The Wimbledon Poisoner

by Nigel Williams

  The only time that Donald didn’t look like a doctor was when people at parties asked him anything about health or physiology. Then he looked like a frightened animal. His composure would vanish, his grey eyes would shift around the room and, muttering something about antibiotics, he would disappear to the other end of the room, where some hours later he would be discovered at some local worthy’s side, discussing parking problems at Wait-rose with the quiet authority of a great physician.

  Maisie had gone round to the passenger door of the Volkswagen and was standing, one hand poised to open it as soon as Henry should unlock it. Henry lowered himself into the driver’s seat and stood looking out at her for a moment. It was amazing how little time children wasted. How they went on to the next thing with such satisfaction and certainty. How they went on from being carried and put in things to sitting in the front seat of cars, opening things for themselves, unlocking the tame mysteries of life. She’ll be bloody driving soon, he thought, as he clicked open the lock and his daughter settled in beside him. She had her mother’s knack of occupying space around her. She snapped the seat belt into position and stared out through the window as if in search of something else to organize.

  ‘Elsie Mitchell says I stink!’ she said, as if opening this topic for theoretical debate.

  ‘Who’s Elsie Mitchell?’

  ‘A girl in Class Two of course,’ said Maisie, ‘with a nose like a pig!’

  Henry drove.

  He turned right into Caldecott Road, left into Howard’s Avenue, right on to Mainwaring Road and up the wide thoroughfare that led to Wimbledon Hill. In all these streets, thick with lime trees, estate agents’ boards and large, clean cars, there were no people to be seen at all. Henry knew all the houses – the double-fronted mansion with the Mercedes in the driveway, the row of early Victorian workmen’s cottages, fastidiously restored, the occasional bungalow or mock Gothic affair with turrets – he knew what each one was worth, and he followed their fortunes, decay, repair, sale, in the way a countryman might watch the seasons. At 29 Howard’s Avenue the builder’s skip was still outside and the rusty scaffolding blinded its shabby windows. At 45 Mainwaring Road the upper maisonette was still advertising itself for sale – no less than six boards competing for the passerby’s attention. Henry noticed all these things with something like affection while Maisie pressed her nose (very like a pig’s, Henry thought) to the window of the Passat.

  How was he going to turn the conversation round to the subject of poison? Henry could not imagine, when it came to it, the beginning, middle or end of a conversation in which Donald would tell him how to get hold of an untraceable poison.

  He could steal some leaves from Donald’s prescription pad. But were doctors allowed to order poisons? Why should they be? What were the medical applications of, say, arsenic? Henry realized he had absolutely no idea. He was as pathetically unqualified in the art of murder as he was at golf or philosophy. The problem with this poisoning business was that the preliminary research was horribly incriminating. One minute there you were asking casual questions about arsenic and the next there was your wife throwing up and having her hair fall out. People would put two and two together.

  Christ, what were the major poisons?

  There was arsenic, cyanide, prussic acid and – the list stopped there. Nobody much used poison any more; that was the trouble. Or if they did it was so modern that nobody got to hear about it. Henry couldn’t think of any celebrated poisoners apart from Maltby and Crippen. And after Crippen, what? The line died out, didn’t it? And while we were talking about Crippen, it would probably be unwise to choose as a role model someone who had been topped for the offence. He wanted someone who had got away with it.

  He was drawing up outside the hall when he thought of Graham Young.

  For the moment he could think of nothing apart from the name. Young had, as far as Henry could remember, been sent to Broadmoor. But hadn’t he been a state-of-the-art poisoner? A man who approached the subject with some finesse. Even if it wasn’t quite enough finesse to keep him out of the loony bin. From Henry’s recollection of the trial, which was, admittedly, not all that clear, Young had been some kind of chemist. There was probably no better way, if one was going to do this thing properly, than to study a celebrated practitioner. It wouldn’t be enough to find a poison that would finish her off. He needed to know how to play it when the abdominal pains got started. Was there, for example, a poison that created symptoms that looked like a fairly recognizable disease? And if so, why wasn’t every red-blooded English male using it?

