Waking Up Dead

by Nigel Williams

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said DC Purves, who was, obviously, the member of the team in charge of the personal side of things.

  Hobday went back to looking at the floor. ‘Murder,’ he said, ‘is never pleasant. But the murder of a close family member is very hard to deal with. For another close family member.’

  ‘My brother,’ said Stephen, ‘has not been murdered. It was my mother who was murdered. At least – I don’t think my brother was murdered. Was he murdered, Nat?’

  ‘He was not,’ said Nat. ‘At least, not as far as I can tell. I’ll be issuing a death certificate. It was his heart.’

  Hobday trained his eyes on Dr Nat. Oh, was it indeed? his pale blue eyes seemed to be saying. Barging in here and telling me my job! We’ll see about that, matey!

  George was, once again, staggered at the certainty of doctors. The man had squinted at him once or twice in a darkened room and he was pronouncing with the confidence of the Pope on the Virgin Birth. Nat’s qualifications, however, were going to cut little ice with Hobday. He was evidently a man who suspected anyone and everyone; he was not going to be easily impressed by a few years at medical college and a good bedside manner.

  ‘My mother,’ Stephen was saying, ‘is on the kitchen floor. We found her. It looks like a break-in. There is a pane of glass in the french windows. Smashed. By a burglar. The man broke the glass and opened the door. He broke in to burgle. And … burgled. Or not. But he was probably interrupted. By my mother. Who was sleeping downstairs. She had a Zimmer frame but she could walk. With it. The Zimmer frame is also on the floor. Pushed there. By the burglar.’

  DI Hobday looked Stephen up and down. Slowly. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘you’ll let us be the judge of that!’ He inclined his head, very slowly, in the direction of the kitchen-diner at the back of the house. Then, with an even briefer nod to DC Purves, he slid almost imperceptibly towards the door to the kitchen. The assorted members of the Pearmain family – though not Jessica’s two friends – showed every sign of trying to follow him. DI Hobday held up his hand. ‘I shall need the person who found the body,’ he said. ‘No one else. Who discovered the body?’

  There was a slightly accusatory tone to this question. Perhaps this was why no one, at first, seemed very keen to answer it, but eventually, in a small voice, Esmeralda owned up: it was she who had stumbled across her mother-in-law first.

  ‘And you are?’ said Hobday.

  ‘Her daughter-in-law,’ said Esmeralda. ‘Mrs Esmeralda Pearmain.’

  Hobday studied her closely. It was clear, from his expression, that he thought being someone’s daughter-in-law was a pretty good motive for murder. George, from his experience of this particular blood tie, could not help but agree with him. If Esmeralda had not topped his mother (and her surprise this morning had sounded fairly genuine) then Lulu was certainly in the running for prime suspect, as far as the killing of the ninety-nine-year-old ex-piano teacher was concerned. He would not have been surprised to learn that Lulu Belhatchett (she never, ever used her married name, and only soiled her mouth with George’s family’s handle once it had been carefully disinfected with inverted commas) had put the rubbing-out of Jessica in the hands of some reliable firm of assassins, while she gave herself an alibi by slithering off to Basingstoke early yesterday evening.

  He was just thinking this when, this time in ordered sequence, the bell was rung, the front door was opened and his sister-in-law had appeared on the mat, bearing the aspect, as usual, of one who had just been teleported from some distant galaxy where terminal sangfroid was the norm. Lulu’s clothes, as usual, were immaculate. Lulu’s coiffure, as usual, suggested she had just been wheeled out of some exclusive salon in a weatherproof container. Lulu’s shoes bore no trace of having been in contact with anything as vulgar as the pavement. Lulu’s jewellery – the tiny budded golden earrings, the chunky gold bracelet, the discreetly expensive pearls – spoke to anyone with the insolence to examine it closely of but one thing. Insurance. Lulu’s skin – if there was anything that corresponded to that word under the inches of anti-wrinkle cream, deep, pure cleansing oil and wholly natural essence of jojoba – glowed like virgin snow under arc lights. Lulu’s manicured nails, tapping restlessly on her personal organizer, spoke of boundless ambition, impatience and hostility to those foolish enough not to understand the fundamental importance of Lulu Belhatchett.

