The Wimbledon Poisoner (35 page)

Rush appeared to be talking about love.

‘If you want someone,’ Henry heard him say, ‘if you want them, really want them, want them to be all yours, then . . . then . . .’

Henry decided not to join in this one.

‘Love,’ said Rush, ‘love . . .’

And then again, ‘Elinor. Elinor . . .’

His voice, still addressed to no one in particular, became suddenly quite perky and chatty. ‘I first saw her,’ he said, ‘in the street. And I thought what I thought. She was so pure. So good and pure and sweet. I didn’t understand how she could be with you, do you understand? I didn’t understand how anyone so pure and patient and sweet and honest and gentle could even dream of loving someone like you. Because you’re evil. You’re a rotten little compromiser. There’s no soul in you, there’s only a little snigger about the beautiful things in the world. Oh Elinor! You’re so beautiful! And so gentle and so sweet!’

The one thing Henry had never had about Elinor was romantic illusions. She had always been, since the first day he met her, simply Elinor. She had an unavoidable quality. Partly because, even then, she was a fairly wide girl. Henry had met her on the towpath up near Kew Gardens and, from what he now remembered of the encounter, she had, quite literally, been blocking his way. At first he had been rather irritated by this. But on closer inspection there had been something he rather fancied about her.

‘What are you looking at?’ she had squawked.

‘You!’ Henry had replied.

Their early courtship had been nearly all on that level.

‘Do you want to come out?’

‘Well, I’m not bothered . . .’

‘Well I’m not bothered either!’

‘That’s nice!’

‘Is it?’

Why was he recalling all this so clearly now? And why had it been hidden from him for the last few months? Memory was so closely related to will, wasn’t it? Henry could not, still, recall how he had met the shambling figure walking ahead of him. Rush was someone who had come over him quietly, like a virus. He tried to block out the man’s voice and think, think again, what it was about Elinor . . .

They had both known in those early days that something was going to happen. But neither knew quite what it might be. Sometimes it appeared that it was going to be a fist fight. At other times Henry thought they were both waiting for some other person to come along and get them out of whatever it was that they had started. But, somehow, no one else did come along, did they? And so, presumably, they can’t have been looking very hard.

‘Like a jewel . . .’ he heard Rush say, ‘like a jewel and that fat bastard crawling all over her and if you could stop . . . if you could stop it . . . if you could make it so that no one, no one . . . ever . . .’

Then a low moan, ‘Elinor . . .’

Henry had always found romantic love a demeaning spectacle, and Rush seemed to exemplify the final stages of the disease. The ideal lover worshipped his or her partner without much reference to his or her behaviour; the only way to get the love object to collaborate unquestioningly in the fantasy was to stop it moving, permanently. True lovers didn’t fart like Henry or Elinor (actually very few people farted quite as much as Henry or Elinor); they didn’t argue about who was going to do the shopping or clean the floor, they went around feeling big, beautiful emotions and making people like Henry feel like vermin.

But who, these days, could afford big, beautiful emotions? And why was it people were such suckers for things that came on grand? At least he had been honest about what he felt.

The more he thought about it, the only thing he regretted about his attempts to murder Elinor was their underhand nature. He should have come at her with a pickaxe that first Saturday. She would have understood. She would have lowered her head, gone for his midriff, nutted upwards into his neck . . . it would have been OK.

‘Call yourself a fucking poisoner . . . you couldn’t . . . no, you couldn’t . . .’

In fact, thought Henry, the level of his incompetence had reached the stage where it was a definite asset. If he went on like this he was going to end up President of the United States. He wondered, idly, how many other people Rush had poisoned in the course of the winding road that had brought him to 54 Maple Drive and the poisoned apple for Elinor Farr.

‘We will never know,’ said Lustgarten, right on cue. ‘Was Rush the man who introduced four grains of veratrine into a selection of speciality rolls at Marks and Spencer, Lee Lane, in June 1985? Was it the disordered representative of order who made free with the picutoxin on Albert de la Fissolies’s first course of chargrilled polenta with chicken livers at a restaurant in Barnes in August 1987? The answer to these questions will never be known. Rush took them with him to the grave, just as he took the secret of the origin of his perverted passion for the lawful wife of Henry Ian Farr, or the precise pathology of his obsession with the case of the celebrated Victorian poisoner, Everett Maltby. Was Maltby in some way haunting the detective, as he had, in his own way, haunted Farr? Only one thing is certain – it is unwise’ – here Lustgarten, aware that he was about to deliver a
bon mot
to the camera, smirked – ‘. . . to interfere between husband and wife, even when they are trying to kill each other.’

