The Wimbledon Poisoner

by Nigel Williams

  There was another headline, the usual rash of comment, and then people forgot about Karim Jackson. Or at least Henry did. He was no longer aware of what people, or indeed journalists, thought. He was scarcely aware of Elinor or Maisie. Only when Rush came to call, which seemed to be every other day, did he take notice of his wife, watching the way she smiled when Rush told one of his endless anecdotes, nearly all of which seemed to deal with the fatal mistakes made by over-confident criminals.

  ‘Your murderer,’ he would say, watching Henry keenly over his gin and tonic, ‘is a man living in the hell of guilt. He knows – as we know – that one vital piece of evidence will send him to the Old Bailey, and that somewhere in the trail of misery he leaves behind him the one piece of fabric or trace of chemical that will tie him to the crime lies in wait for the observant member of the force! Let’s take Sprott, for example!’

  ‘He died!’ said Maisie, watching Rush with huge eyes. When he has finally finished playing with me, thought Henry, and married Elinor, he will make a good father to Maisie. Perhaps the three of them will come and see me in Broadmoor.

  ‘I know,’ laughed Rush lightly, ‘but you see at the time people didn’t take kindly to my theories about the poisoner. They thought your Uncle John was barking mad!’

  Elinor flushed. ‘If people had listened to you,’ she said, ‘none of this need have happened.’

  Rush shrugged. ‘No hard feelings!’ he said, and bent down to Maisie. He’ll bath her, thought Henry, when I’m in Broadmoor he’ll bath her and tell her stories. They’ll all have a good laugh about me. My God, why don’t I do away with him now? One more won’t make any difference, will it?

  Elinor was looking at him oddly. ‘What’s the matter with you, Henry?’ she said. ‘Is something worrying you?’

  ‘Nothing, darling.’

  I’m a mass killer, that’s all! And that man knows it and is waiting for me to crack! Is enjoying the spectacle of my guilt! Wants to make it last!

  ‘So you see,’ Rush was saying to Maisie, ‘I couldn’t get an inquest at the time. I was a voice in the wilderness. But you see, our murderer—’ here he looked straight at Henry – ‘probably knows that there is some chemical in the ashes of David Sprott that ties the murder to him!’

  Finish ’Em, thought Henry. They probably had people down at Wimbledon police station who could not only spot traces of Finish ’Em in a corpse, but say something pretty authoritative about when and where it was bought. Why, though, did Rush want to hang the death of the dentist on him? After all there were plenty of other bodies around for which he seemed to be responsible – psychiatrists, publishers, Boy Scouts, too, as far as he could tell, and . . .

  Henry stopped, and found he was staring at Rush. A terrifying thought had occurred to him. Suppose there really was a maniac on the loose, and the maniac wasn’t him. Suppose Rush knew it wasn’t him. Suppose the man had simply been waiting, all this time, for the moment when he could tie Henry to one murder, and thereby to all the others. That would explain his insistence that Jackson and Macrae had been the victims of random attack, and the reason for his waiting until now before moving in on the remains of David Sprott.

  ‘It’s Sprott we need to look at,’ Rush was saying, ‘and if it takes too long to get the paperwork sorted we shall just have to nip over the garden wall and take the matter into our own hands. Eh, Henry?’

  Henry whimpered slightly. ‘Yes,’ he croaked, ‘yes, of course.’

  As Elinor went past the policeman to fetch a tray of cakes from the kitchen, he put his arm round her waist with offensive familiarity. She stopped and looked down at him, beaming maternally.

  ‘You picked a good ’un here, Henry!’ said Detective Inspector Rush. ‘You better watch your back or I’ll have her away from you!’

  ‘Don’t do that!’ Henry said in a voice whose pitch surprised and displeased him.

  Rush looked into his eyes and smiled. ‘May the best man win!’ he said.

  And both Maisie and Elinor laughed.

  35

  There was only one way out of Henry’s dilemma, and that was to get hold of the remains of Sprott before the policeman. Rush had been making several references to the paperwork involved in exhumations, in the week before Christmas, and one night, without really planning the business very carefully, Henry added breaking and entering to his list of crimes.

