Waking Up Dead

by Nigel Williams

  She turned her gaze on Esmeralda. ‘The police think I killed George,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t. I didn’t like him. I admit that. I hated him. But I did not give him hemlock. I swear I did not. Terrible things have happened, Esmeralda. Terrible things.’

  With which she fell to her knees and began scratching at the carpet, like a frustrated cat. She’s finally lost it, thought George. She has left the reservation.

  ‘I expect Mummy has put a special bequest in it,’ she said. ‘I know she wanted me to have the sideboard. She always said she wanted me to have the sideboard. And the painting of Ullswater. Which is worth a great deal. I need money, Esmeralda. I’m sorry but I do. Because of what happened at the health club. People will say I murdered George – but I did not!’

  Stephen was at the door. Inclining his head slightly, like a maître d’hôtel with important guests, he indicated that perhaps the others would like to follow him out into the sunshine.

  ‘I’m positive,’ Frigga was wailing, as they left, ‘that she wanted me to have the cutlery!’

  George noticed Stephen give a quick, furtive glance in the direction of the cutlery drawer.

  Jessica had made a habit, over the last ten years, of approaching all her close friends and relatives, looking deep into their eyes and saying ‘When I am gone I would like you to have the cutlery/sideboard/watercolour/bottle of vintage claret/Afghan rug.’ He was pretty sure she had promised him the cutlery on a number of occasions. Not that, as things stood, he could see any possibility of his needing a knife or fork or spoon.

  Esmeralda had been looking at the watercolours in what George thought was a definitely calculating manner. Stephen almost drove her and Veronica and Nat out towards the car. Frigga showed no sign whatsoever of following them. She had now jammed her head under the sofa and was making great sweeps of the area of Jessica’s oatmeal carpet concealed beneath it. She had powerful, almost simian, arms and they scythed backwards and forwards as Frigga pushed her head further and further under the piece of furniture. All you could see of her was her behind, which, as her mother had never tired of reminding her, was not her best feature.

  George very much did not want to be left alone with Frigga. He had never been able to think of anything to say to her when he was alive. His death, as far as he could see, had not made any more topics of conversation available to them. If anyone was going to haunt anyone, he thought, in this instance the living would be haunting the dead.

  Somehow, though, the thing he did not want to happen was happening – and he was alone with his younger sister.

  ‘Frigga,’ he said, in a cautious tone, ‘can you hear me?’

  She clearly could do nothing of the kind but, as she pulled her head out from under the sofa, she did seem to be looking vaguely in his direction.

  ‘Oh, George,’ she said, ‘I feel your presence somehow. In the last few weeks I have had the sensation that you are still here. That you are in Hornbeam Crescent. Still. Watching over us all. But I feel you here, too, George. I feel you are also in Cromwell View. What are you doing here, George? Are you trying to help us find the will? What are you trying to tell us? I feel you’re trying to tell us something. What is it? Why are you here?’

  Why indeed? thought George. Was this question any easier to answer when you were dead rather than alive? Why was he here?

  He had not wanted, for example, to spend quite so much of his life in Norfolk. He had done so because Barry’s and Maurice’s parents-in-law, who seemed to have nothing whatsoever to recommend them, came from that part of the world. He had not wanted to spend years of his life with a small, weaselly man called Schlock, but Schlock was his deputy at NatWest and, for about five years, George had managed to fool himself that he even liked the man. We have no choice on either side of the grave, he reflected stoically. We just have to try to make the best of it.

  ‘I really have not the faintest idea, Frigga,’ he said.

  Frigga twitched violently. ‘Oh, my God, George!’ she said. ‘You’re trying to reach me. I feel you. I feel you, George!’

  ‘Where,’ said George, not sure that he really wanted the answer to this question, ‘do you feel me?’