  And then, of course, there was the nose. It was built on a massive scale. In its day the nose had struck terror into the hearts of countless politicians and celebrities. Strong men had been known to run when they saw it coming round a corner; and yet, thought George, there was still something glamorous about it.

  The effect on DI Hobday was sensational.

  George had taken him for a man who was hard to impress. If Einstein himself had wandered into George’s front hall, George felt that he would have been just another potential suspect. He was a man who had seen dead bodies and not blinked. He was a man who was capable of being unmoved by strong men crying for mercy or gorgeous women throwing their tits at him in order to escape a jail sentence.

  At the sight of Lulu Belhatchett, however, his poise crumbled, like an old digestive biscuit in a cup of hot coffee. His jaw did what jaws are supposed to do when men register shock. It dropped. His eyes widened and, for a moment, he seemed to be less excited than usual at the thought of a freshly killed murder victim.

  ‘My God,’ he said. ‘Come Sit On My Knee.’

  Lulu allowed herself a small smile. ‘Come Sit On My Knee,’ she said, ‘Indeed. Come Sit On My Knee.’

  DI Hobday seemed unable to get his jaw up and running. His eyes remained glued to Lulu’s face as he said, ‘You are Lulu Belhatchett. You did Come Sit On My Knee.’

  Now, and only now, when she was sure of her ground, and waking up to the possibility that she might be walking into the unquestioning loyalty of one of her many, many fans, Lulu allowed the persons in the hall the luxury of an uninterrupted view of dental work that was almost as expensive as her jewellery. ‘Lulu Belhatchett.’ She smirked. ‘Come Sit On My Knee!’

  Chapter Five

  Come Sit on My Knee had started life as a radio programme, developed, or, some said, regressed, into a television programme and, at a certain point in the 1990s, become a legend. It had originally been presented by a stout lesbian called Maureen O’Reilly; there were those who said the programme had been her idea, but there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that it had never really established itself with the public until Lulu Belhatchett made the move from news reporting into being the voice and, later, the face of the show.

  ‘So … Tony Blair…’ she would say, in low, controlled tones, ‘… come … sit on my knee.’ And the nation shivered with anticipation.

  Maureen O’Reilly, a motherly person, who had started life as a nurse, had wanted to do an interview show, which, as she put it, ‘let people be themselves’. She had a natural horror of the awkward question. When Colin Bleah, the heavy-metal guitarist who had just been through a messy divorce and a two-year jail sentence for possession of heroin, was on the programme, Maureen had refused to ask him about any subject other than gardening, of which he was reported to be fond.

  The original notion behind Come Sit On My Knee was that guests would be encouraged to talk about their childhood ‘as if they were talking to their mothers’ but, as the years went on, O’Reilly became more and more obsessed with the concept of the show and less and less interested in the celebrities who were hauled in front of her by her production team.

  ‘So,’ she would say, ‘now you’re on my knee, how does it feel? Did it seem a long way to clamber up there? Do you need the loo at all?’

  There were some who found her line of questioning, with its constant harping on the issue of how, when and why the participants had got on and off her knee, a trifle distasteful. When she asked the permanent under-secretary for the Treasury if he felt he needed the potty, it was thought time for her to go.

  Lu
lu Belhatchett dealt in hard news. She had covered no less than three wars. She had insulted Martin McGuinness and asked Gerry Adams what it felt like to have blood on his hands. She had received death threats from an obscure group of Serbian nationalists after she had described them, publicly, as ‘loonies’ and she was rumoured never to have shown fear in the presence of Margaret Thatcher.

  Her real name was not, of course, Belhatchett. Her real voice – which no one had ever heard – was, George suspected, nothing like the precision-steel instrument with which she tortured all those unfortunate enough to be in the news. Some said she came from Glasgow. Others swore she was originally from Cardiff. ‘Wherever she comes from,’ Esmeralda always said, ‘she did not learn to talk like that in our galaxy. Her elocution lessons must have happened on Mars.’

