The Wimbledon Poisoner (36 page)

His little eyes were bloodshot. All around them on the darkened common was silent. And his voice, now, seemed to be coming from inside Henry’s head. If Rush was part of him he was the authentically evil part. Was he now going to come even closer, to sidle up to Henry’s mouth, and press himself close to him, put those wrinkled middle-aged lips on his and climb into him, as an astronaut might clamber into a space suit?

‘The anemone is poisonous when fresh,’ crooned Rush, ‘and water dropwort, they call it oenanthe crocata, that’s poisonous too. Nature has made it look like the plant they call sweet flag. Some children ate it and died in 1947. Why did Mother Nature do that? Why do you think? I think because she is very cruel, like all mothers, and she plants in her garden things that heal us and things that hurt us and we don’t know any more what will heal and what will hurt us. We are living off poison. We have poison in our bloodstream; it has got into our bloodstream and we must drive it out.’

His voice was rising in pitch and his mouth, working this way and that, was dribbling freely. ‘I wanted to save Elinor from the poison. You’re poisonous, you are, you are poison. I wanted her to be free, I gave her the antidote, we have no antidotes now, we have sold our antidotes, we have no English poisons, we have Paki poison and Jew poison and Nigger poison and you’re not listening to me, are you?’

Henry was trying not to listen. But it was proving difficult.

Rush’s voice suddenly changed tone completely. ‘The earliest form of windmill in England,’ he said, sounding rather bright and cheerful, ‘was the post mill, which first appeared in 1180!’

Windmills, Henry decided, were much safer territory than the English Naturalist’s Guide to Poisons of the Hedgerows. In the interests of keeping this conversation as alive as conversations of this nature could ever be, he said, ‘Really?’

‘Don’t pretend to be interested,’ said Rush, ‘when you’re not! Don’t fake it! I can spot fakes!’

He looked across at Henry in a sullen manner. ‘Do you think God is a windmill?’ he said. ‘I think God is a windmill. Worm drive and rack and pinion. Fantail and sailblade. I am His Miller you know. I am God’s Miller. He came to me last night and asked me to grind up the bad people in Wimbledon. All of the bad people. Do you think I should grind them up, Henry?’

Henry found this a completely unanswerable remark. Once, years ago, a boy at his school had, in the middle of a history lesson, informed him that all the clocks and watches in Wimbledon were being shipped out at night in furniture vans. What, he asked Henry, who was only fourteen, was he going to do about this? He goggled then, as he goggled now, at a loss to know what to say.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Rush, ‘died for us, and he broke bread for us but it isn’t wholewheat you see, it’s processed. It’s full of poisons. They put the list of the poisons on the side and God is angry. So I am going to give everyone an antidote to the poisons. Truth casts out falsehood, right? Sodium thiosulphate casts out hydrocyanic acid, that would have done your shrink friend more good than talk talk talk about his dreams, there are no dreams. There are laudanum dreams, what would you give for laudanum? Potassium permanganate. We must cast out the devils in the bread!’

‘I see . . .’ said Henry, thinking he had found a way of giving this conversation some direction. If he could bring it round to additives in food he felt he was on safe ground. But Rush was looking at him as if he, Henry, was the one who was barking mad. Insanity of course, is very proud of its rules, it doesn’t want just anyone to join its club. What was strange about Rush was the easy commerce between the apparently normal and the transparently crazy, and the fact that the building bricks of the edifice Rush was constructing, the words, the phrases, the sentences, some of the ideas, were the currency of the normal, the everyday. Just as poisons were chains of chemicals, which, linked in another order, might create, and not destroy life, so Henry saw cliché, comedy, real pain and even rational intelligence glimmer fitfully in his speech, promise the great human achievement, coherence, only to see them, seconds later, gutter out in the wind and the rain that blew through his skull.

‘I am going up into the mill now,’ said Rush, ‘because my mother is there. She knows all about Maltby of course. She’s good with Maltby. There’s a man in CID Wimbledon called Maltby and a man called Miller. That’s when I knew I was God’s Miller and I had to grind him up the way we used to grind the bread so I ground glass in his beef daube, you can see through glass, I could see right into his stomach and in his stomach I saw all this poison, all this poison we read and see and think and feel and never own up to because we are supposed to be so fucking squeaky clean, I am going in now!’

