That might help to explain Lulu. Stephen had had to marry the kind of woman George disliked intensely. Of course he had. She was doing the very things that George had been supposed to do for him. Guidance wasn’t the word exactly: ‘orders’ would have been more appropriate – and George had never really wanted to give anyone orders, least of all his brother. He had, now he thought about it, found the burden of being the eldest son at times intolerable. All that intense love and equally intense doubt from his father, all that wonder and cluelessness in equal measure from his mother.
Why was he only finding out about this stuff now? It was a bit fucking late, wasn’t it?
‘Are you saying,’ Stephen was saying slowly, to Esmeralda, ‘that this may be murder? Not suicide? If so, I can’t see any sign of anyone else having been here apart from her. The front door is locked. So is the back.’
As if to prove his point, a small, hooded figure appeared from the garden and began rattling at the back-door handle. Mabel Dawkins, in spite of being in her sixties, made a habit of wearing her son’s tops even though, as she often said, ‘I look like one of them neighbourhoddies that do the assault with batteries.’ She seemed desperate to get on to the premises and showed no sign that she had seen Frigga’s body.
‘Someone,’ said Esmeralda, ‘had better tell her.’
‘I will,’ said Stephen. ‘I’ll let her know what’s happened. She has a right to know. She was fond of Frigga. God knows why but she was. I was fond of her, come to that. She drove me mad, of course, but I loved my sister.’
His face twitched. For a moment George thought he was actually going to cry. Then he recovered himself. He walked over to the patio door and shouted through it to Mabel, who continued to rattle the handle. His manner, as always when talking to Mabel, resembled that of a high-born English tourist speaking to a native bearer some time in the late 1890s.
‘I cannot let you in, Mabel,’ he said. ‘This is a crime scene.’
‘Ice cream?’ said Mabel, and went back to rattling the door handle.
‘Look behind me, Mabel,’ he continued, still sounding like an early user of the Bell telephone. ‘There is a body hanging from the ceiling. Frigga has hanged herself.’
‘Banged ’erself where?’ said Mabel, who still did not seem to have seen Frigga’s body although it was not only in her line of vision but had been pointed out to her with the patient clarity of a tour guide indicating the whereabouts of an important item of sculpture.
Perhaps, thought George, she was becoming desensitized to corpses. Or perhaps it was her hood. As well as lending her a vaguely criminal aspect, it obstructed her view as effectively as the kind of headgear worn by monks who are up to no good. Stephen went on shouting at her through the glass door, as if they were standing on the edge of a station platform as an express thundered through.
‘Frigga is right there. You see? She has hanged herself. We think she has probably hanged herself. We do not know definitively. Someone else may have hanged her. This is a crime scene.’
Mabel kept right on pumping the door handle.
‘I think,’ said Esmeralda, wearily, ‘you had probably better let her in.’
Mabel still did not seem to see the body even after Stephen had opened the back door, shown her in and thrust Jessica’s carer in the direction of the dangling cadaver. George had read somewhere that when the Aztecs had first sighted ships out in the ocean they simply had not seen them. They had no way of understanding how such a thing could be. It was like that with Frigga and Mabel. When she finally allowed her eyes to make contact with the white socks, the pale, mottled calves, the blue and knobbly knees, the loose-fitting floral dress, the junk-shop beads and then, finally, the neck, the tightly stretched cord (was it, George wondered, from his mother’s dressing gown?) and the head with its listless white hair at a pitiful angle to the rest of the ensemble, she gazed at it with a kind of awe.
‘Oh, my Gawd!’ she whispered. ‘Oh, my bleed’n’ Gawd! They hunged you up like a chicken, din’t they, the barstids?’
Mabel and Frigga had had an intense relationship. For years they had been very close. As far as Jessica was concerned, the class structure of England had not really altered since the First World War. She had made a habit of saying to Mabel, in the sweetest imaginable tones, ‘Of course, dear, I am placed high above you. But although I have a music degree I do not think of you as inferior. You are my friend. Not my servant.’ She came out with lines like this as Mabel was hauling her off to the lavatory or prising her off the floor after one of her frequent falls. If George was in the room when this kind of thing happened – which he often was – Mabel would wink broadly at him. He had once found her watching the old lady through a crack in the door, and when he asked her what was happening, she replied, ‘Watchin’ ’er fart. She does it at top volume, Georgy. Lissen! Like a fuckin’ machine gun.’
