The Wimbledon Poisoner Read online

  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.

  2

  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.

  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.

  3

  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. Un
believably, 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.