The Wimbledon Poisoner

by Nigel Williams

  ‘Hullo there!’ A figure who had been staring in at the Maltby display turned to face Henry, who to his horror saw it was smiling at him.

  ‘Mr Bleath, isn’t it?’

  It was the young man who had sold him the thallium.

  ‘I—’

  Henry found he was walking towards him across the empty street. Behind him he could hear Rush’s footsteps in a dead patrol – one, two, one, two, we’ll get you, Farr, one, two, one, two, I’ll marry your wife, we’ll get you, Farr, one, two, one, two . . .

  ‘Did you call me Bleath?’

  ‘Isn’t it Mr Bleath? Didn’t I sell you some—’

  ‘Optical lenses!’ said Henry wildly. ‘Optical lenses!’

  What was this man doing here so late at night? Why was he looking in at that picture of Maltby?

  ‘Your shop . . .’ Henry found himself saying, ‘is near where Maltby’s . . . I mean, your shop is . . .’

  ‘Mr Bleath?’

  ‘Maltby lived here . . .’ Henry was saying, ‘and now there’s a poisoner here and . . .’

  ‘Thallium?’ the young man from the chemist’s was saying in a wheedling, comforting tone. ‘Thallium? Thallium? Thallium?’

  Henry looked from the chemist to Maltby and back to the chemist again. Remarkable how similar they looked really. Bland. Innocent. That was why they were using Maltby to sell things of course. Like so many poisons he looked sweet and innocent and attractive. Like so many guilty people he looked respectable. Henry could hear Rush’s footsteps behind him. One, two, three, don’t try and run, Farr. One, two, three, we’re going to get your wife, Farr. One, two, three . . . Why was the man in the window looking at him like that? Could he see into his soul? Why was he looking at him so knowingly?

  Later of course, when it was all over, he could see quite clearly that the youth was simply a youth (admittedly a youth with a somewhat over-liberal interpretation of the rules governing the sale of registered poisons) and the picture of Maltby simply a picture. That in the affair of the Wimbledon Poisoner everything was precisely as it seemed and that dreams, hauntings, reincarnations and all the other junk beloved of such people as Unpublished Magical Realist were precisely that – junk. But at the time, with the racket in his head and the racket behind him, as he stared at the man who knew him as Alan Bleath, when all this pretence had started, Henry felt himself letting go of everything he had taken for reality. And that falling feeling started again, so that the youth’s face zoomed in to his, as it had that day he had taken off his glasses and a voice that seemed like his but was, of course only in Henry’s head, started up and he found he was saying, not thinking, the magic words that would release him from all of this.

  ‘I am the Wimbledon Poisoner!’

  The youth did not seem very impressed with this remark. Henry tried again.

  ‘I,’ he said, ‘am the Wimbledon Poisoner. My name is Henry Farr and I am the Wimbledon Poisoner.’

  There was, as there always is at moments of crisis, a great deal of time. I must, he thought, be saying it wrong. He started towards the youth and tried out the sentence again, in a calm, I-have-got-to-live-with-this voice. They probably got a lot of basket cases coming up to them and trying to tell them they were the Wimbledon Poisoner.

  ‘I,’ said Henry, stooping down towards the youth and gripping his arm, ‘am the man who did the poisonings!’

  Perhaps this new construction would get the message across. It didn’t. The youth was looking at him as if Henry was a rather puzzling piece of modern sculpture or a German expressionist play.

  ‘Look—’ said Henry.

  And then time, as time always does, started again, and Henry heard Rush right behind him, heard the policeman’s heavy breath and wondered – Why don’t you do it now? Why don’t you arrest me and get it over with?

  ‘And so it was,’ said Lustgarten, ‘that the poisoner, Farr, met his end at the hands of the very man who he had feared for so long! At the sight of the innocent chemist who had sold him the thallium a whole host of memories came flooding back and he saw that some evil spirit was working its way through him as it had through Everett Maltby all those years ago. For Justice has a way of finding out the guilty and, in the end, making them confess, very much as Henry Farr the solicitor did, simply to be rid of the intolerable pain of their conscience!’

