The Wimbledon Poisoner (31 page)

‘Let’s feast on all his sides of beef

Let’s slaver over cottage pies,

For he who dines with Maltby, boys,

Dines marvellously, ere he dies!

O hurry Southward, didst thou think

That Phoebus’ brightness ever shone?

No no! The evening comes and brings

The Poisoner of Wimbledon!’

It wasn’t, thought Henry, only his sense of guilt that made this performance so unnerving. Rush’s hands shook as he came to the last verse and his mouth, never a very attractive thing at the best of times, wriggled across his face like a snake in a bag. He looks, thought Henry, about as crazy as I must be.

Down below the front door opened. Henry heard what was almost certainly Edwina Sprott’s step in the hall. No one could mistake that slow, tombstone tread of hers, the creak and thud of her Doc Martens hitting the stripped pine floor, reminiscent of the opening sequence of
Feet of Frankenstein
, and then the deep boom of her voice, calling up the stairs – ‘I’m back, darling!’

Henry’s first thought was that Mrs Sprott had a toy boy concealed somewhere about the house. Women in Wimbledon, Elinor included, were always moaning on about toy boys, perhaps because if their husbands had one thing in common it was a lack of ludic quality. Accountant’s Wife with Over-developed Breasts and New Sierra had, people said, actually got a toy boy, although when finally sighted he was reported to be quite as fat and old and boring as everybody else. Certainly number 12b had had a black toy boy, who had come to investigate her soakaway drain and stayed, but he had only stayed three days and, people said, had left with her television, compact-disc player and fifty-three pounds in cash.

It was only when the widow was halfway up the stairs that Henry realized. She was talking to the late David Sprott.

‘I couldn’t stand Nelly any more,’ she was saying, as she dropped what sounded like a case, ‘so I left and came straight on back. I just felt sort of wild and crazy and desperate to get back home. Do you know what I mean?’

Henry thought he did. He started to tiptoe, at speed, towards the large cupboard in the corner of the room. Rush, polythene bag in hand, followed him.

‘She was going on about how marvellous she was was Nelly,’ said the relict of the man known to some as ‘Cap ’em’ Sprott, ‘and if I have to hear one more time how marvellously that stupid little cow Monica is doing at St Paul’s, I shall spit. She reckons she has an IQ of 184 or something – I said “come off it” – and plays the violin without music. I don’t condone that myself.’

This conversation brought a new dimension to all those wise words about death being but a brief interruption in our conversation with our fellow pilgrims. It also served to remind us, in Henry’s view, how, very often, those conversations should never even have been started, let alone continued across the Great Divide. Death and taxation might be the only certain things, but Mrs Sprott’s version of snobbery was probably immune to both.

‘Mozart this and Mozart that, I let her know how well Timmy was doing anyway, and why she won’t have Mother for Christmas I don’t know, it suited me to have her on Boxing Day but oh no, it had to be Christmas Eve. Anyone would think her husband was something interesting. He’s only a monkey who reads the news!’

In amongst his second victim’s suits, Henry remembered that Mrs Sprott’s brother-in-law read the local news somewhere or other; it was a source of mild satisfaction to him that she should be subjected to the incomprehensible, bottomless vanity of this species of person.

‘I said had they seen the results of the Lossiemouth by-election but it was pretty clear that they had no interest. I tried them on Nicaragua but they didn’t seem to have formulated a view on it. And one of them didn’t seem to have any idea of who the member for Bristol East was!’

Sprott, of course, had been kept abreast of politics by his wife, whose capacity to consume weekly journals, TV programmes and even live conferences concerned with political issues was legendary. It was clear that even his death was not going to stand between him and political enlightenment.

‘And I heard Kinnock on the radio. That man has no conception of how to orchestrate his power base. He needs to confront Conference!’

Through a chink in the cupboard door, Henry observed her pull the lid off the vase and peer down at whatever Rush had put in it. If it was rabbits she was presumably looking at a whole colony. Whatever it was it seemed to satisfy her, for she replaced the lid with a little smile.

‘It’s nice to be home, darling,’ she said, ‘it’s nice to know you’re there on the mantelpiece.’

Henry looked down. Rush was squatting on the floor, clutching the polythene bag close to him. He looked back out into the room and, to his horror, saw that Mrs Sprott was starting to undress.

