The Wimbledon Poisoner (21 page)

Hang on, hang on, Henry. This is England, not Russia. For Christ’s sake! You’ve tried to poison your wife. It was something people did. In the heat of the moment. No jury would convict. You had a tiff – you went out and got a shotgun or some strychnine and let off steam. You couldn’t have love without hate as that man on
Stars on Sunday
had pointed out. Think positive, Henry.

I have become tougher, he said to himself, I have become more independent. I am better read. I know a lot more about chemistry. Yes, I have lost a valued friend and several neighbours, but for God’s sake, if people can’t learn from their mistakes and become useful citizens once more, what is the hope for any of us? Crime does not necessarily imply punishment these days – if it ever did. We are more, not less Christian than we were in Dostoevsky’s day.

As they approached number 54, he linked his arm into hers. She started at first. Elinor was not used to him touching her. Her therapy group had apparently decided that Henry had something called ‘touch taboo’. And, indeed, the pressure of her arm on his felt, at first, a little alarming. But as they turned in through the gateway Henry realized, to his surprise, that he was not actually gritting his teeth. She felt warm and, yes, comforting.

It was amazing how, when you had decided not to poison a person who probably deserved it, the world suddenly seemed a better, more decent, cleaner place. Maybe that was it. Maybe he had been suffering from whatever it was Raskolnikov had had, and hadn’t realized it. He had had bad thoughts. He had acted on them. He had been mean and small-minded and thought only about himself and his problems. And look what had happened to him as a result! Years of negative thinking had turned him into a quadruple murderer. But, thought Henry as he let them in to the hall, he wasn’t going to lie down under that stereotype. No sirree!

He had been full of spite and bitterness towards the world that lay outside Wimbledon. But now he was going to learn to be generous. Some people flew all over the world and had themselves profiled in colour magazines and had hundreds of women and as much Jack Daniel’s as they could drink while other people were fat and lived in Wimbledon. That was life! Some people sat up till four in the morning talking about the imagination and the sunset on the north face of the Eiger, while other people watched
News at Ten
and went to bed. That was life. The people with yachts and penthouses and as much sex as they wanted and shares and private beaches and planes constantly at their disposal and suntans and fantastic digestions were not, most of them, happy. Were they! Oh no. Happiness was a more complex emotion than that.

Would he, for example, when it came down to it, swap Maisie and Elinor and 54 Maple Drive for some villa with a swimming pool in Marbella complete with leggy blonde with a first in physics and an insatiable appetite for sex in strange positions with Henry? Would he?

Henry felt a momentary twinge of doubt and pushed it aside. He wouldn’t.

Would he exchange his life of struggle, of patient, unrewarded research on a subject that was, possibly, of no interest to anyone anyway? Would he swap his
Complete History of Wimbledon
for some quick, easy, Nobel Prize-winning piece of crap about the state of play in Third World jails? Would he exchange all that lived experience, the forty years of actually being Henry Farr for the cushy way out – I mean, said Henry to himself, who do you want to be? Henry Farr or Graham Greene?

For the briefest of brief moments he thought he was going to scream ‘GRAHAM FUCKING GREENE!’ and, running from the room, sink the coal shovel into Elinor’s neck, but such was the power of positive thinking that the moment passed. He looked round at the sitting room and, his heart growing bigger and bigger, more and more human with each glance, he reached for a pencil and paper. He found himself writing:

Pluses

1.   I have not been found out.

2.   I have not killed anyone on purpose.

3.   I have come to terms with my marriage.

Minuses

But, when it came to it, he could not think of any minuses. From where Henry was sitting, poisoning had been a challenging, bracing way of getting to grips with a mid-life crisis. The
Reader’s Digest
would have been proud of him. He was already thinking of Henry the Murderer in the past tense. Something along the lines of ‘When I Tried my Hand at Poisoning . . .’ or ‘My Wife-murdering Phase’. He was entering a new world in which he might learn all those basic skills that had for so long been denied him. For Christ’s sake, thought Henry, women are just people. People have problems, don’t they?

The awesome thought came to him that, on his own, without any artificial aids or any money changing hands, he, Henry Farr, was experiencing Therapy.

