The Wimbledon Poisoner (26 page)

Of course, thought Henry, an inquest would only prove that Sprott had an unusually large amount of bleach inside him. And Rush wanted more than that. He wanted the only thing that would get him a conviction – a confession. And Henry knew all about confessions. The police used any and every method of extorting them from suspects. Once the detective inspector had declared his hand, all Henry had to do was deny. He was being cleverer than that. He was making friends with Henry. He was slowly and surely creating an atmosphere in which Henry wanted to tell him things, to confide in him. And what better atmosphere than one in which the two of them became partners in a kind of crime. It was as if Rush was a kind of accessory to Henry’s guilt.

The policeman’s very panic at the thought of not catching the poisoner (already people were suggesting wild and fantastic suspects, from the star of a current TV soap opera to a member of the royal family) had communicated itself to Henry, so that at times, in the way one finishes a sentence for an old friend, he wanted to see Rush’s uncertainty resolved.

The other thing that made the advent of Advent more than usually unpleasant was the thought that, somehow or other, Everett Maltby was responsible for all of this. In the days after Gordon Macrae’s death Henry went, two or three times, to
The Complete History
to refresh his memory about the Maltby case. On one occasion he got as far as looking out his notes on the poisoner; but when he had got within five or six pages of what he now thought of as the danger area, the paper seemed to weigh on his fingers. It was rather like recalling a party at which one had misbehaved or, more nearly, staying away from a dark room in which something (what?) could be heard moving. It woke in Henry all sorts of fears and anxieties that made him set down the manuscript and stare out of the study window at the bald suburban garden for hour after hour.

It was at such moments that Henry could see himself doing the ghastly things the poisoner was supposed to do. And he found the only company that seemed able to relieve him, the only person with whom he felt able to share anything was Inspector Rush. He was almost getting to like Rush. They spent long hours walking across the common, whole afternoons sitting in Henry’s front room, neither of them speaking. If Henry went to the pub, Rush accompanied him; and sometimes the detective would share information about the latest news on the case.

What no one had been able to discover was a pattern in the case. The poisoner seemed to murder (where murder was verifiable) in an entirely random manner. His victims were not exclusively male or female (although, Henry was relieved to note, there were no children); the only thing that united them, as far as anyone could see, was that all the crimes occurred in Wimbledon. Rush was of the opinion that there was no pattern, although plenty of people had identified what they described as his ‘target group’. The most popular theory was that he was a man with a grudge against Wimbledon itself, possibly an unsuccessful trader. But no one – to Henry’s relief – had, so far anyway, come any closer than that.

‘Of course,’ said Elinor one afternoon, ‘there might be a pattern. But he’ (everyone called the poisoner ‘he’) ‘might be deliberately obscuring it.’

Rush leaned forward in the armchair that he now designated his. He looked across at Henry, as he said, ‘How do you mean?’

‘Well,’ said Elinor, ‘he might have a real target in mind. And he might not want us to know who that target is.’

‘So you mean,’ said Rush, ‘he goes about poisoning people as a blind?’

‘It’s possible.’

Henry coughed. ‘Sounds a bit cumbersome,’ he said. ‘If I wanted to murder someone I’d get right in there and do it. Get my hands dirty.’

‘You wouldn’t, Henry,’ said Elinor, with unusual prescience, ‘you’d gibber around with all sorts of schemes and make a complete hash of it. Actually—’ here she gave her booming laugh – ‘it’s such a far-fetched idea of mine it’s the sort of thing you’d go for. You never deal directly with anything.’

Henry managed a jovial laugh. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘so I’m the suspect, am I? I’m the chappie who goes around tampering with the groceries!’

Rush, he noticed, wasn’t laughing.

‘I’m not saying that!’ said Elinor. ‘All I’m saying is – it’s possible the poisoner isn’t a psychopath who kills at random, but a man who wants to kill someone desperately, so desperately that he deliberately kills an arbitrary selection of people in order to conceal his true target. Maybe even from himself!’

Henry gulped. ‘How do you mean . . . from himself?’ he said.

‘I mean,’ said Elinor, ‘he can’t face up to the fact that he really wants to kill the person he wants to kill, so that he kills, almost unconsciously, not simply to lay a false trail, people that he sees as “in his way”. He might not even know he’s doing it!’

