The Wimbledon Poisoner

by Nigel Williams

  32

  ‘It was the apple that gave me the idea,’ said Elinor.

  ‘How come?’ said Henry.

  ‘Well,’ said Elinor, ‘I like apples.’

  Rush stroked his chin reflectively. Of all his Great Detective mannerisms, this was the one Henry found most irritating. Elinor, however, seemed oblivious of him.

  ‘No one knows how Maisie got hold of the apple, do they?’

  ‘They don’t!’ said Henry.

  ‘Well,’ here Elinor sighed deeply, ‘I gave it to her.’

  Rush shifted in his chair.

  ‘I know I should have said,’ she went on, ‘but I just couldn’t bear to. And what I had to say wouldn’t have helped much. And a bit of me – it’s really stupid – felt guilty. I felt I was somehow responsible.’

  ‘And where,’ said Rush, ‘did you . . . obtain the er . . . apple?’

  ‘That’s the point,’ said Elinor. ‘It was just . . . there. On the bowl. I couldn’t work out how it had got there.’

  Henry was thinking back to the night on which Jungian Analyst with Winebox gave what was positively his last consultation. Had he had time to go out, buy an apple, inject it with prussic acid and leave it on the fruit bowl for Elinor? Probably, was the answer.

  ‘But I can’t resist apples. Especially big, red juicy ones. Henry knows I can’t!’

  Henry wondered whether to admit this was true. As she talked he tried to work out whether being a solicitor would give him less or more rights when he was arrested. Would he only be allowed, for example, one phone call to himself? He wouldn’t be any use, though, would he? He couldn’t do conveyancing, let alone murder. But Rush wasn’t looking at him. His piggy little eyes were fixed on Elinor’s face.

  ‘And then I remembered,’ she went on, ‘about Everett Maltby. That man Henry was always going on about. It was the apple, you see, that reminded me. So I went and looked him up. There’s an awful lot written about him.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Henry, ‘in The Complete History I try to—’

  What did he try to do? Why had he so thoroughly and completely blacked out on the subject of Maltby? His entire mental processes, these days, could be described as the physiological equivalent of the dot dot dots in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

  ‘There’s a particularly good book,’ said Elinor, ‘called A Woman’s Weapon, which is a sort of feminist study of domestic murder in the nineteenth century.’

  ‘Proving,’ said Henry, ‘that it was a response to male chauvinism, presumably. Lizzie Borden: Pioneer Worker in the Field of Sexual Politics. I think—’

  ‘Shut up, Henry!’ said Elinor sharply, ‘I’m talking!’

  Rush was looking at her with a kind of adoration. Why was it, Henry wondered, that his wife was able to inspire uncritical appreciation in so many people who weren’t him? If he had been able to look at her like Rush, all this would never have started.

  ‘Actually,’ she continued, ‘it studies men who killed women and women who killed men. But it’s most interested in men who killed, or tried to kill, their wives. And by far the best bit of the book is about Everett Maltby.’

  ‘Maltby,’ said Rush, ‘didn’t only kill his wife. He killed—’

  ‘Norman Le Bone, the butcher,’ Henry heard himself saying, ‘Genevieve Strong, a neighbour, and—’

  ‘I’m telling this, Henry!’ said Elinor. ‘Shut up!’

  Henry had grasped a new and potentially sensational fact about his memory. It only seemed to function in close proximity to his wife. Maybe Elinor, who had always seemed to know where his tie, socks, shirt or clean trousers were located, had begun to usurp other functions of his brain. Perhaps his little store of knowledge had leaked across to her circuits. Perhaps there was an instruction in his cerebellum that said: COPY FILE TO WIFE.

  ‘And of course,’ she said, ‘Maltby was born in this very street!’

  That was something Henry knew he didn’t know. He had never known that. This was something completely and utterly new. Or was it? The trouble was, once you had forgotten something it was pretty hard to remember whether you had ever known it. The best thing to do was to behave as if you were with one of Elinor’s intellectual friends, nodding sagely at the titles of books you had never read, films you were never going to see . . .

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said, ‘he had a daughter called Maisie!’

  ‘Actually,’ said Elinor, ‘he did!’

