Waking Up Dead

by Nigel Williams

‘You do,’ said Veronica Pinker, anxious not to be left out of this. ‘You always wake up when they go crashing around.’ She glared at Hobday as if to suggest she had a pretty good idea of what he got up to at four in the morning. ‘It’s the prostate,’ she added, with unholy relish.

  Hobday managed to ignore her. ‘It’s possible,’ he said eventually, ‘that Mr Pearmain was unusually quiet last night, when he left the marital bed to do whatever he had to do. Although, from the sound of it, that would not fit into his normal pattern of behaviour. He did not, for example, wake up to complain of chest pains?’

  ‘Not last night,’ said Esmeralda. ‘He usually did wake up to complain of chest pain but he didn’t last night. He was too busy having a heart attack.’

  And then she gave vent to what George found a gratifyingly intense burst of weeping. It really did seem as if – for some peculiar reason – she was missing him. Yes, he thought, you’re going to miss all those things you disliked. You’ll wonder how you managed to get through the day without my hypochondria. You’ll yearn for the sound of my farts.

  ‘Tell me, Mrs Pearmain,’ said Hobday, gently, ‘I appreciate this is very difficult for you and I do thank you sincerely for talking to us, but … when your husband came up to bed after a … good night, let us say … was he the kind of man who brought up a glass with him? A drink of some kind? To put by the bed?’

  George saw at once that there was more than charity behind the softening of the inspector’s manner. This was an important question – he felt sure – even though it might not have seemed like it. There was a long silence before Esmeralda answered. All anyone could hear was a solitary bird, somewhere out there in the June morning. A blackbird, trying out its long, liquid, floating trill among the green bushes and the bright flowers of their rambling English garden.

  ‘He did,’ said Esmeralda, in a tiny voice. ‘He always did. How did you know that?’

  ‘It’s a common thing,’ said Hobday, with quite extraordinary quietness and compassion. I’ve got this guy wrong, George found himself thinking. He’s actually a thoroughly decent person – and a first-rate detective into the bargain. ‘I like a glass of wine with my meals,’ Hobday went on, ‘and very often, Mrs Pearmain, I take one up to bed with me. After some of the things I have to see in my job, I bloody need one I can tell you.’

  Pawlikowski was looking sulky. He was clearly desperate to get on with the job of removing tissue samples and, in the very near future, wielding a Black & Decker drill on George’s skull and upper chest cavity. There were, obviously, some tensions between him and Hobday, but Hobday seemed to have a special knack of ignoring anything that might come between him and the case in hand. He stood by George’s body, lost in contemplation, like a composer listening to a tune that no one, apart from him, was able to hear.

  ‘You see,’ he continued, ‘although I have made only a very superficial examination of this crime scene, I did observe on what is evidently your husband’s side of the bed – and I’m sure, Mrs Pearmain, that, like me, you and your husband had a regular side – the clearly registered, slightly damp imprint of a wine glass. A wine glass that contained – who knows? We can easily establish what it was but for now, perhaps … parsnip wine? For the moment, all we know is that a glass was left by your husband’s side of the bed within the last eight hours or so.’

  Hobday swung round and glared, severally, at everyone in the room.

  ‘And yet,’ he continued, ‘the glass is not there. There is a clear indication that it was there. Very, very recently. But it is not there now. There is no sign of it. If your husband did not get up in the night – and, Mrs Pearmain, I hope you will allow me to say that I find you a very reliable witness and I am absolutely sure that he did not get up in the night – then, well, who moved it? And where did they move it to?’

  There was a very, very long silence.

  Then Esmeralda said, ‘Well, I didn’t move it.’

  ‘No,’ said Hobday, in a voice that gave no clue whatsoever as to whether he really believed what he was saying. ‘I’m sure you didn’t, Mrs Pearmain. I’m sure you didn’t.’

  This was all something to do with glass – and varieties of glass. What was it Hobday had said in the kitchen? ‘Fragments of another kind of glass entirely’. George had had the impression that the inspector was not happy about the way the glass from the window had fallen. And now Hobday was talking about the glass that George had, presumably, taken up to bed with him. He had been so drunk last night, he couldn’t remember anything much. Plus he was dead. That wouldn’t do much for the old memory.

