The Wimbledon Poisoner Read Online Free PDF

to come to a diagnosis off his own bat.
    ‘It’s the . . . polyneuritis . . .’ he heard himself say, as Donald sneaked towards the medical dictionary, his big handsome head bowed with concern, his grey eyes looking into the distance, in the direction of the local tennis court.
    He might even sob. That would be good. If only to observe the embarrassment on Donald’s face.
    Where should he have her cremated? Somewhere rather low-rent, Henry thought. There was a particularly nasty crematorium in Mitcham, he recalled, with a chapel that looked more than usually like a public lavatory. And, from what he remembered of the funeral (his grandmother’s), the ushers looked like men who were trying hard not to snigger. Or should he go completely the other way? Hire a small cruiser and slip her coffin over the side in some ocean that might have some special meaning for her? (The Bering Straits, possibly.) He could . . . but Henry was almost too full of good ideas for her funeral. She wasn’t even dead yet.
    Half an hour left.
    The chief problem with thallium was that it didn’t seem to be used for anything much apart from the manufacture of optical lenses of a high refractive index – camera lenses, for example. Henry stared for some moments at the word ‘optical’. Why should he need stuff for making lenses? He didn’t make cameras, he wasn’t an optician—
    No, but Gordon Beamish was. Gordon Beamish was a real live optician. He was all optician. He was probably always nipping down to Underwoods for a few grams of thallium. Susie Beamish probably drank it for breakfast. There would be an especial pleasure in using Gordon Beamish’s name. If anyone deserved a few years in an open prison it was Beamish.
    Like many people who wear glasses, Henry hated opticians, especially opticians with 20/20 vision. Gordon Beamish was a man who made a fetish out of being lynx-eyed. He could be seen most mornings at the door of his shop in Wimbledon Village, arms crossed, mouth twisted in a superior sneer, just waiting for the chance to decode the small print on the front of buses.
    ‘I saw you in the High Street the other day,’ he would say, in a tone that suggested that it was quite impossible for Henry to have seen him. Henry had lost count of the number of times Beamish began a sentence with the words ‘I notice . . .’ or ‘I observe . . .’ Things were always crystal clear to Beamish; he was always taking a view or spying out the land or finding some way of pointing out the difference between his world – a universe of sharp corners and exact distances – and the booming, foggy place in which Henry found himself every time he took off his glasses. When suffering eye tests in the darkened cubicle at the back of his shop, almost the only thing Henry ever managed to see was the pitying smile on Beamish’s face as he flashed up smaller and smaller letter sequences, all of them probably spelling ‘You are a fat shortsighted twerp’!
    Beamish, thought Henry, could be the fall guy. He liked to think of Beamish in the dock at the Central Court, his counsel blustering on about his client’s perfectly normal, acceptable need for heavy metal poisons (‘But how do you explain, Mr Beamish, your ordering a quantity of thallium from a perfectly reputable chemist’s . . . ?’) He closed the book, replaced it in the cookery section of the open shelves, and walked briskly to the car. There was no time to lose. It was entirely possible, Elinor being the way she was, that somebody else would try to kill her before Henry got in with his bid.
    Indeed, he reflected, as he joined the queue at the traffic lights opposite the library, it was such a blindingly simple, brilliantly obvious idea, it was very difficult to think why everyone wasn’t doing it. Why, while they were about it, wasn’t she trying to kill him?
    Henry drove cautiously up the hill. He tested the brakes when he reached the top. They seemed OK.
    Maisie looked, as always,