‘OK, then . . .’ said Henry.

And walking like a man in a dream, clutching the remains of Sprott in his right hand and the phial of whatever it was in his left, Detective Inspector Rush walked towards the Wimbledon Windmill to talk to God.

Henry did not attempt to follow him.

Not that he believed God was in the windmill, although, if He was, Henry did not think he was, yet, in a fit state to see Him. What he did feel was that Rush was quite capable of leaping out at him from behind a wooden pillar or a display case of nineteenth-century artefacts.

The trouble was, after Rush had gone and Henry was alone, he suddenly felt exposed, like a man standing under the walls of a medieval castle waiting for the defenders to tip out boiling oil, or an archer to appear somewhere high up on the battlements, his arrow aimed at Henry’s heart. The windmill was so still! So quiet!

Perhaps he should go after him. He cut through the wicket gate in the privet hedge and made for the open door. As far as he remembered there was a steep staircase to the left, leading up to a landing. But it was possible that Rush might be waiting for him on the stairs. It would be best to wait below until the policeman made a move.

The trouble was, once he was inside the door, it seemed quite as frightening to stay where he was as to continue up the dark stairs. The only light came from the illumination outside, which from the interior gave one the illusion of being behind the footlights of a
son et lumière.
Henry felt on display, caught, like an escaping prisoner in a searchlight, but in spite of the alarmingly public nature of the place, everything round it was silent. He stood listening for a moment. There was someone on the floor above him. Creak. Creak. Creak.

‘Er . . .’ Henry craned his neck upwards. ‘Rush?’

There was no answer.

‘Look . . . Rush . . . if you’re hiding up there . . .’

If you’re hiding up there what?

‘If you are . . . you can’t hide for ever . . .’

There was a scurry of feet on the boards of the museum above and the sound of something being dragged across the floor. Was Rush barricading himself in? Henry imagined the noise growing in volume, the creaks, thumps and rattles coalescing, fusing, until in the dawn Rush would, as he had promised, start to grind. The great spur wheel would turn, the governors start to clatter and the unseen hand of some miller open the shutters of the sails through the striking rod and the great stones would start to grind the corn, only it wouldn’t be the corn of course, but the suburb itself, sucked into the machine, like smoke from a pipe, squeezed and bruised through the bed stone and the runner stone, shaken out through the hoppers, mounted on the framework they called the horse, shaken by the spindle they called the damsel because it made so much noise, and then poured like liquid meal through the holes into the floor to be bagged up for market. Reaping the sinners!

‘Rush?’

Henry was now round the turn of the stairs. In time to see the policeman’s legs disappear from the end of a ladder placed against the trap door that leads to the upper part of the mill. Once, in Maltby’s day, there was an external staircase up to the fantail stage – now Rush was climbing up through the interior to . . . to what?

With a new confidence, Henry started to follow him. He was on the third or the fourth rung of the ladder when he heard a voice, booming round in the upper chamber – ‘Come along, Mother!’

Henry stopped. Then he called up into the darkness above him. ‘Rush? Rush?’

He heard what sounded like an old woman’s voice: ‘I’m tired, Everett!’

Then Rush’s voice: ‘Not much further, Mother . . .’

‘Everett! . . . I’m tired . . .’

Henry climbed further up the ladder and put one hand on the edge of the trap door.

‘Everett!’ he called. ‘Everett! Are you there?’

There was a silence.

Then, Rush’s voice: ‘They hanged me at Wandsworth in 1888. They put a rope round my neck and dropped me through the floor. Can you imagine that?’

Another silence. Then – ‘The answer to all this is Maltby. He’s the answer to all this. Nobody understands, you see. Nobody cares about what happened. Nobody cares about the past. That’s what they’ve done to this country. They’ve stopped caring about the past. And so we have to go over it and over it. Over and over and over—’

Rush’s voice was coming nearer.

‘And over and over and—’

‘CHRIST!’

This last ejaculation was caused by Rush’s slamming down the trap door on Henry’s fingers. He heard the policeman cackle as, pushing aside the trap door, he shouldered his way to the upper chamber, in time to see Rush scrambling up the steps that led out to the fantail stage. Henry followed him.