  There was something extra-terrestrial about Lulu’s voice. She formed her full and elegant lips into a perfect O when she needed to pronounce the fourth in the series of major vowels. She gave a kind of sideways gasp when negotiating the first letter of the alphabet, and though she had not, as yet, dared risk the i for ou substitution common among real toffs, her suspiciously emphatic consonants, the pristine purity of her u and the creaking purity of her vowels suggested that something horribly regional had been beaten out of her before she had appeared on national television.

  But even if she had left vulgarity behind her, along with her first husband and her brief career as a children’s television presenter, she still had something of the Glasgow head-banger about her. When she said, in those thrilling, bass tones, ‘So … David Cameron … come sit on my knee,’ you knew that the next thing she was going to do was to kick him in the balls.

  DI Hobday, George suspected, was a fan.

  He looked like a man who had suddenly forgotten all about dead bodies. He hadn’t yet got round to asking the questions everyone usually wanted to ask (‘Did David Bowie really try to bite you?’, ‘Did Nick Clegg actually belch?’). He was at the first stage of celebrity worship. The stage at which the sufferer simply wants to stare at his or her idol in order to try to match image to reality. He was warming both hands before the fire of fame.

  Or was he? There was something George did not quite understand about the look Hobday was giving his sister-in-law. Was there an element of distrust, even hostility, in his expression? Whatever it was, when he finally spoke to her his voice was friendly and impartial, registering a tone that at once acknowledged her celebrity and, at the same time, managed to make light of it.

  ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, Lulu,’ he said.

  ‘Mother is dead,’ said Stephen to his wife. ‘Did my email not get through? George is also dead.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Lulu, bridling slightly, as if someone had pinched her bottom. ‘Oh.’

  ‘We think,’ Stephen went on, ‘that a burglar attacked Mother and that George had a heart attack.’

  ‘Was he watching?’ said Lulu. ‘Was it the shock?’

  Lulu was always prepared to think the worst of George. Even so, George reflected, a scenario in which he watched some lout beat his mother to death and fought back by staging a cardiac arrest was, even by her standards, a serious underestimation of her brother-in-law’s worth. They had never liked each other. George had always found the sight of her stepping backwards into the limelight a dispiriting business.

  DI Hobday shook himself awake. ‘I think,’ he said slowly, ‘I would now like Mrs Esmeralda Pearmain to accompany myself and DC Purves while we examine the body.’

  ‘If I can be of any help, Officer…’ said Stephen. ‘I was not, obviously, first on the scene but I was there pretty quickly. I was the first in after my sister-in-law. I heard her scream. And I came down the stairs. Two at a time. If you asked me whether I was first on the scene I would have to say, “No. No. I wasn’t.” But I was there pretty promptly. I thought you should know that.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Pearmain,’ said Hobday, as, holding out one arm, he indicated to Esmeralda that she should follow him into the kitchen. As she passed him he turned to the rest of the group in the hall. ‘We shall want to talk to all of you,’ he said, ‘so we would be grateful if you could wait for a while and we will do some interviews.’

  The Mullins woman clearly felt it was time to show proper respect for the boys in blue. ‘Can we get you a cup of tea, Officer?’ she said. ‘And some biscuits?’

  Esmeralda was clearly unimpressed by the retired headmistress’s attempts to make free with her kitchen. This, her brief glance in the ninety-four-year-old’s direction seemed to suggest, was no time for tea or biscuits.

  George followed her and the two detectives into the kitchen. Somehow or other, he seemed to get there before they did. He wasn’t quite sure how he had managed this. He was pretty sure he had started out just as DC Purves’s large behind disappeared round the kitchen door; and yet, as she waddled smartly forward across the quarry-tiled floor, with the June sunlight pouring in across the big, scrubbed wooden table, the dressers, sparkling with immaculate glasses and the sideboards still strewn with the remains of last night’s meal, George seemed to find himself, already, over by the french windows, the untended garden behind him, looking at a dead body that, for a change, was not his.

