The Wimbledon Poisoner

by Nigel Williams

  She gave him a searching glance. ‘We repress our feelings, we bundle up into a ball and don’t talk about how we really feel. Deep down you probably do care, as you were saying today. Deep down you do care about the environment. About what we’re doing to whales and dolphins and the North Sea and the inner cities, and the whole unleaded petrol thing.’

  Why bring unleaded petrol into this? thought Henry. I have not formulated a view on unleaded petrol.

  ‘What matters,’ said Elinor, ‘in anyone, is a spark of caring. Just something that tells you they’re still alive. That they’re still there. That other people can, well . . . touch them. Don’t you think?’

  Henry narrowed his eyes. He felt more than usually trapped.

  ‘You feel threatened by my feminism, for example. You feel frightened by my growth as a woman. You feel . . .’

  ‘I feel . . .’

  Elinor stiffened with attention.

  ‘I feel . . . frightened by you!’

  ‘What about me frightens you, Henry?’ said Elinor, laying a hand on his arm. ‘Is it me, my physical presence as a woman, my needs and powers as a mother? Or are you frightened of me as an intellectual?’

  ‘I’m frightened of you as a . . . thing,’ said Henry, ‘by the way you look at me, by the space you take up. By you. When I hear your step on the path I . . . I just cower!’

  Elinor threw back her head and gave a braying, mannish laugh.

  ‘Oh, Henry,’ she said, ‘you are funny!’

  And she cuffed him, amiably, about the shoulder. Henry found this curiously erotic.

  He looked around for Maisie. She had been very quiet during the service, although a few days before she had been heard asking what people usually ate at funerals and if there was usually a lot of it. Eventually he saw her in the garden with a whole bowl of rice salad and what looked like a new garden trowel. Black did not seem to have its customary slimming effect on Maisie’s figure. She looked, if anything, bigger.

  Over in the corner Dave Sprott was, to use his own words, ‘settling in’ to the punch. Next to him, Inspector Rush stood, glass in hand, peering at it suspiciously. But then Inspector Rush peered at everything suspiciously. Even small children on tricycles. Sprott took a sip, shook his head violently and started to bang himself on the back of the head.

  ‘Wow!’ he said. ‘Wowza! Got a kick to it, eh?’ Mrs Is-the-Mitsubishi-Scratched-Yet, a thin, girlish, fluffy woman, in an even fluffier mood than usual, grinned up at Henry girlishly. ‘What have you put in this, Henry?’ she said. ‘Paint-stripper?’

  Henry was beginning to have second thoughts about the punch. What had possessed him? He didn’t want to poison the entire population of Maple Drive, did he? Well, at least not in a way that would lead so directly to him. He wasn’t even sure any more that he wanted to poison anyone. But as so often in the murdering game, it was a bit late for doubts.

  ‘Let me try it,’ said Henry. ‘I left it out in the front garden this morning. I hope no one’s interfered with it!’

  He sounded, he thought, like a character in a Victorian melodrama. Several people, including, he was concerned to note, Inspector Rush, were looking at him oddly. He sipped a glass.

  It tasted of almost nothing but bleach.

  ‘I think,’ Sprott was saying, ‘it has quite a resonant, flinty finish!’

  Sam Baker QC (almost) was rolling the punch around his glass and wincing at it. He introduced a minute amount into his mouth and rinsed it around his gums.

  ‘Extraordinary!’ he said. ‘A very positive nose and plenty of body. It reminds me of a New World wine, aged in the barrel. With a hint of . . .’

  ‘Bleach!’ said Dave Sprott.

  Everybody laughed.

  ‘Actually,’ said Henry, ‘if there is anything wrong with it I don’t think we should drink it. I left it out in the garden.’

  ‘And put a rat in it!’ said Sam Baker QC (almost), accenting as he always did the concrete noun in the sentence. Did he do this, thought Henry, because he favoured anything that might possibly be regarded as evidence? Was it a tic, acquired through long afternoons in the Court of Chancery, where the only way of enlivening sentences might be to stress the wrong word? Or was it simply that Sam Baker QC (almost) was (as usual) trying to make you feel awkward?

  ‘Elinor, love,’ said Henry, ‘you try it!’

  ‘No no no,’ said Elinor, ‘it tastes like bleach!’

