‘Open up, Henry,’ said a voice within him, ‘you are not all bad! You are businessman, father, cook, raconteur! You are murderer, socialite, good neighbour. A murderer is, in many ways, a very positive thing to be. Quite a lot of people would like to be in your shoes. Go with the flow, Henry. Accept the changes in your life! Be well, husband, commuter, solicitor, unapprehended poisoner!’
He was actually grinning to himself when Elinor came into the room. She looked, he thought, almost triumphant.
‘John Rush!’ she said, in the tones of a butler announcing a celebrity at a party. Then she flung the door wide open. ‘He says he wants to see you about something!’
Henry goggled at her as Rush came into the room, bowing slightly as if to acknowledge the importance of his appearance. Before she retired, Elinor, still in larky mood, waved her hand towards him, as if she was proud to have a representative of Law and Order on the premises.
‘Detective Inspector Rush,’ she said, ‘all the way from Wimbledon CID!’
PART TWO
Crime and Punishment
‘Don’t you see that blessed conscience of yours is nothing but other people inside you!’
Luigi Pirandello, Each in His Own Way
25
Henry could tell straight away that, when actually on the job, Detective Inspector Rush was one of the most astute and ruthless detectives of the twentieth century.
There was something about the way he fiddled with his pipe, tamping down the tobacco with the back of a matchbox, biting the stem and, from time to time, squinting along it in a knowing sort of way, that suggested a policeman of almost superhuman intelligence.
But Henry could tell, from the man’s drabness, his thin, nasal voice, and his resolute disinclination to discuss anything to do with criminology, that he was a very serious customer indeed. Why else was he parking himself in Henry’s front room talking about the weather, about Elinor, whom he seemed to know worryingly well, and, indeed, almost anything but the subject that had quite obviously brought him here. He was clever, thought Henry, very, very clever indeed.
‘Your wife,’ said DI Rush, ‘is a remarkable woman!’
‘She is!’ said Henry.
‘You picked a good ’un there!’ went on Rush.
‘Indeed!’ said Henry.
What was it about Elinor that made her so attractive to such widely different social groups? Policemen, doctors . . . where would it end? thought Henry. Was it simply that, without really being aware of it he had, for all these years, been married to a very attractive woman? The thought was, somehow, frightening. If this was the case – how was he going to hang on to her? Rush was talking again, and something about the look in his eyes told Henry he was getting on to the purpose of his visit.
‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ he said, eventually, with what seemed like reluctance, ‘but I’ve been talking to quite a few people in Maple Drive about . . .’
Here he waved his pipe at the window. Once again Henry noted the subtlety with which the subject was being introduced. It was almost as if Rush was broaching it against his will.
‘. . . poison . . .’
‘What kind of poison?’
The detective inspector seemed to forget, for a moment, which kind. But he also managed to suggest that this very absentmindedness might be some subtle interrogator’s ploy. Henry felt an absurd desire to throw himself on the carpet and shout ‘I confess! I’m an animal! Take me away!’
‘Poison . . .’ he said, and paused. Then he gave a short, stagy, little laugh. Henry wished he would stop making gnomic remarks and get on with the real business of the afternoon – alibis, heavy innuendo and possible threats of violence.
‘I’m particularly interested in poison,’ Rush was saying. ‘I look through the local paper and I see someone’s been taken ill or found dead somewhere or other and I think . . . I wonder . . . I wonder . . .’
‘Yes,’ said Henry, ‘I expect you do.’
Rush was at the window. He wheeled round, suddenly theatrical, and jabbed his pipe at Henry. ‘Three people dead,’ he said, ‘after a . . .’ He paused.
‘Drunken spree?’ said Henry.
‘Precisely,’ said DI Rush.
He paced back to the sofa and sat on the arm, looking even more like a man who had been instructed to do all this – walk, sit, tamp down pipe, suck, pause, blow – by a not very good theatre director.
‘And of course,’ Rush seemed close to laughter, ‘there was no inquest. It was simply another party that got out of hand. Three more stiffs.’
‘Can I offer you a drink,’ said Henry, ‘or are you on duty?’
