The Wimbledon Poisoner (2 page)

And they would never, never find out that he had done it.

When he came into the office, past Selinda his secretary, an elderly woman who was constantly asking him to give her ‘something interesting to do’ (How could he? Henry himself never had anything interesting to do), he squeezed close to the wall and coughed to himself in an extra drab way. He left his office door open and, for the next hour, treated her to a stunningly drab conversation about the searches on a leasehold flat in Esher. When she put her head round the door and asked in her usual, conspiratorial manner if he wanted tea, Henry said, ‘Tea would be a delight, my dear!’ He said this in a high-pitched monotone that was intended to convey boringness; he was, however, he could tell from Selinda’s expression, trying a little too hard.

He pulled out a correspondence file between a landlord and tenant in Ruislip – nearly eighty pages devoted to conflict over responsibility for a dustbin area – and tried to concentrate. How was he going to do it?

Murder should not, he felt, be unnecessarily complicated. It should have a clean, aesthetic line to it. It should involve as few people as possible. Oneself and the victim. If it was like anything, thought Henry, it was probably like the art of eating out.

His first thought was to do something to the Volkswagen Passat. That would have the advantage of getting rid of both car and wife at the same time. If there was anything that Henry hated as much as his wife, it was the car they had chosen and purchased together. He had hated the little brochure that described it – the pathetic attempt to make it look glamorous, the photographs of it, posed, doors open, doors shut, desperately trying not to look like what it was – a square box with hideous speckled seats. The Volkswagen Passat was about as glamorous as a visit to the supermarket, which was what it was principally used for. The people in the photographs in the brochure – a man, his wife, his two children and his stupid, stupid luggage, his folding chairs, his folding table, his hamper, his sensible suitcase packed for his sensible holiday – were exactly how Henry imagined the advertisers thought of him. A man called Frobisher-Zigtermans – a person who insisted on not remaining anonymous during the transaction – had described it as ‘all car’. ‘It’s all car!’ he had said. ‘I’ll say that for it!’ And, as Henry smiled and nodded damply, he thought to himself, Is that all you can find to say about it? ‘It’s all car.’ Can’t you talk about its roadholding? Its incredible power over women? You can’t, can you? Because you think I wouldn’t respond. Because you think I’m as boring as this car. Which is why I’m buying it.

Just thinking about his car made Henry want to hire an electric hammer and run with all convenient speed to Wimbledon, to fall upon its bodywork with screams of rage.

He would saw through the brake cable. Not right through. Almost through. He would do it tonight, Friday, just in time for the weekly trip to the supermarket. Elinor would turn left up Maple Drive, left again into Belvedere Road, left again on to the hill . . . and then . . . oh then . . .

Except she didn’t go to the supermarket, did she? He did. Which was one of the many reasons, now he thought about it, why he was planning to kill her. How did one saw through a brake cable anyway? It was no good chopping the thing in half, was it? Your victim would catch on before accelerating to a speed likely to be fatal. You had to saw it halfway through, didn’t you? Henry wondered where the brake cable was, what it looked like, whether it was the kind of thing to which you could take a saw. The trouble with this sawing-halfway-through lark was that you had no control over where and when the thing was likely to break. Christ, it might even be when he was driving! Even if she was sitting next to him, complaining about his driving, her own imminent decease would not compensate for the depression generated by his own. Ideally, of course, Elinor would be driving her mother somewhere. Somewhere a little more interesting than Wimbledon Hill. Somewhere, well, steeper . . .

Henry sat for quite a long time thinking about the conversation between Elinor and her mother as they hurtled down the Paso della Lagastrella, brakeless. ‘Darling,
do
something!’ ‘I’m
doing
something, darling!’ ‘Oh darling, we’re going to die, oh my
God
!’ ‘I
know
we’re going to die, it’s not my fault, oh my
God
!’ He thought about the soaring, almost optimistic leap the Volkswagen would make as it cleared the edge of the cliff (from Henry’s memory of it there was no safety barrier on that particular stretch of the Apennines). He thought about the long, long fall and then the flames, way below. About the immense difficulty that would undoubtedly be experienced by rescue teams.

It was five twenty-nine and fifteen seconds. In just forty-five seconds he would get up from his desk, take his coat and walk past his secretary. He would say ‘Goodnight all’ (although she would be the only other person in the room), and then he would take the lift down to the chilly autumn street and Blackfriars station, all soot and sickly neon. And from there he would rattle back to Wimbledon and his wife of twenty years.