When he got out on to the wooden platform, the thick white sails of the fantail straight ahead of him, like one of those child’s toys designed to turn and rattle in the wind, Rush was nowhere to be seen. Down below Henry could see the top of the two yew trees, from this angle and in the theatrical light as dense and sculptured as a cumulus. He looked around him in the cold December night and then, cautiously, went towards the edge of the platform, shielded from the drop by only one whitened spar, at above chest height. Had the man jumped? Then as he came to the edge he heard a laugh above him and, turning, he looked up to see the detective sitting on the edge of the windmill’s cap.

‘Look at it!’ said Rush. ‘Look at it!’

He gestured out towards Parkside and the village. From up here you could see the lights, and beyond them the dark incline of the hill; beyond that the far south of the city, spread out into Surrey, Merton, Mitcham, Wallingford, Epsom . . .

‘Look at what?’ said Henry.

‘Wimbledon!’ shrieked Rush. ‘Wimbledon! Wimbledon! Wimbledon!’

And, unsteadily, he climbed to his feet. He began to walk across the curved cap of the windmill towards the floodlit sails. Away down to Henry’s right he heard voices. Someone had been alerted.

‘I don’t like Wimbledon,’ Rush was saying, ‘I don’t like it.’

This, thought Henry, was in some ways a promising development. If he could get him to talk about—

‘I don’t like the people!’ Rush went on. ‘I don’t like them!’

Henry decided not to respond to this.

‘I don’t like the roads or the trees or the houses or the pets or the gardens or the shops or the cars or the—’

He stopped and looked down at Henry.

‘Why do you think you’re so perfect?’ he said. ‘Why do you think you’re so squeaky clean? Every single thing you do helps to kill someone. Every time you make a plan or buy a drink or phone a friend, you’re helping to kill them. Life is a disease, my friend. And how do you know what you put in that food didn’t kill? It helped to kill, didn’t it? It all helped to kill.’

He held up the polythene bag containing Sprott. ‘What counts,’ he said, ‘is our intention. What counts is our secret thoughts. People put on smart coats and ties and go out to lunch and look almost human, but inside . . . oh, inside . . . And if we do look at the intention, you see, if we do look at the soul, and we judge the soul, how many times a day do we kill or murder or torture or betray or behave obscenely? Everyone is guilty in their secret thoughts. Don’t think you’re any better than me because you aren’t. You’re a hypocrite. And your Justice, your dear old Blind Justice is just a way of reassuring yourself that you can see. Well, you can’t. You’re stumbling along in the dark, groping your way home and you don’t know anything about anything.’

The voices below were getting louder. Someone was telling someone else that there were vandals. But as yet, it seemed, no one could locate the source of the voices. Henry should have called out to them but he didn’t. He stood looking up at Rush.

‘Morality,’ said the policeman, ‘morality! What’s your morality? Your morality is poison. And you swig it down and roll it round your tongue and you say “that did me good” because someone smacked your bottom when you were a baby and said “now you’re better” and you were better. It’s a matter of habit, your morality, and you’re going to have to acquire some new habits, little man in the bowler hat, because your world is changing and with it your morality. And you’re all going to have to get used to the taste of poison. There’s poison in Ireland and poison in Africa and poison in Latin America and there’s poison right here in Wimbledon and every day you drink it up like a good little man in a bowler hat and you say “My, that feels better! My, that’s good poison!” Don’t you? Don’t you? Don’t you?’

Henry felt this required some response. ‘I—’

But Rush, waving the polythene bag around his head, silenced him with a scream. ‘In here,’ he shouted, ‘I’ve got a dentist!’

He shook the bag violently. Sprott’s ashes clouded against the transparent, plastic walls of the container.

‘Forty-odd years—’ went on Rush, ‘of being a dentist! Of being a good little dentist! Of doing his bit for people’s teeth! Good boy! Well done! Forty years of standing up and drilling away and thinking you were being some use! And at the end of forty years? What at the end of forty years, eh?’

Here he shook the bag again. Little bits of Sprott dashed against the polythene. There was the possibility, thought Henry, that he would evacuate the man’s remains all over the cap of the windmill. But, instead, Rush opened the neck of the bag and looked down into it. What he saw seemed to please him.