The Wimbledon Poisoner (30 page)

Elinor was muttering something in her sleep. Something in the elaborate chemistry of her brain sent a signal along a nerve that moved her tongue, and her voice, though not her conscious self, started to say . . . ‘He’s a poisonous little man . . .’ Henry looked over to see if she was awake. She wasn’t. Without her knowledge, polypeptides and neurons hummed and wriggled inside her and she said, again in a bass, mechanical voice . . . ‘Poisoning a poisonous person isn’t poisonous . . .’ Henry looked more closely at her. She still wasn’t asleep. But her voice was fading slightly . . . ‘Poison a poison . . .’ she said and again, ‘It’s poison . . . poison . . . poison . . .’ Then she spoke no more.

All we are is chemistry, thought Henry, as he struggled into his trousers, socks and shoes, that is all we are. But if only we were something more! If only! Perhaps then mankind wouldn’t be such a horrible, self-seeking, blind, greedy, poisonous little bunch of bastards. And with that uncomforting, not totally original thought he crept down the stairs, opened the door and tiptoed towards David Sprott’s house.

David Sprott’s dustbins were legendary. ‘You could,’ as he once told a man from Teamwaste, who was flinching at the sight of what he thought was a maggot, ‘eat your dinner off my dustbins.’ They seemed to Henry, as he crossed Maple Drive, to be a touching memorial to the man, arranged as they were, like soldiers, facing the street, inscribed, in white painted letters a foot high, sprott: 102 maple drive wimbledon. (Who did Sprott think was after his dustbins?) Sooner or later, thought Henry, the rubbish men will come for me. They will take me out in a van or a skip and, like everything else in the suburb, the bedsprings, the cardboard boxes, the Pentel pens, the old cassette cases, the buckled cans of lager, the potato peelings, the floor tiles nobody wanted, the stacks of wet newspaper and the empty, grease-stained bottles of Soave, I will be carried out towards the great ocean of junk.

He started down the side passage; the door, neatly painted and labelled, was closed and locked, but under a brick on the windowsill to his left was a Yale key. Henry eased it into the lock, pushed open the door and, holding his breath, moved forward along the rough concrete of the passage, above him, to his right, the red-brick cliff of the building. Somewhere away to his left a dog barked, and on the hill he heard the sound of a single car.

The window that was usually unlocked was on the far side of the back of the house. To get to it, he would have to cross the french windows, and to his horror, he saw that from within the dining room behind them there was a dim, single light. Surely she couldn’t be up? Not at this time? Henry flattened himself against the wall and wriggled round towards the french windows; he must try and blend into the background; he mustn’t even breathe; he must move one step at a time and between each step, stop, look, listen.

He stopped. At the far end of the rear wall of the house, screened from him by one of the thick bushes that fringed the fences of the garden, there was a figure. Oh no, thought Henry, please no! For an instant he thought he could make out the shape of Sprott’s head, the beard, the glasses, and, as he froze into the wall, he waited for the sound of the dentist’s voice, that mocking northern intonation . . . ‘Hullo there, Henry? All right, are yer?’ But then the figure moved out from the bush towards the window to which Henry was moving, as slowly and cautiously as Henry himself. The moon made the garden, as neat as the fences, the doors, the dustbins, and the thick, empty lilac bushes into a bold, clear woodcut, and the face of the other stranger, in dramatic relief, was a thing of frightening contrasts. The nose twitched and sniffed, like some animal after its quarry, and the mouth was half open, with excitement or fear or both. But it was the eyes that Henry noticed most. The eyes were fixed ahead in a rapture of concentration, as if something in the house was sucking them in, as if the light from the french windows exerted some horrible, unavoidable pull on Detective Inspector Rush.

There could be only one thing he was after, thought Henry. And he could not be allowed to get his hands on it. He stepped out into the moonlit patio and hissed a greeting.

‘Rush—’ he heard himself say, ‘Rush – it’s me!’

The detective stopped and turned towards him. As soon as he saw Henry his face split into a smile, all teeth and lips, that reminded Henry of the
risus sardonicus
printed on Jackson’s face, a week or so ago. He knows, thought Henry again, he knows all about me. He even knew I was coming here tonight. That’s why he’s here. He knows all of the ghastly things I think and feel and don’t tell anyone about. And he knows them without me having to explain. He knows all the things only the detective knows about the criminal.

