The Wimbledon Poisoner

by Nigel Williams

  With a new confidence, Henry started to follow him. He was on the third or the fourth rung of the ladder when he heard a voice, booming round in the upper chamber – ‘Come along, Mother!’

  Henry stopped. Then he called up into the darkness above him. ‘Rush? Rush?’

  He heard what sounded like an old woman’s voice: ‘I’m tired, Everett!’

  Then Rush’s voice: ‘Not much further, Mother . . .’

  ‘Everett! . . . I’m tired . . .’

  Henry climbed further up the ladder and put one hand on the edge of the trap door.

  ‘Everett!’ he called. ‘Everett! Are you there?’

  There was a silence.

  Then, Rush’s voice: ‘They hanged me at Wandsworth in 1888. They put a rope round my neck and dropped me through the floor. Can you imagine that?’

  Another silence. Then – ‘The answer to all this is Maltby. He’s the answer to all this. Nobody understands, you see. Nobody cares about what happened. Nobody cares about the past. That’s what they’ve done to this country. They’ve stopped caring about the past. And so we have to go over it and over it. Over and over and over—’

  Rush’s voice was coming nearer.

  ‘And over and over and—’

  ‘CHRIST!’

  This last ejaculation was caused by Rush’s slamming down the trap door on Henry’s fingers. He heard the policeman cackle as, pushing aside the trap door, he shouldered his way to the upper chamber, in time to see Rush scrambling up the steps that led out to the fantail stage. Henry followed him.

  When he got out on to the wooden platform, the thick white sails of the fantail straight ahead of him, like one of those child’s toys designed to turn and rattle in the wind, Rush was nowhere to be seen. Down below Henry could see the top of the two yew trees, from this angle and in the theatrical light as dense and sculptured as a cumulus. He looked around him in the cold December night and then, cautiously, went towards the edge of the platform, shielded from the drop by only one whitened spar, at above chest height. Had the man jumped? Then as he came to the edge he heard a laugh above him and, turning, he looked up to see the detective sitting on the edge of the windmill’s cap.

  ‘Look at it!’ said Rush. ‘Look at it!’

  He gestured out towards Parkside and the village. From up here you could see the lights, and beyond them the dark incline of the hill; beyond that the far south of the city, spread out into Surrey, Merton, Mitcham, Wallingford, Epsom . . .

  ‘Look at what?’ said Henry.

  ‘Wimbledon!’ shrieked Rush. ‘Wimbledon! Wimbledon! Wimbledon!’

  And, unsteadily, he climbed to his feet. He began to walk across the curved cap of the windmill towards the floodlit sails. Away down to Henry’s right he heard voices. Someone had been alerted.

  ‘I don’t like Wimbledon,’ Rush was saying, ‘I don’t like it.’

  This, thought Henry, was in some ways a promising development. If he could get him to talk about—

  ‘I don’t like the people!’ Rush went on. ‘I don’t like them!’

  Henry decided not to respond to this.

  ‘I don’t like the roads or the trees or the houses or the pets or the gardens or the shops or the cars or the—’

  He stopped and looked down at Henry.

  ‘Why do you think you’re so perfect?’ he said. ‘Why do you think you’re so squeaky clean? Every single thing you do helps to kill someone. Every time you make a plan or buy a drink or phone a friend, you’re helping to kill them. Life is a disease, my friend. And how do you know what you put in that food didn’t kill? It helped to kill, didn’t it? It all helped to kill.’

  He held up the polythene bag containing Sprott. ‘What counts,’ he said, ‘is our intention. What counts is our secret thoughts. People put on smart coats and ties and go out to lunch and look almost human, but inside . . . oh, inside . . . And if we do look at the intention, you see, if we do look at the soul, and we judge the soul, how many times a day do we kill or murder or torture or betray or behave obscenely? Everyone is guilty in their secret thoughts. Don’t think you’re any better than me because you aren’t. You’re a hypocrite. And your Justice, your dear old Blind Justice is just a way of reassuring yourself that you can see. Well, you can’t. You’re stumbling along in the dark, groping your way home and you don’t know anything about anything.’