Henry sat in his chair as the seconds ticked away. But when the large hand of his watch passed the twelve, he did not move. He sat and stared at the desk in front of him, the creamy whorls in the wood, the tanned grain. And he thought about the endless mystery of objects.

It was dark by the time Henry reached home. The lights were on in all the houses up Maple Drive. At number 23 the Indian was seated, motionless, in his bay window. On the top floor of 32, Mrs Mackintosh stared nervously out at the dark street. Mrs Mackintosh had Alzheimer’s disease. ‘Has my husband gone out now?’ the expression on her face seemed to say. ‘Or is he due back at any moment? Or perhaps he’s here somewhere in the house, lurking behind a chest of drawers, waiting to spring out at me.’ Only last week she had told Henry (who had lived in Maple Drive for twelve years) that she wished to welcome him to the neighbourhood. On Wednesdays she was driven by her sister to something called the Memory Clinic, where Henry imagined some ghastly psychiatric version of Kim’s Game being played. Not that Henry’s memory was getting any better. Only the other day . . . Only the other day what? . . .

At 49 all the curtains were drawn and at 51 Mrs Archer had left the front door open, perhaps in the hope that Mr Archer would return. Mr Archer had left her four years ago for a married man with a beard who lived, people said, in Shepherds Bush.

In his own house the curtains were open, the light was on and he could see a young girl with a pigtail, seated at the piano. She was playing ‘Für Elise’, very, very slowly and cautiously. Next to her was a woman with long black hair, a stubby nose and the kind of jaw found on actors playing responsible sheriffs in cowboy films. As the girl played the woman dilated her nostrils and rose slightly off the piano stool, as if someone was drawing her up by an invisible wire attached to the crown of her head. When the child reached the bottom of the first page the woman darted forward, black hair swinging across her face, for the kind of effortful page turn that would have upstaged Paderewski himself. ‘Behold!’ the gesture seemed to say. ‘I turn the page!’ The child struggled gamely on to page two but seemed to suspect that, after a page turn of this quality, anything else was liable to be an anti-climax.

Henry watched the woman for some time. Her broad shoulders. The determined set of her upper torso. Her grim concentration on her child’s performance. Mrs Elinor Farr. The mother of his child.

Should he, perhaps, push her off a cliff? They could go down to Beachy Head. Wander along the edge of the cliff. Some remark, along the lines of ‘Oooh look! Over there, dear!’ And then a smart shove in the small of the back.

But how to persuade her to go to Beachy Head? Let alone to stand near the edge of a cliff. And suppose, as she fell, she clutched on to him? Or, suspecting what was up, dodged smartly to one side when Henry made his move? Henry saw himself in the air, high above the sea and the shingle, spread out like a starfish, Elinor above him, cackling wildly.

She was going to be difficult to kill, no question about it, thought Henry. She had that dogged look about her. Sighing, he let his key into the lock. His daughter was see-sawing, inelegantly, between E natural and D sharp. Maisie had managed, somehow, to make Beethoven’s tune sound like a tired police siren; when it dropped a fourth to B natural she paused, fractionally, before playing the note; it sounded, as a result, like a burp or a fart. At the cadenza, she stumbled down the keyboard with something that had elements of a flourish but ended up sounding more like a digital coronary, an awful, shaming collapse of the fingers that, at the last minute, recovered itself and looked as if it might turn into something like the chord of A minor. Such was not its destiny. As Henry removed his coat and set his briefcase down, Maisie’s fingers, like demented spiders in a bath, ran this way and that, in any direction, it seemed, that might lead them away from the wistful logic of the melody. All Mrs Craxton’s pencilled annotations on the manuscript (
Sudden drop!! Fingering here, Maisie!!!
)
,
all of O. Thurmer’s revisions, phrases and fingering, all four hundred and sixteen poundsworth of tutorials suddenly slipped away and Maisie Farr hammered the keys of the piano like a gorilla on amphetamines.

Henry paused on his way upstairs. He loved music. Why was Elinor in charge of Maisie’s piano lessons?

