There was broken glass on and around the mat in front of the french windows. Hobday looked, for a moment, as if he might be about to walk in its direction but instead he turned to DC Purves and, indicating a line running wall to wall across the room from just inside the door, said, ‘No one behind this line, Barbara. Ashton and Pawlikowski are on their way.’ Then he turned to Esmeralda and added, ‘I’m afraid, Mrs Pearmain, that we may need to take a look at your husband.’
Once again, Esmeralda burst into floods of tears. Perhaps, thought George, she imagined they were going to drape yards of tape around him marked ‘POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS’. Hobday looked briefly troubled and shot a pleading glance in DC Purves’s direction.
‘You’re upset, love,’ she said. ‘Your husband is dead. And your mother-in-law is dead. And—’
‘And what?’ said Esmeralda. ‘Is there something else I haven’t noticed?’
With which she strode from the room and, in the hall, did a bit more of her Hecuba on the Walls of Troy impression. George was alone with Hobday and Purves. There was a sense, of course, in which he wasn’t really alone with them since it could be argued he wasn’t there in the first place; events seemed to be progressing quite satisfactorily in the Pearmain house without him.
It was, however, true, that his point of view, in so far as he had one, no longer seemed to depend on the position of the fat man upstairs on the bed. He didn’t quite have the illusion of turning to left or right, which was unsurprising as he didn’t have a head; rather, the scene in front of him played out as if he was an unattended wide-angle camera lens that someone had parked on a tripod in the corner of the room.
A camera didn’t quite describe it: it was as if they had parked several cameras about the place so that Hobday and Purves were being observed, now from the edge of the Aga, now from the top of the fridge and now (as in now, now, now) from just by the door.
‘There were problems in the relationship, I hear,’ Hobday was saying, with a significant look after Esmeralda.
What was with this guy? How come he was such an expert on George’s marriage? Was this information he had picked up since the phone call had come in or did the local fuzz keep Stasi-style transcripts of every night’s conversation at 22 Hornbeam Crescent? Things, George had to admit, could get pretty heated. When he was alive, Esmeralda had never been afraid to call him a fat, lazy, lying bastard and, judging by this morning’s episode, showed no sign of slowing down now he was dead.
Her attitude to his mother had been, if anything, even less forgiving. The Axis of Evil. The Bat. The Madwoman of Putney Bridge. She Who Must Be Avoided. Her names were many and few were complimentary.
Was it possible that Hobday thought Esmeralda had done in her husband and mother-in-law? On the same night? The police were famously fond of arresting anyone unfortunate enough to run across a body. And Esmeralda seemed to have discovered two within the space of about three and a half minutes.
Him and his mum. At almost the same time. For a moment a stab of self-pity threatened to conjure a tear out of ducts that were not only not there, but had not even a pair of eyes to which they could attach themselves; and then, as so often in his not terribly long and certainly undistinguished life, a keen interest in process dragged him back to what, improbably, seemed to be reality.
‘I don’t like this,’ Hobday was saying, ‘I don’t like this one little bit. It’s fishy.’
‘Is it, Boss?’ said DC Purves.
The respectful politeness of her manner concealed, George suddenly saw, a certain reservation about her superior’s very masculine manner of command. Perhaps, he thought idly, she’s a lesbian. This idea instantly made her more interesting and, in spite of her slightly heavy-handed sympathy with Esmeralda, more sympathetic. Also, she did not think Hobday a fool. That was comforting.
‘What exactly don’t you like about it, Boss?’ she continued.
‘I don’t like the timing,’ said Hobday. ‘I don’t like the look of that sideboard. I don’t like the look of that woman with the beard. I don’t like the glass on the floor. And I really do not like the way she is lying, Barbara. I do not like it at all.’
George was warming (inappropriate word) to Hobday. He would not have described Mullins as having a beard, more the beginnings of a moustache, but putting her in the beaver class felt like a good way of putting her in her place. And she had – as always – a furtive look about her. What George found most encouraging, however, was that the inspector was giving voice to suspicions that, however vague and unfounded, had been a part of George’s lingering consciousness ever since he had failed to wake up that morning.