Frigga, perhaps to annoy her mother, had deliberately cultivated a chummy relationship with Mrs Dawkins. She called her ‘Mabe’, which was what her husband called her. Mabel called her ‘Frigg’, which no one else in the world had ever called the sixty-two-year-old librarian. At one point they became so close Frigga asked Mabel along to a meeting of her coven. No one had ever found out what happened, but they did not speak for weeks afterwards. When George asked her about it, Mabel said, ‘They done some disgustin’ things there. She should be ashamed of ’erself. Witches is filth in my view. If I’d known there was gonna be witches there I never woulda fuckin’ gone.’ George did ask her what she thought a coven was. She said she thought it was something to do with cooking.
She was staring up at his sister now as if she was fairly sure witchcraft might have had something to do with her death. ‘Oh, Frigg,’ she whispered. ‘I ’ope this is not Satan’s doing. You was never one-a the bad ones, was you? You shoulda had a hullo roundjer really. Oh, Frigg. What ’as all this led to, my darlin’? I do not think so, Frigg. Frigg. Frigg. Frigg.’
With which she staggered back into the coffee-table, her right arm raised above her face, as if to ward off another blow from the Almighty. Then she turned and spat violently into her left palm. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but there’s evil spirits in ’ere an’ I don’t mean you, Stephen! All we need is the fuckin’ ’angman. Pardon my French, boys and girls.’
She stared long and hard at the body. There was suddenly something, George decided, unbelievably sinister about her manner. Had she spotted some Satanic trademark on the body? If she had, she was keeping very quiet about it. What, then? She knew Frigga probably better than any of them. Did she know things about her that might go some way to explaining her previously well-concealed habit of pushing people under trains at the Gare du Nord? Mabel wheeled round and, still with the same air of doom and prophecy about her, said to Stephen, ‘You’ll be next, Stephen. First yore mum and then yore bruvver. And now you. It’s a series killer, Stephen, mark my words. It’s a long-running series, thass wot it is. Oh, my Gawd, we better ’ave this place exercised as soon as possible. Anyone know an exercist? This is Devil worship, I would say, ladies and gentlemen.’ With which she began to howl furiously.
It was, thought George, curious that Frigga’s mother’s carer seemed to have a more emotionally direct response to his sister’s death than anyone in her immediate family – including the brother Frigga seemed to have boasted about having murdered.
Was this something to do with the famous English reserve? The talents of the Anglo-Saxon middle class for treating their loved ones as if they had just met them at a breakfast party? Or perhaps it was simply that all of her family had spent more time with Frigga than had Mabel Dawkins. Prolonged exposure to her was enough to provoke anyone into finding ways of speeding her departure from the world.
‘You was so beautifully preserved,’ sobbed Mabel. ‘You turned out lovely – time after time. And now they gone and turned you off like a common criminal. Was it one a them witches, darlin’? I wou’n’t be surprised if they did yore mum in an�
� all. An’ Georgy Porgy.’
No one had called George this since he was twelve – and on that occasion he had bitten the offender’s ear. If he had had the gnashers he would have done the same now. There was something, he decided, definitely not right about Mabel. If you thought about it, she’d had a pretty good motive for polishing off the whole Pearmain family. No man is a hero to his valet and no family is immune to the contempt of the professional carer. What had his mother left her in this mysterious codicil?
‘The police,’ Stephen was saying, as he placed one tentative paw on Mabel’s shoulder, ‘are on their way.’
Esmeralda was giving Jessica’s carer the sharp sideways look she so often visited on a world that, as George well knew, she had never been able to trust. When he had been alive he had often been frustrated by her intensely suspicious nature, her shyness and her inability to frame the simplest social demand. She had once had an embarrassing accident in John Lewis simply because she was too shy to ask anyone the way to the Ladies’.
