Had her death, possibly, been an accident? Could there, perhaps, have been some late-night lesbian row – along the lines of ‘I’ve always loved you, Jessica. How could you get involved with that ghastly man? And give birth to that hideously fat, sexist son of yours?’ George could not quite see this happening, but there might, it occurred to him, have been some kind of row about money. He had the vague idea that Mullins and Vickers were a little bit short of the ready.
Money, he could not help thinking, was probably at the bottom of all this. He should have told her to leave it equally to all the children. The fact that he had not done so was more or less proof that, as the eldest son, he had had a special relationship with his mother on which he had ruthlessly capitalized. He had always thought of himself as a nice person but, if he was honest – and now there was little point in being anything else – he would have to admit that he enjoyed the power she had granted him over his two siblings. Would he have shared the money equally? He liked to think so but perhaps it would have been more complicated than that.
‘What exactly,’ Mullins was saying, ‘did Jessica say in this codicil?’
She was not even pretending interest in the remains of her oldest friend’s daughter.
Stephen, perhaps to prevent her and Beryl shovelling cutlery, watercolours and small antiques into a large bag and hotfooting it off to their cottage in East Sussex, pointed dramatically at his sister’s body. ‘As you can see,’ he said, in what Esmeralda used to call his ‘Stephen Pearmain News at Ten Anywhere in the World Where Horrible Things Are Happening’ voice, ‘my sister has hanged herself. Some people are saying she may have been murdered.’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Esmeralda, ‘that that is what I said.’
‘Oh,’ said Mullins, as if she had only now remembered that there was a dead body in the room. ‘Oh, my God!’
‘Oh, my God!’ said Beryl Vickers, squinting up at the body. ‘You mean someone put her up there?’
Mullins and Frigga, George recalled, had once been very close and then, only a few months ago, while at Jessica’s, they had had a furious argument, provoked by a short speech from Frigga that began ‘Homosexuality is wicked.’ She had gone on to say even more unacceptable things about any liaison that deviated from what she had referred to as ‘the holy love between man and woman’. Why Frigga should have felt like this George would never understand. He had always thought she would have had more luck as a muff-diver than she had ever had in the quest for Mr Right. He sometimes wondered whether Vickers had made a move on her.
‘Mrs Pearmain’s flat,’ Hobday said, ‘seems to have been as busy as Clapham Junction this afternoon.’
No one, it seemed, wanted to add to this remark. If he had hoped it would prompt some revealing remarks from Mullins, Mabel or Beryl Vickers, he was wrong.
‘What we will need,’ said the inspector, ‘is access to her flat. Does anyone have a key?’
It turned out everyone did. Everyone in the room, apart from Esmeralda, had been conscripted at one time or another to look after Frigga’s cat. In the end Hobday accepted one of Stephen’s. He had two and seemed unwilling to let go of either.
The inspector still showed no sign of wishing to cut Frigga down. The reason became clear when Pawlikowski took a long, complicated call that seemed to herald the arrival of experts in the field of gallows retrieval.
There was something else about the body that was worrying him, thought George, although he was clearly not going to say what it was. Hobday was standing by the window. On the floor next to him was a large green canvas bag. The detective squatted on his haunches and took out something that George instantly recognized as Frigga’s purse. This was followed by a small teddy bear, a pair of slippers, three packets of Kleenex, a bewilderingly large assortment of pill bottles and an even larger assortment of recently gathered leaves and berries. Last out was an illustrated book entitled Things I Found in an English Hedgerow.
With Which I Poisoned People! thought George, but, as Hobday went further down into the recesses of the bag and came out with a small rubber ball, three plastic teapots and a selection of rag dolls, he felt a pang.
She had loved his granddaughters. They were almost the only people in the world with whom she seemed able to be natural. He remembered watching her watch them, perched on the edge of his sofa, her awkward smile and air of veiled terror being, for once, suspended, as Bella Ella or Ella Bella pattered their way across the floor, muttering to themselves about tea in the way even very small females seem to do.