‘I’m never off duty!’ said Rush. ‘I’m always on duty. At four in the morning I wake and I stare into the darkness, thinking about crime and the evil things we do to each other. And about, well, how beastly we can be! I’ll have a gin and tonic if you’re having one.’
‘Surely!’ said Henry, trying to keep his voice steady.
He went to the door. Maisie was crouched at the keyhole, eyes round with excitement. She followed him through to the kitchen. ‘What have you done?’ she said.
‘What have you done?’ said Henry.
‘Nothing,’ said Maisie, ‘I’m a child.’
‘Being a child,’ said Henry, as he poured the biggest gin and tonic he had ever poured in his life, ‘is no excuse.’
He poured one half the size for the detective inspector and, followed by Maisie, went back towards the front room. She installed herself by the crack in the door as he went in. Rush was still standing, staring out at the street, his hands by his side, the pipe now dead to the world. When he heard Henry he wheeled round sharply.
‘A nice quiet street,’ said Rush in a manner that suggested that it was nothing of the kind, ‘in a nice, quiet suburb. Full of nice, quiet houses, and nice, quiet families inside them. And somewhere, in one of them . . .’
His eyes flared dangerously into life. ‘A madman. A psychopath. A killer.’
Henry jumped. ‘Do you think so?’
‘Oh, I know so,’ said Rush, ‘I know so. I know that somewhere out there, somewhere out there is a man so twisted by hatred and spite, so bent out of shape by life that he couldn’t really be called human any more.’
‘Golly!’ said Henry.
‘A man,’ said Rush, waving his right arm and pacing up and down on the carpet, ‘a man who thinks the world owes him something. A drab little man, obscure, meek and mild, hen-pecked perhaps. Like Crippen, say, with a pathetic pipe dream of his own that will never come to fruition—’
Henry thought of The Complete History and gulped. He had the uncomfortable sensation that this man could see right into him, that unlike almost everyone else with whom he had dealings (including Elinor) he knew what Henry was thinking.
‘A man who is probably impotent. Unable to connect. Perhaps homosexual, I don’t know. But, above all, a man with a warped, vile, grotesque view of the world. A narrow, twisted little man, a moral cripple, a—’
‘A beast?’ said Henry, in a high, squeaky voice.
‘That’s it!’ said Rush, amazed at Henry’s powers of intuitive understanding. ‘A beast!’
Rush’s face was pale with righteous fury. Henry could see his knuckles whiten round the pipe.
‘Most of us,’ he went on, ‘rue the day the death penalty was abolished.’
‘Indeed,’ said Henry, ‘indeed!’
Rush was clearly not one of your namby-pamby community policemen. He was a copper out to get his man. The sort of person who would work on a case twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, until he had brought the guilty one to justice. The sort of policeman of whom, in normal circumstances, Henry thoroughly approved. He was not entirely sure, however, that in this case such zeal was appropriate. There was something, he decided, odd and fanatical about the man.
It was the same with the death penalty. Henry had always been in favour of the death penalty. For other people. In his case he felt it would qu
ite simply be unfair. He deserved something for what he had done of course. Light whipping maybe. But death? For God’s sake! Would his death bring Donald back? Wasn’t it simply an archaic desire for revenge? He drank deeply of his gin and tonic.
‘But,’ said Rush, ‘you’ve got me on my hobby horse!’
‘What is your hobby horse?’ said Henry.
‘The Wimbledon Poisoner,’ said Rush. He laughed, briefly, and from his top left-hand pocket drew a sheaf of clippings. Henry wasn’t quite sure whether he was supposed to look at them, and in order not to offend the man – he had in fact an almost insane desire to stay on the right side of him – he stretched out his hand for them. Rush moved his hand away with a larky little smile. He wagged a reproving finger at Henry.
‘Oh, no you don’t!’ he said. ‘You’re the same as me!’
‘How do you mean?’
‘A local historian.’
‘Ah . . .’
Certain things about the man’s behaviour were becoming clearer.
‘You remember at the Wimbledon Society,’ went on Rush, ‘last year. They were telling us about Everett Maltby!’
‘Were they?’
