In George’s view, being married to Geraldine had made his brother a nicer person. For about three years Stephen had gone through a Caribbean phase. ‘Me cyarn’t believe it!’ he used to shout, as he did the W8 version of the bump and grind at parties. George once heard him use the phrase ‘raas claat’ to a driver who had cut him up, spoiling the effect by adding, for George’s benefit, ‘Apparently it’s a term of abuse in Jamaica and means “sanitary towel”.’ He claimed to enjoy drinking rum. He often wore brightly coloured short-sleeved shirts. He even, at the height of his passion for Geraldine, bought a small black trilby hat, which he wore indoors.
His heart, however, was never in Barbados.
He went there a few times. He lay on the sand at Holetown. He ate flying fish. He had sex on the beach and drank Sex on the Beach. He failed to learn to water-ski. Somewhere in the middle of all this, Geraldine gave birth to two children. The first was a boy. Geraldine wanted to call him Otis. Stephen objected. ‘You cannot call a child Otis Pearmain!’ he said. ‘It sounds ridiculous!’ But she did. Stephen insisted on his middle name being Tristram so he was Otis Tristram Pearmain – or Tristram Otis Pearmain if his father was speaking to him. When the girl was born, eighteen months later, Geraldine threatened to call her Donkey Rihanna but ended up with Rosalina. Stephen made a bid for Charlotte. ‘If you call her Charlotte,’ said Geraldine, ‘I will call her Rosalina Donkey Rihanna!’ Her full name was, therefore, Rosalina Donkey Rihanna Charlotte Pearmain. Stephen never called her anything but Charlotte.
The first sign that the marriage was going wrong came, for George, the day his brother muttered to him, after a few pints, ‘Of course, black people are lazy! They admit it themselves!’ It wasn’t long before he was calling them a lot of other things as well. ‘I’m fed up,’ he said to George, one night, ‘with all this talk about slavery. Slavery, slavery, slavery. Slavery was the best thing that happened to the bastards. Without slavery they would still be running round the jungle eating each other. We brought them over to the West. We gave them job opportunities. They’ve done very well out of it. They dominate the Olympics. They sell millions of records. Stop moaning. I get this all the time from Geraldine. She drones on about Pearmain being her “slave name”. My God! You’d think it was me personally who roped up her great-great-grandfather and taught him the basics of sugar-cane cultivation!’
When George pointed out that ‘job opportunities’ was not a very accurate way of describing the systematic torture, flogging and degradation of millions of Africans, Stephen replied, ‘Things are not easy for any of us, old boy! Have you any idea of what goes on at the BBC?’ Was that a joke? It was hard to tell any more. Stephen had been mocking George’s youthful period as a Trotskyite for so long that his political attitudes were nearly all deliberate caricature that was on the way to becoming sincerely held belief.
There had never been any doubt in George’s mind that Stephen’s disenchantment with Geraldine – and the shift in his racial attitudes – had a great deal to do with Lulu Belhatchett. Although no one had ever admitted it, George was fairly sure Stephen had been porking her from a few months after Rosalina was born – around the time the two had covered the first Gulf War together. Lulu – everyone said – looked good in a helmet. It was after that trip that Stephen started voting Conservative and telling George that Geraldine was ‘totally ignorant of English history’.
Jessica Pearmain had remained calm during her younger son’s divorce. ‘I suppose,’ she said to George, ‘it’s all to do with her being black! They don’t have things in common! And she should be nicer to him! Not all white people are bad! She should stop criticizing him! I never saw a black person until 1956!’
But even if she was secretly relieved about being one black relative down, she remained passionate about her grandchildren. In spite of her quite openly racist views, Jessica never showed any sign of noticing that both Otis Tristram Pearmain and Rosalina Donkey Rihanna Charlotte Pearmain were a lot more black than they were white.
This was not a fact that had escaped Lulu Belhatchett’s notice.
‘Oooh! Your hair’s all frizzy!’ she would say to Rosalina. ‘You should have it straightened!’ She not only followed her new husband’s lead in calling the boy Tristram, but when he asked her to call him Otis, she said, ‘O-tis! O-tis! Can’t call you O-tis! It’s a ridiculous name!’
