The Wimbledon Poisoner (27 page)

‘In the bowl,’ said Elinor, ‘by the window. But then anyone could have got in. It wasn’t that that spooked me about it. You see poison is a spooky thing, as Gordon was saying. It’s to do with . . . I don’t know . . . it sounds stupid . . . with . . . loving someone in a way. And I thought . . . that poem, it’s by Edwina Cousins, a Victorian lady poet who got quite obsessed with Maltby, what it’s saying is . . . poison is to do with obsession. And you see this person, who’s doing all this, now, I mean, I think they got it all from Maltby.’

‘Why?’ said Henry. ‘Whatever gave you that idea?’

‘Well,’ said Elinor, ‘all the people the poisoner has killed, I mean
our
poisoner, live in exactly the same streets lived in by Maltby’s victims.’

Rush gave a little gasp.

‘And when Maltby did finally kill his wife, he did it with a poisoned apple. Laced with prussic acid. He was a keen amateur photographer you see!’

She looked across at Henry with a smile. ‘That’s why I didn’t tell the Law,’ she said, ‘I thought it was Henry! Doing his bit for local history!’

Henry bit back a sob. ‘Extraordinary!’ he said. ‘And then, I suppose you thought . . . how absurd! Henry wouldn’t . . . er . . . do anything like that. Did you? Is that what you thought?’

If the poisoner’s intention, as a woman on the
New Statesman
had opined, was ‘to destabilize bourgeois society’ – he had not really succeeded. Bourgeois society, even in Wimbledon, went right on being bourgeois. People washed their cars and read quality newspapers and worried about their shares as if there wasn’t anyone sneaking around Belvedere Drive and Pine Grove waiting to make their diet even more high risk than it already was.

The poisoner had, however, had considerable impact on lunch. People didn’t walk into San Lorenzo di Fuoriporta, at the bottom of Wimbledon Hill, with quite the same
élan.
The waiters didn’t greet you with the same style, and somehow there wasn’t quite the same thrill as you sat at the white tablecloth, toyed with an aperitif and wondered whether to have
linguine alla vongole
or
carpaccio
for your first course. For a start, you couldn’t see the kitchens. And this fact that, previously, had made lunch such an entrancing prospect for the bourgeoisie of the borough, rendered it, now, almost unbearable. Who knew what was happening behind those double doors that flew apart and slammed shut behind the sallow waiters as, humming rather effortfully, they made their way from kitchen to table?
He
could have got to the
radicchio
before you did.
He
could have done a thorough job on the
gnocchi. He
could have coated the
vitello
with something a bit more lively than a
salsa tonnata
.

Businessmen still gamely went through with the ritual. Many of them said that the British economy would collapse without lunch. The more honest of them said that they didn’t know about the British economy but for sure they would collapse without lunch. But you could see from their nervous glances about them, their anxious enquiries about where Luigi was buying his stuff these days (‘Don’ worry sah – we go alla way to Keeng’s Cross! An’ we got double locks on alla da doors!’) that the pleasure of dining out, that exquisite combination of helplessness and dominance, that highly formalized return to the nursery had lost, both literally and metaphorically, its savour.

The most popular restaurant in Wimbledon, since the poisoner scare had started, was a small Turkish taverna. For a start you could see what the chef was cooking. And the very simplicity of the cuisine – grilled meat and salads – militated against the poisoner’s techniques. The restaurant bought its meat from Smithfield, brought it, under lock and key, to Wimbledon, and invited the diners to compose their own salads.
BRING YOUR OWN VINAIGRETTE
said a sign in the window,
DON’T LET YOU-KNOW-WHO HAVE A HAND IN YOUR LUNCH!
Alone of the eateries in the district, they seemed to make a virtue out of the crisis, perhaps because of the healthy tradition of poisoning that had always existed under the Ottoman Empire. When they brought your doner kebab to the table there was always a little joke (‘This should finish you off nicely!’) and always, in a gesture that was both charming and did genuinely inspire confidence, the proprietor tasted the offered dish before serving. As Henry observed to Elinor one of the great thrills about eating in Mehemet’s Cave of Pleasures, as the place was known, was wondering whether Mehemet would keel over and drop dead immediately after nibbling a bit of your shashlik.

