The Wimbledon Poisoner

by Nigel Williams

  If only she drank something other than herb tea.

  Trying not to think about her possible reaction, Henry loaded cured fish, offal, red meat and a bold assortment of vegetables he had never even heard of, let alone eaten. All they had in common was a potential for repelling Mrs Farr. Bags of kohlrabi and okra, sweet potatoes, chillies, Chinese-leaf lettuce and three pounds of a very peculiar thing called an edenwort, which looked like a beetroot going through a severe identity crisis. There was a little plastic notice next to it which read EDENWORT: SLICE IT OR BAKE IT OR USE IT IN CASSEROLES. Or just throw it at the neighbours, thought Henry grimly, as he tipped the edenwort in next to the water-chestnuts and the giant yam.

  Checking his purchases against her list as he approached the checkout, he was pleased to find that at no point did the two coincide.

  Then he saw Donald, trolley piled high with middle-of-the-road food.

  ‘Hullo there!’ called Henry.

  Donald nodded, briefly.

  ‘How about a pint?’

  Donald considered this offer; his features rippled with thought. If he were a picture his handsome, regular cheekbones and serious eyes would probably be titled ‘A Doctor Decides’.

  ‘OK,’ he said, in the end. Imaginary nurses sighed with relief. The hours of waiting over! At last they had a diagnosis! ‘A jar would be very nice.’

  If Henry arrived back after three, Elinor would be at therapy. Maisie would be at ballet. He would have time to stow away the kohlrabi, the offal and the edenwort. And by the time she returned it would be six or six thirty. Teatime!

  Time, now Henry was forty, did not proceed in the way it had previously done. Once upon a time, there was waking, which was slow and painful, and then quite a long period, replete with chances and triumphs and defeats and risks, which sometimes, though not always, ended in lunch. Afternoon, Henry remembered, used to be as prolonged and arid as Arizona, and they were followed by things called evenings, which were entirely different and separate from nights. Now – you woke up with a sense of relief and surprise that you were still there, you got up, brushed your teeth, and before you knew it you were watching television. It was dark outside and well past your bedtime. You were also, probably, drunk, but how you got drunk, or where you had been between that first moment of reacquaintance with yourself and now, was a mystery. Apart, of course, from the shops. You had almost certainly been to the shops.

  ‘We could go to the Rose and Thorn!’ said Donald.

  ‘Great!’ said Henry.

  Donald began to place his groceries on the moving counter.

  Henry tipped out the edenwort and looked at Donald’s back. He looked like a man who would sign a mean death certificate.

  What to do with the chicken after the meal? Assuming he phoned Donald as soon as she began to vomit and have headaches, wouldn’t Donald ask what they had eaten for dinner? Maybe not, since Henry, unless he got the thallium anywhere near the chicken leg, would be feeling fine.

  It was vital, though, to include Donald in the diagnosis of Elinor’s condition. He was not only a close personal friend, he was also, to Henry’s knowledge, one of the worst doctors in the southeast of England.

  ‘Some bloke came into the surgery,’ he would say, sourly, ‘complaining of headaches. “What do you expect me to do about it?” I said. “I get headaches. We all get headaches. Piss off out of it!” I said, “You’re giving me a headache!” ’

  ‘Good for you!’ Henry would reply. ‘Send him away with a flea in his ear. Psychosomatic, I suppose?’

  Donald would pull on his pint (he had to be fairly drunk in order to even start discussing medicine) – ‘In fact,’ he would say, ‘turned out to be a bloody brain tumour, didn’t it?’

  ‘Christ!’ – from Henry.

  ‘Can you beat it? Can you beat it?’

  ‘Indeed not,’ Henry would reply.

  And the two men would shake their heads over the inconsistent, bloody-minded civilians who swarmed through a general practitioner’s surgery, deliberately misleading qualified men about the nature of their fatal diseases.

  Over the pint Henry would make a few more casual references to Elinor’s polyneuritis. When Donald examined his wife in the last stages of the illness it might be necessary to lead him to a medical textbook and steer those calm, grey eyes in the direction of the chapter headed ‘The Guillain-Barré Syndrome’.

