The Wimbledon Poisoner (18 page)

‘It’s always that way at a funeral,’ said Vera ‘Got All the Things There Then?’ Loomis. ‘Once it gets going it really goes!’

Dave Sprott seemed totally desperate for the mixture. He stood by the bowl and making a pretence of serving the other guests managed to drink more than anyone else in the room. After a while it became impossible for Henry to discover how many people had actually had more than three or four glasses. He went out through the french windows into the garden. Would the local crematoria be able to cope with the influx of customers, a day or so from now?

When he returned there were only two or three hardened drinkers standing by the bowl, although Henry was disturbed to note that Inspector Rush was still there, standing just clear of the wall, his glass still full, looking across at Sprott as if he was just about to ask him to come along quietly. Sprott had stopped smacking his lips and muttering that it had a refreshing directness and an unambiguous honesty – but had decanted the punch into a small vase and was tipping it back into his throat, pausing only after each mouthful to slap himself on the back of the neck and shout ‘Wowee!’ and ‘Wowza!’

He showed no signs of frothing. He was distinctly unclammy. And from where he was standing, Henry could observe no signs of cyanosis. It was Rush he didn’t like. The detective kept peering over the lip of the bowl and pursing his lips, and then looking back at Henry, and though he kept close to the side of the punch, Henry never saw him drink any.

‘I remember—’ he was saying as Henry came into the room, ‘dealing with a poisoning case once, which made a great impression on me.’

No one, however, was listening to him. They were listening to Dave Sprott.

What Dave Sprott did do – as he always did, when drunk – was to start to talk, loudly and aggressively, about teeth. ‘People’s teeth,’ he said, his carefully preserved northern accent astonishing the artificial gas fire, the Heal’s sofa and the watercolours above the mantelpiece collected by the late Donald Templeton MD over a period of twenty years, ‘people’s teeth are the expression of their personality. For example, a fact not very well known to those outside the profession is that the Romans considered the teeth were the seat of all the most basic human emotions. Was it the Romans, Edwina?’

Edwina Sprott, six foot two, built like a prop forward, hair on the back of the hands, huge nose, voice like Vincent Price, no breasts to speak of, said, ‘No, David! I don’t think anyone considers the teeth the seat of all the most basic human emotions. Apart from you.’

Sprott, who always saw in his wife’s remarks a wit not at first appreciated by others (until Sprott pointed it out to them) laughed hysterically. ‘It is, though,’ he said, ‘it is. Take anyone’s teeth and look at them, and you will find the key to their personality. Take that politician I do. The Labour one. His teeth, in my view, say a great deal about his policies!’

Edwina Sprott towered above him. For a moment Henry thought she might be about to scoop him up in her arms, as a mother gorilla might draw her baby to her, but although she looked as if she might like to do this, she did not. ‘It’s David Steel!’ she said instead.

‘It’s David Steel you do, David!’

‘Christ, so it is!’ said Sprott. ‘So it is!’

A sure test of their marriage’s durability was their capacity to be surprised by each other’s anecdotes.

‘Christ, he come in for a clean t’other week,’ said Sprott, ‘and I said to ’im, “Clean?, Clean? This isn’t cleaning. This is a restoration job, this is,” I said. I told him my theory about teeth and personality and I think what I said may have an impact on the future development of the Liberal Party!’

‘David,’ said Edwina Sprott, her huge hands dangling in front of her, looking down on her man as if he were a particularly tasty snack in some pastrycook’s window, ‘you say the weirdest, weirdest things!’

Teeth and celebrities were Sprott’s two main obsessions in life. Once started on the subject of celebrities’ teeth he was unstoppable. He talked of the role of teeth in history, their importance in the shaping of the modern world, their influence on great events. As he spoke more about teeth he claimed more and more for them. He spoke of his South African cousin whose entire life had been changed by the clumsy insertion of a bridge. He spoke of the relationship between capped teeth and business success, of the obvious link between loose fillings and feelings of sexual inadequacy.

‘Aren’t you having any?’ said Inspector Rush to Henry with a thin smile.

‘I won’t, thanks!’ said Henry. ‘I’m driving!’

Rush’s enigmatic expression seemed to hint at the absurdity of this excuse. Sprott, meanwhile, tipped the last of the bowl down his throat.