Henry looked briefly across at Rush to see if the detective was watching him. To his relief, he wasn’t. Henry’s heart was making an eerily amplified noise inside his ribs. He folded his arms judiciously and tried to look as if he was just another wally discussing the poisoner.

‘It still sounds a bit . . . complicated to me,’ he said; ‘what gave you the idea?’

‘Everett Maltby,’ said Elinor.

The room had gone very quiet.

‘Tell us,’ said Rush, ‘do!’

‘It was the apple that gave me the idea,’ said Elinor.

‘How come?’ said Henry.

‘Well,’ said Elinor, ‘I like apples.’

Rush stroked his chin reflectively. Of all his Great Detective mannerisms, this was the one Henry found most irritating. Elinor, however, seemed oblivious of him.

‘No one knows how Maisie got hold of the apple, do they?’

‘They don’t!’ said Henry.

‘Well,’ here Elinor sighed deeply, ‘I gave it to her.’

Rush shifted in his chair.

‘I know I should have said,’ she went on, ‘but I just couldn’t bear to. And what I had to say wouldn’t have helped much. And a bit of me – it’s really stupid – felt guilty. I felt I was somehow responsible.’

‘And where,’ said Rush, ‘did you . . . obtain the er . . . apple?’

‘That’s the point,’ said Elinor. ‘It was just . . . there. On the bowl. I couldn’t work out how it had got there.’

Henry was thinking back to the night on which Jungian Analyst with Winebox gave what was positively his last consultation. Had he had time to go out, buy an apple, inject it with prussic acid and leave it on the fruit bowl for Elinor? Probably, was the answer.

‘But I can’t resist apples. Especially big, red juicy ones. Henry knows I can’t!’

Henry wondered whether to admit this was true. As she talked he tried to work out whether being a solicitor would give him less or more rights when he was arrested. Would he only be allowed, for example, one phone call to himself? He wouldn’t be any use, though, would he? He couldn’t do conveyancing, let alone murder. But Rush wasn’t looking at him. His piggy little eyes were fixed on Elinor’s face.

‘And then I remembered,’ she went on, ‘about Everett Maltby. That man Henry was always going on about. It was the apple, you see, that reminded me. So I went and looked him up. There’s an awful lot written about him.’

‘Actually,’ said Henry, ‘in
The Complete History
I try to—’

What did he try to do? Why had he so thoroughly and completely blacked out on the subject of Maltby? His entire mental processes, these days, could be described as the physiological equivalent of the dot dot dots in
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
.

‘There’s a particularly good book,’ said Elinor, ‘called
A Woman’s Weapon
, which is a sort of feminist study of domestic murder in the nineteenth century.’

‘Proving,’ said Henry, ‘that it was a response to male chauvinism, presumably.
Lizzie Borden: Pioneer Worker in the Field of Sexual Politics
. I think—’

‘Shut up, Henry!’ said Elinor sharply, ‘I’m talking!’

Rush was looking at her with a kind of adoration. Why was it, Henry wondered, that his wife was able to inspire uncritical appreciation in so many people who weren’t him? If he had been able to look at her like Rush, all this would never have started.

‘Actually,’ she continued, ‘it studies men who killed women and women who killed men. But it’s most interested in men who killed, or tried to kill, their wives. And by far the best bit of the book is about Everett Maltby.’

‘Maltby,’ said Rush, ‘didn’t only kill his wife. He killed—’

‘Norman Le Bone, the butcher,’ Henry heard himself saying, ‘Genevieve Strong, a neighbour, and—’

‘I’m telling this, Henry!’ said Elinor. ‘Shut up!’

Henry had grasped a new and potentially sensational fact about his memory. It only seemed to function in close proximity to his wife. Maybe Elinor, who had always seemed to know where his tie, socks, shirt or clean trousers were located, had begun to usurp other functions of his brain. Perhaps his little store of knowledge had leaked across to her circuits. Perhaps there was an instruction in his cerebellum that said:
COPY FILE TO WIFE
.

‘And of course,’ she said, ‘Maltby was born in this very street!’

That was something Henry knew he didn’t know. He had never known that. This was something completely and utterly new. Or was it? The trouble was, once you had forgotten something it was pretty hard to remember whether you had ever known it. The best thing to do was to behave as if you were with one of Elinor’s intellectual friends, nodding sagely at the titles of books you had never read, films you were never going to see . . .

