Waking Up Dead

by Nigel Williams

  She was obviously new to the job. ‘I’m not sure where it all goes,’ she bleated, as Pawlikowski started to make his exit.

  ‘Heart on the left side. Ribcage underneath the neck. Get the skull the right way round if you can. Fuck the intestines. No one gives a stuff about them. Give them to your dog. If you have a dog.’

  ‘I feel,’ said Carole, whose opinion of Pawlikowski seemed to correspond to George’s, ‘we should behave with appropriate respect to the dead.’

  Pawlikowski gave her a broad wink. ‘Oh, sure,’ he said. ‘But come back and tell me that when you’ve been in the job as long as I have. A stiff is a stiff is a stiff. In my view. Speaking as a pathologist, I would say we go into our profession because we like working with people who can’t answer back. Right, Doc? When I die they can do what they like with my mortal remains. The meat counter at Sainsbury’s will do me.’ He stopped. For a moment he abandoned his tough-guy act and a look of quite appalling sentimentality softened the edges of his geometrical features. ‘So long as they scatter my ashes in Jastrzębie-Zdrój,’ he said, as he followed his master out into the sunshine.

  George found himself hoping that the next thing on his agenda would be his own death, preferably in suspicious circumstances, so that an even more unfeeling pathologist might play football with his head or practise basic juggling with his heart, liver and lungs.

  Nat stayed behind, smiling sympathetically at the junior pathologist. ‘Do you want a hand?’ he said. ‘I am a qualified doctor.’

  George found himself wondering if this was a come-on. From the way Nat was smiling he rather suspected it was. His GP had his head to one side in a way he obviously considered charming and was giving Carole the benefit of some, if not all, of his well-preserved front teeth.

  ‘I think,’ she said, rather prissily, ‘I can manage.’

  Making the best of not being allowed to shove his old friend’s organs back inside his body in the wrong order, Nat headed after Hobday, Purves and Pawlikowski.

  Outside, the sun was still high in the sky and the streets of the suburb were filled with light. On the other side of Wandsworth Park, the Thames glittered its way to the heart of the city, reminding George that he was once more in, and yet not part of, the land of the living.

  Veronica Pinker and Esmeralda had got out of the car and were chatting in the way they always chatted – as if there had been no real beginning and would be no real end to their conversation. He caught fragments of dialogue he was almost sure he had heard before and found them curiously comforting. When Hobday broke the news that George had been murdered, Esmeralda’s face betrayed nothing, but she watched the detective with a look that George knew very well. She was trying to decide whether Hobday was up to the task of finding his killer.

  She had become less, not more, mysterious to him since his death. It had, George found, made it easier to appreciate her good qualities. A slight breeze seemed to be pulling him over to where she was standing as he gazed with admiration at her shrewd eyes. And it was not only her intelligence that had held their marriage together. Who would have guessed, looking at this respectable sixty-something grandma, nodding respectfully at the local copper, that she had a talent for giving blowjobs that could have earned her a six-figure salary?

  Removing him from the equation had made it finally possible for George to see what his marriage had been: it was only now he had lost it that he was beginning to understand its value and, correspondingly, to have moments of real rage at whoever had decided to take it from him. He floated at the edge of the talk between Esmeralda and Hobday with what was now genuine urgency and passion.

  ‘You see,’ Hobday was saying, ‘we’re working on the theory that there was some kind of confrontation in the kitchen that night. That would be consistent with the way in which your mother-in-law fell and with the fragments of glass we found on the floor.’

  ‘You think,’ said Esmeralda, ‘it was the glass George took to bed that night.’

  ‘We think it has to be,’ said Hobday.

  ‘Someone put hemlock into it during the course of the evening. George drank it and that was why he died. Not a heart attack.’

  ‘No,’ said Hobday. ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘So you think,’ said Esmeralda, ‘that whoever spiked his glass crept into our bedroom and took the evidence away but Jessica, being a light sleeper and downstairs, heard whoever it was, went into the kitchen and tried to take away the glass. To wash it up, knowing her. And was pushed to the floor for her pains. And died. After which the criminal tried to make it look like a break-in.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘You,’ said Hobday, ‘are a very insightful woman.’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ said Esmeralda. ‘I should have joined the fucking police force.’

