Waking Up Dead

by Nigel Williams

  ‘What,’ said Stephen, rather sharply, ‘is she trying to tell you? Apart, of course, from the fact she is dead.’

  Hobday allowed himself a very slight smile. ‘The note,’ he said, ‘is pinned to her chest. With an ordinary drawing pin. Millions like it are produced. To the untrained eye it is just another pin, but we will subject it to a battery of tests. We will do the same with the paper. Where did the paper come from? You will notice that it has been torn at the top end and there are still traces of what was written above it. Did Miss Pearmain write us a longer letter, then think better of it? That might explain the way she seems to go into the message without trying to claim a particular person’s attention.’

  ‘Did she have it with her when we were all here? When did she write it?’ said Esmeralda. ‘It’s very odd, as you say, Inspector, that it is not addressed to anyone in particular. She must have known we would be the ones who found her.’

  ‘It is, Esmeralda. It is,’ said Hobday. ‘And then there is the position of the chair, and the knot in the pyjama cord or whatever it is. All this tells us something.’

  ‘It looks like her handwriting,’ said Esmeralda, ‘but is it her handwriting?’

  ‘It is her handwriting,’ said Stephen. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  To George’s surprise, the inspector seemed in agreement with this. He nodded vigorously as, quietly and tactfully at first and then, after only a little while, becoming more brazen, Pawlikowski started to take photographs. George had expected a larger and more impressive camera. Instead he was using one that might double up for taking his holiday snaps. Mind you, judging from the ecstasy on his face, this was much more Pawlikowski’s idea of fun than two weeks in, say, the Tatra mountains.

  ‘What I’m trying to say,’ said Esmeralda, ‘and it seems a peculiar thing to say, but it … it’s the way it’s written. It’s the style.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Hobday, quickly, ‘it doesn’t sound like her?’

  ‘It sounds like her and yet not like her,’ said Esmeralda. ‘It’s curious. Almost like a parody.’

  Hobday nodded – like one professional acknowledging another professional’s opinion.

  Stephen, who was clearly getting irritated by all this, cut in: ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I knew my sister. Knew her better than anything. That is her writing. That is her.’

  ‘It is, I’m sure, her handwriting,’ said Esmeralda, patiently, ‘but the style isn’t quite the way she talks. Talked. Sorry. Well, some of it is. Most of it. Then you get this bit about the trolls dancing on the heads of the slain. That sounds like someone doing an impression of the sort of thing Frigga might say. Actually she wouldn’t. I don’t want to be rude about the dead – there was a sense in which I was fond of Frigga – but, and again I do not wish to be offensive because the poor woman is dead, I don’t think she had the imagination to write that. The trolls dancing on the heads of the slain. Sorry.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Veronica, clearly seeing parallels between this debate about the tone of Frigga’s suicide note and her book group, ‘she was trying for a bit of fine writing. I mean, if you’re going to write a suicide note, you know, it might as well be a good one.’

  Esmeralda, who respected Veronica’s intelligence a good deal, nodded. It seemed to set her thinking again. ‘And then,’ she said, ‘there is this business of the Gare du Nord.’

  ‘She quite often went to Paris,’ said Stephen.

  Mabel Dawkins nodded enthusiastically. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is the God’s honest troof. But I do not think she went there to push people under trains. She coulda done that at Victoria. Or Clapham Juncture.’

  Hobday, George noticed, was watching everyone’s face. He was talking to Esmeralda but he was watching the others. He was using this conversation to examine their expressions. George, who had unlimited opportunity for staring at people, followed the inspector’s sly, furtive glances and examined faces and body language at his leisure. When you are dead, everyone’s a waxwork. He noted Stephen’s expression. When he thought no one was watching him, his brother’s face did show emotion. He looked not only genuinely shocked but also, suddenly, desperately sad. He had, of course, been fond of Frigga. There was something else in there as well, thought George. At first he couldn’t identify what it was. Normally Stephen’s face was about as expressive as a cricket bat but now something was definitely going on. It took a while before George realized his brother was afraid. Of what, though?

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Hobday was saying, ‘that I like the position of the chair. And the knot on the noose worries me.’