  Rush let out a long slow sigh, like a deflating lilo, and taking out his pipe started to do some rather overdone listening, of the kind that suggested he was waiting for a chance to interrupt.

  ‘And his shop,’ said Elinor, ‘was just off the bottom of the hill. In one of those roads whose name you never can remember. You know? Like Bolsover Street or Atlantis. It’s one of those streets you can never find consciously. The only way back to it is to let your mind go blank and hope your feet get you there. I think the chemist’s shop is still—’

  ‘He was a chemist,’ Henry was saying, ‘of course he was a chemist!’

  Elinor ignored this interruption. ‘Maltby’s wife seems to have had some kind of nervous breakdown, and in the spring of 1888, as far as we can tell from her journal—’

  Journal? Journal? This was typical of feminist history. Who could have known Mrs Maltby kept a journal? Of course, in his study of the Maltby case Henry had more or less concentrated on the Wimbledon angle; but he had no recollection of where the man lived. He would have remembered that, surely?

  ‘She went off sex anyway. Became very difficult, and Maltby, who in many ways was a very advanced husband – he did most of the cooking, for example, most unusual in a Victorian marriage – decided to do away with her. It seems to have been that he saw no other way out of his relationship.’

  Henry looked at the floor. He found, somewhat to his surprise, that he was clenching and unclenching his hands.

  ‘In truth,’ Elinor said, ‘I see no other way forward, for all sides oppress me like a wall that faces the humblest prisoner in a jail and strong poison is my only helpmeet!’

  Maybe she was possessed by the soul of a Victorian poisoner. This certainly wasn’t how she normally carried on. Then Henry saw that Elinor was reading from a paperback book.

  ‘You see,’ she said, putting the book down, ‘I got this ridiculous, ridiculous idea that Henry was trying to poison me!’

  ‘My God!’ said Henry, ‘surely you didn’t!’

  He decided to try this line again. He still sounded unbelievably unconvincing. ‘Me?’ he said desperately, trying to kick start his credibility. ‘Me? Poison you? Darling!’ He tried a little laugh here (‘No, love, no!’ from Rush’s invisible director).

  ‘Because, you see, Maltby hit on a most ingenious way of getting rid of Helena. He began to poison people in the locality, rather in the way William Palmer did, but, as was argued at his trial, he murdered the butcher, the clerk in the house opposite and a family of five simply to cloak his real intentions.’

  ‘I still don’t see,’ said Henry, ‘what this has got to do with our poisoner.’

  He stopped.

  ‘Unless of course,’ he said, ‘you think I’m sort of . . .’ he laughed again, ‘possessed! Or something!’

  By way of answer Elinor got to her feet. Henry had never heard her talk for so long on any subject not directly concerned either with Maisie’s education, her personal therapy or a domestic appliance. He felt vaguely as if his interest in the subject had been hijacked and, looking across at Rush, hoped to see the man yawning or shaking his head sadly. He wasn’t. He was looking at Elinor with what could only be described as rapture.

  ‘The cup he hands you and the wine

  Are tainted with the hate he bears

  Yet drink it down and ye yield up

  All of your present woes and cares!

  Pour on! Pour on! Drink deeply now!

  Since Faith and Hope and Love are gone,

  Let us drink all with Him they call
<
br />   The Poisoner of Wimbledon!’

  This, Henry realized, from the uncomfortable silence that accompanied it, was poetry. He didn’t like poetry. He didn’t know much about it but he knew he didn’t like it. Elinor, perhaps sensing this, gave him some more.

  ‘Since Memory and Reason are

  But dust in th’Historic Wind,

  Since Love and Justice are alike,

  Both impotent and vain and blind,

  Let us take meat and share our board

  Yea! Let Him feed us and begone!

  We have forgot our need to live

  Brave Poisoner of Wimbledon!’

  Elinor gave no clue as to where this poem might have come from or, indeed, why she was reciting it, but that was fairly typical of poetry lovers. They shoved it down your throat at every opportunity, declaiming it in buses or quoting it with relish at you when you were trying to do something else. A bit like people who insisted you had an alcoholic drink, or the worst type of jazz aficionado.

  Rush didn’t seem interested in the poem. ‘And where,’ he said, ‘did you find the apple?’

