The Wimbledon Poisoner (4 page)

As he groped his way under his seat, seeking somewhere to stow the paper, his fingers met something cold and hard and sharp. The jack. He’d been looking for that for ages. And if all else failed it would probably be an effective, if unsubtle way of letting his wife know that something rather more serious than Marriage Guidance was required to get them out of their marital difficulties. He wrapped the prescription paper round it and started the engine. He had an hour to get to the library, do his research and return for Maisie. A whole hour. What better way to spend one of those rare breaks in the suburban day than by studying methods of getting rid of one’s wife.

There were no fewer than four books in the Wimbledon Public Library that dealt with the Graham Young case. One of them – by a man called Harkness – was 400 pages long, contained twenty-four black and white photographs, three appendices and several maps and diagrams. It was eighty pages longer than the standard biography of Antonin Dvo
ř
ák, the composer, and only seventy pages shorter than the definitive historical account of Rommel’s North African campaign.

There were pages and pages of psychoanalytic rubbish, Henry noted, and endless, dreary character sketches of the people Young had poisoned. But there was also a fairly concisely written chapter entitled ‘Thallium Poisoning: Odourless, Tasteless and almost Impossible to Detect’. This was just the sort of thing Henry wanted to read.

Most poisons, it seemed, tasted unpleasant. (Elinor did not drink either tea or coffee and only the occasional glass of mint tea. She drank no alcohol and thought most forms of seasoning depraved. Her diet was, in a sense, poison proof.) But thallium, it appeared, was quite tasteless.

Its effects, however, were sensational. Your hair fell out. You had hallucinations. You lost the use of your limbs. You went on to do sterling work in the diarrhoea, headaches and vomiting department and you ended up coughing out your last in a way that Henry thought would be entirely suitable for Elinor. It wasn’t just that. Thallium poisoning created a set of symptoms exactly matching a series found in a type of polyneuritis known as the Guillain-Barré Syndrome. The first post-mortem on one of Young’s victims – Fred Biggs – had found no traces of thallium in the body, although later microscopic analysis revealed there were several hundred milligrams, more than enough to kill him.

It was the polyneuritis that Henry liked. Two years after they had been married, Elinor had suddenly, mysteriously, developed a weakness in her legs, and Henry, who, equally mysteriously, in those days wasn’t trying to kill her, had hurried her to the local hospital where the doctors had diagnosed – wait for it – polyneuritis. Polyneuritis was clearly a word like morality that meant so many different things as to be absolutely meaningless. If it meant anything at all, thought Henry, it was something along the lines of
We haven’t got a clue.
Henry could imagine the conversation with Donald now. Elinor on the bed, hair falling out, vomiting, losing the use of her limbs and he and Donald, over by the window, voices low, faces discreetly grave. Donald would issue a death certificate for any cause you suggested to him; this case, Henry felt, might be so staggeringly self-explanatory as to allow him to come to a diagnosis off his own bat.

‘It’s the . . . polyneuritis . . .’ he heard himself say, as Donald sneaked towards the medical dictionary, his big handsome head bowed with concern, his grey eyes looking into the distance, in the direction of the local tennis court.

He might even sob. That would be good. If only to observe the embarrassment on Donald’s face.

Where should he have her cremated? Somewhere rather low-rent, Henry thought. There was a particularly nasty crematorium in Mitcham, he recalled, with a chapel that looked more than usually like a public lavatory. And, from what he remembered of the funeral (his grandmother’s), the ushers looked like men who were trying hard not to snigger. Or should he go completely the other way? Hire a small cruiser and slip her coffin over the side in some ocean that might have some special meaning for her? (The Bering Straits, possibly.) He could . . . but Henry was almost too full of good ideas for her funeral. She wasn’t even dead yet.

Half an hour left.

The chief problem with thallium was that it didn’t seem to be used for anything much apart from the manufacture of optical lenses of a high refractive index – camera lenses, for example. Henry stared for some moments at the word ‘optical’. Why should he need stuff for making lenses? He didn’t make cameras, he wasn’t an optician—

No, but Gordon Beamish was. Gordon Beamish was a real live optician. He was all optician. He was probably always nipping down to Underwoods for a few grams of thallium. Susie Beamish probably drank it for breakfast. There would be an especial pleasure in using Gordon Beamish’s name. If anyone deserved a few years in an open prison it was Beamish.

