Nobody did. Apart from George who remembered only too well. They had been staying at some cottage near Ullswater. George and Stephen were in their early twenties. George had just become the proud owner of a new Morris Marina that had mysteriously disappeared during the holiday. He had always thought it had been stolen, crashed and abandoned by joyriders. Stephen! You bastard!
Brothers again. You stole their things. You tried to steal their girls and then, when you were all grown-up, you … No, surely not. Stephen wouldn’t actually have tried to kill him, would he? Now he was confronted with the thought that his brother had murdered him, George found he was, quite simply, unable to believe it. There was some other explanation. Stephen had, perhaps, picked hemlock by mistake and, without realizing it, placed it on the pile of herbs Frigga had been adding to the parsnip wine.
‘It was when I saw Frigga picking those herbs,’ Stephen went on. ‘I was asking her about this one and that one and she was telling me. I pointed out one plant and she said, “No no no – you mustn’t ever pick that, Stephen. That’s hemlock! It would kill you.” I don’t know why but I picked it. I wasn’t thinking of killing anyone at that stage, I really wasn’t.’
‘Stop this!’ said Lulu. ‘Stop it now!’
But Stephen didn’t want to stop.
‘I had seen the will,’ he went on. ‘I had told Lulu what was in it. She said I had to talk to Mummy about it but I couldn’t talk to Mummy about it. I couldn’t talk to her about anything, really. It was always George with her. George. George. George. She was never very interested in me. Maybe I’m not a very interesting person. I don’t know.’
‘Stevie, shut the fuck up!’
‘But it wasn’t the money, really. I just wanted him out of the way. I’d wanted him out of the way since the day I was born. I couldn’t see the point of him. I couldn’t understand why my ridiculous father liked him so much. Perhaps because they were exactly the same. Both suburban losers. Little people who never do anything. Never risk anything. Life is all about risk. If you don’t risk something you’ll never gain anything. People complain about bankers but at least they did something, didn’t they? In the days my father was a banker he never took risks with anything. We never had quite enough money and he moaned about it. All the time. George was just like him. A moaner. He deserved to die. Him and his horrible wife. She’s rude. And dirty. She keeps a dirty house.’
For some reason Lulu chose to support him in this judgement. ‘She does,’ she said. ‘It’s filthy. Look at it.’
‘Lulu,’ said Stephen, ‘always washes the curtains. She washes everything. She washes herself. She washes the kitchen floor. Herself. She irons all her own underwear. She bakes her own bread.’
Here, Esmeralda spoke, for the first time in what seemed an age. ‘She doesn’t,’ she said. ‘She can’t cook for toffee. And you’re a disgusting, greedy little man.’
Stephen followed his custom of the last forty years and paid no attention to her whatsoever. ‘After I realized Mummy was dead,’ he went on, ‘I made it look like a burglar had done it, and if people had let that idiot Pinker carry on with the heart-attack rubbish after he’d seen George, we would have been all right. Home and dry.’
‘Actually,’ said Nat, ‘the symptoms of myocardial infarction are remarkably similar to those of hemlock poisoning.’
‘George was always crawling round Mummy to make sure he got the lion’s share of the will. He thought it was all his by right. He got favoured treatment from Daddy because he was there first. I was cleverer than him in business and I got a first—’
‘You got a third,’ said Esmeralda.
Stephen continued to ignore his sister-in-law. ‘His poetry,’ he went on, ‘is rubbish. Absolute rubbish. It isn’t modern. This is the twenty-first century, for God’s sake. It’s derivative rubbish.’
George was getting annoyed. It was one thing to poison him. It was, perhaps, a logical conclusion to the tensions between them that, now he thought about it, probably went back to the day when he had run over, and badly mangled, Stephen’s rabbit with his tricycle in 1956, but to make a gratuitous and savage attack on his poetry – he hadn’t even published it! Leave me alone, bro! You appear to have poisoned me! Wasn’t that enough?
‘I managed to convince Frigga that she’d done it. That was quite easy. Lulu was going to see her that afternoon to make absolutely sure but then … I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. I couldn’t believe she’d done what she had.’