The sideboard. The sideboard. ‘I don’t like the look of that sideboard.’ George was fairly sure we were not talking kitchen design here. Why did he not like its look?
It was, as far as George could make out, an appalling mess. There were glasses, smeared with grease, lying on plates that bore the puddled remains of Esmeralda’s lasagna, Barry’s bean salad and gnarled fragments of George’s garlic bread. There were cigarette ends – Maurice’s lumpy roll-ups, Someone’s lipstick-coated menthols – jammed into the wreckage of the fruit salad. In the corner there was a great mound of the nourishing herbs that Frigga had lifted from Putney Heath yesterday afternoon – Witches’ Armpit, Dragoon’s Beard, Volesfoot, or whatever they were called.
Frigga always trotted out their Latin names as she chopped them up and sprinkled them on salads, or brushed them into the parsnip wine she insisted that everyone should drink. ‘Collybium penthesilea,’ she would trill. ‘It’s good for the bowels. Lagopulaea frenescens. Come on, everyone. It’s used in Finland to cure incontinence. I think it’s Finland. And I’m fairly sure it’s incontinence. It may be gout. But who cares? It’s lovely.’
Around herbs – though not the ones you bought in shops – Frigga recovered a girlishness that had never really been hers, even in her brief and unsuccessful attempt at childhood. A serious, squat child in her Ladybird T-shirt and Ladybird shorts, Frigga had peered out at the world from behind her National Health glasses, waiting for the cruelty that her anxious expression usually provoked. Only two things had released her from the long, grim sentence of being Frigga: baroque music, usually played on the recorder, and the appallingly wide selection of edible roots, flowers, berries and leaves that were to be found in the average English hedgerow.
She had excelled herself last night, thought George. There had been no stopping her. At one point, George had suggested using a chunk of basil – the kind of herb George understood, especially if it came in a clearly labelled plastic pouch from a supermarket – but Frigga would have none of it. ‘What you need, George,’ she had said, ‘is Brachythellilla aggravantens. It’s very good for obesity. And alcoholism. And for depression.’
Hobday, however, was not talking about the herbs. He was a big man with a big chin and, as he looked from George’s mother’s body to the sideboard, he stroked it carefully with his big hands.
‘What,’ said DC Purves, ‘don’t you like about the sideboard, Boss?’
‘I don’t like,’ said Hobday, ‘that her feet are pointing towards it.’
‘See what you mean, Boss,’ said DC Purves, although George was fairly sure she didn’t.
‘Which implies,’ went on Hobday, ‘that Mrs Pearmain was facing her attacker, who was presumably, when she confronted him, turning away from deep contemplation of the said sideboard. Was there, perhaps, the odd gold bracelet scattered among the remains of last night’s dinner? I find that hard to believe, Barbara.’
‘Indeed, Boss,’ said DC Purves.
Hobday seemed interested in a section of the floor a few feet away from George’s mother’s right hand, twisted with arthritis, which lay now in the terrible stillness of death. He knelt a little way from it, careful not to tread anywhere near the tiles that seemed to interest him. He gave a small, wintry smile.
‘Someone’s tried to do a bit of tidying up around here,’ he said. ‘A nice,
polite, clean and tidy burglar. But not over there. Not at all.’ He squinted at the damaged pane in the french windows, nodding quietly to himself. ‘Glass on the floor, Barbara,’ he said, ‘and inside the room, as you would expect if some Jack the Lad had wandered into the garden and smashed the glass from the outside, but I would ask you, DC Purves, to note the position of the fragments of glass on the floor and tell me if you think there’s anything unusual about them.’
DC Purves looked long and hard at the glass on the floor. ‘Is it something to do with the position they’re in, Boss?’ she said.
‘Very good, Barbara,’ said Hobday. ‘Very good indeed.’