  ‘Listen!’ Henry shouted. ‘I am the Wimbledon Poisoner!’

  The young man didn’t seem at all interested. He was turning from the Maltby display and, with what looked like some urgency, moving away up towards Putney. It seemed to Henry as if he didn’t want to hear him.

  ‘I killed them!’ he shouted at the retreating chemist. ‘I killed them all!’

  The man did not even turn round. Christ, thought Henry, what do I have to do to get attention? Steal a nuclear bomb or what?

  ‘I’m a bastard!’ he shrieked. ‘I am! I put thallium on Donald Templeton’s chicken! I did! For God’s sake, I did!’

  It did sound, he had to admit, pretty improbable. For a moment he found himself wondering whether it was even true, and then, like a man determined to see through a difficult, dull, unlooked-for task, he went on with his confession. It would have sounded a lot better if there had been music on the soundtrack, or if he could manage something a bit more Grand Guignol in the delivery; as it was it seemed, in spite of the sensational nature of its content, a fairly low-grade affair.

  ‘I put bleach in the punch!’ he shouted again. ‘I get blackouts! I forget things!’

  But by now the chemist was running. Perhaps he thought Henry was trying to implicate him in the affair of the Chicken Thallium. Or perhaps, given his carefree way with scheduled poisons, this was always happening to him.

  ‘I inject apples with prussic acid!’ yelled Henry. ‘I slip strychnine into salad dressing! I hang round supermarkets, for Christ’s sake, and I smear aconite on to wholewheat loaves! I’m poison! Hear me! I’m a dreadful, cruel, greedy, stupid, mad, thoughtless person! I’m the fucking Wimbledon Poisoner, for Christ’s sake! That has to be worth something, doesn’t it, you bastard?’

  No one, of course, had ever really sat down and listened to Henry. If they had, they tended to get up and walk away halfway through whatever it was he was trying to say. At school, however high he lifted his hand, he seemed to be one of those boys the masters never saw. The least he could have hoped for, he felt, was for people to listen to his confessing to multiple murder. I mean, Christ, he thought miserably, what do they want from me? Some people go on television and talk about absolutely nothing at all and people listen with their tongues hanging out. OK. I’m the quiet little man in the corner. I read a few books and then forgot them. I’m the man who looked like he might do something and then didn’t. I’m a . . . well . . . I’m a solicitor, for Christ’s sake, but surely, when in a lull in the pub conversation I lean forward and in a piping voice just happen to mention that I chopped up my wife and left her in a bath of acid, people might say ‘Hey! There’s something going on here!’

  ‘LISTEN!’ he shrieked, as the chemist disappeared into the gloom, ‘LISTEN! I HAVE MURDERED FIVE PEOPLE! AND A WHOLE LOT MORE PROBABLY! I’M SICK! CAN’T YOU UNDERSTAND? I NEED HELP! I’M A CRAZY! PLEASE! LISTEN! I’M THE FUCKING WIMBLEDON POISONER, YOU STUPID, GREEDY, IGNORANT BASTARDS!’

  He was alone in the street. The man had gone. No one was left to listen to him. Only the man who he had started to think of as his conscience, as someone inside him nagging at him, indistinguishable from his very self. It was, of course, as it always had been, to Rush that he would have to talk. Rush who wanted all of Henry – his wife, his confession, his very soul. For the first time in forty years, as Henry turned to face his tormentor he really felt that there was such a thing as a soul. What else could be giving him such a non-corporeal ache? What else could be singing in his head like blood pressure, blocking out the here and now, forcing him to say things he had never thought he could say?

  But there was a kind of insufferable
complacency about Detective Inspector Rush, and his expression, too, suggested that if he had heard Henry’s confession he did not find it particularly interesting or believable.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re the Wimbledon Poisoner, are you?’

  ‘I—’

  Henry found his voice faltering.

  ‘I’ve . . .’

  ‘You’ve what?’

  ‘I’ve killed people!’ said Henry. And now, for the first time, his crimes sounded real. Prosaic, flat, but terrifyingly real.

