The Wimbledon Poisoner Read online

  At the corner of Wealdlake Road, four streets north of Wimbledon station, was the ideal place. A heavy wooden window frame, dusty glass and three big-bellied bottles, coloured with the bright, mysterious fluids Henry remembered from his childhood. He couldn’t remember quite when he had first visited the shop but, like Wimbledon itself, it had always been there. Henry had lived in Wimbledon all his life. They would, Henry thought, be glad to see anyone, even a prospective poisoner. They were probably desperate enough to offer a comprehensive after-sales service (‘Thallium not right, sir? Try antimony perhaps? Or potassium chlorate . . .’).

  He parked the Passat and told Maisie he was going to buy some aspirin.

  ‘Can I come?’

  ‘No!’ said Henry.

  Before she had time to protest he had locked the doors and, removing his glasses as he went, walked briskly over the road. He narrowly missed what he thought was a lamp post but turned out to be a tree, and reached for where the handle was usually to be found on a front door. To his surprise it was there.

  He felt perfectly calm as he entered the shop. Not only calm. He felt Bleath-like to a surprising degree. Perhaps this was because he could hardly see more than a yard in front of his face.

  ‘Hullo, sir!’ said a blurred, white shape. It sounded old and incompetent.

  ‘Hullo!’ he replied, moving cautiously towards it. Then, with the air of a man asking for twenty cigarettes, he said, ‘I need 10 or 15 grams of thallium. Do you keep it or should I go to a larger store?’

  The blurred white shape came closer. It seemed to be smiling. Why was it smiling? You are Henry Farr the Wimbledon Poisoner and I arrest you in the name of— Hang on, hang on. He wasn’t the Wimbledon Poisoner. Yet.

  In the face of the shape’s silence, he continued, breezily, ‘I don’t know whether a place as small as this keeps registered poisons but I’ve just moved labs . . .’

  Moved labs! Brilliant!

  ‘And I don’t know this neck of the woods . . .’

  The shape was close enough for Henry to see that it was male.

  ‘Thallium,’ it said, in a frankly sinister tone, ‘thallium . . .’

  Henry wished it would not say the word quite so loudly. And was it necessary to repeat it like that? Or, in so doing, sound like that man in Journey Into Space who was born in 1945 and died in 1939? Yes, thallium you old berk, thallium, the heavy metal poison that makes your hair fall out and gives you diarrhoea and you die screaming. That one. Thallium.

  ‘Not Valium,’ said Henry briskly, ‘but thallium!’

  ‘Yes,’ said the shape. ‘I remember . . .’

  It sounded, Henry thought, as if all this had happened before. As if, on this very spot a hundred years ago . . . what? Some thought, some fragment of memory was tugging at him but he could not quite catch it, as so often these days. Something he had said or somebody had said, something . . . There was, anyway, an atmosphere in this shop, an unpleasant feeling, as if he had just walked through a gateway into a world parallel to our own, where huge and unpleasant moral choices are offered, fought over and discussed.

  The shape seemed to be looking through a book, although what the book was Henry could not tell. How to Spot a Poisoner perhaps, or Some Common Excuses Used by Murderers. Or perhaps he was just trying to find out what thallium was.

  ‘The heavy metal . . .’ said Henry, in what he hoped was an offensively knowledgeable tone.

  ‘What do you require this for?’ said the shape.

  ‘Work on optical lenses,’ said Henry, adding, smartly, ‘with a high refractive index!’

  ‘Oh yes . . .’ said the shape.

  Maybe he was looking at a book that told you things like that. Or maybe people were always popping in here for 10 grams of thallium. Or maybe he was bluffing. He was going to look it up, whip down to Boots and, having bought a few quidsworth, sell it to Henry at ten per cent over the retail value. He was probably willing to sell anything, the glass jars in the window included.

  It was spooky, though, thought Henry, it was a spooky shop. Or was it just that what he was doing was spooky?

  He moved up to the counter with the air of a man who doesn’t like having to go through a routine once again but is prepared to do so, all right then here’s my card if you insist! He took out the letter and tossed it on the counter.

  ‘There’s my authority,’ he said, ‘if you need that.’

