The Wimbledon Poisoner (22 page)

‘All areas of the world,’ Rush was saying, ‘have their particular crimes, and the same is true of districts of Britain. There are, for example, an awful lot of cases of death due to sudden, unscheduled abdominal pain in Wimbledon.’

Henry coughed. ‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ said Rush, ‘that crime isn’t always a matter of bashing an old lady over the head and running away. Real crime can be very much more subtle. Real crime is often hidden, beneath the surface of an apparently respectable community. The doctor who raises his hat to you in the High Street may be one of the Bus Station Buggers. The bank manager may have a rather over-liberal attitude to accounting proceedings. You take my meaning?’

‘Not really,’ said Henry.

‘I’m coming to you,’ said Rush, in a tone that suggested the opposite was the case, ‘because of course we’re both local history fiends. It’s difficult. Quite a few people think I’m way off beam on this one. But I had a hunch you might understand.’

‘Understand what?’

Rush flung his arms wide. ‘We live on the street,’ he said, ‘we’re neighbours. Let’s get together. Let’s discuss it. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? You know what I think’s going on under the oh-so-respectable surface of this oh-so-respectable manor. I’m talking, of course, about poisoning.’

So this was a social, rather than a business call. Or was it? Was Rush here to frighten him? Or had he some even darker purpose?

‘It’s just a barmy theory of mine,’ he was saying. ‘I’m a voice in the wilderness, but I’m convinced, absolutely convinced that there is a poisoner at work in the borough. Here and now!’ He gave an enigmatic smile. ‘My colleagues think I’m crazy,’ said Rush, ‘they don’t want to know. With them, it’s clamp this, clamp that, traffic flow . . . football hooligans . . .’ He snorted. ‘Football hooligans.’

Then, ‘When I first got on to the poisoner, I told a few people, and they were, I have to say, unsympathetic to a degree. But that, if you don’t mind me saying so, is the mark of a modern police officer. The door-to-door slog, the house-to-house search, the repetitive, mechanical labour of collecting evidence. Look at the Yorkshire Ripper.’

‘Well, indeed,’ said Henry, ‘indeed, he—’

But Rush ignored him. ‘There was no one there who trusted his judgement. Who went out on a limb. Who stood up and said “Look, I have a theory. A crazy theory.” Because the psychopath is only to be tracked down by an intuitive guess. He’s somebody who otherwise doesn’t read as a criminal. He’s you!’

He pointed directly at Henry. Henry gave a low squeak.

‘He’s me! This is the story we’re looking at. The Wimbledon Poisoner is out there OK. He’s there. He’s anyone. He is you and me. He is the dark part of ourselves. You know?’

‘Fascinating,’ said Henry, ‘and . . . er . . . when did you first notice this . . . er . . . pattern of abdominal disorders?’

Rush screwed up his face, paced across to the patch of carpet nearest to the fire, which seemed to be his favourite spot for significant remarks and, wheeling round, did his best bit of pipe work so far, a double lunge, with parry in quarte and passage of waltz-time conducting, followed by a bit of invisible crosshatching above his ear.

‘It clicked,’ he said, ‘it all fell into place a week or so ago. When I saw you at Donald Templeton’s funeral.’

‘Let me,’ said Henry, ‘get you another gin and tonic.’

It was horrible. The man was playing some elaborate game with him, waiting for him to crack. He might even be lying about the Maltby talk. Oh Jesus, thought Henry, I am very sorry about the poisoning. I really do apologize. If you get me out of this one I will never ever do anything like it again. I will not think unpleasant things about people. I will not . . .

He poured a gin and tonic about twice the size of his first one, drank it and then poured one twice the size of that for Rush. Important to have the man on your side.

Maisie was still crouched by the door.

‘You could bring me a drink!’ she said.

‘Shut up!’ hissed Henry.

‘It’s very interesting,’ she said, ‘about the poisoner. Who is it, do you think?’

‘You shouldn’t be listening to this,’ said Henry.

When he had been served with his drink, Rush started pacing the carpet once more. ‘But I really started,’ he said, ‘a long, long time ago. You see evidence, in a case like this, has a habit of disappearing. What looks like a normal death . . .’

He took a fairly pristine-looking cutting from the file and thrust it at Henry.

TEMPLETON, Donald
[it read].
At his home in Maple Drive after a brief illness. Much loved father of Arfur, and devoted husband to Billykins. ‘FOR GOD’S SAKE WHY?’

‘She was very upset,’ said Henry. ‘It’s not the best-worded announcement of a death I’ve ever read.’