When Stephen’s children came to them for Christmas, Lulu’s presents for her stepchildren were a masterpiece of subtle insult. While Peregrine got electric cars, expensive musical instruments (although he was tone deaf) and, on one occasion, a selection of imitation small arms of almost American-army standard, Otis Tristram (or ‘Tris’, as she now insisted on calling him) got woolly jumpers that looked as if they had come from a jumble sale. Rosalina Donkey Rihanna Charlotte (‘Cha, darling, is a nice name, isn’t it? I can’t call you all those other silly names, can I?’) often got no more than a useful bag to put things in.
Lulu also operated what both children came to call ‘apartheid Chiswick style’. Even if both sets of children were in the house at the same time, she attempted separate development, as far as meals, bedtimes and, of course, presents were concerned. Her children stayed up later. Her children got steak. Geraldine’s kids got pasta – if they were lucky. If they talked back they were locked in their room.
‘I hate her,’ Rosalina used to say to George, if ever he saw her on her own. ‘I’d like to kill her!’
She did not say this only to George. She said it, and so did Otis Tristram, to Granny. Jessica listened to their confidences with every appearance of impartiality, occasionally lobbing in an emollient phrase along the lines of ‘It must be difficult for her, dear!’ or ‘You’ll just have to try and make allowances, darling!’ but, over the years, she found it harder and harder to play nice on the subject of her second daughter-in-law.
Hence the second will.
George had found this one tucked inside one of his father’s music manuscripts – a concerto for castanets and male voice choir – and found that it made no mention of Stephen at all. Jessica had simply written him out of history, in the manner of Stalin with his Old Bolshevik contemporaries. George and Frigga had got nearly all of it – there was a large bequest to the Mullins woman. George had told his mother this was simply not acceptable. ‘You have to be fair!’ he told her.
In the third will, which Jessica showed to George, although not to Stephen or Frigga – she got him to swear he wouldn’t mention it to either of them – Stephen and his brother got slightly less than their sister and the Mullins woman a bequest of two million. George was clearly being punished for interfering. Between the third will and the fourth, she discovered the codicil. Her codicils were very complicated indeed. In one draft of her fourth will she tried to leave £200,000 to Jeremy Thorpe – the dead former Liberal leader. When George explained the politician’s current situation, she said, ‘They’re all dead! I shan’t leave anything to anyone. Everyone I care about is dead. I should be dead.’
She never really liked her fourth will, which was dragged down by the weight of its codicils, but it had the effect of drawing her and George much closer together. He had been, as everyone in the family acknowledged, his father’s favourite, and it had only been with the old man’s death that he had started to make a proper relationship with his mother. George, like his father, wasn’t really interested in money, which made her trust him in financial matters.
Her fifth will was very much a joint operation. When it was completed George found himself the recipient of her entire fortune. He asked her not to do that. He insisted she write in a clause making him responsible for the fair distribution of her assets between himself and the other people she wanted to be beneficiaries. Esmeralda, all the grandchildren, Stephen, Lulu, Frigga, the Mullins woman, Beryl Vickers and Mabel Dawkins. All the people who had been at the party last night. All, now he thought about it, with an obvious motive for doing away with him. Although she had promised him she wou
ldn’t tell anyone the details of her last testament, she was, as he well knew, incurably indiscreet. She could have told any or all of them what she intended.
There was another twist in this story. After she had hidden her will in a place where, they both agreed, no one would possibly find it, he had said, in a humorous tone, ‘What if I die before anyone else, Mum? Who’s going to be the one to see fair play?’
‘I’ve taken care of that,’ said Jessica, her eyes bright. ‘There’s a codicil. If you fall down the stairs drunk, it kicks in. I don’t trust any of the rest of them to sort things out equitably.’ Then she looked at him with real affection. ‘You’re like your father, George,’ she said. ‘You’re fair. I trust you to look after all of them.’
But now he was dead – and no one would have the faintest idea where the will might be. They were all at the mercy of Jessica’s mysterious codicil. Where and what might it be? More importantly, didn’t it now look very likely that someone at that party yesterday evening might have done away with him? Had one or other or even some of them managed to get a look at the codicil?
But how had they done it? If they had done it. Had he, perhaps, been poisoned?