  Rush smirked. ‘Tell me about it!’ he said. ‘Tell me! Tell me! Do!’

  40

  The two men, as if by some pre-arranged signal, began to walk up towards Putney. Henry tried to concentrate on his confession. This was, he knew, a very important moment for him. Ideally he would have liked a ring of admiring listeners, a log fire and a policeman who wasn’t trying to steal his wife. But he would have to do the best he could. It was going to be difficult, he could see, to get across the pity and the terror of it all. He felt rather as a relative of Aeschylus must have felt, when trying to tell someone about how the great playwright died: ‘Well . . . it’s like this . . . he was walking along and . . . a tortoise fell on his head!’

  ‘First of all,’ he said, ‘I put some thallium on her chicken.’

  ‘Pull the other one,’ said Rush, ‘it’s got bells on it!’

  Was he, wondered Henry, trapped in some ghastly reworking of The Trial by Franz Kafka, in which he was doomed to wander around London trying, unsuccessfully, to convince people of his guilt?

  ‘And then,’ said Henry, ‘I put a whole load of Finish ’Em in the punch at Donald’s funeral.’

  This still failed to capture the detective inspector’s interest. Perhaps he wasn’t saying it right. Perhaps he wasn’t expressing enough remorse. The trouble was, although he had felt remorse, remorse wasn’t something you could go around feeling for long. Henry was perfectly capable of feeling randy or envious for phenomenally long periods of time, but remorse was, in his experience anyway, something that sneaked up on you, like indigestion.

  ‘Why did I do it? What made me do it? How could I have done it? It seems incredible, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rush, in a small, mean voice, ‘it seems completely incredible.’

  Far away to their right a pair of headlights raked the darkness of the common and swung away north up towards town.

  ‘I think,’ said Henry, ‘that I am losing my mind.’

  Rush speeded up his pace. To Henry’s horror he realized the man was trying to get away from him. Henry stumbled after him through the long grass.

  ‘I’m a bloody psychopath,’ he said again, ‘I’m a bloody psychopath, man. I’m a crazy. I should be put away somewhere before I do any more damage. I don’t know how I got this way but . . .’

  Rush turned to him. ‘But what?’ he said. ‘But what?’

  ‘But I have the blood of five people on my hands!’

  The trouble was, the more he went over his confession, the more improbable it sounded. Had he really done all the things he thought he had done in the three months since he sat in his office and thought about disposing of Elinor? Or was the whole thing a mirage, a thought experiment?

  ‘You see,’ he said, ‘Everett Maltby—’

  Rush rounded on him again. This time the detective grabbed Henry, and Henry found, to his surprise, that the man had an extraordinarily strong grip.

  ‘What about Everett Maltby?’ he said.

  ‘Do you believe,’ said Henry, ‘that people can possess you? That you can find yourself doing things and not know you’re doing them? Like Jekyll and Hyde?’

  Rush declined to answer any of these questions.

  ‘Because,’ Henry continued, ‘maybe the poisoner is someone who’s full of . . . I don’t know . . . bitterness, bad emotion . . . and maybe this . . . maybe Maltby sort of . . . acts through him . . . or maybe he, I mean maybe I, without knowing it, am acting out what Maltby did. You see? Do you see? Maybe I’m sort of going through what he did, like a puppet . . . like . . .’

  Rush’s lower lip was working furiously. ‘You don’t know anything about Everett Maltby,’ he said. ‘You don’t know anything about anything.’

  Then he paused. As if the thought had just occurred to him, he said, ‘Were you really trying to poison your wife?’

  For the first time since the beginning of this conversation Henry felt an important question was being asked. He felt, too, that when he answered it, his answer would count for something. That it really would describe the long years of bitterness and frustration, go some way to explain what Elinor and he had become, how once, perhaps, they had loved each other, but now, whether through time or lack of imagination or weakness on one or other of their parts, they had, quite literally, forgotten what that love meant. And perhaps, in trying to kill her, he had been trying to make that love come alive again, that forgotten feeling, forgotten like so many other things, that was, if it was like anything, like a kind of certainty or a memory of a place he had once visited, oh probably Switzerland, for Christ’s sake, who the hell knew?