‘Don’t tell me,’ he said, ‘he had a daughter called Maisie!’

‘Actually,’ said Elinor, ‘he did!’

Rush let out a long slow sigh, like a deflating lilo, and taking out his pipe started to do some rather overdone listening, of the kind that suggested he was waiting for a chance to interrupt.

‘And his shop,’ said Elinor, ‘was just off the bottom of the hill. In one of those roads whose name you never can remember. You know? Like Bolsover Street or Atlantis. It’s one of those streets you can never find consciously. The only way back to it is to let your mind go blank and hope your feet get you there. I think the chemist’s shop is still—’

‘He was a chemist,’ Henry was saying, ‘of course he was a chemist!’

Elinor ignored this interruption. ‘Maltby’s wife seems to have had some kind of nervous breakdown, and in the spring of 1888, as far as we can tell from her journal—’

Journal? Journal? This was typical of feminist history. Who could have known Mrs Maltby kept a journal? Of course, in his study of the Maltby case Henry had more or less concentrated on the Wimbledon angle; but he had no recollection of where the man lived. He would have remembered that, surely?

‘She went off sex anyway. Became very difficult, and Maltby, who in many ways was a very advanced husband – he did most of the cooking, for example, most unusual in a Victorian marriage – decided to do away with her. It seems to have been that he saw no other way out of his relationship.’

Henry looked at the floor. He found, somewhat to his surprise, that he was clenching and unclenching his hands.

‘In truth,’ Elinor said, ‘I see no other way forward, for all sides oppress me like a wall that faces the humblest prisoner in a jail and strong poison is my only helpmeet!’

Maybe she was possessed by the soul of a Victorian poisoner. This certainly wasn’t how she normally carried on. Then Henry saw that Elinor was reading from a paperback book.

‘You see,’ she said, putting the book down, ‘I got this ridiculous, ridiculous idea that Henry was trying to poison me!’

‘My God!’ said Henry, ‘surely you didn’t!’

He decided to try this line again. He still sounded unbelievably unconvincing. ‘Me?’ he said desperately, trying to kick start his credibility. ‘Me? Poison you? Darling!’ He tried a little laugh here (‘No, love, no!’ from Rush’s invisible director).

‘Because, you see, Maltby hit on a most ingenious way of getting rid of Helena. He began to poison people in the locality, rather in the way William Palmer did, but, as was argued at his trial, he murdered the butcher, the clerk in the house opposite and a family of five simply to cloak his real intentions.’

‘I still don’t see,’ said Henry, ‘what this has got to do with our poisoner.’

He stopped.

‘Unless of course,’ he said, ‘you think I’m sort of . . .’ he laughed again, ‘possessed! Or something!’

By way of answer Elinor got to her feet. Henry had never heard her talk for so long on any subject not directly concerned either with Maisie’s education, her personal therapy or a domestic appliance. He felt vaguely as if his interest in the subject had been hijacked and, looking across at Rush, hoped to see the man yawning or shaking his head sadly. He wasn’t. He was looking at Elinor with what could only be described as rapture.

‘The cup he hands you and the wine

Are tainted with the hate he bears

Yet drink it down and ye yield up

All of your present woes and cares!

Pour on! Pour on! Drink deeply now!

Since Faith and Hope and Love are gone,

Let us drink all with Him they call

The Poisoner of Wimbledon!’

This, Henry realized, from the uncomfortable silence that accompanied it, was poetry. He didn’t like poetry. He didn’t know much about it but he knew he didn’t like it. Elinor, perhaps sensing this, gave him some more.

‘Since Memory and Reason are

But dust in th’Historic Wind,

Since Love and Justice are alike,

Both impotent and vain and blind,

Let us take meat and share our board

Yea! Let Him feed us and begone!

We have forgot our need to live

Brave Poisoner of Wimbledon!’

Elinor gave no clue as to where this poem might have come from or, indeed, why she was reciting it, but that was fairly typical of poetry lovers. They shoved it down your throat at every opportunity, declaiming it in buses or quoting it with relish at you when you were trying to do something else. A bit like people who insisted you had an alcoholic drink, or the worst type of jazz aficionado.

Rush didn’t seem interested in the poem. ‘And where,’ he said, ‘did you find the apple?’