The Wimbledon Poisoner (24 page)

Everett Maltby had started to frighten him. Perhaps it was the night, perhaps it was Rush, trotting behind him like some apparently biddable dog, perhaps it was the disturbing power his career as a murderer seemed to have given him, but as they crossed on to the damp grass Henry felt haunted by something. This was how Maltby felt, wasn’t it? When he watched his wife die? And wasn’t that another set of footsteps he could hear behind him on the cold pavement? The footsteps of a man with a pale face and a high wing collar and a handshake as clammy as the evening.

Henry walked ahead of Elinor, and seizing Maisie by the hand ran forward towards the cottage that stood, alone, at the edge of the grass. In a sudden hurry to get this over, he raised his hand to beat out a rhythm on the door, but before he could do so, just as Maisie was preparing to screech a witch’s curse, it was flung open from the other side and from the darkness came a howl like a hungry wolf’s.

‘GO AWAY!’ shouted Gordon Macrae. ‘AWAY! AWAYAWAY!’ He had clearly been at the winebox. He did not turn on the light but stood in the shadows, his mane of white hair shaking this way and that. Maisie stepped back, whimpering. Macrae’s voice seemed to have been amplified in some curious way.

‘It’s Hallowe’en!’ he shouted, in the same ghostly voice. ‘It’s Hallowe’en. There are spirits abroad. Away! Away! The damned are out tonight! There is Evil in the air! I feel it!’

All this was fairly standard with Macrae. As the author of a bestselling book about the significance of gesture and a brief but telling study of death and exorcism, he waved a mean arm, and, when he chose, frightened pretty good. Tonight, however, perhaps prompted by the season, he was almost worryingly effective. Behind him, in the pale hall, the even paler figure of Lingalonga Boccherini emerged. She looked, thought Henry, like a crofter’s wife, caught at a nasty moment in the Clearances. She was wearing a brown shawl, a brown headdress and stout brown shoes and, as if to emphasize her resemblance to something out of a diorama in the Folk Museum, Aberdeen, she stretched out her hand towards Gordon and began to keen.

‘Oh no . . .’ said Lingalonga Boccherini. ‘Oh no-oo-oo . . .’

Maisie cowered behind Henry. She had clearly not expected resistance. At Hallowe’en you went round and scared people and they gave you sweets. They didn’t rush out at you with plasters on their legs, howling and keening.

Jungian Analyst with Winebox produced from behind his back a knobbed walking stick and began to wave it. ‘There is a curse out tonight!’ he went on. ‘A curse! Away! Away foul fiends! Away!’

Then he laughed. Maisie clearly found the laugh the most frightening thing about him. She ran into Henry’s coat, as in the remote distances of the hall two figures in pyjamas, of the kind Henry could remember from his childhood, striped flannel jobs with white string cords, crept towards Lingalonga Boccherini. Caedmon and Wulfstan.

Caedmon (or was it Wulfstan?) was saying something. ‘Please, Mother,’ he was saying, ‘just one more two-part canzonetta before bedtime!’

Lingalonga Boccherini did not hit him hard in the pit of the stomach for this remark. She continued to keen in the direction of her husband.

‘Yaaargh!’ said Elinor, rather lamely.

Nobody seemed very frightened.

‘Hullo, Julia!’ she said.

Maisie stepped out from behind Henry’s coat. ‘Oooowaaieeeiou!’ she howled, and then, ‘Eaaaargh!’

Lingalonga Boccherini smiled sweetly at her. ‘Oh, Maisie . . .’ she said, ‘lovely!’

And then, from the shadows, came Inspector Rush. He had been standing in the long grass, a little out of sight of the Macrae family, but in two steps he was caught in the yellow light of a street lamp, his neat mackintosh pulled up round his face, his trilby well down over his eyes. He had sucked in his cheeks and stroked his moustache. His attempt to seem sinister was undermined, however, by his voice. Rush was quite simply unable to stop sounding like a man asking you whether you were aware that you were travelling in a bus lane with out-of-date tax disc on display.

‘Name’s Crippen! Hawley Harvey Crippen. Hilldrop Crescent. Would the kiddies care for a cup of hot, sweet tea?’

Birdwatching Child Viola Player burst into tears. ‘Who’s that horrid man, Mummy?’ he wailed.

‘It’s Crippen!’ said Henry, ghoulishly. ‘We found him on the common. He’s a poisoner!’

