The Wimbledon Poisoner

by Nigel Williams

  She turned to them, naked and, humming to herself, went towards the cassette deck by the bed. She had one of those deep, architectural, solid navels, Henry noted, and large brown nipples. Elinor’s were pink. But before he had time to compare and contrast the two women (another aspect, he presumed, of his cold, calculating, psychopathic nature) Mrs Sprott had turned on the machine and the strains of ‘Guantanamera’ filled the room. It was a song Henry had always enjoyed and, even under these somewhat awkward circumstances, he found himself nodding his head in time to it, and trying, once again, to work out what the hell those words were that immediately followed the opening.

  Guantanamera

  Akeela (?????)

  Guantana-meeera!

  And, one more time—

  Guantanamera

  Ah feel ya (?????)

  Guantana-meeera!

  And, surely, this time one would get it? Come on! Here it comes again! This time, surely! Surely!

  Guantanamera

  Tequila (?????)

  Guantana-meeera!

  But no. They were on to the bit about his poems being flaming crimson and how he was a truthful man who only wanted to bugger sheep. And Mrs Sprott, who had returned to the mantelpiece, was dancing, naked, in front of the photograph of her late husband. Henry did not dare look to see what Rush was making of this. He almost expected the picture of the dentist to register some emotion (surprise possibly) but, like a holy picture, like Mary or Jesus receiving an act of piety, Sprott continued to grin out at the opposite wall, while his widow rotated her buttocks, bumped and ground and . . . oh my God, she wasn’t, was she?

  Oh yes she was. Now wildly out of time to the music (the man had finished his translation of the lyric and, having demonstrated to his and everybody else’s satisfaction that it was incomprehensible in both Spanish and English, was now singing it all over again, in that same, linguistically secretive style), she rotated her hips faster and faster and her elbow jerked up and down as if she was beating mayonnaise.

  Guantanamera

  Ah steal ya (????)

  Guantana-meeera!

  Not feeling that this was something he wanted to watch, Henry concentrated on the picture of Sprott, who continued to look at the camera in what he clearly thought was a confident, solid, reasonable fashion. But his wife (it was impossible to ignore her) was pumping her way towards climax, as the guitars, drums and flutes continued their endless circle. Her left hand snaked round her neck and pulled at her hair, then slid down, past her breasts and buried itself in the flesh of her left buttock. She was moving faster, faster and . . . What happens, thought Henry, if the cassette finishes before she does? But through what was probably long practice, both Mrs Sprott and the Havana All Stars – or whoever they were – came to a conclusion at the same time and, dripping with sweat, she started to cast around for her clothes as the tape hissed on in disapproving silence. My Christ, thought Henry, whoever said Wimbledon was dull?

  Eventually she resumed her conversation.

  ‘Well,’ she said, as she struggled back into her clothes, ‘that was very nice, David. Very nice indeed. Thank you very much. I enjoyed that a lot. I hope you were all right. Were you all right? I was. I was fine. Oh, look, you had a good innings really, didn’t you? For God’s sake, we none of us live for ever, do we? You could be bloody boring, David, actually. You had no interest in politics. You just—’ Here, she sat on the bed and began to sob violently.

  Oh my God, thought Henry. Oh my sweet Jesus Christ. I am sorry. I am very, very, very sorry. This is awful. I didn’t mean to. I tried to stop them. I honestly did. I tried to stop him drinking the bloody stuff. I really didn’t want him dead. I didn’t like him. I admit that. But I didn’t want him dead. I mean I may have wanted him dead once or twice. But I didn’t mean it. Everyone wants someone or other dead some time or other, don’t they? Look, I’m really, really sorry.

  ‘Look, Henry,’ said Sprott, ‘I was insured. I was very heavily insured as a matter of fact. She’s better off now than she was with me alive.’

  Mrs Sprott continued to cry on the bed. Fat tears rolled down her face, smudging her make up, blurring the lines on her cheeks, reminding Henry against his will that real actions had real consequences. And it was then, he realized afterwards, watching a lonely woman crying on a rumpled bed, in a deserted house, that he knew, whatever else he was, he wasn’t a psychopath. He was pretty fucking close, but not there yet. And the only way he was going to get out of this, the only thing that would stop the dull ache the sight of her caused him, would be if he went out to her now and told her everything. Told Rush too. Told all of them what he had done and why he had done it. Atoned, for Christ’s sake. Atoned. Because this feeling wasn’t containable. It was like a needle in his side or an unstoppable headache that made him, as he stood there in the cupboard, feel he was about to lose his balance.