Like many people who wear glasses, Henry hated opticians, especially opticians with 20/20 vision. Gordon Beamish was a man who made a fetish out of being lynx-eyed. He could be seen most mornings at the door of his shop in Wimbledon Village, arms crossed, mouth twisted in a superior sneer, just waiting for the chance to decode the small print on the front of buses.

‘I saw you in the High Street the other day,’ he would say, in a tone that suggested that it was quite impossible for Henry to have seen him. Henry had lost count of the number of times Beamish began a sentence with the words ‘I notice . . .’ or ‘I observe . . .’ Things were always crystal clear to Beamish; he was always taking a view or spying out the land or finding some way of pointing out the difference between his world – a universe of sharp corners and exact distances – and the booming, foggy place in which Henry found himself every time he took off his glasses. When suffering eye tests in the darkened cubicle at the back of his shop, almost the only thing Henry ever managed to see was the pitying smile on Beamish’s face as he flashed up smaller and smaller letter sequences, all of them probably spelling ‘You are a fat shortsighted twerp’!

Beamish, thought Henry, could be the fall guy. He liked to think of Beamish in the dock at the Central Court, his counsel blustering on about his client’s perfectly normal, acceptable need for heavy metal poisons (‘But how do you explain, Mr Beamish, your ordering a quantity of thallium from a perfectly reputable chemist’s . . . ?’) He closed the book, replaced it in the cookery section of the open shelves, and walked briskly to the car. There was no time to lose. It was entirely possible, Elinor being the way she was, that somebody else would try to kill her before Henry got in with his bid.

Indeed, he reflected, as he joined the queue at the traffic lights opposite the library, it was such a blindingly simple, brilliantly obvious idea, it was very difficult to think why everyone wasn’t doing it. Why, while they were about it, wasn’t she trying to kill him?

Henry drove cautiously up the hill. He tested the brakes when he reached the top. They seemed OK.

Maisie looked, as always, subtly different after her piano lesson. She looked more aware of the world, brighter, more optimistic. This was some compensation for the fact that she was almost certainly no better at the piano.

Donald’s son, Arfur, was there, a small, fat six-year-old, who stared at Henry and said: ‘I played the piano!’

‘Good!’ said Henry, through compressed lips. He seized Maisie by the hand and walked back to the car. If he could get hold of something from Beamish, he might be able to lay his hands on some thallium by lunchtime. She could be dead by the time children’s television started or, if not dead, at least well on the way to it. He chose a route back down the hill that did not involve too many serious gradients, moving from Roseberry Road to War-burton Drive to Chesterton Terrace and, from there, doubling back along a series of streets with an offensively tangible air of
esprit de corps –
Lowther Park Drive, where people called to each other over their Volvos and, even worse, Stapleton Road, a place that seemed almost permanently on the verge of a street party.

The brakes still seemed OK.

Gordon Beamish was not in his shop – instead, under a gigantic spectacle frames stood a small, rat-faced girl called Ruthie. Ruthie, as if to compensate for her boss’s powers of vision, seemed to have every known complaint of the eyes short of blindness. Astigmatism, squints, premature presbyopia, short sight, long sight, tunnel vision, barrel vision, migraine, Ruthie had the lot, and her glasses resembled some early form of periscope; they were a circular, heavy-duty affair, with catches and locks and screws. Somewhere underneath the pebble lenses, tinged both grey and pink, the steel traps and the wires were, presumably, a pair of eyes but they were only, really, a flicker, in the depths of the optician’s
pièce de résistance
that towered above Ruthie’s nose.

Henry liked Ruthie and Ruthie liked him.

‘Is Gordon about?’

‘No,’ said Ruthie, ‘he took Luke to Beavers.’

Beavers. That was a new one on Henry. What the hell was Beavers? Some neo-Fascist organization perhaps? From what he could remember of Luke, the boy would have fitted well into the Waffen SS. Leaving Maisie on the street he went into the shop.

‘I’ll leave a note for him!’ he said.

Ruthie folded her arms, as if to emphasize her lack of responsibility for the shop she was minding. Her eyes, or something very like her eyes, moved in the thick depths of the glass. ‘Fine!’ she said.

Henry went through to the back of the shop.