Rush snickered. ‘It seems pretty carefully worded to me,’ he said, ‘ “brief illness”. Not, you notice, “sudden and inexplicable gastric attack”, not “after severe abdominal pains”. No no no. People aren’t interested in that sort of thing. They like to draw a veil over it, don’t they?’

He stopped at his favourite patch of carpet and then, as if conscious that he had used this as a base before, moved off towards the window. ‘And then,’ he went on, ‘actually at the funeral, three more deaths! Extraordinary coincidence, don’t you think? Extraordinary! But of course no one remarks on it, do they? No one puts two and two together, do they? In the paper we read—’

He handed Henry another cutting. Henry read:

COVENEY, Rufus. Beloved son of George and Myfanwy. Novelist and critic of note, at Maple Drive after a seizure. ‘Go not behind for all is dark before!’

Henry was studying this quotation and finding it vaguely suggestive when, below it, he saw:

SPROTT, David. David died peacefully at a social gathering of friends last Tuesday. His funeral will be held at Putney Vale Crematorium, where anyone who wishes a last chance to see him will be most welcome, and afterwards at the family home. Good man, good dentist, good, good, good. ‘Farewell.’

He was beginning to sweat.

‘All just slips by, doesn’t it?’ said Rush. ‘Another corpse. Why bother? It is only someone who looks carefully, who studies the evidence, who can put facts together and say “Hang on a tick! There’s more here than meets the eye.” That’s police work, Mr Farr. Constant vigilance. Constant suspicion. It’s like having a little man inside who asks nasty questions. I’ve got a nasty little man inside me and he won’t go away. Look at this—’

Rush pushed a much older-looking clipping towards Henry. It read:

PURVIS, Alan. At Parkside Hospital after a collapse in the Cat o’Nine Tails Bar and Brasserie. O Death where is thy sting? Mourned by Mum, Dad and all at the folkclub
.

‘There are others,’ said Rush. ‘Manning, last September. Severe intestinal pains after an outdoor buffet lunch with a group of salesmen from White’s garage, Wimbledon. Pedersen, collapse and subsequent death after ingesting a hamburger at Putney Show. Annabel Lee Evans, only twenty-two, vomiting, diarrhoea and death in May of this year four hours after attending a disco and Bar-B-Q at Southlands College where she ate a meal of curried chicken and coleslaw . . .’ He spread his arms wide. ‘We’re dealing with a maniac. A clever, unscrupulous maniac.’

Henry was inclined to agree with him. He had never met such a maniac in all his life. The man should not be allowed out. But, as Rush continued to pace the carpet, stab the air with his pipe and talk rubbish, Henry wondered whether he might not be misjudging him. He recalled a phrase of Keith Simpson’s: ‘Almost every event in life is consequent upon a meal.’ Just as poisoning was, therefore, hard to detect, it was, by the same token, all the more possible. And once you had fallen under its sway, as Rush had, it offered a hideous but plausible explanation for so many things! In a way, of course, he and Rush were not unalike. Other people would have found them dull. They were dull. They both knew that they were dull. But that didn’t stop them.

‘A maniac,’ said Rush, ‘someone who roams the streets, waits his moment, and then, bingo, injects the hamburger, the chocolates, the ham and tomato sandwich, the chicken vindaloo. Lays his little trap and passes on. The poisoner’s reward is reading about himself – reading about deaths that
he
made happen. He has a power that no one knows about.
He
made all this happen. He’s playing God, don’t you agree, Mr Farr?’

Here Rush snaked his head forward at Henry, seeking his interlocutor’s eyes, and then, heading back to his favourite bit of carpet, looked around the room for applause. For a moment Henry thought, How does he know? and then, as quickly, realized that he had better not start feeling guilty about poisonings in which he had no involvement. This was taking social responsibility a little too far. He was off the hook, wasn’t he? He didn’t fit into this guy’s theory. Or did he? If he didn’t, why was Rush looking at him like that, in that knowing way? Maisie’s head appeared round the door.

‘Mummy says do you want sandwiches?’ she said.

‘That would be most kind!’ said Rush.

‘Chicken mayonnaise or liver sausage?’ she said.

‘Anything,’ said Rush, ‘so long as it doesn’t contain a registered poison!’

He laughed. A jolly, companionable laugh.

‘I’ll tell her!’ said Maisie.

