He stopped. At the far end of the rear wall of the house, screened from him by one of the thick bushes that fringed the fences of the garden, there was a figure. Oh no, thought Henry, please no! For an instant he thought he could make out the shape of Sprott’s head, the beard, the glasses, and, as he froze into the wall, he waited for the sound of the dentist’s voice, that mocking northern intonation . . . ‘Hullo there, Henry? All right, are yer?’ But then the figure moved out from the bush towards the window to which Henry was moving, as slowly and cautiously as Henry himself. The moon made the garden, as neat as the fences, the doors, the dustbins, and the thick, empty lilac bushes into a bold, clear woodcut, and the face of the other stranger, in dramatic relief, was a thing of frightening contrasts. The nose twitched and sniffed, like some animal after its quarry, and the mouth was half open, with excitement or fear or both. But it was the eyes that Henry noticed most. The eyes were fixed ahead in a rapture of concentration, as if something in the house was sucking them in, as if the light from the french windows exerted some horrible, unavoidable pull on Detective Inspector Rush.
There could be only one thing he was after, thought Henry. And he could not be allowed to get his hands on it. He stepped out into the moonlit patio and hissed a greeting.
‘Rush—’ he heard himself say, ‘Rush – it’s me!’
The detective stopped and turned towards him. As soon as he saw Henry his face split into a smile, all teeth and lips, that reminded Henry of the risus sardonicus printed on Jackson’s face, a week or so ago. He knows, thought Henry again, he knows all about me. He even knew I was coming here tonight. That’s why he’s here. He knows all of the ghastly things I think and feel and don’t tell anyone about. And he knows them without me having to explain. He knows all the things only the detective knows about the criminal.
‘Well,’ said Rush, ‘well, well, well!’
Sometimes Henry wondered whether Rush might not be a bit of his own genetic material that had somehow sloped off on its own to some lab and got a dodgy biochemist to set it up as a freelance individual. If he was a cutting off Henry, though, he was probably grafted from the toenail or somewhere up the rectal passage.
Rush continued to smile. ‘Are you looking for what I’m looking for?’ he said.
Why don’t I tell him? Why don’t I just say: ‘Fair’s fair. Between you and me and the gatepost and Sprott’s lilac bush, I did it. Now go ahead and prove it!’ What was unbearable, as always with Rush, was the urge to confess, because only with this man was what Henry had done actually thinkable. When with Elinor, Maisie, people from the office or the street, it seemed to have nothing to do with Henry at all. But here, in the moonlight, looking at the policeman, tugging at his upper lip, Henry knew he had killed five people, none of whom, with the possible exception of Sprott and Coveney, deserved to die. Henry decided to face it out.
‘Well,’ he heard himself say, ‘I thought I’d . . .’
‘Get hold of the ashes,’ said Rush, as if he were referring to the cricket trophy, as if this were the most normal thing to do in the world, ‘of course!’
Without speaking, Henry went towards the window and, in silence, began to slide up the sash. It rattled as it rose. The silence between Henry and the policeman became, as he worked, not silence. A car came up Maple Drive. You could hear it from a long way away, falling in pitch and gaining in volume in a graceful curve until it shouldered its way past them, directly outside, with a muted ‘pop’, followed by the long, slow slide to absence and somewhere else.
Had Rush seen him? Leapt out of bed, taken an alternative route, some secret tunnel perhaps known only to members of the Wimbledon CID that led to Sprott’s back garden? Was he intending to confront Henry with the granulated dentist, waving the urn around in a challenging fashion? ‘See! Here he is! This is what you’ve done, you bastard!’
Henry got one leg over the sill. Inside, the house was silent. Rush, who followed him in, led the way across the carpet. As they came out into the hall it occurred to Henry that all this might be some ghastly mistake, that Edwina Sprott might not, after all, have gone on her weekly visit to her sister. If that were the case, however, Rush had clearly got hold of the same inaccurate information for, as they reached the stairs, he spoke again in clear, almost relaxed tones.
‘It’s a funny thing about poisoners,’ he said. ‘Most of them want to get caught. It’s a club, do you know what I mean? They have to show their cleverness to the world.’
