The Wimbledon Poisoner (3 page)

He opened the desk drawer and took out a page at random. It was from a rather combative chapter somewhere around the middle of ‘Wimbledon in the Ninth Century after Christ’. ‘We read’, he read, ‘in Jasper McCrum’s unreliable, tendentious and often plainly wrong book
The Early and Mediaeval Wimbledon
that “in 878 a Danish army took up winter quarters just across the river at Fulham. Nothing is known of its activities, but Vikings normally maintained themselves by raiding the country within a wide range of their base.
So Wimbledon would have been very fortunate to have escaped without some damage
.” (My italics.)’

He had hit McCrum pretty hard, thought Henry, but he had been right to do so. Standards were standards. The thought of McCrum cheered him up, and he got up and went over to the bookcase where the offending pamphlet was stored. He opened it and chose a sentence at random. He was not disappointed. ‘During the Bronze Age – 2,500 to 750 bc – the first metal objects appeared in Wimbledon.’ What did the man think he was doing? Had he no notion at all of historical method? The sentence conjured up, for Henry, bizarre images, ancient and modern. He seemed to see men in winged helmets lounging around Frost’s, the late-night delicatessen, or peering oafishly into the windows of Sturgis, the estate agent. From there, he allowed the Vikings more licence. They swarmed up Parkside and boarded buses bound for Putney, shouting unpleasant things at the driver-conductor. And then they surrounded McCrum’s house and pillaged and put to the sword McCrum and other members of the Wimbledon Society who simply did not understand that—

‘You look as if you’re going to have a thrombie!’ said a voice behind him.

Henry wheeled round, the pamphlet in his hand.

‘You’re naked!’ she said accusingly.

Henry lowered the pamphlet and stood in what he hoped was a coquettish manner. She looked at him stonily. He gave her his best smile, a greeting he normally reserved for waiters. It was going to be important not to arouse her suspicions during the planning stages.

‘I’m sorry!’ he said, adding in a tone that was intended to be gentle, but came out wheedling, ‘Do you find me repulsive?’

Elinor’s answer to this was to slam the study door. Henry scratched his crotch reflectively and stared down at his
History of Wimbledon.
Down below the piano started up again. She was playing slightly better this time, but the effect was still markedly sinister. She sounded just perfect for the Wimbledon Poisoner’s Daughter.

The next morning was Saturday.

Once, a long time ago, Henry could recall being alarmed at the emptiness, the ease, the sheer possibility offered by Saturday. This was no longer the case. On Saturdays Maisie now followed a routine as carefully planned as a day in the life of a nun in a particularly strict order. She went to piano. She went to ballet. She went to drama classes. She went to lessons in drawing, ice-skating, junior aerobics and many other skills which she had absolutely no hope of acquiring. She did not, thought Henry bitterly, as he dragged himself out of bed and weaved his way to the bathroom over Elinor’s discarded knickers, go to classes in being thin, or classes designed to allow the participants to hold one idea in their heads for more than five minutes.

My daughter, he told himself as he brushed his teeth and stared down at number 47’s red Mitsubishi, is like me, fat and untalented. Opposite him, the net curtains of number 47 parted and number 47 peered out. Henry did not have to see his thin anxious face, his nervous nibble at his lower lip or the furtive glance to left and right to know that number 47 was performing the ritual known as Is the Mitsubishi Scratched Yet? Ever since the pharmaceutical company for which he worked had given him the vehicle (
given
, thought Henry grimly) number 47 had been watching over it in a manner that suggested an emotion deeper than motherhood, more desperate than romantic love. It was as if he feared the car would suffer from some mechanical equivalent of cot death, would suddenly buckle and blister and bend, hideously out of shape, there before his eyes, at berth, peacefully parked at its usual angle. Sometimes, Henry thought, it would be kindness itself to rise one night between three and four when the suburb slept and drag a sharp stone across the Mitsubishi’s flanks. At least it would end the awful suspense. At least number 47 would know, instead of suspecting, that even expensive objects get old and dirty and die.

Die.

Elinor, now asleep in the bedroom, her square jaw up like a tombstone, her mouth as wide as a new grave, her light snore ticking fitfully, like some tired machine. Elinor was going to die. Henry brushed and spat into the basin, noticing the blood darken the snow-white saliva.