  The night he became a burglar began with another of his attempts to talk to Elinor about what he was now fairly sure was a raging affair with a senior member of the Metropolitan Police. He started as he usually did by pretending to discuss Rush the Policeman, rather than Rush the Great Lover.

  ‘Old Rush,’ he said, ‘has obviously got a theory of who the poisoner is, hasn’t he?’

  This thought seemed to excite Elinor unnaturally. As she turned towards him, her eyes bright, it occurred to Henry that she and Rush might be working together, the two of them pushing him closer and closer to the edge, until . . .

  ‘Who is it, do you think?’ she said. ‘Who do you think?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘No, who though? I mean . . .’ She propped herself up on one elbow. ‘Do you know, Henry, I really did think . . . at one time . . . it might be you!’

  Henry’s eyes popped open in the dark.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you are pretty repressed. You are interested in poisons. And you know a bit about Maltby.’

  ‘The Maltby theory is crazy,’ said Henry, ‘it doesn’t . . .’

  ‘But,’ said Elinor, falling back on to the pillow, ‘I decided you couldn’t possibly be the poisoner.’

  Henry closed his eyes again.

  ‘The only person you’d want to poison,’ she said, in a smallish voice, ‘is me.’

  Henry stiffened. ‘Why should I want to poison you, darling?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Elinor, ‘I’m the only person who’s nice to you.’

  Henry found this curiously touching. ‘Would you be nice to me,’ he said, ‘even if I was trying to poison you?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Elinor, ‘how could I be nice to someone who was trying to poison me?’

  ‘I might,’ said Henry, ‘be trying to poison you in a nice way. Isn’t poison an acceptable brand of oral sadism?’

  Elinor sat up again, and flailed her left hand in the direction of the bedside lamp. It collided with something that slithered on to the floor. When the light came on, Henry recognized it as a copy of a magazine called Lifestyle Design, that was for some reason pushed through their letter box every month. It was, as Henry recalled, full of articles about how to make brik à l’oeuf and which rosé to drink at parties. It was probably all written by Karim Jackson under false names. Oh my God. Karim Jackson! He burrowed back under the duvet.

  ‘If you tried to kill me,’ said Elinor, in a warning tone, ‘I’d jolly well try to kill you back.’

  ‘I know,’ said Henry, ‘but you might not know!’ He could hear Elinor thinking about this. If she didn’t go to sleep soon the dawn would be printing itself on the sky behind the red roofs of Maple Drive, old Mr Grade from 37 would be taking his dog for a walk . . .

  ‘You don’t try to poison someone because you love them,’ said Elinor, ‘it isn’t a branch of sado-masochism. It’s a sneaky way of doing someone in, that’s all. You aren’t really trying to poison me, are you Henry?’

  ‘Switch the light off,’ said Henry. ‘I’m trying to get to sleep.’

  ‘I won’t switch the light off,’ said Elinor, leaning over him, ‘until you tell me.’

  ‘Switch the light off,’ said Henry, ‘and then I’ll tell you.’

  He peered up through a crack in the duvet. Her big white face was just above him. She looked fairly serious. There was a pause and then she moved out of his line of vision; a crash as another two magazines hit the floor to join the puddle of glossy pages already there, and then the room was once more in darkness. To Henry’s surprise, she did not speak. And, to his surprise, he
heard himself saying, ‘Of course I’m not trying to poison you. I . . .’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I love you.’

  This sounded, even in the dark, incredibly insincere. She sounded surprised to hear this news.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I do!’

  He heard the sound of her moving towards him under the duvet, like some large animal lost in the underbrush. When she got to the end of her duvet (the Farrs slept under separate duvets ‘in order’, Elinor used to tell their friends ‘to avoid unnecessary body contact at night’) she grunted slightly as she moved through the cold patch into his territory. When she reached him, her right hand groped for his body and landed on his stomach. It felt large. Henry wondered, with some apprehension, where it was going to next.

  ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘I may have thought about poisoning you . . .’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Well. I mean . . . this last year . . . you haven’t been . . . we haven’t been . . .’