  ‘In the bowl,’ said Elinor, ‘by the window. But then anyone could have got in. It wasn’t that that spooked me about it. You see poison is a spooky thing, as Gordon was saying. It’s to do with . . . I don’t know . . . it sounds stupid . . . with . . . loving someone in a way. And I thought . . . that poem, it’s by Edwina Cousins, a Victorian lady poet who got quite obsessed with Maltby, what it’s saying is . . . poison is to do with obsession. And you see this person, who’s doing all this, now, I mean, I think they got it all from Maltby.’

  ‘Why?’ said Henry. ‘Whatever gave you that idea?’

  ‘Well,’ said Elinor, ‘all the people the poisoner has killed, I mean our poisoner, live in exactly the same streets lived in by Maltby’s victims.’

  Rush gave a little gasp.

  ‘And when Maltby did finally kill his wife, he did it with a poisoned apple. Laced with prussic acid. He was a keen amateur photographer you see!’

  She looked across at Henry with a smile. ‘That’s why I didn’t tell the Law,’ she said, ‘I thought it was Henry! Doing his bit for local history!’

  Henry bit back a sob. ‘Extraordinary!’ he said. ‘And then, I suppose you thought . . . how absurd! Henry wouldn’t . . . er . . . do anything like that. Did you? Is that what you thought?’

  33

  If the poisoner’s intention, as a woman on the New Statesman had opined, was ‘to destabilize bourgeois society’ – he had not really succeeded. Bourgeois society, even in Wimbledon, went right on being bourgeois. People washed their cars and read quality newspapers and worried about their shares as if there wasn’t anyone sneaking around Belvedere Drive and Pine Grove waiting to make their diet even more high risk than it already was.

  The poisoner had, however, had considerable impact on lunch. People didn’t walk into San Lorenzo di Fuoriporta, at the bottom of Wimbledon Hill, with quite the same élan. The waiters didn’t greet you with the same style, and somehow there wasn’t quite the same thrill as you sat at the white tablecloth, toyed with an aperitif and wondered whether to have linguine alla vongole or carpaccio for your first course. For a start, you couldn’t see the kitchens. And this fact that, previously, had made lunch such an entrancing prospect for the bourgeoisie of the borough, rendered it, now, almost unbearable. Who knew what was happening behind those double doors that flew apart and slammed shut behind the sallow waiters as, humming rather effortfully, they made their way from kitchen to table? He could have got to the radicchio before you did. He could have done a thorough job on the gnocchi. He could have coated the vitello with something a bit more lively than a salsa tonnata.

  Businessmen still gamely went through with the ritual. Many of them said that the British economy would collapse without lunch. The more honest of them said that they didn’t know about the British economy but for sure they would collapse without lunch. But you could see from their nervous glances about them, their anxious enquiries about where Luigi was buying his stuff these days (‘Don’ worry sah – we go alla way to Keeng’s Cross! An’ we got double locks on alla da doors!’) that the pleasure of dining out, that exquisite combination of helplessness and dominance, that highly formalized return to the nursery had lost, both literally and metaphorically, its savour.

  The most popular restaurant in Wimbledon, since the poisoner scare had started, was a small Turkish taverna. For a start you could see what the chef was cooking. And the very simplicity of the cuisine – grilled meat and salads – militated against the poisoner’s techniques. The restaurant bought its meat from Smithfield, brought it, under lock and key, to Wimbledon, and invited the diners to compose their own salads. BRING YOUR OWN VINAIGRETTE said a sign in the window, DON’T LET YOU-KNOW-WHO HAVE A HAND IN YOUR LUNCH! Alone of the eateries in the district, they seemed to make a virtue out of the crisis, perhaps because of the healthy tradition of poisoning that had always existed under the Ottoman Empire. When they brought your doner kebab to the table there was always a little joke (‘This should finish you off nicely!’) and always, in a gesture that was both charming and did genuinely inspire confidence, the proprietor tasted the offered dish before serving. As Henry observed to Elinor one of the great thrills about eating in Mehemet’s Cave of Pleasures, as the place was known, was wondering whether Mehemet would keel over and drop dead immediately after nibbling a bit of your shashlik.

