Waking Up Dead

by Nigel Williams

  As he was thinking this – and as Nat, Veronica and Esmeralda were climbing into Nat’s car – George saw, on the other side of the street, a figure he thought he recognized. The same big, square head. The same four great paws planted firmly on the pavement. The same seductive eyebrows and big mournful eyes.

  It was Partridge, his Irish wolfhound. Had not Partridge been dead for eight years? To George’s certain knowledge he had. That did not seem to stop him standing there and looking across at George with the same mournful expectancy he had shown in life. He was clearly waiting for George to give him a biscuit. He had spent his life waiting for George to give him something to eat. Death did not seem to have altered that.

  As Esmeralda, Veronica and Nat settled into Nat’s Volvo, Partridge crossed the road, clearly as invisible to them as he was to the driver of a large Range Rover, who drove straight through him as he stared, mournfully, through the windows of Nat’s car.

  George, who had still not mastered even basic permeability, nipped into the back next to Esmeralda, as Partridge’s big black eyes stared at him with the same soulful longing he had shown in his life.

  ‘I have something very important to tell you!’ said Partridge.

  Nat engaged the engine and the Volvo slid away from the kerb, leaving the wolfhound behind. George could still see the animal peering after them sorrowfully as the doctor accelerated and, after a hundred yards, turned right into the road that led to Putney Hill.

  Jesus, thought George. This is all I need. A talking dog. With an important message to deliver. Will it never end?

  Chapter Ten

  The Putney morgue was an unassertive building, shy of revealing itself to strangers. It was only as Nat’s car turned off Putney Bridge Road, just after Wandsworth Park, and headed towards the river that he recognized a small, square, vaguely modernist structure that he had driven past a hundred times without really noticing. There was no sign outside – evasive or otherwise – and in all the times he had driven past it he had never seen anyone entering or leaving.

  There was a sense, of course, in which he was in there already but he still felt a slight thrill of anticipation, a sense of penetrating the unknown, as he followed Nat and Veronica out of the car. He knew, from the moment he took his first close look at it, that the Putney morgue was his kind of place.

  Esmeralda, unsurprisingly, had elected not to take a front-row seat at George’s autopsy and Veronica had said she would stay with her in the car, then reminded Nat of his complete insensitivity in even considering that Esmeralda would want to watch George being cut up into little pieces. To George’s surprise, Nat put up a spirited defence of his conduct and told his wife that Mrs Duveen-Hollis had found Mark Duveen-Hollis’s autopsy ‘very healing’. Veronica reminded him that Martha Duveen-Hollis was later found to have had a hand in his murder. George wondered whether this was how he and Esmeralda had sounded to outsiders.

  His had been a good marriage, hadn’t it? Now he was dead he was not entirely sure. A horrible element of objectivity had crept into his assessment of it. Had he ever really known what Esmeralda felt about him? Had they been just another couple yoked to each other by habit and laziness?

  As he listened to Veronica, and caught the all-too-familiar words (‘self-obsessed’, ‘lazy’, ‘selfish’, ‘out of touch’), he found himself wondering what Partridge had had to tell him. He had said it was important. George reflected that it was almost certainly liable to be more important for Partridge than for him. It was probably something along the lines of ‘Why did you give me the dogfood with jelly? I never liked jelly!’

  Veronica had got out to dress down Nat but she was now back in the car with Esmeralda. George heard her say, ‘God, he is a boring little man sometimes!’

  To which Esmeralda replied, in a small voice, ‘You don’t really think anyone would actually want to murder George, do you?’

  Veronica didn’t answer. Perhaps, thought George, she could easily believe someone would.

  Two police cars, carrying DI Hobday, DC Purves and quite a few other people pulled in ahead of them. As they clambered out George looked for Pawlikowski. He did not seem to be there. That was a relief. Maybe they had got a better, more sympathetic pathologist. He very much did not want the sulky Pole drilling through his scalp or showing off his prowess by rummaging round his intestines with a pair of surgical gloves.