  The voices below were getting louder. Someone was telling someone else that there were vandals. But as yet, it seemed, no one could locate the source of the voices. Henry should have called out to them but he didn’t. He stood looking up at Rush.

  ‘Morality,’ said the policeman, ‘morality! What’s your morality? Your morality is poison. And you swig it down and roll it round your tongue and you say “that did me good” because someone smacked your bottom when you were a baby and said “now you’re better” and you were better. It’s a matter of habit, your morality, and you’re going to have to acquire some new habits, little man in the bowler hat, because your world is changing and with it your morality. And you’re all going to have to get used to the taste of poison. There’s poison in Ireland and poison in Africa and poison in Latin America and there’s poison right here in Wimbledon and every day you drink it up like a good little man in a bowler hat and you say “My, that feels better! My, that’s good poison!” Don’t you? Don’t you? Don’t you?’

  Henry felt this required some response. ‘I—’

  But Rush, waving the polythene bag around his head, silenced him with a scream. ‘In here,’ he shouted, ‘I’ve got a dentist!’

  He shook the bag violently. Sprott’s ashes clouded against the transparent, plastic walls of the container.

  ‘Forty-odd years—’ went on Rush, ‘of being a dentist! Of being a good little dentist! Of doing his bit for people’s teeth! Good boy! Well done! Forty years of standing up and drilling away and thinking you were being some use! And at the end of forty years? What at the end of forty years, eh?’

  Here he shook the bag again. Little bits of Sprott dashed against the polythene. There was the possibility, thought Henry, that he would evacuate the man’s remains all over the cap of the windmill. But, instead, Rush opened the neck of the bag and looked down into it. What he saw seemed to please him.

  ‘There, there,’ he said, ‘there, there, there!’ And started to shake the contents of the phial in his left hand into the bag. Henry watched. Was Rush, he wondered, extending the range of his poisoning operations to include those already dead? What else would explain the fierce look of concentration on his face as he kneaded the colourless liquid into the ashes of Henry’s neighbour? The policeman stirred and poked the dark grains and, as Henry watched, the remnants of a married man of forty-two soaked up the transparent juice in Rush’s left hand. As Rush stroked it into the surface of the ashes, the liquid molecules bumped and rolled into the solid molecules, and the dead oral surgeon changed shape, until he was closer to yeast or dough than chaff or meal. This seemed unnatural. When we die, thought Henry, we do not rise again. We are not put in the oven to prove. We are dust, aren’t we? Dust on the wind . . .

  But Sprott was yeast, flour and water. Sprott was living bread again, and as Rush kneaded him he acquired that eerie, plastic life that dough, plasticine or clay have in them; he was God’s raw material and Rush, the mad miller, the crazy baker, was pushing and pulling him into human form once again. He was a ball now, a dense, rubbery ball, and Rush was rolling him between his fingers, holding him as high as he could, like the communion host, shown to the loyal congregation.

  ‘Take,’ said Rush, ‘take! Eat! This is Thy Body!’

  He started to giggle.

  ‘This is Thy Blood and Body! This is Thy Spirit and Flesh! This Nourisheth and Sustaineth! This is the staff of life, O Jesus!’

  His voice rose to a scream. ‘This is the Body of God! This is strong poison! This is the acid of the Lord God of Hosts! Bow down! Bow down! This is the Body of Jesus Christ! Eat him for his Burthen is
easy! And his . . .’

  He started to giggle again. A hideous, unrestrained canter up the scale, operatic, alien . . .

  ‘His Choke is Light!’

  And as Henry watched, Detective Inspector Rush began to masticate the paste. He chewed it with elaborate ceremony and seemed to savour whatever it was that had bound the fragments of Sprott together again. Were they, Henry wondered, afterwards, the alkaloids of aconite, were they brucine or emetine or quebracho or yohimbine or cotamine or curare or colchicum or cantharidine or laudexium, its salts or dyflos?

