The Wimbledon Poisoner (28 page)

‘Must have a pee!’ he heard himself say. Had he actually said that out loud? Or had he said Mustapha Pee the well-known Turkish lavatory attendant, ha ha ha. Foreigners, as Frank Richards said to George Orwell, are funny ha ha ha. Turks and Pakis and Jews and
Oh my God, Henry, what are you saying? Is this the inside of your mind?
And don’t be stupid, Henry, just take it calmly, remember the murder of Roger Ackroyd, this isn’t that, is it,
dot dot dot . . . ?
Oh dot fucking dot, where am I? Could I have put some poison up my arse like they do with cannabis at airports? I am a bit obsessed with my arse.
Oh my God, Henry, this is the inside of your mind, Henry, this is what you are actually like, is it? . . . dot dot dot
where are we? Where are we, are we all right there, are we? Are we all right? What am I doing? Am I all right?

‘Are you,’ Rush was saying solicitously, ‘all right, Henry?’

They were in the lavatory. As far as Henry could see he was not sexually assaulting the policeman. He seemed to be urinating in an orderly fashion, with Rush next to him, doing likewise. But how had he got here? And what had he done in between the table and the lavatory?

‘Don’t blame you for getting out,’ said Rush. ‘You probably didn’t like listening to our friend from overseas, did you?’

Rush’s voice was sweetly insinuating. Of course he was expert at interrogations. He would know how to conjure up the racist, psychopathic monster that was somewhere inside Henry Farr. Maybe this was all part of a ploy to do more than merely convict him. Thirty years in Broadmoor wasn’t enough. Henry looked down at the policeman. He realized, with some surprise, that he disliked Rush intensely. That of the two men he would far rather spend time with Karim Jackson. Karim Jackson was better looking, better read, better dressed and far, far better company than Rush would ever be. And yet, such were the appalling limitations of being white and English and living in Wimbledon, he, Henry, was doomed to spend the rest of his life with people like Rush, had indeed, just attempted, or indeed, succeeded, in poisoning a man whose only crime would appear to be that his parents came from somewhere a bit more interesting than Wimbledon.

His fingers stiff and weary, he buttoned his penis back into his trousers and followed the detective inspector out of the Gentlemen’s.

At the door, Rush stopped and looked up at him knowingly. ‘What disgusts you,’ he said, ‘is that people like that, black uppity bastards like that come over here, get good jobs and probably white women and plenty of them into the bargain. Isn’t that what you can’t stand?’

Henry reflected that Karim Jackson had probably an altogether prior claim on white women than he and Rush, on the grounds of hygiene alone. But he did not say that. He stood, listening to the dripping cistern, the door half open, looking down at the inspector’s knowing smile, thinking, now the awful rage had passed, How does he know the worst things I’m thinking? Why doesn’t he just arrest me? What does he want to make me do?

‘He might even,’ said Rush, ‘try a poke at Elinor! Imagine that! A black man humping your wife!’

These days Elinor’s increased libidinous activity had left him so mentally and physically exhausted that such a prospect would come as something of a relief to Henry. But Rush seemed to think it highly likely that Karim Jackson would want to have sex relations with Mrs Elinor Farr, although in Henry’s opinion the publisher would probably have to be offered money before he consented to do such a thing.

‘Elinor,’ said Rush, ‘is a treasure!’ He sounded, thought Henry, depressingly like Donald. ‘I used to see her in the street, long before we even met,’ went on Rush, ‘and think, “there’s an English Rose! There’s a perfect specimen of English Womanhood! There’s a woman a man could really love!” ’

He looked at Henry, the vaguely critical glance with which Henry was familiar from fans of his wife’s. ‘How,’ the expression seemed to say, ‘did this fat, badly groomed bastard get hold of such a pearl!’ Had Rush been watching him and Elinor long before their fateful encounter at the Everett Maltby talk? Somehow the prospect was even more depressing than the thought that he, Henry, had just poisoned a major force in world publishing, but it might explain why the detective had not yet moved to arrest him. He was Elinor’s lover, and he (maybe she as well) was, were playing with him, enjoying the spectacle of his wriggling on the end of the hook. Weren’t all policemen sadists anyway? The pleasure of the job was, for them, not the righting of a wrong but the sight of the punishment of the guilty. And my God, was he guilty! As the two men came back into the restaurant, Henry found his lip was twitching out of control. In the mirror above the bar he caught sight of an ill-looking, pale-faced Henry and, his mind a jumble of half-therapized impulses, poisoned apples and sheer confusion at what might be going on in his soul (if he had one), he sat down opposite Jackson.