It was to Mehemet’s restaurant that Henry went, one day in December, to meet Detective Inspector Rush and Karim Jackson of Brawl Books. It was fairly clear, Henry thought, that the policeman had asked him to the occasion in order to tempt him into making one last, fatal mistake. Jackson was, after all, the man who had turned down
The Complete History of Wimbledon
, and Henry had quite often made abusive remarks about him in the detective’s presence. It might be true that, when possessed by the soul of the poisoner, Henry was so fiendishly clever that even this mistake would prove fatal only to those who shared his meal. But this thought was no longer of much comfort. Henry wanted to be discovered. He wanted it all to finish. If he was found slipping something into the publisher’s humus, so much the better.

Elinor and Maisie seemed pleased that he was going out to lunch with someone from the media. Maisie asked him if he could get Michael Jackson’s autograph, and Elinor hinted that a casual mention of her upcoming monograph on ‘The Politics of Poison’ might earn Henry unspecified sexual favours. But Henry’s heart, as he pushed open the restaurant door, was heavy. He did not want to kill again. ‘I must not,’ he muttered to himself as he scanned the shabby tables, ‘bear hatred. I must not feel angry. This man has a right to reject my work. I do not want to kill Karim Jackson.’

‘Hi!’ said a voice from a table in the corner, and Henry found himself looking at the first man to send back the most detailed account of a suburb ever put together in the English language. ‘Henry Farr?’

To Henry’s surprise the only concession that Karim Jackson appeared to have made to the Third World was to be ever so slightly biscuit-coloured. In dress, manner, frame of cultural reference and physical appearance he seemed completely English. He was, also to Henry’s surprise, really rather charming. Henry waited in vain for him to sneer or boast. When he was told that Henry was the same Henry Farr who had offered him
The Complete History of Wimbledon
he seemed overjoyed. He spoke warmly of ‘the vast scale of the book’s ambition’ and explained that, although it wasn’t something they wanted for ‘their list’ (at which, in spite of Jackson’s extreme diffidence of manner, Henry felt a prickle of hostility) he thought it was a splendid piece of work and one which should, in time, find a proper home.

What made all this much worse was that, at any moment, Henry knew he might try to slip something in Jackson’s food. Although he had searched himself thoroughly before leaving Maple Drive, Henry knew enough about the workings of the unconscious to know that he might have secreted Jackson’s quietus, without his being aware of the fact, anywhere about his person. He might even, thought Henry, have got up in the middle of last night, broken into Mehemet’s Cave of Pleasures and doctored a fragment of doner which he might then, by a process so subtle he himself would not even be aware of it, manage to steer in the direction of the publisher. The whole trouble with therapy, he reflected glumly, acknowledging that he was in the middle of some crude, stone age, do-it-yourself version of the activity, was that it stirred up things you never even knew were there. You got to know quite what a bastard you were, exactly how far you were in the grip of things that made you, to use Elinor’s phrase, ‘stunningly peculiar’.

He had even started reading books on therapy – although there didn’t seem to be many of them aimed at middle-aged men – and wondering whether he was something called an anal regressive. He was – Henry took another mouthful of cabbage – obsessed with farting and bottoms. This was something (according to one of the books he had read) you were supposed to have got out of your system by the age of five. Might his poisoning activity be a way of compensating for the unsatisfactory nature of his mother’s attempts to breastfeed him (he assumed from everything about himself that they were unsatisfactory, although he would never have dared to broach the subject with Mrs Farr Senior). Was he, in stalking about the place tipping solanaceous alkaloids into vats of rice salad, trying to provide nourishment for the dark impulses that, as Elinor was always pointing out, he had nourished for so long?

‘Is your wife green?’ Jackson was saying to Henry.

Ah ha, thought Henry, at last the insult, carefully led up to by a show of politeness to put you off your guard.
No, she’s blue with pink spots. What colour is yours?

‘Because,’ went on Jackson, chewing his chicken kebab very slowly and thoroughly, ‘I rather go along with the ecological aspect to the poisoning case. Poisoning as a way of controlling the environment, say, of purging it of the things that one sees as unhealthy. But purging it, of course, by making it, as we would say, “worse”. Do you take my meaning?’

‘Not really,’ said Rush, who was looking white and strained.