  Whatever they were they were the staff of death. They were part of Detective Inspector Rush’s last meal on earth, and from the ecstatic expression on his face you would have thought he was swallowing life its very self. Poison was always his favourite flavour and to eat it à la resident must have been the ultimate experience, the equivalent, for a gourmet, of a meal at the Tour d’Argent. How quick acting it was Henry never knew, for the policeman gagged on his former neighbour, slipped and fell forward on to the huge white sail that sloped away from the cap down to the dark garden. There was a scream, a sound of slithering Rush, and then, somewhere out of sight, the dull crunch of a body hitting the earth below. Then, for as long as Henry waited, no sound.

  Rush was dead. But he was a psychopathic poisoner. As well as a psychopathic poisoner he was one of the most boring people Henry had ever met. So that was OK. Wasn’t it?

  Henry stumped down the stairs towards the body.

  45

  In Rush’s home they found, among other things, a detailed account of his poisoning activities. It was this diary, made available to the coroner’s inquest, that closed the affair of the Wimbledon Poisoner. When it was published a few years later (to form the basis of a very successful stage play called, simply, D. I. Rush) it caused something of a sensation. People talked about the banality of evil, about the lessons for all of us in Rush’s ramblings and Henry read bits of it, out loud, to Elinor, when the more decent parts of it were published in the Sunday papers.

  November 3rd 1987

  Morning overcast. In the afternoon it rained. I put 0.2 grains of gelsemium in a bun and tried to feed it to the fish. They didn’t seem to want it. In evening hoovered spare bedroom.

  It was hard, from the papers, to work out which crimes of Rush’s were fantasy. Even a year after his death no one was quite sure how many people he had killed. The natural tendency, of course, was to give him credit for every abdominal disturbance, polyneuritis, seizure, fit and remotely questionable disease in the Wimbledon area for the past few years. He had drawn pictures of some of his victims, and in the downstairs broom cupboard was an electoral roll with a skull and crossbones by the names of at least half of the inhabitants of Maple Drive – which proved, as Henry pointed out to Elinor, that he wasn’t all bad. His mother, it transpired, was a schizophrenic who, by a coincidence that turned out to be just that, lived very near to Henry’s mother.

  Rush was, of course, a monster, but in the course of time he became another sort of monster. A more graphic creature altogether. People who had known him spoke of the strange look in his eyes, of the aura of evil that surrounded him, and many said he had for some years been practising devil-worship. He was said to have heard voices, to have stalked and raped young women and, in the words of one profile, ‘to have always been alone’. Nobody, for some reason, asked Henry about him. Nobody ever mentioned the fact that he was incredibly boring. Being boring didn’t, somehow, go with being a mass poisoner and psychopath.

  In the course of time people forgot about the Wimbledon Poisoner. He went into history, along with Maltby and Seddon and Maybrick and Lafarge and the rest of them. And they forgot about Henry; it seemed extraordinary, really, that they had ever been able to remember him. He was quoted, briefly, in one paper, on the subject of Rush, but the newspapers, to Henry’s surprise, were remarkably ill-informed about the true facts of the case. The journalists who hung around Maple Drive and drank in the Dog and Fox were, almost to a man, highly incurious people.

  And in the course of time Henry, too, forgot. He forgot more things than he had already forgotten. He forgot about poisoning, or not poisoning, his doctor, his dentist, his wife’s psychiatrist, his ninety-two-year-old neighbour, his publisher (he had come now to think of Karim Jackson as his publisher, and even boasted to neighbours about ‘going up to London for a chat with his editor’) and he forgot not only whether he had or had not poisoned any of these people but even whether he knew who they were or where they had come from. He lived very, very quietly.

  He forgot about Wimbledon too, although he continued to live there. He forgot about Everett Maltby and Everett Maltby’s wife and Everett Maltby’s trial. He forgot about world affairs and local affairs. He forgot about the seasons and the stars and the winds and the rains and almost everything that he didn’t absolutely have to remember in order to pay his mortgage, feed and clothe his wife and daughter and get reasonably drunk three nights out of four.

  But he did not forget about the time he tried to murder his wife.