  ‘I’ve been awful,’ said Elinor.

  Henry tried not to sound as if he took this as an offer of submission. ‘Well I’ve been . . . pretty awful . . .’ he said.

  ‘You’ve been dreadful.’

  This struck Henry as unfair.

  ‘I don’t believe you really have,’ said Elinor, ‘not really thought about poisoning me.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Henry slowly, ‘thinking about doing it is as bad as doing it. Or . . . trying to do it and failing!’

  Elinor guffawed suddenly. ‘That’s pathetic!’ she said. ‘That’s what you’d do, Henry!’

  Well, thought Henry, I think I have had rather an alarming success rate actually. I don’t call a body count of five too bad for a first-time poisoner. It’s just that none of them happened to be you, darling. In fact I may well have murdered thousands of people . . .

  ‘I love you,’ Elinor was saying, sounding, Henry thought, a good deal more sincere than him.

  ‘Even though you are a psychopath.’

  ‘Am I a psychopath?’

  ‘A bit of a psychopath.’

  Her large hand slid down and landed on his penis. Henry was not sure what to do about this, so he did nothing. By way of response, Elinor made a farting noise with her lips, a gesture that Henry found curiously comforting. Henry propped himself up on his elbow.

  ‘Do you think I could be the Wimbledon Poisoner? And . . . not know I was sort of thing?’

  ‘God knows, Henry,’ said Elinor, as she started to move off with elephantine slowness to her own duvet. She had received the comfort she needed. She was ready for sleep. Henry was now wide awake.

  ‘If I was . . . you would sort of . . . stand by me, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Elinor drowsily, ‘of course I wouldn’t. Poisoning people is wrong. Especially poisoning complete strangers.’

  Henry thought he saw a glimmer of hope for himself here.

  ‘Do you mean . . . poisoning your wife . . . or husband, of course . . . is OK?’

  ‘I don’t mean that. But it’s . . . understandable. If there’s . . . provocation . . .’

  Like . . . feminism, possibly?

  ‘Anyone can murder really, can’t they? And it could be someone they then realize they love. Like Othello.’

  Henry could not think of anyone more unlike him in any of world literature.

  ‘Love is funny. It’s mixed up with really horrible feelings, isn’t it? If it’s any good or it’s going to survive children and people dying and your parents and so on, it must be full of the most awful . . . well, poison. But taste sweet, like that poor man’s salad.’

  Henry did not want to think about Karim Jackson. But Elinor was now wide awake too.

  ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘it’s an awful thing to say. But all that business with Donald somehow got me through depression. I don’t know.’

  Thanks, Donald, thought Henry, thanks a lot, mate. Donald didn’t answer. Perhaps Donald was beginning to have second thoughts about his earlier, generous attitude to being poisoned by Henry. Perhaps he had been talking to Loomis, Coveney, Sprott, Macrae and Jackson.

  ‘I do love you, Henry. Although you’re absolutely horrible.’

  ‘Could you ever . . .’ said Henry, ‘love anyone else?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ said Elinor.

  ‘Well,’ said Henry, cautiously, ‘you must be attracted to other people. Maybe you have . . . you know . . . secret admirers!’

  If he was honest with himself, one of the things he had at first liked then disliked about Elinor was the thought that she would not, could not be drawn to anyone else. But now, the very thing that was pulling him back to her was his suspicion that she and Rush were up to something. Was it wickedness and weakness that people liked to see in other people?

  ‘Yes . . .’ he said, ‘I think . . . you see old Rush is in my view no ordinary policeman. He is someone who has a mind that must make him very attractive to women. Women like you, who are . . .’

  He stopped. Elinor was snoring, loudly. Her full-blooded snores were echoed, from upstairs, by a shriller version of the same from Maisie. It was, thought Henry, as if mother and daughter were calling to each other. As she snored, she moved, or rather flailed her left arm in his direction. Henry kicked her hard in the leg. This usually stopped her. But instead of answering with a grunt and a retreat to the edge of her side of the mattress, this time she carried on both snoring and thrashing the duvet with her left arm. Henry got up, went to her side of the bed and, pulling her by the foot, got her as far away from him as possible, so that she was lying diagonally across the corner that was at the opposite end of their bed’s rectangle. Her head lolled over the side awkwardly and her right foot protruded from the grubby linen. She looked, even in sleep, uncomfortable. But at least she wasn’t snoring.