‘Well,’ said Jackson, ‘what’s healthy to us, a lively society, say, one that’s mixed racially—’

Henry tried not to think about racism. Racism brought back memories of Donald. It brought back, too, the disquieting thought that this man had a point. Wasn’t it rather absurd to be obsessed with a few square miles of suburb, when one’s society offered someone so puzzling, picturesque and likeable as Karim Jackson.

‘One in which things are growing and changing, not staying static, is one that someone else might say was “sick”. The human ecology of our society actually depends on change and growth, just as the . . . whale needs the plankton, say . . . we need . . .’

He grinned rather charmingly. ‘Paki bastards like me.’

Please, thought Henry, please don’t talk about racism. Please don’t talk about the loss of the British Empire and multi-culturalism and the need for change. I’m sure those things have their place, but it isn’t, I’m afraid, in Wimbledon. Yes, I know I shouldn’t think these things. I know it’s backward of me. It may be why I seem to do these monstrous things. Elinor is always going on about what she calls the ‘monster of racism’ that lurks in me. But it’s how I am. I am trying to be better. I am trying as hard as I can not to murder people, not to think the awful, shameful thoughts that seem to lead on to murder. But it seems that I can’t stop. And if you start going on about the British Empire, for whose excesses I was not personally responsible—

‘The Amritsar Massacre, for example,’ Karim Jackson was saying, ‘is an interesting example. Like all of the other showpiece horrors of British Imperialism, it was carried out by decent quiet, home-loving Englishmen, who weren’t aware of how racist, how savagely, murderously hostile they actually were to the world outside the world they knew. And our poisoner is a hangover from the imperial past. He kills to forget the horrors he is heir to.’

Henry could feel the hostility rise in him. Make him stop! he prayed. Don’t let him go on about Thatcherism and the danger of Little Englandism! Deep down, he intoned in his head, over and over again, Karim Jackson is a nice bloke. He may have a funny name and be the colour of underdone toffee but
au fond
he is, like me, an Englishman. I am not a racist psychopath, I am – hang on, that’s wrong. I
am
a racist psychopath but I am trying not to be one.
And this bastard is not helping me any by going on about Imperialism and Thatcherism!

Henry noticed he was gripping the table hard with his hands. Jackson was now, to Henry’s horror, talking about the Boxer Rebellion. He folded his hands over his ears, then, to try and stop them shaking, held them on to the table. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Rush. The policeman was looking at him with that mocking, enigmatic smile of his. ‘Go on!’ he seemed to be saying, ‘go on! All I need is the evidence of my eyes. An inquest, and then you’ll be neatly sewn up, won’t you, sunshine?’ Henry looked down at his hands. There was something in them. A piece of paper from his pocket? What was it? His hands did not seem to be able to keep still. They were sliding nearer and nearer to Jackson’s food. And Jackson was talking again. Henry must concentrate on his face. Then he wouldn’t be able to see what his hands were doing. What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve about. He’ll stop me, won’t he? The Law wouldn’t let a man die, would they? Or would they? Evidence. They want evidence. These days you’ve got to have evidence. Henry stared at Jackson, willing the man not to say anything Marxist or anti-Imperialist.

‘The poisoner,’ he was saying, ‘is a perfect metaphor for the way we are now. Our fear, our narrowness, our obstinate refusal to see ourselves as anything other than the centre of the world. It’s the perfect Marxist paradox. England’s very littleness has made her universally relevant. You’ve no idea of the interest I’ve had from American publishers and media people about this story. They see it as absolutely central. And yet, in a sense, begging your pardon, Henry, but if it weren’t for this who, really, would give a stuff about Wimbledon? I mean it’s a nightmare really, isn’t it? Wimbledon? It’s dead from the neck up. It takes a psychopath to make it interesting, right?’

Henry could not see clearly. The room in front of him was going in and out of focus and Jackson’s voice that had, a minute ago, seemed pleasant, cultivated, was booming, echoing, as if they were in some cellar or underground cavern. Jackson’s face too was a brown blur and his teeth had gone as white and sharp as a tiger’s. All Henry could hear was ‘. . . Wimbledon . . . not interesting . . . psychopath . . . not interesting . . . Wimbledon . . . not interesting . . . psychopath.’ I must get out, he told himself, before I do something awful. I must get out . . . Wimbledon . . . not interesting . . . psychopath . . . not . . .