  He didn’t say why it worried him. It looked, to George, like an ordinary knot. Although, come to think of it, it had a professional air about it. Frigga had never been the Girl Guide type.

  Mabel Dawkins was peering at it and shuddering visibly. ‘A relative of mine was ’ung!’ she said. ‘In 1924. For murderin’ ’is communal-law wife. I do not care for nooses. Or that bag they put over your ’ead. The thought of it makes my flesh creep. You wind it round and you wind it round. Thirteen times and Bob’s your unc.’

  ‘Did your sister sail?’ said Hobday, suddenly, to Stephen.

  Stephen jumped. ‘Not as far as I know,’ he said, understandably baffled by this line of enquiry. ‘Although it is perfectly possible. Frigga did all sorts of peculiar things. She might have met a man who sailed.’

  ‘She was writing a novel,’ said Esmeralda, ‘called All Those Who Do Not Go Down to the Sea in Ships. She’d been writing it for years. Maybe she sailed for research. Are you talking about the knot, Inspector?’

  Hobday shot her a keen, appreciative glance. ‘I am, Mrs Pearmain,’ he said. ‘I am.’

  George was hoping he might say something more about the noose and the knot but he suddenly turned his attention to Mabel Dawkins, swinging his large, well-structured head in her direction as if she was some guest on a current-affairs programme who urgently needed to be brought into the discussion. ‘So,’ he said, ‘at what time did you last see Miss Pearmain?’

  Mabel coughed. ‘I last seen ’er,’ she said, with the air of one who was not going to share information with the police lightly or casually, ‘when I just come in now an’ seen ’er swingin’ like that as if she was a configgered criminal. But I seen ’er before that – which, as I say, was the last time I saw ’er. I come in arahnd ’alf one an’ when I saw ’er then she was walkin’ an’ talkin’ like a normal person an’ showin’ no signs of strangulation that I could see, Inspector. There was not a whiff a’ Rugger Mortice on that occasion, I beg to state formally. Although, as I say, she was very worried about the windersill. She was lookin’ for it everywhere.’

  Hobday turned to Esmeralda. ‘She’s expecting a visitor,’ he said. ‘Someone of whom she seems, from what Mrs Dawkins has told us, to be afraid. And, while waiting for this person to arrive, or perhaps, even after they arrive, she writes this suicide note, gets up on a chair and ties a rather skilful knot, pins the note to her chest and kicks away the support.’

  Stephen was looking very thoughtful indeed. George gazed out at the garden. Dust stood, turning restlessly, in the columns of light that came in from the day outside. He wasn’t even dust. He was hanging in the air, even more fragile than a golden mote, twisting with the specks and grains in the sun that would never find the real George again.

  ‘She was worryin’,’ went on Mabel, ‘abaht Mrs Pearmain’s last will an’ testimony. She’d looked it over an’ she wasn’t ’appy about Georgy Porgy gettin’ the lot. I mean, Gawd bless ’im, ’e’s dead so, you know, good luck to ’im, but ’e was always out for ’imself, wasn’t ’e? There was other people more worthy of a few bob in my ’umble. People wot ’ad taken ’er on and off of the commode in every kind of weather. People ’oo ’ad made ’er ’er lunch every day and taken ’er to Waitrose on demand. People ’oo ’ad washed ’er pants an’ taken ’er up Queen Mary’s for the Falls Class, if you take my meanin’. While certain other people ’ung around and brought a b
ottle of champagne every three months. Waitin’ fer the windersill and a nice fat cheque.’ She thrust her face into the detective’s. ‘I name no names, but I wonder ’oo is named in the coddysill or the windersill or whatever it’s called. I think Mabel Dawkins ’as a right to be there.’

  During this speech everyone looked at the floor.

  George studied Frigga’s face. Whatever it was that had gone from it was not in the room. It had never been a very noticeable quality, the thing that made her Frigga rather than her equally lacklustre friend Diana Pullman or her hardly there at all confidante from the Putney library. You would never have called it a spark, because it wasn’t a spark, but whatever it was, it was not there.