  He probably would have gone out there too, he thought afterwards (in which case the whole thing would have ended differently). The only thing that stopped him was the near certainty that he would have given her a heart attack. And he didn’t, no, he positively did not, you could quote him on that, want to cause any more deaths. Ever. He wanted to be nice to people. He wanted to make children smile. He wanted to gladden the last years of grannies and grandpas. He wanted to be helpful, in an unpatronizing manner, to the disabled. He wanted to be all the things his class, his upbringing and his country seemed to militate against. Generous. He had, in the last few months, got rid of so many hostilities, resentments, spites, perversions and jealousies that he must now, he thought, be the nicest guy in Wimbledon. He was poison free, for Christ’s sake! He was as clean as a lanced boil! What he was feeling, here in the cupboard, while Mrs Sprott cried into her sheets for a man who was – let’s face it – a pretty nice guy as well, was love. Love for her, and for her husband, yes, don’t laugh, for Sprott and for Mr and Mrs Is-the-Mitsubishi-Scratched-Yet and Nazi Who Escaped Justice at Nuremberg and Vera ‘Got All the Things There Then?’ Loomis and Jungian Analyst with Winebox and Lingalonga Boccherini and Surveyor with Huge Gut and Drink Problem and Surveyor with Huge Gut and Fondness for Potatoes and Published Magical Realist and Unpublished Magical Realist and, oh for God’s sake, all of them, the whole hopeless, gargoyle crew of them. Because, this was the fact he had never been able to face, let’s face it, he wasn’t any better or worse than any of these people. He was one of them. He was Fat Man with Bowler Hat and Unimaginable Feelings of Hostility Towards People. He was—

  If only I could roll back time, thought Henry. If only I wasn’t a quintuple murderer. How simple, easy and pleasant life would be!

  And that thought brought him back to the fact that he couldn’t roll back time. That he wasn’t just Fat Man with Bowler Hat and Unimaginable Feelings of Hostility Towards People, he was Fat Man with Bowler Hat Who Had Poisoned God Knows How Many Innocent People. And that thought made him feel he was falling, falling, the way he had felt that night he tried to strangle Elinor and, to stop that feeling that he was falling, which of course was unstoppable because once you fall you fall, dead people don’t come back to life and time will not, however hard you try, go backwards, he felt for a feeling that would stop the falling feeling and found he was feeling, or rather failing to feel, since he was falling, for something that felt as if it was filling the feeling that perhaps he had been failing to feel, the feeling that—

  He was gripping Rush’s shoulder, hard, the way he had gripped Maisie’s shoulder that night, months, although it felt like years, ago. And Rush was trying to brush him off. And Henry’s face was pushed into the dark cloth of one of Dave Sprott’s suits. And his brushing against it must have started up dust, because of course the poor bastard hadn’t been able to wear them where he was going, and the dust swirled about Henry’s nostrils and something in the chemistry between dust and nose set off a reaction that, once started, could not, it seemed, even by a major effort of will, be stopped.

  Henry sneezed.

>   38

  To understand what happened next, it is necessary to appreciate quite what an effect the presence of the Wimbledon Poisoner had had on the local population. It wasn’t, as Nazi Who Escaped Justice at Nuremberg pointed out, that people were afraid to go out. They were afraid to stay in as well. You never knew just where or when the poisoner would strike. The folk stories about him, and there were plenty, said that he was able to slip into any house he wanted. That he was a trained locksmith as well as a trained chemist. Some said, of course, that he was a policeman who talked his way into people’s kitchens while pretending to warn them about the poisoner. Others maintained he was a member of the judiciary and still others that he was, in fact, a she-poisoner, a motherly woman who worked in some local school, who had looked after children all her life and suddenly, sickened by all that care and nourishment, had turned to food that blighted, not sustained.

  A sneeze in a cupboard meant only one thing to Edwina Sprott. It said poisoner, loud and clear.

  She didn’t move. She stayed where she was on the bed and said, in a clear, nervous voice, ‘Please don’t do anything to me!’

  Neither Rush nor Henry knew quite how to respond to this. ‘If you’re the poisoner,’ she went on, ‘don’t make me eat anything!’