‘Oh, shut up, you spineless twat!’ said Lulu, ‘You got us into the mess with the fucking money, didn’t you?’
Suddenly Stephen began to scream at her. ‘You made me do it!’ he yelled. ‘It was you! I never meant to kill him! I loved him! But you never stopped, did you? Day in and day out, “Your fucking brother!” You poisoned my mind against him! You poisoned my mind against Mummy! You’re disgusting! You’re mad! You killed that old woman and you…’
Lulu had not moved for the last twenty minutes. When she did you could see just how strong and physically controlled she was. She sprang at her husband with the speed and accuracy of a rattlesnake. Before anyone had understood what was happening she had both hands round his neck and was squeezing for dear life. She had, George noted, huge hands. Strangler’s hands. It took two policemen to drag her off. Stephen coughed horribly for a while, and then he said, ‘I didn’t mean to kill George. Not really. It was an impulse thing. I didn’t mean to do it. I was drunk. And Mummy was an accident. She’s the one you should send away. You should hang her.’ He looked at Hobday with a pathetic attempt at a smile. ‘I’ll tell you everything,’ he said.
Chapter Twenty-three
George thought he had done that already, but Stephen obviously did not agree. It proved rather hard to shut him up. Once he had started confessing he seemed to get an appetite for it. George had the strong impression he was about to own up to other crimes, including ones he had not actually committed. There was, however, plenty of entirely justified confessional material. He certainly seemed to have got up to a few financial tricks that would have horrified George’s father. Companies in the Cayman Islands. Raising mortgages on properties that did not exist.
He spoke about other things as well. He spoke – at length – about his toupee. He told everyone how much it had cost, how difficult it was to keep tidy, how he felt that it was not a success, that people spotted it in the street and laughed at him behind their hands. He had adopted it in his thirties and by the time better hair technology came along it was too late. They laughed more as he got older, he said. Sometimes to his face. He said he had thought of buying a knife so as he could cut up the people who insulted him in that way but he had not had the nerve to do so. He spoke of how much he hated Barry and Maurice because they sniggered about his toupee. Esmeralda told him this was perfectly true and that it was not going to make his time in prison any easier. Stephen started to cry.
He spoke of how much he hated Barry and Maurice. He talked about his work, by which time the room was getting restless. He spoke of how he and Lulu had planed to develop an English-language current-affairs programme in China but the project had been torpedoed by a man called Chung. He spoke at length about Chunge. Then he got on to the subject of his marriage to Geraldine. ‘I don’t know why I married her,’ he said, ‘I think I only married her because I thought she was black.’
‘I am black,’ said Geraldine, who was sitting on the sofa next to Esmeralda.
‘Not very,’ said Rosalina’s boyfriend, Justice, who was sitting on the arm of the sofa.
‘But she didn’t understand me,’ went on Stephen, who did not appear to have heard any of these remarks, ‘because she was black.’
By this stage, not only Lulu but almost everyone else in the room was wishing he would shut up and go off to jail like a good boy. At one point he started to talk about masturbation, a topic George had always found embarrassing but actively distasteful now he was dead. Opportunities for self-abuse had been seriously li
mited since his brother had poisoned him; but now Stephen, who was clearly looking at some of the ways in which he might be spending his time during the years ahead, seemed keen to give everyone his views on this once-frowned-upon subject. He spoke of how many times he did it each day, of the immense pleasure it had given him over the years, of how George had once tried to stop him doing it when they had shared a bed on holiday in Cornwall and how he had always resented what he called George’s ‘pompous and Puritan attitude’.
Lulu seemed to have given up trying to make him stop.
Most of all he talked about George. George had had no idea his brother held so many passionate opinions about him. He had always thought he and Esmeralda were the only ones who bitched about their respective family members. It was clear that Stephen had devoted almost as much time to thinking about his older brother as he had devoted to his mobile phone.
‘He was desperate to get his hands on the money,’ he said at one point. ‘He was always sucking up to Mummy, taking her to Waitrose and getting her to rewrite her will. He wanted to get his hands on the Vienna Regulator too. He always had his eyes on that. And on the sideboard. The sideboard is worth thousands.’