  OK. He had taken a glass up to bed with him. Someone had moved it. Who? And why?

  It was curious. The idea that there had been something dodgy about George’s death had perked him up considerably. He had been getting rather depressed at the thought that he was just another late-middle-aged man who had – awful word – succumbed to a heart attack. The idea that he had been murdered was rather bracing. It might explain why he was still around. To make life difficult for the perpetrator. Perhaps, in the weeks ahead, he was going to develop a few post-mortem skills. The ability to moan and gibber. To lower the temperature of a chosen room. Perhaps, even, to appear to selected victims.

  He wouldn’t mind appearing to Lulu fucking Belhatchett. He had, when alive, consistently failed in all his attempts to make the bitch jump out of her skin. Now was the time to start putting things right. She hadn’t even flickered when he’d told her (untruthfully) that he had never heard or watched Come Sit On My Knee. Her oval features had shown no sign of cracking when he had announced during a dinner party at Stephen’s house in the country that there were too many women in television.

  And he had put up with so much. He had watched her mistreat her stepdaughters (his nieces) and said not a word. He had allowed her to prod his stomach at a Christmas party and say, ‘All the Pearmains are plump,’ without reaching out for a length of lead piping and bringing it down on her massive, perfectly coiffured head.

  All bets were off. He was dead. He would say and do whatever he damned well liked.

  The front-door bell rang again – long, loud and somehow menacing in the peace of the June morning.

  ‘Are you expecting reinforcements?’ said Nat to Pawlikowski, in a slightly satirical tone. This seemed likely. Pawlikowski was, clearly, a man who, faced with any kind of problem, called for more equipment. The twitch of his thin lips and his pale, worried eyes suggested a possible shortage of tweezers.

  Neither he nor Hobday, however, seemed to have invited over any more of their gang. It was Esmeralda, who had been studying George’s corpse with what he would have described as a kind of horrified tenderness, who suddenly clapped a hand to her mouth and said, ‘Bimbo Baggins! And the Prune!’

  No one, apart from George, seemed to have the faintest idea of what she meant. Bimbo Baggins (whose real name was, even more improbably, Peregrine) and the Prune (a thirty-something female of no interest to anyone) were Lulu Belhatchett’s children by her first husband. A man whom no one had ever met and whose name was never raised in conversation.

  They had arrived, of course, for the same reason as everyone else. Jessica Pearmain’s death had not affected the fact that it was her ninety-ninth birthday. They were out there even now in the spotless morning. Peregrine in his check shirt and blue blazer, with his total lack of chin. The Prune in one of her many light, loose, flimsy, flowery dresses that were still not quite loose enough to hide her figure. Peregrine would be pecking at his iPhone. The Prune would be smiling vacantly at anyone foolish enough to look her way. They would have brought presents. Peregrine would have brought a bottle of champagne, because he always did. The Prune would have brought a scented candle.

  Both would be ready with flowers and kisses and carefully tactful conversation. Neither would have any idea they were walking into a house practically stuffed with dead bodies or that the birthday girl was stretched out on the kitchen floor, surrounded by tape and men in un
iform.

  ‘Lulu will break it to them,’ said Esmeralda. ‘She likes to be first with bad news.’

  This was no less than the truth. She was good with disaster. Everyone had said that. Quite a lot of people had been given the job of telling the world about the Rwandan massacres, but no one had done it quite like Lulu. A slight compression of the lips, as if to suggest she felt the burden of having to communicate the horrors of the news.

  Down in the hall, abetted but not aided by George’s brother, she was giving her birth children the lowdown on their stepfather’s mother’s sudden and violent death. ‘Jessica’s birthday,’ she was saying, in the voice she tended to use for fairly good news about the Royal Family, ‘should have been a happy day. But it is now the cause of much sadness. There seems to have been a contretemps with a burglar. Some lout who broke in during the night. She had a fall on the floor and fractured her skull. He then fled. As they do.’

