The Wimbledon Poisoner (34 page)

Rush was staring up at him in something like horror. He was no longer attempting to kick, strangle or scratch Henry.

‘Sometimes I love her,’ said Henry, ‘sometimes I hate her and sometimes I want to kill her.’

He realized he had left something out. ‘And sometimes,’ he added, slightly lamely, ‘I do actually try to kill her!’

He now loosened his hands from Rush’s throat. ‘But I . . . er . . . don’t succeed. I seem to succeed in poisoning everyone in the street apart from her. Which is . . . right . . . depressing. I mean I had nothing against Donald Templeton. I had no legitimate grievance against Sprott or Coveney or Loomis or any of them. I didn’t know Donald was going to eat the bloody chicken or that that punch at the funeral would be quite so bloody lethal. You knew then, didn’t you? That’s when you knew, didn’t you? And you’ve been playing with me ever since, haven’t you, you bastard? I mean, I didn’t want Karim Jackson to die. Well, I may have wanted him to have a nasty accident but . . .’

He wished Rush would stop looking at him quite like that. One thing, he realized, was that he would never be able to explain quite what he felt about Elinor to anyone. He thought they were probably too close, now, even to use a word like ‘love’. He hadn’t fallen in love or out of love with Elinor and what was between them was a lot more frightening and complicated and, probably, durable, than the meanings associated with that overused and under-explained word. There was no one else in the world quite real to him. That was it. She was the only person associated in his mind with any sort of feeling, and even though quite a lot of the feelings were of the more unpleasant kind, it was probably true that bad feelings were better than no feelings at all. He probably wanted to be a psychopath and she wouldn’t let him, that was why he had tried to kill her. But he was as much a disaster at assassination as he was at being wholeheartedly without scruple.

Henry let his arms hang loose by his sides. He rocked back on his haunches and looked up at the moon.

‘Anyway,’ he said in a rather sulky voice, ‘you’d better clap the handcuffs on or whatever you do. Or caution me or something. Because, hard though this may be to believe, I am the Wimbledon Poisoner!’

Rush looked at him. His lip curled slightly, and he said, ‘No, you’re not.’

He paused.

‘I am.’

As the French poisoner Eustachy said at his trial, ‘It was all a joke!’ And Henry, too, as he looked down at Detective Inspector Rush, realized that he had never been fundamentally serious about poisoning. He was not, would not, could not be in the premier league of those who seek to administer toxic substances to persons without their prior knowledge or consent. And, as he scrambled to his feet, it was obvious that if there was to be competition between himself and the detective for what the late Gordon Macrae would have called ‘the role of Wimbledon Poisoner’, then Rush had the edge on him. He was, to coin a phrase, quite clearly desperate for the part.

‘Look,’ said Henry, who was rapidly losing his grip on this conversation, ‘you may be a poisoner, I don’t know. You may be a poisoner who happens to live in Wimbledon. But I am
the
Wimbledon Poisoner. I know when I’ve put poison in something and—’

‘Poisoner!’ said Rush. ‘You don’t know anything about poison. You couldn’t poison a fucking fruit cake!’

‘I think I could actually . . .’ Henry started to say. Then he stopped. Rush was walking away from him again, deeper into the darkness of the common, so far from the road now that you could not even see the distant lights in the houses on Parkside. Ahead of them the bare trees lifted their branches out towards each other, touching at the tips in a dead, pleasureless embrace.

‘I am the Wimbledon Poisoner,’ said Rush, ‘and there are no other poisoners worth their salt operating in the district. I am the Wimbledon Poisoner!’

This, thought Henry, was getting like one of those dreary demarcation disputes of the early 1960s. But before he could start rehearsing his life of crime once more, Rush had started to talk again, in a crooning voice, his head rocking from side to side as he spoke.

‘Poison is a passion,’ he was saying, ‘there are so many poisons! So many things that can change the way your body is! When I was ten, you see, I got a chemistry set and—’

‘Look,’ said Henry, ‘I put thallium, got it? Thallium on a piece of chicken that my wife was supposed to eat but didn’t! And I put Finish ’Em, got it? Finish ’Em in a punch that my wife was supposed to drink. I’m a poisoner, OK?’

Rush snorted. ‘Templeton died, what, four hours afterwards?’

‘Yes . . .’