Macrae cackled. He seemed pleased by the sight of his own children’s mental collapse. ‘Jolly good!’ he cackled. ‘Jolly good! Crippen! Hawley Harvey Crippen, of course! The man who loved his wife!’ He winked broadly at Elinor.

‘Poisoners,’ said Macrae, not asking them to come in, or to come any nearer his winebox than was absolutely necessary, ‘poisoners love their subjects. It’s their way of saying “I want you and I don’t want anyone else to have you.” Julia is writing a paper on it, aren’t you Julia?’

Lingalonga Boccherini looked up from Caedmon. Her face had moved, as so often, from melancholy gladness, to sudden, irrational terror. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘poison is nourishment!’

Rush gazed at her with some respect.

‘Poison is all the bad things we think about anyone expressed in chemical form, isn’t it? And it’s nearly always served with love and attention, to turn the loved one into a victim, the way in which the possessive mother—’

Here Jungian Analyst with Winebox pointed at his wife’s head.

‘Which of course, as Gordon says, I am – the possessive mother seeks to control her child, of course, very much in the way the doctor controls the patient. Because motherhood, like murder, is controlling. And we say, don’t we, that motherhood is “murder”. Or that the children have been “murder” today. And that is because, of course, we want to kill them because we love them and because our love is, literally, murder, which is why we want to put arsenic on their fish fingers or whatever!’

Wulfstan started to howl. Jungian Analyst with Winebox laughed and went back into the darkened hall after his son. Lingalonga Boccherini shrank back with the boy in her arms.

‘And chop them up!’ her husband added. ‘And fry them and serve them to the neighbours the way they do in Polynesia! Best thing to do with your wife and your children, in my opinion! Eat them before they eat you! Ha ha ha!’

Caedmon was also looking on the verge of tears. As indeed, thought Henry, will I be if he doesn’t let us in and at the Côtes de Nuit fairly soon. But Jungian Analyst with Winebox showed no signs of letting them past his front porch. He paced around in the darkened hallway, waving his arms frantically, free associating, free of charge, into the dank November night.

‘The Manichees,’ he went on, ‘believed that virtue and evil are locked up in certain foods. Rather like saying, if you grasp this, that bananas are immoral!’

‘Or toast and marmalade is good!’ said Henry, brightly. Macrae looked at him suspiciously.

‘Evil dwelleth in the frankfurter!’ went on Henry. But this remark only made matters worse.

Macrae gripped him by the collar and, with undisguised dislike, said, ‘Food. Don’t you see? Food is morality. Why do you think we lay such emphasis on “table manners”? Why do we need to control our eating?’

‘Because,’ said Henry, hoping that Macrae would put him down soon, ‘we don’t want to get fat!’

‘Listen to the words we use about food,’ replied Macrae, slackening his grip, ‘we offer someone a drink and say “what’s your poison”?’

‘I’ll have a Côtes de Nuit!’ said Henry.

‘We want, of course, to kill our friend, to punish him for his greed because, of course, the irony of food is that it is a hunger for spirit, as in the communion wafer for example, the sacrament of married life, say, in which we eat each other and no one gets the leftovers. And the irony of poison is that it is a hunger not for death, but for life, for the spirit that quickens! It is a way of bringing the loved one in direct contact with the Almighty.’

Rush goggled at him from out of the darkness. He had clearly never met anyone like Jungian Analyst with Winebox before. The Wimbledon CID, thought Henry, probably used a much tamer species of psychiatrist. But Maisie, who was now clearly out of her depth and anxious to restore some kind of festive quality to this encounter, stepped forward with the apple in her hand. Perhaps, Henry thought later, she was going to offer it to him as a reward for shutting up; in fact it provoked a new torrent of speculation on Macrae’s part.

‘The apple!’ he said. ‘Of course! The apple! The apple that we bob for at Hallowe’en is of course the same apple offered to Snow White in the fairytale! What is it? The apple of death in life. The apple of desire that Eve forced Adam to eat in the Garden of Eden. The apple of the female principle. The feminists understand this, don’t they? The male poisons the apple to kill his mother, of course!’

‘Oh, yes,’ chimed in Lingalonga Boccherini, ‘because this aspect of nourishment is perceived of as threatening by the male, isn’t it?’

Macrae was nodding vigorously. When on this course the Macraes could keep up a kind of antiphonal exchange that, in Henry’s experience, could last hours. He began to peer past them in the direction of the kitchen where lay the winebox of Côtes de Nuit.

