The Wimbledon Poisoner (13 page)

‘At Marriage Guidance,’ went on Henry, ‘I didn’t feel able to discuss my need to tie you to the bed and whip you with my pyjama cord. But that wasn’t on the agenda, was it? On the agenda was something called Tenderness with a capital T. Well—’ Henry thrust his face towards her, allowing a small fragment of saliva to trickle down his chin. ‘Tenderness is just another aspect of female control. Tenderness is just something that women like because it gives them the upper hand. Tenderness is that hideous, cooing voice you hear mothers using to their children as they get them to do this, go there, stay here. I am so pissed off with being told how men own and control the world. I tell you they don’t. They all start out doing what some woman wants them to do. And you know the weapon she uses? She uses Tenderness with a capital T!’

Elinor folded her arms and, shaking her head in the way Henry sometimes did at the motorists who cut him up, she began to pace up and down the red-tiled kitchen. She did quite a lot of snorting, quite a lot of brittle laughter and a very great deal of what Henry took to be assumed inarticulacy.

‘Basically . . .’ she said, ‘basically . . . I think . . . I don’t know, but I think . . . I suspect . . . I feel . . .’

Here she raised her square white face up to his and sought his eyes. Then she said, according a miraculously even level of stress to each word in the sentence: ‘We’re-at-the-end-of-the-road.’

At this point the telephone rang. Henry answered it. It was Donald’s wife. Henry could never, would never be able to remember her name.

‘It’s Donald . . .’ she said.

‘Yes!’ said Henry. He sounded curt, businesslike. Perhaps a little too businesslike, he thought. He sounded like a man whose next line would be ‘I’m in a meeting’.

‘He’s . . .’

‘Yes?’

Her voice suddenly swooped into hysterics. For a moment, Henry thought she was going to laugh, and then came a sudden explosion of sobbing.

‘He’s . . . dead!’

At this moment Tibbles came into the room.

‘Roger From the Practice is here!’

Well, I’m not surprised he’s dead. I’m surprised you’re not all dead!

‘He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead!’

Henry wished Mrs Donald (what was her name?) would stop behaving like an extra in
Oedipus Rex. So
he was dead. Plenty of other people were going to be dead before the night was out. Tibbles for one. She was looking a bit like she had the morning of her hysterectomy. She prowled and paused and placed her feet carefully, all as if she were a normal feline, but there was something woefully uncatlike about her performance. She looked as if she was not entirely sure she was a cat, as if, thought Henry, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight of her nine lives were oozing out of her like blood from a wound.

Henry looked up at Elinor smartly. He said: ‘Donald’s dead!’

‘Oh my God!’ said Elinor. ‘Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! Oh my God!’

Christ, thought Henry, he’s only your doctor!

At the other end of the phone Mrs Donald (what was her name?) was grieving with similar bravura.

‘Respiratory failure at 11.30 p.m.,’ she said (why did women have to be so scrupulously exact as to detail?) ‘and before that he couldn’t swallow. He said that he had a violent head pain. And then he had hallucinations. He thought there was a pig in the room.’

‘What kind of pig?’

‘I don’t know. Just a pig. Oh my God! Oh my God! He was so sweet. I loved him so much.’

‘I . . . Christ . . . I liked him. He was a nice bloke. A damned nice bloke actually.’

‘And oh my God my God just like that! Like that. He’s dead he’s dead he’s dead he’s dead he’s dead. He’ll never come back. He’s dead.’

A pause.

‘Roger From the Practice is here!’

‘Good.’

‘He was so good and loyal and honest and brave and sweet and kind. And . . . he was such a good doctor.’

Henry thought this was depressingly typical of the way in which people talked about the recently deceased. Inaccurate would be a charitable way of describing Mrs Donald’s description of her husband. He held the receiver a yard away from his ear. Tiny strangled sobs floated out of it and across the room. Elinor swung towards him. For a moment Henry thought she was going to hit him, and then, instead, she seized the receiver from him and, sweeping it down to the floor with her she poured love, support, tenderness and quietness down the line.

‘Billykins,’ she said (surely this could not be the woman’s name?), ‘Billykins, this is so awful.’

Henry wandered to the other end of the room. Elinor sat on the floor, allowing her long black hair to fall around her and started saying ‘Yes . . . yes . . . yes, I know . . .’ and ‘Of course . . .’ a lot. She listened, thought Henry, the way some people figure skated. Presumably Billykins was telling her about Donald the Gourmet Cook, Donald the Great Fighter for Social Change, Donald the Novelist. He can’t only have been Donald the Great Doctor.