She had loved the girls. She had loved Barry and Maurice when they were small. When George and Frigga were children he had gone out with her once to look for her black rabbit after it had escaped. He had put his arms round her when she heard the unfortunate animal had been eaten, or half eaten, by foxes, and said, ‘It’ll be all right, Frigga! You’ll see! It’ll be all right!’ How could it have been all right? Her beloved rabbit was dead. He had as much chance of coming back as, now, did George, but his saying that had made it all right at the time. Something in him had loved her, even if, for the last two decades, it had been buried deep under the accumulated weight of the years. It was hard enough when you were alive to find your way back to the love you had felt for your brothers and sisters in childhood. Now he was dead, he would never even be able to try.
It had probably not been more than a few minutes that they had all been grouped around Frigga’s corpse. It had seemed much longer than that. As Pawlikowski began to pull things out of his bag, Hobday shepherded them all into the kitchen.
‘Immediately after your mother and brother died,’ he said to Stephen, in conversational tones, ‘Frigga seemed to be saying she was responsible for your brother’s death. She said, as I’m sure you remember that she had “probably” done something that had ended Mr Pearmain’s life. What we later assumed – as perhaps did everyone else – was that she had, deliberately or accidentally, picked hemlock on Putney Heath during the afternoon before she served everyone with parsnip wine. But when we asked her about it later she said she had not done anything of the kind.’
‘It’s possible,’ said Stephen, ‘that she had picked hemlock by mistake. It is possible.’
‘Of course,’ said Hobday, slowly, ‘that was before we had any idea that your brother had been poisoned. It wasn’t in the frame at that stage.’
‘No one,’ said Esmeralda, ‘had any idea that George had been poisoned. Who on earth would want to poison poor George? What harm had he done to anyone?’
‘But they did,’ said Hobday, ‘and maybe Miss Pearmain had seen something suspicious, something she couldn’t quite explain at the time, and done nothing about it. Which was why she felt guilty.’
That fitted, thought George, with what Frigga had told his corpse. He was, unfortunately, not in a position to pass on this information to anyone, apart from a dead Irish wolfhound. The doorbell rang. More pathologists arrived. DC Purves arrived. There was the noise of heavy feet from the front room.
‘If she had picked hemlock,’ said Esmeralda, ‘and knew she had, she would have told everyone about it. If she was innocent. It does sound as if she was in some way implicated. And there is the question of the note. I agree with Stephen. That is her writing, even if the style is a little odd.’
Hobday nodded in an animated fashion.
I really should find out a little more about this man, George thought. Hobday was getting keener on his widow by the minute. Was Hobday married? Was she just a casual pick-up for him? Perhaps he enjoyed the buzz of shagging the recently bereaved. Those affected by violent crime must be especially vulnerable. They needed comfort. Perhaps Hobday provided it in the form of mutual sexual climax. George was outraged. If he wasn’t dead, he would certainly be getting in touch with the Independent Police Complaints Commission to … well … complain.
Hang on. He was getting ahead of himself. All the guy had done was smile at Esmeralda a few times. What was really bothering him was that, sooner or late
r, some lucky geezer was going to be asked back to 22 Hornbeam Crescent, then to share a few glasses of fine wine from the Rhône and, before either of them knew it, whip upstairs for a spot of anal intercourse and other things that had been denied George during his long and, on the whole, happy marriage.
He had always said to her, ‘When I’m dead, I want you to get on with your life. I want you to be happy.’ Well, he did want her to seize any chance of happiness she was offered, but he did not particularly want a ringside seat while she was doing it. He had always, if he was honest, been violently jealous of anyone else who took an interest in her. Even if it had taken an unhealthy dose of hemlock to get him to admit it. He had kept the business with Julie Biskiborne such a closely guarded secret because he had assumed Esmeralda was as possessive as him. Was she, though? Would the man who came along to replace him allow her to flower in a way he had never managed?