  The Rose and Thorn, on the edge of Wimbledon Common was, in the eighteenth century, a favourite spot for highwaymen. The infamous Tibbet, executed at the roundabout at the top of Putney Hill, is reported to have stabbed a man to death there; it has literary associations also. In the nineteenth century, Swinburne, having been thrown out of his local, the Green Man, on the west side of Putney Hill, walked over the common to the Rose and Thorn, where, according to a letter of Watts Dunton, he drank eight pints of strong ale and was violently sick over the landlord’s daughter, a woman called Henrietta Luce who later married a distant relative of Trollope’s.

  Henry told Donald some of this, as he did every time he and Donald used the pub, and Donald nodded and smiled and said: ‘Really! How extraordinary!’ As he did every time Henry told him these things.

  He had got to the point, now, of sometimes saying, ‘Yes. I read somewhere I think there was a landlord’s daughter called Loo or Loup or . . .’

  Thus giving Henry the chance to reply, ‘In fact her name was Luce . . . perhaps I told you . . .’

  To which Donald would reply, a little too swiftly, ‘No, no . . . I don’t think so . . .’

  And then . . . ‘Fascinating, really!’

  And the two of them would discuss, with some enthusiasm, where Donald could have acquired this information. Their conversations were, Henry felt, the sweeter for having a core of known fact which they could then decorate and refine, like old men in some village discussing last year’s harvest.

  ‘Of course,’ he said on their third pint, ‘the Wimbledon Poisoner used to use the back bar.’

  ‘Is that right?’ said Donald.

  ‘Everett Maltby,’ said Henry, ‘who lived off Wimbledon Hill. He poisoned his wife and his mother-in-law and any number of other people, including some of the regulars at his local.’

  ‘Christ!’ said Donald. ‘Why?’

  ‘Liven things up a bit, I suppose,’ said Henry.

  Donald took a deep swig of his beer. He ran his tongue round his lips, as if assessing the taste.

  ‘Can get pretty dull, I suppose . . .’ he said.

  Pretty dull, thought Henry, I should say so.

  ‘I think I’ve heard of Everett Maltby,’ said Donald.

  ‘It’s possible you have,’ said Henry. ‘He’s a well-known local story!’

  That must have been where he got the idea from, of course. That was why Everett, suddenly, seemed more real, more frightening than usual. Not that Henry believed in any of that rubbish about possession or reliving history or the power of the myth. That was all so much fashionable garbage, wasn’t it? History was what happened to dead people. It didn’t act on the living, like yeast. Although . . .

  ‘Wasn’t he hanged?’ Donald was prompting him.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Henry, ‘in 1888. The mystery really, is why he did it. He was a quiet, apparently happily married man with no enemies. He stood to gain nothing. A complete mystery man. He was a model citizen.’

  ‘Like you, Henry!’ said Donald.

  They both laughed. Then they drank a little. Then Donald said: ‘How did they catch him?’

  Well, he had confessed, hadn’t he? ‘Burdened’ as he put it at his trial, ‘with the intolerable knowledge of my own beastliness!’ That wasn’t going to happen to Henry though, was it? If a chap hadn’t the guts to stand up for his own beastliness, where was he? There was, Henry felt, something rather unsavoury about Maltby. Perhaps that was why he had never worked up the notes he had made on the case. At one time he had intended a whole chapter of The Complete History of Wimbledon to be devoted to th
e issue of Maltby, but somehow the chapter had never materialized. For a start, he kept losing the notes, and then, when he had managed to find them and set them out on his desk, he seemed to lack the will to start work on them. There was something decidedly spooky about Maltby. And as they talked the image of the man became clearer and clearer, until Henry wanted to say to Donald, ‘No. Don’t let’s talk about this, shall we? It’s too . . . dangerous.’ He could see the stuffy front room and the hideous green plant. The heavy oak furniture, the unused piano, the not very attractive daughter . . . He could see Everett’s trips up to London, in the days before the electrification of the Wimbledon Railway. He could see Everett sitting at a tall stool, in an office not unlike Henry’s, helping to build the wealth of the empire. But there was some detail he knew he didn’t want to remember. Why didn’t he want to remember it? And why did thinking about it, yes, it did, frighten him?

  ‘How did they, though?’

  He had been silent too long. Henry took the route often taken by historians faced with a tricky historical problem. He made something up.

