‘In that case,’ said Esmeralda, ‘how is he going to find out anything at all?’
Lulu had responded with a silvery laugh that managed to combine tolerance and slight contempt in almost exactly equal measure. ‘Oh, Esmeralda,’ she said. ‘You are so funny.’
As the celebrant waddled out to stand at the lectern, he looked down at the two visible corpses with a deep, thoughtful expression that, George thought, was almost certainly a result of trying to work out which was which. Neither of them were anything like their photographs. Why was that? Incompetent embalming?
George looked down, with his celebrant, at the woman who had given him life. She was wearing her favourite skirt and jacket, which had caused something of a panic in the days leading up to the funeral. She had asked to be buried in it in her will and, at first no one could find it. It was Esmeralda who had remembered, only days before the ceremony, that it had been sent to the dry cleaner’s, and now here she was, lying in her coffin, looking as if she was all got up for a dinner party, ready, as always, to be fascinated by strangers.
George knelt on the front end of his coffin and blew hard into Frigga’s face. He thought he saw a strand of her hair tremble slightly. Not enough for anyone to notice, but if he could make Frigga’s heavy tresses move, however slightly, he might get more purchase on Jessica. She had very fine grey hair – usually set by Mabel Dawkins but now combed out nearly straight, accentuating the Native American look she seemed to have developed since death.
The celebrant was going on at length about her arthritis as George made a mental picture of himself as one of those rosy-cheeked spirits shown blowing out the wind in classically themed paintings. He had, suddenly, full red cheeks – as he had had when a boy – and he was puffing as he had on a camping trip, trying to start a fire in some dank field. To his great surprise and joy, it seemed to be working. Jessica’s hair stirred slightly and then, responding to the current of the breeze he was generating, blew back against her face, as if she was out walking – which she had loved to do – and raising her head to the thing she had invoked as a familiar god of George’s childhood: fresh air. ‘You’d be much better off in the fresh air!’ and ‘What you need is some fresh air!’
Still no one seemed to have noticed. It had taken an age. The celebrant was now trying to find something to say about Frigga – and, having failed miserably, rounded off with a few rhetorical questions: ‘Why did she become a librarian? Was she ever really happy? Why did she never find the right person? Why was she murdered in such a brutal and cruel fashion?’ George gave it one more push and was rewarded by the sight of the lapel of his mother’s jacket rising slightly in the air and falling back to reveal, in her top right-hand pocket, a neatly folded, large sheet of paper.
George was close enough to read a fragment of the word heading the sheet. ‘CODIC’ was what it said, and he did not need to blow it into exposure any further to know that the missing letters were I and L and that this was Jessica’s addition to her last will and testament. If it hadn’t melted in the dry cleaner’s, which was presumably where it had been while everyone was looking for it.
Had anyone else seen it? If they hadn’t, in about fifteen minutes the codicil was going into the furnace with his mother, and a vital clue as to who stood to gain most from George, Jessica and Frigga’s murder would be gone for ever.
It didn’t look as if anybody had.
The celebrant had finished with Frigga. He closed with a list of the things Frigga hadn’t done – win the egg-and-spoon race at school, publish a novel, pass grade eight on the recorder – with the intention of showing what a plucky spirit she was to have tried and not succeeded at so many things. The result was merely to make everyone even more aware of how utterly miserable her life had been. Being hanged had, clearly, been the most exciting thing that had happened to her. As the congregation was trying to adjust to this unique dose of misery, Stephen added to the gaiety of the moment by howling like a dog. Lulu clutched his hand and, to George’s surprise, his brother pulled it away, slightly petulantly.
He had been fond of Frigga, that must be it; and Lulu was as little interested in her as she was in any other of the Pearmains.
The Prune was brought forward and, accompanied by a long-nosed youth with a portable keyboard, gave them all the benefit of Mozart’s ‘Laudate Dominum’. If that was what it was. It sounded, to George, more like ‘Michael, Row The Boat Ashore’. Barry and Maurice each read a poem. One by Thomas Hardy, the other by Philip Larkin. The Larkin poem had the word ‘fuck’ in it, which pleased George greatly. Esmeralda started to cry, and George, who could not bear to watch her, started to blow, even harder, at his mother’s jacket.