‘Open up, Henry,’ said a voice within him, ‘you are not all bad! You are businessman, father, cook, raconteur! You are murderer, socialite, good neighbour. A murderer is, in many ways, a very positive thing to be. Quite a lot of people would like to be in your shoes. Go with the flow, Henry. Accept the changes in your life! Be well, husband, commuter, solicitor, unapprehended poisoner!’

He was actually grinning to himself when Elinor came into the room. She looked, he thought, almost triumphant.

‘John Rush!’ she said, in the tones of a butler announcing a celebrity at a party. Then she flung the door wide open. ‘He says he wants to see you about something!’

Henry goggled at her as Rush came into the room, bowing slightly as if to acknowledge the importance of his appearance. Before she retired, Elinor, still in larky mood, waved her hand towards him, as if she was proud to have a representative of Law and Order on the premises.

‘Detective Inspector Rush,’ she said, ‘all the way from Wimbledon CID!’

‘Don’t you see that blessed conscience of yours is nothing but other people inside you!’

Luigi Pirandello,
Each in His Own Way

Henry could tell straight away that, when actually on the job, Detective Inspector Rush was one of the most astute and ruthless detectives of the twentieth century.

There was something about the way he fiddled with his pipe, tamping down the tobacco with the back of a matchbox, biting the stem and, from time to time, squinting along it in a knowing sort of way, that suggested a policeman of almost superhuman intelligence.

But Henry could tell, from the man’s drabness, his thin, nasal voice, and his resolute disinclination to discuss anything to do with criminology, that he was a very serious customer indeed. Why else was he parking himself in Henry’s front room talking about the weather, about Elinor, whom he seemed to know worryingly well, and, indeed, almost anything but the subject that had quite obviously brought him here. He was clever, thought Henry, very, very clever indeed.

‘Your wife,’ said DI Rush, ‘is a remarkable woman!’

‘She is!’ said Henry.

‘You picked a good ’un there!’ went on Rush.

‘Indeed!’ said Henry.

What was it about Elinor that made her so attractive to such widely different social groups? Policemen, doctors . . . where would it end? thought Henry. Was it simply that, without really being aware of it he had, for all these years, been married to a very attractive woman? The thought was, somehow, frightening. If this was the case – how was he going to hang on to her? Rush was talking again, and something about the look in his eyes told Henry he was getting on to the purpose of his visit.

‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ he said, eventually, with what seemed like reluctance, ‘but I’ve been talking to quite a few people in Maple Drive about . . .’

Here he waved his pipe at the window. Once again Henry noted the subtlety with which the subject was being introduced. It was almost as if Rush was broaching it against his will.

‘. . . poison . . .’

‘What kind of poison?’

The detective inspector seemed to forget, for a moment, which kind. But he also managed to suggest that this very absentmindedness might be some subtle interrogator’s ploy. Henry felt an absurd desire to throw himself on the carpet and shout ‘I confess! I’m an animal! Take me away!’

‘Poison . . .’ he said, and paused. Then he gave a short, stagy, little laugh. Henry wished he would stop making gnomic remarks and get on with the real business of the afternoon – alibis, heavy innuendo and possible threats of violence.

‘I’m particularly interested in poison,’ Rush was saying. ‘I look through the local paper and I see someone’s been taken ill or found dead somewhere or other and I think . . . I wonder . . . I wonder . . .’

‘Yes,’ said Henry, ‘I expect you do.’

Rush was at the window. He wheeled round, suddenly theatrical, and jabbed his pipe at Henry. ‘Three people dead,’ he said, ‘after a . . .’ He paused.

‘Drunken spree?’ said Henry.

‘Precisely,’ said DI Rush.

He paced back to the sofa and sat on the arm, looking even more like a man who had been instructed to do all this – walk, sit, tamp down pipe, suck, pause, blow – by a not very good theatre director.

‘And of course,’ Rush seemed close to laughter, ‘there was no inquest. It was simply another party that got out of hand. Three more stiffs.’

‘Can I offer you a drink,’ said Henry, ‘or are you on duty?’

‘I’m never off duty!’ said Rush. ‘I’m always on duty. At four in the morning I wake and I stare into the darkness, thinking about crime and the evil things we do to each other. And about, well, how beastly we can be! I’ll have a gin and tonic if you’re having one.’