  ‘We’re in Room Two,’ said Hobday, with only a very slight nod to Nat (he clearly did not want him there), and moved off towards the back of the building, with his team. Nat followed him and George followed Nat. The sun was further up in the sky and the breeze had dropped. Sweat was standing out on Hobday’s brow. He looked, George thought, like a man under pressure.

  ‘It’s nice and cool in there!’ he said, to no one in particular, as he led the way into the morgue.

  There didn’t seem to be any other bodies on display. As far as George could make out, the place seemed empty of the living and the dead. Nobody seemed to be sliding stiffs out of drawers, as they did in television crime shows, or painstakingly attaching labels to their feet. He did, he noticed, feel quite at home. He had not, since his death, felt any urge to loiter round graveyards or funeral parlours or any other place where the dead are gathered, but this hotel for the defunct seemed somehow right.

  They went down a corridor, across an empty hall and into one of two rooms, side by side, at the back of the building. There, to George’s dismay, in a green hat, green apron, white rubber boots and a pair of fearsome rubber gloves was none other than Pawlikowski. As they came into the room, he was decanting George’s heart into a small bowl. He seemed, George thought, exceptionally cheerful.

  ‘I thought I’d get started,’ he said, nodding to a row of silver dishes on the side. ‘Amanda’s doing the stomach and bowels even as we speak. I’m making a start on the coronary arteries. After that…’ he turned towards George’s body and George could have sworn he heard him actually smack his lips ‘… I thought we’d get started on his brain.’

  ‘What on earth,’ said Nat, ‘has his brain got to do with it?’

  Pawlikowski swung round and stared at him for a moment. Who let this amateur in here? his expression seemed to say. Then, turning back to the red, pulpy mass that had kept George on line for sixty-five years, he said, ‘I’m interested in brains. They reveal a lot.’ He said this in the tone of a man who was about to fry one in butter with a little garlic and a few capers.

  Nat showed no sign of being disturbed by the sight of his old friend’s insides being waved around by some mad Polish pathologist. He did not flinch, either, when Pawlikowski got out a power saw and began to work on George’s sternum. In fact, he moved in closer to get a better look. Blood and bits of bone were flying all over the place. This seemed to increase Pawlikowski’s enthusiasm for the job in hand.

  ‘His ribcage is pretty impressive,’ said Pawlikowski, who was, George thought, responding to him more positively now he had him on the slab. ‘Was he a singer?’

  ‘He sang,’ said Nat, ‘but I wouldn’t say he was a singer.’

  As Pawlikowski ferreted round in George’s thoracic cavity, like a medieval hangman in the final stages of his public office, Nat folded his arms and looked quizzically at a small selection of George’s bones. ‘The second of the costae spuriae,’ he said, ‘is bifid. And there is some damage to the costal cartilage.’

  ‘Caused by a weapon?’ said Pawlikowski.

  ‘Caused, I imagine,’ said Nat, ‘by his golf swing. It was a thing to behold.’

  George was waiting for a short, eloquent speech about how the sight of his ex-patient’s bones had reminded Nat of how George had once set the dinner tables of Putney alight with his impression of Margaret Thatcher being buggered by a goat or, perhaps, singing ‘You And Me And Bobby McGee’, accompanied by his steel guitar with the string missing. It did not come.

  When Pawlikowski had finished sloshing around in George’s ribcage and the junior pathologist had tak
en away the heart for further examination (no one, unsurprisingly, seemed very interested in George’s liver while his kidneys were treated with open contempt), he really got going on George’s skull. He had not only a kind of miniature Black & Decker but also a wide variety of manual saws, odd-shaped drills and spoon-shaped instruments for scooping out George’s brains.

  George was almost sure, as Pawlikowski got started, he heard him sing the Seven Dwarfs’ marching song from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

  Nat, now abandoning all pretence that he might be there to safeguard George’s interests, had moved up even closer as the pathologist brought into the light of day more of the pinkish beige offal that had created so many brilliant aperçus, so many masterly, if unpublished, poems. ‘The occipital lobe,’ he said, ‘is extraordinarily large. And the temporal lobe is very unusual indeed. You say he was a bank manager?’

  ‘He was,’ said Nat.