  Henry stumped miserably back to his side of the bed. It had started to rain outside. Oh my God, thought Henry, poor old Donald. It would seem that poisoning the bastard was the most positive marital move he had made in fifteen years. It seemed to have cheered Elinor up no end. Of course, when it came down to it, people wanted other people to die. It made sound ecological sense. Death and money, these days, were the only way of telling how well you were doing.

  ‘Donald, old son,’ he said, ‘you didn’t die in vain.’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Donald. ‘I look on it as being a kind of kidney donor, really. I go over the top but show you guys the way.’

  ‘Donald,’ said Henry, ‘I’m really sorry. I’m really, really sorry.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, mate,’ said Donald, ‘don’t apologize!’

  The rain was harder now. He was going to have to get up in a minute and go down to the street and when he was finished with the night’s work there would be nothing left to link him with the Wimbledon Poisoner. That was all he had to do. And then he could forget about it. Because he wasn’t going to kill again. Somehow he was sure of that. It had just been something he did, an illness really, like influenza or jaundice. With the last of the evidence would go the last of his guilt. Come on, Henry. Up you get. Up you get.

  Elinor was muttering something in her sleep. Something in the elaborate chemistry of her brain sent a signal along a nerve that moved her tongue, and her voice, though not her conscious self, started to say . . . ‘He’s a poisonous little man . . .’ Henry looked over to see if she was awake. She wasn’t. Without her knowledge, polypeptides and neurons hummed and wriggled inside her and she said, again in a bass, mechanical voice . . . ‘Poisoning a poisonous person isn’t poisonous . . .’ Henry looked more closely at her. She still wasn’t asleep. But her voice was fading slightly . . . ‘Poison a poison . . .’ she said and again, ‘It’s poison . . . poison . . . poison . . .’ Then she spoke no more.

  All we are is chemistry, thought Henry, as he struggled into his trousers, socks and shoes, that is all we are. But if only we were something more! If only! Perhaps then mankind wouldn’t be s
uch a horrible, self-seeking, blind, greedy, poisonous little bunch of bastards. And with that uncomforting, not totally original thought he crept down the stairs, opened the door and tiptoed towards David Sprott’s house.

  36

  David Sprott’s dustbins were legendary. ‘You could,’ as he once told a man from Teamwaste, who was flinching at the sight of what he thought was a maggot, ‘eat your dinner off my dustbins.’ They seemed to Henry, as he crossed Maple Drive, to be a touching memorial to the man, arranged as they were, like soldiers, facing the street, inscribed, in white painted letters a foot high, sprott: 102 maple drive wimbledon. (Who did Sprott think was after his dustbins?) Sooner or later, thought Henry, the rubbish men will come for me. They will take me out in a van or a skip and, like everything else in the suburb, the bedsprings, the cardboard boxes, the Pentel pens, the old cassette cases, the buckled cans of lager, the potato peelings, the floor tiles nobody wanted, the stacks of wet newspaper and the empty, grease-stained bottles of Soave, I will be carried out towards the great ocean of junk.

  He started down the side passage; the door, neatly painted and labelled, was closed and locked, but under a brick on the windowsill to his left was a Yale key. Henry eased it into the lock, pushed open the door and, holding his breath, moved forward along the rough concrete of the passage, above him, to his right, the red-brick cliff of the building. Somewhere away to his left a dog barked, and on the hill he heard the sound of a single car.

  The window that was usually unlocked was on the far side of the back of the house. To get to it, he would have to cross the french windows, and to his horror, he saw that from within the dining room behind them there was a dim, single light. Surely she couldn’t be up? Not at this time? Henry flattened himself against the wall and wriggled round towards the french windows; he must try and blend into the background; he mustn’t even breathe; he must move one step at a time and between each step, stop, look, listen.