‘You don’t know anything about poisons,’ said Rush. ‘You know fuck-all about poisons. If you knew anything at all about poisons you would know that his symptoms were nothing like the symptoms of thallium poisoning. And that the speed of action of the poison was nothing like that of thallium. Christ Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! Stupid, ignorant little man! Stupid, stupid, little amateur cunt! Where was the depilation? Eh? Where was the stomatitis, eh? Loss of energy and weight? Polyneuritis, eh? AND ALL THESE ARE DELAYED, YOU IGNORANT LITTLE BASTARD!’

Henry watched Rush’s face very carefully.

‘How much did you give him?’

‘I don’t know exactly,’ said Henry, feeling piqued by this mode of questioning, ‘a few grams, I . . .

‘A FEW GRAMS, EH? IS THAT IT? A FEW GRAMS? AND HOW MUCH FINISH ’EM DID YOU GIVE ’EM, EH?’

‘Well, er . . .’ said Henry, with an increasing sense of irritation, ‘a bottle, basically . . .’

‘A bottle, eh?’ said Rush, who had gone suddenly quiet after his outburst. ‘A bottle of Finish ’Em. I know the stuff. In dilute solution. Yes? About thirty bottles of Yugoslav Riesling, right? Do you know what’s in Finish ’Em? Have you even looked at the make-up of the stuff? It’s only a brand name. Do you know what’s in it, Mr Wimbledon Poisoner?’

‘Well,’ said Henry, now definitely annoyed at this series of slurs on his poisoning record, ‘it’s got . . .’

‘Mild alkali NaKOH, or something along those lines. Milder than that. You’d need 80 to 100 grams neat to finish you off, work out the odds on a few glasses of a dilute solution, try and remember how they died, you stupid, stupid, stupid little man.’

Henry was trying, admittedly not
very
hard, to remember how they died. He did remember David Sprott talking, rather over-enthusiastically, about teeth.

‘The symptoms of atropine poisoning,’ said Rush, ‘are primarily excitative: restlessness, mental excitement, incoherence, even mania, flushing and dry skin, pupils dilated . . . think back, think back!’

Henry thought back. And he remembered all these things. Looking across at Rush he remembered seeing the man at the edge of the punch-bowl. Could it be possible that . . .

‘You don’t know anything about poisons,’ said Rush. ‘If you’ve read any books on the subject you certainly haven’t absorbed the information in them. You’ve just let your eyes travel over the page for a few minutes and then closed it under the illusion you’ve actually acquired some knowledge.’

This, thought Henry, was entirely probable. It seemed indeed a fairly accurate description of his normal method of reading. But if thallium hadn’t killed Donald Templeton, then what had?

Rush answered his thoughts. ‘I wasn’t able to get as much atropine into the chicken,’ he said, dreamily. ‘You see I injected quite a few things at random, and I didn’t get much time. They’re always watching you. I had to tear the stupid wrapping off. And it would have taken about four hours, I reckon, with the amount I’d managed to get into it.’

The wrapping, of course. He had forgotten that. Did this mean that Henry hadn’t killed anyone? He was about to ask Rush about Karim Jackson and Gordon Macrae but, once again, the little man was there before him.

‘The trouble about poisoning,’ he said, ‘the real trouble with it is not how difficult it is to conceal, but how impossible it is to detect. Every day, in every part of the country, people are being poisoned. But nobody cares. Poison is part of our diet. We encourage it. I couldn’t get anyone to understand, you see. I’d put something in the food and no one would notice. They wouldn’t believe me. The food’s all poisoned anyway. It’s all poisoned. England’s poisoned now. There’s filth in the water supply, there’s salmonella in the eggs, listeria in the cheese, there’s caesium fallout in the milk and lamb and—’

Here Rush pressed his face close to Henry’s. His breath, Henry noted, smelt strongly of onions. He had, too, a large and worryingly mobile Adam’s apple. Henry tried to look away but the policeman’s eyes found his.

‘There’s the Paki poison, isn’t there? There’s the Jew poison and the Arab poison and all the other poisons that flood in and change the chemistry of the country. So that Wimbledon isn’t Wimbledon any more but somewhere else. And England isn’t England. It isn’t a green and pleasant land any more. It’s a brown and pleasant land, isn’t it? It’s do you want a chapati, isn’t it? It’s where’s my poppadum? Eh? Eh?’