  Graham Young, yes. Graham Young. Henry had an image of a quiet man in a suit. A man not unlike himself. Something wet and heavy hit the side of his head. He realized Maisie was kissing him. He turned and watched her run up the path and into the hall. Where, though, was Donald? His white Sierra was parked just ahead of Henry, the door open, but there was no sign either of him or Arfur.

  Henry got out of the car and sauntered over to the Sierra. No one around. The passenger door was open. And there, on the top of his open bag, staring straight at him, was the white notepad he used for issuing prescriptions. Henry pulled open the door, yanked off the three top sheets and scuttled back to his car. Only when he was safely inside the Passat did he look round to see if he had been observed. He was safe he was safe he was safe.

  As he groped his way under his seat, seeking somewhere to stow the paper, his fingers met something cold and hard and sharp. The jack. He’d been looking for that for ages. And if all else failed it would probably be an effective, if unsubtle way of letting his wife know that something rather more serious than Marriage Guidance was required to get them out of their marital difficulties. He wrapped the prescription paper round it and started the engine. He had an hour to get to the library, do his research and return for Maisie. A whole hour. What better way to spend one of those rare breaks in the suburban day than by studying methods of getting rid of one’s wife.

  4

  There were no fewer than four books in the Wimbledon Public Library that dealt with the Graham Young case. One of them – by a man called Harkness – was 400 pages long, contained twenty-four black and white photographs, three appendices and several maps and diagrams. It was eighty pages longer than the standard biography of Antonin Dvořák, the composer, and only seventy pages shorter than the definitive historical account of Rommel’s North African campaign.

  There were pages and pages of psychoanalytic rubbish, Henry noted, and endless, dreary character sketches of the people Young had poisoned. But there was also a fairly concisely written chapter entitled ‘Thallium Poisoning: Odourless, Tasteless and almost Impossible to Detect’. This was just the sort of thing Henry wanted to read.

  Most poisons, it seemed, tasted unpleasant. (Elinor did not drink either tea or coffee and only the occasional glass of mint tea. She drank no alcohol and thought most forms of seasoning depraved. Her diet was, in a sense, poison proof.) But thallium, it appeared, was quite tasteless.

  Its effects, however, were sensational. Your hair fell out. You had hallucinations. You lost the use of your limbs. You went on to do sterling work in the diarrhoea, headaches and vomiting department and you ended up coughing out your last in a way that Henry thought would be entirely suitable for Elinor. It wasn’t just that. Thallium poisoning created a set of symptoms exactly matching a series found in a type of polyneuritis known as the Guillain-Barré Syndrome. The first post-mortem on one of Young’s victims – Fred Biggs – had found no traces of thallium in the body, although later microscopic analysis revealed there were several hundred milligrams, more than enough to kill him.

  It was the polyneuritis that Henry liked. Two years after they had been married, Elinor had suddenly, mysteriously, developed a weakness in her legs, and Henry, who, equally mysteriously, in those days wasn’t trying to kill her, had hurried her to the local hospital where the doctors had diagnosed – wait for it – polyneuritis. Polyneuritis was clearly a word like morality th
at meant so many different things as to be absolutely meaningless. If it meant anything at all, thought Henry, it was something along the lines of We haven’t got a clue. Henry could imagine the conversation with Donald now. Elinor on the bed, hair falling out, vomiting, losing the use of her limbs and he and Donald, over by the window, voices low, faces discreetly grave. Donald would issue a death certificate for any cause you suggested to him; this case, Henry felt, might be so staggeringly self-explanatory as to allow him to come to a diagnosis off his own bat.

  ‘It’s the . . . polyneuritis . . .’ he heard himself say, as Donald sneaked towards the medical dictionary, his big handsome head bowed with concern, his grey eyes looking into the distance, in the direction of the local tennis court.

  He might even sob. That would be good. If only to observe the embarrassment on Donald’s face.

  Where should he have her cremated? Somewhere rather low-rent, Henry thought. There was a particularly nasty crematorium in Mitcham, he recalled, with a chapel that looked more than usually like a public lavatory. And, from what he remembered of the funeral (his grandmother’s), the ushers looked like men who were trying hard not to snigger. Or should he go completely the other way? Hire a small cruiser and slip her coffin over the side in some ocean that might have some special meaning for her? (The Bering Straits, possibly.) He could . . . but Henry was almost too full of good ideas for her funeral. She wasn’t even dead yet.