  ‘I feel you here!’ said Frigga, striking herself just below her left breast. ‘I feel you here!’ Then she smote herself in the lower bowel, just above the groin. ‘And here!’ she said. ‘And here!’ Her jaw dropped a notch and her eyes began to glisten, in a way they only usually did after alcohol or Renaissance music. ‘I killed you, George,’ she said. ‘I murdered you.’ She gave a brief, mildly insane laugh and added, ‘I pulled the wool over the inspector’s eyes. They told me what to say. They helped me. They’re evil. I murdered you, George.’

  George thought this had the potential to become the most interesting conversation he had ever had with his sister. If he could only find a way of keeping up his end of the proceedings it might be revelatory. It was not, actually, by the standards of their usual discourse, particularly one-sided. They seemed, he decided, to be communicating rather better than they had managed to do when he was alive. ‘What do you mean by “murdered”?’ he said.

  ‘What do I mean? Do I mean I put the hemlock into your glass, George? I don’t know. They told me at first that I hadn’t. And then they said I might have done. I certainly picked it, George. I pick herbs. Maybe I did put it in your glass. I did want you dead, George. I did want the money. Oh, my God, I wanted the money!’

  ‘Who,’ said George, ‘are they? Are they voices? Or do you actually see them?’

  Frigga hunched her back and moved away from him. When she spoke again she wasn’t looking at him. She hadn’t, he decided, ever really seen him. She was talking to herself – the way most people did most of the time, even when they thought they were talking to other people.

  ‘They are evil,’ she said, in a cracked voice. ‘They are agents of the Devil. And they know all about me and how wicked I am. They know I wanted you dead. I was frightened she had left it all to you. And to Mullins. You and Mullins, the ones she really loved. I was never her favourite.’

  For a moment a look of pure hatred crossed her face. Then she said, ‘I hate Mullins!’

  With that she flung herself to the floor again and, thrusting her hand underneath the carpet, began to scrabble along the floorboards. This, thought George, was what she had been saying immediately after he and his mother had been killed but there was something not altogether convincing about the confession.

  What he couldn’t understand, however, was how someone as well up as Frigga on herbology could have introduced hemlock into someone’s drink by accident. That was what she seemed to be saying had happened. Or, rather, it was what she wanted to have happened. She knew what hemlock looked like. She had been picking herbs that afternoon. She must have done it.

  She was also a pretty good fit for the murderer as far as motive was concerned. She had always been close to crazy and perhaps the thought of the money had finally been too much for her. The mysterious people who had been telling her she had done it were probably the voices in her head that had prompted her to pick the stuff in the first place. It was as if she was at war with them, thought George. She was a victim of the war within the self that creates psychosis.

  Still muttering about Mullins (she now seemed to be saying that Mullins had poisoned George and pushed Jessica to the floor), she got to work on Jessica’s desk, pulling out the drawers and scattering old letters, bills and fragments of George’s father’s chamber music on the floor.

  It was time to check up on Stephen.

  George went to the front door. He was really going to have to start asserting himself here. He was still completely lacking in basic phantom techniques. He had rather less spirit style than, say, Partridge. These days, his wolfhound seemed to have the gift of walking through doors. George, meanwhile, had relapsed into a condition that was the lot of the average dog: standing by a door and waiting for a passing human to open it.

  He reached for the hand
le. Or, rather, he tried to imagine something like that happening but his imagination, if that was what it was, did not succeed in bringing his hand (which was what it obviously wasn’t) any closer to the handle. For a moment he had the illusion that he might be able to bring the handle towards him – but that didn’t seem to work either.

  He tried again. This time he did not exactly fail to make contact. There were moments – as with the business in his bedroom just after he had died when he had found himself sinking into the carpet – when he could have sworn he was thrusting his fingers into the fabric of the door; he knew, somehow, that this was not an actual sensation but he also knew, in the way one knows things in dreams, that, although this was not what he had experienced, it was waiting for him somewhere and that he must have done it, or had an insight into what it would be like if and when he did, because he felt he knew how the wood and paint would seem to give way to what was no longer his hand.

  Suddenly, with the clarity of a Christian appreciating the reality of Christ’s Resurrection or a Muslim scenting the delights of Paradise, he realized he was going to have to go through the keyhole.