  The two of them looked at each other.

  ‘You have presumably,’ went on Esmeralda, ‘worked out where everyone was during the course of that evening. Who had the opportunity. Who saw anything suspicious and so on. There were other people visiting that night – including Mabel Dawkins, Nat and Veronica – but whoever put it into George’s glass, then moved it from the bedroom, must have been staying the night.’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Hobday. ‘It could have been done at any time. And there is a chance, of course, that the broken french-window pane was really done from outside. We can’t rule that out completely. It is very difficult to be precise about what happened that evening. Parsnip wine, don’t you know? About the only thing we’re sure of is that you went to bed at nine, Mrs Pearmain.’

  ‘We left just before nine,’ said Nat, joining the conversation, ‘and all I remember is that everyone was knocking back parsnip wine and stuffing those herbs that Frigga had brought into their drinks like crazy. She kept saying they were good for you.’

  Hobday nodded to himself, as if he already knew this. He probably did, thought George. The man had known it was murder (or murders) from the moment he had walked into the house. He almost certainly had wall-to-wall charts up in the police station, tracing everyone’s movements the night before G. Pearmain had been murdered.

  Murdered. Bloody hell! He had often suspected he was not as popular as he would have liked to be but it seemed as if things had been even worse than he’d feared.

  ‘Motive,’ said Hobday, ‘is what I cannot quite fathom yet.’

  Esmeralda’s phone was shuddering in her hand. She looked at the screen without visible enthusiasm and was obviously wondering whether to answer it or not. When she did George knew, instantly, in the way he did when she was talking on the phone, who was at the other end of the line. Her blend of formal patience and only just mastered impatience meant it had to be Stephen or Lulu.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and then, ‘Yes … Yes … Yes … Of course we will. Straight away.’ She turned to the rest of them. ‘That was Stephen,’ she said. ‘They’ve just found Jessica’s will. It’s in her flat. They’re there now. We have to go over. Now.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Jessica Pearmain’s mansion flat was on the ground floor of Cromwell View, a large, purpose-built thirties block, named in honour of the Debates in the Army in Council that had taken place, at the end of the English Civil War, in a church only a few hundred yards away from the building.

  There were lawns at the back, complete with weeping willows and a pond. A porter called Ron did very little and a senior porter, called Pillock, did even less. The average age of the occupants was about eighty-five.

  George, as he had done so often in life, was sitting in the front passenger seat while Nat drove. Esmeralda and Veronica were in the back, sitting exactly as they would have done had he still been alive – not talking but looking as if they were about to do so at any moment.

  He looked at Esmeralda as they pulled into the wide drive and came to a halt at his mother’s door. It was odd to be paying this familiar call on someone who was dead, and being dead himself did not make it less peculiar. Esmeralda, when she thought
no one was looking, allowed her real anxiety to show. She needs a lot of looking after, he thought. Who is going to do it now? Is that, in fact, what I did for all those years? I never thought of it like that but perhaps that was what, in the end, it became.

  Jessica’s front garden had a small pond all of its own. There were lilies and flag irises and, in the borders, small flowers whose names she always knew. It was only now, looking at them, that George realized how much he missed her. They had got close in her last years, close, he now saw, to the extent of excluding his brother and sister.

  ‘Frigga found it, apparently,’ Esmeralda was saying to Veronica. ‘Stephen said she was tearing the place apart.’

  At first, of course, no one had been able to find Jessica’s will. They had gone through and through her cupboards. They had looked in all the pockets of all her coats. They had rifled through her books. Stephen had even prised up the floorboards and groped around underneath them. Mabel Dawkins, the Mullins woman and Beryl Vickers, who all seemed to know they were in line for something, had joined in enthusiastically, but no one had worked out that it was inside a waterproof jacket inside the cistern of the lavatory in her back bathroom. Which was where Frigga had found it.