Hobday was having one of those long and tedious conversations in which he attempted to establish where everyone had been during the period when Frigga was likely to have died. Mabel Dawkins, who, George thought, was being particularly evasive, seemed to be saying that she had been in and out of the flat at regular intervals since Jessica’s death. Was she, George wondered, looking for the mysterious codicil?
Pawlikowski put his face round the door. He seemed, George thought, excited. An ominous sign. ‘Something I need you to look at, Boss,’ he said. George could, of course, have followed him but, after Hobday had told everyone they could go, he stayed with Esmeralda and the others.
He really must learn to let go of Esmeralda. Perhaps when he had done that he would be relieved of the terrible burden of consciousness. She was the one who was haunting him in the way the living can haunt the dead and bring them, piece by piece, away from the calm and oblivion that should rightfully be theirs.
She was following Veronica and Nat out into the sunshine. Mabel, the Mullins woman and Beryl Vickers showed every sign of wanting to stay, but Stephen, who seemed to have recovered somewhat from the shock of seeing his sister’s body, shepherded them towards the door. He clearly did not like the idea of any of them being alone with the silver.
Veronica and Esmeralda were saying their goodbyes with one of those heartfelt embraces that women seem to achieve so much better than men. Esmeralda was to be taken back to Hornbeam Crescent with Stephen. Other people, George noted, were already showing signs of competing to look after her – as if losing her husband was a form of disability. She didn’t like this. She had never liked people trying to look after her. George took in the unhappiness in Esmeralda’s face and, once again, felt the loss of being unable to talk to her directly. A few words would be all it would take. What was it his father had said to him when he was dying in that grim side-room in the hospital? ‘There is one sense in which I never want you to go.’ A typically literary last line from Pearmain Senior and one that, even now he had joined his father among the ranks of the dead, had power to move him. Well, he didn’t seem able to go, but Esmeralda had no way of knowing that.
‘It’ll be good,’ Stephen was saying to Esmeralda, ‘to talk through some things before I go.’
What could those be? He could tell that, whatever they were, she had no wish to discuss them – if he had been alive he would have picked that up immediately, simply from the angle of her shoulders or a movement in her eyes, and set about getting rid of his brother. She found that kind of thing very difficult. But George was no longer there to make it easier for her.
‘Look,’ he said to her, as the three of them climbed into Stephen’s car, ‘let’s try to be positive about this. I’m never again going to forget to put my breakfast plate in the dishwasher. I’m all done with spending too much time in the lavatory. I’ll never again want to watch the Boat Race. There’s no chance whatsoever now of my not doing anything in the garden. You’ll never again have to put up with me laughing at my own jokes.’
This showed no sign of having any effect – good, bad or indifferent – upon its intended audience. Stephen was holding open the front passenger door of his Range Rover. Esmeralda gave it a dull stare. ‘I’ll go in the back, if that’s all right,’ she said, ‘I always used to go in the back when George was…’ She was unable to finish this sentence. Stephen arranged his face to suggest sympathy.
They had been on holiday, once, the three of them, when Stephen was between marriages. It had not been a success. They had driven through Devon, staying in grim bed-and-breakfast places, staffed by people with obvious marital difficulties who made threatening conversation over breakfast. George had sat in the front, next to his brother. They had talked about their parents, the deficiencies of Frigga, happier memories of childhood and, mostly, about money because Stephen like to talk about money. He had a lot of it and he enjoyed telling George all about that, while remaining coy about actual figures. Esmeralda, excluded from this, sat in the back looking out at the green hedgerows and the narrow lanes, her face a mask.
You grew away from your mother and father, brothers and sisters. That was the way. George had found it easier to do that because of his marriage. Frigga, of course, had never found any way of escaping the horrible closeness of her relationship with Jessica. It was different with Esmeralda.
