Waking Up Dead

by Nigel Williams

  As a child, he had often dreamed of being able to walk through walls. Of being able to listen to people’s most private conversations. He had tried a bit of this over the last dull months but found, to his dismay, that most people behaved in private pretty much as they did in public. They were not inclined to be any less boring when they thought they were unobserved. There were some surprises – not all of them pleasant. He wished he had not stumbled across Mr and Mrs Hohenzollern from number fifty-eight having rear-entry intercourse on their kitchen floor. He had been a little surprised by Veronica Pinker’s views on immigration but, on the whole, life in Putney seemed to be pretty much what he had always suspected it was.

  The flowers, though, he had to admit, were really nice – even if he had no idea who had sent the vast majority of them. He wished he knew their names. This was only going to happen once. He might as well make the most of it.

  He could have wished Hobday was closer to finding out who had murdered him. He was less interested in who had done for Jessica and Frigga but was intrigued to know if it was the same person.

  ‘The murderer,’ Hobday had said, ‘was in Hornbeam Crescent on the night of the murder. Unless they let themselves in with a key, which puts our friend Mabel Dawkins in the frame since she was there earlier in the evening. I like the brother for it. He must have been well pissed off not to be mentioned in the will. Likewise our bearded lesbian friend. I can’t see her shoving Jessica on to the floor but our Beryl might well have done so. Unless it was Frigga. And then someone else took revenge on Frigga. That is a possibility.’

  George had been to only one or two of the meetings Hobday had called to investigate his murder. He was surprised to find how little they resembled the ones you saw on television. There was an astonishing lack of whiteboards. Was he being demanding or did Putney CID have a proper understanding of the importance of the task they were facing? Were they taking his death seriously enough? Some seemed to think George had simply found another ingenious way of wasting police time.

  Not Hobday. George had watched, with admiration, as he paced up and down his tiny office, packing and unpacking his long, bony frame into and out of the worn chair at his overladen desk. He had marvelled at the way the inspector jabbed at the air with his long, bony finger to emphasize a point or underline a question that seemed to come out of nowhere and suggest thought processes of a complexity and intelligence to which his team could never aspire.

  ‘Why,’ he would say, crumpling his yoghurt pot in one huge hand, then throwing it, with extraordinary accuracy, into a wastebin ten feet away while scrabbling in his desk drawer for another, ‘do none of our witnesses agree about the sequence of events on that night at Hornbeam Crescent? Is it because they were all drunk? Or is it because they were all sober?’

  George knew, because he had heard Hobday discuss it with his wife, that at one point the inspector had seriously considered the possibility that Stephen, Lulu, Frigga, the Mullins woman, Vickers and Dawkins had conspired together to get rid of George and Jessica. ‘They all stood to gain by the death of Mr Pearmain and his mum,’ he pointed out, with perfect truth, ‘and I have never heard six people give such contradictory accounts of the same event. It smacks of collusion.’

  George remembered enough of the evening to be absolutely sure they were all too drunk to remember any of it.

  ‘What is the significance of the fact that Frigga Pearmain told us first she thought she might have been responsible and then denied it? Did this have anything to do with the mysterious stranger she was supposed to meet at Jessica Pearmain’s flat on the afternoon she was murdered? What – this is just to make sure you’re awake, DC Bradshaw – is the capital of Sri Lanka?’

  As he went on his questions grew more and more incomprehensible.

  ‘Is there any significance in the fact that, out of our six suspects, no fewer than four have at one time or another been members of sailing clubs? How long does it take to drive from Basingstoke to Putney? Had Frigga Pearmain ever discussed literary matters with the Mullins woman? Exactly how was her body placed in the position in which we found it, and would there have to have been two people involved?’

  No one, including George, had any idea how to answer any of these questions. There was DNA and there were witness statements and weeks of forensic analysis but no one, really, had a clue.