After Barry and Maurice had finished, Stephen came to the front of the chapel and, placing what George thought was a rather patronizing hand on his coffin, began his eulogy.
‘A lot of people,’ he began, ‘have told me I should not do this.’
‘My feelings precisely,’ said George.
‘It is not easy. It is hard. This is my sister. That is my mother. In the box in the middle is my brother. His wife, Esmeralda, my sister-in-law, felt that people would not want to look at his face. I don’t know why this was. He was not a good-looking man but I, personally, would have liked us all to have been able to gaze on him. But obviously we cannot do that. As he is in his coffin. That is Esmeralda’s right and prerogative. He was my brother but he was also her husband. And, of course, the son of the woman who lies here before me in her coffin. Jessica.’
‘Get on with it,’ said George.
Stephen, however, did not seem able to get on with it. He was staring down at their mother in what looked like genuine astonishment. He was the one, thought George, who had wanted the poor old thing laid out like a fish on a slab. Was it that the sight of her had woken some genuine regret in the way he had treated her for the last fifteen years of her life? Once Lulu had got hold of him he had never come to see her, never even phoned her for weeks on end. Maybe the sight of her dead face had finally made him realize what he had, or rather had not, done. Perhaps there had been some point to Jessica’s will after all. It had been a brutal thing to do but sometimes, in families, brutality is the only way to communicate.
The silence in the chapel continued. Some people, obviously, felt that Stephen was in the grip of a powerful emotion and lowered their eyes tactfully as he stared at the figure of Jessica lying in her box before him. Stephen turned to the congregation.
‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘but I have to do this.’
With which he reached into the coffin. There was a thrill of horror in the first few rows as he bent over the casket. Could they see him groping for something inside it? Or were they just afraid he was going to pull the corpse out and kiss it, Hamlet-style? Had there been some terrible mistake at the undertaker’s and were they, perhaps, trying to fob him off with the wrong body? Eventually his hand emerged clutching a large, official-looking piece of paper.
Outside there was the first growl of thunder. George was not sure who else could see what he was clutching, but he could. It was definitely the codicil to Jessica’s will.
Chapter Eighteen
George felt a great deal better after he had been cremated.
It was not what he had expected. He had thought he might find the experience depressing, but it seemed to have the same sort of effect as going to the gym for a workout or trying out one of those diets that are supposed to leave your insides as clean as a new bathroom.
He watched with keen interest as the crematorium staff took the handles off his coffin and slid it into the furnace. He stayed to observe them sifting through what was left of him, picking out the bones and whirling them through something called a cremolator, after which he resembled the kind of thick grained powder that Esmeralda sprinkled on the flowerbeds.
‘I can move on,’ he said to himself, as he slouched out of the back of the furnace building and wandered through the crowd, inspecting the large number
of floral tributes, inscribed with names he did not recognize. ‘I’m beginning to develop as a dead person. I’ve managed to make a limited impact on the physical world. Who knows what lies ahead?’
It was possible, he decided, that death in its early stages was as difficult to deal with as life for a newborn. Death was, as they kept saying in all the Christian bollocks that dealt with the subject, only the beginning. He was a learner – but he was a learner who was, at last, making real progress. He had to put his lack of a future behind him. This was the only way.
His funeral had ended almost as badly as it had begun. Stephen had tried to get his triple eulogy back up to speed but it was clear his heart was not really in it. He had started to talk, for some reason, about George’s pension, which was, as far as George could make out, rather better than Stephen’s. He was clearly only interested in Jessica’s codicil and finding out to whom she had left her money. In fact, as soon as he had finished speaking he went back to his seat, opening the paper in a rather furtive manner, as soon as he had sat down.
What he read did not seem to please him, George thought.