  The letterbox was a possibility but never a serious one. There was a chance, he decided, of getting stuck, just as Jessica’s next cargo of junk mail was being delivered. The keyhole seemed, for reasons he could not have described, to be a simple, clean alternative. He knew also that he would go in head first, like a diver.

  Diving had never been George’s thing. Sitting up straight in a chair was bad enough. Arranging his body neatly for sleep had, of late, been a near impossible task. What chance had an average fat guy of lining up his head with his chest, knees and feet in the appallingly short time it took to travel from diving board to pool surface? And this was no mere high-board-at-Putney-Leisure-Centre job. This involved travelling parallel with the floor into a 95 x 35 mm A2001 Banham Rim Autolock.

  He did not breathe deeply. He failed to flex his non-existent knees or stare ahead of the shadow of himself with the kind of rapt contemplation seen in the faces of Olympic divers before they commence the triple somersault with double back flip and multiple corkscrew turn. He considered the word ‘keyhole’. He thought hard about its jagged edges, waiting, like a reef, for some unwary ship caught in a furious storm. He fancied how the cold passage of the lock might close over your head, like water. How you would smell the shiny neutrality of metal, a tiny nip of autumnal sawdust, an ecstatic whiff of paint in the nostrils and then the August day outside – the breeze, the pollen, honey sweet, and the warm smell of the dark earth.

  And then, somehow or other, he found himself outside the Lebanese restaurant in Lower Richmond Road.

  It was not where he had planned to be – George had never liked Lebanese food – but it was close enough to the Duke’s Head to be a credible result. He felt a touch of quiet pride as he looked around. All he had to do was get the Thames on his left and start walking towards Putney Bridge. He felt, at the same time, a touch of panic. He could easily have overshot the target. It was all very imprecise. He could have ended up in Kidderminster or Calais or Ashby de la Zouch!

  The trouble was, walking did not seem as simple as it had a moment ago. When he began to move what he still thought of as his shoulder towards the river, it began to spin wildly out of control and he found he was revolving very fast, like a drill or an over-enthusiastic Dervish. The word ‘giddy’ occurred to him, as he screwed himself into the pavement, revved up furiously, rose into the air, then travelled at what seemed an improbably high speed, at about thirty yards off the ground, in the direction of the Duke’s Head. Before he got anywhere near it, though, he was forced sharp left into Glendarvon Road, then right on to the Embankment before accelerating wildly back on to the B306 and screeching to a halt outside the pub.

  It was a bit, thought George, like being trapped inside a particularly wilful satnav system, with more than usually definite views on topography. It was not the way he would have chosen to go to the Duke’s Head, but, some invisible power seemed to be telling him, it was the way he was going to have to go. ‘You’re dead,’ whoever was in charge here was saying. ‘Get over it. You’ll go where we want you to go, motherfucker.’

  When he was outside the door of the upper saloon bar, he allowed himself the luxury of thinking he had some choice about how he got into the pub. It was one of the few basic freedoms left to a middle-class Englishman, these days. Was he going to slither in through a gap in one of the open windows? Head-butt his way through the main wall? Waft through the decorative glass panel in the door? He was considering all these possibilities when, without his knowledge or permission, he was picked up and deposited at a table overlooking the river, where his brother, as usual, was laying down the law.

  ‘She’s left it all to George,’ Stephen was saying, as he pored over Jessica’s will. ‘That was her right and privilege. He was her eldest child. He was her first-born. He was greatly loved by her. She’d left him the money. Twelve million pounds. A great deal of money. Not, of course, to some people. To Donald Trump, for example – chicken feed. But not to any of us, I imagine. She seemed to think George would provide for the rest of us. For me. Obviously. And Frigga. And Mullins. And Vickers. And Mabel Dawkins.’

  He chewed his moustache. He looked at Esmeralda. ‘Did you know Jessica had left it all to George? Did you know about the codicil?’ he said. ‘I had no idea Mother even knew what a codicil was.’