  Apart, George thought, from Hobday. He was not, however, as DC Purves kept reminding him, a team player. His method of leadership was to give long and often entertaining monologues about the characters in the case, but never to tell anyone what he was really thinking. He was particularly obsessed, George was pleased to note, with George.

  ‘What kind of man was George Pearmain? Was he a sexual predator? What do we think of the evidence of the man at NatWest? Why did he tell us Pearmain was “sexist with a filthy mind”? Did he really shag Biskiborne – as three people told us – or was that just a rumour? Why did his mother leave all the money to him? Is not this case, ladies and gentlemen, all about the money? Should we not be following the money?’

  They were trying. It was not an easy task. Mullins had had money – but it looked as if Beryl Vickers had rather substantial gambling debts. Stephen and Lulu had apparently been worth a great deal a few years ago but nobody had yet had access to the audited accounts of their last two years. Mabel Dawkins was, certainly, desperate for money. It seemed her husband was interested in another woman and there was a good chance she would lose her council flat.

  ‘It all hangs,’ said Hobday, ‘on this damned codicil. What was in that codicil?’

  Here Bradshaw was unwise enough to attempt to answer one of his boss’s questions. ‘The name of the murderer, Boss? Perhaps?’

  Hobday gave him a withering glance.

  ‘Frigga Pearmain was, as we know, obsessed with the codicil. She was desperate to find it. Of course she was. It is, I’m sure, the key to the heart of this mystery. It was Jessica’s last word on the subject of whom she loved most. Find that codicil.’

  But they did not find that codicil. They had pulled Frigga’s flat to pieces. They had emptied George’s desk drawers and even discovered his half-finished sonnet to Biskiborne – which Hobday took away as possible evidence – but the codicil was nowhere to be found.

  The hearse was now turning off the road out of London. The crematorium, where George’s father’s had been decanted into the grass all those years ago, was situated just behind a large supermarket and, for a moment, George had the strange impression that the whole cortège was about to stop off and load up with Maris Piper potatoes and packets of frozen peas. As they caught sight of the newly built Commemoration Chapel, he had his first view of the mourners. There seemed to be about three hundred. This, thought George, as the hearse came to a stop at what managed to be both a cute and frightening building, is more like it. Maybe there were even more people. Maybe they had a satellite link.

  This moment of exhilaration was followed by the realization that only a third of the punters had come to see him. It might be less than that. The only faces he recognized, as the back doors of the hearse were opened, were friends of Frigga’s. Well, maybe not friends, exactly. There was a woman who had tried to sue her. There was her psychiatrist. There was the woman from whom she had bought her cat, but at least they were there.

  At the moment, George could not see a single one of his friends. The clouds had massed, bruised violet against the suddenly distressed sun. Somewhere in the distance George was sure he could hear thunder. He stepped out on to the tarmac as four men from the undertaker’s, in grey suits, lifted his coffin and started out for the chapel.

  From the first two cars came Stephen and Lulu. Behind them, Mabel Dawkins, the Mullins woman and Beryl Vickers loitered awkwardly, as Jessica and Frigga, in their turn, were unloaded. George looked from one face to another. One of these five people, he thought, murdered me, and probably my sister and my mother as well. Which one?

  Chapter Seventeen

  Geo
rge’s pallbearers were not finding him easy to carry. None of them was in the peak of condition and the front-left man looked as if he should have been inside with George, rather than lugging him across the tarmac. They were not really keeping in step as they wobbled his mortal remains to the chapel door. Was I that heavy? he thought. I really should have stayed on the Dr Loessmuller Strawberry Diet for a couple of weeks longer.

  As they got to the entrance they very nearly collided with the four men who had been given the easier job of carrying his mother’s coffin. She had also managed to wangle a much classier breed of pallbearer. They were all under thirty-five and managed an almost military precision as they reached pole position in the coffin queue. George had been placed in the middle and behind him, carried by four female pallbearers, came his sister. They were all hefty girls (as she had specified in her will), although the one in the rear-right quadrant was at least six inches shorter than her teammates, which meant that Frigga’s coffin rode into place at a suspiciously jaunty angle.