Jackson was eating a salad and seemed, for the moment anyway, to be in good health. Maybe I didn’t do it, thought Henry, maybe . . . Jackson smiled warmly at him, and Henry, his anger quite evaporated, found himself smiling back.

‘This salad,’ said Jackson, ‘is delicious! It tastes really sweet! I wonder what they put in the dressing!’

‘I can’t think!’ said Henry, lightly. And breathed deeply again. Just to check, he tasted his salad, very carefully. But as he had feared, it did not taste sweet at all. If anything, it was sharply flavoured. Henry chewed it and as Jackson began to talk once again about the poisoner, he reflected that it was possible that the media person’s research might be about to prove a little more intensive than he had anticipated.

Of the three people round the table at Mehemet’s restaurant, it was almost certain that Karim Jackson was the only one unfamiliar with the symptoms of strychnine poisoning.

There were those who said, after the incident at Mehemet’s Cave of Pleasures (nicknamed, in the few months the business lasted after the December incident, ‘Mehemet’s Hole of Horrors’), that the fatal kebab was not, as Mehemet maintained, of chicken but of guinea fowl, or game of some kind, that had run up against a farmer who was with callous disregard for his fellow men ignoring the Animals (Cruel Poisons) Act of 1962.

But, as Detective Inspector Rush pointed out, his eyes on Henry’s face, Jackson had absorbed the poison in a quantity that suggested that the poisoner had been at work.

‘Basically,’ Jackson said, as the others sat down, ‘I’d like to do a book which looks at the suburb and the poisoner together. There’s a sense in which this is Sunday supplement country, you know, three hundred words on Gewurztraminer for God’s sake, but I’d like to do a book about a locale, maybe even using some of your ideas, Henry, and about a case, an issue – my God, I feel most peculiar!’

Henry looked at the publisher open-mouthed. He ought, he knew, to get on the phone and order some gastric lavage for the man, as soon as possible, but could not think how to do so without incriminating himself. Who would believe a story about ‘blacking out’ for God’s sake, any more than they had believed poor Everett Maltby? It seemed such a shame this man had to die. He was, as Henry had already observed, a little over-impressed with America, but this was a common fault among British people. He was politically naïve, and unhealthily obsessed with his obviously complex racial origins, but beside that, Henry could really find not much wrong with the man. Added to which he seemed to be offering to publish Henry’s book, albeit in a mutilated and over-sensational form. It was a cruel irony, thought Henry, that the one man he was ever likely to meet who took a genuine interest in his life’s work was also one of the people whom his baser, unreconstructed, untherapized, unconscious self should have chosen to murder. Did this mean that, fundamentally, deep down, he didn’t want his book published? Or was it yet another illustration of the little known law of nature which decreed that if Henry Farr looked like he was getting a break, God would take it away from him?

‘You see,’ Jackson was saying, ‘the movie, which obviously is what I have in mind, has very universal appeal. Englishness is about our only durable export, and this is a sort of hard study of attitudes in the eighties. What I want to do is stay down here.’

‘Down here’? What did he mean, ‘down here’? thought Henry, forgetting temporarily that the man had only a few minutes to live. Wimbledon wasn’t the end of the world, for God’s sake.

‘I might stay at the Cannizaro Hotel,’ went on Jackson, ‘named, as I’m sure you know, Henry, after the Duke of Cannizaro, who was also the basis for one of the characters in the
In-goldsby Legends
, and really get to know Wimbledon. Soak myself in its atmosphere so that I can get it on the page, make people feel that they are there with me and I might – my chest feels a bit funny—’

Henry gazed in baffled compassion at the only man he had ever met who knew the little-recorded fact that Karim Jackson had just confided across the lunch table. It was at that moment that he knew that somehow or other he must have laid his hands on the cursed alkaloid that comes from nux vomica. Jackson appeared to be grinning broadly at him.

Quite suddenly a rigid stiffening of the body takes place, the back becoming arched (opoisthotonus) and the chest more or less fixed so that cyanosis sets in. It is this fixation of the chest which serves best to distinguish strychnine convulsions from those of tetanus
.