He would get the poison today.

Humming to himself, he went back into the bedroom and put on a pair of grey corduroy trousers, a red shirt and a bright turquoise jumper, stained with food. He looked, he thought as he examined himself in the mirror, more than usually hideous. He rather hoped his wife would wake and catch him like this, unshaven, hair greasy and uncombed, and as he stood beside the bed he farted quite loudly, as if to remind her that she deserved someone as awful as him.

But she did not wake and for a moment Henry was flooded by helpless rage, a feeling that made him want to run to the bedside table, snatch up Elinor’s nail scissors and twist them into her neck, this way and that, gouging out blood and veins. ‘Excuse me!’ he would scream as he slashed at her throat, ‘I am here! I exist! Excuse me! Excuse me!’

Giving himself dialogue seemed to calm him and he stood for a moment, arms idle at his side, breathing slowly and heavily. He felt as if he had just run fifty yards, rather quickly. Calm, Henry. Calm. The great thing about poisoners is their control. You don’t dash into breakfast and slop paraquat over the wife’s Frosties, while hurling abuse at her. You are quiet and slow and methodical. And when she clutches at her side and complains of a slight ache you lean forward solicitously and ask, ‘Are you all right, my darling?’ You are gentle and considerate. And inside you are the Wimbledon Poisoner.

He was OK now. He bent over, kissed the least precipitous bit of her chin that he could find and went downstairs to find his daughter.

Maisie was sitting in front of the television, glaring sullenly at a man in a pink tracksuit. Getting her out was clearly going to be a problem.

After ‘No’ her favourite word was ‘Why’.

Henry’s ploy was simply to lie. ‘I thought of going out for some choc bars,’ he would say, adding
sotto voce
as his daughter ran for her anorak, ‘and I thought we might drop off at the gym/piano teacher’s/library on the way . . .’

He promised her a sight of Arfur this morning. He had remembered that Donald, Arfur’s father, was liable to be waiting, with other fathers, in his parked car outside the Wimbledon Young Players’ rehearsal. Unbelievably, he had actually christened his only son Arfur. Even more unbelievably Maisie thought Arfur was, to use a word too much on her lips these days, ‘cute’. Even more unbelievable than either of these details was the fact that Donald was a doctor.

All the men in the suburb had jobs. Henry didn’t know any unemployed people. He read about the unemployed in newspapers and saw films about them on television, pacing across photogenic sections of contemporary Britain and muttering darkly about waste and emptiness. The curious thing was that the lawyers, dentists, opticians, salesmen and accountants he knew didn’t seem to do much work. Perhaps, he thought as he followed Maisie down the front path, it was that he knew them only as fathers, as people whose primary function was to stand at the edge of swimming pools, dank gymnasia or football fields, their collective manhoods bruised by nurture, blurring with age and helpless love.

Or perhaps they didn’t actually do any work at all. Perhaps they only pretended. Perhaps the unemployed were the only people who did any work these days.

Once you knew Donald was a doctor, of course, it was impossible to forget it. His manner, over the years, had come to seem eerily medical. If Henry offered him a drink, Donald would compress his lips, lower his eyes, as if in the middle of a difficult diagnosis, and nod, slowly, responsibly, like a man burdened with some ghastly secret about the state of Henry’s insides.

‘Thanks, Henry,’ he would say, in a tone that indicated this might well be the last drink he would be accepting from his friend, ‘thanks!’

The phrase Henry wanted to use whenever alone with Donald’s permanent bedside manner was
How long have I got, Doctor?
There was something about the care with which he looked into your eyes that was truly frightening.

The only time that Donald didn’t look like a doctor was when people at parties asked him anything about health or physiology. Then he looked like a frightened animal. His composure would vanish, his grey eyes would shift around the room and, muttering something about antibiotics, he would disappear to the other end of the room, where some hours later he would be discovered at some local worthy’s side, discussing parking problems at Wait-rose with the quiet authority of a great physician.

