The Wimbledon Poisoner (9 page)

‘Donald’s staying to break bread with us!’ she said.

Henry managed a smile. Once again, Lustgarten was on the line to him. ‘It was when the friend of the family, Donald Templeton, the trusted and valued doctor who attended both Farr and his wife, came to call that the plans of the man who came to be known as the Wimbledon Poisoner came badly unstuck. Suddenly, to Farr’s consternation and disappointment, it wasn’t a cosy, deadly meal for two by the fireside, but Chicken Thallium for three!’

Lustgarten stopped by the fire, his hand on the wall, and glared, menacingly, at the camera.

Lustgarten had a point. Did Donald like breast meat? If he did, was Henry going to be able to avoid serving him with any? He tried to readjust his face to make him look less like Macbeth.

‘Oh,’ he said again, ‘great!’

Donald looked at Maisie. ‘Only ten!’ his big, grey eyes seemed to say. ‘Ten years old, and less than a month to live!’ Maisie grinned.

‘Hullo, Donald!’ she said.

Henry attempted to gain some control over the situation. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’ve got a nice, juicy chicken leg for you!’

Donald did not seem unresponsive to this notion. He did not say, ‘Actually – I’m a breast man myself!’ But then, it was early in the game for such delicate negotiations. Soon, carving etiquette might well be as developed and intricate a ritual as chess and, when it did get that advanced it would probably be in Wimbledon but, for the moment, Henry was faced with the unattractive prospect of involuntary double murder. Was polyneuritis infectious?

‘I don’t understand it, Doctor! They both started throwing up and seeing flashing lights! Might it be some form of . . . I don’t know . . .’ (rapidly) ‘. . . infectious polyneuritis?’

The trouble with this, of course, was that it might lead to another doctor, one more competent than Donald, examining their evening meal. No – he would have to make sure that no breast meat came Donald’s way. It shouldn’t be too difficult.

‘Henry tells me,’ Donald was saying in a carefully conversational manner, ‘that you’ve had a touch of the old . . . polyneuritis!’

He said this as if amused by the thought. There was nothing terrifying or frightening about polyneuritis, his half-smile and gentle nod seemed to say, it was just an illness . . . like . . . cancer . . . or coronary thrombosis . . . or Alzheimer’s . . . or leprosy! Pretty soon they would all be laughing about it.

‘He what?’ squawked Elinor.

She shot him one of her more mainline, Elinor-style glances. The standard who-is-this-jerk-and-why-am-I-married-to-him expression. Which, for some reason, then turned into a laugh.

‘Silly old thing!’ she said, and cuffed him affectionately.

Henry looked at Donald. ‘She’s a brave little liar!’ he tried to make his eyes say. ‘She doesn’t want to bother you with it.’ Donald, who was still nodding his head, did not seem to notice any of this. Perhaps he was just in the kind of trance he went into as a matter of course every time illness was discussed. He had a faraway, Buddhist look in the eyes – a kind of stillness and peace that denoted the complete absence of any mental process.

‘I’ve been a bit depressed,’ she said, ‘that’s all.’

Bit depressed? Bit depressed? You’ve been behaving like a commodity broker on Black Thursday, haven’t you?

‘Let’s have a drink!’ said Henry as he thought this.

‘Sherry,’ said Elinor swiftly.

A pint mug, my dear? Or shall we decant it into a bucket?

‘Surely, my love,’ said Henry lightly.

Donald chose Scotch. Maisie had a lemonade. Henry poured himself a Perrier water. He was going to have to keep calm and steady for the task ahead.

‘For Farr,’ said Lustgarten, ‘as he laughed and joked with his old friend in the front room of their Wimbledon home, was already planning exactly where his carving knife would skirt the edge of the poisoned breast meat, digging deeper and deeper away from the tainted flesh, so that neither he nor Templeton would suffer. Farr’s doctor was no part of his murderous plan. His venom, both actual and metaphysical, was held in reserve for his wife!’

Henry went to the oven and looked through the grease-stained glass window. He could just make out the chicken. It was still oatmeal-white around the fleshy part of the thighs. But the breast was turning a golden brown – the herbs, the black pepper and the thallium were crisping up nicely. He turned back to Elinor and Donald.

