The Wimbledon Poisoner Read Online Free PDF Page B

subtly different after her piano lesson. She looked more aware of the world, brighter, more optimistic. This was some compensation for the fact that she was almost certainly no better at the piano.
    Donald’s son, Arfur, was there, a small, fat six-year-old, who stared at Henry and said: ‘I played the piano!’
    ‘Good!’ said Henry, through compressed lips. He seized Maisie by the hand and walked back to the car. If he could get hold of something from Beamish, he might be able to lay his hands on some thallium by lunchtime. She could be dead by the time children’s television started or, if not dead, at least well on the way to it. He chose a route back down the hill that did not involve too many serious gradients, moving from Roseberry Road to War-burton Drive to Chesterton Terrace and, from there, doubling back along a series of streets with an offensively tangible air of
esprit de corps –
Lowther Park Drive, where people called to each other over their Volvos and, even worse, Stapleton Road, a place that seemed almost permanently on the verge of a street party.
    The brakes still seemed OK.
    Gordon Beamish was not in his shop – instead, under a gigantic spectacle frames stood a small, rat-faced girl called Ruthie. Ruthie, as if to compensate for her boss’s powers of vision, seemed to have every known complaint of the eyes short of blindness. Astigmatism, squints, premature presbyopia, short sight, long sight, tunnel vision, barrel vision, migraine, Ruthie had the lot, and her glasses resembled some early form of periscope; they were a circular, heavy-duty affair, with catches and locks and screws. Somewhere underneath the pebble lenses, tinged both grey and pink, the steel traps and the wires were, presumably, a pair of eyes but they were only, really, a flicker, in the depths of the optician’s
pièce de résistance
that towered above Ruthie’s nose.
    Henry liked Ruthie and Ruthie liked him.
    ‘Is Gordon about?’
    ‘No,’ said Ruthie, ‘he took Luke to Beavers.’
    Beavers. That was a new one on Henry. What the hell was Beavers? Some neo-Fascist organization perhaps? From what he could remember of Luke, the boy would have fitted well into the Waffen SS. Leaving Maisie on the street he went into the shop.
    ‘I’ll leave a note for him!’ he said.
    Ruthie folded her arms, as if to emphasize her lack of responsibility for the shop she was minding. Her eyes, or something very like her eyes, moved in the thick depths of the glass. ‘Fine!’ she said.
    Henry went through to the back of the shop.
    On Gordon’s desk was a pile of headed notepaper. Henry picked up two sheets. Then he saw something better. In a square, steel tray at the back of the desk was a notepad, the kind of thing given away by small businesses in an attempt to register their names with the public. A. M. Duncan, it read, Lenses, Photographic and Ophthalmic. And underneath the heading, an address. After a quick glance back through the shop (Maisie and Ruthie were staring out at the street in silence) Henry slid one sheet of the printed paper into Gordon’s typewriter. What he really wanted to write was:
    Henry Farr wishes some thallium to administer to his wife. Please give this to him. He is desperate.
    But instead he told whomsoever it might concern that he was Alan Bleath, a researcher employed by the above company and he needed to buy 10 grams of thallium for research purposes. Was that going to be enough? She was quite a big woman. Shouldn’t he order a kilo? Two kilos? A lorryload, for Christ’s sake! The trouble was, he thought, as he signed the paper, indecipherably, with his left hand, folded it and put it into his jacket pocket, he didn’t know much about thallium poisoning, and even less about the making of lenses with a high refractive index. A really thorough murderer would have boned up on both subjects more intently.
    Ten grams would have to do. He took a sheet of Gordon’s notepaper and typed a short note to Alan