‘It was the deaths in Maple Drive that confirmed my theory,’ went on Rush. ‘Before then I thought I saw a pattern. And the pattern would evade me. You know? I’d think to myself sometimes, “Rush, you’re barmy.” No way is there any connection between Julia Neve, who died of quote polyneuritis unquote last February, and Martin Crump the railway worker who died in agony in Roehampton only five hours after eating a meal of peaches, risotto and Continental cheese.’

Elinor appeared at the door, wiping her hands on her apron. Rush looked up at her, sharply, and for a brief moment her eyes met his.
There is one not very far from here who admires me!
thought Henry. He looked across at Elinor as she shook the black hair away from her forehead, and he had to acknowledge that his wife was a very attractive woman. How was he going to keep her? How was he going to put Neighbourhood Watch off the track?

‘Are you all right, Henry?’ said Elinor.

‘Fine, love,’ said Henry, ‘fine.’

Inspector Rush was looking at him oddly. ‘All this talk of poisoning,’ he said, ‘has put you off your food!’

‘Not at all,’ said Henry.

‘Actually,’ said Elinor, ‘Henry is very interested in poisoning. He’s got a whole lot of books about it upstairs.’

Henry decided it was time to intervene. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I am very interested in poisoning. I’m thinking of writing a book about it. The . . . er . . . Everett Maltby case got me started. I thought . . . you know . . . I’d look into poisoners as a breed. They’re a fascinating bunch. Fascinating!’

Rush’s eyes watched him. ‘Indeed!’ said Rush.

Did he suspect the truth or not?

It was worst of all when he talked about Donald.

‘What I don’t get,’ he would say, his eyes on Henry’s face, ‘is how the poisoner got to that chicken!’

For there was no doubt in Rush’s mind that the chicken that had been Donald Templeton’s last meal was in the same category as the tubful of beef satay at the Wimbledon Council’s Bring and Buy Sale in Aid of Bangladesh; it had been got at.

‘Perhaps,’ Henry would say, sweating, ‘he got at it in Waitrose.’

‘How do you mean?’ said Rush, a little smile curling at the edge of his lips.
Pull the other one, squire, it’s got bells on it! Come on, Farr! Own up, why don’t you, eh? Eh?

‘He could have . . . er . . . injected it through the polythene cover. Or else made up a simulated free-range chicken in his own home and smuggled it into Waitrose.’

Rush would look at Henry. A man who could think up something as perverted as this was quite clearly in the running as a suspect.

‘Yes,’ he would say, ‘ye-es. Or possibly he could have introduced some substance into a batch of saucepans. Easy to do. Smear a little carbon tetrachloride round the edge and next time you cook sprouts it’s headache and vomiting and bysey-bye to your renal functions.’

‘Except,’ Henry replied, ‘we were all right.’

‘Yes,’ Rush said, ‘you were all fine and dandy. Weren’t you?’

And his little detective’s eyes travelled up and down Henry’s face, and he smiled that smile again, that bleak little policeman’s gesture to levity that said
You better watch your step, sunshine.

‘Ah me,’ he continued, ‘maybe there is another explanation!’

And he laughed, lightly.

He seemed to be constantly round at the house. One night he was in the front room when Henry returned late from a meeting with his divorce in Aldershot (the woman, it transpired, could only make love to her husband with the dog in the room, ‘which,’ Henry pointed out, ‘might or might not be favourable to her case, depending on the kind of involvement required of the creature’). He invited the two of them out for meals at a fashionable bistro in Wimbledon Village, during which he made several off-colour jokes about poisons. Elinor seemed to find them funny, but Rush’s eyes, Henry noted, never left Henry’s face.

‘It would have been so simple,’ said Henry at one point, ‘if you could have pushed for an autopsy on . . . er . . . the Maple Drive contingent!’

‘Wouldn’t it?’ he said in a quiet voice.

If Henry had had a soul, Rush would probably have been looking straight into it.

‘I pushed for an autopsy on Ellen Wilcox of South Wales Road, New Malden,’ he said, ‘and my, there was a fuss. I’d showed my hand too early. We found nothing. Since when my . . . superiors have been running scared of me. Never mind if a psychopath gets away. Just don’t rock the boat. Eh?’

‘Indeed!’ said Henry.

‘We’ll get our autopsy,’ said Rush quietly; ‘one day he’ll overplay his hand. He’s crazy. He’s bound to. And in the meanwhile, maybe we’ll get lucky—’

Here he gave a professionally ghoulish laugh. ‘Maybe someone’ll forget to bury a body!’

Elinor was staring across the table at him, her eyes bright with the wine. ‘Your job,’ she said, ‘must be fascinating!’