He looked straight at Henry. ‘I’ve studied poisoners,’ he said, ‘all my life. They’re . . .’ Here he gave an awkward little laugh, to show that he was making a joke. ‘. . . meat and drink to me.’
Perhaps Rush was going to drug him and take him back to some private Black Museum of his own. Perhaps Henry was of too great scientific interest to be just chucked over to the boys from legal aid and then sent off to Parkhurst for twenty years. Perhaps he would be taken into Rush’s garden shed and nameless experiments would be performed on him. Henry thought he would probably prefer Parkhurst.
‘Is there something you want to say to me, Henry?’
‘No!’ said Henry, rather sharply.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ said Henry, ‘I’m sure.’
Rush stroked his upper lip.
‘It’s the loneliness, I think,’ he said, ‘I think they must have spent night after night wondering . . . is there anyone like me out there? Someone who shares my . . .’ Here he laughed again, dry, perfunctory. ‘. . . enthusiasms. Cream, Young, Crippen, Palmer. The only time they come together is as waxworks. Know what I mean? And what they wanted was probably to just be with someone who would understand. Who’d say the names with them, you know? Hyoscine, gelsemium, aconite . . . You know?’
Henry was sweating. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘we should go on up the stairs.’
Rush smiled. ‘Of course, Henry,’ he said, ‘of course!’
He became suddenly practical when they reached the bedroom. The door was open and, facing them, above the mantelpiece was a 12” by 10” portrait picture of Sprott in his dentist’s uniform. He was standing in his surgery with a drill in his right hand, trying, unsuccessfully, to look relaxed. Below his image, in a blue vase, was what remained of him, corporeally speaking, and on either side of the vase were two blue candles, burned halfway down. Say what you like about Sprott, thought Henry, he was a damned good dentist.
‘Wait there!’ said Rush.
The detective sank to his knees. Henry backed away nervously, while Rush flopped forward on his belly into the Sprotts’ bedroom, indicating to Henry that he should do the same.
‘Photo cell alarm!’ he said, indicating a point about halfway up the side of the door. Henry wondered whether these precautions had been taken before Mrs Sprott’s husband had swallowed a litre or so of bleach; in a sense, of course, people’s value only became clear when they were dead. When alive Dave Sprott had been treated with amused condescension, now he was getting the treatment handed out to a more than usually influential local saint in Mrs Sprott’s church (Edwina was reputed to be a devout Anglo-Catholic).
It didn’t take Rush long to check the mantelpiece. He straightened up and from his left-hand pocket took a polythene bag. He slipped the neck of the vase into the bag, and, making sure not a drop of dentist was spilled, upended Henry’s neighbour’s remains into it. Then from his other jacket pocket he took an envelope and shook its contents into the vase.
He turned to Henry. ‘Two rabbits,’ he said, ‘she should be quite happy with that.’
Then he held up the polythene bag. ‘One dentist!’ he said. ‘Just add water and stir and he’ll be back on the job in no time!’
Henry thought this remark was in rather dubious taste, and said so.
Rush’s only response was to flash him a crooked grin. ‘When you’re dead,’ he said, ‘you’re dead. And that’s all there is to it. There’s nothing else to say.’
Rush seemed able to alter Hen
ry’s opinions more drastically than anyone he had ever known. He very much, for once, wanted this remark not to be true. He wanted a flash of light to break in at the window and for Sprott to rear up, twenty feet tall, tearing at Rush’s throat with his hands.
‘What,’ said Henry, ‘are you going . . . to . . . do with . . . him?’
Rush smiled slightly. ‘What were you going to do with him?’
‘I was . . .’
The policeman was still holding the ashes aloft. He looked up at them, as a Chancellor might look at his briefcase on Budget Day.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘the poisoner wants to get caught. I think being caught is the only thing that would relieve the awful, awful loneliness he must feel. The dreadful sense that everything that happens is happening in his head. That there isn’t a real world at all, just his own consciousness. And that his consciousness . . .’
Henry gulped.
