The Wimbledon Poisoner (23 page)

‘It is!’ said Rush, and he looked levelly at Henry. ‘There’s nothing more interesting than stalking a criminal. Waiting, watching, listening, and then, suddenly, when he’s made his mistake—’

Here he leaned forward and rapped the table sharply with a bread roll.

‘Pouncing!’

Henry jumped.

‘All we need,’ said Rush, ‘is a body!’

It was almost November, the week before Hallowe’en, when someone told someone in the street who told someone else in the street who almost immediately told someone who told Elinor who told Henry that Mrs David Sprott, widow of the highly insured dentist, David Sprott, forty-two, kept his mortal remains in a small glass jar on a shelf in their bedroom. She also kept, in a drawer in a dresser in the same bedroom, Sprott’s false teeth (one of the most closely guarded secrets in world dentistry), his wire glasses and a small fragment of his beard. It was, as Henry said when he heard, almost as bad as having Sprott himself around.

‘His trousers,’ said Edwina Sprott in her deep, bass voice, ‘are still in the cupboard. His boots are still in the hall.’

Bits of Sprott himself! Powdered dentist! Powdered dentist that might contain traces of Finish ’Em, of bleach, of Shine and Zappiton and whatever else he had put into the punch. The trouble was, Henry didn’t know whether such things remained in the ashes of a cremated victim. The police had certainly identified traces of thallium in one of Graham Young’s victims. Was the same true for bleach? And how much bleach had they drunk anyway?

‘Suppose,’ he said to Rush one afternoon, ‘one had drunk a fair amount of corrosive fluid . . .’

‘Yes . . .’

‘And suppose . . .’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ said Elinor. ‘Can’t you two talk about anything but poisoning? There are other things in life, you know. There are healthy, normal things! Things that nourish and sustain!’

Although Elinor had given up her therapy class she still retained traces of their style in her speech. The woman in charge had told her, apparently, that she was cured. She was, Elinor told Henry, a fully rounded human being. She was in no further need of therapy.

At first Henry assumed that this meant the therapy class had finally had enough of her. But on close examination he found his wife to be a perfectly pleasant woman in early middle age, with whom he could not, however hard he tried, find any fault. She had had her hair cut, and started to sing as she went about the house. She began to eat normally. She developed an obsession with television programmes involving American policemen shooting at each other. And she dressed in gayer colours, like a woman who wanted to please a man.

Which man, though? That was the problem.

By the night of Maisie’s Hallowe’en party the little bits of Sprott on Mrs Sprott’s mantelpiece had become a major talking point in Wimbledon. Almost the only person in the street who had not discussed the issue with Henry and Elinor was Detective Inspector Rush. Rush, Henry decided, was waiting for Henry to make his mistake.

‘She’s got Sprott in a vase!’ he said, as he arrived for Maisie’s party, carrying, as he often did when visiting the house, a large bunch of flowers for Elinor. ‘The remains of Sprott,’ he went on, ‘are less than a hundred yards from where we are standing.’ And he looked hungrily over in the direction of the dentist’s house.

Henry coughed. ‘I . . . er . . . know!’ he said.

Why was the man mentioning this fairly well-known piece of local gossip now? Because, presumably, he felt sure that Henry was about to make that ‘fatal mistake’ to which the policeman was always referring. If Rush thought he was about to make a fatal mistake, thought Henry, he had better go right ahead and make one. In the end it would probably be simpler.

Maisie was wearing fangs and a black cloak. Henry had a rubber hammer sticking out of his head and a highly realistic bloodstain across his temple. Elinor was looking, Henry thought, rather ravishing, in a kind of black silk bodystocking. He was looking at her back when Rush approached, and trying to decide whether he had made the right move by resolving not to poison her. She had been showing signs, lately, of a reawakened interest in sex, which Henry was not entirely sure was a good thing. Only last night she had made a number of arch references which Henry thought seemed to imply that they had had anal intercourse in the lavatory of a train between Margate and Ramsgate. He could not remember ever going to Ramsgate let alone buggering his wife on public transport in that area of the country.

‘Sprott,’ said Rush, his eyes on Henry’s face, ‘in a vase! Makes you think, doesn’t it?’

‘Come on!’ said Elinor gaily. ‘We’re going to frighten people!’