‘Well,’ said Rush, ‘well, well, well!’

Sometimes Henry wondered whether Rush might not be a bit of his own genetic material that had somehow sloped off on its own to some lab and got a dodgy biochemist to set it up as a freelance individual. If he was a cutting off Henry, though, he was probably grafted from the toenail or somewhere up the rectal passage.

Rush continued to smile. ‘Are you looking for what I’m looking for?’ he said.

Why don’t I tell him? Why don’t I just say: ‘Fair’s fair. Between you and me and the gatepost and Sprott’s lilac bush, I did it. Now go ahead and prove it!’ What was unbearable, as always with Rush, was the urge to confess, because only with this man was what Henry had done actually thinkable. When with Elinor, Maisie, people from the office or the street, it seemed to have nothing to do with Henry at all. But here, in the moonlight, looking at the policeman, tugging at his upper lip, Henry knew he had killed five people, none of whom, with the possible exception of Sprott and Coveney, deserved to die. Henry decided to face it out.

‘Well,’ he heard himself say, ‘I thought I’d . . .’

‘Get hold of the ashes,’ said Rush, as if he were referring to the cricket trophy, as if this were the most normal thing to do in the world, ‘of course!’

Without speaking, Henry went towards the window and, in silence, began to slide up the sash. It rattled as it rose. The silence between Henry and the policeman became, as he worked, not silence. A car came up Maple Drive. You could hear it from a long way away, falling in pitch and gaining in volume in a graceful curve until it shouldered its way past them, directly outside, with a muted ‘pop’, followed by the long, slow slide to absence and somewhere else.

Had Rush seen him? Leapt out of bed, taken an alternative route, some secret tunnel perhaps known only to members of the Wimbledon CID that led to Sprott’s back garden? Was he intending to confront Henry with the granulated dentist, waving the urn around in a challenging fashion? ‘See! Here he is! This is what you’ve done, you bastard!’

Henry got one leg over the sill. Inside, the house was silent. Rush, who followed him in, led the way across the carpet. As they came out into the hall it occurred to Henry that all this might be some ghastly mistake, that Edwina Sprott might not, after all, have gone on her weekly visit to her sister. If that were the case, however, Rush had clearly got hold of the same inaccurate information for, as they reached the stairs, he spoke again in clear, almost relaxed tones.

‘It’s a funny thing about poisoners,’ he said. ‘Most of them want to get caught. It’s a club, do you know what I mean? They have to show their cleverness to the world.’

He looked straight at Henry. ‘I’ve studied poisoners,’ he said, ‘all my life. They’re . . .’ Here he gave an awkward little laugh, to show that he was making a joke. ‘. . . meat and drink to me.’

Perhaps Rush was going to drug him and take him back to some private Black Museum of his own. Perhaps Henry was of too great scientific interest to be just chucked over to the boys from legal aid and then sent off to Parkhurst for twenty years. Perhaps he would be taken into Rush’s garden shed and nameless experiments would be performed on him. Henry thought he would probably prefer Parkhurst.

‘Is there something you want to say to me, Henry?’

‘No!’ said Henry, rather sharply.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes,’ said Henry, ‘I’m sure.’

Rush stroked his upper lip.

‘It’s the loneliness, I think,’ he said, ‘I think they must have spent night after night wondering . . . is there anyone like me out there? Someone who shares my . . .’ Here he laughed again, dry, perfunctory. ‘. . . enthusiasms. Cream, Young, Crippen, Palmer. The only time they come together is as waxworks. Know what I mean? And what they wanted was probably to just be with someone who would understand. Who’d say the names with them, you know? Hyoscine, gelsemium, aconite . . . You know?’

Henry was sweating. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘we should go on up the stairs.’

Rush smiled. ‘Of course, Henry,’ he said, ‘of course!’

He became suddenly practical when they reached the bedroom. The door was open and, facing them, above the mantelpiece was a 12” by 10” portrait picture of Sprott in his dentist’s uniform. He was standing in his surgery with a drill in his right hand, trying, unsuccessfully, to look relaxed. Below his image, in a blue vase, was what remained of him, corporeally speaking, and on either side of the vase were two blue candles, burned halfway down. Say what you like about Sprott, thought Henry, he was a damned good dentist.

‘Wait there!’ said Rush.