  Sprott drained his glass and smacked his lips. ‘It goes down a treat after a while,’ he said, in his carefully preserved northern accent. ‘It has a nicely balanced quality of well-orchestrated fruit. What have you put in it, Henry?’

  ‘Bleach!’ said Sam Baker QC (almost). Everyone (apart from Henry) laughed again. Detective Inspector Rush, who had been rocking to and fro on his heels, started to peer into the bowl.

  ‘I’m a bit worried about this!’ said Henry. ‘I think we should take a look at—’

  ‘No no no!’ said Sprott, dipping his glass in the mixture and taking a deep draught of Yugoslav Riesling, brown sugar and assorted domestic cleaners. ‘It’s good. It’s a bit on the aggressive side. But basically it’s good. Has it got Slivovitz in it? Or is it some form of regional tequila?’

  ‘I think,’ said Henry, who was starting to sweat with the enormity of his offence, ‘that someone may have . . . I don’t think we should drink . . .’

  But, as so often, people were ignoring him.

  ‘What do you think?’ Sprott was asking Mr Is-the-Mitsubishi-Scratched-Yet. Mr Is-the-Mitsubishi-Scratched-Yet made nervous little movements with his hands. He sipped a little, smiled prettily and, casting a nervous glance out to the street towards the Mitsubishi, said: ‘It’s not unpleasant!’

  ‘Can’t we—’ Henry began.

  But now everyone wanted to get at the punch. Even Elinor consented to have half a glassful. Henry tried to scrape the ladle along the bottom of the bowl when he served her, reasoning that Impact and Start and Finish ’Em would probably sink through the wine, milk and orange juice, but he was not sure that half a glass would be enough. He was not, to be honest, sure that the solution was going to have any effect whatsoever. The only person who did not accept any of the punch was Detective Inspector Rush who, whenever Henry caught sight of him, was looking down into his glass, suspiciously.

  ‘I’m a little cautious about taking drinks I’m not sure about,’ he said to Henry.

  ‘Is that right,’ said Henry.

  ‘One never knows,’ said Rush, smiling thinly, ‘you can’t be too careful.’

  As the friends, relatives and neighbours of Donald Templeton MD crowded round the punch-bowl licking their lips and holding out their glasses like children in a lunch queue, Henry, who took a couple of glasses himself, peered anxiously round the gathering looking for signs of collapse. There seemed, as far as he could tell, to be a fair amount of that. But then, people in Maple Drive were usually in that kind of state at parties. Part of the trouble was that the subtle blend of Yugoslav Riesling and assorted domestic cleaners was proving astonishingly popular. People said they had never had such a punch. It took a couple of glasses to get you going, they said, but when you got going, they said, you went. Vera ‘Got All The Things There Then?’ Loomis, the ninety-two-year-old from 92, had to be rescued from tipping the bowl up to her lips with her third glass, and Henry and several others remarked that they had never seen such animation among mourners.

  ‘It’s always that way at a funeral,’ said Vera ‘Got All the Things There Then?’ Loomis. ‘Once it gets going it really goes!’

  Dave Sprott seemed totally desperate for the mixture. He stood by the bowl and making a pretence of serving the other guests managed to drink more than anyone else in the room. After a while it became impossible for Henry to discover how many people had actually had more than three or four glasses. He went out through the french windows into the garden. Would the local crematoria be able to cope with the influx of customers, a day or so from now?


  When he returned there were only two or three hardened drinkers standing by the bowl, although Henry was disturbed to note that Inspector Rush was still there, standing just clear of the wall, his glass still full, looking across at Sprott as if he was just about to ask him to come along quietly. Sprott had stopped smacking his lips and muttering that it had a refreshing directness and an unambiguous honesty – but had decanted the punch into a small vase and was tipping it back into his throat, pausing only after each mouthful to slap himself on the back of the neck and shout ‘Wowee!’ and ‘Wowza!’

  He showed no signs of frothing. He was distinctly unclammy. And from where he was standing, Henry could observe no signs of cyanosis. It was Rush he didn’t like. The detective kept peering over the lip of the bowl and pursing his lips, and then looking back at Henry, and though he kept close to the side of the punch, Henry never saw him drink any.

