‘I want to look at my brother’s dead face,’ Stephen was saying. ‘I want to look at Frigga’s face. I want to look at the dead face of my mother.’
Was this, thought George, normal? Was there an element of gloating about it? And even if that was what Stephen wanted, why did he have to take a simultaneous gander at all three corpses? Judging from her expression, a triple funeral was not Esmeralda’s idea of fun. The whole thing was turning into something strongly reminiscent of the old Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors.
‘We’ll have them embalmed, of course,’ Stephen went on. ‘I know a very good man in Roehampton. He did Lulu’s brother. He was in terrible shape when they got him out from under the lawn mower but by the time this guy had finished he looked good enough to eat.’
Esmeralda looked helplessly at her Nokia. George hoped Barry or Maurice would get back to her. Failing that, she should call Veronica Pinker. She needed allies. Badly.
‘Lulu actually kissed Montmorency on the lips. On the lips! Right there in the crematorium! It made an incredible impression on the audience. The congregation. The audience. Whatever. She said it was like kissing a rubber ball that had just come out of the fridge. People were crying. Crying. She was crying. I was crying. Peter Duchamp from ITV was sobbing openly.’
From what George could remember of Montmorency – was that really his name? – physical contact with the man when he was alive had had a lot in common with brushing up against a chilled rubber ball. It was clear, he thought, that Esmeralda had decided to say nothing until her sons arrived. This was wise, in George’s view. From the look of her, most of the words hovering unspoken in and around her mouth were four-letter ones.
He felt like loosing off a few carefully chosen expletives himself. He really did draw the line at an open coffin. Would his brother compromise and accept a pane of glass? Or a sort of detachable lid, which those who really wanted to get a peek at G. Pearmain’s cadaver could lift to check him out, then pop back on, in the manner of someone assessing the status of a pan of boiling vegetables?
Embalming, anyway, thought George, was not really the right word for whatever they were going to have to do to him to bring him before the public without provoking major attacks of hysteria. Total reconstruction was the half of it. They might do better to pick another corpse off the pile rather than try to modify the handiwork of that mad Polish pathologist.
‘And Handel,’ Stephen was saying. ‘Everyone likes Handel. The minuet from Berenice.’
George wasn’t sure that everyone liked Handel. He was absolutely sure that his brother did. Perhaps the whole service was going to reflect Stephen and Lulu’s taste. She was, he seemed to remember, rather fond of the Commodores and Black Sabbath. It would be a very mixed event – especially in the readings department. Lulu liked Pam Ayres and Wendy Cope, though she never seemed sure of which was which. Stephen would probably go for one of those awful minor Edwardian poets he—
‘We could have a reading from W. E. Henley,’ said Stephen, brightening perceptibly at the prospect. ‘I am the master of my thingy and the captain of my you know what and even when I am feeling absolute shit I will … you know, not bow down to tyrants or whatever.’
Esmeralda, finally, spoke.
‘George didn’t like “Invictus”,’ she said. ‘He preferred the one about Death being the ruffian on the stair and Madam Life being a piece in bloom. His favourite poet was Thomas Hardy.’
Stephen looked at her. Then he looked at his phone. Then he said, ‘Horse-drawn funerals are expensive, but they do make an impact. Lulu’s daughter is a trained opera singer.’
‘Oh, yeah? I am not,’ muttered George, ‘having the Prune struggle through a few bars of the “Pie Jesu” from Fauré’s Requiem. I really will start howling under your window if you let the ghastly bag loose on a Mozart Concert Aria. Whose funeral is this anyway? Please?’
Fortunately, at this point, there was the noise of a key in the lock of the front door, then Barry and Maurice tumbled into the hall. George caught the tail end of a conversation that sounded as full of life as the two of them usually were, something about some bastard from Foxtons stitching them up over an impossible split-level conversion, before they found themselves in the house where they’d grown up, remembered their father was dead and fell suddenly silent.