  Bleath was clearly a man impatient of bureaucracy, anxious to get back to his lenses. The shape seemed impressed.

  ‘Do you have any identification, Mr Bleath?’

  Bleath put a hand into his breast pocket. Then he transferred the same hand to the back pocket of his trousers and did some not very good patting of both flanks.

  ‘I seem to have mislaid my driving licence!’ he said tetchily and then, ‘Here’s a letter addressed to me!’

  It was the way he handed the old fool the letter, Henry decided afterwards, that had done it. He had long ago noticed that if you stared at a customs officer when going out through the green channel, the customs officer stopped you. You had to be careful with officials. And he handed over the letter (which had creased beautifully in his pocket) with just the right note of impatient politeness.

  ‘You’ll have to sign the register!’ said the shape.

  He had done it.

  5

  The Poisons Register was, like the rest of the shop, a piece of England’s past. It was in a thick blue binding and its antique look – the paper was ruled in the way Henry remembered books of his childhood being ruled – gave it the air of a family bible. ‘There you are, Mr Bleath.’

  He went on to name a sum that Henry thought very acceptable. It was a cheap and easy way of murdering your wife, thought Henry. Very reasonable. Very reasonable indeed. Mind you, in any area of domestic life it was more sensible, in budgetary terms anyway, to Do It Yourself. Some of these types who went in for murder as a professional thing would probably take you to the cleaners as soon as look at you.

  He went out, slowly, calmly, ready for the catch question at the door . . . ‘Best of luck with the poisoning!’ ‘Thanks!’ Shit! Henry replaced his glasses. But the shape, who was now revealed to be an amiable-looking man of about thirty, remained silent.

  The air outside smelt good. Up the hill from the south-west a gentle breeze was blowing, and opposite him a huge chestnut tree, already infected with the beautiful rust of autumn, stirred in sympathy with the wind. It was good to know that Elinor would not be breathing this sweet, suburban air for very much longer.

  In the car Maisie was studying her music. She looked old and serious. She had scraped her hair back from her forehead and tied it in a ponytail with a pink ribbon. Maisie was always doing things with her hair. Sometimes she piled it up, sometimes she pulled it forward in a fringe, and sometimes she let it hang straight, like her mother’s. But whereas Elinor’s hair fell, as she herself put it, ‘like a great, calm waterfall’, Maisie’s hair just hung, like old socks on a washing line. And whatever she did with her hair, it still, thought Henry, didn’t do anything for her face – Maisie’s face was still there, round as a dinner plate. The kind of face one saw on children by roadsides in Connemara.

  He leaned over and kissed his daughter on the forehead. She continued to study her music. After Elinor was dead, he and Maisie could really get to know each other, thought Henry. As he intended to behave extraordinarily well, she would grow to like and respect him (he wasn’t entirely sure she did at the moment). One of the advantages of scheduling one’s own bereavement was that it was far easier to respond in a mature, caring way to one’s partner’s decease. Henry had read an article in The Times, which said that partners who lost a loved one often blamed the departed for the death. Henry did not intend to do this. He was going to be a tower of strength to all concerned.

  ‘You’ve been ages,’ said Elinor, as he and Maisie trudged up the steps.

  ‘Sorry!’ said Henry.

  His wife came towards
him menacingly. When she walked she moved each hip separately, like a gunslinger moving towards an opponent down Main Street. She drew her right hand out from the folds of her apron and thrust a piece of paper at him, averting her eyes as she did so. It was as if, thought Henry, she wished to have nothing to do with the dispute she knew this word would provoke.

  ‘Waitrose!’ she said.

  ‘I thought you went yesterday . . .’ said Henry. His voice, he noticed, made him sound frightened. Why was this?

  Elinor narrowed her eyes and swung her straight black hair out behind her like a scarf. She moved, as she often did, from pure, concentrated malice, to a vaguely girlish mode, as if she was looking for someone (not Henry) to put his arms round her and tell her everything was all right. A fatherly sort of chap. Henry grabbed the paper and backed away down the path.

  ‘You go to Waitrose now!’ she barked.

  Was this a command or a statement? It felt like a command, as did so many of Elinor’s remarks – but it had the menacing power of a scientific law.