On Gordon’s desk was a pile of headed notepaper. Henry picked up two sheets. Then he saw something better. In a square, steel tray at the back of the desk was a notepad, the kind of thing given away by small businesses in an attempt to register their names with the public. A. M. Duncan, it read, Lenses, Photographic and Ophthalmic. And underneath the heading, an address. After a quick glance back through the shop (Maisie and Ruthie were staring out at the street in silence) Henry slid one sheet of the printed paper into Gordon’s typewriter. What he really wanted to write was:

Henry Farr wishes some thallium to administer to his wife. Please give this to him. He is desperate.

But instead he told whomsoever it might concern that he was Alan Bleath, a researcher employed by the above company and he needed to buy 10 grams of thallium for research purposes. Was that going to be enough? She was quite a big woman. Shouldn’t he order a kilo? Two kilos? A lorryload, for Christ’s sake! The trouble was, he thought, as he signed the paper, indecipherably, with his left hand, folded it and put it into his jacket pocket, he didn’t know much about thallium poisoning, and even less about the making of lenses with a high refractive index. A really thorough murderer would have boned up on both subjects more intently.

Ten grams would have to do. He took a sheet of Gordon’s notepaper and typed a short note to Alan Bleath, thanking him for his recent contribution to the stimulating seminar on lenses of a high refractive index, signed this with a fair approximation of Gordon’s hand and put it in one of the ‘Gordon Beamish: See?’ envelopes, addressed to Alan Bleath, 329 Carradine Road, Mitcham. (‘Do you seriously expect me to believe, Mr Beamish, that someone came into your office and, without your knowledge, used your typewriter to address a letter?’ ‘Well, I—’ ‘I put it to you that you had always loved Elinor Farr. Your lust for her knew no bounds and when this loyal woman spurned you for her husband of twenty years you wreaked a terrible revenge!’ ‘No no no! You’ve got it wrong!’)

Actually, thought Henry, as he checked himself in the mirror, no one, not even the police, would be stupid enough to imagine that Elinor could be the victim of a
crime passionnel.
The only passion involved in this operation was an overmastering desire to see her nailed down in a brown box.

He looked, he thought, fairly Bleath-like. Apart from the glasses. He slipped these off and saw a blurred, red disk of a face which resembled a Francis Bacon portrait. Alan Bleath.

‘Hurry up!’ said Maisie. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Leaving a note for Gordon,’ said Henry.

Let’s have a jar! he wrote on Gordon’s pad. ‘Jar’ was the sort of stupid, hail-fellow-well-met word that Gordon would appreciate.

He decided not to go to a chain chemist’s. Those sort of places made so much they could afford the luxury of high standards. He wanted an old-fashioned, grubby place with old-fashioned glass bottles in the window. Somewhere run by an elderly couple with no commercial sense. The sort of people who cried with relief when you went in to buy a piece of Elastoplast.

He needed the sort of chemist’s he had gone to as a child. If he could remember that far back. These days he had trouble recalling the troublesome fragments of his education he had bothered to memorize in the first place; the names of new acquaintances were jumbled together with old verb forms and things he thought were childhood haunts turned out to be places he had only just discovered. But there was somewhere, wasn’t there, where once, years ago, he had gone with his mother, or someone fairly like his mother, anyway? Wealdlake Road. That was it! Wealdlake Road!

At the corner of Wealdlake Road, four streets north of Wimbledon station, was the ideal place. A heavy wooden window frame, dusty glass and three big-bellied bottles, coloured with the bright, mysterious fluids Henry remembered from his childhood. He couldn’t remember quite when he had first visited the shop but, like Wimbledon itself, it had always been there. Henry had lived in Wimbledon all his life. They would, Henry thought, be glad to see anyone, even a prospective poisoner. They were probably desperate enough to offer a comprehensive after-sales service (‘Thallium not right, sir? Try antimony perhaps? Or potassium chlorate . . .’).

He parked the Passat and told Maisie he was going to buy some aspirin.

‘Can I come?’

‘No!’ said Henry.

Before she had time to protest he had locked the doors and, removing his glasses as he went, walked briskly over the road. He narrowly missed what he thought was a lamp post but turned out to be a tree, and reached for where the handle was usually to be found on a front door. To his surprise it was there.