Why was he unable to remember meeting Rush at the Wimbledon Society? Surely something as important as a talk about Everett Maltby (he was beginning, now, to recall it) would have marked the occasion as something special. It struck him that there might be something sinister in this lapse. His notes on Maltby were constantly going astray, weren’t they? Perhaps, Henry didn’t like this idea at all, there was something paranormal going on.
‘All areas of the world,’ Rush was saying, ‘have their particular crimes, and the same is true of districts of Britain. There are, for example, an awful lot of cases of death due to sudden, unscheduled abdominal pain in Wimbledon.’
Henry coughed. ‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean,’ said Rush, ‘that crime isn’t always a matter of bashing an old lady over the head and running away. Real crime can be very much more subtle. Real crime is often hidden, beneath the surface of an apparently respectable community. The doctor who raises his hat to you in the High Street may be one of the Bus Station Buggers. The bank manager may have a rather over-liberal attitude to accounting proceedings. You take my meaning?’
‘Not really,’ said Henry.
‘I’m coming to you,’ said Rush, in a tone that suggested the opposite was the case, ‘because of course we’re both local history fiends. It’s difficult. Quite a few people think I’m way off beam on this one. But I had a hunch you might understand.’
‘Understand what?’
Rush flung his arms wide. ‘We live on the street,’ he said, ‘we’re neighbours. Let’s get together. Let’s discuss it. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? You know what I think’s going on under the oh-so-respectable surface of this oh-so-respectable manor. I’m talking, of course, about poisoning.’
So this was a social, rather than a business call. Or was it? Was Rush here to frighten him? Or had he some even darker purpose?
‘It’s just a barmy theory of mine,’ he was saying. ‘I’m a voice in the wilderness, but I’m convinced, absolutely convinced that there is a poisoner at work in the borough. Here and now!’ He gave an enigmatic smile. ‘My colleagues think I’m crazy,’ said Rush, ‘they don’t want to know. With them, it’s clamp this, clamp that, traffic flow . . . football hooligans . . .’ He snorted. ‘Football hooligans.’
Then, ‘When I first got on to the poisoner, I told a few people, and they were, I have to say, unsympathetic to a degree. But that, if you don’t mind me saying so, is the mark of a modern police officer. The door-to-door slog, the house-to-house search, the repetitive, mechanical labour of collecting evidence. Look at the Yorkshire Ripper.’
‘Well, indeed,’ said Henry, ‘indeed, he—’
But Rush ignored him. ‘There was no one there who trusted his judgement. Who went out on a limb. Who stood up and said “Look, I have a theory. A crazy theory.” Because the psychopath is only to be tracked down by an intuitive guess. He’s somebody who otherwise doesn’t read as a criminal. He’s you!’
He pointed directly at Henry. Henry gave a low squeak.
‘He’s me! This is the story we’re looking at. The Wimbledon Poisoner is out there OK. He’s there. He’s anyone. He is you and me. He is the dark part of ourselves. You know?’
‘Fascinating,’ said Henry, ‘and . . . er . . . when did you first notice this . . . er . . . pattern of abdominal disorders?’
Rush screwed up his face, paced across to the patch of carpet nearest to the fire, which seemed to be his favourite spot for significant remarks and, wheeling round, did his best bit of pipe work so far, a double lunge, with parry in quarte and passage of waltz-time conducting, followed by a bit of invisible crosshatching above his ear.
‘It clicked,’ he said, ‘it all fell into place a week or so ago. When I saw you at Donald Templeton’s funeral.’
‘Let me,’ said Henry, ‘get you another gin and tonic.’
26
It was horrible. The man was playing some elaborate game with him, waiting for him to crack. He might even be lying about the Maltby talk. Oh Jesus, thought Henry, I am very sorry about the poisoning. I really do apologize. If you get me out of this one I will never ever do anything like it again. I will not think unpleasant things about people. I will not . . .
He poured a gin and tonic about twice the size of his first one, drank it and then poured one twice the size of that for Rush. Important to have the man on your side.
Maisie was still crouched by the door.
‘You could bring me a drink!’ she said.
‘Shut up!’ hissed Henry.
‘It’s very interesting,’ she said, ‘about the poisoner. Who is it, do you think?’
