The Wimbledon Poisoner (19 page)

There were two (Roger From the Practice said) dead on the first landing. One had got as far as the shed before keeling over, and in the downstairs back lavatory, number 61a (Unpublished Magical Realist) had breathed his last in a manner worthy of one of his characters. He had died with his head deep in the Armit-age Shanks bowl and his feet at a bold angle. He may not, as someone said later, have turned into a giant ostrich or begun to improvise verses from the Koran, but it was a step in the right direction.

Henry disliked most species of fiction writer but of them all considered magical realists to be the most suspect – perhaps because Elinor was always going on about them at such length. And this particular magical realist was a particularly difficult customer. But however prone the man was to double-park his own neighbours, Henry would not have wished this end on Rufus Coveney, as he was called. Neither would he have wanted Denimed Lout Who Voted Labour and Boasted About It from 129 to have leapt crazily from an upper bedroom and broken both legs in Donald’s flower bed.

Henry could honestly have said, as he and Roger From the Practice made a body count, that he had not wanted any of this to happen. And Elinor, who accompanied them, was magnificently human. She consoled, she comforted, she leaned over number 43 (Widower in Blue Suit Who is Rarely in the Country) as he frothed and cyanosed, and with skills presumably acquired in her therapy class persuaded him to think positively about his situation, to enumerate his own personal strengths and maximize ‘the plus side of being him’ until the ambulance arrived. She gave cardiac massage. She put her fingers down people’s throats. She treated the inhabitants of Maple Drive with almost as much care and concern as if they had been Nicaraguan peasants. Henry, looking at her, could not imagine why it was he had wanted to poison such a strong, useful, friendly woman.

This was the whole trouble with murder. On Monday it seemed a clear-cut, straightforward affair. But, by Wednesday, your victim had lost all traces of the things that had made them so eminently killable and, although you felt sure that tomorrow or the next day you would be up to steering them towards a vat of liquid metal or leaving them alone with a naked flame and a mains gas leak, today you just couldn’t feel it the way you should. Your resolve weakened.

The real trouble, Henry decided, as he and Roger From the Practice carried another borderline case out into the garden, was people. You just never knew what they would do next. They were so difficult to classify. Sometimes it seemed as if there was no such thing as people, just an endless series of tricks of the light, a history of false impressions.

‘Oh my God!’ said Elinor, as the first ambulances arrived. ‘This is absolutely terrible!’

‘Yes,’ said Henry, ‘yes!’

In the end, only three people actually died at Donald’s funeral, and one of these, Vera ‘Got All the Things There Then?’ Loomis, from 92, was ninety-two and therefore, everyone agreed, didn’t really count.

People didn’t seem very interested in asking why. There had been, everyone said, ‘something not right’ about the punch. People had, of course, drunk too much of it. There was talk of analysing what was left of it. But the trouble was – there wasn’t any left, which only served to emphasize quite how much the mourners had managed to put away. The person who might have been expected to haul Dave Sprott’s remains in to Wimbledon police station and begin the task of cutting him into little pieces was, of course, Detective Inspector Rush. One neighbour had the temerity to ask him whether he intended to do so, to which Rush responded with an enigmatic smile. Mind you, he responded to most questions with an enigmatic smile.

This ought to have reassured Henry. But it didn’t. Something about the man’s manner made him suspect that he was biding his time. There was something about the way he tipped his hat to Elinor, too, that . . . No. That thought was impossible. Rush was, in the words of Jaspar Cecil, the wine merchant from 83, ‘married to the Wimbledon police force’.

That was why his silence was so frightening.

It was two or three days after the funeral that Henry started to study books on toxicology, as a sort of retrospective research effort. He had, he decided, made such a hash of his career as a poisoner that he had no real way of even telling quite how badly he had done. And, in the inquiry that he expected daily, he would have to have some line of defence. All the books he read made him feel a lot worse. But of all of them, from
Lives of the Great Poisoners
to
Some Toxicological Aspects of Pathology
, none made him feel worse than Keith Simpson’s
Forensic Medicine
, which he obtained from Wimbledon Public Library.

1.   In a previously healthy subject, the onset, sudden or slow, of symptoms which do not correspond to ordinary illness, should raise suspicion.