Henry was beginning to suspect that he might be uninvolved in the placing of strychnine in Karim Jackson’s green salad. That he might not be the person who had left around a red apple full of hydrocyanic acid for his wife to find, only to have it consumed by a Jungian analyst. He might – this thought was almost too surprising to contemplate – have not poisoned anyone at all. What did you get for attempted poisoning? Six months? If that. They wouldn’t be interested in Henry anyway, not with a twenty- four-carat fruit cake like Rush on the stand. He was clearly going to sell a lot of newspapers, thought Henry, provided he could be got to the Old Bailey in one piece.

‘What about Gordon Macrae?’

Rush sniggered. ‘Macrae got the apple. Isn’t that funny? Macrae got the apple. He wasn’t supposed to get the apple, of course. But he did. But by then I almost didn’t care who got the apple. It was doing it, you see. It was seeing how they died. It was so . . . interesting.’

There was a long silence. Henry didn’t feel like talking at all.

‘A psychopath,’ said Rush, very quietly. ‘is someone who doesn’t feel anything. You’re not like that. You feel a lot of things. I can see it in your face. You’re full of feelings. Bad and good, I don’t know. I have no feeling. None. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine what it’s like to be me? It’s like being locked in an empty room day after day after day. Can you imagine what that’s like?’

Henry moved away from him slightly. ‘Actually,’ he said in a shaky voice, ‘I think I can.’

Rush didn’t seem to have heard this. ‘I got the idea from Everett Maltby,’ he said, ‘that’s what gave me the idea. You could poison a lot of people and then you could poison the one person you wanted to kill and people wouldn’t think it was you. They’d think, they’d think it was . . . a . . . maniac!’

He started to laugh. His laugh erupted across his face, shaken out of his body, like nausea, rippling across his shoulders, rising in pitch like an operatic soprano and then, suddenly, cutting out, dead.

‘It’s funny,’ he said, ‘you can have a fantasy about something. You can think “What would it be like
if
. . .” You know? And then, one day you can decide to put the fantasy into practice. To see what happens. I used to go to prostitutes.’

I’m not surprised, thought Henry. I can only hope the poor things were adequately rewarded for their trouble.

‘They were boys mainly . . .’ said Rush.

It’s a wonder they weren’t fucking alligators, thought Henry, who faced by this creature was coming, to himself anyway, to seem more and more like a pretty regular guy.

‘It was like it was with the prostitutes,’ said Rush, ‘it was like a dream, really. It was so easy and slow and curious. And the more I did it the more I wanted to do it. Because I wanted to see what it was like, you see. Because I hadn’t really done it. Not really. Because nothing is real to me, you see. I can’t feel anything at all. I’m dead inside. Quite, quite dead.’

And, much to Henry’s distaste, the little man put his head into his hands and started to cry. He wondered whether he should say something along the lines of ‘there there’ or ‘pull yourself together’ or even ‘cheer up – it isn’t as bad as all that’ but, thinking about it, he decided Rush should probably not cheer up because it was quite as bad as all that. It was probably a great deal worse. More to stop the man’s tears than anything, he heard himself say, ‘Er . . . did you want to kill anyone specific?’

Rush looked up from between his hands, his face grubby with tears.

‘I mean . . . did you have anyone in particular in mind? Or was it just . . . anyone?’

Suddenly the detective became angry. ‘Of course I fucking did, you stupid, ignorant little cunt,’ he said. ‘Of course I fucking did. Didn’t I tell you I got the idea from Maltby? Didn’t I? Didn’t I?’

There was a long silence. Henry did not speak. Over in the bushes to their left a small animal of the night moved cautiously through the dead leaves.

‘It was Elinor I wanted to die,’ Rush said, dreamily. ‘I didn’t want her to live, you see. I couldn’t bear her to be alive. I couldn’t bear it.’

Henry might have been expected to feel some vague stirrings of kinship with the man at this point. But if anything could have convinced him that murdering Elinor was the reverse of a good idea it was the news that someone who was not him should have embarked on the project.

‘Why,’ he asked, somewhat unreasonably given his circumstances, ‘should you want to murder Elinor?’

Rush did not answer this. The two men stood some yards apart in the moonlight, a little way away from the black trees. Then, still without speaking, Rush turned again and walked off north, where, against the black and silver sky, they could see the clear, surprising outline of the windmill, its sails like the blades of some infernal machine, poised to deliver just or unjust punishment.

Rush was mumbling to himself as, the polythene bag containing Sprott in his right hand, he trudged on about ten or fifteen yards in front of Henry. They had found one of those paths that run across the common and were walking on black cinders; their shoes crackled, out of time with each other. It was very cold.