Cyanosis or no cyanosis, Karim Jackson continued to make his pitch. In the early stages of strychnine poisoning he yet managed to talk of deals, of percentages of the gross profits, of the paperback rights, the mini-series rights, of the intellectual integrity and honesty of the project he was adumbrating as well as its colossal commercial appeal. He spoke – admittedly with some difficulty – of the
Sunday Times Colour Supplement
, of the sharp political relevance the Wimbledon Poisoner had to British society and thereby to the world. He spoke of agents and development deals and full-colour glossy pictures and of the enormous interest already expressed by television producers in the story he was about to try and tell. British publishing would have been proud of him.

‘The story has to be told and it has to be . . .’

He seemed to be grinning.

Tetanus spasm is most pronounced in the jaw. The face is fixed in a grim, sardonic smile,
risus sardonicus.

‘Christ, the deal would be . . .’

After a minute or two the whole body relaxes and the wretched subject lies exhausted, gasping for breath.

‘I’m not feeling . . .’

Some minutes later the seizure grips the body again, often fired off by some trivial stimulus. The mind remains clear until death from exhaustion follows a few hours later.

‘Look, this is a really interesting . . . Christ All-bloody-mighty . . .’

Treatment is difficult if convulsions are already established. It is hopeless to try and introduce a stomach tube, assuming one can be easily located, for any such attempt will immediately excite another convulsion
.

‘Wimbledon . . .’

It was, thought Henry afterwards, eerily appropriate that the last word on Karim Jackson’s lips should have been ‘Wimbledon’. For Wimbledon, that unregarded quarter of south-west London that he had once sneered at, then discovered, and finally, almost embraced, had, in the end, been the death of him. He passed away spectacularly, with the style and flair for catching the attention of the public that had characterized his brief but successful career in publishing. Juddering like a car trying to accelerate in low gear, he jerked forward into the table like a robot and,
risus sardonicus
in full flower (which only increased his nightmarish resemblance to some elegant creature from the metropolis, in the middle of assessing a colleague’s reputation), he breathed his last, with twitchy bravura, into Detective Inspector Rush’s doner kebab with salad.

‘Oh my God!’ said Rush. ‘Oh, my bloody Christ!’ And he looked across at Henry, eyes mute with misery. Rush, you could tell, had had enough of murder. He had had enough of poison. He wanted to go back to traffic control, which was where, unless Henry gave himself up pretty quickly, he was going to be headed. But as well as the misery, Henry saw something else in his face, and it was no longer the superior, enigmatic expression he had feared ever since Donald’s funeral. It was pure, unmixed hatred. He knows, Henry thought, he knows what’s wrong with me. He led me up to it, made me do it, and still he won’t give me the pleasure, yes, the pleasure of arresting me. Because it would, by now, have been nothing but a relief to be able to say, out loud, to someone, even if it was only a policeman, what he was thinking and feeling. He’s in love with Elinor, thought Henry, and that’s why he’s letting me do these things! He fought for the words that would implicate him, and found, to his horror, that they would not come.

Karim Jackson’s funeral, which neither Rush nor Henry attended, was a very fashionable affair. Edwina Lush, the fashionable lesbian novelist, author of
Boy’s Games
and
The Fearing
gave a dignified, simple address that, those present agreed, enhanced her already considerable reputation as a fashionable lesbian novelist. ‘She looked,’ said Meryl Johnson, an unfashionable lesbian novelist, ‘very boyish. Karim would have been proud of her.’ It emerged during the proceedings that his name wasn’t Karim at all, but Dave, and that he had adopted his first name at the age of fifteen, on learning that his mother’s first husband (not his father) hailed from Rawalpindi. He was biscuit-coloured because he was biscuit-coloured. There was, his closest relatives revealed, absolutely no racial significance in his colour.

There was another headline, the usual rash of comment, and then people forgot about Karim Jackson. Or at least Henry did. He was no longer aware of what people, or indeed journalists, thought. He was scarcely aware of Elinor or Maisie. Only when Rush came to call, which seemed to be every other day, did he take notice of his wife, watching the way she smiled when Rush told one of his endless anecdotes, nearly all of which seemed to deal with the fatal mistakes made by over-confident criminals.