  As far as George was aware, Frigga was the first person to see it, but that didn’t help in the task of spotting whether she or one of the others might have murdered him. Knowing that he was the sole beneficiary was enough to give the holder of that information a very respectable motive for murder, but, if any of them knew how Jessica had carved up her estate they were keeping it very quiet indeed. Being dead and invisible gave one unparalleled access to private conversations but, so far, nothing had emerged. Perhaps soon he would acquire some more interesting dead skills, such as managing to be in two places at once, X-ray vision and other such talents as were found in the heroes of American comics.

  How had Frigga found it? Had she known all along? Or had she, possibly, used witchcraft?

  Stephen met them at the door. He was wearing a dark brown suit with a tie of a matching shade. His shoes were pale russet and his shirt came equipped with elegant chocolate stripes. He was, thought George, an autumn symphony. Lulu chose his clothes and she had, once again, managed to pick out an outfit that went superbly well with his toupee.

  ‘She was going mad,’ Stephen said, as he opened the door. ‘The old lady was definitely losing it. She hid the damn thing in the lavatory cistern. It’s a miracle it wasn’t flushed away.’

  It was interesting, thought George, that his brother’s grasp of plumbing was almost as shaky as his hold on human character and emotions. Stephen led them into the spacious hall, still lined with Jessica’s favourite watercolours, a photo of George’s father, looking a little like Clement Attlee, and, on the floor, a gigantic brass bowl that Uncle Arthur had brought back from Tibet the year before George was born.

  Frigga was standing in the middle of the living room, behind her the vivid green of the Cromwell View gardens and Jessica’s tiny patio, crowded with white, red and purple flowers. Even the position of the chairs had not altered since George had last been there. He found it hard to believe that his mother was not going to hobble in from the garden, trowel in hand, her smile lifted in greeting. Nothing is more beautiful than happiness in an old face. In spite of her many faults, Jessica had been a happy person. Perhaps that was why her spirit was at rest. It certainly did not seem to be hanging around in whatever weird dimension George was now condemned to occupy. That was, in a way, a relief. George was fond of his mother. He would have liked someone else to talk to, apart from a dead Irish wolfhound. But his mother? For all eternity? Maybe not.

  The afterlife was clearly meant for creatures like him and Partridge, beings who had spent their lives trapped by circumstances and were now condemned to tread the same circles they had worn away when alive. Perhaps soon he and Partridge would go on ghostly walks and return, as they had done so often, to this very flat, to sit facing the window. Maybe then his mother would put in an appearance. She might at least be able to put him right on how George had died, which would set him off on the trail of whoever had spiked his drink with hemlock.

  Frigga was waving Jessica’s will. She did not seem particularly satisfied that she had found it. In fact, thought George, she seemed even more distressed than usual.

  ‘She has left it all to George,’ she said, her face more highly coloured than the luckless recipient of all that cash had ever seen it. ‘She’s left all her millions to George. And he is dead. It is so unfair.’

  George could not quite work out which bits of this proposition Frigga thought were unfair – that he was dead or that he was now worth millions. A bit of him wondered whether that meant Esmeralda copped the lot. He found himself hoping that that was the case. Serve the other bastards right. She could buy a house with a swimming-pool. He had always wanted a swimming-pool. Even if he wouldn’t be able to use it he could float above it and watch Barry and Maurice splash around with Ella and Bella.

  ‘She says there’s a codicil,’ went on Frigga, ‘that sets out what happens if George should die. Which he has, of course. And she says that this codicil makes provision for me and you and we get all of the money, Stephen, but she also says there are more – and very important – bequests, involving Mullins and Vickers and Dawkins and she expects us to honour them. I mean, really! Really! Didn’t she trust us?’

  George had not realized his sister was quite so acquisitive.