  ‘I never thought Jessica’s will was anything to do with me, Stephen,’ said Esmeralda.

  ‘No?’ said Stephen, giving her a doubtful look. He tapped the will with his index finger. ‘She’s obviously left Mullins and Dawkins well provided for,’ he said, ‘which is a good thing. They need money. We all need money obviously, but they need it badly. Frigga needs money. As do you. As do I. Although I’m doing OK. In profit. Media’s not easy but … well, I’m comfortable. Nevertheless money is always useful. But. I’m sure George would have provided for us all. He was a fair-minded man. As you are a fair-minded woman. I do not think we need to involve lawyers. We need to find the codicil obviously. Which seems from what she says here to set out things.’

  It was curious how George’s absence had stripped away the complicated routines with which he and his siblings had dealt with the jealousies that lived in so many of their hearts. Was his mother punishing him, he wondered, for his attempts to be fair? At the end she had disliked both Frigga and Stephen. Leaving him in charge of proceedings was bad enough. His dying had made the situation impossible.

  And – this was, literally, the million-dollar question – how much did Stephen and Frigga know? Jessica had told him she had said nothing to either of them but he would not have been surprised if she had let something slip. If one of them had done it – and they seemed the obvious candidates, if only because it was usually one’s closest relatives who did this kind of thing – it would be whichever of them had managed to ferret out the truth about the contents of the will.

  Unless they had done it together. That, thought George, was highly likely. They had always got on well. Ganging up on their older sibling was something they had been trying, not very successfully, to do all of their lives. Maybe they had finally brought it off in spectacular style.

  ‘It must,’ Esmeralda was saying, ‘make you very angry. That she left it all to George. I think it was a monstrous thing to do.’

  ‘Thank you for that, Esmeralda,’ said Stephen with every appearance of sincerity. ‘I was a little put out. We had become distant. We had lost touch. But I’m sure that … if he had lived, George would, you know…’

  ‘I’m sure he would,’ said Esmeralda.

  Stephen turned to her and seized her wrist. ‘It’s possible,’ he said, ‘that Frigga knew the terms of Mother’s will. It’s possible that she killed George. It’s possible that she killed Mother. We have to face that thought. It’s not a pleasant one but we have to face it. As a real possibility.’

  ‘If we can’t find this codicil,�
�� said Esmeralda, ‘I suppose we’ll have to get a solicitor.’

  A look of total panic crossed Stephen’s face. To be replaced, instantly, by decisive resolution. Which was followed, in its turn, by an even more acute look of desperation. ‘We could get a solicitor,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we’ll have to. I think it’s important to be decisive about these things. I’ll call Lulu. She’ll have views. I won’t call her. I’ll email her. She prefers email.’ He stopped, and started to twitch, like a rabbit scenting a predator.

  ‘We have to talk, Esmeralda. We really have to talk. We’ve never really talked, have we? We must talk.’

  Everything was changing in the Pearmain family, thought George. Stephen and Esmeralda talking! Stephen apparently desperate to talk to her. He usually couldn’t wait to get out of the room fast enough if she was around. Was there some other motive for all of this? Whatever was going on, it was clear that the crisis in the Pearmain family was a more serious one than even the day Stephen had borrowed Esmeralda’s car and pranged it on the M40, or the night Lulu had told George he was ‘a bit of a loser’ or, indeed, any of the other conflicts that had, miraculously, not prevented any Pearmain refusing to speak to some or all other Pearmains for all eternity, amen.

  It’s time, he said to himself (since no one was capable of hearing him) that I made my presence felt.

  Chapter Twelve

  This was not going to be easy. He tried, several times, during Stephen and Esmeralda’s increasingly intense conversation. He tried saying, ‘It is I! George!’ in a sepulchral voice at any decent pause in the dialogue but, although he got a couple of odd looks from Veronica Pinker, no one else seemed interested. At one point he thought he might have managed to make a packet of crisps move a few inches, but it turned out to be the breeze coming in from the river.