The other thing about post-thallium Elinor was that she seemed to have become almost relentlessly cheerful. Especially when in the company of Detective Inspector Rush. This, thought Henry, is probably Her Moment. He would have liked to have had a Moment. Unemployed Journalist with Punk Hairstyle, from 194, was always talking about His Moment which, apparently, occurred in something called The Seventies. Younger people talked about The Seventies as if they were something that actually happened, and not, as they were for Henry, a sort of ghastly blur punctuated by requests for money from the National Westminster Bank’s Home Loans Service.

Maybe this was her moment. She was flowering, just as he, Henry, was about to fall into whatever trap it was the detective inspector had set for him. He looked across at Rush, who was wearing a brown trilby and had on a battered, rather dated suit, very different from his usual neat blue outfit. He was also, Henry noted, sporting a small false moustache.

‘Who are you supposed to be?’ said Henry with just a trace of irritation.

Rush smiled enigmatically. ‘I should have thought you would have recognized the allusion,’ he said, allowing his smile to curl upwards like paper in a furnace, ‘being a keen student of poisoners!’

Henry started to shake.

‘Would you?’ he said, more than ever convinced that the man was trying to frighten him into doing something foolish.

‘I’m Hawley Harvey Crippen,’ said Rush, ‘of Hilldrop Crescent. The meek little man who wanted to murder his wife. And so bought five grams of hyoscine which he gave her.’

Elinor and Maisie were now some yards ahead of them. Henry found he was talking in a whisper. ‘People,’ he said, ‘do murder their wives, don’t they?’

‘They do,’ said Rush, ‘and if they do . . . we often find they’re capable of anything. Now – shall we talk about how to get hold of Sprott? For the purposes of analysis.’

‘Who shall we frighten first?’ said Maisie. ‘Let’s frighten someone who doesn’t like me.’ She laughed ghoulishly. ‘Gives us a lot of scope!’ she added.

‘I know,’ said Elinor, ‘let’s frighten Accountant Who Talks a Lot!’

She had recently taken to attempting to follow Henry’s re-christening of the neighbourhood, without noticeable success. She lacked malice, thought Henry, looking at her and remembering vaguely why it was he had wanted to kill her.

‘Let’s!’ he said.

‘The trouble is,’ said Rush, ‘because that bloody doctor did what he did I’ll have a devil of a job to get a look at him officially.’ He chewed his lip. ‘Evidence, evidence, evidence,’ he muttered. ‘All I want’s a body!’

‘Come on, Maisie!’ said Elinor.

Maisie made a farting noise with her lips and followed her mother.

‘We could ask to borrow his ashes,’ said Rush, ‘for sentimental reasons.’

‘You’re a policeman,’ said Henry. ‘For God’s sake! Can’t you impound him? Or subpoena him or something?’

Why had he said this?

‘I’m afraid,’ said Rush darkly, ‘there are not many who think as we do. To some the poisoner is a fanciful notion!’

Henry thought he could understand the reasons for this.

‘I’m regarded,’ said Rush, ‘as a bit of a joke!’ And he gave Henry that intimate glance, as if to imply that only the two of them knew the real secret. Yes, thought Henry, he knows, but is never going to tell. He’s going to amuse himself with me, torment me with this shared secret until one day I can’t stand it any more and I find myself screaming to anyone who’ll listen – ‘I DID IT! I DID IT! TAKE ME AWAY!’ This, of course, had happened to Raskolny-whatever-his-name-was, hadn’t it?

Maisie was now running ahead of the group. In her right hand she was carrying a bright red apple. Henry tried to break away from Rush who, without apparent effort, seemed to be able to stay about a yard from his left elbow. Police training presumably.

They were at the corner of Maple Drive. The garden of the house in front of them, piled high with builder’s rubbish, looked dark and threatening to Henry. Hallowe’en was quite frightening enough without dressing up as a monster with an axe in your head. Saying the word, hearing the shrieks of the children in the neighbouring streets . . . Over to the right a group of rowdy little girls was approaching, decked out in black hats and coats and rather fetching little broomsticks. ‘Trick or treat, trick or treat?’ they were singing. ‘We have slime that you must eat!’

‘What’s the apple for, Maisie?’ asked Henry.

‘I thought somebody might bob for it,’ she said. Maisie looked at the apple as if surprised at the fact that she was holding it. It was improbably large and shiny, a fairy-tale apple. Had she had it with her when she came out?

‘Where did you get it?’

Maisie looked at it, puzzled. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said, ‘I just got it.’

