floor, than Harris, Harris and Overdene. It wouldn’t be so bad, somehow, if he was any good at being a solicitor. But, as Elinor was always telling him, Henry did not inspire confidence as a representative of the legal profession. He had, she maintained, a shifty look about him. ‘How could you expect anyone to trust you with their conveyancing?’ she had said to him, only last week. ‘You look as if you’ve only just been let out on parole!’

  Glumly, Henry carried his coffee along the dark corridor towards the stairs that led to his office. ‘Office’ was a grandiose term for it really. ‘Cupboard’ would have been a better description. It was a room about eight to ten feet square, offering, as an estate agent with whom Henry was dealing had put it, ‘a superb prospect of a ventilator shaft’. It was, like so many other things in Henry’s life, more like a carefully calculated insult from the Almighty than anything else.

  He would give himself a treat today. He would g
o up in the lift. He stabbed angrily at the button. Mr Dent from the third floor, who was waiting by the lift doors, looked at him narrowly. ‘Can’t you tell –’ his eyes seemed to say, ‘that I have already pressed it? Surely you realize that when the button is illuminated someone has pressed it?’ Henry, before Dent was able to start talking to him about lifts, weather, the Law Society or any of the other things that Dent usually talked about, headed for the stairs. He pushed open the door and, as he put his foot on the first step, experienced a revelation comparable to that undergone by Newton in the orchard or Archimedes in his bath.

  He could kill Elinor, very easily and no one need know. The implications of this were absolutely breathtaking. No one need know. He said it aloud to himself as he trudged up the stairs. No one need know. Of course. No one need know. Every minute of every day people were being murdered. Hundreds of people disappeared without trace every year. No one ever found them. The police were all, as far as Henry could see, totally incompetent. They spent their time hiding behind low stone walls and leaping out at motorists travelling in bus lanes. They liked people like Henry. People like Henry, white middle-aged men who lived in Wimbledon and had one daughter, were their idea of what British citizens should be. One young constable had come to the house last year when they had been burgled and, very laboriously, had written the details of the crime into a book. He had looked, Henry thought, like a gigantic blue infant, a curious cross between cunning and naïveté, a representative of an England that was as dead as the gold standard. Henry had tried to tempt him into making a racist statement by announcing that he had seen a black person outside the window two weeks ago, but all the constable had said was ‘You don’t see many coloureds in this part of Wimbledon.’ He said this almost with regret, in the tones of a disappointed birdwatcher searching for the great crested grebe.

  Nobody would ever suspect Henry. He was well aware most people thought he was something called a Nice Bloke. Henry was never quite sure what being a nice bloke entailed – it certainly wasn’t much to do with behaving scrupulously well towards one’s fellow man. If it meant anything at all it probably meant other people thought you were a bit like them. To most of those who knew him Henry was just eccentric enough to be terrifyingly normal, and even his carefully calculated bitterness, the quality of which, on the whole, he was most proud, had become, in early middle age, a Nice Dry Sense of Humour.

  I’ll give them nice dry sense of humour, he thought savagely as he came out on to his floor and lumbered towards room 4038, I’ll give them nice dry sense of humour and then some. I’ll give them the real Henry Farr, and he won’t just be making witty little remarks about the London orbital motorway either.

  Of all Elinor’s friends he was the least likely to be suspected of her murder. She had, even at their wedding, surrounded herself with people, nearly all of whom were interesting enough to warrant the close scrutiny of the police. Many of them, to Henry’s horror, openly smoked drugs. One of them wore a kaftan. Two wore sandals. And they still trooped in and out of his house occasionally, looking at him pityingly, as they talked of foreign films, the latest play at the Royal Court and the need for the immediate withdrawal of armed forces from Nicaragua. Sometimes they sat in the front room reading aloud from the work of a man called Ian McEwan, an author who, according to Elinor, had ‘a great deal to say’ to Henry Farr.

  Oh yeah, thought Henry grimly as he passed 4021a, his coffee threshing around dangerously in its plastic beaker, and Henry Farr had a great deal to say to Ian McEwan as well.

  The trouble was, of course, that among Henry’s sort of person, a rugby-playing surveyor, for example, or the kind of dentist like David Sprott who wasn’t afraid to get up on his hind legs at a social gathering and talk, seriously and at length, about teeth, he was considered something of a subversive. At their wedding, all those years ago, his friends, all of them even then in suits and ties, had nudged each other when he rose to answer his best man. ‘Go on then,’ he could see them thinking, ‘be a devil!’ But as his eyes travelled across to Elinor’s crowd, with their frizzy haloes of hair, their flowered dresses and carefully arranged profiles, he realized that there was nothing he could think of to say that would persuade them he was anything other than a boring little man.