‘But in the folktale, of course,’ went on Lingalonga Boccherini, in the dreamy, hypnotic voice that had been largely responsible for her nickname, ‘after she has eaten the poisoned apple, poisoned by the wicked possessive mother, who is someone like me really, I suppose, she falls into a faint and she can only be wakened by a kiss from a male, that is to say, a prince, which isn’t really a kiss of course but the male urge to rape and violate and explain away the contradictions of the female, very much as you, Gordon, of course try and destroy me sexually!’

‘Absolutely!’ said Macrae, nodding.

He took the apple from Maisie and held it up high, shaking his white hair out behind him. ‘The apple of good and evil, of the carnal and uncarnal knowledge of others! Why else do we bob for it at Hallowe’en? Because of course it represents the evil spirits that are around tonight. Here, even as we speak! And yet of course, we must not, as Adam in the garden did or Snow White at the gate of the cottage, bite into this round, red juicy thing, for it is, of course, tainted. It is the apple of death!’

Here he suited his actions to the words and gnawed a chunk of the fruit away. It had crisp, white flesh and that treasured, sour smell of apples that Henry remembered from his childhood, when his mother . . . Why was he thinking about his mother?

‘If we bite into it and chew it we go blue! And choke! And whirl around like this!’

Here he performed what was, even for Macrae, a fantastically good impression of someone dying of prussic acid poisoning. He leapt up in the air, tugged at his collar, gave a ghastly choking sound and, his face blue, fell forward on to the path in front of the house.

It was only when he failed to rise that Henry stooped down beside him and discovered that the psychiatrist was stone dead.

The worst thing about being a serial killer, Henry reflected in the weeks after the demise of Gordon Macrae, was that you might not know you were a serial killer. You might think you were jogging along with the occasional regrettable lapse, such as the poisoning of a few people in the road, but by and large, you might suppose, you were a decent enough citizen. And then, one day, you might wake up and discover that when you thought you had been watching the television or mowing the lawn you had, in fact, been out garrotting people on towpaths.

Christ, Henry could not even remember the names of people with whom he had had dinner the night before. He had for years of their marriage offered Elinor both tea and coffee, forgetting she did not like either, and these days was unable to remember talks he had given on (oh, my Christ!) the Wimbledon Poisoner. Suppose he was
the
Wimbledon Poisoner? Not the half-hearted creature he knew himself to be but a real, top-level psychopath.

Because on the inquest on Gordon Macrae it was revealed by a very senior police forensic scientist that the apple contained enough prussic acid to wipe out half the Jungians in Wimbledon. ‘And thereby,’ said Henry to Elinor, ‘saving the neurotics of the district a large amount of valuable time and money.’

Everyone wanted to know where Maisie had got the apple. She couldn’t remember. The more they asked her the more she couldn’t remember. She didn’t seem distressed by their questions, remarking to one particularly insistent WPC, ‘I didn’t kill him! I didn’t like him but I didn’t kill him!’

For a time Henry thought she might be following in his footsteps. But even Maisie was not up to the purchase of prussic acid, let alone injecting it into an apple. The more he thought about it, the more Henry became certain – along with all the national and local press – that there was such a person as the Wimbledon Poisoner. And that he was it.

‘
MADMAN ON LOOSE IN WIMBLEDON!
’ they said in the London
Standard.
And ‘is
THERE A POISONER IN YOUR ROAD?
’ They published artists’ impressions of a man people had seen behaving suspiciously near the scene of the crime (which looked, as Elinor remarked, exactly like Henry). They published analyses of him by eminent psychiatrists, who were more than usually censorious about the unknown assassin. All the sketches of the poisoner’s character sounded, to Henry, like Henry.

When, he wondered, as he rattled in to Harris, Harris and Overdene, would he strike again? A client of his in Epsom threatened suicide if contracts were not exchanged on his house by Christmas. But Henry could not concentrate on work. He sat staring out at Ludgate Circus, waiting for the red mist that would send him off down the road, in a deep trance, for another kilo of antimony.

At times he wondered whether he might not only be the Wimbledon Poisoner but a few other psychopaths into the bargain. His guilt knew no bounds and, if there was any consolation, it was that Donald, Sprott, Coveney and Loomis no longer caused him any pain. They were simply a step along the road for the poisoner, an episode when, for some inexplicable reason, he had remained fully conscious while perpetrating his despicable acts.