The Wimbledon Poisoner (32 page)

He was gripping Rush’s shoulder, hard, the way he had gripped Maisie’s shoulder that night, months, although it felt like years, ago. And Rush was trying to brush him off. And Henry’s face was pushed into the dark cloth of one of Dave Sprott’s suits. And his brushing against it must have started up dust, because of course the poor bastard hadn’t been able to wear them where he was going, and the dust swirled about Henry’s nostrils and something in the chemistry between dust and nose set off a reaction that, once started, could not, it seemed, even by a major effort of will, be stopped.

Henry sneezed.

To understand what happened next, it is necessary to appreciate quite what an effect the presence of the Wimbledon Poisoner had had on the local population. It wasn’t, as Nazi Who Escaped Justice at Nuremberg pointed out, that people were afraid to go out. They were afraid to stay in as well. You never knew just where or when the poisoner would strike. The folk stories about him, and there were plenty, said that he was able to slip into any house he wanted. That he was a trained locksmith as well as a trained chemist. Some said, of course, that he was a policeman who talked his way into people’s kitchens while pretending to warn them about the poisoner. Others maintained he was a member of the judiciary and still others that he was, in fact, a she-poisoner, a motherly woman who worked in some local school, who had looked after children all her life and suddenly, sickened by all that care and nourishment, had turned to food that blighted, not sustained.

A sneeze in a cupboard meant only one thing to Edwina Sprott. It said
poisoner
, loud and clear.

She didn’t move. She stayed where she was on the bed and said, in a clear, nervous voice, ‘Please don’t do anything to me!’

Neither Rush nor Henry knew quite how to respond to this. ‘If you’re the poisoner,’ she went on, ‘don’t make me eat anything!’

Rush looked up at Henry, his jagged mouth turned down comically. He was mouthing something. Henry leaned down and made out the words ‘Fantastic tits!’

Really, thought Henry, Rush wasn’t the sort of man with whom one would have wanted to share any kind of space, however large. Being in a cupboard with him was almost completely unacceptable.

Mrs Sprott was talking again. Her delivery was that of a not very good performer in a West End play. Her lines were put over with a kind of emphasis thought needful to get across basic information to elderly people who have come miles by charabanc, and who, as well as being of low intelligence, are halfway through a large box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray. This theatrical manner did not, however, manage to conceal her evident embarrassment at having had an audience for her recent performance in front of Sprott’s photograph.

‘I’m going out now,’ she said, ‘and I shall leave the door open. I shall not ask any questions of you. You are free to leave. I am going to take refuge with a neighbour. I promise not to look or phone the police.’

Rush looked at Henry, grinning. Henry ignored him.

‘In my opinion,’ she went on, ‘you are in need of psychiatric help. I bear no malice to you for what you did to my late husband. Hating you won’t bring David back. I think you are a poor, sick, creature whose mind is disturbed. You probably don’t even know what you’re doing. Give yourself up! I am going now.’

Henry was going to give himself up. Not now. But soon. He would go somewhere quiet with Detective Inspector Rush and turn himself in. He had had enough.

It wouldn’t be too bad. At least he would find out what he had and hadn’t done. Whether he was, like the conkers he had played with as a child, a one-er or a two-er, or a three-er or maybe a fifty-eighter. There would be the trial, of course – bad pencil sketches of him on
News at Ten
, yet more profiles, and after the verdict an endless string of articles and photographs of the exterior of Maple Drive. They would write about Elinor too. poisoner’s wife denied him sex! therapy drove mass poisoner farr to murder five! ‘i love him still’ says poisoner’s woman. Then there would be the musicals, the drama documentaries, the serious studies of the case written by people who would not, sadly, be Karim Jackson; and then a long, long time in Broadmoor with all the other loonies.

Oh, Broadmoor wouldn’t be too bad. He had seen a film about it a few weeks ago. About the only drawback to the place, as far as Henry could see, was compulsory group therapy. Although at group therapy would be eager-eyed psychiatrists just dying to hear about his guilt, his blackouts, his sense of isolation.

‘She’s gone!’ Rush was whispering. ‘Let’s go!’

