‘I am asking you, Miss Pearmain,’ said the coroner, ‘if you think you could have picked any by mistake.’
‘Of course not,’ said Frigga, crossly. ‘I would know if I’d picked any. I know a great deal about herbs. Especially poisonous ones. I am a registered witch.’
This was, everyone felt, not a wise thing to say. Lewis, to everyone’s relief, did not allow her to drone on about the Craft or tell them all about her internet publication, Broomstick – the Monthly Journal of Accredited English Witches. He simply said, ‘And you are sure you did not pick any hemlock in honour of your mother’s birthday?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Frigga. ‘What kind of birthday present would that have been?’ She paused. ‘Quite a good one, actually. My mother was an awful, awful woman in many ways. She stunted my growth as a female. I suppose I loved her, but even if I did, somewhere deep down, I can’t deny that there were many, many times when I wished she wasn’t there, that she would be run down by a train or something, but in my fantasies of her death it was always carried out by someone else. Like a hitman or something. Or, as I say, a train. Or a car. Or something falling on her head.’
The speech caused something of a sensation.
Those in the know were not surprised that she used the inquest on her brother as a forum for expressing her deep hostility to her mother. Frigga had been undergoing therapy from a completely unqualified woman called Gillian, whose policy was to get her clients to say whatever came into their heads whenever they felt like it. It was Gillian who had encouraged her to talk about her bulimia whenever an opportunity presented itself. She had also helped her to realize that she was anorexic, claustrophobic, arachnophobic, and had a morbid fear of escalators. There did not seem to be a Greek-derived name for that, which was perhaps why she had had a seizure while trying to get from the District Line to the Piccadilly Line at Earl’s Court Station.
Recently, around the time that her fees had doubled, Gillian had discovered even more trauma lurking within the breast of the unmarried librarian. She had found out that Frigga was ‘full of hidden aggression towards her mother and brothers’ (as George said, ‘What was hidden about it?’) and she spoke at length about this at the inquests on Jessica and on George.
‘My most common fantasy,’ she said now, as Lewis goggled at her, ‘is that I’m strangling my brother George. I have him locked up in a basement and first I torture him by cutting him with knives. To pay him back for what he did to me in the tree house. After that I put sort of tape on his mouth and strangle him with my bare hands. He doesn’t die at first. I have to hit him with a hammer, like in that film with Olivia Newton-John!’
By the time her evidence was through, George was sure Hobday was going to leap up and arrest her on the spot.
Esmeralda was recalled to the stand after Frigga had finished giving evidence and said that she didn’t think Frigga really disliked George – at which Frigga had a hysterical fit. She went on to say that ‘he liked a glass of wine with his meals’ and that she had not noticed him complaining about anything he had eaten or drunk on the night he died. He had, she said, complained of chest pains, backache, pains in his shoulder, housemaid’s knee, sore throat, tennis-elbow-without-the-tennis, loose bowels, constipation, headaches, gastric bloating, feelings of inadequacy and ‘probable cancerous lumps all over his body, especially in the morning’.
She said, also, that she had loved him. She cried several times but refused a glass of water. When asked about the details of the night before her husband and mother-in-law had died, she said, ‘I didn’t see much because I went to bed early. All the rest of them stayed up – even Mullins and Beryl Vickers, I think. I don’t think it was the parsnip wine. Everyone had parsnip wine. If there was hemlock in the parsnip wine then we would all be dead. Frigga kept throwing all those herbs into it. She wouldn’t stop. She’s mad. All George’s family are mad. He was the only sane one.’ After which she burst into tears again.
By the time Hobday took the stand, there had been other, even harder, acts to follow. The Mullins woman had spoken crazily of her love for Jessica – ‘A marvellous woman! A marvellous piano teacher! In touch with life! She was on the side of life! George never appreciated his mother. Well, Jessica never liked Esmeralda, you see. She never ironed his shirts, you know. I think Jessica felt Esmeralda had some kind of hold over George. To do with sex.’