Henry stopped. Lustgarten was, as he seemed to be doing more and more these days, anticipating events. What was even more worrying was that very often he seemed to be absolutely right. He was becoming a kind of Tiresias for the media age. Even if he wasn’t right about this one, it was certainly true that Henry was in close proximity to a very deranged customer indeed. Rush certainly looked as if he was about to kill someone and, if it wasn’t himself, it was probably fairly sure to be Henry.

Just as Henry thought this, Rush turned to him and, as if noticing him for the first time, said, ‘I should have killed you first!’

‘Do you think?’ said Henry, as politely as he could.

‘I should have killed you,’ said Rush, ‘that day I put the atropine in the punch. It would have been easy.’

‘I’m sure,’ said Henry, not wishing to antagonize the man, ‘that for you it would have been no problem at all. You obviously . . . know your stuff when it comes to poisons!’

Rush looked at him narrowly. ‘Don’t patronize me!’ he said.

‘I’m not patronizing you,’ said Henry, ‘I just think that . . . well . . . when it comes to poisoning people you’re . . . first class! Obviously!’

Rush sniffed. No one, thought Henry, not even a deranged psychopathic mass poisoner, is immune to flattery. As Rush walked on closer to the hedge that fringes the Wimbledon Windmill, Henry tried a bit more of it.

‘Christ,’ he said, ‘I thought I was a poisoner! I fancied myself at it. I can see now I was a complete amateur. I didn’t have a clue!’

Rush was starting to scowl. Henry decided to change the subject. Get his mind off whatever his mind is on. Talk about something that will absorb him. ‘I was thinking the other day,’ he said, ‘about Charles Bravo, you remember the one? Who died on . . .’

‘Friday, 21 April 1876,’ snapped Rush, ‘after being in constant agony since the previous Tuesday, when he had consumed a dinner of whiting, roast lamb and anchovy eggs on toast.’ His lip curled slightly, ‘Don’t try and change the subject,’ he said. ‘We were talking about how I should have killed you.’

Holding Sprott’s ashes high up above his head he moved towards Henry. Henry smelt once again that sour smell of onions on his breath, noticed the folds of skin on the neck, the ill-fitting collar, the watery blue eyes and that awful, yearning expression that seemed to be looking way, way beyond them, but was in fact looking only inside at the mess within him. He judged it best not to back away, but to stand his ground as one might with a dog that seemed threatening.

‘And how I still might,’ said Rush, ‘how I still might! You’ve had murderous thoughts in you, haven’t you? You deserve to die! Don’t you? Don’t you? Don’t you?’

Henry coughed. ‘I think,’ he said, sounding rather pompous, ‘I could learn to be a useful member of society!’

Rush put one clawlike hand on Henry’s shirt. He shook his head. Once again Henry had that uncomfortable feeling that this man, only this man, knew precisely what he was feeling, knew the worst things about him, the things he never told anybody, the things he couldn’t start to put into words.

‘Oh no,’ said Rush, ‘oh no, no, no. It’s too late for that caper. You’re going to die, Henry Farr. You’re going to die, die, die!’

One of the chief drawbacks of poison as a murder weapon is that it does require the collaboration of the victim. Short of forcing a tomato sandwich down Henry’s throat or suddenly breaking off to suggest a visit to a nearby Thai restaurant, Rush did not really have much going for him. He could, Henry supposed, try and jab a syringe in him and, indeed, he was waiting for him to make a sudden movement; but the detective, seemingly exhausted by his monologue, stood quite still in the damp grass, the ashes of his victim in his right hand. And then, slowly, wearily, he groped in his pocket and produced his pipe.

Henry backed away a little. It might, conceivably, be a dual-purpose pipe, a blow as well as a suck job. From his inside pocket Rush was taking something from a square box and he was squeezing it into the bowl and . . .

He was putting tobacco in it. He was lighting the tobacco. He was smoking it. Henry breathed out slowly. He looked up at the windmill – the rear end of it, lit from below, looked like a space capsule, the small, rear sail resembling a propeller rather than anything else. The light only faintly touched the four larger sails, waiting in the black sky for some signal that would never come.

‘I,’ said Rush, in one of those abrupt changes of mood that seemed to accompany his overtly lunatic side, ‘am a member of the Wimbledon and Putney Commons Conservation Society!’