It occurred to Henry that Mrs Sprott might well be lying in wait for them. She hadn’t sounded like a woman about to lie in wait. She had sounded like someone en route for dressing room number one and the smelling salts. But she might, possibly, be planning to conceal herself somewhere and spy on them. It was to this end that Henry removed two jackets from the hangers in the cupboard, and indicated to Rush that they should place them over their heads. It would probably, he thought grimly, be good training for his first appearance at Wimbledon Magistrates’ Court.

With the late dentist’s jackets over their heads, the two men crept out on to the landing. By pinching the lapels together, Henry managed to conceal his face and preserve a narrow field of vision; it meant that he had to move his whole body if he wished to look in another direction, rather as if he were the front end of a pantomime horse, but at least, as he scanned the landing, left, right, fore and aft, and then one 360-degree turn, like a radar beam sweeping over the night sky, he was able to be sure that Mrs Sprott had been as good as her word. The two men started down the stairs. The front door was open as Henry, head lowered, made for the street, the jacket hugged to his head like a friar’s cowl. Ahead he could see a plane tree, empty of leaves, pointing angrily in all directions. But there was no sign of Mrs Sprott. Henry walked slowly out and down the front path, towards the white gate.

He peered left. No one. Then right. No one. With a short, urgent gesture to Rush, Henry started out to the left, along the pavement.

He couldn’t see or hear her but perhaps she was on the phone already. Perhaps, in minutes, Maple Drive would be swarming with dog-handlers, meat wagons, forensic experts and all the other things the police liked to drag along to places where they had no hope of solving serious crime. The trouble was, his field of vision was so restricted by the jacket that he was unable to ascertain whether or not it was safe to remove it. He ran, bent double, zigzagging like a man avoiding machine-gun fire. Behind him he could hear Rush, breathing heavily and occasionally calling out for reassurance: ‘Are we OK?’

Henry did not even want to answer. He was vaguely aware that they were passing number 84 (Stockbroker Who Could Turn Nasty) but, since it seemed easier to keep his head down, he had no idea of what might be ahead or behind him. He noted the pavement, marked with cracks and discolorations, a low wall, painted white, then a privet hedge to the left, a tree to the right, a lamp post, then more discoloured pavement. He stopped. He had come to a bumpy section of kerb, north of which was the gutter. Raising his head he saw he was in Belvedere Road. All he had to do was to slip the jacket off and stroll up towards the common. No one knew him in Belvedere Road. He would go on the common, with Rush, and there he would end all this. He would turn himself over to the policeman. He was just about to slip the jacket off his head, and planning the opening stages of his confession (‘Have you ever heard of something called Finish ’Em by any chance?’) when, from behind, he heard cries. Not only cries. Feet. Feet slapping the pavement. Not just one person’s feet. Quite a lot of feet. Henry juddered round, as awkward as a robot and there, jerked into vision, like something slipping into the perspective offered by a periscope, he saw the line of houses that was Maple Drive. About a hundred yards away a door was opening, and beyond that, another door. Someone was shouting something. Was it Mrs Sprott?

Henry did not wait to find out. Burrowing his head into the dentist’s jacket he pushed Rush in the back and the two men ran for the common. He had almost forgotten, in the excitement, that he was the Wimbledon Poisoner. If any of the inhabitants of Maple Drive got to him before the police (Fat Man with Loved Alsatian, for example) he would be very lucky to get as far as Broadmoor, and it wouldn’t be group therapy he’d be needing but plastic surgery on a large scale.

‘Faster!’ he hissed to the detective, almost oblivious of the fact that this was the man to whom he was due to make his confession, ‘Faster! Faster! Faster!’

The hue and cry, as Henry had noted in volume seven of
The Complete History of Wimbledon
, was a comparatively rare occurrence in the history of the village. In 1788 a man called Paggett had been pursued from the Dog and Fox towards Putney Hill, because – according to a contemporary diarist – he had shouted revolutionary slogans outside a butcher’s shop in the village. Enraged local tradesmen had followed him across the common to the Queen’s Mere, where ‘they caused him to regret his Enthusiasm for the Queen’s enemies by using those appurtenances of honest labour viz their true English Hands, to douse him in one of Her own Ponds!’

