Waking Up Dead

by Nigel Williams

  Lulu – to George’s surprise – had not a trace of blood on her. She stood over the corpse, completely calm, and wiped the handle of the carving knife carefully with a tissue she produced from her handbag. Then, with the same ease and assurance, she crossed to the prone figure of Mabel Dawkins, slipped the knife into her right hand and stood back to admire her handiwork. The codicil was still in Mullins’s fist. Again, with great precision and care, Lulu, wrapping her hand in tissue paper first, smeared blood from the blade of the carving knife across Mabel Dawkins’s sodden dress. Then, satisfied, she took one more look at the two supine figures, straightened herself up, took a vanity mirror from her bag and, in her own time, made her way carefully back down the garden.

  When she got to the patio there were two or three mourners standing out in the night but none of them seemed to see her. Moving still with the grace and precision she had employed to such good effect on 321 walk-downs in front of the studio audience for Come Sit On My Knee she re-entered society. By the time she reached the hall, where Stephen was slumped on the lower stairs, his head in his hands, she seemed no more than slightly damp.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  One thing was clear about this. George was no nearer to knowing who had poisoned him. There had been a moment, out there in the garden, when he had wondered whether Stephen and Lulu might be some kind of double-act along the lines laid down by Mr and Mrs Cawdor. They played golf together. They played bridge together. Perhaps they also committed atrocious murders together. But Lulu had been in Basingstoke on the night he died. Could it have been, after all, an accident? George was a little disappointed at that idea. It was nice to have someone to blame for being dead.

  There was something about the swift savagery with which she had despatched Mullins that suggested she might well be the person who had strung up George’s sister. She had been a Pearmain, and Lulu obviously did not approve of Pearmains, apart, possibly, from the one to whom she was married. Although, from what George had seen of the inside of their marriage, she was only prepared to give very limited endorsement to his brother.

  It was clear, too, from the way in which Lulu picked up the conversation with her husband in the most artless, casual manner, as she came in from slashing, slicing and skewering, that Stephen had no idea whatsoever that his wife went around stabbing people when she thought there were no spectators in the vicinity.

  ‘I’m a little tired,’ she whispered, in her most coquettish tone, to Stephen, as she sat next to him on the stairs. ‘I’ll have a drink and then we should go.’

  Well, you would be tired. You do need a drink, I’m sure. Inflicting multiple knife wounds – even on a defenceless woman of ninety-four – can be thirsty work. You need a lie-down, Lulu. And to get out of here before someone discovers the body.

  George was actually quite keen on the idea of her leaving. There was no reason why she should have noticed the Panasonic camera over by the fence, as she was showing off a few of her routines from the scherma di stiletto siciliano, but the longer she stayed in Hornbeam Crescent the more likely she was to notice it was there. Perhaps, now he seemed to have developed a few basic poltergeist skills, it was time to practise a few on Lulu. It might be nice to nip out into the garden, pick up the bloodied carving knife and hold it before her, the handle towards her hand. She was well overdue for a fatal vision and George was clearly the man to supply it.

  There was a gas bill on the hall table. One of the many he was now never going to pay. George went over to it and, trying to repeat the casual, unthought-out way he had grabbed hold of his video camera, reached out for it. To his annoyance, his fingers slipped through it and it remained where it had been before, lying just to the left of a reminder from Amnesty and a letter from an estate agent asking George if he would, perhaps, like to sell his property. He swiped at it, violently this time, but still was unable to connect. What was all this about? Had his sudden ability to touch material objects, even to move them from place to place, even – my God! – to work a video camera (a pretty remarkable achievement for a dead person) suddenly evaporated as definitively as had his own heart, brain, lungs and stomach?

  It seemed he had acquired these talents to perform some specific function. He had been granted the ability to generate a breeze and, as a result, had put the codicil on public display. If he had not been able to use the camera, there would have been no clear proof of Lulu’s guilt. Could it be that, instead of being in Christian limbo or the throes of Buddhist rebirth, George was trapped in a destiny laid down for him by the all-powerful God of the Muslims? Whatever was happening to him, he felt, once again, that agonizing sense of his own powerlessness that was still, overall, the defining characteristic of being no longer alive.

  He turned angrily towards Stephen and Lulu to be rewarded by the sight of Beryl Vickers, who was clutching at the sleeve of DI Hobday. He seemed, as far as George could make out, to be on the verge of saying his goodbyes to Esmeralda. As far as he was aware, of course, the discovery of the codicil had not led to any spectacular outburst or revelation. He was back to the painful and difficult task of establishing the guilt of his suspects by firm evidential proof.