He found himself, as the first few drops of rain started to fall, in the middle of a rather mangy patch of grass. There was a small notice stuck into the earth at the side of it that read ‘SCATTERING AREA’. Lulu was standing next to Esmeralda, who was gazing at the notice with a searching, numbed expression.
‘Are you going to have George scattered?’ Lulu was saying. Esmeralda did not seem to hear her. Lulu was not very interested in the answer anyway. She kept looking at Stephen, who, ever since he had read the codicil, was looking more and more anxious. This codicil business was clearly at the heart of the motive for murdering quite so many members of the Pearmain family. Someone had murdered Jessica. Or, at least, pushed her to the floor so violently it had killed her. Whoever this person was had also killed George and, later, Frigga. It was, thought George, most likely to have been his brother. Stephen, after all, would have come into all Jessica’s millions once his sibling had been eliminated. He was perfectly capable of killing George – indeed, as far as George could make out, he had vaguely wanted to do so since prep school. He could quite easily have had a quick look at the will and decided to get rid of all his family in short order.
Points against this argument?
Stephen was fond of Frigga. Not only that: he had a perfect alibi for her murder. He had also, in spite of his appalling behaviour to her, been fond of his mother. Most importantly, however, he would have had to know that the codicil was in his favour, and no one had yet seen it.
He was the prime suspect in this case. No doubt about it. The only argument against his guilt that George could see at the moment was that Stephen and Lulu were apparently absolutely loaded. Did they need a few million quid? Probably not – but, then, rich people always needed more money. The real question was whether Jessica’s codicil was, ultimately, in his favour or not.
George had to get a look at it. It was, for the moment, firmly in the inside pocket of Stephen’s jacket.
He looked around him, even as he felt, without feeling, more drops of rain on his face. The clouds were rolling in from the south-west with military menace. Geraldine, who had been granted two minutes with Lulu, was dumped at the furthest possible point from anyone she might know, while Lulu returned to bestow the favours of her celebrity on anyone lucky enough to recognize her.
‘I hate her,’ Rosalina was saying to her mother.
‘No, you don’t,’ Geraldine was replying.
‘Yes, I do.’
When he had found out where the money was going, which, as Hobday kept on saying, was the way to approach this case, George was going to start on the heavy-duty ghost action. He was not going to stop at creating a small breeze in the area of his mother’s coffin. He was going to go out there and get some answers. After that, he was done with Putney. It was too limited. He had to break out. Where were all the other dead people? Where was Shakespeare? Where was Lenin? Where was Thomas Cromwell? Hadn’t he lived in Putney? Why hadn’t Robespierre or Richard III popped up to share a few aperçus about the French Revolution or Tudor England? Where was his father? Where was Toby Taylor, that bloke from the NatWest who had jumped in front of a tube train in 1992? George had always wanted to ask him why he had done it. Was it just working for the bank for thirty years? Taylor, even badly mangled, would at least be someone to talk to.
‘I hope,’ Stephen was saying to Uncle Arthur, Cousin Eliza and the Prune, who looked as if she was hoping to get in another few verses of ‘Laudate Michael Row The Dominum Ashore’, ‘you will come back to the house for the, er, funeral baked meats.’
‘The house’, thought George. He means my house – except that it isn’t mine any more, is it? George had always enjoyed playing the host but this did not seem an option as far as his funeral party was concerned. There were going to be no opportunities for him to sing ‘The Mountains of Mourne’ or do his famous impression of Nick Clegg being buggered by a goat. He was going to have to use the occasion to see if any of the likely suspects betrayed themselves.
Esmeralda had laid in drink so he hoped that someone would let something slip. The key question was, had anyone, apart from him, seen Stephen pocket the piece of paper from Jessica’s jacket? Stephen had had his back to the congregation but there must have been someone who …
George stopped. The Mullins woman, a little way from Stephen, Lulu and the rest of them, was looking suspiciously at George’s brother. She saw, thought George. She saw! Which meant that she would be keeping a close eye on Stephen at the party. His brother did not seem unduly keen to let anyone else know he had found the document for which everyone had been searching. If George was going to get it out to the public he was going to need an ally from the land of the living. As Esmeralda, Barry and Maurice went towards their car, George, with a new sense of purpose, bounced across the grass towards Stephen and Lulu. It was starting to rain harder now and people were shaking out umbrellas and hurrying away from the chapel. Presumably, once his brother and sister-in-law were alone, they would discuss whatever Stephen had seen on the elusive piece of paper.