If Roger From the Practice was doing the post-mortem, thought Henry, he should be OK. Roger From the Practice couldn’t tell emphysema from the common cold.

‘. . . Yes yes, my darling . . .’ (Uh?) ‘. . . my darling, yes . . . we’re with you . . . we’re with you . . .’

Elinor put down the phone. She stared bleakly across at Henry.

‘My God,’ she said, sounding a bit like a vicar who has just discovered the Third World, ‘this makes one’s own problems seem pretty small, doesn’t it?’

‘Does it?’ said Henry.

He sucked on his lips. She put her head on one side.

‘I think,’ she said, ‘that you have instincts and feelings that are not really human at all. I don’t think you are human, actually. I think you’re like some disgusting little animal, some creature from another planet. I’m sorry for you, Henry. One day you’ll wake up and realize how utterly ghastly you are, and I don’t think you’ll find that very easy to live with. I’m going to bed.’

Flexing his fingers, Henry followed her up the stairs. Behind him, pathetically, Tibbles mewed in the hall. Henry hoped she wasn’t going to make a fuss about dying. Ahead of him Elinor was pulling her dress over her head. She was wearing, as usual, a sack-like dress, one that hinted coyly at pregnancy. Underneath it was, as usual, Elinor’s body. It wasn’t, actually, if you could forget who it belonged to, a bad body. The thought occurred once again to Henry that someone who wasn’t him might have a sexual interest in his wife. If not Donald, then perhaps one of the women from the therapy group. Was he, could he, be married to a lesbian? Such things had happened to more eminent lawyers than he. He heard the sound of the tap running, and then the sound of bristles against gum, ivory and lip. Arms out in front of him, Henry ran up the stairs, thinking, as he ran – She has three minutes to live.

She turned out to have rather longer than that.

For a start, when Henry rounded the bathroom door it seemed, to use a phrase of Elinor’s, ‘inappropriate behaviour’ to run at her. He found himself walking at a steady pace towards those meaty shoulders. Her head, which was rotating at a different speed and a contrary motion to her brushing arm, reminded him of a duck in a shooting gallery. It had a difficult-to-hit quality about it, an almost larky imperviousness to attempts to interfere with it.

Still flexing his fingers, he started to dig them into the base of her neck, or rather, in the area where her neck might be assumed to begin. He found his hands full of dry, papery skin which, as he worked his way closer to her windpipe, came up and away like a curtain of strudel dough. Tossing this first layer of skin aside, he attempted to burrow deeper, only to discover yet more skin, though whether this was the outer skin that had slithered back through his advancing fingers, or a whole new layer was not apparent, but it was pretty clear that finding her windpipe, let alone getting hands round it and squeezing it, was a two-person job.

‘What are you doing, Henry?’ she squawked. ‘Do you want sex again?’

‘What do you mean, “again”?’ said Henry.

‘You only ever touch me when you want sex,’ said Elinor. And started to brush her teeth again.

‘I don’t,’ said Henry. ‘I sometimes put my arms around you because I need to feel your closeness. I need to touch you tenderly and feel the warmth of your body.’

As he said this, Henry pulled at his nose and raised his upper lip to expose his gums. He looked, he thought, like a nasty species of rodent.

‘Shut up, Henry!’ said Elinor. ‘You just grope my fanny and expect me to respond. Sex isn’t just about an animal urge. It isn’t like going to the lavatory.’

Henry started to slide down the wall. It looked as if strangling her was not going to be possible. Tonight anyway. Maybe he should go for a contract killing.

‘It’s a bit like going to the lavatory!’ said Henry. ‘Anyway, what’s so wrong with going to the lavatory? I like going to the lavatory.’

‘We had noticed!’ said Elinor archly and, shaking out her black hair behind her, she placed the toothbrush, emphatically, in the plastic cup and marched out of the bathroom. On the landing a new thought occurred to her and she re-entered, her long arms swinging, her face screwed up with anger.

‘How can you, though?’ she said. ‘How can you? Your best friend lies dead. Dead. And all you think about is . . . that!’

Here she pointed dramatically at Henry’s flies. Henry found he was grinning foolishly. Any sort of attention to his genitals, even if it was the sort of gesture usually used by particularly aggressive barristers, was welcome.