If anything, thought Henry, the contemporary inhabitants of Maple Drive were a deal more frightening than a few drunken butchers. There were even, Henry shuddered at the thought, a few bond salesmen at the posher end of the street. If what you read in the newspapers was true, the middle classes in the Britain of the late 1980s made your average pack of ravening wolves look like the
corps de ballet
in
Swan Lake.
He thought he could hear more doors opening, more shouts, more feet on pavement, as he ran, quite blind as to what was ahead of him, up towards the village.

After a hundred yards or so, however, he found his pace had slowed, and was, for the moment, unaware of the pressure of anyone’s hand on his back. Perhaps his neighbours were so deeply imbued with the philosophy of self-help that, when actually faced with someone who had taken the law into his own hands, they were unable to stop themselves standing back in admiration. Perhaps murder, like everything else, was now part of Mrs Thatcher’s enterprise economy. Or perhaps – this was the most likely explanation – they were all a little too scared. Whatever the reason, when he and Rush reached the village High Street, pulled off their jackets and looked back down the hill, they saw no one, only the quiet suburban streets and the cars, parked with loving neatness under the lamps.

It was then that Henry turned back to the village and, in the window of a shop selling electrical equipment, found himself looking at the face of Everett Maltby. He recognized the big, damp eyes, the side whiskers and the high collar. Next to him, with a little shock of horror, he recognized Maltby’s wife, and to one side of the couple a pile of photographic plates. It was one of those cardboard displays, of the kind usually used to advertise something. Surely they couldn’t be cashing in on the poisoner? Henry felt a chill of disgust at the thought that his perverted desire to kill was being employed to market electrical goods. Then he saw the slogan: wimbledon traders against the poisoner. fight the blighter! And underneath this was what looked like a list of signatures. Why did people think that signing your name to a petition affected anything? It might, perhaps, have some minimal impact on politicians, but its effect on murderers was probably to spur them on to greater efforts.

‘Hullo there!’ A figure who had been staring in at the Maltby display turned to face Henry, who to his horror saw it was smiling at him.

‘Mr Bleath, isn’t it?’

It was the young man who had sold him the thallium.

‘I—’

Henry found he was walking towards him across the empty street. Behind him he could hear Rush’s footsteps in a dead patrol – one, two, one, two, we’ll get you, Farr, one, two, one, two, I’ll marry your wife, we’ll get you, Farr, one, two, one, two . . .

‘Did you call me Bleath?’

‘Isn’t it Mr Bleath? Didn’t I sell you some—’

‘Optical lenses!’ said Henry wildly. ‘Optical lenses!’

What was this man doing here so late at night? Why was he looking in at that picture of Maltby?

‘Your shop . . .’ Henry found himself saying, ‘is near where Maltby’s . . . I mean, your shop is . . .’

‘Mr Bleath?’

‘Maltby lived here . . .’ Henry was saying, ‘and now there’s a poisoner here and . . .’

‘Thallium?’ the young man from the chemist’s was saying in a wheedling, comforting tone. ‘Thallium? Thallium? Thallium?’

Henry looked from the chemist to Maltby and back to the chemist again. Remarkable how similar they looked really. Bland. Innocent. That was why they were using Maltby to sell things of course. Like so many poisons he looked sweet and innocent and attractive. Like so many guilty people he looked respectable. Henry could hear Rush’s footsteps behind him. One, two, three, don’t try and run, Farr. One, two, three, we’re going to get your wife, Farr. One, two, three . . . Why was the man in the window looking at him like that? Could he see into his soul? Why was he looking at him so knowingly?

Later of course, when it was all over, he could see quite clearly that the youth was simply a youth (admittedly a youth with a somewhat over-liberal interpretation of the rules governing the sale of registered poisons) and the picture of Maltby simply a picture. That in the affair of the Wimbledon Poisoner everything was precisely as it seemed and that dreams, hauntings, reincarnations and all the other junk beloved of such people as Unpublished Magical Realist were precisely that – junk. But at the time, with the racket in his head and the racket behind him, as he stared at the man who knew him as Alan Bleath, when all this pretence had started, Henry felt himself letting go of everything he had taken for reality. And that falling feeling started again, so that the youth’s face zoomed in to his, as it had that day he had taken off his glasses and a voice that seemed like his but was, of course only in Henry’s head, started up and he found he was saying, not thinking, the magic words that would release him from all of this.