This drew a guffaw from Esmeralda.
‘Her family did not deserve her. She was a wonderful woman. I think any one of them could have killed her – and, I mean no offence by this, there were many occasions when I would gladly have killed any one of them. Jessica always had time for people. She was alone in that flat for hours on end, only looked after by that woman Dawkins who was, in my view, only after her money!’
Dawkins followed Mullins. She said she loved Jessica like a brother and had always thought George ‘a wonderful man’. She had helped serve drinks during the evening and left early and, no, she had not seen anyone tamper with the parsnip wine. ‘It didn’t need tampering with to be illethal!’
After Dawkins came Stephen, who gave his evidence like a man delivering a piece to camera from downtown Beirut. There was, George thought, a submerged tension about him, although that might have been due to worry about his toupee falling off – something that always plagued him when making public statements. Was it that, though? Its rich chestnut, glossy texture had not wavered once when the Berlin Wall came down and had been a fixture right the way through the London riots – why should it crumble now?
There was always something anxious about Stephen’s big, circular face but his manner at the inquest was, George thought, suspicious in the extreme. Even his ginger moustache seemed furtive. By the end he looked less like a journalist and more like a man in public office trying to dodge awkward questions.
‘The mood in Hornbeam Crescent was positive,’ he said. ‘We were all positive about my mother being ninety-nine. We all felt it was a good thing. We are a pretty close family. I am close to George. Was close to George. He is close to me. Was close to me. There is a sense in which George is very much still here. Looking on. Although, obviously he is, er, dead. And mourned. Deeply mourned. By me. And others. As is his mother. My mother. Our mother, for God’s sake!’
‘This must have been very difficult for you,’ said the coroner, who obviously felt Stephen was the one reliable person giving evidence.
‘It was,’ said Stephen, as though this thought had only just occurred to him. ‘It was. Difficult is exactly what it was. It was not easy. It was hard. One’s brother dying is a problem. As is one’s mother dying. When the two of them die at the same time it is a lot to take in.’
‘Is it difficult for you now?’ said Lewis, who, George thought, showed signs of an emerging homosexual attachment to Stephen.
‘It is,’ said Stephen, who sounded as if it was the easiest thing in the world. ‘It is often difficult to talk about these things. One’s mother. One’s brother. Their simultaneous death. Deaths, rather. One has to stop. And take a good long hard look. At oneself. And at everyone, really. We have to ask. You have to ask. I have to ask, for God’s sake, “What does this tell us? About one’s self? And other people, too, of course.” These are the questions. Where are we at with this? We will need a whole raft of proposals for tackling it. If we can tackle it. We need blue-sky thinking.’
At one point, Lulu got to her feet and, as she was apparently entitled to do, cross-examined her husband briefly. ‘Stevie,’ she said, ‘you were obviously very concerned to support your brother. And your mother. And your sister. As you always do. You were there. On the ground. There. Doing the business, as it were. For them. That is right, is it not?’
‘It is!’ said Stephen, smartly, straightening his shoulders and staring ahead, like a soldier on parade.
‘And,’ she went on, ‘where was I during all this?’
‘You were in Basingstoke, darling,’ said Stephen.
‘Thank
you,’ said Lulu. ‘That will be all!’
In spite of any fears he might have had about being upstaged, Hobday, when he finally came to deliver his evidence, caused a sensation. George had thought he had disliked the prospect of going in last, but as soon as the detective crossed the floor to begin testifying, he decided that, in fact, Hobday had deliberately arranged to be the final witness. He and the coroner were not only scrupulously polite to each other but, from the kick-off, managed to sound like a carefully prepared double-act.
‘You said at the coroner’s inquest into Mrs Pearmain’s death,’ said Lewis, peering at his notes, ‘that the injuries sustained by Mr Pearmain’s mother were not caused by a deliberate blow to the back of the head.’
