Waking Up Dead

by Nigel Williams

  Here Hobday inserted one of his Harold Pinter-style pauses – giving his audience time to wonder what exactly these might be. Had the Putney police got around to waterboarding? Esmeralda, sitting on the sofa by the window, winding her hands together, clearly thought he had done quite enough unpleasant things already this morning.

  ‘We are going to have to request an autopsy on Mr Pearmain.’

  George could have sworn he flinched. Or twitched. Or did a bit of both at the same time. The thought of Pawlikowski being let loose on his naked body in some overlit morgue, surrounded by men in green wellingtons, managed to convince him that he was wrong in thinking that the day could not get any worse. Nat, from the look of him, seemed to agree and looked as if he was about to put Hobday right on a few points of medical etiquette.

  Did GPs outrank policemen? Was there going to be any kind of debate about this? Or did the boys in blue have the right to cut up anyone they fancied?

  Hobday was holding up his hand for silence. Nat had started to mutter in disgust and Esmeralda, too, was weighing in on the side of keeping George’s corpse away from Pawlikowski and his knife-wielding team of experts. She was no longer crying. She was white with an anger that George recognized instantly. He had been on the receiving end of it for forty years.

  ‘Listen, you stupid man,’ she was saying, ‘you … absurd little … Hobday! I know when my husband’s had a heart attack! I’ve been married to him for forty years! I’m the best judge of how and why and when he may have dropped off the twig. I’ve actually been on the same twig as him for…’ Here, suddenly, it was all too much for her and she started sobbing again.

  ‘The other thing,’ went on Hobday, imperturbably, ‘is that everyone in this room should consider themselves a suspect.’

  The Mullins woman let out a low snarl. Frigga went even whiter than usual. Beryl Vickers squeaked. Stephen became even more interested in his mobile phone. Lulu got to her feet. She was deathly calm. Her big shoulders were squared, like a boxer’s. That was how she had looked when she had destroyed Nigel Lawson. If Hobday had any sense at all, thought George, he would make a run for it now.

  ‘I was in Basingstoke last night,’ she said. ‘I left here at nine in the evening. So unless you think me capable of being in two places at once I suggest you cross me off your little list, Inspector – or perhaps you wish me to go straight to the Independent Police Complaints Commission on whose board I have several personal friends. Do you have any idea of whom you are dealing with?’

  Hobday, George thought, appeared to have looked as if he had a very good idea. The first look he had given her was not, George now realized, that of a fan. The inspector, in fact, had a healthy distrust of celebrity.

  ‘Everyone,’ he continued, still managing the almost impossible task of ignoring Lulu, ‘who was in this house last night had opportunity. And a large percentage of those present, even if they may have left at some point in the evening, had motive. I haven’t yet asked you to give a detailed account of your whereabouts last night, Lulu, but, in due course, I shall be doing so.’

  Brilliant use of her first name, thought George. Unfortunately for her, the sort of celebrity in which she specialized gave almost anyone the right to do precisely that.

  ‘Perhaps you were in Basingstoke. I do not know. May I remind you that this is a murder scene, Lulu. Two people have died. There is in my view some relation between the two deaths. It may be that there were other people here last night. I do not know. We will attempt to establish that, but this is a serious inquiry. You get my meaning? Who hated George Pearmain? Who hated his mother?’

  George looked round the room. Barry and Maurice were looking very serious indeed. They didn’t hate me, thought George. My boys are not like that. Or are they? They have been doing rather a lot of the ‘Is Georgy a Weeble?’ joke recently. Do I know either of them? Really? And the Mullins woman has clearly wanted to do away with me for years. ‘She loves you,’ she had said to him, only last night. ‘You do not appreciate your mother. She loves you. You think only of yourself.’

  As he looked round the faces of the people in the living room he realized, once again, how little he really knew any of them. He and his family had never had the kind of intimate discussion about their relationships that was obligatory in Eugene O’Neill plays. Their deeper feelings, such as they were, usually emerged in oblique discussions of family members who had made the mistake of not being present. ‘Barry can be a bit “how’s your father?”’ Esmeralda might say. Or George let slip that he thought Maurice could be, on occasions, ‘a bit of a retard’.