‘. . . is hell. That he’s reduced someone to this. That he’s brought a man who could walk, talk, be any number of things, to something you could fit into a jumbo matchbox. And the reason he’s done it? Shall I tell you the reason he’s done it?’
No, thought Henry, please don’t!
‘Because he can’t feel,’ said Rush, in a crooning voice, ‘he can’t feel anything at all. He’s dead inside. And to make himself feel, he has to do the most frightful things. He has to kill and kill and kill again and each time he kills he thinks it will be better but it isn’t, and so, in shame and disgust, he goes out to kill again, to heal himself, but after the next killing there is still the same emptiness.’
Henry thought it was about time they left. Interesting as this conversation was, this did not seem the time or place to be having it. Somewhat to his surprise, Rush’s technique was not having much effect on him. Perhaps he was so hardened a psychopath that he didn’t even realize that he wasn’t feeling. He was so much of a loony that he thought he was having feelings. Tremendous, strong, violent, real feelings. About therapy groups and being made to go to Waitrose and—
‘He has to go back to his victims and dig them up and examine them and go through their ashes and test that what he did to them did actually kill them. Because to him, life is a kind of experiment. He has to go back to it and back to it to try and understand it but he never will understand it and that’s what cuts him off from normal human feeling and why he never will be human at all!’
This, thought Henry, was a little unfair. He had always hoped that, one day, he might become, if not completely human, at least partially so. He was only forty, for Christ’s sake. There was a way to go, he knew that, but in ten or fifteen years he might have acquired the odd natural response. ‘Steady on, Rush!’ he wanted to say, ‘this isn’t Russia. This is Wimbledon.’
But Rush was staring into his face with that same, glittering intensity. ‘You know that poem about Maltby,’ he said, ‘don’t you?’
‘I think,’ said Henry, ‘I heard a car outside. I—’
‘Death has no terrors for me now,
My heart’s heavy; let’s begone!
And dine with He who heals all grief,
The Poisoner of Wimbledon!’
Henry wasn’t, for once, lying or exaggerating. He had heard a car outside. And the sound of its engine was familiar. And – oh my God, no, say it isn’t so – the door was slamming and he could hear familiar footsteps and—
‘Let’s feast on all his sides of beef
Let’s slaver over cottage pies,
For he who dines with Maltby, boys,
Dines marvellously, ere he dies!
O hurry Southward, didst thou think
That Phoebus’ brightness ever shone?
No no! The evening comes and brings
The Poisoner of Wimbledon!’
It wasn’t, thought Henry, only his sense of guilt that made this performance so unnerving. Rush’s hands shook as he came to the last verse and his mouth, never a very attractive thing at the best of times, wriggled across his face like a snake in a bag. He looks, thought Henry, about as crazy as I must be.
Down below the front door opened. Henry heard what was almost certainly Edwina Sprott’s step in the hall. No one could mistake that slow, tombstone tread of hers, the creak and thud of her Doc Martens hitting the stripped pine floor, reminiscent of the opening sequence of Feet of Frankenstein, and then the deep boom of her voice, calling up the stairs – ‘I’m back, darling!’
37
Henry’s first thought was that Mrs Sprott had a toy boy concealed somewhere about the house. Women in Wimbledon, Elinor included, were always moaning on about toy boys, perhaps because if their husbands had one thing in common it was a lack of ludic quality. Accountant’s Wife with Over-developed Breasts and New Sierra had, people said, actually got a toy boy, although when finally sighted he was reported to be quite as fat and old and boring as everybody else. Certainly number 12b had had a black toy boy, who had come to investigate her soakaway drain and stayed, but he had only stayed three days and, people said, had left with her television, compact-disc player and fifty-three pounds in cash.
It was only when the widow was halfway up the stairs that Henry realized. She was talking to the late David Sprott.
‘I couldn’t stand Nelly any more,’ she was saying, as she dropped what sounded like a case, ‘so I left and came straight on back. I just felt sort of wild and crazy and desperate to get back home. Do you know what I mean?’
Henry thought he did. He started to tiptoe, at speed, towards the large cupboard in the corner of the room. Rush, polythene bag in hand, followed him.