‘They were not,’ said Hobday, with a glance towards Pawlikowski, who was sitting at the back of the court, wearing dark glasses and looking sulky. ‘They were consistent with Mrs Pearmain falling backwards on to the kitchen floor, possibly accidentally but possibly because she was pushed.’
‘They were consistent with a fall,’ said Lewis. ‘The verdict at the inquest on Mrs Pearmain was, as I understand it, an open verdict and, in your view, that verdict does not fully explain her death.’
‘At the inquest on Mrs Pearmain,’ said Hobday, who was, George thought, choosing his words very carefully indeed, ‘I went through the evidence for a break-in at twenty-two Hornbeam Crescent and made it clear that there were certain discrepancies in that evidence that suggested to me that the glass in the french windows of the property may have been broken from inside. I also made it clear that we were doing extensive forensic tests on fragments of a glass we had found near Mrs Pearmain’s body. And also on a stain we had found on the kitchen floor.’
‘Although,’ said Lewis, ‘you had not yet had the results of those tests.’
‘We had not!’ said Hobday. ‘We have them now!’
George had somehow missed the business of the stain on the floor. In fact, the inquest on his mother had been brief to an almost insulting degree. He was, he noted, far more involved in his own inquest than he had been in his mother’s. Vanity, it seemed, was easily as strong as death. Of course, if they hadn’t had the results of the tests on the mysterious stain – about which Hobday had been keeping very quiet indeed – the police and the coroner had, presumably, been waiting for this moment to reveal what they thought about both cases.
Pawlikowski had removed his dark glasses. He was leaning forward in his seat with a triumphant expression on his face.
‘And what did they show?’ said Lewis.
‘They showed traces of the parsnip wine that was being drunk at twenty-two Hornbeam Crescent on the night before Mrs Pearmain and her son died,’ said Hobday. ‘And they also revealed traces of something else.’
‘What,’ said Lewis, now positively glorying in his role as feed to the inspector, ‘was that “something else”?’
‘It was hemlock,’ said Hobday, ‘which, as Miss Pearmain has already reminded us, is a poisonous plant common in the English hedgerow. There were extensive traces present in the sample of parsnip wine we analysed.’
If it was possible for a gasp to run round a court, that, thought George, was what happened when the inspector made his revelation. Esmeralda gasped. The Mullins woman clasped Beryl Vickers’s hand. Barry and Maurice’s jaws dropped. When it got to Mabel Dawkins, the gasp had become a sob, and although it had declined into a severe twitch as it struck Lulu and a triple twitch with facial tic when it reached Stephen, by the time it reached Frigga it had become the sort of noise wolves make to a full moon in Siberia.
‘Silence!’ called Lewis, who clearly enjoyed saying this. ‘Silence! Or I will clear the court!’
Pawlikowski seemed to be licking his lips. He knew what was coming.
‘That, Inspector,’ went on the coroner, ‘is why you have requested a post-mortem examination of Mr Pearmain’s body. And that of his mother.’
‘We have,’ said Hobday, ‘but we would obviously like to do a full autopsy on Mr Pearmain first.’
Why? thought George. What’s so great about putting me first in line to be carved up into little pieces by that mad Polish pathologist? Clearly Hobday and the Pole had decided George was the one. What really interested him about this charade was how beautifully it illustrated the manipulative skills of those who ran the country. The famous English respect for fair play was, he decided, simply a tribute to the wealthy and powerful members of UK Ltd, who were so good at fooling the underclass into thinking they were nice guys. English democracy? It simply meant the population had been more than skilfully lobotomized by the bosses. The result required here was the opening up of George Pearmain. It had, of course, been provided by the court.
‘The immediate cause of death of Mrs Pearmain,’ went on Hobday, ‘was the injury she sustained in her fall.’
As far as he could make out, George was watching all this from somewhere in the area of the visitors’ gallery. If you could call it a gallery, which you couldn’t. It was, in fact, a roped-off area at the back of the anonymous hall where the inquest was taking place and, appropriately enough for such an indeterminate space, George could not really have said he was in it or, if he was, where exactly he was situated.