Donald looked, thought Henry, like a perfect blend of Doctor Kildare and Gillespie, the older, wiser doctor of the partnership. Donald was perfectly poised on the edge of middle age – greying curls, the big, sculptural ears, the solidly Roman nose all suggested power, maturity, certainty. Henry concentrated on Donald’s face and, as so often these days, found it easier to look as if he was listening by doing the reverse. He timed his nods and yesses and ‘Indeeds!’ on an entirely mathematical basis, interspersing them with a sort of pucker-cum-squint that could be mild disagreement or the preface to some statement of his own. Sometimes he helped along this impression of participation by opening his mouth and shovelling his chin forward until someone interrupted him.

‘Actually,’ Elinor was saying, ‘we were going to Portugal, but I think we’ll be staying in Wimbledon this year. I can’t see myself getting out of Wimbledon at all.’

Unless you count the ride up to Putney Vale Crematorium, thought Henry, that’ll be a nice little outing for you, won’t it? He got up again and went back to the oven. Donald and Elinor had been talking for thirty minutes. Henry marvelled once again at time. Its passage seemed, nowadays, to be the only event in his life. Nothing happened in it any more. It just went. It wasn’t the flying thing described by poets. It was the only thing on the horizon, shouldering aside achievement and sensation with attention-seeking roughness, and nothing, not conversation, wine, sexual encounters or the search for knowledge or fame could prevent it. What had they actually done while this chicken was cooking? Bugger all.

Maybe murder was the only way to make all this meaningful. Maybe that was why he was trying to poison Elinor? For a moment he could not quite think why he was trying to poison Elinor. It was just another thing he did – like dealing with wills and conveyancing at Harris, Harris and Overdene, or shouting at Maisie to go to bed. Then he pulled down the oven door, smelt the sweet, fatty smell of the meat and knew that it was probably this very fact that accounted for his decision to go through with the business.

He was poisoning Elinor because she was there.

‘Lovely chicken,’ said Henry, ‘coming up!’

She was smiling at him. My God, thought Henry, perhaps the therapy is beginning to work. Perhaps she is going to turn into a quietly spoken, normal human being. Perhaps that is the point of therapy. For the first year or so it turns you into a kind of psychopathic animal and then suddenly, like a butterfly emerging from the pupa, you sprout wings, your heart opens, you become . . . charming. He looked at Elinor as he brought the chicken to the table.

No. Not yet, anyway. Killing Elinor was, Henry felt, still an ecologically sound thing to do. It would take at least another seven or eight years to turn her into a recognizable human being. Maybe even longer. In fact (Henry went back to the fridge and took out two bottles of wine), if she kept on with this present therapist there was absolutely no hope for her at all. If there was any hope for her, it was indisputable that the outlook was grim for anyone with whom she might come in contact. The woman kept telling her she needed assertiveness training. Elinor needed about as much assertiveness training as Napoleon.

‘Lovely chicken!’ said Henry. ‘Tasty free-range chicken.’

They were looking at him oddly. Elinor took another swig of sherry and Henry arranged wine glasses at each place. Then he went back to the cutlery drawer and, with a skill born of long practice, lobbed knives and forks over to Maisie, who set them down in her customary eccentric manner. Sometimes forks would appear on the right and knives on the left, sometimes (Henry always felt this was Maisie’s way of telling people they were not welcome) two knives or only a spoon. Elinor, who usually took it upon herself to criticize all aspects of her daughter’s behaviour, was into her third sherry. She and Donald were discussing cars with great enthusiasm. They talked of the Nissan Cherry, the Volvo 740, the Granada Ghia, the Renault 5, the XJ6 Jaguar.

People in Wimbledon, these days, always talked about things as if they were people, and people as if they were things. They lacked confidence in their own values.

Henry was going to add a chapter towards the end of
The Complete History of Wimbledon
in which he planned to deal with the failure of nerve he sensed in the place. Some creature he had met at a dinner party recently (he was, it had to be said, from East Finchley) had had the nerve to tell him that New York was ‘more vibrant’ than Wimbledon. He had gone on about lofts. People in New York, apparently, lived in lofts, presumably because they couldn’t afford houses. ‘You have to go there,’ he had said to Henry, pressing his face forward, ‘it’s so alive!’ And another man, who should have known better even though he was from Southfields, had announced that Wimbledon was ‘on the dull side. It’s all accountants and solicitors, isn’t it?’ What was wrong, thought Henry, with being a solicitor? He thought about Harris, Harris and Overdene. He thought about how Harris smiled at Harris, whenever Henry passed his office door. He thought about the way that Overdene looked at him from his glass cubby hole whenever Henry was twenty minutes late from lunch. And found to his annoyance that he was grinding his teeth.