Now he thought he had not only started to understand her way of looking at the world but was starting to believe she was probably in the right. To be dead, he thought, is to be pessimistic.
‘Why were you coming round?’ Esmeralda was saying to Mabel.
Mabel swivelled her head in Esmeralda’s direction. There had always been a cautious respect between the two women. Mabel now looked, George thought, more cautious than respectful as she replied quietly, ‘That is a very good question, Esmeralda. A very good question.’ There was silence in the room. Mabel continued: ‘I come round about an hour ago,’ she said. ‘She was ’ere on ’er own. And I was worried about ’er.’
‘Why was that?’ said Esmeralda.
Veronica, who had never liked Mabel, leaned forward slightly, her eyes never leaving the carer’s face.
‘She said I ’ad to go. There was someone comin’ to meet ’er. ’Ere. She wou’n’t say ’oo it was but she bustled me out real quick. I wondered whether it mighta bin one of ’er witches. Dunno. But ’ooever it was I woulda said she was scared of this person. Terrified of them. That was why I come back. And when I come back what do I find? I find ’er strung up like this.’ Mabel shook her head slowly. ‘This wasn’t suicide,’ she said. ‘This was murder!’
Chapter Thirteen
George was not really obliged to wait in a room that contained the hanged body of his sister. He had always tried to cut short his encounters with her when the two of them had been alive and there seemed no reason whatsoever for prolonging the present meeting. She was not in any way improved by being suspended from a hook in the ceiling.
He was dead. He could, theoretically, go anywhere he liked. He could take a bus to Heathrow and slip on to a flight to Málaga. He had always liked Málaga. He wouldn’t even have to go through security. Perhaps it was Esmeralda who kept him there. The way she had kept him in that shabby one-bedroom flat in Southfields, the tiny house off Lacy Road where Maurice and Barry had been born and, finally, the comparative dignity of 22 Hornbeam Crescent. The perfect place for an Englishman to die.
He still did not quite understand the power she seemed to have over him. It must be more than the blowjobs. We were getting into a tricky area here for a dead person. Something spiritual? George had never been a big fan of the spiritual, unless it was being sung by large African-American men. If they did have a spiritual rapport, surely this would have meant that George would sometimes have been swept away by love and found himself possessed by an overmastering urge to, say, buy her flowers! He had, he recalled now, once been possessed by an overmastering urge to buy her flowers. It had been, he thought, some time in August 1998, but there did not seem to be any florists within easy reach.
Nobody in their right mind would have called Esmeralda spiritual. She was, thought George, borderline coarse. Like him. Why did the sight of this small, dumpy woman, with her shock of black hair, her rather too prominent nose and her fine brown eyes conjure up feelings that he could not put into words without seeming sloppily sentimental or comprehensively pretentious?
He didn’t know. He couldn’t express the emotions she inspired in him. Perhaps there were simply too many of them.
The doorbell rang. Stephen froze. Esmeralda jumped. Mabel Dawkins slumped. Veronica gave a small squeal. Nat folded his arms, unfolded them again and then, with the air of a man who was going to get the gesture right this time, folded them for a second time.
After that, somehow, Inspector Hobday and Pawlikowski were in the room.
‘Who found her?’ said Hobday to Esmeralda.
Stephen seemed, as usual, keen to be the one in charge. ‘I was first into the room,’ he said. ‘There is a note pinned to her dress. A suicide note.’
Hobday began to read it aloud. He did not attempt to put much colour into it. As an audition piece it would have got him waved on after the first sentence, but what his voice lacked in expressiveness, it more than made up for in clarity and volume. As he went on he allowed some atmosphere to creep in and by the time he got to the bit about the Trolls dancing on the heads of the slain he was rolling his eyes and rs to chilling effect.
When he had finished he turned to Esmeralda, even though Stephen was desperately trying to get into his eyeline. ‘The Gare du Nord, eh?’ he said.