  Stephen and Lulu had, of course, ended up getting many of the things they had wanted. One of the things Esmeralda thought she had managed to strangle at birth was the idea of playing ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ as the coffins came under starter’s orders. That was the music that boomed out of the loudspeakers. Esmeralda jolted like a frightened horse. ‘Did we agree to this?’ she muttered to Barry.

  ‘I’ve lost count,’ Barry whispered back. ‘I think we should grab the poor old bugger and run off with him. Now.’

  Stephen was watching as the three coffins fanned out as they approached the chapel entrance. All this had been planned. Jessica would move to the far right, George would take up centre position and Frigga be placed on the far left. They would go into the chapel side by side. This was Stephen’s coup de théâtre.

  ‘I want us there,’ he had said, ‘as a family. Together. Frigga, Mum, George. All three of them. Equal in death. Mother always treated us equally. She never had favourites. I want them to go in together. At the same time. As one. In formation. All three of them. Not in a line. Together. Side by side. With Lulu and I walking behind. Side by side. Together. Lulu and I want to walk behind them down the aisle. Side by side.’

  Attention to detail was not Stephen’s strong point. He had not bothered to measure the width of the doorway or calculate the exact amount of space occupied by three coffins and the twelve pallbearers. As George eyed the cortège, moving now at speed towards the fake Gothic door, it became pretty obvious that all three were not going to make it through at the same time. Jessica’s coffin stopped. George’s coffin stopped. Frigga’s coffin stopped. There was a brief, frantic exchange of glances between the eight bearers able to make eye contact with those next to them. The small woman at the rear-right hand corner of Frigga’s tried to look underneath it to see what was going on to the left, stumbled and, for a moment, it looked as if Frigga was going to be tipped out on to the flowerbed next to the chapel.

  Stephen had managed to ensure two out of three coffins were lidless. If he was regretting that decision, in the light of the current situation, he showed no sign of it. His big, circular face, its regularity only broken by that huge ginger moustache, stayed as carefully composed as ever.

  Lulu and I want to walk behind them down the aisle. Side by side.

  As far as George could see, his brother was going to find that rather hard. There was something of a coffin bottleneck.

  ‘Form a line!’ hissed the tall youth who had Jessica’s front-right-hand corner. ‘Form a line! The old lady goes first! Then the bloke! Then the bird ’oo ’ung ’erself!’

  If Stephen heard all of this – and he was close enough to do so – his face gave no sign of it. None of the other pallbearers, as far as George could make out, had heard the youth either.

  ‘Left!’ he hissed again. ‘Move left! Then I’ll go in!’

  All might have been well had it not been for the fact that the only two pallbearers to hear him – perhaps because they were the ones, apart from him, whose heads cleared the coffins – were the rear-left corners of Jessica and George. As a result of which, after the tall youth had nearly lost his grip on his box, the two far-right coffins moved into a diagonal position. Frigga’s team, who had no idea what was happening, simply followed the direction of the others and so, in a matter of seconds, all three coffins were facing away from the chapel entrance at an angle of forty-five degrees.

  The tall youth did not seem to understand what had happened.

  ‘Left!’ he hissed again. ‘I said left!’

  Exactly the same thing happened a second time, and before any of them could do anything about it, all three coffins had moved through a full ninety degrees and were now facing the main road and the exit to it. The mourners, who clearly thought this was some kind of prescribed semi-military ritual, looked on solemnly, their hands folded in reverence. ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ had only been scheduled for fifty-seven seconds and there was an eerie silence as the bearers shuffled sideways.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ hissed the youth again. ‘I said left! Left!’

  Once again the coffins were on the move and the deceased were now, as Stephen had wished, in a line, though facing directly away from the chapel. Perhaps, thought George, this was their cue to get the hell out of it, which might not have been such a bad idea. As if to reinforce this notion, someone inside the crematorium pressed a button and ‘The Wind Beneath My Wings’ boomed out from the loudspeakers at top volume.