He had never really been allowed near his daughter. She had been presented to him, rather in the way she had been presented to her mother, ten years ago, by a Jamaican midwife, in Queen Mary’s Hospital, Roehampton. Served up, thought Henry, and not always graciously. Sometimes she was served up garnished with prizes, a certificate of excellence in swimming or a merit card from a teacher, but more often than not she was slapped down in front of him like a British Rail sandwich, garnished with a series of medical complaints. ‘She needs grommets!’ Elinor would squawk, pointing at her daughter in the gloom of the kitchen. Or else, ‘Her chest! Listen to her chest, Henry! It’s awful! Listen to it!’ And Maisie would stand like some artist’s model, exhibiting her diseases as if they were her only claim on him.

Perhaps a few blows to the side of the head with an axe? Or an electric fire tipped into the bath one afternoon? Henry liked the idea of his wife dying in bath gear. The thought of her twitching her last in a plastic hat, face covered with green mud, carried him through to their bedroom (a room Elinor had taken to calling ‘my’ bedroom) and shored him up against Maisie’s rendition of the second subject in ‘Für Elise’. F major did not help her any, he reflected, as he struggled out of his ridiculous businessman’s shoes.

The trouble was, all these methods were now the staple diet of Radio 4 plays. Just as cliché haunted Henry’s daily journey to the train, his socks from Marks and Spencer, his regular nightly bedtime, his fondness for a cup of tea at ten thirty in the evening, just as he seemed to be destined to be as remorselessly English as the plane trees in the street outside or the homecoming commuters clacking through the twilight towards the village, so his one existential act (hadn’t someone called it that?) seemed destined for suburban predictability. Why couldn’t he roast her in oil? Hurl her into a pit of snakes? Inject her with a rare South American pois—

The word ‘poison’ had scarcely formed itself in his mind before Henry knew, with the sweet certainty that accompanies most forms of conquest, that he had found his
métier
. He wasn’t, clearly, the Mad Axeman of SW23. He was not, could not be the Southfields Strangler or the Rapist of Raynes Park. But the Wimbledon Poisoner! He stood up, walked across to the mirror and there studied his reflection. Then he said, aloud – ‘The Wimbledon Poisoner’. First ideas were always the best. He removed his jacket, trousers, shirt, tie and underclothes and studied himself in the mirror. A fat man of forty with an improbably long penis and a dense mass of wiry pubic hair. A face, as Elinor was often telling him, like a deviant grocer’s. A few thin strands of black to grey hair and a nose that looked like badly applied putty. An out-of-date Englishman.

At the thought of the word ‘Englishman’ Henry stiffened to attention. He straightened his shoulders (straightened one of them anyway. It seemed to be impossible to straighten both at the same time) and thrust out his chest. Don’t be down! There was some go in him yet! By stealth and devotion to his craft he might yet give something back to the class and the country that produced Crippen. What did England produce now, by way of criminals? Louts who could go no further than ill-thought-out violence on street corners. Where were the classic murders that had once held the attention of the world? The patient, domestic acts performed in this country of fogs and mists that had made English murderers the doyens of the civilized globe. These days, the average Brit’s idea of a crime was a drunken assault on a Pakistani grocer. He would do it, and he would do it slowly, exquisitely. He grasped his penis firmly in his right hand and agitated it. It stiffened with blood and, like a dog sighting its lead, throbbed with anticipation. Henry removed his hand and wagged his index finger at his member.

‘Not yet!’ he said. ‘We need all our energies for the task ahead!’

He had remembered (how could he have forgotten?) that the suburb had once boasted a poisoner almost as celebrated as Henry intended to be. A really first-grade monster. A beast. A ravening wolf in sheep’s clothing. Everett Maltby. Chapter 24 (Appendix), Volume 8 of this book.

Where was the section on Everett Maltby? It was always going missing. Sometimes you would find it wedged next to ‘Witchcraft in Stuart Wimbledon’ and, later, it would appear in the middle of ‘The Impact of the Black Death on South West London’. He padded through to the room that Elinor described as his ‘study’. Henry thought of it more as a shrine. It was here that he completed income tax forms, read carefully through the property pages of most of the local newspapers and, most sacred of all, worked on his
Complete History of Wimbledon.
The title alone had cost him two weeks’ work. It couldn’t be simply
The History of Wimbledon
(there was a book with that title – it didn’t matter that it had been published nearly two hundred years ago). It had to be something that would give the prospective punter some idea of the staggering depth and scope and thoroughness of Henry’s work. Suggest to them the fact that when they had finished this one they would know absolutely bloody everything that could be possibly known, now and for always, about Wimbledon. That there would be no escape from the great wall of knowledge Henry was propelling in their direction.