As Hobday and his team got rid of the last of the revellers and he and DC Purves began the long, complicated task of taking statements from everyone who had been on the premises the previous night, George found himself studying them with more than usual interest. As soon as he had any idea whether he had been murdered and, if so, how, he had to devote some quality time to finding out who the perpetrator had been. After that, he decided, he should get on with some serious haunting.
PART TWO
‘Let us hope that when we are dead things will be better arranged. At any rate, we shall not always be having to put on low-cut dresses. And yet, one never knows. We may perhaps have to display our bones and worms on great occasions.’
In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
Chapter Nine
George had started to lose interest in his corpse. He had never been very captivated by his body when he was alive, but since he had stopped breathing, he had found himself unable to work up any enthusiasm for it at all. Its stomach was too large and its arms too thin; the pubic hair had a badly tended look about it, and the penis could have done with a lot of structural work. If only he had died with a hard-on! Not that they had been that common recently.
His body just lay there, stubbornly refusing to move, and – this was mildly disturbing – those who were in charge of getting it from A to B, while being reassuringly efficient about making sure no one moved it on to C, for the purpose of removing the kidneys and selling them to some Baltic Republic, seemed, on the whole, to have a somewhat lackadaisical attitude towards it. They hadn’t actually started stubbing out cigarettes on his head or parking pint glasses on his abdomen, but George was pretty sure that, if he spent much more time in the Putney morgue, that kind of thing was likely to happen.
Today, however, was different. Today was the day of his autopsy. He hadn’t been dead much more than a couple of months and now they were going to cut him up into little pieces.
He found, to his surprise, that he was looking forward to it. There certainly wasn’t much going on at 22 Hornbeam Crescent and, although he was sure there were going to be some difficult moments, it was bound to be more fun than the inquest.
The inquest had not been good. People had not behaved well. It was now George’s considered opinion that inquests should be held, if possible, without the coroner present. Maybe somewhere in the United Kingdom there were wise, good, open-minded coroners but the one he had been lumbered with was, in George’s view, about as interested in impartial justice as the Nazi Party.
The witnesses were not much better. They all seemed to manage to contradict not only each other but also themselves, often in the course of the same sentence. ‘Did your brother seem drunk on the night of the twenty-third?’ the coroner had asked Frigga.
‘He was very drunk!’ Frigga had said. ‘I mean – not drunk but he had drunk. Which was what I meant to say. George drank a lot. When he drank. But when he didn’t drink he didn’t drink at all. Sometimes he didn’t even drink when he drank. Sometimes at lunchtime he didn’t have a drop. Although obviously, you know, he did have the “other half”, as it were. Stephen drank. And he’s alive. Oh, God!’ At which she had burst into tears.
Nat Pinker had repeated his belief that George had died of a heart attack. The coroner, who insisted on being called ‘Professor Lewis’ although, according to Nat, he wasn’t one and was only famous for having removed the wrong bits from a mother of four, asked some very nasty questions.
‘Did you take tissue samples?’ he said, in a mean voice.
To which Nat replied, ‘It did not seem appropriate!’
‘Why?’ said Lewis, in an even meaner voice.
‘I wasn’t going to open him up right there in the bedroom, was I?’ said Nat. ‘With Esmeralda beside me!’
Lewis sniffed loudly. ‘Was there ischaemia?’ he countered. ‘Dyspnoea? Tachyarrhythmia?’
‘For all I know,’ said Nat, ‘there may have been polymorphic ventricular stenosis with knobs on. The patient was unable to inform me as to whether there was or was not any evidence of symptoms that might have suggested such a thing. He was dead!’
‘Had he complained to his wife about anything?’ said Lewis.
‘He was always complaining to his wife,’ said Nat. ‘She got fed up with it. On that occasion he was unable to do so. He was dead.’
Some interesting facts about George’s last night on earth did emerge. It seemed, as far as George could make out, pretty typical. He had drunk a lot of parsnip wine. He had farted a lot – which, apparently, was a sign of an imminent heart attack although, as Esmeralda pointed out in her evidence, if farting was always followed by a coronary, George would have had many, many thousands of them, especially late at night.