  ‘Yes,’ he said, clearly, simply, ‘I wanted her dead. I really did want her dead.’

  With a kind of eldritch screech Rush ran at him, his talon-like hands out in front of him. Henry stepped back, fell against a tussock of grass and the detective landed on him, his hands groping for Henry’s neck.

  This was a bit more like it. At least, thought Henry, we’re getting some reaction here.

  ‘There are times,’ he said, as they grappled together in the long grass, ‘when I’d like to take a fucking pickaxe to her. When she drives me so fucking crazy I’d like to tie her up in a sack and drop her over Hammersmith Bridge. When I’d like to tie her up and throw darts at her. When I’d like to drop her out of an aeroplane.’

  Rush was kneeing upwards into Henry’s crotch. By leaning forward Henry managed to absorb the blow in his stomach. He pushed out his right hand and clawed at Rush’s face, getting a fair bit of cheek and quite a lot of thick, rubbery nose.

  ‘Cunt,’ said Rush, ‘fucking horrible bastard cunt!’

  This, Henry thought, was manly and straightforward talk. At least we all now knew where we stood.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said, ‘you haven’t felt like murdering your wife. Not that you’ve got a wife. But if you had one you’d feel like murdering her. Everybody does. They just haven’t got the nerve to go through with it, that’s all. They quarrel about property or the children or they destroy each other slowly, over years, when what they really want to do is get their hands round the old rat’s throat and squeeze. Everyone wants to murder their wife. It’s fair enough!’

  Rush, who had not yet managed to make much headway with Henry’s throat, was screaming obscenities at him.

  ‘She’s owed a crack at me, probably,’ went on Henry. ‘Why not? What’s all this big deal about killing people? At least it’s over and done and you can get on with your lives! Christ, it’s better than rowing all the time, isn’t it? It’s better than niggle niggle niggle. Get right on in there and wrap the whole thing up. For Christ’s sake, lots of people murder people they really and truly love, for God’s sake. Because they don’t want anyone else to have them! And they walk out of the courts free men! You can get more for robbing a train than for killing someone! Why is it supposed to be the worst thing in the world to try and top someone?’

  Rush was kicking Henry in the shins. He seemed to be trying to say something but Henry wasn’t particularly interested in listening to it. What he really wanted to do, he realized, was not to confess but to explain, to justify. In order to shut Rush up he got his hands over the man’s mouth and started to bang his head into the ground.

  ‘I don’t see,’ he went on, ‘what Elinor and I want to do to each other is anybody’s business but ours. It certainly isn’t anything to do with you, you grubby little bastard!’

  The policeman’s face was turning crims
on. Saliva was oozing out of the corner of his mouth. In a few minutes, thought Henry, I shall be up to victim number six. How appropriate that it should be an officer of the law!

  ‘President Nixon and Henry Kissinger,’ he said, ‘killed hundreds and thousands of people. I know they were only Vietnamese and Cambodians, but they were all fully paid up members of the human race. They do all right, don’t they? They get honorary degrees from American universities, for fuck’s sake! All I have tried to do is tried to murder a very difficult woman to whom I have been married for twenty years. We’re talking about self-defence!’

  Rush managed to get one of Henry’s hands off his throat.

  ‘Elinor—’ he started to say.

  ‘You don’t know Elinor,’ said Henry, ‘you don’t know what she can be like. And in my view nobody who hasn’t been married to her for as long as I have has the right to say anything about her. Or just casually condemn me for putting a bit of thallium on her chicken or a touch of bleach in a festive potion. I know Elinor, OK?’

  Rush was staring up at him in something like horror. He was no longer attempting to kick, strangle or scratch Henry.

  ‘Sometimes I love her,’ said Henry, ‘sometimes I hate her and sometimes I want to kill her.’

  He realized he had left something out. ‘And sometimes,’ he added, slightly lamely, ‘I do actually try to kill her!’