  ‘He confessed,’ said Henry. ‘It all got too much for him. Guilt. You know? And he broke down. In this very pub, one night, and told everyone that he was the Wimbledon Poisoner. It took him some time to convince them, apparently.’

  ‘I don’t think you’ve ever told me that!’ said Donald, sounding peeved to have elicited an original statement from Henry while on licensed premises. Henry, too, felt somewhat alarmed to find himself using his imagination. He tried to steer the conversation back to theory.

  ‘Your typical poisoner,’ he said, ‘is a drab, quiet creature seeking to call attention to himself by his crimes. But often, so drab is he that even when he barges into the pub waving a bottle of paraquat and shouting I dunnit, people just don’t want to know. No one could believe that Everett Maltby had done the appalling things he had done. He had to convince them.’

  He drank some more.

  ‘Murder,’ he said, in the tones of someone who knew a bit about the subject, ‘is something we try and classify. Try and put beyond the pale. But we all have a murderer in us. It’s just that most of us are not honest enough to admit to the fact. And there are more ways of killing people than by killing them. If you know what I mean.’

  ‘Not sure I do . . .’ said Donald.

  Henry looked at the clock. It was two thirty. Donald had had enough local history. Like many people, he thought that local history was dull. You could see him wanting to talk about the controversy over the redevelopment of Wimbledon town centre (Greycoat versus Speyhawk, or Caring Architects versus Greedy Planners). Henry did not want to talk about the redevelopment of Wimbledon town centre. As far as Henry was concerned they could fill the whole thing in with concrete.

  If he wasn’t careful they would get on to the subject of the motorway. Someone, it appeared, was planning to run a motorway through Wimbledon. There were even rumours that it was going to go straight through the middle of Henry’s house, a thought that, somewhat to his surprise, filled him with savage pleasure. It was the past that inspired Henry, not the present.

  Up at the bar he saw Everett Maltby and, beyond him, Tibbet the Highwayman and beyond him Cicely de Vaulles, who held the fief of the manor house, 250 yards from where he and Donald were drinking. And he touched the thick-ribbed beer mug, brought it to his lips and drank again, sour, brown English beer. History. He had read somewhere, possibly in one of the books Elinor was always reading, that people under totalitarian regimes had no access to their past. This happened in Wimbledon, too. People were simply too lazy to try and remember.

  Henry’s memory, of course, seemed only defective in matters that immediately concerned him. Who he had had dinner with the night before, and what, if anything, he thought about them. But he was starting to lose track of the things that had made him what he was as well. Where he had been to school, what kind of degree he had got at university. Once upon a time he had read a quite terrifying number of books and accumulated an equally terrifying number of opinions about them. But now his intellectual horizons had shrunk to debates about motorways or endless conversations about the right school for one’s child, it was as if he didn’t want to remember the Henry who had once promised a little more than that.

  To his surprise, Donald was talking about disease. Perhaps he was drunk. Henry felt rather drunk.

  ‘Tell me . . .’ Donald was saying, ‘this . . . polyneuritis of Elinor’s . . .’

  ‘Yes . . .’ said Henry.

  ‘Was that when I was treating her?’

  ‘I should think,’ said Henry, ‘you would have noticed if a patient of yours was diagnosed as having polyneuritis. I mean, I should think you would have something to do with it, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Donald gloomily. ‘I might not have noticed it. I might have said . . . “pains in the legs sort yourself out sort of thing”. I sometimes do. And she might have gone to a specialist to have it diagnosed. Or perhaps I did diagnose it but I’ve forgotten. These days I forget what I prescribe and what people have got when they walk out of the surgery. It just goes. I forget everything. I forget where I’m supposed to be and what I’ve done the day before and whose round it is . . .’

  ‘It’s yours!’ said Henry quickly.

  ‘You see?’ said Donald, with an air of triumph, ‘you see? The old brain is cardboard. Complete and utter cardboard these days.’

  He got to his feet and walked stiffly to the bar.

  Perhaps you only forgot things you didn’t want to be there in the first place. That was certainly how Donald felt about his patients. And maybe that was how Henry felt about himself. And Maltby. Why should he not want to remember Maltby, though? Back to the matter in hand. Come on. Come on. Elinor.