  ‘It isn’t my turn!’ said Henry.

  ‘It is!’ said Elinor.

  ‘It isn’t!’ said Henry.

  ‘Oh yes it is!’ said Elinor.

  Henry kicked the side of the kerb viciously. She was being more than usually assertive. Things weren’t helped by the fact that he had remembered, in the course of this not very elevated argument, that it was actually his turn. He kicked the kerb again hard and set his lips in a scowl. Why did he always choose to lose his temper over issues in which he was in the wrong?

  She’s been seeing her therapist again, thought Henry, as he stumbled towards the Passat.

  ‘Can I go?’ said Maisie.

  Elinor drew herself upwards and outwards. Then, with the fluidity usually only displayed by cartoon characters, she swooped down and around her daughter; her arms cradled each shoulder and her face slid down next to Maisie’s. Her voice changed too. It acquired an impossible sweetness, a tenderness that was almost sinister.

  ‘Darling,’ said Elinor, ‘shall Maisie stay with Mummy and do her cello practice while Mummy helps her?’

  Maisie looked trapped. She liked Waitrose. In Waitrose there were Twix bars and Breakaways; there were chocolate digestives and huge jumbo packets of crisps and giant, plastic bottles of Coca-Cola. Sometimes she and Henry sat together in the car, a few streets away from their home, munching chocolate bars, while in the back of the Passat huge cardboard boxes of grains, wholewheat cereal, low-fat spreads and calorie-free, taste-free things to stop you dying of cancer awaited Elinor’s approval. She would not have sweets in the house. Simply to smell Coca-Cola made her, she said, violently sick.

  ‘See you later, Maisie!’ said Henry.

  ‘We were going to Elspeth’s!’ said Maisie.

  Christ yes! He started to mouth the words ‘I’ll bring you a choc bar,’ but before he was halfway through this soundless sentence his wife’s face levelled up towards him. She had the clear gaze of an experienced poker player.

  ‘No sweets!’ she said.

  ‘No, dear,’ said Henry.

  Clutching the phial of thallium in his pocket he got back into the car. It was curious. The last place he wanted to be was in the car. Why, every time he got out of it, was he forced back into it?

  Today, of course, it suited him to be doing the shopping. What went well with thallium? Curried things? Chicken Dopiaza Thallium Style! But she wouldn’t eat curry, would she? Anyway the stuff had no taste. Just give her thallium! Thallium à la mode de Wimbledon, served in a little china pot with a spray of basil and a clean table napkin. Elinor might almost accept that. Nouvelle cuisine methods of preparing thallium . . . a drop of thallium on a piece of seaweed, chilled thallium, served garnished with a single radicchio leaf . . . down home thallium . . . thallium and beans . . . big, tasty, hearty, man-sized thallium burgers served with french fries, pickle and thallium on the side . . . ‘It’s so versatile,’ said Henry, aloud, as he drove back down the hill, ‘There are so many things you can do with thallium!’

  Shopping with death in mind made shopping almost bearable.

  Henry was by far the most cheerful-looking person in Wait-rose, as he scanned the loaded shelves for his wife’s last meal. Elinor’s favourite food was yoghurt. Yoghurt and thallium? Not really. Ahead of him a morose-looking man in a cardigan was sorting through slabs of meat in plastic containers. Once again Henry was struck by the enormity of supermarkets . . . those millions of dead animals, butchered, arranged in parcels, labelled with a SELL BY or a BEST BEFORE date, grouped, not by species or sub-species, but by parts of the body. Whole rows of chicken thighs, galleries of boneless chicken breasts, chicken escalopes coated with breadcrumbs, ready-seasoned, free-range, corn-fed chicken that—

  Hang on. Ready-seasoned, free-range, corn-fed chicken. Henry pulled one towards him. In a way, he thought, it was a cleaner life being a battery chicken than a free-range, corn-fed chicken. At least the battery chicken knew what it was up against. Stuck in a cell, the light on twenty-four hours a day, at least the battery chicken wasn’t going to be fooled into thinking well of people. But the free-range, corn-fed chicken was the victim of a cruel joke. Given a little hope, a little patch of ground . . . so that it would taste better. Soon, thought Henry, feeling, as he often did, a sense of solidarity with chickens, they would label one with THIS FOWL HAS BEEN HAND-REARED AND TALKED TO NICELY. IT DIED PEACEFULLY.