  But there were certain advantages in being considered boring. And if they wanted him to be boring then that would be the performance that he would offer. He would be so stunningly boring that even the bankers, account executives, product managers and stockbrokers he counted as his friends would start to back away from him. He would play up to Elinor’s friends’ idea of what he was. He would play the part of the upright citizen, the dull wounded little man whose horizons were bounded by the daily journey to the office, the suburban garden and the suburban sky, set around with suburban roofs and neat suburban trees. He cut a little caper as he walked along the corridor that led to his office, recovering a quality that had suddenly become important to him – his drabness. He would be drab. Drab drab drab drab. He would be as drab as Crewe railway station. As drab as a not very important mayor. He would blend into Wimbledon until he was indistinguishable from the trees, the homing children, the lollipop ladies, or the gables on the red brick houses.

  And they would never, never find out that he had done it.

  When he came into the office, past Selinda his secretary, an elderly woman who was constantly asking him to give her ‘something interesting to do’ (How could he? Henry himself never had anything interesting to do), he squeezed close to the wall and coughed to himself in an extra drab way. He left his office door open and, for the next hour, treated her to a stunningly drab conversation about the searches on a leasehold flat in Esher. When she put her head round the door and asked in her usual, conspiratorial manner if he wanted tea, Henry said, ‘Tea would be a delight, my dear!’ He said this in a high-pitched monotone that was intended to convey boringness; he was, however, he could tell from Selinda’s expression, trying a little too hard.

  He pulled out a correspondence file between a landlord and tenant in Ruislip – nearly eighty pages devoted to conflict over responsibility for a dustbin area – and tried to concentrate. How was he going to do it?

  Murder should not, he felt, be unnecessarily complicated. It should have a clean, aesthetic line to it. It should involve as few people as possible. Oneself and the victim. If it was like anything, thought Henry, it was probably like the art of eating out.

  His first thought was to do something to the Volkswagen Passat. That would have the advantage of getting rid of both car and wife at the same time. If there was anything that Henry hated as much as his wife, it was the car they had chosen and purchased together. He had hated the little brochure that described it – the pathetic attempt to make it look glamorous, the photographs of it, posed, doors open, doors shut, desperately trying not to look like what it was – a square box with hideous speckled seats. The Volkswagen Passat was about as glamorous as a visit to the supermarket, which was what it was principally used for. The people in the photographs in the brochure – a man, his wife, his two children and his stupid, stupid luggage, his folding chairs, his folding table, his hamper, his sensible suitcase packed for his sensible holiday – were exactly how Henry imagined the advertisers thought of him. A man called Frobisher-Zigtermans – a person who insisted on not remaining anonymous during the transaction – had described it as ‘all car’. ‘It’s all car!’ he had said. ‘I’ll say that for it!’ And, as Henry smiled and nodded damply, he thought to himself, Is that all you can find to say about it? ‘It’s all car.’ Can’t you talk about its roadholding? Its incredible power over women? You can’t, can you? Because you think I wouldn’t respond. Because you think I’m as boring as this car. Which is why I’m buying it.

  Just thinking about his car made Henry want to hire an electric hammer and run with all convenient speed to Wimbledon, to fall upon its bodywork with screams of rage.

  He would saw through the brake cable. Not right th
rough. Almost through. He would do it tonight, Friday, just in time for the weekly trip to the supermarket. Elinor would turn left up Maple Drive, left again into Belvedere Road, left again on to the hill . . . and then . . . oh then . . .

  Except she didn’t go to the supermarket, did she? He did. Which was one of the many reasons, now he thought about it, why he was planning to kill her. How did one saw through a brake cable anyway? It was no good chopping the thing in half, was it? Your victim would catch on before accelerating to a speed likely to be fatal. You had to saw it halfway through, didn’t you? Henry wondered where the brake cable was, what it looked like, whether it was the kind of thing to which you could take a saw. The trouble with this sawing-halfway-through lark was that you had no control over where and when the thing was likely to break. Christ, it might even be when he was driving! Even if she was sitting next to him, complaining about his driving, her own imminent decease would not compensate for the depression generated by his own. Ideally, of course, Elinor would be driving her mother somewhere. Somewhere a little more interesting than Wimbledon Hill. Somewhere, well, steeper . . .

  Henry sat for quite a long time thinking about the conversation between Elinor and her mother as they hurtled down the Paso della Lagastrella, brakeless. ‘Darling, do something!’ ‘I’m doing something, darling!’ ‘Oh darling, we’re going to die, oh my God!’ ‘I know we’re going to die, it’s not my fault, oh my God!’ He thought about the soaring, almost optimistic leap the Volkswagen would make as it cleared the edge of the cliff (from Henry’s memory of it there was no safety barrier on that particular stretch of the Apennines). He thought about the long, long fall and then the flames, way below. About the immense difficulty that would undoubtedly be experienced by rescue teams.

  It was five twenty-nine and fifteen seconds. In just forty-five seconds he would get up from his desk, take his coat and walk past his secretary. He would say ‘Goodnight all’ (although she would be the only other person in the room), and then he would take the lift down to the chilly autumn street and Blackfriars station, all soot and sickly neon. And from there he would rattle back to Wimbledon and his wife of twenty years.