She slipped her dress over her shoulders and allowed it to fall to her knees. She was wearing a black bra and black silk knickers that Henry recognized, with a thrill, as coming from Marks and Spencer. Elinor had a pair exactly the same. She crossed to the full-length mirror in the corner of the room, and looked at herself. Henry heard Rush give a little wheeze of excitement next to him, as Mrs Sprott lowered her knickers. The two men gazed out from her cupboard at something no man other than the late David Sprott had ever seen, the naked, white buttocks, tapering down to a fuzz of black pubic hair and a pair of no-nonsense, meaty, muscular thighs.

Next to Henry, Rush continued to wheeze. Was the detective, Henry wondered, stimulating himself in some way? He looked down and saw Rush, on his knees, eyes fixed to the crack in the cupboard door. His hands, as far as Henry could see, were nowhere near his trousers. The widow Sprott started to unhook her bra, in an extremely sensual manner. She shook it over her breasts, while making little rowing motions with her upper arms, and as it fell to the floor she gave a little twitch of the hips, causing Rush to leak what sounded like a whimper.

Did this, thought Henry, go on every night in the Sprott bedroom? And what about other bedrooms in Maple Drive? Did Mrs Is-the-Mitsubishi-Scratched-Yet, after she had drawn the bedroom curtains, switched on the light in the hall, come down in her dressing gown and gone up in her dressing gown, carry on like this? Was this the reason Mr Is-the-Mitsubishi-Scratched-Yet leapt up the stairs each night, two at a time, minutes after she had gone upstairs? And if this was the case, if things like this, or things even more spectacular than this even, were happening in front bedrooms the length of the street, wasn’t it time Henry got a pair of infra-red binoculars and some kind of hide in the front garden?

She turned to them, naked and, humming to herself, went towards the cassette deck by the bed. She had one of those deep, architectural, solid navels, Henry noted, and large brown nipples. Elinor’s were pink. But before he had time to compare and contrast the two women (another aspect, he presumed, of his cold, calculating, psychopathic nature) Mrs Sprott had turned on the machine and the strains of ‘Guantanamera’ filled the room. It was a song Henry had always enjoyed and, even under these somewhat awkward circumstances, he found himself nodding his head in time to it, and trying, once again, to work out what the hell those words were that immediately followed the opening.

Guantanamera

Akeela (?????)

Guantana-meeera!

And, one more time—

Guantanamera

Ah feel ya (?????)

Guantana-meeera!

And, surely, this time one would get it? Come on! Here it comes again! This time, surely! Surely!

Guantanamera

Tequila (?????)

Guantana-meeera!

But no. They were on to the bit about his poems being flaming crimson and how he was a truthful man who only wanted to bugger sheep. And Mrs Sprott, who had returned to the mantelpiece, was dancing, naked, in front of the photograph of her late husband. Henry did not dare look to see what Rush was making of this. He almost expected the picture of the dentist to register some emotion (surprise possibly) but, like a holy picture, like Mary or Jesus receiving an act of piety, Sprott continued to grin out at the opposite wall, while his widow rotated her buttocks, bumped and ground and . . . oh my God, she wasn’t, was she?

Oh yes she was. Now wildly out of time to the music (the man had finished his translation of the lyric and, having demonstrated to his and everybody else’s satisfaction that it was incomprehensible in both Spanish and English, was now singing it all over again, in that same, linguistically secretive style), she rotated her hips faster and faster and her elbow jerked up and down as if she was beating mayonnaise.

Guantanamera

Ah steal ya (????)

Guantana-meeera!

Not feeling that this was something he wanted to watch, Henry concentrated on the picture of Sprott, who continued to look at the camera in what he clearly thought was a confident, solid, reasonable fashion. But his wife (it was impossible to ignore her) was pumping her way towards climax, as the guitars, drums and flutes continued their endless circle. Her left hand snaked round her neck and pulled at her hair, then slid down, past her breasts and buried itself in the flesh of her left buttock. She was moving faster, faster and . . . What happens, thought Henry, if the cassette finishes before she does? But through what was probably long practice, both Mrs Sprott and the Havana All Stars – or whoever they were – came to a conclusion at the same time and, dripping with sweat, she started to cast around for her clothes as the tape hissed on in disapproving silence. My Christ, thought Henry, whoever said Wimbledon was dull?