  ‘I remember—’ he was saying as Henry came into the room, ‘dealing with a poisoning case once, which made a great impression on me.’

  No one, however, was listening to him. They were listening to Dave Sprott.

  What Dave Sprott did do – as he always did, when drunk – was to start to talk, loudly and aggressively, about teeth. ‘People’s teeth,’ he said, his carefully preserved northern accent astonishing the artificial gas fire, the Heal’s sofa and the watercolours above the mantelpiece collected by the late Donald Templeton MD over a period of twenty years, ‘people’s teeth are the expression of their personality. For example, a fact not very well known to those outside the profession is that the Romans considered the teeth were the seat of all the most basic human emotions. Was it the Romans, Edwina?’

  Edwina Sprott, six foot two, built like a prop forward, hair on the back of the hands, huge nose, voice like Vincent Price, no breasts to speak of, said, ‘No, David! I don’t think anyone considers the teeth the seat of all the most basic human emotions. Apart from you.’

  Sprott, who always saw in his wife’s remarks a wit not at first appreciated by others (until Sprott pointed it out to them) laughed hysterically. ‘It is, though,’ he said, ‘it is. Take anyone’s teeth and look at them, and you will find the key to their personality. Take that politician I do. The Labour one. His teeth, in my view, say a great deal about his policies!’

  Edwina Sprott towered above him. For a moment Henry thought she might be about to scoop him up in her arms, as a mother gorilla might draw her baby to her, but although she looked as if she might like to do this, she did not. ‘It’s David Steel!’ she said instead.

  ‘It’s David Steel you do, David!’

  ‘Christ, so it is!’ said Sprott. ‘So it is!’

  A sure test of their marriage’s durability was their capacity to be surprised by each other’s anecdotes.

  ‘Christ, he come in for a clean t’other week,’ said Sprott, ‘and I said to ’im, “Clean?, Clean? This isn’t cleaning. This is a restoration job, this is,” I said. I told him my theory about teeth and personality and I think what I said may have an impact on the future development of the Liberal Party!’

  ‘David,’ said Edwina Sprott, her huge hands dangling in front of her, looking down on her man as if he were a particularly tasty snack in some pastrycook’s window, ‘you say the weirdest, weirdest things!’

  Teeth and celebrities were Sprott’s two main obsessions in life. Once started on the subject of celebrities’ teeth he was unstoppable. He talked of the role of teeth in history, their importance in the shaping of the modern world, their influence on great events. As he spoke more about teeth he claimed more and more for them. He spoke of his South African cousin whose entire life had been changed by the clumsy insertion of a bridge. He spoke of the relationship between capped teeth and business success, of the obvious link between loose fillings and feelings of sexual inadequacy.

  ‘Aren’t you having any?’ said Inspector Rush to Henry with a thin smile.

  ‘I won’t, thanks!’ said Henry. ‘I’m driving!’

  Rush’s enigmatic expression seemed to hint at the absurdity of this excuse. Sprott, meanwhile, tipped the last of the bowl down his throat.

  ‘Teeth,’ he said, just before he hit the last of it, ‘teeth, the whole of oral hygiene really, is the expression of a society. Britain today is a society in which we have ceased to care about teeth, in which we have ignored the real nature of what we are because—’

  And on the edge of what might have been a truly global aperçu about teeth and British society, without any trace of cyanosis, frothing, soiling of the air passages, pneumonia, or wrinkled, greyish, leathery hardening of the oesophagal mucous membranes, he whirled round in mid-gesture, clawed at his throat and fell, headlong, on Billykins’s carpet.

  21

  No one was very sympathetic.

  Most of the guests were shouting for more punch and Henry, who was dispatched by Elinor to Thresher’s for twenty more bottles of Yugoslav Riesling, added it to the more corrosive elements of his recipe, only to be told that the new blend ‘lacked fizz’.

  Sprott lay face down on the carpet, while Mrs Sprott (who was more drunk than anyone had ever seen her) shouted obscenities at him in a voice that sounded as if it were coming from an even deeper grave than usual. By this stage Henry was back in the room and the group round the punch-bowl had split up; it was Henry who found himself prodding the body with his foot and giving his opinion as to Sprott’s state of health. As far as he could tell, Sprott was still breathing. Henry went out into the hall and looked through the open door at the chestnut trees on the green.