  Her long training in BBC Current Affairs, thought George, had had its effect. She was still making it up as she went along.

  ‘We don’t know,’ Stephen broke in, ‘we have no idea how it happened. Or why. But we’re on it. We’re going to find out. Probably. We’ll get the bastard. The police are here.’

  There was a slight, frozen silence of the kind Lulu usually generated whenever her husband tried to say anything. Then, when she was sure there was no danger of his attempting to say anything else, she continued, in the same lightly inflected voice, ‘It’s going to be very difficult to cancel the party. People are coming from all over. We don’t have all their numbers. A lot of them don’t have mobile phones. They’re old – obviously. John Bleaney and his wife are on their way from Richmond. They have no idea. He is blind. She is deaf.’

  There was a slight pause. Lulu whinnied out a nervous laugh. ‘Just hope she’s driving. Anyway. It’s too late. Jessica is dead. George is also dead. Upstairs. In his bed. He died in the night, it seems. It’s all absolutely awful!’

  Hobday, Esmeralda, the Pinkers, DC Purves, Pawlikowski and (probably) George had moved out on to the landing. Down below, Lulu was running through a list of all the other people who were, even now, on their way to toast the recently dead ninety-nine-year-old. Many were in their nineties. None had a mobile phone. At least two were coming by ambulance. There was a strong chance that the sudden switch from birthday party to wake might kill the lot of them.

  Hobday did not seem bothered about any of this. Neither did the people who had been in the room with him when he had said whatever he had said about George’s death. He went down the stairs in magisterial fashion. What he had said had quietened Esmeralda. She looked surprisingly uninterested in making trouble. Frigga was crying again. Barry and Maurice were looking lost. Stephen was trying to talk to his phone. When he arrived on the third stair, DI Hobday looked at the group.

  ‘I would like everyone in the front room,’ he said. ‘I have an important announcement to make!’

  Chapter Seven

  Ella Bella, Bella Ella and their respective mothers were excused. Ginny said she would take Bella out into the back garden to look at the fish but was told she could not do so as it was a crime scene. Bella burst into tears and said, ‘Cime scene. Want go cime scene.’ Jojo and Ella remained tactfully silent. Ginny gave Esmeralda a sharp look as her daughter said, once again, in a small, wistful voice, ‘Fish. Cime scene.’

  His granddaughter, thought George, had a great deal in common with his brother’s mobile phone.

  In the end Ginny and Jojo, Bella Ella and Ella Bella all went out for a walk.

  ‘I don’t think,’ hissed Veronica Pinker to Esmeralda, in a voice she clearly intended to be heard, ‘they are suspects. The flat-feet draw the line at involving young mothers in their paranoid schemes.’

  ‘Well, Inspector?’ said Lulu. ‘Are we to be allowed to know what is going on?’

  Hobday did something not many people dared to do with all six foot four of Lulu. He ignored her. Lulu, for whom this morning no equine metaphor seemed unsuitable, did the kind of leg yield and half-pass only usually seen in international dressage competitions. In fact, she looked as if she might well rear up on her hind legs, punch the air with her hoofs and gallop full on at the inspector before clopping him to the carpet.

  ‘Would anyone like a glass of champagne?’ said Peregrine. ‘Because, you know, champagne…’

  Hobday ignored him as well. He let the room go quiet. Then he said, ‘I’m afraid this is going to take some time.’

  Veronica Pinker whispered loudly to Nat that it was liable to take even longer if the ridiculous little man didn’t talk a bit faster and stop staring at everyone for half an hour between each sentence. If Hobday heard her he gave no sign of it.

  George geared himself up for the next set of revelations from the inspector. He did not want to find himself tuning out of whatever the man had to say just as it was about to cast some light on his death, but, like that bloke in the Kafka novel, he found it extremely hard to stay awake when the officer talked. That might, of course, be something to do with the fact that it was only the act of concentration that gave him the illusion of being alive. If his previous existence was any guide to his afterlife, he didn’t have that much concentration available, and the inspector had one of those voices that seemed made for putting people to sleep. He could, George felt, have made a great career as a stage hypnotist.