‘And stop smirking!’ she barked. ‘Christ! Anyone’d think from the way men carry on that their . . . things . . . are somehow clever and funny.’

She was down to its level now, her finger jabbing at the zip of his trousers.

Sex between Henry and Elinor had come to a halt some four or five years ago and, from what Henry could remember about it, it was something that was better discontinued. Elinor had spent most of their congress complaining. There were pains in her back, her right arm had gone to sleep, she was stiff, he wasn’t stiff. It was lasting too long. It was over too quickly. He was too tentative, too assertive, too submissive, too dominant.

Following her into the bedroom, he decided to continue on the plainly offensive tack.

‘Maybe,’ he said, sitting on her side of the bed as she reached for a woman’s magazine, ‘maybe I’m gay!’

She looked at him oddly. ‘Don’t be silly, Henry!’ she said, in a slightly querulous tone. Then she started reading a recipe.

‘I often think,’ he went on, ‘about having sex with men.’

Elinor looked at him over the rim of her magazine.

‘Well,’ said Henry, ‘it would make a pleasant change from having sex with you. Or rather, from not having sex with you.’

Elinor snorted.

‘You are just being silly,’ she said, ‘and offensive!’

‘Getting down on all fours,’ went on Henry, ‘and being rogered by a complete stranger in the open air. On the common. Melting back into the undergrowth, your trousers by your ankles—’

‘Henry,’ said Elinor, ‘I think you are sick. I think you are ill. I think you need treatment.’

‘What kind of treatment?’ said Henry, licking his lips, ‘corrective treatment? A good lashing?’

‘Donald,’ she said, ‘is dead. He’s gone. We’ve lost him. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? Don’t you have any human feelings?’

If he had hoped that a row might spur him on to a direct, hands on approach to murdering Elinor, Henry was disappointed. Talking to her, as so often, left him demoralized and confused. She seemed to have such endless resources of anger, so many obviously right, sincerely held opinions.

The more he thought about it, the more it became clear to him that this was a job for a real professional. A man with a hatchet face in a blue suit. Elinor would step out of her therapy class one morning, wave goodbye to Anna and Linda and Susie and Tatiana and Ruth and
wham –
several hundred rounds from an M16, the screech of tyres and the howl of brakes as the saloon car roared off down Makepeace Avenue.

‘Did you know anyone who had a grudge against her?’

‘I . . . don’t, officer . . .’ Henry would sob, ‘she was just a quiet, ordinary housewife . . .’

The trouble was, he thought as he pulled off his trousers, where did one find contract killers? They didn’t stick their cards through your letter box or advertise in the Yellow Pages. And very often they were unreliable people, demanding payment in advance or trying to blackmail you. A bit like builders. He had had a lot of trouble with builders last year. As had Donald. They had talked it over in the Rose. If something went wrong with his contract killer perhaps he would talk it over the way he talked over his builder.

‘OK, mate?’

‘Not so bad. But we’ve got one of these . . . contract killers on and . . .’

‘I had one of those for Billykins. She—’

Donald.

Donald was dead. He had killed Donald. He was a murderer. Henry lay back against the pillow and closed his eyes.

‘Sorry, Donald,’ he said, in his mind, ‘really sorry.’

Donald was very nice about it.

‘Look, mate,’ he said, ‘it happens. Come to the funeral.’

‘I will,’ said Henry. ‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’

Elinor was looking at him curiously. ‘Are you thinking about Donald?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Henry, ‘I was. I was thinking about what a nice bloke he was.’

‘Oh my God!’ said Elinor. ‘He leaves a great gaping hole in the community.’

‘He does,’ said Henry.

And indeed he would, very shortly, be going in to a great, gaping hole in the community. In the Putney Vale Crematorium to be precise.

‘One minute,’ said Elinor, who seemed to have cheered up considerably, ‘there he was laughing and joking and having a good time. And the next minute there he was, writhing around on the floor in agony!’

‘I know!’ said Henry.

‘It was like he’d been . . . I don’t know . . . poisoned or something!’ said Elinor.

Henry coughed. ‘I don’t think,’ he said, ‘that that remark was in very good taste.’

It was long after she had gone to sleep and he had prodded her in the ribs to stop her snoring and was, himself, lying awake, staring into the darkness, thinking about Donald that it occurred to Henry that this was the longest conversation he had had with Elinor for about a year and that, after a bad start, she had, once or twice, come dangerously near to amiability.