  Elinor liked ready-seasoned, free-range, corn-fed chicken. And the fine dusting of the seasoning – the green of the parsley, the black of the pepper, would be a perfect cover for thallium. Even more importantly, Maisie didn’t like chicken, especially free-range, corn-fed, humanely killed chicken that had been through Jungian analysis. She liked great slabs of chicken in crispy batter. It would also be comparatively easy – he was getting excited – to sprinkle the thallium on the breast, because Elinor liked breast and he liked leg.

  ‘A little white meat, darling?’

  ‘Of course, my darling!’ Elinor would squawk, brushing her mane of black hair away from her forehead. And then the plate, piled high with sprouts and potatoes and gravy and topped with succulent slices of perfectly roasted breast of chicken, coated with a crispy surface of parsley, pepper and thallium, would land before Mrs Farr. And she would spear a piece of chicken and carry it high in the air towards that great black hole of a mouth and, still talking about her therapy, her plans for the future, his inability to understand her as a woman, his crude, male-orientated sexuality, she would munch, munch, munch . . .

  ‘Are you going to make love to that chicken?’

  Henry jumped.

  It was Donald.

  ‘Oh. Hi!’

  ‘You look miles away.’

  ‘I was.’

  Donald peered into Henry’s trolley in a companiable fashion. All it contained was a small jar of capers.

  ‘You’re a bit behind, Henry.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  Donald had got four sponge rolls, three jumbo packets of cornflakes, five loaves of bread, some digestive biscuits, a square packet of something called Uncle Sam’s Chocolate Chip Cookies, a Battenburg cake and two mixed, assorted crisps, in bags that were the size of a small dustbin. Donald approached Wait-rose with military precision, working his way steadily through Farinaceous, Vegetables (Salad), Vegetables (Root, Loose and Packed), Poultry, Game, Continental Cuts and Mince, and from there by way of Fish (Frozen) and Fish (Fresh) to Spices, Pickles and Non-refrigerated Ready-packed Sauces, through to Pet Food, Pet Accessories and Household Cleaners.

  He nodded his big, handsome head still thick with greying curls.

  ‘Keeping well, though?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Henry, ‘fine.’

  Donald narrowed his eyes very slightly and nodded once again. His perfect profile looked off down the rows of brightly coloured packets. ‘Should I tell him now?’ his expression seemed to say, ‘Or would it be better to let the disease take its course? It won’t be lon
g now anyway . . .’

  ‘Elinor’s a bit off colour, though.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well . . . it’s a funny thing. I don’t know whether I told you . . . but some years ago she was diagnosed as having . . . polyneuritis.’

  Donald’s perfectly formed lips began to tremble.

  ‘I was wondering whether . . . maybe . . .’

  Donald looked away, longingly, towards Refrigerated Delicatessen, his clear doctor’s eyes, moving expertly from Ready-packed Gravadlax, through Hand-sliced, Oak-smoked, Ready-interleaved Salmon Slices, along the twelve varieties of German and Polish sausage, the pre-packed slices of Waitrose Pastrami and Salt Beef until they reached the orderly rows of Fresh Tortellini, Cappelletti, Paglia e Fieno and Tagliatelle (Green and White).

  ‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘must get on!’

  And with one more nod of that perfect head he was off, working his trolley through the morning crowd with the air of a great surgeon.

  Henry put the chicken back in the pile. He paused, then from the back took one that seemed to have got separated from the rest. Its polythene wrapping looked vaguely torn and grubby, as if members of the Waitrose staff had already been playing catch with it. It was past the SELL BY date too. It would do perfectly. It seemed wrong, somehow, to poison a piece of meat in pristine condition.

  He threw it in the trolley and went off to look for things Elinor didn’t like.

  6

  Once he had decided on Free-range Chicken à la Thallium, it was fairly important not to buy anything Elinor might choose as a substitute. If she were to insist on veal goulash, for example, all would be lost. Maisie liked veal goulash. She had heard it was bad for you.