  George found he was looking to the area just below the ceiling where, according to some contemporary theories, the souls of the recently departed hover around to view their bodies before being called away by white lights and ethereal music. No Frigga.

  Perhaps, he thought, Frigga, like Partridge, will have been transformed by death. She will have acquired new qualities. She will, like me, return to Putney, but not in the same grim, earthbound way that I seem to have done. Perhaps, soon, I will catch a glimpse of her on a corner of the high street and she will be smiling and wearing the bright colours she never dared to wear when alive or holding out her arms to me the way, surely, she must have done at some point in our miserable sixty-two years together.

  But there was still no Frigga. Only her long, limp body and her neck, so sadly twisted, and the fallen shoes and the lank white hair.

  Hobday was talking again – with the calm authority that Esmeralda seemed to find so worthy of notice. ‘If she writes it here,’ he was saying, ‘this … note that is so interestingly written and not quite typical of Miss Pearmain, where is the pen she used? A ballpoint of some kind, I would have said. Where is it?’

  Nobody seemed to have an answer to this question. Stephen, who now appeared to have given up his previous attempts at superiority, looked like a man who was prepared to get his bum in the air and go on the grope round the edges of the carpet but, once again, Hobday’s was a purely rhetorical question.

  ‘And who,’ Hobday continued, ‘was her mysterious visitor? Who calls on the flat of a dead woman? And why?’

  As if in answer to this question, there came a long, loud buzz from the doorbell. Rasping in tone, it seemed to violate the stillness of Jessica’s flat and the peace of green gardens beyond her still blooming patio.

  ‘Who in God’s name can that be?’ said Stephen.

  He’s still frightened, thought George. But what is it that’s frightening him? His lip, too, was definitely not as firm as usual. Underneath his moustache it showed early signs of collapse. Is he going to cry? thought George, remembering again how many times Stephen and Frigga had formed common cause against him. George was selfish. George didn’t understand. Christ. You would have thought death would make family life a little easier. It had not.

  Stephen did not, as he usually would have done, offer to go and see who was out in the hall. He parked himself on one of his mother’s armchairs and, without even the strength to look at his phone, set about chewing more of his moustache. In the end it was Esmeralda, still wrapped in thought as effectively as a chess player contemplating the endgame, who went out to discover whom the visitor might be.

  Chapter Fourteen

  George was not particularly pleased to find it was Beryl Vickers and the Mullins woman. He had never liked Mullins. Ever since she had asked him – at Jessica’s eighty-fifth-birthday party – why he was always ‘so pink at parties’ and he had asked her, by way of reply, why she always looked so wrinkled, relations between them had been cool.

  One of the things that might have accounted for her rather syrupy smile, as she peered into the room, was that George was not likely to be in it. He found a certain grim satisfaction in watching her placatory grimace wiped off her features by the sight of Frigga.

  They really ought to cut her down soon, he thought. Was Hobday proposing to leave her up there? Just days after his mother’s death, Stephen had begun to talk about putting her flat on the market. A body hanging from a hook in the living room was not going to do anything for prospective buyers. What happened to the smell of freshly baked bread or coffee bubbling on the stove?

  ‘Oh, no!’ said Mullins, clasping one hand to her mouth. ‘Oh, no!’

  ‘Oh, no!’ repeated Beryl Vickers, managing to duplicate her friend’s gesture with utter precision. ‘Oh, no!’

  They were both, as always, wearing sensible tweed skirts, sensible cream blouses and square-toed shoes that screamed aloud to all who had eyes to see or ears to hear, ‘We are lesbians!’

  Vickers was younger than Mullins by at least twenty years. She looked perfectly capable of stringing up a difficult woman from a hook. She had worked, George seemed to remember, in catering. Her hands were large and muscular, and in a straight fight with her, George would not have fancied his chances.

  Mabel Dawkins, George noticed, was watching them furtively. She was the first to speak. To both women, she said, ‘I meant ter call yer but I got carried away with the sighta the copse. I never seen someone actually stretched like that. I thought we was meetin’ at six. I never thought you’d’ve electrocuted to come so early.’