‘You shouldn’t be listening to this,’ said Henry.
When he had been served with his drink, Rush started pacing the carpet once more. ‘But I really started,’ he said, ‘a long, long time ago. You see evidence, in a case like this, has a habit of disappearing. What looks like a normal death . . .’
He took a fairly pristine-looking cutting from the file and thrust it at Henry.
TEMPLETON, Donald [it read]. At his home in Maple Drive after a brief illness. Much loved father of Arfur, and devoted husband to Billykins. ‘FOR GOD’S SAKE WHY?’
‘She was very upset,’ said Henry. ‘It’s not the best-worded announcement of a death I’ve ever read.’
Rush snickered. ‘It seems pretty carefully worded to me,’ he said, ‘ “brief illness”. Not, you notice, “sudden and inexplicable gastric attack”, not “after severe abdominal pains”. No no no. People aren’t interested in that sort of thing. They like to draw a veil over it, don’t they?’
He stopped at his favourite patch of carpet and then, as if conscious that he had used this as a base before, moved off towards the window. ‘And then,’ he went on, ‘actually at the funeral, three more deaths! Extraordinary coincidence, don’t you think? Extraordinary! But of course no one remarks on it, do they? No one puts two and two together, do they? In the paper we read—’
He handed Henry another cutting. Henry read:
COVENEY, Rufus. Beloved son of George and Myfanwy. Novelist and critic of note, at Maple Drive after a seizure. ‘Go not behind for all is dark before!’
Henry was studying this quotation and finding it vaguely suggestive when, below it, he saw:
SPROTT, David. David died peacefully at a social gathering of friends last Tuesday. His funeral will be held at Putney Vale Crematorium, where anyone who wishes a last chance to see him will be most welcome, and afterwards at the family home. Good man, good dentist, good, good, good. ‘Farewell.’
He was beginning to sweat.
‘All just slips by, doesn’t it?’ said Rush. ‘Another corpse. Why bother? It is only someone who looks carefully, who studies the evidence, who can put facts together and say “Hang on a tick! There’s more here th
an meets the eye.” That’s police work, Mr Farr. Constant vigilance. Constant suspicion. It’s like having a little man inside who asks nasty questions. I’ve got a nasty little man inside me and he won’t go away. Look at this—’
Rush pushed a much older-looking clipping towards Henry. It read:
PURVIS, Alan. At Parkside Hospital after a collapse in the Cat o’Nine Tails Bar and Brasserie. O Death where is thy sting? Mourned by Mum, Dad and all at the folkclub.
‘There are others,’ said Rush. ‘Manning, last September. Severe intestinal pains after an outdoor buffet lunch with a group of salesmen from White’s garage, Wimbledon. Pedersen, collapse and subsequent death after ingesting a hamburger at Putney Show. Annabel Lee Evans, only twenty-two, vomiting, diarrhoea and death in May of this year four hours after attending a disco and Bar-B-Q at Southlands College where she ate a meal of curried chicken and coleslaw . . .’ He spread his arms wide. ‘We’re dealing with a maniac. A clever, unscrupulous maniac.’
Henry was inclined to agree with him. He had never met such a maniac in all his life. The man should not be allowed out. But, as Rush continued to pace the carpet, stab the air with his pipe and talk rubbish, Henry wondered whether he might not be misjudging him. He recalled a phrase of Keith Simpson’s: ‘Almost every event in life is consequent upon a meal.’ Just as poisoning was, therefore, hard to detect, it was, by the same token, all the more possible. And once you had fallen under its sway, as Rush had, it offered a hideous but plausible explanation for so many things! In a way, of course, he and Rush were not unalike. Other people would have found them dull. They were dull. They both knew that they were dull. But that didn’t stop them.
‘A maniac,’ said Rush, ‘someone who roams the streets, waits his moment, and then, bingo, injects the hamburger, the chocolates, the ham and tomato sandwich, the chicken vindaloo. Lays his little trap and passes on. The poisoner’s reward is reading about himself – reading about deaths that he made happen. He has a power that no one knows about. He made all this happen. He’s playing God, don’t you agree, Mr Farr?’
The Wimbledon Poisoner Page 17