  It was, of course, about the most interesting thing he had done. Or, to be more precise, nearly the most interesting thing he had done, since he had never actually done it. It was in his mind when they went to bed and when they rose in the morning and it coloured every individual way he looked at her. Because, of course, now he was not burdened with the intolerable weight of having to go through with it, it was, once again, a delightful possibility. If she showed signs of interest in a holiday with Club Mediterranée, for example, or an ill-thought-out fondness for the work of some young radical playwright, there was. the possibility, close to hand, of dropping into the Fulham Armoury, buying a hand gun, and simply blowing her head off, one Saturday morning, just before he departed for Waitrose. The more he entertained this possibility, the better behaved she seemed to be, until about a year or so after he had first decided to kill her he realized, with dumb wonder, that they hardly ever argued, that their friends (they seemed to have acquired quite a lot of friends) were pointing them out as a model couple. And it was then that he thought quite seriously of telling her about the time he tried to give her Chicken Thallium. But he never did. Somehow saying the thing out loud would have had a quite unreasonably large impact on their marriage and, as certain adulterers go quietly to their graves with a secret, so Henry Farr hugged his to himself.

  One night, about a year after everyone had been talking about the Wimbledon Poisoner, when he was long forgotten, when Maisie had suddenly grown miraculously taller and thinner, when Henry’s office had become an almost restful, neutral place of pilgrimage, when Elinor had acquired a whole new range of obsessions and phrases and Henry hadn’t even noticed them, they were lying in bed, under their separate duvets, when she suddenly said to him, ‘Did you ever try to kill me?’

  Henry did not reply.

  ‘There was a time,’ she went on, ‘when I really thought you might be. . .’

  ‘Really?’ said Henry in what was almost genuine surprise. ‘Oh yes!’

  ‘When was that?’

  She stirred under the duvet. He hoped she wasn’t going to come over to his side of the bed. Henry liked his side of the bed. It felt safe and warm. He heard her click her teeth, a sure sign that she was thinking.

  ‘Oh ages ago . . . I don’t remember . . .’

  ‘Was it . . . when the poisoning . . . started?’

  ‘No,’ said Elinor, ‘it was just before all that. One Saturday. Here. There was such a bad feeling in the house.’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘And then poor old Donald . . .’

  Henry coughed. He didn’t want to think about Donald. ‘How was I going to do it?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  Henry turned over and listened to the wind on Wimbledon Hill.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘suppose . . .’

  ‘Suppose what?’

  ‘Well . . . suppose the balance of my mind was disturbed sort of thing . . . and
suppose . . .’

  ‘Suppose what?’

  ‘Suppose I did . . . well . . . only once, of course . . . get this . . . mad urge . . . to . . . do away with you . . .’

  Elinor sat up in bed. Henry stayed very still.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well . . . I don’t know . . . suppose . . . well, say we’d been having a row and then we were walking . . . well, near a cliff, say . . . and I had this urge to . . . push you off . . . say . . .’

  ‘And what then?’

  ‘Well . . . suppose . . . you know . . . I . . . had a go sort of thing . . . you know? What would you . . . er . . . do?’

  ‘I’d divorce you,’ said Elinor, ‘and I’d phone the police and have you sent to prison.’

  ‘Fine!’ said Henry.

  There was another pause. Eventually she slid down to a supine position in the bed. But he could tell from the tense quality of her stillness that she was not asleep.

  ‘I just wondered!’ he said, brightly.

  ‘Because you don’t want to kill me, do you Henry?’ she said.

  ‘Oh no!’

  Elinor coughed. ‘Good,’ she said.

  He heard her snuggle further down into her duvet.

  ‘You couldn’t really say anything else, could you?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ said Henry.

  Then she stirred in a lazy way and yawned. ‘I’m very strict about things like that!’

  ‘I know,’ said Henry.

  The silence was of a different quality now. It was restful, autumnal, like the season, like the leaves on the plane tree outside, that were turning, as they had turned a year ago when they were both different people, as they would be tomorrow.

  ‘You can’t go round murdering people!’ said Henry. ‘It’s just not on!’