  It was to Mehemet’s restaurant that Henry went, one day in December, to meet Detective Inspector Rush and Karim Jackson of Brawl Books. It was fairly clear, Henry thought, that the policeman had asked him to the occasion in order to tempt him into making one last, fatal mistake. Jackson was, after all, the man who had turned down The Complete History of Wimbledon, and Henry had quite often made abusive remarks about him in the detective’s presence. It might be true that, when possessed by the soul of the poisoner, Henry was so fiendishly clever that even this mistake would prove fatal only to those who shared his meal. But this thought was no longer of much comfort. Henry wanted to be discovered. He wanted it all to finish. If he was found slipping something into the publisher’s humus, so much the better.

  Elinor and Maisie seemed pleased that he was going out to lunch with someone from the media. Maisie asked him if he could get Michael Jackson’s autograph, and Elinor hinted that a casual mention of her upcoming monograph on ‘The Politics of Poison’ might earn Henry unspecified sexual favours. But Henry’s heart, as he pushed open the restaurant door, was heavy. He did not want to kill again. ‘I must not,’ he muttered to himself as he scanned the shabby tables, ‘bear hatred. I must not feel angry. This man has a right to reject my work. I do not want to kill Karim Jackson.’

  ‘Hi!’ said a voice from a table in the corner, and Henry found himself looking at the first man to send back the most detailed account of a suburb ever put together in the English language. ‘Henry Farr?’

  To Henry’s surprise the only concession that Karim Jackson appeared to have made to the Third World was to be ever so slightly biscuit-coloured. In dress, manner, frame of cultural reference and physical appearance he seemed completely English. He was, also to Henry’s surprise, really rather charming. Henry waited in vain for him to sneer or boast. When he was told that Henry was the same Henry Farr who had offered him The Complete History of Wimbledon he seemed overjoyed. He spoke warmly of ‘the vast scale of the book’s ambition’ and explained that, although it wasn’t something they wanted for ‘their list’ (at which, in spite of Jackson’s extreme diffidence of manner, Henry felt a prickle of hostility) he thought it was a splendid piece of work and one which should, in time, find a proper home.

  What made all this much worse was that, at any moment, Henry knew he might try to slip something in Jackson’s food. Although he had searched himself thoroughly before leaving Maple Drive, Henry knew enough about the workings of the unconscious to know that he might have secreted Jackson’s quietus, without his being aw
are of the fact, anywhere about his person. He might even, thought Henry, have got up in the middle of last night, broken into Mehemet’s Cave of Pleasures and doctored a fragment of doner which he might then, by a process so subtle he himself would not even be aware of it, manage to steer in the direction of the publisher. The whole trouble with therapy, he reflected glumly, acknowledging that he was in the middle of some crude, stone age, do-it-yourself version of the activity, was that it stirred up things you never even knew were there. You got to know quite what a bastard you were, exactly how far you were in the grip of things that made you, to use Elinor’s phrase, ‘stunningly peculiar’.

  He had even started reading books on therapy – although there didn’t seem to be many of them aimed at middle-aged men – and wondering whether he was something called an anal regressive. He was – Henry took another mouthful of cabbage – obsessed with farting and bottoms. This was something (according to one of the books he had read) you were supposed to have got out of your system by the age of five. Might his poisoning activity be a way of compensating for the unsatisfactory nature of his mother’s attempts to breastfeed him (he assumed from everything about himself that they were unsatisfactory, although he would never have dared to broach the subject with Mrs Farr Senior). Was he, in stalking about the place tipping solanaceous alkaloids into vats of rice salad, trying to provide nourishment for the dark impulses that, as Elinor was always pointing out, he had nourished for so long?

  ‘Is your wife green?’ Jackson was saying to Henry.

  Ah ha, thought Henry, at last the insult, carefully led up to by a show of politeness to put you off your guard. No, she’s blue with pink spots. What colour is yours?

  ‘Because,’ went on Jackson, chewing his chicken kebab very slowly and thoroughly, ‘I rather go along with the ecological aspect to the poisoning case. Poisoning as a way of controlling the environment, say, of purging it of the things that one sees as unhealthy. But purging it, of course, by making it, as we would say, “worse”. Do you take my meaning?’