‘Teeth,’ he said, just before he hit the last of it, ‘teeth, the whole of oral hygiene really, is the expression of a society. Britain today is a society in which we have ceased to care about teeth, in which we have ignored the real nature of what we are because—’

And on the edge of what might have been a truly global
aperçu
about teeth and British society, without any trace of cyanosis, frothing, soiling of the air passages, pneumonia, or wrinkled, greyish, leathery hardening of the oesophagal mucous membranes, he whirled round in mid-gesture, clawed at his throat and fell, headlong, on Billykins’s carpet.

No one was very sympathetic.

Most of the guests were shouting for more punch and Henry, who was dispatched by Elinor to Thresher’s for twenty more bottles of Yugoslav Riesling, added it to the more corrosive elements of his recipe, only to be told that the new blend ‘lacked fizz’.

Sprott lay face down on the carpet, while Mrs Sprott (who was more drunk than anyone had ever seen her) shouted obscenities at him in a voice that sounded as if it were coming from an even deeper grave than usual. By this stage Henry was back in the room and the group round the punch-bowl had split up; it was Henry who found himself prodding the body with his foot and giving his opinion as to Sprott’s state of health. As far as he could tell, Sprott was still breathing. Henry went out into the hall and looked through the open door at the chestnut trees on the green.

Behind him the noise of the party went on. He could hear Billykins shouting something. ‘Who wants a widow?’ was what it sounded like. Someone, probably Derek Bloomstein, the Other Optician, had started playing the piano.

At least Sprott wasn’t exhibiting any of the symptoms of acid poisoning. There was nothing clammy about him. Had Sprott, Henry asked himself, swallowed the stuff in such quantities that it was acting independently of his digestive system? Sloshing around his immaculately cared-for mouth, cannoning into the walls of his gullet and smashing straight through them into the bloodstream?

If it had, he was probably well beyond cyanosis, frothing, or soiling of the lips. He was probably in deep shock. He might, thought Henry, have only minutes to live. If things went on like this there would not only be no one to take his blood pressure or check on his wisdom teeth, there would be no one to sort out his eyes, check out his conveyancing problems or tell him which roofing company to avoid. He had better go back in and get Roger From the Practice to look over Sprott. Except, of course, he couldn’t possibly tell the man what was wrong with the dentist. Could he? That would incriminate him, wouldn’t it? Could he?

Henry was not particularly fond of Sprott. He had never, for example, liked the mechanical, almost threatening way the man said ‘Rinse!’ There had also been a nasty incident some years ago, known as The Capping of Elinor’s Teeth, in which, in Henry’s view, the dentist had steered dangerously close to extortion.

But when it came to it, could he do it? Could he let the man die? Was it fair?

He had already murdered Donald of course. Henry had expected, in the days after hearing the news, to feel some of the things murderers were traditionally supposed to feel. Guilt, for a start. At any moment, as he went between Blackfriars, the Rose and Thorn, St Michael and All Angels Primary School, Wimbledon, and Waitrose PLC he half expected Donald to leap out at him from behind a tree, gibbering, covered in blood and chains. Sometimes, very late at night when he could not sleep, he saw him coming up the garden towards him, blood on his face, soil round his lips and in his right hand a cracked vase in which was, of course, a few drops of fatal thallium . . . But on the whole, having become a murderer did not seem to have altered his life. If anything, he felt slightly better than usual.

He had no particular urge, either, to murder anyone else, a thing he had noticed happening to quite a few murderers. Once they had tasted blood, some characters seemed to get a nose for chopping up people into easily manageable portions and leaving them in left-luggage compartments. A slight lowering of their moral standards seemed to bring on an uncontrollable urge to be beastly, an urge Henry did not feel. Even his urge to be rid of Elinor was not, he noticed, as keen as it once was. If he was still wedded to it, it was in the spirit of ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’, rather than the almost romantic fervour with which he had first embraced the notion.

He sighed and went back to the denuded front room. Elinor and Inspector Rush were in the middle of what looked like a rather intense conversation, which seemed, like so many intense conversations, to fail upon Henry’s approach.

‘You see,’ Rush was saying, ‘I’m a naturally suspicious man. It’s my job. I’m paid to be suspicious.’