She had had none of the qualities that were liable to make his parents reach for the subtle insult or the awful sting of qualified approval. She wasn’t an Orthodox Jew or an alcoholic or just plain crazy, like the Irish girl Stephen had brought back from university and who had been pronounced ‘really good fun’ by both parents. Esmeralda was just Esmeralda and, from the very beginning, everyone in the Pearmain family seemed to have decided that there was something wrong with her. Perhaps it was her voice or her hair or her brusque manner of disagreeing with people or simply that she always said when she did disagree with people. Perhaps it was her habit of remaining totally silent at mealtimes. Perhaps it was her mother. Although her mother was, in many respects, an almost exact mirror image of George’s. Even if she taught mathematics rather than music and sometimes wore clothes that Jessica described as ‘fast’. She smoked. She had been known to swear in public. Was that it?
Surely not.
Anyway, neither Jessica nor George Senior had ever really accepted Esmeralda’s mum and her husband, a small, inoffensive man with a pointed head, an accountant who led a blameless life for sixty-four years and then had a quietly inoffensive heart attack in the back of a taxi. Was that it?
Not really. All the Pearmains, each for very different reasons, had decided there was something wrong with Esmeralda from the moment she had first put her face round the door in the middle of George’s second term at Oxford. This was where, as George remarked in his wedding speech, he had finally got over the fact that she had hit him on the head with that skipping rope at St Jude’s Primary School.
Stephen had said, only weeks after he had been introduced, that there was ‘something shifty’ about her. Frigga made her sour-milk face every time Esmeralda’s back was turned. Jessica publicly objected to the fact that Esmeralda did not iron George’s shirts. Everyone took offence at her – in those days – left-wing stance on all things political.
But both his parents’ reactions were violently hostile.
‘There’s something wrong with her,’ George’s father had said, when he had brought her home for the second time. ‘I don’t know what it is. But something is not right.’ His mother had nodded in agreement, like a tall flower in a regular breeze. George Pearmain Senior never had condescended to reveal what was not right about Esmeralda. At first, George thought it might be that, even way back then in the early seventies, he had been open about the fact that they were sleeping together. Indeed, there were occasions when George Pearmain Senior, a moderately observant Anglican, had said that that was precisely the nature of his objection.
It wasn’t, of course. What it was, George thought, was that his father was jealous, and so was his mother. He had always, for reasons he had never completely unders
tood, been their favourite. Perhaps it was simply that he was the first and that, as they never failed to remind the poor girl, the follow-up act, Frigga, had been such a disappointment. They could not bear losing George, and when he had met Esmeralda he had been lost to the world, as well as to his parents. He could still remember the feel of her skin, the smell of her as they walked, and the blind, confused hunger she could wake in him, even now he was dead and would never touch her or smell her or kiss her lips again.
In a way, his coming to terms with his mother and father still felt like a betrayal of her. Perhaps the absurd complexities of his mother’s will were a punishment for that.
Before Stephen had had time to close the passenger door, George had slipped in to occupy his usual place next to his brother.
As they drove back up Putney Hill, towards Hornbeam Crescent, he looked back at his wife. She was staring out at the bright day in just the way she had studied the Devon lanes all those years ago. The girls were coming out of school, in careless groups, in the August sun. The giant green castles of the chestnut trees on the corner of their road held her eyes. George wanted to lean over and reach out his hand to her. For a moment he thought that that was what he had done and then, like a man who has suffered some great loss, wakes not remembering it and almost instantly sees how bright the world was once and how suddenly it is now dark, he knew he would never be anything other than deceased.
‘Do you really think Frigga was murdered?’ Stephen was saying.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Esmeralda, ‘but something’s not right about it.’ There was a silence. Then she said, ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Oh, God,’ said Stephen. ‘So am I. She was an awful person in many ways but I was very fond of her. She looked up to me, I suppose. I…’
Was he going to cry? He had been close to it several times since they had found Frigga’s body. He had that frightened look about him too. Why had Mabel Dawkins said that Frigga had seemed frightened? That was a mystery George could not even begin to think of solving.
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