2.   If the source is suspected to be food, endeavour to obtain some of it: trace other persons who partook of it.

3.   Keep any vomit, stomach wash-out, faeces, units of CSF which come to hand. Seal them and affix labels.

As far as Henry could see, there were no faeces or stomach washouts lying around in Billykins’s house, but there was enough vomit on her carpets to keep a team of pathologists in business for a year, and it only needed one person enterprising enough to start picking up bits of it for them to be on to Henry. For several days he went in and out of Billykins’s house, offering to take things to the cleaners and watching anxiously for strangers equipped with clear plastic bags and sticky labels. In particular he looked out for Detective Inspector Rush: but he saw no sign of him.

But after a week or so, he grew calmer. People in Wimbledon, thank Christ, didn’t think like Keith Simpson. They didn’t go round rifling through people’s faeces and affixing labels to them. Poison (this is its beauty) is part of everyone’s diet. People were always pouring poison down their throats. Looked at in this light, Simpson’s work became a comfort rather than a threat. On page 322, he read:

Ethyl Alcohol (C
₂
H
₅
OH)

Three forms of poisoning occur:

1.   Acute (fatal) alcohol poisoning.

2.   ‘Drunkenness’ (insobriety).

3.   Chronic alcoholic poisoning (chronic alcoholism).

Further on he read:

Stupor – this is the ‘dead drunk’ stage at which the patient is roused into response only by the strongest stimuli. To be ‘anaesthetic’ or unfeeling to injury, to lie in a snoring stupor with flushed face and dribbling lips, is the last stage of helpless inebriety. This is the stage which is likely to be simulated by cerebral disease or head injury.

Even the words used to describe drunkenness, thought Henry (who was by now becoming rather censorious of people who abused their bodies, who subjected them to poison when there was so much healthy, life-giving sustenance around), were a giveaway.
Headbash. Braindeath. Wipe out.
And, if he felt guilt, which somewhat to his surprise he did, it was about the fact that he had not tried hard enough to stop the bastards drinking the stuff. He had even, on the evening after the funeral, suggested to Roger From the Practice that someone had ‘got to’ the punch but Roger From the Practice, true to his late master’s instincts, was unkeen to investigate any theory other than that his neighbours and friends had keeled over as a result of alcohol and stress in fatal doses.

Donald, thought Henry, would have been proud of him. His medical knowledge seemed to be largely derived from reading the colour supplements of newspapers, and his analysis of the party was borne out by the local journal, whose banner headline read: ‘
THREE DIE AFTER DRINKING SPREE FUNERAL HORROR.
“
MY SHAME!
”
SAYS WIDOW.
’

People did not meet each other’s eyes in the street. Nazi Who Escaped Justice at Nuremberg met Detective Inspector Rush at the golf club, and suggested to him that someone should inform the coroner. Rush, apparently, had smiled with enigmatic bitterness, and replied, ‘My dear Gunther, I would like to inform the coroner. I am a policeman, am I not? But my hands are tied in this matter. You understand? I am not a free agent in this affair!’

And he had looked, people said, so steely and enigmatic that Nazi Who Escaped Justice at Nuremberg had had to go out and play another round of golf, to get over it. Anyway, nobody had any idea where the coroner was. Even if they had been able to find him he was probably out moonlighting, or had been cut or privatized like everything else in Britain. The fact was that nobody much cared that three more people had croaked. They were all too busy trying to sell their houses at a profit or worrying whether higher interest rates would lead to a slump.

Henry, to his surprise, was getting rather left wing.

Murder, of course, changed you. It sharpened you up, made you less provincial. It gave you an interest. And Elinor, who in the days after Donald’s funeral might have been expected to go on even more about his grossness, his obscene masculinity and his record-breakingly loutish behaviour at the funeral of a close friend, seemed positively amiable. There was, of course, nothing like surprising people.

‘Really, Henry,’ she said one evening, ‘you’re a mystery, aren’t you? You’re . . . peculiar!’