When George got to the car he found he was reaching for the handle of the rear door, just as he would have done if alive. To his surprise he had the illusion that his hands were closing round the metal, as he heard Stephen click open the central-locking system and, even more surprising, that he was actually opening the door. That it was moving in response to his touch. If this was what was happening then, surely, not only Stephen and Lulu but any number of other observers would have been able to see something extraordinary – a door opening and closing by itself. George could have sworn he heard it snap shut as he settled back in the expensive leather of the rear seat.
Nobody seemed to react. Had anyone seen? Was this purely another illusion generated by a man who was himself an illusion, a shadow of a shadow of a shadow? The story of my life, thought George, as he studied the big, secure, breathing forms of his brother and sister-in-law.
‘I thought,’ said Stephen, as they pulled out of the car park, ‘that it went very well.’
How many funerals has he been to? thought George. If that was his idea of a good one he needs to attend a few more – and soon. It was the worst fucking funeral George had ever been to – and he had been to a few recently. If they ever got round to ranking his Last Rites, it was going to get the kind of reviews handed out to Mein Kampf by the Jewish Chronicle. There had been moments, back in the crematorium, when he had thought the whole thing was a carefully calculated insult.
They were directly behind Esmeralda, Barry and Maurice, who seemed to be riding with Stephen’s first wife and children. Behind them were the Mullins woman, Beryl Vickers and Mabel Dawkins, all of whom seemed to be chatting away with the animation of witches in the throes of a particularly important sabbat. Behind them were Hobday and his wife, a tall, melancholy woman, who did not seem to be talking at all.
‘He had no id
ea, did he, really?’ said Stephen.
He was, presumably, referring to George, rather than the celebrant. Unlike George, the celebrant had been his idea. Stephen always liked his own ideas.
‘Hopeless,’ said Lulu, staring out of the window at the rain, now falling heavily across the two-lane carriageway leading back into town. Suddenly she added, with a contained fury that surprised George, in spite of what he knew about her, ‘How could she do that? How could she? What was your mother thinking?’ Her face darkened. ‘She was senile,’ she went on. ‘She’d lost her mind. Either that or she wanted to punish you. She always wanted to punish you. And you sat there and took it and let Georgy Porgy be smothered with attention. Mummy and Daddy’s darling. Leaving it all to him! And now her! My God! Have you no spine at all? What were you thinking of? And look what she’s done now! Look at it!’
She was holding the codicil. George leaned forward and read. It was his mother’s usual fluent, slightly gushing style. He could hear her voice in each sentence. However hard Lulu tried to clear the prose from any trace of Jessica as she read, by pert, conspiratorial looks sideways to Stephen, or sometimes with elaborately raised eyebrows and the careful placing of inverted commas round phrases she obviously found absurd, it was Jessica who came through.
‘In the event that my eldest son George should die before the wishes expressed in this will are carried out I ask that all my estate be passed to my oldest friend, Audrey Mullins. Mullins has always been a tower of strength to me and I am sure she can be relied on to divide my estate fairly between those who have a claim on it.’
Lulu set the paper on her knee. ‘What? What was she thinking?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Stephen. ‘I don’t know.’
There was another long silence between them. If George was hoping for a Macbeth-style conversation in which they would snarl, gibber and discuss their joint career in murder, he was disappointed. There was something curiously unprivate about their conversation – as if they both suspected they might be being recorded. Sometimes Stephen would look sideways at Lulu, like a rabbit that had just caught sight of a snake it hoped hadn’t seen it, but if Lulu registered his nervous glances in her direction she showed no sign of it. When she finally spoke it was in the lazy, composed drawl with which she confronted her wider public.
Waking Up Dead Page 23