  ‘We have to find this codicil, Stephen. Otherwise Mullins, Dawkins and Vickers could sue us and try to stop us getting the money. If we shared it between us, Stephen, we would get millions of pounds each. I could go to Machu Picchu or whatever it’s called. I could buy a vegetarian restaurant. I could have work done on my face. And body.’

  Perhaps that was all part of Jessica’s plan, thought George. Perhaps this codicil was a kind of quest Jessica had devised in order to force her children to come to terms with their weaknesses. He had certainly never seen Frigga’s real nature so vividly in evidence. All that phoney spirituality had gone right out of the window the moment her mother had dangled masses of moolah in front of her.

  God, the bastard, was probably going to make sure Frigga and her mother shared all eternity. Their mutual dislike had been of the special kind that mothers and daughters reserve for each other. They could pass the next trillion years criticizing each other’s dress sense, arguing about what to eat and how to eat it and, best of all, subtly reminding each other of their moral deficiencies.

  ‘What we must do first,’ said Stephen, ‘is read the will.’

  Frigga gasped as if he had just asked her to strip naked. ‘Read the will?’ she said. ‘Get everyone together in a room with a solicitor and Read the Will?’

  ‘No,’ said Stephen, with only slight impatience. ‘That only happens in Hollywood movies. I mean read the will. Become aware of its content and provisions. In regard to this … codicil. And everything else, of course.’ He stretched out his hand. ‘I need to look at this very carefully!’ he said. ‘I haven’t actually seen it. I had no idea that that was what Mother intended. I’m still trying to absorb it. It was her money. She had a right to leave it to whom she liked. A dogs’ home. If that was what she wanted. Although she didn’t like dogs. George liked dogs. She did not. Neither do I. In fact. We were closer than we seemed. I think.’

  Frigga gave him a crazy, cunning look. ‘You will give it back, won’t you, Stephen?’

  ‘Of course I won’t, Frigga,’ said Stephen, waggishly. ‘I’ll eat it. I’ll set light to it.’

  Frigga’s face began to implode. For a moment George thought she was actually going to cry. Stephen’s voice became gentle and persuasive. ‘Of course I’ll give it back to you,’ he said. ‘And well done for finding it. What I suggest is we all go down the Duke’s Head and go through it with…’

  A fine-tooth comb! thought George, marvelling, as ever, at his brother’s way with a cliché.

  ‘… a fine-tooth
comb!’ said Stephen. Then he stopped. ‘God!’ he said. ‘I can almost hear old George ticking me off for that one. He was so like Father. Always looking out for what he called “the cliché” while I was always … you know…’

  Spouting them, thought George, by the yard.

  Stephen chuckled in what George found an over-familiar manner. ‘I miss the old bugger,’ he said. ‘I really miss his salty humour.’

  There were times when George had thought he loved his brother and times when he was fairly sure he didn’t. Since he had died he had definitely found Stephen harder to take. Partly because being dead gave you so much more time to think. It was all you could do. Stephen’s attempts to sound as if he was the most mature member of the family had started to irritate him and, with himself out of the way, he was fairly sure they had got more pronounced. It is all too easy to patronize the dead – to ascribe to them the thoughts and feelings you think they ought to have had.

  ‘I think,’ went on Stephen, with another of those annoying chuckles, ‘he’s looking down on us and saying, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! When will you ever learn?”’

  His hand was still extended towards Frigga. Eventually she allowed him to take it but, as he did so, she watched him, nostrils flared, as if she really expected him to dash out of the room and disappear with it, cackling like some treasure-hungry gnome of Swedish folklore. As soon as he had it in his grasp he turned to Esmeralda, Nat and Veronica and suggested, once again, they adjourn to the Duke’s Head.

  Frigga got that cunning look again. ‘I’ll stay here,’ she said. ‘I have an appointment.’

  She looked as if she expected people to ask her what the appointment was. They did not. Staring at Stephen now, with what George thought was a distinctly mad expression, she said, ‘I’m going to hunt for that codicil. We have to find the codicil. I’m going to find it. You can do what you like. I’m going to hunt for it. I will find it. I found the will, didn’t I? I’m going to find it.’