George didn’t want his boys to be quiet. He wanted them to go on bumping bellies and high-fiving and making jokes about masturbation. He wanted them never to stop liking each other. He wanted them to keep right on enjoying making money. He didn’t want them to stop loving their wives or their children or their mother or, in their own offhand way, celebrating the love he was sure they had felt for him and that he certainly felt for them.
Most of all he didn’t want them to stop laughing. He didn’t want them to take themselves or their lives too seriously. They hadn’t dedicated their lives to others, but they were not devoid of charitable instincts and they certainly, as far as he could see, made an attempt to be decent people. Like him, they were ordinary and, like him, they seemed to find the ordinary amusing and worthwhile. Look at what people who wanted to be exceptional had done to the world, thought George, as Maurice and Barry came in.
They did not, of course, find much amusing about the room where they had eaten so many family meals. Neither were they obviously delighted to see their uncle sitting in George’s place, as the sun out in the garden shifted round to the west and shone in on the part of the house that would never again see their father glumly shoving cutlery into a drawer.
‘Mum!’ said Barry.
‘Mum!’ said Maurice.
‘Barry!’ said Esmeralda.
‘Maurice!’ said Maurice.
All three laughed, and they embraced her, and then, while Stephen concentrated even more furiously on his phone, Esmeralda began to cry.
She had only just stopped when, outside in the street, a big Mercedes slowed to a halt. George did not need to go to the front room window to see Lulu Belhatchett, allowing the engine to tick quietly on while she checked herself in the driving mirror. It went on ticking while she double-checked her phone for messages and ticked into silence with the tact of a butler tiptoeing from a table. Then there was the click of expensive heels on the front porch of George’s house and, finally, a short, businesslike peal of the bell.
Stephen stood to attention. Now, his face seemed to suggest, we’ll be getting down to a bit of serious funeral-planning. Black plumes on black horses, black top hats and a few thousand quid’s worth of flowers here we come.
‘It’s Lulu!’ he said.
He clearly thought everyone else should be on their feet applauding as keenly as the front row of a party conference in Moscow in 1935 when Stalin strolled on to the platform. He felt the need to make clear the enormous importance of what had just happened to those present – they seemed too stupid or rude to grasp it. He spoke slowly, as to a trio of village idiots.
‘She’s here. Lulu. Here. Now.’
His phone snapped into life with the speed of a Greek chorus commenting on some particularly gruesome murder. It sounded, George thought, suddenly more authoritative.
‘Lulu Belhatchett,’ it said, ‘is at twenty-two Hornbeam Crescent. Please open the door for her. Immediately.’
Lulu, as it happened, was not the only one on the doorstep. Standing next to her was the inspector and, in his right hand, he was holding a manuscript. It was encased in what looked like a polythene evidence bag.
Oh, no, thought George. Someone else who wants Esmeralda to read his fucking novel.
Esmeralda had read many of George’s novels. She had even managed to finish the one about the son of a bank manager who had gone to Oxford, dreamed of being a poet and ended up as a bank manager in Putney. When she had asked him, very tentatively, if he thought it was autobiographical, he had stormed out of the room, threatening never to speak to her again.
‘I found this,’ said Hobday, ‘in Miss Pearmain’s flat. It’s in an ev
idence bag because, whatever its literary merits, evidence is what it is.’ He squinted through the wrapper at the title page and read aloud, ‘We Do Not Go Down to the Sea in Ships!’ He shrugged. ‘Not,’ he said, ‘that the book has much to do with sailing. It’s mainly about a witch who goes around poisoning people. Including her own mother, who is also a witch. Although not as good a witch as the daughter. Who is called Fragga. The mother is called Jessica.’
‘Oh,’ said Stephen. ‘Oh.’
‘It’s not my kind of thing,’ said Hobday. ‘I like a bit more story and a bit less blood.’
‘Why are you telling us this, Inspector?’ said Stephen. ‘What on earth does it have to do with my sister’s suicide?’
‘If it was suicide,’ said Hobday. ‘If it was suicide.’