  George fought back. He must pay attention. He must …

  ‘… Mrs Pearmain. Who had been the victim of an attack. The first, superficial, impression was that an intruder had entered the premises in the early hours of the morning by smashing a pane of glass in the french windows. He – or she – or they…’

  At the back of the class the Mullins woman murmured, to no one in particular, ‘Black probably.’

  ‘… surprised Mrs Pearmain, pushed her to the floor and made off down the outside passage to the side door to the street, which is, indeed, open. On my preliminary examination of the crime scene, however, there were several things that I found puzzling. First, the glass pane had not been surgically removed. The “job” – if I may use that expression – was a pretty amateurish one. It would have been no easy task to get any but a child’s hand through the aperture, but we found no blood.’

  ‘No blood!’ said Pawlikowski, in the affirmative manner used by a backing group in a gospel song.

  ‘What we did find,’ went on Hobday, ‘were traces of a fibre that may … I remind you that this is not confirmed by rigorous forensic tests…’ he looked straight at Pawlikowski, who nodded and, in the same affirmative manner, repeated ‘rigorous’ several times ‘… but, and I am only an ordinary copper passing on information as he receives it – may come from a tea towel replaced, very recently, in one of the drawers near the hob. There are other things that suggest it may be possible that whoever broke that pane of glass broke it from the inside. I do not mean by that, of course, that he or she was literally on the inside because if they had been the shattered glass would have been all over the patio. I mean that whoever broke the glass wanted to make it look as if there had been a burglary but, in fact, was in this house last night. An “inside job”, if you like. The first thing I noticed was that there was something not quite right about the angle at which the glass from the window had fallen – and I will return to that issue very soon.’

  George was trying to think if anyone in the house last night had disliked Jessica enough to kill her. The only remotely plausible candidate was Lulu – and she had left at around nine in order to be in Basingstoke.

  ‘If it was a burglar,’ Hobday continued, ‘how did he or she get into the garden? The side gate was locked. Did he or she or they…’

  Here the Mullins woman muttered something about Asians.

  ‘… climb over it? They would almost certainly have left some traces. There are none. There is also the question of the evidence yielded up by a close examination of Mrs Pearmain’s back garden. Or, rather, the evidence not yi
elded up by it. The lighter sleepers among you may have noticed that there was a shower of rain in this area at three twenty-one this morning, but although most habitual burglars are, these days, forensically aware, I’m not sure I’ve met one who is capable of hovering six inches above a damp lawn to conceal the traces of his or her approach.’

  He had them, George thought, by the goolies, but although what the inspector was saying was interesting, what was even more intriguing was why he was bothering to communicate it. Most policemen, in George’s experience, tried not to tell anybody anything.

  ‘It may be, of course,’ continued Hobday, ‘that the break-in happened before the rain. Which would explain why there is no mud or soil on the kitchen floor. But at whatever time it happened, there is this question of the glass on the kitchen floor. There are, I have observed, two entirely distinct groups of broken glass and it is, I’m afraid, too early for me to discuss, in detail, one of them, except to say I have noticed one or two very, very small pieces of what could be, might be or, rather, might have been a drinking glass of some kind near to the body of Mrs Pearmain. Even if I knew the significance of this fact – which, as yet, I do not – I would be looking for its deeper implications. But because the angle at which the glass from the window fell did not look right to me from the moment I first saw it – and I can’t yet quite say why – I think there may be a connection between the two horrific events that occurred in this house last night. The death of Mrs Jessica Pearmain and the death of her son, George Pearmain.’

  He looked, George thought, like a man who was about to arrest the lot of them. There was enough of an atmosphere of nervousness among his listeners to suggest that some of them thought exactly the same thing.

  ‘I am not at liberty at the moment,’ went on Hobday, ‘to be precise about exactly why I think this may be a double-murder inquiry. I am letting you into what I like to call my “process” because, over the next few days, I am going to have to do some rather unpleasant things.’