He looked away from the window and seemed, for a moment, to be staring straight at George. It was curious. For the first time this morning George had the uncomfortable feeling that someone was aware that he was in the room. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant sensation. For the moment he was happy with anonymity. Hobday put his head to one side and, keeping his eyes on the former master of 22 Hornbeam Crescent, said, ‘I get a feeling in this room, Barbara. A very strong feeling. That someone is trying to tell me something. About what went on last night. I’m one of those, Barbara, who think that the dead talk to us – and on this occasion I’m getting a very strong feeling indeed, right around…’ He waved his hand in the air and concluded by pointing his index finger directly at the spot where George was standing. ‘There. Right there.’
There was a silence. Then he added, ‘Fragments of glass, Barbara. But are they fragments of glass from the window? Or are they another kind of glass entirely?’
Chapter Six
George was absolutely positive the man had sensed his presence.
‘It’s not about you!’ was something Esmeralda was always saying to him. ‘The whole world does not revolve around you!’
George was in complete agreement with her on that issue. Almost nothing, especially not his immediate family, revolved around George, but that did not seem a good reason for him to stop trying to get it to do so. Clearly, death had done nothing to dent his doomed enthusiasm for being the centre of attention.
DI Hobday did not have the look of a man who was a dab hand with the Ouija board. Communing with the Other World was not, George felt, his idea of a rigorous murder inquiry, yet he still wanted to believe that the policeman was listening to him, was understanding that he had not simply been erased from the suburb.
I think therefore I am. Therefore I am.
If there was going to be a chance of opening a dialogue with the inspector, though, it was not going to happen any time soon. The doorbell had rung. Several times. Men with special shoes and plastic gloves swarmed all over the house. And the garden. They seemed very keen on the garden. They swept up interesting fragments that they found between the broken french window and the fishpond. They dusted the doorbell and the french window. They squirted talcum powder on the gate to the side passage and they took more photographs than the average American tourist hitting St Mark’s Square in Venice.
Then they all trooped upstairs to take a look at George.
Nat was not happy about this. His wife, Veronica, who had appeared to offer Esmeralda moral support, stood on the landing while he argued with the officers, in order, as she put it, ‘to stop him making a fool of himself’.
‘I have,’ said Nat to Hobday, ‘already issued a death certificate. I mean, I haven’t actually issued it but I’m in the process of writing it out. George died of a heart attack. In his sleep.’
Hobday’s pathologist, an even younger man than him with close-cropped blond hair called Pawlikowski (his name seemed to be the only Polish thing about him), sneered openly at the general practitioner. ‘What,’ he said, ‘was the time of death?’
Nat looked shifty. ‘In the night,’ he said, ‘some time between twelve thirty and eight.’
The police pathologist snorted lightly. He went over to George’s body and started to prod at George’s ribcage. George was starting to take a dislike to the man. He had a square face and a very pale complexion, suggesting long hours spent indoors with dead bodies. His fingers, too, were square at the ends and the nails bitten down to the quick; there was something too neat about him. Too many things on his head were also square. His ears. His mouth. The man was altogether over-geometrical. After a bit of lip-sucking, Pawlikowski shot a knowing glance at Hobday.
‘Any sign of trauma?’ he said. ‘Or exsanguination?’
‘Listen,’ said Nat, in a menacing voice. ‘I know when a man has died of a heart attack.’
Out on the landing Veronica Pinker did a bit of snorting on her own account. ‘Oh, yes?’ she said loudly. ‘Like that woman in Gwendolen Avenue? Or Pramit Chowdray’s brother? My God!’
Pawlikowski did a small shake of his head, like a man being bothered by a mosquito, and shot Hobday a small but significant glance. ‘We may need a tarpaulin!’ he said, obviously disappointed by the absence of bullet wounds or blunt-instrument trauma to the cranium.
‘I think, Marek,’ said Hobday, patiently, ‘we’re just exploring the envelope here. Dr Pinker has given his version of events and we have to respect that. What we really want to find out is if there is any connection between the two deaths.’
Nat, evidently sensing antagonism, did what he usually did in an argument and repeated himself in a louder voice. ‘George Pearmain,’ he said, ‘was my patient. In my view he had a heart attack. Myocardial infarction. Whatever you like to call it.’
‘He was,’ said the pathologist, in grudging tones, ‘obese.’