Henry breathed deeply. Sooner or later something was going to snap.

‘Are you all right?’ said Elinor.

‘Fine, darling!’ said Henry.

The plates were on the table. The group was seated. Henry was carving. Ladies first. Two, three, four huge chunks of Chicken Thallium. Smothered with gravy, garnished with unspeakable, uneatable edenwort and okra. Ladies first. If you don’t like the vegetables – have the meat! Ladies first! The plate was on its way to Elinor.

‘Leg OK for you, Donald?’ said Henry.

‘Actually,’ said Donald, ‘I fancy a bit of breast!’

‘Have this!’ said Elinor, thrusting her poisoned meat towards him. ‘I’m not hungry all of a sudden. Have this!’

Of course, in all the books, poisoning was a comparatively simple affair. You made them Horlicks or Ovaltine or tea or coffee. You added the arsenic, the antimony or the heavy metal. And they took it down dutifully. Henry might have known that in his case the operation would prove a little more complicated. He watched, open-mouthed, as Donald beamed down at his Chicken Thallium.

‘Well,’ said Donald, ‘I’d better get abreast!’

Elinor seemed to find this very funny. It was the kind of joke that went down well in Wimbledon. Normally, Henry would have joined in the laughter. Now he watched in horrified silence as Donald cut himself a giant slice of poisoned meat.

‘Won’t you have any?’ he said, desperately, to Elinor.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I might eat later.’

‘It’s lovely!’ said Henry feebly.

‘Mmmmm,’ said Donald, swallowing a mouthful, ‘it is!’ He chewed it very thoroughly and, as Henry watched, began to swallow. ‘You could die for this!’ he said.

Too right you could, thought Henry.

Things were now going very, very slowly. As Henry watched (no one else round the table was eating) Donald lifted another laden fork towards his mouth. Halfway through the trip he decided to make the mouthful even more exciting. He smeared the chicken with edenwort, okra and gravy, rubbed it round the plate and set it off once more in the direction of his wide, beautifully moulded mouth.

The edenwort and the okra would do it. Surely. Unlike thallium, Henry felt, they were probably odourful and tasteful in the extreme. Enough to make you gag on first crunch, surely. Donald would choke and spit and deposit the whole mouthful back on to the plate. But, as Henry watched, Donald broke into a smile. And not just any smile. It wasn’t simply that he was managing to smile with his mouth full – a difficult enough task at the best of times – it was that his smile expressed so many real, positive qualities that it must be designed to sell something. It seemed a shame to waste it on friends.

‘Mmmm,’ said Donald, ‘mmmm!’ And then, after a bit of Christ-this-is-so-delicious-it-seems-a-shame-to-go-on-about-it-but-I-feel-it-is-my-duty acting, he went on, ‘So chewy. So chewy and fresh!’

He was even beginning to talk like an advertisement. He really liked Chicken Thallium and he wanted people to know that he did. Feeling like an accomplice in this business (‘Tell me – how did you get it so chewy?’) Henry said, ‘Yes. It is. It is chewy. It’s a bit tough, the meat. I—’

‘What is it?’

‘Edenwort and okra.’

Even this did not make Donald crane his neck forward and start retching all over the table. He just nodded and smiled and went on chewing Chicken Thallium, slowly and methodically.

Henry tried to think of a remark that would go with an expansive gesture. The sort of gesture that might, reasonably, allow a chap to knock over a bottle of wine and make sure at least half of it got all over Donald’s plate. ‘But what does it all mean?’ perhaps, or, ‘For God’s sake, we’re all going to die!’

He was unable to think of a suitable gesture. With a violence born of desperation, he swung at the bottle nearest to him and the mouth of a bottle of Tavel Rosé landed neatly in the pile of Donald’s chicken, allowing pink liquid to pulse on to the plate.

‘Henry!’ said Elinor. ‘What on earth did you do that for?’

‘Sorry,’ said Henry, ‘I slipped!’

Donald was looking foolishly down at his plate. ‘Oh . . .’ he was saying, ‘oh . . .’

He wanted more Chicken Thallium, you could tell. Henry was so infuriated by the childlike look of loss on his face he had half a mind to give him some. Then, getting to his feet, he scooped up the plate. Before he could head off for the dustbin, Elinor gripped his wrist firmly. She had strong hands, and the pressure she put into her grasp felt as if she was about to throw him over her shoulder or come out with some menacingly appropriate comment.