She screwed up her eyes as she said this. But from her expression Henry gathered that being peculiar was a better thing to be than obscenely masculine. It might, in the end, be almost attractive. Henry had become a question mark, some difficult, unclassifiable quantity, and his behaviour only intensified her interest. After all, it was not habitual for Henry to jump every time the doorbell rang or give a low cry whenever he heard a police siren heading down the hill (‘Good evening, Mr Farr. We’d like to ask you a few questions about a quantity of
bleach
we have found in the stomach of the late David Sprott . . .’).

Goaded on by her curiosity about the man she had married, Elinor began, in the evenings, to go over the early history of their relationship, much of which, as she described it, bore no relation whatsoever to anything Henry remembered.

‘Do you remember,’ she would say, ‘that little hotel in Switzerland?’

Henry would look at her glumly across the supper table. What was she talking about? They had never been to Switzerland. Had they?

‘That funny little man with the alpenstock,’ went on Elinor, ‘and the beard. And we went up to that waterfall!’

Here she leered suggestively. Did she mean to imply that they had had intercourse? Henry could not even remember going to Switzerland, let alone having intercourse by a waterfall in that country. Not with her anyway. Perhaps she had done all this with someone else. Some teacher from her primary school days. Or possibly – Henry didn’t like this thought – with whoever her secret admirer might be.

Maisie was also, for some reason, a great deal more quiet and submissive. Donald’s funeral seemed to have impressed her. She even asked Henry on one occasion whether Mars Bars gave you cancer, to which Henry replied: ‘If they do – I recommend we begin chemotherapy on you right away.’

Dave Sprott’s funeral, a double date with 61a (Unpublished Magical Realist) was a low-key affair, only enlivened by the sight of Unpublished Magical Realist’s family, all of whom remained dry-eyed throughout the proceedings. The person who spoke on his behalf, a cadaverous man with a strong Welsh accent, actually waved a copy of his manuscript (
Decay of the Flying Wolves
) and attempted to give some résumé of the plot to the now somewhat blasé mourners of Maple Drive, SW19. ‘After this extraordinary mythical character,’ he said, ‘half tortoise, half publisher, returns to the mythical country of Rumalia, Rufus is, I think, trying to tell us that the victor, ultimately, is not death and, similarly, in this great, this very plangent image of a toothless wolf alone in the deserted Stock Exchange, Rufus is saying that the struggle goes on, to be ourselves, whatever we may be. And I think when this manuscript is published it will be a testament to the positive thing in all of us.’

But people get bored with death, even in Wimbledon. Vera ‘Got All the Things There Then?’ Loomis was scattered in the scattering area, Coveney was taken in a small urn down to Hastings and cast into the sea by one of his relatives (in death he remained unpublished), and the suburb forgot them. Henry became involved in a rather messy divorce in Aldershot and, in spite of what he regarded as one of the most closely argued letters in British legal history, failed to resolve the issue of the dustbin shelters. It seemed for a while as if no more was to be heard from the man who called himself the Wimbledon Poisoner.

‘But at number 54 Maple Drive,’ said Lustgarten, pacing the length of the quiet street in a long, dark coat, ‘Henry Farr, quadruple murderer, planned his next crime. His poisonings may have been the result of bad planning. He tried to tell himself, in the long, lonely nights that followed the tragic deaths of Templeton, Loomis, Coveney and Sprott, that he was not as guilty as he felt. But the fact was that he was now stained not only with the blood of his doctor but also with the blood of his dentist, a respectable widow and a young man whose only crime, apart from the writing of magical realist novels, was to have drunk the lethal cocktail that Farr had prepared for his wife. Although he felt the Furies close in round him, although he was almost sure that vengeance, that justice was about to descend, Henry Farr saw no way back.’

Often, as October, sunny and cold, starved the leaves along Maple Drive, Henry Farr thought about not poisoning his wife. He thought about not poisoning her as much as he thought about poisoning her.

As Maisie and Elinor and he walked one afternoon across the common to the windmill, he found himself reflecting that, if he stopped now, there was no question of his ever being discovered. Whereas if he continued, who knew who would be the next to get it in the neck? There seemed to be no easy relation between the people he wanted to die and the ones who copped it. He thought about this as the three of them stood in the wet grass to the south of the windmill, and he read from the local guide, sadly lacking as it was in detail.