  ‘Not that areas of the brain – apart, of course, from the occipital – are activity specific,’ said Pawlikowski, who clearly enjoyed telling Nat things he almost certainly knew already, ‘but I am one of those who think that the temporal lobe does serve as a memory storage unit. Of course…’ here he started to lift off a large chunk at the top of George’s skull ‘… what do we mean by memory? Is the brain a purely material instrument? Where do we store our information, the things we know and feel? It’s a bit like asking where that email you sent this morning actually is. It’s winging its way across the world. It’s an electrical impulse. You can’t see it or touch it but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Our souls, if you want to use that word, are not, as Leibniz pointed out, that easy to locate.’

  With these comforting words, he levered out the remaining contents of George’s bonce and, after stripping a few bits off, carried it, with some ceremony, to a small weighing machine on a side table. He peered at the register. ‘One point eight kilos,’ he said. ‘Some bank manager!’

  ‘He was,’ said Nat, with every appearance of gravity, ‘a very good bank manager.’

  At this moment, from a large door in the high white wall opposite the bench where Pawlikowski was working, a small woman in the obligatory rubber gloves, apron and wellingtons, plus one of those hats designed to obliterate all traces of individuality from the wearer, emerged with two specimen jars and an expression of muted excitement.

  ‘We have the results of the stomach and bowel!’ she said, as if she was announcing the winner of the Man Booker Prize.

  Hobday, who had been pacing around at a respectful distance from the drawing and quartering, swivelled round and glared intensely at the newcomer. Even Pawlikowski looked up from his scrutiny of George’s cerebellum, as the woman moved further into the room.

  ‘Enough pyridine alkaloids,’ she said slowly, ‘to monkey around quite considerably with his nicotine acetylcholine receptors.’

  ‘By which you mean…?’

  ‘Hemlock,’ said Pawlikowski, tearing himself away reluctantly from George’s brain and loosening his mask. ‘Enough hemlock to kill Socrates five times over. You had it right, Guv. We’re looking at one murdered bank manager.’

  ‘Yesss!’ said Hobday, his eyes glittering with the joy of being proved right. ‘Yesss! I knew it!’

  With which he advanced on Pawlikowski and the two high-fived each other.

  ‘Fucking murdered!’ he said. ‘Fucking poisoned! Bang to rights, baby! I knew it the moment I walked in! I could smell it! I could sniff it coming up the stairs! Felony, as I live and breathe, Marek! Oh, yes yes yes! Am I good or am I good?’

  ‘You are good, Boss!’ said Pawlikowski.

  The two linked arms and began to perform a dance that looked like a cross between a hornpipe, a jig and the final stages of the English country dance known as Gathering Peascods. They tripped around the morgue, Pawlikowski’s rubber boots and Hobday’s brogues slapping on the hard floor, Hobday’s large, long-fingered hands twirling above his head and the pathologist beating time with his left elbow, as if he were cranking up the invisible chanter of a set of pipes.

  Hobday, George decided, had something of the Sherlock Holmes about him. His long nose had an aquiline quality and his long face was that of a contemplative, someone with a vivid inner life. He had the physique of a sportsman and the eyes of an ascetic, but there was nothing ascetic about him now. He was clearly the liveliest thing in the Putney morgue.

  The dance was quite elaborate. They looked as if they had done it before. After a few minutes they went into a kind of mime version of a knife fight. Pawlikowski feinted left. Hobday feinted right. Then Hobday began to clap his hands above his head, flamenco-style, while Pawlikowski started up a strange improvised wordless vocal with something of an Arab tonality to it. Eventually he added words. ‘You are the be-e-est!’ he moaned.

  ‘I am the be-e-e-st!’ responded Hobday, wobbling around half-tones like a muezzin calling from a minaret in some ghostly desert city. Then they both went into a kind of wail that sounded more like a vocal effect from a Jewish funeral. ‘Ayyyiii! Ayyyiii!’ This was followed by a vigorous sequence of rhythmical stamping.

  They had both plainly forgotten that Nat was there. Quite suddenly, Hobday stopped. There was total silence.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Hobday. ‘I’m very, very sorry. We meant no disrespect to your patient.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Nat. ‘I completely understand.’

