The Wimbledon Poisoner (6 page)

‘You’re a bit behind, Henry.’

‘Indeed.’

Donald had got four sponge rolls, three jumbo packets of cornflakes, five loaves of bread, some digestive biscuits, a square packet of something called Uncle Sam’s Chocolate Chip Cookies, a Battenburg cake and two mixed, assorted crisps, in bags that were the size of a small dustbin. Donald approached Wait-rose with military precision, working his way steadily through Farinaceous, Vegetables (Salad), Vegetables (Root, Loose and Packed), Poultry, Game, Continental Cuts and Mince, and from there by way of Fish (Frozen) and Fish (Fresh) to Spices, Pickles and Non-refrigerated Ready-packed Sauces, through to Pet Food, Pet Accessories and Household Cleaners.

He nodded his big, handsome head still thick with greying curls.

‘Keeping well, though?’

‘Fine,’ said Henry, ‘fine.’

Donald narrowed his eyes very slightly and nodded once again. His perfect profile looked off down the rows of brightly coloured packets. ‘Should I tell him now?’ his expression seemed to say, ‘Or would it be better to let the disease take its course? It won’t be long now anyway . . .’

‘Elinor’s a bit off colour, though.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well . . . it’s a funny thing. I don’t know whether I told you . . . but some years ago she was diagnosed as having . . . polyneuritis.’

Donald’s perfectly formed lips began to tremble.

‘I was wondering whether . . . maybe . . .’

Donald looked away, longingly, towards Refrigerated Delicatessen, his clear doctor’s eyes, moving expertly from Ready-packed Gravadlax, through Hand-sliced, Oak-smoked, Ready-interleaved Salmon Slices, along the twelve varieties of German and Polish sausage, the pre-packed slices of Waitrose Pastrami and Salt Beef until they reached the orderly rows of Fresh Tortellini, Cappelletti, Paglia e Fieno and Tagliatelle (Green and White).

‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘must get on!’

And with one more nod of that perfect head he was off, working his trolley through the morning crowd with the air of a great surgeon.

Henry put the chicken back in the pile. He paused, then from the back took one that seemed to have got separated from the rest. Its polythene wrapping looked vaguely torn and grubby, as if members of the Waitrose staff had already been playing catch with it. It was past the SELL BY date too. It would do perfectly. It seemed wrong, somehow, to poison a piece of meat in pristine condition.

He threw it in the trolley and went off to look for things Elinor didn’t like.

Once he had decided on Free-range Chicken
à la Thallium
, it was fairly important not to buy anything Elinor might choose as a substitute. If she were to insist on veal goulash, for example, all would be lost. Maisie liked veal goulash. She had heard it was bad for you.

If only she drank something other than herb tea.

Trying not to think about her possible reaction, Henry loaded cured fish, offal, red meat and a bold assortment of vegetables he had never even heard of, let alone eaten. All they had in common was a potential for repelling Mrs Farr. Bags of kohlrabi and okra, sweet potatoes, chillies, Chinese-leaf lettuce and three pounds of a very peculiar thing called an edenwort, which looked like a beetroot going through a severe identity crisis. There was a little plastic notice next to it which read EDENWORT: SLICE IT OR BAKE IT OR USE IT IN CASSEROLES. Or just throw it at the neighbours, thought Henry grimly, as he tipped the edenwort in next to the water-chestnuts and the giant yam.

Checking his purchases against her list as he approached the checkout, he was pleased to find that at no point did the two coincide.

Then he saw Donald, trolley piled high with middle-of-the-road food.

‘Hullo there!’ called Henry.

Donald nodded, briefly.

‘How about a pint?’

Donald considered this offer; his features rippled with thought. If he were a picture his handsome, regular cheekbones and serious eyes would probably be titled ‘A Doctor Decides’.

‘OK,’ he said, in the end. Imaginary nurses sighed with relief. The hours of waiting over! At last they had a diagnosis! ‘A jar would be very nice.’

If Henry arrived back after three, Elinor would be at therapy. Maisie would be at ballet. He would have time to stow away the kohlrabi, the offal and the edenwort. And by the time she returned it would be six or six thirty. Teatime!