  Jessica Pearmain was flat on her back, with her feet pointed towards the dishwasher. Her right hand was flung out behind her head. Her left arm lay at her side. A pool of blood spread out from beneath her neatly tended grey hair. She had had it done, of course, in expectation of her birthday. Her mouth was open, and horribly wide.

  ‘Did you attempt to revive her?’ said Hobday.

  ‘I did not,’ said Esmeralda. ‘She was … you know … dead.’

  ‘Was this,’ said Hobday, slowly, ‘after you realized your husband was dead?’

  ‘It was before,’ said Esmeralda. ‘I came down here and found she was dead. Then I went upstairs to tell George. And found him dead.’

  George’s mother had always looked young for her age. She had, of late, rather lost track of how old she was and, if asked, would usually say she thought she was somewhere in her late eighties. When you told her she was very close to being a hundred she would express genuine surprise. Followed, usually, by telling everyone, quite cheerfully, that she would probably be better off dead.

  And now she was dead. She was never again going to ask George what day it was. She had made her last trip to Waitrose. She was, at last, no longer a target for mail-order scams or the disgusting little man who had sold her, door to door, an electric bed that didn’t work. She suddenly looked as old as some tribal elder from the Indian plains. She had put on another twenty years since George had last glimpsed her. Death had carved her features into the kind of unflinching sculpture that might stare out at you from the ruins of some long-dead jungle empire where cruelty was normal and natural.

  That might, of course, have something to do with the fact that she hadn’t put back her false teeth before hobbling through from the ground-floor bedroom to sort out the bastard who had killed her. George’s mother had always been very courageous. Once, not long after George’s father had died, she had awoken in the middle of the night to find a youth in her bedroom. ‘What are you doing here?’ she had said, in motherly tones. ‘You should be in your own house!’ Whereupon the youth had departed, muttering something about climbing in through the wrong window.

  The way she was lying there puzzled George. It was Hobday who gave voice to something that was, until he spoke, nothing more than a half-formed idea.

  ‘Her right arm,’ mused Hobday, ‘is flung out behind her. Why is that?’

  ‘Good question, Boss!’ said Purves, who had, clearly, no idea what the answer might be but was used to her superior thinking aloud.

  ‘You see,’ went on Hobday, ignoring her response, ‘if someone was attacking you, is that the way you would fall? There is no sign of any damage to the face or the front of the body. This woman was just … pushed. And her right arm is way out behind her. As if she had been tr
ying to get something out of her attacker’s hand. Something he had stolen? Something valuable to her? If it was some … piece of jewellery or whatever, he obviously got away with it.’

  ‘There was nothing valuable to her in this house,’ said Esmeralda. ‘Apart from George.’

  DI Hobday began to pace to and fro across the red-tiled floor. George looked out at the garden – the buddleia, alive with butterflies, and the clematis wound around the ivy on the fence. The green wooden chair where he had sat two days ago, reading. He was never going to sit on it again. Well, not so as anyone would notice.

  Hobday looked, George thought, like a man who had been able to intuit, from the moment he walked into the room, the name, age, sex and possibly the address of the culprit. There was an air of coiled omniscience about him. Mind you, Hobday probably always looked like this. It was, without doubt, a professional gambit to alarm any criminals in the vicinity. That was how the man had made inspector so early. He couldn’t have been much more than forty.

  ‘A burglar,’ Hobday was saying, ‘smashes that pane in the french windows. He lets himself in and is about to help himself to whatever he wants to steal when round the corner comes a very, very old lady. I’m assuming she isn’t in here when he smashes the window because any burglar worth his salt – I won’t dignify this person with the adjective “professional” – is simply not going to come in if he sees Mrs Pearmain in the kitchen.’

  Here he swerved suddenly and glared at Purves as if he had only just remembered she was in the room. ‘Why doesn’t she make a noise? Why does she hobble all the way from the room on the other side of the hall to confront this individual? And then, when she’s there, make an attempt to grab whatever it is in his hand without alerting the very large number of other people in the house to the fact that that is what she is doing?’

  He smiled suddenly at Esmeralda. He had, George thought, rather a pleasant smile. ‘Pay no attention Mrs Pearmain,’ he said. ‘Just thinking aloud.’