‘Surely!’ said Henry, trying to keep his voice steady.

He went to the door. Maisie was crouched at the keyhole, eyes round with excitement. She followed him through to the kitchen. ‘What have you done?’ she said.

‘What have
you
done?’ said Henry.

‘Nothing,’ said Maisie, ‘I’m a child.’

‘Being a child,’ said Henry, as he poured the biggest gin and tonic he had ever poured in his life, ‘is no excuse.’

He poured one half the size for the detective inspector and, followed by Maisie, went back towards the front room. She installed herself by the crack in the door as he went in. Rush was still standing, staring out at the street, his hands by his side, the pipe now dead to the world. When he heard Henry he wheeled round sharply.

‘A nice quiet street,’ said Rush in a manner that suggested that it was nothing of the kind, ‘in a nice, quiet suburb. Full of nice, quiet houses, and nice, quiet families inside them. And somewhere, in one of them . . .’

His eyes flared dangerously into life. ‘A madman. A psychopath. A killer.’

Henry jumped. ‘Do you think so?’

‘Oh, I know so,’ said Rush, ‘I know so. I know that somewhere out there, somewhere out there is a man so twisted by hatred and spite, so bent out of shape by life that he couldn’t really be called human any more.’

‘Golly!’ said Henry.

‘A man,’ said Rush, waving his right arm and pacing up and down on the carpet, ‘a man who thinks the world owes him something. A drab little man, obscure, meek and mild, hen-pecked perhaps. Like Crippen, say, with a pathetic pipe dream of his own that will never come to fruition—’

Henry thought of
The Complete History
and gulped. He had the uncomfortable sensation that this man could see right into him, that unlike almost everyone else with whom he had dealings (including Elinor) he knew what Henry was thinking.

‘A man who is probably impotent. Unable to connect. Perhaps homosexual, I don’t know. But, above all, a man with a warped, vile, grotesque view of the world. A narrow, twisted little man, a moral cripple, a—’

‘A beast?’ said Henry, in a high, squeaky voice.

‘That’s it!’ said Rush, amazed at Henry’s powers of intuitive understanding. ‘A beast!’

Rush’s face was pale with righteous fury. Henry could see his knuckles whiten round the pipe.

‘Most of us,’ he went on, ‘rue the day the death penalty was abolished.’

‘Indeed,’ said Henry, ‘indeed!’

Rush was clearly not one of your namby-pamby community policemen. He was a copper out to get his man. The sort of person who would work on a case twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, until he had brought the guilty one to justice. The sort of policeman of whom, in normal circumstances, Henry thoroughly approved. He was not entirely sure, however, that in this case such zeal was appropriate. There was something, he decided, odd and fanatical about the man.

It was the same with the death penalty. Henry had always been in favour of the death penalty. For other people. In his case he felt it would quite simply be unfair. He deserved something for what he had done of course. Light whipping maybe. But death? For God’s sake! Would his death bring Donald back? Wasn’t it simply an archaic desire for revenge? He drank deeply of his gin and tonic.

‘But,’ said Rush, ‘you’ve got me on my hobby horse!’

‘What is your hobby horse?’ said Henry.

‘The Wimbledon Poisoner,’ said Rush. He laughed, briefly, and from his top left-hand pocket drew a sheaf of clippings. Henry wasn’t quite sure whether he was supposed to look at them, and in order not to offend the man – he had in fact an almost insane desire to stay on the right side of him – he stretched out his hand for them. Rush moved his hand away with a larky little smile. He wagged a reproving finger at Henry.

‘Oh, no you don’t!’ he said. ‘You’re the same as me!’

‘How do you mean?’

‘A local historian.’

‘Ah . . .’

Certain things about the man’s behaviour were becoming clearer.

‘You remember at the Wimbledon Society,’ went on Rush, ‘last year. They were telling us about Everett Maltby!’

‘Were they?’

Why was he unable to remember meeting Rush at the Wimbledon Society? Surely something as important as a talk about Everett Maltby (he was beginning, now, to recall it) would have marked the occasion as something special. It struck him that there might be something sinister in this lapse. His notes on Maltby were constantly going astray, weren’t they? Perhaps, Henry didn’t like this idea at all, there was something paranormal going on.