Maisie had gone round to the passenger door of the Volkswagen and was standing, one hand poised to open it as soon as Henry should unlock it. Henry lowered himself into the driver’s seat and stood looking out at her for a moment. It was amazing how little time children wasted. How they went on to the next thing with such satisfaction and certainty. How they went on from being carried and put in things to sitting in the front seat of cars, opening things for themselves, unlocking the tame mysteries of life. She’ll be bloody driving soon, he thought, as he clicked open the lock and his daughter settled in beside him. She had her mother’s knack of occupying space around her. She snapped the seat belt into position and stared out through the window as if in search of something else to organize.

‘Elsie Mitchell says I stink!’ she said, as if opening this topic for theoretical debate.

‘Who’s Elsie Mitchell?’

‘A girl in Class Two of course,’ said Maisie, ‘with a nose like a pig!’

Henry drove.

He turned right into Caldecott Road, left into Howard’s Avenue, right on to Mainwaring Road and up the wide thoroughfare that led to Wimbledon Hill. In all these streets, thick with lime trees, estate agents’ boards and large, clean cars, there were no people to be seen at all. Henry knew all the houses – the double-fronted mansion with the Mercedes in the driveway, the row of early Victorian workmen’s cottages, fastidiously restored, the occasional bungalow or mock Gothic affair with turrets – he knew what each one was worth, and he followed their fortunes, decay, repair, sale, in the way a countryman might watch the seasons. At 29 Howard’s Avenue the builder’s skip was still outside and the rusty scaffolding blinded its shabby windows. At 45 Mainwaring Road the upper maisonette was still advertising itself for sale – no less than six boards competing for the passerby’s attention. Henry noticed all these things with something like affection while Maisie pressed her nose (very like a pig’s, Henry thought) to the window of the Passat.

How was he going to turn the conversation round to the subject of poison? Henry could not imagine, when it came to it, the beginning, middle or end of a conversation in which Donald would tell him how to get hold of an untraceable poison.

He could steal some leaves from Donald’s prescription pad. But were doctors allowed to order poisons? Why should they be? What were the medical applications of, say, arsenic? Henry realized he had absolutely no idea. He was as pathetically unqualified in the art of murder as he was at golf or philosophy. The problem with this poisoning business was that the preliminary research was horribly incriminating. One minute there you were asking casual questions about arsenic and the next there was your wife throwing up and having her hair fall out. People would put two and two together.

Christ, what were the major poisons?

There was arsenic, cyanide, prussic acid and – the list stopped there. Nobody much used poison any more; that was the trouble. Or if they did it was so modern that nobody got to hear about it. Henry couldn’t think of any celebrated poisoners apart from Maltby and Crippen. And after Crippen, what? The line died out, didn’t it? And while we were talking about Crippen, it would probably be unwise to choose as a role model someone who had been topped for the offence. He wanted someone who had got away with it.

He was drawing up outside the hall when he thought of Graham Young.

For the moment he could think of nothing apart from the name. Young had, as far as Henry could remember, been sent to Broadmoor. But hadn’t he been a state-of-the-art poisoner? A man who approached the subject with some finesse. Even if it wasn’t quite enough finesse to keep him out of the loony bin. From Henry’s recollection of the trial, which was, admittedly, not all that clear, Young had been some kind of chemist. There was probably no better way, if one was going to do this thing properly, than to study a celebrated practitioner. It wouldn’t be enough to find a poison that would finish her off. He needed to know how to play it when the abdominal pains got started. Was there, for example, a poison that created symptoms that looked like a fairly recognizable disease? And if so, why wasn’t every red-blooded English male using it?

Graham Young, yes. Graham Young. Henry had an image of a quiet man in a suit. A man not unlike himself. Something wet and heavy hit the side of his head. He realized Maisie was kissing him. He turned and watched her run up the path and into the hall. Where, though, was Donald? His white Sierra was parked just ahead of Henry, the door open, but there was no sign either of him or Arfur.

Henry got out of the car and sauntered over to the Sierra. No one around. The passenger door was open. And there, on the top of his open bag, staring straight at him, was the white notepad he used for issuing prescriptions. Henry pulled open the door, yanked off the three top sheets and scuttled back to his car. Only when he was safely inside the Passat did he look round to see if he had been observed. He was safe he was safe he was safe.