That was the other thing about children. Just as they had started to stun you into silence with their maturity, their knowledge of sex relations or the IRA they hit you with cluelessness and infantile jokes or a bewildering ignorance about something on which you had assumed they would be well informed. If only, thought Henry, people would be one thing and stick to it. If wives would be nice or nasty, if . . . oh, his trouble was easy to spot. He wanted the world to stay the way it was.

Rush was giving him one of those looks again. Henry tried to move away from him, and went in pursuit of Maisie.

‘Who,’ she said to him as he drew level with her, ‘are we going to frighten?’

‘We are going to frighten Jungian Analyst with Winebox,’ said Henry, ‘and we are going to terrify his wife, Lingalonga Boccherini, not to mention Birdwatching Child Viola Player and Sensationally Articulate Twelve-Year-Old!’

Jungian Analyst with Winebox was a man called Gordon, who for some reason always insisted on being called Gord. He was married to an immensely tall, thin woman with huge eyes and a mournful manner, who for no very good reason was known to Henry as Lingalonga Boccherini. The other two were their children, Caedmon and Wulfstan. Elinor, who was an old friend of Lingalonga Boccherini, had never heard this name before, although she seemed to know to whom Henry was referring.

‘Do you mean,’ she said edgily, ‘Gord and Julia?’

‘I do!’

‘I don’t think,’ she said, ‘that is a funny or clever way of describing them.’

‘They can take it,’ said Henry, ‘they’re psychiatrists.’

‘I don’t think we should frighten them,’ said Elinor.

‘Why not?’ said Henry. ‘Why should psychiatrists be exempt from being frightened! They dish it out all the time, don’t they? They tell you you’re regressive and introverted and immature and God knows what. They’re always going on about the importance of ceremonies, aren’t they? Why shouldn’t we scare the arse off them?’

‘Because,’ said Elinor, ‘they’ll be out frightening someone else.’

Henry began to find this conversation bracing. Gord and Julia were, of course, Elinor’s friends. All Elinor’s friends belonged to Elinor, although it was understood that if Henry ever acquired anyone interesting (the nearest he had ever got to it was Donald, which was not, Henry felt, very near) then Elinor had rights of trespass on them.

‘It’s very important,’ Elinor was saying, ‘for them to express anger. That’s why you’re such a mess, Henry. Because you don’t express your anger.’

Henry felt his neck thicken in his collar and wondered whether not poisoning Elinor might be bad for his health. Gord and Julia didn’t need to express anger as far as he was concerned. What they all too clearly felt was that it was a public disgrace that someone as disgusting as Henry should be allowed to stalk about the place unanalysed. But Henry had seen them
get
angry at him. He had seen their lips tighten when he referred to all psychiatrists as ‘shrinks’ and to all psychiatric theories as ‘bollocks’.

Henry did not like analysts. He was frightened of them. The idea of lying on a couch and telling someone everything that was in your mind! Everything in Henry’s mind! That ‘open sewer’ as Elinor, in one of her less charitable moments, had called it. Where would he start? With the poisoning? The incessant masturbation? The feelings of hatred towards absolutely everyone? The total lack of moral scruple? The compulsive eating? The lack of talent? And what would he be left with if all this were taken away?

‘Jungian Analyst with Winebox,’ said Henry, ‘deserves frightening. Him and his mane of white hair. Walking around, conducting imaginary orchestras. He deserves frightening right out of his sensible, caring, cord trousers.’

‘He won’t be
in
!’ wailed Elinor.

‘He’ll be in,’ said Henry; ‘he broke his leg!’

Maisie finally decided the matter. She wanted to frighten Caedmon and Wulfstan. They would not, thought Henry, be difficult to frighten.

Jungian Analyst with Winebox and his family lived in a small cottage on the edge of the common. Here, surrounded by clavichords, violas and books about dreams, they looked out at the south side of the common as the dusk came in through the beech trees.

The party went up through Belvedere Avenue and into Church Road, then left towards the village High Street. Here expensive cars, parked nose to tail, waited for their owners. The village itself wore, as usual, the air of some carefully designed exhibition at Olympia, and Henry, looking at the wooden shopfronts and the come-hither graphics in the windows, the resolutely phoney atmosphere of the antique, saw, the way some people saw skulls under skin and hair, the plaster, the rotten beams, the real, ugly history that held the suburb together.