‘We did argue about the farting,’ said Esmeralda, who, in her evidence, seemed in free confessional mode. ‘I even started to fart myself as a sort of riposte and then, of course, I was unable to stop. We argued about it a lot.’
‘Did you often have arguments with your husband?’ said the coroner, with a significant look off left to where an imaginary jury was hanging on his every word.
‘We were always having arguments!’ said Esmeralda.
Lewis’s eyebrows climbed even higher up his forehead.
‘What,’ he said, ‘did you argue about?’
‘I said he was a drunken bastard who didn’t deserve to live,’ said Esmeralda. ‘That quite often provoked arguments.’
‘And,’ said the coroner, who was now beginning to sound like a more than usually enthusiastic member of the Spanish Inquisition, ‘on the night Mr Pearmain died did you two have an argument?’
‘We did,’ said Esmeralda. ‘I asked him not to bring his glass of parsnip wine up to bed with him. If he ever came!’
At this point Lewis threw a significant glance in Hobday’s direction. It was only then it occurred to George that these two might already have confided in each other and that Hobday had told him rather more than he had told any of the suspects about why he thought George had been murdered.
‘And why was that?’ said Lewis. ‘Why did you ask him not to take his glass of wine up to bed?’
‘Because,’ said Esmeralda, wearily, ‘I didn’t want him to take it up to bed!’
‘You didn’t want anyone examining the contents of the glass?’ said the coroner.
‘I didn’t want George to pour any more of what was in the glass down his throat,’ said Esmeralda, crossly. ‘Are you implying that I put something in the glass? Because I didn’t. One of my chief concerns throughout the evening was to stop people trying to put all that funny stuff in the parsnip wine. Parsnip wine is bad enough without all the stuff Frigga makes them put in it.’
Lewis’s voice went very quiet. ‘What stuff does your sister-in-law put in her parsnip wine, Mrs
Pearmain?’
‘Parsnips, obviously,’ said Esmeralda, which got a laugh. ‘And, as if that wasn’t enough, she makes everyone put leaves in it. Wild food. Food for free. She picks it on Putney Heath. She thinks we all ought to be cramming nettles into our faces. And sea beet. And Virgin’s Whiskers, or whatever they call it. And God alone knows what else.’
At this point Frigga began to howl. She had done a lot of howling since George had died. Anyone would think, thought George, from the way she carried on, that she’d liked him. When it came for her turn to give evidence, she sobbed so hard, even before she got into the box, that Stephen had to take her outside and walk her up and down for a few minutes. Then they adjourned the inquest while she was given a drink of water. When she finally got back, the coroner asked her a great many questions about the wild herbs she had picked on the afternoon before the deaths of her mother and brother. She answered him at great length and in a firm, steady voice. Talking about the English hedgerow seemed to calm her down. She had picked Old Man’s Beard, Maids a-Winking, Wild Chervil and about five different varieties of nettle. It was a wonder, thought George, as she got into a list of Latin names, that they weren’t all dead. Maybe he was allergic to Old Man’s Beard.
It was the coroner who finally gave the game away. George was sure he noticed Hobday twitch when the specific area of his suspicions was finally revealed.
‘Did you,’ said Professor Lewis, ‘in any of these wild plants that you observed and picked, notice any specimens of Conium maculatum? Its common name, as I am sure you know, Miss Pearmain, is hemlock.’
The coroner’s manner was low key, but it was clear that he had upstaged the inspector. George thought it was possible Hobday would get to his feet and sue the man for infringement of copyright. Frigga went very, very quiet. Then, in what George always thought of as her real voice, the one that gave away what a very hard, stubborn woman she really was, she said, ‘Of course I know what hemlock is. I’m not stupid. Conium maculatum is also known as Devil’s Bread, Beaver Poison, Poison Parsley and Spotted Corobane. It contains coniine, which has a chemical structure and pharmacological properties similar to nicotine. An ingestion of more than a hundred milligrams is usually fatal, producing ascending muscular paralysis and eventually fatal damage to the respiratory system. They gave it to Socrates. And he died. He walked around for a bit and then he just died. It’s quite an easy way to die, I suppose. Why are you asking me about hemlock?’
Waking Up Dead Page 11