‘She was going on about how marvellous she was was Nelly,’ said the relict of the man known to some as ‘Cap ’em’ Sprott, ‘and if I have to hear one more time how marvellously that stupid little cow Monica is doing at St Paul’s, I shall spit. She reckons she has an IQ of 184 or something – I said “come off it” – and plays the violin without music. I don’t condone that myself.’
This conversation brought a new dimension to all those wise words about death being but a brief interruption in our conversation with our fellow pilgrims. It also served to remind us, in Henry’s view, how, very often, those conversations should never even have been started, let alone continued across the Great Divide. Death and taxation might be the only certain things, but Mrs Sprott’s version of snobbery was probably immune to both.
‘Mozart this and Mozart that, I let her know how well Timmy was doing anyway, and why she won’t have Mother for Christmas I don’t know, it suited me to have her on Boxing Day but oh no, it had to be Christmas Eve. Anyone would think her husband was something interesting. He’s only a monkey who reads the news!’
In amongst his second victim’s suits, Henry remembered that Mrs Sprott’s brother-in-law read the local news somewhere or other; it was a source of mild satisfaction to him that she should be subjected to the incomprehensible, bottomless vanity of this species of person.
‘I said had they seen the results of the Lossiemouth by-election but it was pretty clear that they had no interest. I tried them on Nicaragua but they didn’t seem to have formulated a view on it. And one of them didn’t seem to have any idea of who the member for Bristol East was!’
Sprott, of course, had been kept abreast of politics by his wife, whose capacity to consume weekly journals, TV programmes and even live conferences concerned with political issues was legendary. It was clear that even his death was not going to stand between him and political enlightenment.
‘And I heard Kinnock on the radio. That man has no conception of how to orchestrate his power base. He needs to confront Conference!’
Through a chink in the cupboard door, Henry observed her pull the lid off the vase and peer down at whatever Rush had put in it. If it was rabbits she was presumably looking at a whole colony. Whatever it was it seemed to satisfy her, for she replaced the lid with a little smile.
‘It’s nice to be home, darling,’ she said, ‘it’s nice to know you’re t
here on the mantelpiece.’
Henry looked down. Rush was squatting on the floor, clutching the polythene bag close to him. He looked back out into the room and, to his horror, saw that Mrs Sprott was starting to undress.
She slipped her dress over her shoulders and allowed it to fall to her knees. She was wearing a black bra and black silk knickers that Henry recognized, with a thrill, as coming from Marks and Spencer. Elinor had a pair exactly the same. She crossed to the full-length mirror in the corner of the room, and looked at herself. Henry heard Rush give a little wheeze of excitement next to him, as Mrs Sprott lowered her knickers. The two men gazed out from her cupboard at something no man other than the late David Sprott had ever seen, the naked, white buttocks, tapering down to a fuzz of black pubic hair and a pair of no-nonsense, meaty, muscular thighs.
Next to Henry, Rush continued to wheeze. Was the detective, Henry wondered, stimulating himself in some way? He looked down and saw Rush, on his knees, eyes fixed to the crack in the cupboard door. His hands, as far as Henry could see, were nowhere near his trousers. The widow Sprott started to unhook her bra, in an extremely sensual manner. She shook it over her breasts, while making little rowing motions with her upper arms, and as it fell to the floor she gave a little twitch of the hips, causing Rush to leak what sounded like a whimper.
Did this, thought Henry, go on every night in the Sprott bedroom? And what about other bedrooms in Maple Drive? Did Mrs Is-the-Mitsubishi-Scratched-Yet, after she had drawn the bedroom curtains, switched on the light in the hall, come down in her dressing gown and gone up in her dressing gown, carry on like this? Was this the reason Mr Is-the-Mitsubishi-Scratched-Yet leapt up the stairs each night, two at a time, minutes after she had gone upstairs? And if this was the case, if things like this, or things even more spectacular than this even, were happening in front bedrooms the length of the street, wasn’t it time Henry got a pair of infra-red binoculars and some kind of hide in the front garden?
The Wimbledon Poisoner Page 24