He cleared his throat and reached into another folder, underneath the evidence bag. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is from chapter twenty-four. We made a copy of a particular paragraph. The heroine is just about to throw herself off Putney Bridge. She writes a suicide note which she sends to her mother. I’ll read it to you. “I want to die. This is the way I want to do it. I am sorry. I know finding my body will not be easy. I cannot help that. I am sorry for what I have done. I have done wicked, wicked things. I am sorry. I have killed. I have murdered. I have taken the lives of the innocent. In England and on the Continent. I pushed those people under the train at the Gare du Nord! I have deprived my good, kind brother – the wisest and gentlest man I ever knew – of the precious gift of life. I have sent him down to the Dark Kingdom where the Trolls dance on the heads of the slain. Farewell!”’ He looked round the room. ‘We found injuries on Miss Pearmain’s neck consistent with the theory that she was attacked, then hung from the hook in her mother’s flat’s ceiling. Someone who had access to Frigga’s premises pinned this note to her chest. It has been torn off a page in the long-hand version of the manuscript. Hence that jagged tear along the top of the paper. As far as we can see there are no prints on the manuscript either. Whoever did this knew what they were doing. I’m afraid I have to tell you that we are now treating the death of Miss Frigga Pearmain as deliberate, calculated murder.’
PART THREE
He’s dead but he won’t lie down …
Popular song
Chapter Sixteen
Everyone agreed afterwards that it had been a perfect day for a funeral. What you needed, a lot of people said, was dramatic weather. You didn’t want steady sunshine. You certainly did not want continuous rain – even if black umbrellas, and plenty of them, would accentuate the sombre nature of the occasion. What you wanted was a bit of Sturm und Drang, a chance for the Almighty to show his fist and remind the mourners that they, too, were mortal.
George, his mother and sister were finally laid to rest in early September. The day was about as Wagnerian as a South London suburb gets. It was close, humid, in the high twenties and, all along Hornbeam Crescent, bankers and lawyers had been turning this way and that as they searched for sleep in the sticky night. At dawn the sun was brilliant, sparkling in the window opposite number twenty-two, printed in blocks of light on the well-cared-for roofs, warm and golden on the asphalt road.
By ten thirty, however, the clouds had started to build. The stillness of the day was becoming oppressive. The air squatted on the gardens in thick, unbreathable piles, and as those in the Pearmain family who had contrived not to be murdered gathered at what was no longer George and Esmeralda’s, most of the moisture on their faces was from sweat rather than tears.
Esmeralda, George had been flattered to note, had done quite a bit of crying over the last few weeks. Most of it, to his relief, had been done on her own and, as far as he could tell, seemed pretty genuine. He felt, at times, more than a little puzzled that he had come to mean so much to another person. He would have liked, really, for her to love him a little less. It would have made his loss easier to bear. He was not ready for this constant sorrow. What made it even more puzzling, from a beyond-the-grave perspective, was that quite often her tears were accompanied by a recitation of some of his worst qualities.
‘You were appallingly self-centred…’ sob ‘… and really stupid about so many things…’ more sobs ‘… and sometimes you could be really unpleasant!’ Gales of weeping, removal of tufts of hair, burial of face in pillow, etc.
There were moments when he wished that DI Hobday – who had turned out to be married with four daughters – would make the move that he was so obviously contemplating. It would cheer her up. It would be something to look at – and George, these days, was so in need of distraction from the business of being dead that he would not, probably, have left the room even if they got down to a bit of rumpy-pumpy.
She was owed a bit of fun, for God’s sake. After forty years with him. She was certainly owed a better funeral for her other half than the one Stephen and Lulu seemed to have in mind.
He was proud of his wife’s rearguard action in defence of him. She had tried to keep his funeral reasonably free of vulgarity. This was, however, an impossible task. His brother and sister-in-law had gone further and further since their first tentative approaches to the business. Lulu now seemed to think that three coffins did not really make a funeral, even if two were open-topped and all three were carried in by the finest pallbearers money could buy.
‘I think,’ she had said, at one of the many family conferences about how to put Jessica, George and Frigga away for all eternity, ‘we should have a piper!’
‘Why?’ Esmeralda had replied. ‘Are you Scottish?’