Pawlikowski was slumped in an armchair looking longingly up at Frigga’s neck. He was clearly aching to do inappropriate things to it but, for the moment, contented himself by rifling through his bag of tricks with an air of contained excitement.
‘In my experience,’ said Hobday, ‘suicide notes are usually brief to the point of rudeness. The people who write long involved ones, in my experience, do not go on to do the deed.’
All the time he was saying this, his eyes were on Esmeralda. Stephen was now practically jumping up and down, like the class swot trying to get the teacher’s attention.
‘What do you think, Esmeralda?’ he said.
Was he about to co-opt George’s widow into the Metropolitan Police? He had obviously decided she had investigative skills that might be useful to him.
‘I agree with you,’ she said. ‘Although Virginia Woolf’s went on a bit.’
George was now definitely sure the inspector fancied her. Was there a Mrs Hobday? Nothing the man had said suggested there was, and Hobday fitted the pattern of the men she had, over the years, found attractive. It wasn’t easy to work out what it was she liked. Some were thin, some were fat. Some were tall and some were short. One, George recalled, with a faint thrill, had been black. What they had all had in common was a certain talent for conversation, a certain assurance in manner, combined with a light behind the eyes that suggested a vivid interior life.
Hobday also, of course, had a sense of humour. He might even, thought George, write poetry. George couldn’t help liking the man, despite his dislike of his rather too familiar manner with the woman to whom, due to circumstances not under his control, George was no longer married. Weren’t there professional guidelines about this sort of thing? They were both there to avenge his death and find his murderer, not to ogle each other, but maybe the one followed from the other. Like teaching, detection had a strong erotic charge.
It was, he decided, definitely his love for Esmeralda that kept him on the earth. He was still jealous of anyone paying her attention. One of the reasons he had never told her about Julie Biskiborne was that he was terrified she would decide to leave him. Biskiborne was quite capable of giving her a blow-by-blow account of their affair. It was why he had let her down so very, very gently.
I followed him into his hotel room at a banking conference in Wolverhampton and found he responded passionately to my advances. We made love, subsequently, during the NatWest awayday in a countryside retreat in the Thames Valley and on several occasions in the back of my reconditioned Austin 1100. I would be happy to share him with you, Esmeralda! He has always talked very highly of you in spite of the fact you rather went off sex after Barry was born! I want to be
friends! I want a place in the life that you and George share!
George shuddered at the memory of Biskiborne’s frequently expressed enthusiasm for open marriage. Not being married herself, of course, she found the idea appealing.
Maybe that was why he was doomed to walk the earth – well, Putney, anyway. There was also probably an element of punishment for the hideous sin of shagging Biskiborne. Of allowing her to say things like ‘I love your enormous penis!’ (One of the many reasons he had ended the affair was that she was always saying things like that.) Of writing her a letter that spoke of deep, deep feelings. One of the reasons he loved Esmeralda was that she knew damn well he had absolutely no deep feelings. Or a large penis.
‘Apparently,’ Nat was saying, ‘she was expecting someone. We do not know who. Something funny was going on. She was very strange when we were with her earlier.’
‘She was lookin’ ’unted when I seen ’er,’ said Mabel. ‘She was strung out. Oh, my Gawd, what ’ave I said? She was strung out and now she’s bin strung up. A very unfortunate turning of phrase. I was tellin’ them I am of the opinion witchcraft was involved.’
Hobday did not seem to be listening to any of this. He was looking at Frigga’s body as if in a trance.
Nat coughed politely. ‘Are you … er … going to cut her down?’ he said tentatively.
Hobday swivelled round and glared at him. ‘Everything about a crime scene,’ he said, ‘tells me something. This moment is the important one. When I first see the body. Now. Right now. In an instant, I see everything. Do you understand? When I saw the body of Luigi Marrone in the Asda car park I knew, at once, that Mr Marrone had not been murdered there. For reasons I will not go into here I was instantly aware he had been beheaded in North London. And something of the sort is going on here. Right now. I am listening to Miss Pearmain. I am aware of her. She is trying to tell me something.’
Waking Up Dead Page 17