  Half an hour left.

  The chief problem with thallium was that it didn’t seem to be used for anything much apart from the manufacture of optical lenses of a high refractive index – camera lenses, for example. Henry stared for some moments at the word ‘optical’. Why should he need stuff for making lenses? He didn’t make cameras, he wasn’t an optician—

  No, but Gordon Beamish was. Gordon Beamish was a real live optician. He was all optician. He was probably always nipping down to Underwoods for a few grams of thallium. Susie Beamish probably drank it for breakfast. There would be an especial pleasure in using Gordon Beamish’s name. If anyone deserved a few years in an open prison it was Beamish.

  Like many people who wear glasses, Henry hated opticians, especially opticians with 20/20 vision. Gordon Beamish was a man who made a fetish out of being lynx-eyed. He could be seen most mornings at the door of his shop in Wimbledon Village, arms crossed, mouth twisted in a superior sneer, just waiting for the chance to decode the small print on the front of buses.

  ‘I saw you in the High Street the other day,’ he would say, in a tone that suggested that it was quite impossible for Henry to have seen him. Henry had lost count of the number of times Beamish began a sentence with the words ‘I notice . . .’ or ‘I observe . . .’ Things were always crystal clear to Beamish; he was always taking a view or spying out the land or finding some way of pointing out the difference between his world – a universe of sharp corners and exact distances – and the booming, foggy place in which Henry found himself every time he took off his glasses. When suffering eye tests in the darkened cubicle at the back of his shop, almost the only thing Henry ever managed to see was the pitying smile on Beamish’s face as he flashed up smaller and smaller letter sequences, all of them probably spelling ‘You are a fat shortsighted twerp’!

  Beamish, thought Henry, could be the fall guy. He liked to think of Beamish in the dock at the Central Court, his counsel blustering on about his client’s perfectly normal, acceptable need for heavy metal poisons (‘But how do you explain, Mr Beamish, your ordering a quantity of thallium from a perfectly reputable chemist’s . . . ?’) He closed the book, replaced it in the cookery section of the open shelves, and walked briskly to the car. There was no time to lose. It was entirely possible, Elinor being the way she was, that somebody else would try to kill her before Henry got in with his bid.

  Indeed, he reflected, as he joined the queue at the traffic lights opposite the library, it was such a blindingly simple, brilliantly obvious idea, it was very difficult to think why everyone wasn’t doing it. Why, while they were about it, wasn’t she trying to kill him?

  Henry drove cautiously up the hill. He tested the brakes when he reached the top. They seemed OK.

  Maisie looked, as always, subtly different after her piano lesson. She looked more aware of the world, brighter, more optimistic. This was some compensation for the fact that she was almost certainly no better at the piano.

  Donald’s son, Arfur, was there, a small, fat six-year-old, who stared at Henry and said: ‘I played the piano!’

  ‘Good!’ said Henry, through compressed lips. He seized Maisie by the hand and walked back to the car. If he could get hold of something from Beamish, he might be able to lay his hands on some thallium by lunchtime. She could be dead by the time children’s television started or, if not dead, at least well on the way to it. He chose a route back down the hill that did not involve too many serious gradients, moving from Roseberry Road to War-burton Drive to Chesterton Terrace and, from there, doubling back along a series of streets with an offensively tangible air of esprit de corps – Lowther Park Drive, where people called to each other over their Volvos and, even worse, Stapleton Road, a place that seemed almost permanently on the verge of a street party.

  The brakes still seemed OK.

  Gordon Beamish was not in his shop – instead, under a gigantic spectacle frames stood a small, rat-faced girl called Ruthie. Ruthie, as if to compensate for her boss’s powers of vision, seemed to have every known complaint of the eyes short of blindness. Astigmatism, squints, premature presbyopia, short sight, long sight, tunnel vision, barrel vision, migraine, Ruthie had the lot, and her glasses resembled some early form of periscope; they were a circular, heavy-duty affair, with catches and locks and screws. Somewhere underneath the pebble lenses, tinged both grey and pink, the steel traps and the wires were, presumably, a pair of eyes but they were only, really, a flicker, in the depths of the optician’s pièce de résistance that towered above Ruthie’s nose.

