Free The Wimbledon Poisoner by Nigel Williams Page A

be guilty of the capital crime of blocking Elinor’s creativity. There were other saboteurs and wreckers, Trotskyists and double-dealing spies, who, sneakily and shamefully, crept about, blocking Elinor’s rightful place as an internationally acclaimed oil painter, star newspaper columnist or opera singer. Her mother for a start.
    At first, Henry had not been able to believe that her therapist had got it so right. If anyone had prevented Elinor from being an oil executive, or a leading novelist and short-story writer, it was Elinor’s mother, a small, heavily built woman with a squint, who lived very near the Sellafield atomic reactor. Principally because Elinor’s mother was completely without talent for anything apart from giving men a hard time and had, presumably, passed on her genes to her daughter.
    The therapist, apparently, while finding her mother guilty of the hideous and anti-state offence of blocking Elinor’s creativity, took the view that she had managed to do this by getting Elinor to love her too much. How she worked this out was a mystery to Henry, since her mother’s role in Elinor’s life was confined to twice-yearly visits in which she sat in their front room and listened to Elinor telling her how awful Henry was.
    He put the chicken in a roasting bag and felt in his pocket for the vial of thallium.
    ‘Ugh!’ said Maisie. ‘Chicken.’
    ‘It’s OK,’ said Henry, ‘you can fill up on choc bars and then pretend to eat it and when she isn’t looking I’ll sling it in the bin.’
    ‘Good!’ said Maisie.
    ‘I wouldn’t touch a mouthful of it myself,’ said Henry, ‘it’s that healthy free-range chicken that she likes . . .’
    ‘Yuk!’ said Maisie.
    While she was munching her way through her third chocolate bar, Henry took the chicken through to the scullery and carefully anointed its breast with the thallium. On top of the thallium he sprinkled salt, a very little pepper and a coating of tarragon leaves. It was six thirty.
    Back in the kitchen, he cleaned the edenwort and the okra and chopped them up small enough to be unrecognizable. He whistled as he chopped and, as he tipped the vegetables into the frying pan, he sang, to the tune of ‘Candy Man Blues’, the following song:
    Thallium
Thallium
Guillain-Barré
Thallium
Thallium Thallium
Thallium Guillain-Barré.
    Underneath the frying pan was another note.
    You hate women, don’t you? Why do you hate women? Why are you so frightened of them? Why do you seek to destroy them? To caricature them? Is it their creative potential that frightens you? Their menstrual power? Their child-bearing power? Is it their fund of womanliness you hate? Don’t you hate women, Henry?
    Henry couldn’t think of a woman he disliked apart from Elinor. And, of course, Elinor’s mother.
    How would Elinor’s mother react to her daughter’s death? Henry had a feeling that she would take it well. She had taken her husband’s brain tumour like a . . . well, like a man. ‘OK,’ her square jaw seemed to say, ‘Derek has a brain tumour. That happens. We can deal with it!’ And she and her daughter had dealt with it. They had coped. They had certainly coped a lot better than Elinor’s father, a man Henry had always liked. The news of his impending death had badly ruffled his composure. He had talked wildly about the meaning of life, the emptiness of it all, the lack of scope offered by the Guardian Building Society. Elinor and her mother had clearly found all this in bad taste.
    ‘Daddy is depressed,’ they would say, narrowing their eyes and tilting their square chins downward, ‘very, very depressed. About the fact that he is dying.’
    They clearly felt he should have taken a more manly approach to the brain tumour. A man who had such a positive attitude towards Do It Yourself could surely have used some of that energy to combat the decay of his central nervous system. Henry thought about his father-in-law’s funeral, as he placed the Chicken