  Rush looked up at Henry, his jagged mouth turned down comically. He was mouthing something. Henry leaned down and made out the words ‘Fantastic tits!’

  Really, thought Henry, Rush wasn’t the sort of man with whom one would have wanted to share any kind of space, however large. Being in a cupboard with him was almost completely unacceptable.

  Mrs Sprott was talking again. Her delivery was that of a not very good performer in a West End play. Her lines were put over with a kind of emphasis thought needful to get across basic information to elderly people who have come miles by charabanc, and who, as well as being of low intelligence, are halfway through a large box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray. This theatrical manner did not, however, manage to conceal her evident embarrassment at having had an audience for her recent performance in front of Sprott’s photograph.

  ‘I’m going out now,’ she said, ‘and I shall leave the door open. I shall not ask any questions of you. You are free to leave. I am going to take refuge with a neighbour. I promise not to look or phone the police.’

  Rush looked at Henry, grinning. Henry ignored him.

  ‘In my opinion,’ she went on, ‘you are in need of psychiatric help. I bear no malice to you for what you did to my late husband. Hating you won’t bring David back. I think you are a poor, sick, creature whose mind is disturbed. You probably don’t even know what you’re doing. Give yourself up! I am going now.’

  Henry was going to give himself up. Not now. But soon. He would go somewhere quiet with Detective Inspector Rush and turn himself in. He had had enough.

  It wouldn’t be too bad. At least he would find out what he had and hadn’t done. Whether he was, like the conkers he had played with as a child, a one-er or a two-er, or a three-er or maybe a fifty-eighter. There would be the trial, of course – bad pencil sketches of him on News at Ten, yet more profiles, and after the verdict an endless string of articles and photographs of the exterior of Maple Drive. They would write about Elinor too. poisoner’s wife denied him sex! therapy drove mass poisoner farr to murder five! ‘i love him still’ says poisoner’s woman. Then there would be the musicals, the drama documentaries, the serious studies of the case written by people who would not, sadly, be Karim Jackson; and then a long, long time in Broadmoor with all the other loonies.

  Oh, Broadmoor wouldn’t be too bad. He had seen a film about it a few weeks ago. About the only drawback to the place, as far as Henry could see, was compulsory group therapy. Although at group therapy would be eager-eyed psychiatrists just dying to hear about his guilt, his blackouts, his sense of isolation.

  ‘She’s gone!’ Rush was whispering. ‘Let’s go!’

  It occurred to Henry that Mrs Sprott might well be lying in wait for them. She hadn’t sounded like a woman about to lie in wait. She had sounded like someone en route for dressing room number one and the smelling salts. But she might, possibly, be planning to conceal herself somewhere and spy on them. It was to this end that Henry removed two jackets from the hangers in the cupboard, and indicated to Rush that they should place them over their heads. It would probably, he thought grimly, be good training for his first appearance at Wimbledon Magistrates’ Court.

  With the late dentist’s jackets over their heads, the two men crept out on to the landing. By pinching the lapels together, Henry managed to conceal his face and preserve a narrow field of vision; it meant that he had to move his whole body if he wished to look in another direction, rather as if he were the front end of a pantomime horse, but at least, as he scanned the landing, left, right, fore and aft, and then one 360-degree turn, like a radar beam sweeping over the night sky, he was able to be sure that Mrs Sprott had been as good as her word. The two men started down the stairs. The front door was open as Henry, head lowered, made for the street, the jacket hugged to his head like a friar’s cowl. Ahead he could see a plane tree, empty of leaves, pointing angrily in all directions. But there was no sign of Mrs Sprott. Henry walked slowly out and down the front path, towards the white gate.

  He peered left. No one. Then right. No one. With a short, urgent gesture to Rush, Henry started out to the left, along the pavement.

  He couldn’t see or hear her but perhaps she was on the phone already. Perhaps, in minutes, Maple Drive would be swarming with dog-handlers, meat wagons, forensic experts and all the other things the police liked to drag along to places where they had no hope of solving serious crime. The trouble was, his field of vision was so restricted by the jacket that he was unable to ascertain whether or not it was safe to remove it. He ran, bent double, zigzagging like a man avoiding machine-gun fire. Behind him he could hear Rush, breathing heavily and occasionally calling out for reassurance: ‘Are we OK?’