Pawlikowski was doing nothing whatsoever to alter George’s preliminary assessment of him. His job called for a low level of sensitivity to human feelings but, even for a pathologist, he seemed remarkably cold-blooded. He had, George thought, a reptilian quality about him. He had a long, over-regular nose, thin lips and his tongue was constantly flickering in and out, giving him the air of a creature on the lookout for flies.
‘His cholesterol was high,’ Nat was saying. ‘He was a heavy drinker. And I suspect he’d been at the parsnip wine. I say “suspect” but actually I know he was at it. I was here last night. I saw him knocking it back.’
Hobday’s eyes narrowed. He was obviously adding Nat to his long list of suspects.
George knew why Nat was so keen on establishing that his friend’s death was just another natural – and disappointing – death for just another middle-aged man. He was talking, as we so often do when discussing friends, about himself. Nat was, if anything, even more frustrated and disappointed by life than George. George had his unpublished poetry. Nat had, for years, been writing a long tome entitled Some Common Diseases of the English Suburb although, as he had confided to George, ‘“Common” is what they are not. The title is just to give it academic respectability. This one is going to be shocking. Sensational. It will sell millions.’
As well as ‘Deep Vein Thrombosis Caused by Gallery Seats During a Performance of Les Misérables in Wimbledon’, he had mapped out a racy chapter entitled ‘Clarinet Neck in the Under 8s at St Jude’s School, Putney’ and ‘Some Serious and Life-threatening Abrasions Caused by Electric Mowing Machines in the Roehampton Area’, but when the Lancet had rejected his long, closely argued piece entitled ‘250 Diseases of the Skin Observed in Dog Walkers in East Sheen’, he had rather lost heart.
Nat, in George’s view, did not have long to go either.
‘I think,’ Hobday was saying, ‘we’d better have Mrs Pearmain in and ask her some questions about her last night with Mr Pearmain.’
Esmeralda, who was out on the landing with Veronica Pinker, pushed her face in through the open crack of the door. ‘I’m in now,’ she said, in a threatening manner. ‘And I heard that.’
Hobday did not crack. He was, thought George, rather better at handling Esmeralda than he was. Well, Hobday was the sort of man to whom Esmeralda was often attracted. He was large, he was slightly uncouth and quite obviously capable of standing up for himself in conversation. Would she get marrie
d again? She might very well. Indeed, thought George, from the way she was looking at Hobday, it was quite possible that she was already on the lookout.
She was in the room, now, and Veronica Pinker, emboldened by her friend’s move, had followed her. Mrs Pinker, who had, long ago, worked in a morgue, showed no sign of being ruffled by George’s body. She stood, hands on hips, brilliantly dyed hair swept up in a quiff from her handsome, hatchet face, daring anyone to accuse her of contaminating a crime scene.
‘Did your husband get up in the night?’ Hobday was saying.
‘He always gets up in the night. To pee,’ said Esmeralda, showing signs of being about to burst into tears again – perhaps, thought George, at her use of the present continuous tense. ‘I always wake up when he does. It’s very annoying. He wakes up when I hit him.’
Hobday stiffened perceptibly. ‘Hit him?’
‘When he snores. I hit him when he snores. And he hits me. When I snore. Although I don’t snore. He just hits me. He likes hitting me.’
I have plumbed the dark depths of many couples’ relationships in my work as a murder detective, Hobday’s expression seemed to suggest, but this is about as low as it gets. ‘And,’ said Hobday, his face settling, once more, to its normal, professionally unrevealing mask, ‘did Mr Pearmain get up last night? At any time?’
‘Of course he didn’t,’ said Esmeralda, affecting the weary patience with which one might address a fractious toddler. ‘He was dead. Wasn’t he?’
‘Did he,’ said Hobday, patiently, ‘get up before he died?’
‘I told you,’ said Esmeralda, irritably. ‘He did not get up at all.’ Then she stopped, suddenly aware that this was more worthy of notice than she had first thought. ‘Actually,’ she went on, ‘I suppose that is odd. I’m sure he didn’t. And he usually does. And, as I said, I always notice it. If he gets up in the night.’
Waking Up Dead Page 7