It was possible, of course, that Lulu was Scottish, although she had erased all trace of her origins so successfully that it was impossible to tell if she were from Taunton, Inverlochy or Aix-en-Provence. She had claimed all three as her place of birth although, to be fair to her, she had been in each of the places in question and trying to get publicity when she did so.
She had managed to find an unattributed piece of prose that was even worse than the one about the person who has stiffed only being in the next room.
‘You are not gone. You are here. You are there also. You are in the music we have sung. You are the insects beneath our feet and the goats on the high mountains…’ etc., etc. It went on for about twenty minutes. Esmeralda said if anyone tried to read it at the funeral she would heckle them. She had also vetoed the horse-drawn carriage, the string quartet, the Prune singing the lament from Dido and Aeneas and Stephen’s budget version of a twenty-one-gun salute on offer from a friend of his in the Royal Welch Fusiliers.
It was amazing, really, thought George, as he watched his uncle Arthur walk, ramrod straight, up the front path of Hornbeam Crescent, that she hadn’t got outside broadcast cameras down to Putney Vale Crematorium. Now Jessica was safely dead, Arthur was able to bring along his mistress, Felicity de la Tour, always described by his mother as ‘no better than a common prostitute’. Today, thought George, Felicity looked as if being eighty-seven was not going to get in the way of her selling her body for money.
There were other people who had clearly been avoiding George for years. It was at least fifteen since he had seen Henry, Uncle Arthur’s son by his third wife, Dolores. Why on earth had he bothered to turn up now? He’d had absolutely nothing to say to George while he was alive. Why should his having been poisoned make any difference? There was his father’s Welsh friend Dafydd, who arrived with his grandchildren, all under the age of ten and all sobbing violently an hour before kick-off. When Esmeralda, who had never met any of them, asked whether they had met George, Dafydd said they had not, but ‘It’s good for children to see death. They have to learn. None of us is here for ever!’ Dafydd was ninety-eight.
Barry and Maurice were inside the house, looking as helplessly sheepish as they always did in the company of their wives. Their black ties and grey suits gave them the air of prefects about to set off for school.
Esmeralda, who had, for some reason, been put in charge of the catering, was in the kitchen, making sandwiches. Lulu did
not cook, although her table manners were almost as celebrated as she had once been. In the living room, with her, yet not with her, were Geraldine, Otis and Rosalina. Rosalina looked very serious, which was partly because she had always liked Granny and was equally fond of George, but also because her stepmother had addressed her as Charlotte five times in a row.
It had been touch and go, really, whether any of the three starring bodies was going to keep their date at the crematorium. Getting all three out of the clutches of Pawlikowski and his friends had not been easy.
Pawlikowski did not seem very interested in discovering who was thinning out the Pearmain family if, indeed, it was only one person. He was, as George knew to his cost, really into the dead bodies. He had actually asked if he could come to the funeral and had been told (by Hobday) that this was ‘not appropriate’. In some ways, thought George, the man was probably going to be as upset as anyone else to see three-quarters of the Pearmain family burned to a crisp. Pawlikowski was a man who hated to let a dead body go.
Hobday, however, would be there. Esmeralda wanted him there.
George was sitting on his coffin, in the middle of the three hearses, as they pulled out on to Putney Hill and drove towards Tibbet’s roundabout, under the thickening clouds, through heat that was now positively tropical. He thought he owed it to himself to give his reconstructed corpse all the support he could manage in what was clearly going to be a very difficult day for both of them. He was feeling – to his surprise – particularly physical this morning. He felt there even though he wasn’t.
Over the last few weeks, he had got slightly better at walking through solid objects. He had begun with simple tasks, such as pushing what was no longer his index finger through a sheet of paper. He had built up to penetrating furniture with his notional feet. There had been nasty moments. About ten days ago he had got himself stuck in the floor of the upstairs lavatory, but now he seemed able to negotiate pretty much every kind of substance, apart from water and hot soup. Water was really tricky. He had climbed into Esmeralda’s bath and found himself being whirled around as if he were on a fairground ride.
Waking Up Dead Page 21