  Did he really know Esmeralda?

  She had often expressed a desire to kill him. She had also, quite often, expressed genuine regret that she did not seem to have got round to doing it yet. On the night when he had called her a fat bitch, she had screamed her desire to do so with such force that Mary and Sam from two doors down had rung the bell to ask if everything was all right.

  Esmeralda was also, he decided, well up for polishing off his mother at the same time. In fact, if she ever decided to make a start on the Pearmain family it would not be long before Frigga, Stephen and Lulu were joining the queue for the Putney morgue.

  Had she somehow found out about Julie Biskiborne? It was possible. He had, on one drunken occasion, told Nat – although he hadn’t mentioned her name or that she was a secretary. Somehow the fact that she had been his secretary made it even worse. Steve Profitt, from Head Office, had told him once he thought it might be illegal for employees of the NatWest to do it with each other. Nat could have told Veronica, who would have told Esmeralda, who might well have decided to murder him for doing something as unoriginal as shagging the office bicycle.

  Mullins? Mullins was capable of murder. She would probably think that, after the age of ninety, you were allowed to kill people you disliked – on the bus-pass principle. And her years as kindergarten headmistress had given her formidable organizational skills. She could have roped in any number of the others in the room to help her. Maybe they were all in on it. Maybe it was like Murder on the Orient Express. They all looked pretty furtive, George thought.

  Stephen? Did he have the imagination necessary for murder? It was conceivable. Younger brothers traditionally resented their older siblings. Even though Stephen was richer and far more complacent than George, he might have decided, as any brother or sister could, that—

  Sister. Sister.

  Frigga was, on balance, the most likely candidate for the role of assassin, and therefore, of course, given the way of these things, the person who probably had not, after all, done it. She was quivering now, like a game dog waiting for the command to pick up a pheasant, and before Hobday had the chance to get started on the next leg of his murderthon, she launched herself into speech.

  ‘It’s all my fault, Inspector,’ she said. ‘I hated George. I hated my mother. They blocked my creativity. And now they’re dead.’

  For the first time since he had set out on his appointed task, Hobday showed signs of listening to an interruption. Suddenly Frigga had the attention of the room. She had not, thought George, had this many listeners since the day she had confessed to her eating disorder in the Royal China Restaurant, Chelverton Road. That, he recalled now, had, ironically enough, been at another celebration for Jessica. Her ninetieth? Her eighty-fifth? George felt a brief pang for his ever amiable motherly mother. He recalled her bemused surprise at her difficult daughter’s outburst.

  ‘I make myself sick! I lock myself in the lavatory while you’re all stuffing your faces and I put my fingers down my throat! I vomit! I vomit! I vomit!’ she had cried aloud, as she waved her long, prehensile hands in the air.

  She had stopped several diners in the act of transferring spring rolls or glazed chicken feet from plate to gob, and the Chinese waiting staff had looked as if they might well send out for some hard-line martial-arts expert to throw her out before she put the whole place off their dim sum.

  ‘My novel w
ill never be published,’ Frigga was now saying, to anyone in 22 Hornbeam Crescent who was prepared to listen. ‘I am a doomed woman who will never be fruitful. I am a wicked, wicked person who has evil thoughts. I did something yesterday that may have killed my brother. I did not like George. No no no, I did not. And I did something that—’

  Stephen got up, went over to her and put his hand on her arm. ‘Don’t be silly, Friggs,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying.’

  She looked up at him like a dog. Frigga, George thought, had always preferred Stephen to him. Stephen had the gravitas of the older brother, a role George had never quite managed to play to her satisfaction. It was strange. Even now he was dead, he found it difficult to sympathize with Frigga. You would have thought, he told himself, that shuffling off the mortal coil might have made him more sympathetic to his younger sister. Now was the time to start rising above it all and looking at the world from Frigga’s point of view. But he was still quite unable to understand the workings of her mind.

  Did he know Stephen any better?

  Stephen really did not give a fuck about Frigga. Why the sudden concern? Maybe Frigga and Stephen had got together to do him in.