  ‘Back!’ hissed the tall youth, now loudly enough to be heard by almost everyone. ‘Back! We’ll go in backwards!’

  All twelve pallbearers now started to move rapidly, and as they reversed smartly into the chapel the two outer coffins ran into the wall with a colossal thud.

  For a moment it looked as if the female foursome were going to lose control of Frigga’s remains. The coffin – a Westminster 200, cheaper than either George’s or Jessica’s – started to slide off the shoulder of the shortest bearer. She pushed hard, in an upwards and forwards direction. The front-left corner banged hard against the right ear of the girl responsible for it.

  ‘Fuck!’ she said, quite loudly. ‘Oh! Fuck!’

  If anyone present was at all embarrassed, they did not show it. Stephen’s face, turned reverently downwards, seemed to have closed for the morning. Lulu, who had been covertly scanning the faces of the mourners to see if she was running the pleasurable risk of being recognized, remained glacially calm.

  ‘Change of plan!’ hissed the tall youth. ‘We go in a line! The middle one first! The fat geezer!’

  He was clearly worried that his team were going to start running the whole routine again – and, by this time, George’s pallbearers were showing distinct signs of strain. There was, he thought, a strong possibility they were going to drop him if they didn’t get moving fast.

  ‘Go in backwards!’ hissed the tall youth, who had clearly had the same worry. ‘Backwards! Now!’

  At least, thought George, I’m going in first – even if it looks like it’s going to be a breech death. His coffin wobbled, ahead of the others, into the non-denominational gloom of the chapel. There was a nasty moment when it looked as if the newly promoted lead bearer was going to collide with one of the pews but somehow or other George’s posse managed to reverse into the spot just below where the altar would have been if there had been an altar and, without any consultation, go into a three-point turn to get George’s head to face the furnace.

  ‘Lovely bit of parking,’ observed Jonathan Freeman from number thirty.

  The all-female team, who had been urged down the aisle second by the tall youth, ran into the bottom corner of George’s coffin just as it was taking up its proper place. Frigga, whom nobody had thought to nail down prior to these proceedings, began to roll to what was now her right.

  This was where, of course, Frigga’s mother was docking, on the far right of the now endangered threesome. As Jessica moved into the first phase of her three-
hundred-and-sixty-degree turn, to come to rest next to her only girl child, there seemed a strong chance that Frigga’s women were going to make some comment on their cargo’s issues by tipping her out on to her mum.

  Frigga’s head was now lolling out of her Westminster 200. ‘Lolling’, George reflected, was not really an appropriate word. Whatever Pawlikowski had done to her neck the people who came after had made damn sure there was no wriggle room between shoulder and chin. She was well rigid. She poked over the edge of her box as alert as a conductor’s baton. When the pallbearer on her upper left side popped her back inside she made a loud, almost metallic noise as her head hit the deck. Whatever they had done to his sister, thought George, they had been a little too free with the formaldehyde.

  Stephen still showed no sign of being aware that any of this was happening. He walked down the aisle, Lulu at his side, still apparently unaware that his mother and sister’s corpses had very nearly been shaken and stirred together. His chestnut toupee lowered like a sunflower at twilight, he shuffled sideways into his pew with the gravity and self-absorption of an actor or a politician putting grief on display.

  There was no vicar. They had finally compromised on the idea of a funeral celebrant, someone Lulu had found on the internet. He lived locally. He had been to Oxford. He had done a three-day course on being a celebrant.

  ‘What we don’t want,’ Stephen had kept saying, ‘is one of those people who don’t even know the names of Jessica and George and … er … my sister. This bloke comes round and does research. He asks us all sorts of detailed questions and builds up a picture of the dead person.’

  ‘I don’t think I like the sound of that,’ said Esmeralda.

  ‘Oh, no no no,’ Lulu cut in quickly, allowing one jewelled hand to lie lightly across the arm of her not quite relative. ‘His questions will be in no way personal.’