The Wimbledon Poisoner by Nigel Williams

Author:Nigel Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472106841
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

23

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.

‘It is difficult to understand why Charles March should have built the windmill in this way. But Wimbledon Windmill bears a striking resemblance to one or two other post mills. It is possible—’

Here he tapped Maisie on the chest, ‘Listen, Maisie – it is possible that he simply copied this building out of ignorance of normal windmill practice. Do you see? Isn’t that amazing?’

‘No,’ said Maisie.

‘I mean,’ said Henry, trying to breathe some life into this subject, ‘what an amazing dumbo. Just . . . copying a windmill like that. Not knowing anything about normal windmill practice!’

‘A windmill,’ said Maisie, ‘is just a windmill. Isn’t it?’

Henry sighed. It was true that since Donald’s death he had been making more effort with his daughter; there were times, as a result, when he wondered whether she, not Elinor, was the problem. There were even moments when it occurred to him that he was the problem. He looked across at Elinor.

OK, she was a feminist. That was a harmless eccentricity, wasn’t it? She was a feminist, but when it came down to it she put the things in the dishwasher like anyone else. She mowed the lawn. These days she sometimes even listened to him.

‘I’m bored of this windmill,’ said Maisie. ‘I want to go to the café.’

‘Yes, my darling,’ said Elinor. ‘Yes, of course. Salt and vinegar crisps? Or a sticky bun?’

At the worst point in her therapy (she didn’t seem to go quite as often these days) she would never have allowed such words to pollute her lips. The women in the therapy group were of the opinion that poisons in foodstuffs were a direct cause of many emotional and psychological difficulties, one of them having gone as far as writing Henry a note to tell him to lay off the salami, and once the mere mention of the word ‘salt’ would have brought her out in the kind of rash experienced by someone suffering from a dose of atropine methonitrate or a crafty snort of alkaloids of calabar.

It was Henry who saw the world as under the sway of poisons these days. Poisons, like ugly shapes emerging from a Rorschach blot, were there, behind

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