  Henry liked Ruthie and Ruthie liked him.

  ‘Is Gordon about?’

  ‘No,’ said Ruthie, ‘he took Luke to Beavers.’

  Beavers. That was a new one on Henry. What the hell was Beavers? Some neo-Fascist organization perhaps? From what he could remember of Luke, the boy would have fitted well into the Waffen SS. Leaving Maisie on the street he went into the shop.

  ‘I’ll leave a note for him!’ he said.

  Ruthie folded her arms, as if to emphasize her lack of responsibility for the shop she was minding. Her eyes, or something very like her eyes, moved in the thick depths of the glass. ‘Fine!’ she said.

  Henry went through to the back of the shop.

  On Gordon’s desk was a pile of headed notepaper. Henry picked up two sheets. Then he saw something better. In a square, steel tray at the back of the desk was a notepad, the kind of thing given away by small businesses in an attempt to register their names with the public. A. M. Duncan, it read, Lenses, Photographic and Ophthalmic. And underneath the heading, an address. After a quick glance back through the shop (Maisie and Ruthie were staring out at the street in silence) Henry slid one sheet of the printed paper into Gordon’s typewriter. What he really wanted to write was:

  Henry Farr wishes some thallium to administer to his wife. Please give this to him. He is desperate.

  But instead he told whomsoever it might concern that he was Alan Bleath, a researcher employed by the above company and he needed to buy 10 grams of thallium for research purposes. Was that going to be enough? She was quite a big woman. Shouldn’t he order a kilo? Two kilos? A lorryload, for Christ’s sake! The trouble was, he thought, as he signed the paper, indecipherably, with his left hand, folded it and put it into his jacket pocket, he didn’t know much about thallium poisoning, and even less about the making of lenses with a high refractive index. A really thorough murderer would have boned up on both subjects more intently.

  Ten grams would have to do. He took a sheet of Gordon’s notepaper and typed a short no
te to Alan Bleath, thanking him for his recent contribution to the stimulating seminar on lenses of a high refractive index, signed this with a fair approximation of Gordon’s hand and put it in one of the ‘Gordon Beamish: See?’ envelopes, addressed to Alan Bleath, 329 Carradine Road, Mitcham. (‘Do you seriously expect me to believe, Mr Beamish, that someone came into your office and, without your knowledge, used your typewriter to address a letter?’ ‘Well, I—’ ‘I put it to you that you had always loved Elinor Farr. Your lust for her knew no bounds and when this loyal woman spurned you for her husband of twenty years you wreaked a terrible revenge!’ ‘No no no! You’ve got it wrong!’)

  Actually, thought Henry, as he checked himself in the mirror, no one, not even the police, would be stupid enough to imagine that Elinor could be the victim of a crime passionnel. The only passion involved in this operation was an overmastering desire to see her nailed down in a brown box.

  He looked, he thought, fairly Bleath-like. Apart from the glasses. He slipped these off and saw a blurred, red disk of a face which resembled a Francis Bacon portrait. Alan Bleath.

  ‘Hurry up!’ said Maisie. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Leaving a note for Gordon,’ said Henry.

  Let’s have a jar! he wrote on Gordon’s pad. ‘Jar’ was the sort of stupid, hail-fellow-well-met word that Gordon would appreciate.

  He decided not to go to a chain chemist’s. Those sort of places made so much they could afford the luxury of high standards. He wanted an old-fashioned, grubby place with old-fashioned glass bottles in the window. Somewhere run by an elderly couple with no commercial sense. The sort of people who cried with relief when you went in to buy a piece of Elastoplast.

  He needed the sort of chemist’s he had gone to as a child. If he could remember that far back. These days he had trouble recalling the troublesome fragments of his education he had bothered to memorize in the first place; the names of new acquaintances were jumbled together with old verb forms and things he thought were childhood haunts turned out to be places he had only just discovered. But there was somewhere, wasn’t there, where once, years ago, he had gone with his mother, or someone fairly like his mother, anyway? Wealdlake Road. That was it! Wealdlake Road!