The Wimbledon Poisoner Read Online Free PDF Page A

path and into the hall. Where, though, was Donald? His white Sierra was parked just ahead of Henry, the door open, but there was no sign either of him or Arfur.
    Henry got out of the car and sauntered over to the Sierra. No one around. The passenger door was open. And there, on the top of his open bag, staring straight at him, was the white notepad he used for issuing prescriptions. Henry pulled open the door, yanked off the three top sheets and scuttled back to his car. Only when he was safely inside the Passat did he look round to see if he had been observed. He was safe he was safe he was safe.
    As he groped his way under his seat, seeking somewhere to stow the paper, his fingers met something cold and hard and sharp. The jack. He’d been looking for that for ages. And if all else failed it would probably be an effective, if unsubtle way of letting his wife know that something rather more serious than Marriage Guidance was required to get them out of their marital difficulties. He wrapped the prescription paper round it and started the engine. He had an hour to get to the library, do his research and return for Maisie. A whole hour. What better way to spend one of those rare breaks in the suburban day than by studying methods of getting rid of one’s wife.

4
    There were no fewer than four books in the Wimbledon Public Library that dealt with the Graham Young case. One of them – by a man called Harkness – was 400 pages long, contained twenty-four black and white photographs, three appendices and several maps and diagrams. It was eighty pages longer than the standard biography of Antonin Dvo ř ák, the composer, and only seventy pages shorter than the definitive historical account of Rommel’s North African campaign.
    There were pages and pages of psychoanalytic rubbish, Henry noted, and endless, dreary character sketches of the people Young had poisoned. But there was also a fairly concisely written chapter entitled ‘Thallium Poisoning: Odourless, Tasteless and almost Impossible to Detect’. This was just the sort of thing Henry wanted to read.
    Most poisons, it seemed, tasted unpleasant. (Elinor did not drink either tea or coffee and only the occasional glass of mint tea. She drank no alcohol and thought most forms of seasoning depraved. Her diet was, in a sense, poison proof.) But thallium, it appeared, was quite tasteless.
    Its effects, however, were sensational. Your hair fell out. You had hallucinations. You lost the use of your limbs. You went on to do sterling work in the diarrhoea, headaches and vomiting department and you ended up coughing out your last in a way that Henry thought would be entirely suitable for Elinor. It wasn’t just that. Thallium poisoning created a set of symptoms exactly matching a series found in a type of polyneuritis known as the Guillain-Barré Syndrome. The first post-mortem on one of Young’s victims – Fred Biggs – had found no traces of thallium in the body, although later microscopic analysis revealed there were several hundred milligrams, more than enough to kill him.
    It was the polyneuritis that Henry liked. Two years after they had been married, Elinor had suddenly, mysteriously, developed a weakness in her legs, and Henry, who, equally mysteriously, in those days wasn’t trying to kill her, had hurried her to the local hospital where the doctors had diagnosed – wait for it – polyneuritis. Polyneuritis was clearly a word like morality that meant so many different things as to be absolutely meaningless. If it meant anything at all, thought Henry, it was something along the lines of
We haven’t got a clue.
Henry could imagine the conversation with Donald now. Elinor on the bed, hair falling out, vomiting, losing the use of her limbs and he and Donald, over by the window, voices low, faces discreetly grave. Donald would issue a death certificate for any cause you suggested to him; this case, Henry felt, might be so staggeringly self-explanatory as to allow him