Eventually she resumed her conversation.

‘Well,’ she said, as she struggled back into her clothes, ‘that was very nice, David. Very nice indeed. Thank you very much. I enjoyed that a lot. I hope you were all right. Were you all right? I was. I was fine. Oh, look, you had a good innings really, didn’t you? For God’s sake, we none of us live for ever, do we? You could be bloody boring, David, actually. You had no interest in politics. You just—’ Here, she sat on the bed and began to sob violently.

Oh my God, thought Henry. Oh my sweet Jesus Christ. I am sorry. I am very, very, very sorry. This is awful. I didn’t mean to. I tried to stop them. I honestly did. I tried to stop him drinking the bloody stuff. I really didn’t want him dead. I didn’t like him. I admit that. But I didn’t want him dead. I mean I may have wanted him dead once or twice. But I didn’t mean it. Everyone wants someone or other dead some time or other, don’t they? Look, I’m really, really sorry.

‘Look, Henry,’ said Sprott, ‘I was insured. I was very heavily insured as a matter of fact. She’s better off now than she was with me alive.’

Mrs Sprott continued to cry on the bed. Fat tears rolled down her face, smudging her make up, blurring the lines on her cheeks, reminding Henry against his will that real actions had real consequences. And it was then, he realized afterwards, watching a lonely woman crying on a rumpled bed, in a deserted house, that he knew, whatever else he was, he wasn’t a psychopath. He was pretty fucking close, but not there yet. And the only way he was going to get out of this, the only thing that would stop the dull ache the sight of her caused him, would be if he went out to her now and told her everything. Told Rush too. Told all of them what he had done and why he had done it. Atoned, for Christ’s sake. Atoned. Because this feeling wasn’t containable. It was like a needle in his side or an unstoppable headache that made him, as he stood there in the cupboard, feel he was about to lose his balance.

He probably would have gone out there too, he thought afterwards (in which case the whole thing would have ended differently). The only thing that stopped him was the near certainty that he would have given her a heart attack. And he didn’t, no, he positively did not, you could quote him on that, want to cause any more deaths. Ever. He wanted to be nice to people. He wanted to make children smile. He wanted to gladden the last years of grannies and grandpas. He wanted to be helpful, in an unpatronizing manner, to the disabled. He wanted to be all the things his class, his upbringing and his country seemed to militate against. Generous. He had, in the last few months, got rid of so many hostilities, resentments, spites, perversions and jealousies that he must now, he thought, be the nicest guy in Wimbledon. He was poison free, for Christ’s sake! He was as clean as a lanced boil! What he was feeling, here in the cupboard, while Mrs Sprott cried into her sheets for a man who was – let’s face it – a pretty nice guy as well, was love. Love for her, and for her husband, yes, don’t laugh, for Sprott and for Mr and Mrs Is-the-Mitsubishi-Scratched-Yet and Nazi Who Escaped Justice at Nuremberg and Vera ‘Got All the Things There Then?’ Loomis and Jungian Analyst with Winebox and Lingalonga Boccherini and Surveyor with Huge Gut and Drink Problem and Surveyor with Huge Gut and Fondness for Potatoes and Published Magical Realist and Unpublished Magical Realist and, oh for God’s sake, all of them, the whole hopeless, gargoyle crew of them. Because, this was the fact he had never been able to face, let’s face it, he wasn’t any better or worse than any of these people. He was one of them. He was Fat Man with Bowler Hat and Unimaginable Feelings of Hostility Towards People. He was—

If only I could roll back time, thought Henry. If only I wasn’t a quintuple murderer. How simple, easy and pleasant life would be!

And that thought brought him back to the fact that he couldn’t roll back time. That he wasn’t just Fat Man with Bowler Hat and Unimaginable Feelings of Hostility Towards People, he was Fat Man with Bowler Hat Who Had Poisoned God Knows How Many Innocent People. And that thought made him feel he was falling, falling, the way he had felt that night he tried to strangle Elinor and, to stop that feeling that he was falling, which of course was unstoppable because once you fall you fall, dead people don’t come back to life and time will not, however hard you try, go backwards, he felt for a feeling that would stop the falling feeling and found he was feeling, or rather failing to feel, since he was falling, for something that felt as if it was filling the feeling that perhaps he had been failing to feel, the feeling that—