  ‘Obviously,’ said Hobday, ‘one gets involved. One gets carried away.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Nat.

  The inspector was watching Nat closely. He clearly suspected the man was about to get on to the British Medical Association and the Independent Police Complaints Commission as soon as he left the building but, to George’s surprise, Nat did not seem discomfited by what he had just witnessed.

  ‘He was your friend also,’ said Hobday. ‘Very likely you found what you have just seen … er … offensive.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Nat. ‘Not at all. I wouldn’t say he was my friend. Our wives were friends. I wasn’t close to him. Not really.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Hobday, in a manner that suggested this might have moved Nat up into the rank of suspect. ‘I see!’

  Nat had dropped in on the night George died, had he not? George had a sudden flash from that evening. Veronica saying something to Esmeralda, and Nat holding up his hand as he was offered a glass of parsnip wine. ‘No. I mustn’t. I’m driving.’ Was that significant? Surely old Nat wouldn’t have …

  ‘George was a very difficult person to know. He was the life and soul of the party. Full of jolly jokes. You know? But he was not an easy person. He was disliked by many.’

  That, thought George, was harsh. Especially in the present circumstances. He was at a complete disadvantage. They were in the middle of slicing bits off his brain, for God’s sake! Why hadn’t Nat come out with this sort of thing when George was capable of answering back?

  ‘I never felt,’ went on Nat, ‘that he respected me as a doctor. I never really thought he had a high opinion of my diagnostic skills.’

  How had he spotted that? George had thought he’d managed to conceal it for years. He’d thought he’d done a pretty brilliant job – even to the extent of going out of town when seeking a second opinion – but, as he was beginning to find out, it was very difficult indeed to hide your thoughts from friends. Which was why so many of them ended up as enemies.

  ‘Diagnosis is hard. Let’s face it. You say it’s, you know, kidney stones and, you know, it isn’t. But it’s hard. It’s very hard. Medicine is very difficult. And I may not have much aptitude for it. Let’s face it – who has? Most doctors are pretty rubbish. But that isn’t the point.’

  ‘No,’ said Hobday, who was clearly anxious to stay on Nat’s good side – presumably to avoid headlines such as ‘CALLOUS INSPECTOR DANCES JIG IN MORGUE’.

  ‘I have feelings,’ said Nat. ‘I have emotions. I sometimes felt George thought I didn’t have feelings. Or emotions.’
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  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Hobday.

  ‘He was my friend,’ went on Nat, ‘and I was his doctor.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Hobday.

  He left another decent interval and Nat continued to talk. The sight of George’s insides had clearly prompted a more than usually frank and open mood in the man.

  ‘He was the artistic type. He wrote poetry, of course. I’m no judge of poetry. Although his wife told my wife she thought it was pretty fair rubbish.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hobday, nodding, as if in agreement. ‘Yes.’

  Pawlikowski, too, was nodding. In fact, so was the minuscule female (she was almost, George mused, a midget) who had just brought in chunks of his intestines. Let’s all rubbish George’s poetry! Why not? Perhaps she, too, worked for the London Review of Books. The wankers who hung around there had to have some way of making money, he thought.

  ‘I play golf and tennis and squash and hockey and water polo and I go to the gym. I do not read poetry.’ Nat shook his head sorrowfully as Pawlikowski, foiled now of his chance to carry out more unnecessary experiments on George’s brain, began the complicated business of repacking George’s skull.

  ‘He was my bank manager,’ said Nat, ‘and, actually, he was a bloody good bank manager. Whatever his deficiencies as a poet, he was a first-class bank manager … but was he my friend? I don’t know, really. I just don’t know.’

  Hobday, anxious as he clearly was to stop Nat rushing out and calling the Daily Mail about the performance he and Pawlikowski had recently put on, began to edge towards the door. He continued to make sympathetic noises but it was clear that getting out on the track of a juicy double murder was his major priority. Pawlikowski, in tune, as usual, with his colleague’s needs and wishes, was asking the midget female – whose name seemed to be Carole – if she would mind ‘tidying up’ the violated remains of G. Pearmain.