‘Really?’ said Henry, trying to sound interested.

‘Oh yes,’ said Rush, ‘I’m in and out of the Ranger’s office. I’m in and out of the windmill.’

He seemed to have completely forgotten about poisoning for the moment, and if the extermination of Henry was high on his list of priorities he gave no sign of the fact.

‘It was in a house next to this windmill,’ said Rush, ‘that, in 1907, Lord Baden-Powell began writing his book
Scouting for Boys
!’

Henry, of course, knew this. Just as he also knew that in 1840 Lord Cardigan fought a duel just below where they were now standing, watched by miller Thomas Dann, his wife, Sarah, and their fourteen-year-old son, Sebastian. Just as he knew that Lord Spencer, the evil bastard who tried to sell off Wimbledon Common for building land in 1864, converted the mill into six small cottages, or—

It was curious, thought Henry. In a way Karim Jackson had a point. There was nothing, at first sight, more fascinating than local history. ‘Oh,’ you said to yourself, ‘just here, in 1846, so and so was beheaded, or just there, over where they’ve put the new telephone box, there was a pitched battle between some Jutes in 389! Fascinating!’ But it wasn’t. It was actually completely and totally boring. Who, really, when you came down to it, gave a stuff about local history? Or Wimbledon for that matter?

He gazed at Rush (who was still droning on about the windmill), almost grateful to the man. This, thought Henry, is how I look to other people. How absolutely appalling!

‘In 1893 the miller, John Saunderson,’ Rush went on, ‘was empowered to carry out repairs. He completely rebuilt the roof of the—’

‘SHUT UP!’ said Henry.

Rush stopped. His lower lip began to tremble.

‘I’m not interested,’ said Henry, ‘I’m not interested. I’ve had it. I’ve had it up to here. What do you expect me to
do
with all this information? I’m not interested. Any more than I’m interested in you telling me about my wife and prancing around as if it’s clever and funny to go round poisoning people. Well it isn’t. Anyone can stick a bit of prussic acid in an apple. A child of two could do it. It’s boring and stupid and useless. And it’s also wrong. It’s inadvisable. It’s something that on the whole we should try and avoid. And it’s dull, Rush, it’s very dull! No one thinks it’s clever or funny! It’s dull!’

Rush was beginning to look a little like Billykins on the day of Donald’s funeral. But Henry, who was beginning to discover the bracing effects of morality on the system, continued in almost sadistic tones, ‘I’m not sure I believe you, anyway. Any of this stuff. Isn’t it some sick fantasy? I can’t see you or anyone else really doing all the things you claim. I think this is just a pathetic way of trying to make yourself interesting. The Wimbledon Poisoner? Come on! It’ll never do. There are real and horrible things in the world and you and I are nothing to do with them. The Wimbledon Poisoner? Come on! Come on! Come on!’

He stopped.

From his trousers Rush had taken a small, glass phial. Henry was not sure what it was but, bearing in mind the man’s recent testimony, it was a fair assumption that it was not likely to be particularly good for you. Henry’s nervousness must have showed in his face, and the policeman, clearly convinced that he was at an advantage, held it as high as the bag of powdered dentist, and began to wave it in Henry’s face.

‘See!’ he hissed. ‘See!’

‘Yes,’ said Henry, ‘I see!’ Then he said, ‘I think you ought to see someone. A psychiatrist.’

So long as he wasn’t a Jungian, Henry felt sure he would be sympathetic. Mind you, from the way Rush was carrying on it would probably not be long before he was crossing over to the Other Side, where he could, were he so minded, have chats about his dreams with Jungian Analyst with Winebox, not to mention Sprott, Loomis, Coveney and all the other people he had helped to speed to eternal bliss.

‘See!’ said Rush again. ‘See! See what I have here!’

Actually, thought Henry, Rush was not reachable by any method of analysis yet known in the Western world. He was in the grip of the kind of dementia that could only really be assuaged by hiring Earl’s Court and getting a few hundred thousand people together to clap and cheer at every remark made by the sufferer.

‘We have so many English poisons,’ he was saying, ‘yew, yew, yew. Yew with its toxic alkaloid, taxine. And laburnum bark. Laburnum bark. And do you know what the country people call aconitum napellus, which is the flower that makes your pupils dilate and your chest ache and ache . . . they call it monks-hood. And they call hyoscyamine henbane. Henbane, henbane, henbane.’