  Hobday seemed about to say something. ‘Shut up!’ perhaps? Or ‘You’re under arrest!’ He certainly looked like a man who would like to know what Frigga thought she had done yesterday that had hastened the death of G. Pearmain Esquire, but whatever question he had framed, he did not get the chance to ask it. As Frigga, lips trembling, eyes fixed on her younger brother, debated the issue of whether or not to proceed with the meat and potatoes of her confession, there came an unearthly scream from next door.

  ‘My Gawd! ’Elp! Pleece! Pleece! Someone call the fuckin’ pleece! Where’s the fuckin’ pleece? They’re never arahnd when yoo want them.’

  This, thought George, was not strictly true. There were four of them, as far as he could make out, in the front room alone. More and more inexperienced-seeming coppers had been arriving by the minute. Pawlikowski had acquired a small non-Polish assistant called Hughes – a man with a wispy beard – and there were even more uniformed officers pacing round the garden peering into the flowerbeds for offensive weapons. On the whole it would be fair to say that 22 Hornbeam Crescent was fairly crawling with fuzz.

  ‘Someone’s put tape all over Mrs Pearmain!’ the voice continued, as the front-room audience, frozen into silence by this extraordinary interruption, looked anywhere in the room but at each other. ‘She’s done up like a chicken! It’s a criminal scenario in ’ere, people! It’s Miami Vicious!’

  Mabel Dawkins had been George’s mother’s carer for nearly fifteen years. She was a small, wizened woman in her early sixties, with dyed blonde hair scraped back severely from her forehead and a pair of enormous ears. Her way with language had made her a legend in the Pearmain family. She could nearly always be relied on to say something malappropriate. She lived in a block of council flats close to the more elegant and expensive block where Jessica lived and had, for as long as George had known her, been an invaluable source of information about a group to whom he had ascribed, in the early seventies, an omniscience and charity comparable to that displayed by H. G. Wells’s Morlocks. Mabel had a rather different view of them.

  ‘The working class disgusts me. They’re lazy,’ she often used to say. ‘They scrounge. They take socialist security where they can find it. They’re as bad as the immigrators. The blacks ’ave nothing on ’em. And the ones in the asylum are even worse. Political referees. I’d blow the whistle on the lot of ’em. They come from all over. From By The Russia. From Pole Land. And Africore. We ’ave Zombies next door. From Zombia. One of ’em spat at me lars’ week. Spat. And the ones on the other side are Similia.’

  Mabel was of and yet not of the section of society in which Marx and Engels had put so much faith. As her politics had evolved over the years, she had moved to a place that was, like so much of British society, neither left nor right nor, really, anywhere between the two.

  ‘The Labour Party disgust me,’ she used to say. ‘I vote Labour. Except when I vote Conservative. The Labour are the party of the working man and woman. I despise the Democratic Liberals. But the Labour have bin hijacked. By the Unionists. And the Muslins – the bastards. I know you like them, George. I know you like the Muslins. Solomon Rasher Day. But they come over ’ere an’ give us bollocks about the Korean. An’ Mahmoud the Inevitable or whatever he calls himself. Twit. On ’is camel. Bollocks to ’is camel, I say, George. Let ’im keep ’is fuckin’ camel. I’ll take the bus, thank you. Banning drink. They make me physically sick.’

  It was always hard to work out what she thought of the Pearmain family. She had been there last night. That made her, as far as George could see – which was not, at the moment, very far – a murder suspect. Her manner was a unique blend of the servile and the hectoring that George had always thought uniquely British. Jessica was always ‘Mrs Pearmain’ to Mabel, even when she was telling her she was a silly old cow or hauling her on and off the commode, and her anger now at the indignity that her old lady had been made to suffer was on a par to the view taken of the execution of Louis XVI by a loyal servant of the Bourbons.

  How the hell had she got in there anyway? Wasn’t it supposed to be a crime scene?

  ‘Oh, you fuckers!’ she was screaming. ‘Oh, you ’orrible fuckers! It’s ’er birthday! You gone and done it now!’