Time, now Henry was forty, did not proceed in the way it had previously done. Once upon a time, there was waking, which was slow and painful, and then quite a long period, replete with chances and triumphs and defeats and risks, which sometimes, though not always, ended in lunch. Afternoon, Henry remembered, used to be as prolonged and arid as Arizona, and they were followed by things called evenings, which were entirely different and separate from nights. Now – you woke up with a sense of relief and surprise that you were still there, you got up, brushed your teeth, and before you knew it you were watching television. It was dark outside and well past your bedtime. You were also, probably, drunk, but how you got drunk, or where you had been between that first moment of reacquaintance with yourself and now, was a mystery. Apart, of course, from the shops. You had almost certainly been to the shops.

‘We could go to the Rose and Thorn!’ said Donald.

‘Great!’ said Henry.

Donald began to place his groceries on the moving counter.

Henry tipped out the edenwort and looked at Donald’s back. He looked like a man who would sign a mean death certificate.

What to do with the chicken after the meal? Assuming he phoned Donald as soon as she began to vomit and have headaches, wouldn’t Donald ask what they had eaten for dinner? Maybe not, since Henry, unless he got the thallium anywhere near the chicken leg, would be feeling fine.

It was vital, though, to include Donald in the diagnosis of Elinor’s condition. He was not only a close personal friend, he was also, to Henry’s knowledge, one of the worst doctors in the southeast of England.

‘Some bloke came into the surgery,’ he would say, sourly, ‘complaining of headaches. “What do you expect me to do about it?” I said. “I get headaches. We all get headaches. Piss off out of it!” I said, “You’re giving me a headache!” ’

‘Good for you!’ Henry would reply. ‘Send him away with a flea in his ear. Psychosomatic, I suppose?’

Donald would pull on his pint (he had to be fairly drunk in order to even start discussing medicine) – ‘In fact,’ he would say, ‘turned out to be a bloody brain tumour, didn’t it?’

‘Christ!’ – from Henry.

‘Can you beat it? Can you beat it?’

‘Indeed not,’ Henry would reply.

And the two men would shake their heads over the inconsistent, bloody-minded civilians who swarmed through a general practitioner’s surgery, deliberately misleading qualified men about the nature of their fatal diseases.

Over the pint Henry would make a few more casual references to Elinor’s polyneuritis. When Donald examined his wife in the last stages of the illness it might be necessary to lead him to a medical textbook and steer those calm, grey eyes in the direction of the chapter headed ‘The Guillain-Barré Syndrome’.

The Rose and Thorn, on the edge of Wimbledon Common was, in the eighteenth century, a favourite spot for highwaymen. The infamous Tibbet, executed at the roundabout at the top of Putney Hill, is reported to have stabbed a man to death there; it has literary associations also. In the nineteenth century, Swinburne, having been thrown out of his local, the Green Man, on the west side of Putney Hill, walked over the common to the Rose and Thorn, where, according to a letter of Watts Dunton, he drank eight pints of strong ale and was violently sick over the landlord’s daughter, a woman called Henrietta Luce who later married a distant relative of Trollope’s.

Henry told Donald some of this, as he did every time he and Donald used the pub, and Donald nodded and smiled and said: ‘Really! How extraordinary!’ As he did every time Henry told him these things.

He had got to the point, now, of sometimes saying, ‘Yes. I read somewhere I think there was a landlord’s daughter called Loo or Loup or . . .’

Thus giving Henry the chance to reply, ‘In fact her name was Luce . . . perhaps I told you . . .’

To which Donald would reply, a little too swiftly, ‘No, no . . . I don’t think so . . .’

And then . . . ‘Fascinating, really!’

And the two of them would discuss, with some enthusiasm, where Donald could have acquired this information. Their conversations were, Henry felt, the sweeter for having a core of known fact which they could then decorate and refine, like old men in some village discussing last year’s harvest.

‘Of course,’ he said on their third pint, ‘the Wimbledon Poisoner used to use the back bar.’

‘Is that right?’ said Donald.

‘Everett Maltby,’ said Henry, ‘who lived off Wimbledon Hill. He poisoned his wife and his mother-in-law and any number of other people, including some of the regulars at his local.’

‘Christ!’ said Donald. ‘Why?’

‘Liven things up a bit, I suppose,’ said Henry.

Donald took a deep swig of his beer. He ran his tongue round his lips, as if assessing the taste.

‘Can get pretty dull, I suppose . . .’ he said.

Pretty dull, thought Henry, I should say so.

‘I think I’ve heard of Everett Maltby,’ said Donald.

‘It’s possible you have,’ said Henry. ‘He’s a well-known local story!’