The question was, he had to admit, an even more complicated one than it had been when he was alive.
Immediately after he had died, he had had the impression that not only could he sit, stand, lie down and do all of the things that people over the age of three could generally do but that his ideas of time and space had become a little more eccentric. It was much more like swimming. He was able to dive into the atmosphere around him and wriggle around like a dolphin. Sometimes strange, unexplained currents in a room would waft him up in the direction of the ceiling and he would find himself level with the dado rail or weaving around in the general area of the front-room chandelier.
When he was outside it could get quite dangerous. A few days ago he had been caught by a stiff breeze near Putney Bridge and found himself trapped on the roof of Marks & Spencer for three days. He was still waiting in vain for the moment when whatever force had landed him in that situation would grant him some form of corporeal identity, however hazy. He would gladly have settled for being moderately see-through, like polythene. He would have been really pleased with a spectral outline of the kind used by physicists to identify new elements. He thought he came into the category of a new element. So far, however, nothing of the kind had arrived. He was as invisible to himself as he was to others.
He had spent much of his inquest perched on the coroner’s shoulder, like a pirate’s parrot. This gave him an unobstructed view of the notepad Lewis was using, which he thought might give him some clues as to the possible identity of his killer. So far the coroner had written:
Potatoes for Wed
Chardonnay?
Ring Halliday re sink – URGENT!!!
Fish Waitrose?
He ended the proceedings with a narrative verdict, which enabled him to talk for even longer than he had done already. He managed to make some fairly insulting remarks about George, describing him as ‘a compulsive drinker’, ‘morbidly overweight’ and ‘a man with many enemies, both personal and professional’. The overall impression he left, George thought, was that G. Pearmain had not deserved to live. He said a final verdict would have to await the post-mortem that he now authorized Hobday and his boys to begin.
Which was why, on a sunny August morning some eight weeks after his death, George found himself lurking outside the front door of 22 Hornbeam Crescent, waiting and watching as Nat, Veronica, Esmeralda and other members of his close circle discussed their levels of involvement with the process of cutting his cadaver open.
Their mood was a little too cheerful for George’s liking.
It was – in their defence – a very pleasant day. There was a slight breeze. There were cumulus clouds, printed tastefully on the blue sky above the house tops. Birds were going about their usual business while tre
es and flowers in his front garden were blooming in splendid indifference to the fact that he was no longer as visible as they were.
But did they have to laugh quite so loudly? He wasn’t asking them to wear black permanently – although it might not have been bad if Esmeralda had tried it for a few months – but it had been a little too easy for the jokes to slip back into the fabric of life at 22 Hornbeam. Initially, there had been quite a lot of the ‘he would have seen the funny side of this’ to justify them chuckling while he was still in the chiller, but now they were more brazen about the fact that life was still sweet for those who held it in their hands.
‘You can come if you like,’ Nat was saying to Esmeralda.
Veronica Pinker shot him a glance of pure hatred. ‘For God’s sake, Nathaniel,’ she hissed. ‘Do you think she wants to see whatever they’re going to do to poor George?’
‘I just thought,’ said Nat, ‘she might find it interesting.’
Veronica’s jaw dropped even further. Esmeralda did not seem to have noticed this dialogue.
‘I’ve been to a number of them,’ went on Nat, ‘and in a way they bring you closer to the patient.’
Nat had indeed, thought George, an amazing attendance record at autopsies. It was, some said, the only really effective diagnostic tool in his armoury. This morning, he appeared unusually keen. He was definitely looking forward to it.
George was gazing at his dustbins, with a certain amount of nostalgia. It was Tuesday. Tuesday was the day he put out the dustbins, locked them against the foxes and, after a proud glance at the colossal amount of rubbish he and Esmeralda had created, retired to what Barry and Maurice, since they had left home, had started to call Château Hornbeam. He was never going to take out the rubbish again.
Waking Up Dead Page 12