  Behind him the noise of the party went on. He could hear Billykins shouting something. ‘Who wants a widow?’ was what it sounded like. Someone, probably Derek Bloomstein, the Other Optician, had started playing the piano.

  At least Sprott wasn’t exhibiting any of the symptoms of acid poisoning. There was nothing clammy about him. Had Sprott, Henry asked himself, swallowed the stuff in such quantities that it was acting independently of his digestive system? Sloshing around his immaculately cared-for mouth, cannoning into the walls of his gullet and smashing straight through them into the bloodstream?

  If it had, he was probably well beyond cyanosis, frothing, or soiling of the lips. He was probably in deep shock. He might, thought Henry, have only minutes to live. If things went on like this there would not only be no one to take his blood pressure or check on his wisdom teeth, there would be no one to sort out his eyes, check out his conveyancing problems or tell him which roofing company to avoid. He had better go back in and get Roger From the Practice to look over Sprott. Except, of course, he couldn’t possibly tell the man what was wrong with the dentist. Could he? That would incriminate him, wouldn’t it? Could he?

  Henry was not particularly fond of Sprott. He had never, for example, liked the mechanical, almost threatening way the man said ‘Rinse!’ There had also been a nasty incident some years ago, known as The Capping of Elinor’s Teeth, in which, in Henry’s view, the dentist had steered dangerously close to extortion.

  But when it came to it, could he do it? Could he let the man die? Was it fair?

  He had already murdered Donald of course. Henry had expected, in the days after hearing the news, to feel some of the things murderers were traditionally supposed to feel. Guilt, for a start. At any moment, as he went between Blackfriars, the Rose and Thorn, St Michael and All Angels Primary School, Wimbledon, and Waitrose PLC he half expected Donald to leap out at him from behind a tree, gibbering, covered in blood and chains. Sometimes, very late at night when he could not sleep, he saw him coming up the garden towards him, blood on his face, soil round his lips and in his right hand a cracked vase in which was, of course, a few drops of fatal thallium . . . But on the whole, having become a murderer did not seem to have altered his life. If anything, he felt slightly better than usual.

  He had no particular urge, either, to murder anyone else, a thing he had noticed happening to quite a few murderers. Once they had tasted blood, some characters
seemed to get a nose for chopping up people into easily manageable portions and leaving them in left-luggage compartments. A slight lowering of their moral standards seemed to bring on an uncontrollable urge to be beastly, an urge Henry did not feel. Even his urge to be rid of Elinor was not, he noticed, as keen as it once was. If he was still wedded to it, it was in the spirit of ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’, rather than the almost romantic fervour with which he had first embraced the notion.

  He sighed and went back to the denuded front room. Elinor and Inspector Rush were in the middle of what looked like a rather intense conversation, which seemed, like so many intense conversations, to fail upon Henry’s approach.

  ‘You see,’ Rush was saying, ‘I’m a naturally suspicious man. It’s my job. I’m paid to be suspicious.’

  He stopped and looked at Henry narrowly. Sprott was still lying face down on the carpet. There was no sign of Roger From the Practice. Mrs Sprott was leaning against the mantelpiece, her mouth open, exhausted enough for silence. Mr Is-the-Mitsubishi-Scratched-Yet was kneeling on the tiled surround to the gas fire. He appeared to be being sick. Glumly, Henry went out into the hall. Some mourners, but not all, were looking clammy. Some were singing. Quite a few were being sick out of windows. On the landing on the first floor, Billykins, veil askew, was sobbing into the arms of Peter ‘Where is the Upfront Money?’ Furgess from 65.

  ‘Death,’ Furgess was saying, ‘is certain. You just have to face it, there’s no point in moaning about it. It’s part of life. It’s something that happens. It’s . . .’ Furgess’s face furrowed with the effort of self-expression. ‘. . . it’s . . . par for the course!’

  Billykins seemed to find this thought comforting.

  Well, death was par for the course, wasn’t it? It wasn’t such a great event. Perhaps that was why he felt no urge to confess. Henry had never understood why it was that Raskolny-whatever-his name-was had bothered to turn himself in to the police when no one had anything whatsoever against him.

  ‘Oh!’ came a voice from the floor. ‘Oh my God! Oh!’