The Vienna Regulator had finally been valued, soon after the last family member who had a legitimate claim on it had been murdered. It was worth £150.
He talked quite a lot about the Vienna Regulator. He talked, too, about a present George had been given by their parents in 1957. He didn’t appear to remember what it was but he seemed fairly sure it was a better present than the one he had received. Holidays had been a particularly tricky area. There had been one in the Vosges, apparently, where George had eaten Stephen’s pudding without asking his permission.
George had no recollection whatsoever of any of this. He hadn’t, now he came to think of it, ever really paid much attention to Stephen. Maybe that was why Stephen had poisoned him. He had been trying, in his own way, to make contact. George had never really wanted contact with Stephen, certainly not close contact. Now the distance between them was unbridgeable and, perhaps, that was best for all concerned.
He was not sure that his mother had loved him more than she had loved Stephen. She had certainly preferred both of them to Frigga, but then Frigga was not only female, depressive, talentless, demanding and full of spite but also, from the moment she emerged from the womb, relentlessly critical of her mother. Jessica was allowed to make judgements about her children, wasn’t she? Was it her fault if she felt passionately about them? The English, George thought, so famous for their coldness and reserve, were a ridiculously passionate bunch, betrayed by their feelings constantly and yet constantly trying to tell the world they didn’t really care.
‘Ridiculous,’ Stephen was saying. ‘George was ridiculous. A left-wing bank manager, I ask you! A sucker for all those good causes. A great opponent of the Gulf War. Always parading his liberal opinions but not really prepared to stand up for them. As interested in money as I was. As out for himself as I was. Just did not want to own up to it.’
‘I think,’ said Lulu, as he paused for breath, ‘We are ready to be taken away, Inspector.’
She had give up trying to find out what he had on her. She knew, that, whatever it was, it was damning. George would have liked to find some way of letting her know what he had done but the forces who were ruling his lack of life had clearly decided he was not going to be allowed to take any credit for the assistance he had given to the Metropolitan Police in the investigation of his own murder. The fuzz would not, he thought grimly, have got very far without him.
Lulu rose to her feet, with a touch of Marie Antoinette on her way to the scaffold. As she uncoiled herself from her muscular rear quarters in a manner that, to an experienced Lulu watcher such as George, only served to emphasize her reluctance to put her arse out there, she had, too, an air of Blanche Dubois on her way to the loony bin.
‘Come along, Stevie,’ she said, in her high, precisely elocuted tones. ‘The inspector wants us to go with him. And I think we should! Don’t you? I think the inspector rather likes me, don’t you? When we get to the station, I think I should ask him to … to…’ Here she stopped, and did something unusual. She smiled, showing all of her teeth. For a moment George had the impression they had lost their pearly whiteness and were shining like rotten wood in her suddenly exposed skull. ‘to … to … come sit on my knee!’
She laughed then, not in an extravagantly crazy way but like a full-throated junior-reporter-in-the-pub, yet the apparent naturalness of the sound only made clearer to George that Lulu had always been insane.
‘Mum!’ wailed the Prune. ‘Oh! Mummy!’
George had the distinct impression she was about to sing again. Peregrine’s chin had gone so far into his neck that his head looked as if it was about to be swallowed whole by his immaculately ironed collar.
‘Oh, God!’ he said, in a faint voice. ‘This is awful! Absolutely awful!’
In the corner, Beryl Vickers looked as if she was about to try to say something. There was no hatred or outrage on her face, George noted, only an intense puzzlement that an evening that had started so badly had managed to get even worse. She was muttering to herself, but it was only when he floated over to her that George could hear what she was saying: ‘She was only ninety-four. We were going to go to Provence. To the Cézanne exhibition.’
Lulu’s head was held too high for her to notice any pain Beryl might have been feeling. She was on her way to the door, watched by people who, at last, did not have to be polite to her. Say something, boys and girls! thought George. Give her a brief summary of how, why and where she has proved to be such an absolute cunt!