  For a moment it looked as if Stephen was about to speak, but he did not seem, for once, able to do so. He just stared at them, as if this was the first time he had seen either woman. It was Esmeralda who said, ‘Were you meeting Beryl and Audrey here, Mabel?’ She managed, George thought, the three turn-of-the-twentieth-century forenames with creditable skill.

  ‘We ’ad an arrangement,’ said Mabel, looking furtive in the extreme, ‘to meet up and ’ave a look at some items which Mrs Pearmain wanted these ladies to possibly ’ave. Such as the quilt. And the pokerwork. An’ the thing wiv knobs on in the kitchen. Beryl was inchrested in the Vienna Regulator. Wasn’t you, Beryl?’

  Beryl Vickers smiled. She was, she said, interested in the Vienna Regulator. It was a wonderful thing, she said. She had often spoken of it with Jessica. Jessica had often said she wanted Beryl to have it when she was gone. It would remind Beryl of her. Every time she heard it chime, Beryl said, she would think of Jessica.

  What Beryl did not appear to know was that the Vienna Regulator – a stubby walnut clock with an unusually Gothic face – had not told the time since before the Second World War. If it had ever chimed, it had not done so since the Anschluss.

  ‘Jessica had promised me some of the watercolours,’ gushed Mullins, stroking her beard. ‘I don’t think they are of anything but sentimental value.’

  Esmeralda gave Mullins a sharp look. ‘I could get quite sentimental about eight thousand quid,’ she said, ‘which is what the Alfred Logan Bradley is worth.’

  ‘I think,’ said Stephen, heavily, ‘that there seems to be a codicil somewhere that decides what is coming to everyone. My mother chose to leave everything to George in the first instance, relying on him to apportion her estate fairly between close family and, er, friends such as yourselves. She did specifically say, Audrey, that there was provision for you in that codicil. The problem is that, at the moment, we cannot seem to find it. And, of course, er…’

  He seemed at this point to remember that his sister’s corpse was hanging from the ceiling. He gave an awkward wave in her direction, as if introducing Frigga to the two women for the very first time. They did give Frigga more than a cursory glance but there was, George thought, a definite feeling in the room that his sister had become a more than usually unusual item of home décor. She was being ignored so resolutely by everyone, including the two policemen, that it was as if she had ceased to exist twice.

  There was clearly one thing on Mullins’s mind. She had always made a point of being polite to Stephen. Her manner to him now, George thought, was positively fawning. ‘To know Jessica,’ she was saying to him, ignoring Esmeralda, whom she had never liked, ‘was reward enough.’

 
; It was extraordinary, thought George, how little interest Frigga’s corpse seemed to be provoking. She had never made much impact when alive but, in George’s view, being strung up in her mum’s living room ought to have made her a bit more of a talking point. It was only Stephen’s eyes that kept wandering back to the piteous figure. Stephen had his sensitive side. When their parents had started one of their endless arguments it was Stephen who knuckled his eyes in fear and misery and begged them to stop. It was Stephen who had loved and cared for, in turn, the guinea pig, the rabbit, the cat and, later, the tortoise; it was Stephen, who, as a child, had loved their mother in such a passionate and uncomplicated way that, in George’s judgement, it had started to irritate her. Jessica had been a tough woman.

  Mullins and Vickers were exchanging significant glances. Their relationship to each other and to Jessica had always been a mystery to George. Both seemed to him to be dark, slightly twisted characters. He had always been able to imagine Mullins as a sadist, and Vickers seemed perfectly suited to being her assistant in crime. They had both been there on the night he died, hadn’t they? He had probably done any number of things, in their eyes, that would justify his being handed the odd glass of poisoned parsnip wine. He was, in the meaningless vogue word of the seventies that Vickers, for some reason, had espoused, a sexist. He had dared to stand up to his mother on more than one occasion – especially when it came to Esmeralda.

  Would either of them have been capable of doing in his mother, though? Jessica had never said much about her friendship with Mullins – although it had clearly been a very important one. It was almost impossible to get to the heart of one’s parents’ friendships, but George’s mother had left some intriguing clues. ‘Mullins,’ she used to say, ‘had something of a crush on me at college.’