  Elinor. All this stuff about polyneuritis was handy, thought Henry, but perhaps a little too neat. One minute, there they were talking about polyneuritis, next minute, there she was dying of it. But Donald’s first remark, when he returned with the drinks, was even more eerily appropriate to what Henry had in mind.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘I’ll pop up and have a look at her, shall I?’

  Henry gulped. Donald drank.

  ‘Most likely,’ he said, ‘it’s stress. She’s feeling stressed. She has what we doctors call . . . stress. She’s probably in a . . . stressful situation. And so she imagines she has . . . this . . .’

  ‘Polyneuritis,’ said Henry.

  ‘That’s the one. Well . . .’ Donald went on, ‘who knows what polyneuritis is? Really? Really? Medicine makes a lot of claims, you know, but basically all of us doctors are pretty well in the dark on most things medical . . .’

  Donald was about the nearest he was likely to find to a Murderer’s Doctor. But he wasn’t too keen on the idea of Donald arriving just as Elinor was wiping the last traces of Chicken Thallium off her lips. One of the chief requirements of a poisoner was a quiet domestic life. One needed few visitors, an oppressive routine, long silences, broken only by the tick of the clock and the groans of one’s victim. It was not a public crime. Everett Maltby had . . . But no. Henry didn’t want to think about Maltby any more.

  ‘Are you with me?’ Donald was saying.

  ‘Sure,’ Henry was saying.

  ‘So I’ll pop up about half nine,’ went on Donald. ‘I’m very fond of old Elinor. I think she’s a sweet, no nonsense, old-fashioned girl. She’s such a gentle person!’

  Henry goggled at him. This remark, it seemed to him, was on a par with ‘Stalin was quite a nice guy, basically’. And what had he agreed to anyway?

  There was no chance that Donald would diagnose thallium poisoning. Donald couldn’t diagnose a common cold. Having him there at the beginning was simply a stroke of luck so colossal that Henry’s natural pessimism was trying to turn it into a disaster.

  ‘Make it half ten!’ he said.

  They ate supper at eight. By half past ten the thallium would be creeping round Elinor’s bloodstream.
She would be suffering from pins and needles. Stomach cramps perhaps.

  She would be pleased to see a doctor.

  7

  When he got back the house looked empty. The autumn afternoon was paling and the ivy that covered the façade of number 63 dripped with yellows and browns. Opposite, number 47 in huge green wellingtons and baseball cap was talking to number 60. Number 60’s wife was shouting something at number 60’s children. Or were they number 58’s children? Henry pulled the plastic bags out of the boot of the Passat, and lowered his eyes. Number 47 looked as if he were in a conversational mood.

  As Henry got through the front gate, number 60 went back up the street towards his wife and number 47 dropped, suddenly and dramatically, on to his knees in front of the red Mitsubishi. For a moment Henry thought that this might be a genuine act of worship, a public act of love towards the vehicle (I am not ashamed of what I feel about this car! It’s the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me! ). But, somewhat to Henry’s disappointment, number 47 did not start necking with the bodywork. He started to spray the hubcaps with what looked like toothpaste. Henry was safe anyway. Number 47 was either talking to you or the car; he was incapable of vocalizing what he felt about the Mitsubishi.

  Henry was rather drunk.

  How had he got back? Had he gone via Windlesham Avenue and the comprehensive? Or up Abacus Road, where the only black man in their part of Wimbledon lived? Had he gone down to the bottom of the hill and worked his way up to Belvedere Road from the south-east? The suburb was beginning to play tricks on him, to lie about itself. He should never have started making up stuff about Everett Maltby. Few things were sacred to Henry, but local history was one of them.

  As he stowed the edenwort and the kohlrabi at the back of the cupboard, he saw his mother’s strained, pale face as she boasted, unconvincingly, of her son’s prowess to a neighbour. ‘Henry’s got a real gift for history!’ she would say. After he got his lower second at the University of Loughborough, she told Mrs Freeman at 82 that Henry was ‘on course for a Nobel Prize’. Could it be, thought Henry, as a shower of yams, bottled gherkins and packets of pastrami disgorged themselves on to the red-tiled floor of the kitchen, that his present bouts of cultural amnesia were a response to his mother’s extravagant hopes for him?