They did not do so. Perhaps, thought George, they had all told each other so many times what an appalling person she was that they saw no point in telling her. For a moment he suspected Rosalina was about to try some of the kinds of behaviour dished out to the tailgates of vans containing child murderers by Old Bailey groupies – a bit of spitting, perhaps, or an attempt to pull chunks out of Lulu’s expensive coiffure – but she didn’t.
Just as she reached the door to the hall, George called out to both of them: ‘Thanks! Thanks for everything, guys!’
Lulu showed no sign of having experienced him. She was, thought George, immune to the spirit world. His earlier conviction that she had sensed him was more to do with him than her. She was, he decided, as uninterested in him as he was in his younger brother. Out of such misprision, he reflected glumly, comes violent death.
Stephen, however, stopped. Had he heard his brother’s voice from beyond the grave? He did not look back at George. He gazed off into the distance as if he was listening to a noise he could not quite place. Then his face clouded and he shook himself as if he was deciding not to waste time on considering matters about which, after all, there was nothing to be done. Then he and his wife went out into the street with Hobday, Purves and one of the other police officers.
Chapter Twenty-four
For some reason Pawlikowski did not follow them. He stayed behind with the remaining officer. Perhaps he simply was not able to tear himself away from a freshly killed corpse, especially one as full of knife wounds as that of the unfortunate Mullins. Even though they possessed superbly shot footage of Lulu thrusting George’s carving knife into Mullins’s chest, neck and lower bowel, Pawlikowski was pretty well bound to find some excuse for justifying a trawl through her insides with his pristine white rubber gloves.
Veronica Pinker was whispering to Esmeralda. ‘She’s sort of … perfect, isn’t she?’ she was saying. ‘Isn’t Lulu sort of … perfect? Even in the dock she’ll be bloody perfect!’ This thought seemed to afford Esmeralda some comfort. It was probably, thought George, why those two were such good friends – a shared amusement at the crimes and follies of mankind. Maybe it would help Esmeralda get through the coming years.
Pawlikowski was talking to Nat. George studied his least favourite pathologist, wondering if his brief moment of ghostly glory
was over now the culprits had been arrested. It would be nice to think he could make contact with someone before he was finally consigned to the long silence that he was now almost sure was the next thing on the agenda. He came up to Pawlikowski, did not breathe deeply and let out an ear-splitting scream.
Pawlikowski stopped. He looked around. Then he slapped the back of his neck, once or twice. ‘Do you get mosquitoes in Putney?’ he said to Nat.
Nat seemed puzzled. ‘It’s not high summer,’ he replied.
Pawlikowski shook himself. He looked, George was gratified to note, quite worried. The remaining policeman came up to him and the two moved out into the garden, presumably to bring poor Audrey Mullins to start her long journey through the morgue and the uncontroversial discovery that she had been killed by multiple stab wounds inflicted by a once well-known television personality.
George followed them. Mabel Dawkins, covered with mud, blood and rain, was out there with a uniformed policewoman George had not seen before. The policewoman was asking if she would like to add anything to her statement. Mabel said not. The fire seemed to have gone out of her.
‘I would like,’ she was saying, ‘to sit on the sofia. I’m feelin’ a bit rhubarbative, if you wanna know. She made a fuckin’ mess of poor old Mullins, din’t she? Eh? Can I go now?’
The policewoman held her arm as Mabel staggered inside and collapsed on to the sofa.
George stood directly behind Pawlikowski, who was muttering about evidence bags to his companion. This time George did not even bother to try to open the space where his mouth used to be. He concentrated, very intensely, on who he was. He thought about being dead. He thought about having no eyes to open and no ears to hear and no hands to hold his wife. He thought about his boys and their children and how they would never know him or what he was. He thought about the indignity of death. Something, at last, after his ridiculously happy and protected life he shared with so many of the wretched of the world. He thought about his father’s dignified words to him on his deathbed – ‘I’ve had a good life. I’m ready’ – and he thought about how he had been given no choice in the matter. He thought about how the hemlock had slowly filtered through his system. He thought about how, in the dark watches of the suburban night, his heart had faltered, then stopped for ever as Esmeralda had slept, oblivious, beside him.
Waking Up Dead Page 29