He stopped and looked at Henry narrowly. Sprott was still lying face down on the carpet. There was no sign of Roger From the Practice. Mrs Sprott was leaning against the mantelpiece, her mouth open, exhausted enough for silence. Mr Is-the-Mitsubishi-Scratched-Yet was kneeling on the tiled surround to the gas fire. He appeared to be being sick. Glumly, Henry went out into the hall. Some mourners, but not all, were looking clammy. Some were singing. Quite a few were being sick out of windows. On the landing on the first floor, Billykins, veil askew, was sobbing into the arms of Peter ‘Where is the Upfront Money?’ Furgess from 65.

‘Death,’ Furgess was saying, ‘is certain. You just have to face it, there’s no point in moaning about it. It’s part of life. It’s something that happens. It’s . . .’ Furgess’s face furrowed with the effort of self-expression. ‘. . . it’s . . . par for the course!’

Billykins seemed to find this thought comforting.

Well, death was par for the course, wasn’t it? It wasn’t such a great event. Perhaps that was why he felt no urge to confess. Henry had never understood why it was that Raskolny-whatever-his name-was had bothered to turn himself in to the police when no one had anything whatsoever against him.

‘Oh!’ came a voice from the floor. ‘Oh my God! Oh!’

It was Elinor, and something in the basso contralto of her tone, the thrusting, stagy grief of it all reminded Henry of why it was he was trying to end her life some thirty or so years ahead of schedule.

‘Oh!’ she said again, sounding as surprised as she did when approaching sexual climax (in the days when she approached sexual climax). ‘Oh! Oh!’

Henry looked down.

Elinor was sitting astride Sprott’s chest, jerking her hips up and out and then allowing them to crash down on his lower ribs; she had both hands outstretched in front of her, made into two fists. She had converted herself entirely to piston action, so that as behind rose, arms descended, thumped on chest and then rose again as behind descended for the next assault. No one else in the room was paying much attention to her. Mr Is-the-Mitsubishi-Scratched-Yet was staring at the contents of his evacuated stomach like an archaeologist contemplating some mystery in the soil. As Henry stared down at Elinor, number 61a (Unpublished Magical Realist) zig-zagged towards him. He looked like a man about to make an awkwardly close relationship with the numinous. Behind him came Vera ‘Got All the Things There Then?’ Loomis, who looked if anything worse, and the two disappeared out into the hall, presumably to be sick all over 32 and 48 (Ecology-Conscious Pensioner in Green Anorak and Publisher Going Through Identity Crisis).

Sprott did not appear to be paying much attention to Elinor’s ministrations. Christ, thought Henry, if Elinor was dropping her arse on to my stomach and then bashing me in the chest with her fists I’d want to make a statement on the subject. Sprott was just lying back, neck up, chin ridiculously forward. Was he, Henry wondered, showing off his teeth? Wasn’t there some law against dentists opening their mouths as wide as David Sprott was doing? Wasn’t it tantamount to advertising?

It was only when he got close enough to see his eyes that Henry realized that David Sprott was not going to be mending any more teeth for a while.

Dave Sprott was dead.

‘He’s dead!’ shrieked Elinor, as she continued to hit him in the ribs. ‘He’s dead! He’s dead! He’s dead!’

This was all getting depressingly familiar, thought Henry. But, to his surprise, this time the news did strike him as genuinely shocking. Perhaps it was the sheer scale of the carnage he seemed to have provoked in his attempt to get through to Elinor. Outside in the hall he could hear people being sick, wailing and calling on God, and found himself saying, ‘My God! How awful!’

Roger From the Practice crawled out from behind the sofa. ‘Who’s dead?’ he called. ‘Is someone dead?’

He belched and crawled on towards the hall door. Henry put his foot on the patch of carpet directly in front of the newly promoted GP. Roger From the Practice stopped and looked up at him pathetically.

‘Yes,’ said Henry sternly, ‘someone is dead.’

‘Who is it?’ said Roger From the Practice.

Henry did not answer. Roger From the Practice rolled over on his back like a Labrador waiting to be tickled in the stomach.

‘Who is it?’ he said. ‘Who’s dead? Is it me? Say it’s me. Oh God, say it’s me. Oh God, please, please let it be me!’

It very nearly was. But, after a bout of vomiting that would have done credit to a party of schoolchildren going round the Bay of Biscay in February, Roger From the Practice recovered his composure enough to start handing out death certificates the way Napoleon handed out medals.