  Henry did not even want to answer. He was vaguely aware that they were passing number 84 (Stockbroker Who Could Turn Nasty) but, since it seemed easier to keep his head down, he had no idea of what might be ahead or behind him. He noted the pavement, marked with cracks and discolorations, a low wall, painted white, then a privet hedge to the left, a tree to the right, a lamp post, then more discoloured pavement. He stopped. He had come to a bumpy section of kerb, north of which was the gutter. Raising his head he saw he was in Belvedere Road. All he had to do was to slip the jacket off and stroll up towards the common. No one knew him in Belvedere Road. He would go on the common, with Rush, and there he would end all this. He would turn himself over to the policeman. He was just about to slip the jacket off his head, and planning the opening stages of his confession (‘Have you ever heard of something called Finish ’Em by any chance?’) when, from behind, he heard cries. Not only cries. Feet. Feet slapping the pavement. Not just one person’s feet. Quite a lot of feet. Henry juddered round, as awkward as a robot and there, jerked into vision, like something slipping into the perspective offered by a periscope, he saw the line of houses that was Maple Drive. About a hundred yards away a door was opening, and beyond that, another door. Someone was shouting something. Was it Mrs Sprott?

  Henry did not wait to find out. Burrowing his head into the dentist’s jacket he pushed Rush in the back and the two men ran for the common. He had almost forgotten, in the excitement, that he was the Wimbledon Poisoner. If any of the inhabitants of Maple Drive got to him before the police (Fat Man with Loved Alsatian, for example) he would be very lucky to get as far as Broadmoor, and it wouldn’t be group therapy he’d be needing but plastic surgery on a large scale.

  ‘Faster!’ he hissed to the detective, almost oblivious of the fact that this was the man to whom he was due to make his confession, ‘Faster! Faster! Faster!’

  39

  The hue and cry, as Henry had noted in volume seven of The Complete History of Wimbledon, was a comparatively rare occurrence in the
history of the village. In 1788 a man called Paggett had been pursued from the Dog and Fox towards Putney Hill, because – according to a contemporary diarist – he had shouted revolutionary slogans outside a butcher’s shop in the village. Enraged local tradesmen had followed him across the common to the Queen’s Mere, where ‘they caused him to regret his Enthusiasm for the Queen’s enemies by using those appurtenances of honest labour viz their true English Hands, to douse him in one of Her own Ponds!’

  If anything, thought Henry, the contemporary inhabitants of Maple Drive were a deal more frightening than a few drunken butchers. There were even, Henry shuddered at the thought, a few bond salesmen at the posher end of the street. If what you read in the newspapers was true, the middle classes in the Britain of the late 1980s made your average pack of ravening wolves look like the corps de ballet in Swan Lake. He thought he could hear more doors opening, more shouts, more feet on pavement, as he ran, quite blind as to what was ahead of him, up towards the village.

  After a hundred yards or so, however, he found his pace had slowed, and was, for the moment, unaware of the pressure of anyone’s hand on his back. Perhaps his neighbours were so deeply imbued with the philosophy of self-help that, when actually faced with someone who had taken the law into his own hands, they were unable to stop themselves standing back in admiration. Perhaps murder, like everything else, was now part of Mrs Thatcher’s enterprise economy. Or perhaps – this was the most likely explanation – they were all a little too scared. Whatever the reason, when he and Rush reached the village High Street, pulled off their jackets and looked back down the hill, they saw no one, only the quiet suburban streets and the cars, parked with loving neatness under the lamps.

  It was then that Henry turned back to the village and, in the window of a shop selling electrical equipment, found himself looking at the face of Everett Maltby. He recognized the big, damp eyes, the side whiskers and the high collar. Next to him, with a little shock of horror, he recognized Maltby’s wife, and to one side of the couple a pile of photographic plates. It was one of those cardboard displays, of the kind usually used to advertise something. Surely they couldn’t be cashing in on the poisoner? Henry felt a chill of disgust at the thought that his perverted desire to kill was being employed to market electrical goods. Then he saw the slogan: wimbledon traders against the poisoner. fight the blighter! And underneath this was what looked like a list of signatures. Why did people think that signing your name to a petition affected anything? It might, perhaps, have some minimal impact on politicians, but its effect on murderers was probably to spur them on to greater efforts.