The detective sank to his knees. Henry backed away nervously, while Rush flopped forward on his belly into the Sprotts’ bedroom, indicating to Henry that he should do the same.

‘Photo cell alarm!’ he said, indicating a point about halfway up the side of the door. Henry wondered whether these precautions had been taken before Mrs Sprott’s husband had swallowed a litre or so of bleach; in a sense, of course, people’s value only became clear when they were dead. When alive Dave Sprott had been treated with amused condescension, now he was getting the treatment handed out to a more than usually influential local saint in Mrs Sprott’s church (Edwina was reputed to be a devout Anglo-Catholic).

It didn’t take Rush long to check the mantelpiece. He straightened up and from his left-hand pocket took a polythene bag. He slipped the neck of the vase into the bag, and, making sure not a drop of dentist was spilled, upended Henry’s neighbour’s remains into it. Then from his other jacket pocket he took an envelope and shook its contents into the vase.

He turned to Henry. ‘Two rabbits,’ he said, ‘she should be quite happy with that.’

Then he held up the polythene bag. ‘One dentist!’ he said. ‘Just add water and stir and he’ll be back on the job in no time!’

Henry thought this remark was in rather dubious taste, and said so.

Rush’s only response was to flash him a crooked grin. ‘When you’re dead,’ he said, ‘you’re dead. And that’s all there is to it. There’s nothing else to say.’

Rush seemed able to alter Henry’s opinions more drastically than anyone he had ever known. He very much, for once, wanted this remark not to be true. He wanted a flash of light to break in at the window and for Sprott to rear up, twenty feet tall, tearing at Rush’s throat with his hands.

‘What,’ said Henry, ‘are you going . . . to . . . do with . . . him?’

Rush smiled slightly. ‘What were you going to do with him?’

‘I was . . .’

The policeman was still holding the ashes aloft. He looked up at them, as a Chancellor might look at his briefcase on Budget Day.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘the poisoner wants to get caught. I think being caught is the only thing that would relieve the awful, awful loneliness he must feel. The dreadful sense that everything that happens is happening in his head. That there isn’t a real world at all, just his own consciousness. And that his consciousness . . .’

Henry gulped.

‘. . . is hell. That he’s reduced someone to this. That he’s brought a man who could walk, talk, be any number of things, to something you could fit into a jumbo matchbox. And the reason he’s done it? Shall I tell you the reason he’s done it?’

No, thought Henry, please don’t!

‘Because he can’t feel,’ said Rush, in a crooning voice, ‘he can’t feel anything at all. He’s dead inside. And to make himself feel, he has to do the most frightful things. He has to kill and kill and kill again and each time he kills he thinks it will be better but it isn’t, and so, in shame and disgust, he goes out to kill again, to heal himself, but after the next killing there is still the same emptiness.’

Henry thought it was about time they left. Interesting as this conversation was, this did not seem the time or place to be having it. Somewhat to his surprise, Rush’s technique was not having much effect on him. Perhaps he was so hardened a psychopath that he didn’t even realize that he wasn’t feeling. He was so much of a loony that he thought he
was
having feelings. Tremendous, strong, violent, real feelings. About therapy groups and being made to go to Waitrose and—

‘He has to go back to his victims and dig them up and examine them and go through their ashes and test that what he did to them did actually kill them. Because to him, life is a kind of experiment. He has to go back to it and back to it to try and understand it but he never will understand it and that’s what cuts him off from normal human feeling and why he never will be human at all!’

This, thought Henry, was a little unfair. He had always hoped that, one day, he might become, if not completely human, at least partially so. He was only forty, for Christ’s sake. There was a way to go, he knew that, but in ten or fifteen years he might have acquired the odd natural response. ‘Steady on, Rush!’ he wanted to say, ‘this isn’t Russia. This is Wimbledon.’

But Rush was staring into his face with that same, glittering intensity. ‘You know that poem about Maltby,’ he said, ‘don’t you?’

‘I think,’ said Henry, ‘I heard a car outside. I—’

‘Death has no terrors for me now,

My heart’s heavy; let’s begone!

And dine with He who heals all grief,

The Poisoner of Wimbledon!’

Henry wasn’t, for once, lying or exaggerating. He had heard a car outside. And the sound of its engine was familiar. And – oh my God, no, say it isn’t so – the door was slamming and he could hear familiar footsteps and—