  Hobday and Purves were, finally, on the move. The sound of large feet heading towards the kitchen from every corner of 22 Hornbeam Crescent suggested that backup was also on its way. George, who had not yet mastered the art of moving any faster than he had when he was alive, joined the crush as everyone went about the almost certainly hopeless task of restraining Mabel Dawkins.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Pearmain!’ she was crying, to the unpitying ceiling, as George and quite a lot of other people descended on the newly violated crime scene. ‘What kind of birthday present is this, old girl? Didjer overdo the parsnip wine, lovey? Did you keel over and smack your bonce? What did they tell you at the Falls Class, Mrs Pearmain? ’Ow many times ’ave I pulled you up off of the floor like a tortoise? You was messin’ about with your Zimmerman frame, weren’cher?’

  Mabel Dawkins seemed to be about to try to lever her charge up off the floor and into the vertical. She clearly thought that, if she could get her moving, it wouldn’t be long before the old lady would allow herself to be winched into a wheelchair or dragged on to the lavatory. She thought of George’s mother – he now saw quite clearly – as a sort of mechanical toy running on the same principle as a bicycle dynamo lamp. You had to keep her moving. You had to keep her batteries charged.

  ‘Mabel,’ Stephen was saying, in the brisk, Wehrmacht-like tones he usually adopted with anyone capable of being classed as a servant, ‘this is a crime scene! Mother is dead. You must put her down. Do not attempt to revive her. She has been murdered. By an intruder. These are the police. They are here. This is Inspector Hobday. Inspector, this is Mabel Dawkins. She was here last night. She was devoted to my mother. And my mother could be a handful, I can tell you.’

  Mabel looked from face to face. ‘Dead?’ she said. ‘Murdered? By Persons Unknowing? By a Romanian? Oh, Mrs Pearmain! What did you do to deserve this? It’s a Cat’s Trophy, is what it is. You was almost illegible for your telegram from the Queen. They should ’ang the bastards ’oo done you in, Mrs Pearmain. Not that they will because the “po-lice” is a useless load of jobsworths in my view.’ She did not seem at all put out that there were at least six of them in the room when she said this.

  Mabel must have come in by the side gate and let herself in by the french windows. As DC Purves set about the business of sensitively steering her away from Jessica Pearmain’s corpse and sensitively sitting her down on a chair in the front room so that she could sensitively let her know that George, too, had joined the ranks of those no longer capable of offering her employment, Hobday announced his intention of carrying out a series
of interviews with everyone present so that he could establish their whereabouts last night. He also asked for a list of who else had been on the premises, and concluded by saying he would like to know if anyone had plans for leaving the country.

  Esmeralda said she had not had any plans for doing so but, since meeting Hobday, she had started to think about it seriously. Stephen said he thought he might have to be in Munich in the near future. He asked his phone when he was supposed to be in Munich. His phone told him he was in Munich but he wasn’t supposed to be there. He was supposed to be in New York. Stephen told everyone to pay no attention to his phone. It was always wrong. His phone started to argue with him. He turned it off.

  ‘This is all very disturbing,’ said Lulu, ‘but we must try to help the inspector all we can.’ She had suddenly decided to play nice with Hobday. She was, as a television critic had observed after Jimmy Savile had sat on her knee, both Good Cop and Bad Cop simultaneously, and when she put on the charm and consonants, as she was now doing, it was hard to see how an average Putney CID officer could resist her.

  Hobday, however, seemed to be doing just that. He kept glancing hungrily at Frigga but, after a long, whispered conversation with Stephen, she looked as if she was not going to say anything to anyone without her lawyer present. Not that she had a lawyer.

  While his sister-in-law smirked at the inspector, George was trying to remember what, if anything, he could remember about Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. For some reason he had decided it might go some way to explaining how he found himself in his present situation. If only the dead had access to the internet! As far as he could remember, it was something to do with the unreliability of clocks. Not in a mechanical sense. The unreliability of any arrangement involving time. If you arranged to meet someone at a railway station at seven o’clock, you should not allow yourself to be fooled into thinking that although you had both pitched up under the clock at precisely that time and were naïve enough to assume you had met each other, it meant that anything like that had actually occurred. Two events which, viewed from a system of co-ordinates, are simultaneous can no longer be viewed as simultaneous events from a system that is in motion relative to that system.