That must have been where he got the idea from, of course. That was why Everett, suddenly, seemed more real, more frightening than usual. Not that Henry believed in any of that rubbish about possession or reliving history or the power of the myth. That was all so much fashionable garbage, wasn’t it? History was what happened to dead people. It didn’t act on the living, like yeast. Although . . .

‘Wasn’t he hanged?’ Donald was prompting him.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Henry, ‘in 1888. The mystery really, is why he did it. He was a quiet, apparently happily married man with no enemies. He stood to gain nothing. A complete mystery man. He was a model citizen.’

‘Like you, Henry!’ said Donald.

They both laughed. Then they drank a little. Then Donald said: ‘How did they catch him?’

Well, he had confessed, hadn’t he? ‘Burdened’ as he put it at his trial, ‘with the intolerable knowledge of my own beastliness!’ That wasn’t going to happen to Henry though, was it? If a chap hadn’t the guts to stand up for his own beastliness, where was he? There was, Henry felt, something rather unsavoury about Maltby. Perhaps that was why he had never worked up the notes he had made on the case. At one time he had intended a whole chapter of
The Complete History of Wimbledon
to be devoted to the issue of Maltby, but somehow the chapter had never materialized. For a start, he kept losing the notes, and then, when he had managed to find them and set them out on his desk, he seemed to lack the will to start work on them. There was something decidedly spooky about Maltby. And as they talked the image of the man became clearer and clearer, until Henry wanted to say to Donald, ‘No. Don’t let’s talk about this, shall we? It’s too . . . dangerous.’ He could see the stuffy front room and the hideous green plant. The heavy oak furniture, the unused piano, the not very attractive daughter . . . He could see Everett’s trips up to London, in the days before the electrification of the Wimbledon Railway. He could see Everett sitting at a tall stool, in an office not unlike Henry’s, helping to build the wealth of the empire. But there was some detail he knew he didn’t want to remember. Why didn’t he want to remember it? And why did thinking about it, yes, it did, frighten him?

‘How did they, though?’

He had been silent too long. Henry took the route often taken by historians faced with a tricky historical problem. He made something up.

‘He confessed,’ said Henry. ‘It all got too much for him. Guilt. You know? And he broke down. In this very pub, one night, and told everyone that he was the Wimbledon Poisoner. It took him some time to convince them, apparently.’

‘I don’t think you’ve ever told me that!’ said Donald, sounding peeved to have elicited an original statement from Henry while on licensed premises. Henry, too, felt somewhat alarmed to find himself using his imagination. He tried to steer the conversation back to theory.

‘Your typical poisoner,’ he said, ‘is a drab, quiet creature seeking to call attention to himself by his crimes. But often, so drab is he that even when he barges into the pub waving a bottle of paraquat and shouting
I dunnit
, people just don’t want to know. No one could believe that Everett Maltby had done the appalling things he had done. He had to convince them.’

He drank some more.

‘Murder,’ he said, in the tones of someone who knew a bit about the subject, ‘is something we try and classify. Try and put beyond the pale. But we all have a murderer in us. It’s just that most of us are not honest enough to admit to the fact. And there are more ways of killing people than by killing them. If you know what I mean.’

‘Not sure I do . . .’ said Donald.

Henry looked at the clock. It was two thirty. Donald had had enough local history. Like many people, he thought that local history was dull. You could see him wanting to talk about the controversy over the redevelopment of Wimbledon town centre (Greycoat versus Speyhawk, or Caring Architects versus Greedy Planners). Henry did not want to talk about the redevelopment of Wimbledon town centre. As far as Henry was concerned they could fill the whole thing in with concrete.

If he wasn’t careful they would get on to the subject of the motorway. Someone, it appeared, was planning to run a motorway through Wimbledon. There were even rumours that it was going to go straight through the middle of Henry’s house, a thought that, somewhat to his surprise, filled him with savage pleasure. It was the past that inspired Henry, not the present.

Up at the bar he saw Everett Maltby and, beyond him, Tibbet the Highwayman and beyond him Cicely de Vaulles, who held the fief of the manor house, 250 yards from where he and Donald were drinking. And he touched the thick-ribbed beer mug, brought it to his lips and drank again, sour, brown English beer. History. He had read somewhere, possibly in one of the books Elinor was always reading, that people under totalitarian regimes had no access to their past. This happened in Wimbledon, too. People were simply too lazy to try and remember.