  ‘Inspector,’ Beryl was saying, in a quiet, pleading voice, ‘I can’t find Audrey.’

  Hobday gave her a quick, sympathetic glance and immediately started to ask all the right questions. It did not take him long to establish that Mullins was no longer on the property and that her car was still in the road outside. All this time Lulu was watching him, George noticed, but her face and manner betrayed nothing. In fact she went over to Beryl and whispered to her that she was sure Audrey had just gone out for a nice walk and if she could do anything to help she was at her disposal. Indeed, when DC Purves suggested they search the garden, Lulu was one of the first to volunteer.

  Quite a large number of guests joined in the hunt for Mullins. Nat Pinker was particularly keen. He got hold of a walking stick and, outside, began to belabour Esmeralda’s flowerbeds, in a manner clearly derived from watching police carrying out intensive quests for missing persons on heath or moorland. Veronica Pinker was sure she had seen Beryl upstairs. Perhaps, she said, she had got locked in the lavatory. It was Esmeralda who pointed out that not only was Mullins missing but also Mabel Dawkins did not appear to have returned from her drunken trip down the garden.

  That was when Lulu said, in a soft, concerned voice, ‘She was very drunk, wasn’t she? And very angry indeed. About the money.’

  The rain had stopped. Esmeralda, Stephen, Lulu, Hobday, Purves and the Pinkers worked their way, slowly and methodically, down to the rose trellis and into the untended land beyond it. It was Esmeralda who saw Mullins first and it wasn’t long before Hobday, who was next to her, caught sight of Mabel Dawkins.

  Dawkins was beginning to stir. Perhaps the voices had wakened her. She shook herself like a dog. She raised a hand to her face and found, to her obvious surprise, that she was holding a bloodstained carving knife. She looked at it with great attention. ‘Blimey!’ she said, and then again, ‘Blimey!’ Still, apparently, unaware of the search party she threw the knife out into the darkness. She continued to stare up into the night sky. ‘I never done nuffink!’ she said. ‘I did not do it! I emphatically did not kill anyone!’

  She turned her face to her left. She saw Audrey Mullins’s body. She screamed. She saw Inspector Hobday. She saw Esmeralda. She screamed again. ‘Not me, Guv!’ she said to Hobday. ‘Not me! Honest!’

  Hobday ignored her. He began to talk to DC Purves in low, urgent tones. Esmeralda, who was clearly getting more and more used to crime-scene etiquette, began to steer people back down the garden towards the house. She put her arm round Beryl, who had started to cry.

  ‘Come with me, Beryl,’ George heard her say. ‘We’ll find who did this.’

  ‘We will,’ said Lulu, with every appearance of sincerity. Very soon, there were only Hobday, Purves and two other detectives in plainclothes up by the body. They still, to George’s chagrin,
did not appear to have seen the video camera on its tripod, over by the fence. Had Lulu seen it? It was possible. If only he could create some diversion in the area nearby. Might it be that whatever force was driving things around here would allow that to happen? He stood by the tripod and did a bit of howling and screeching. Hobday, who seemed to be phoning Pawlikowski, paid no attention.

  A large, grey shape was padding towards him through the puddles, in which, being dead, he showed no interest. Partridge, stalking through familiar territory, did not stop to cock his leg against the fig tree, as he had used to do. He had come to talk to George.

  ‘Have you remembered who killed me?’ said George.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Partridge.

  ‘Think!’ said George.

  Partridge thought for a moment. Hobday was still on the phone. Purves and one of the male officers were bending over Mullins’s body. Another female police officer was sitting on the soaking grass next to Mabel Dawkins, who was still dully repeating her innocence. She had not yet, George noted, made any mention of Lulu. She was, obviously, in a state of shock.

  ‘You were always saying hurtful things about me,’ Partridge was saying, ‘when I was in the room. You used to say I was stupid…’

  ‘Well, I – you are. I mean you were sometimes … er…’ began George. Then he stopped.

  ‘But,’ said Partridge, ‘I do not think you deserved to die.’

  ‘No,’ said George. ‘That’s more or less my view of the situation. I wonder if you … er … remember who exactly it was who … er…’

  Partridge and he were standing immediately next to the tripod and camera. To George’s surprise, Hobday, who had finished his conversation with Pawlikowski, seemed to be looking in their direction. ‘Looking’ did not really do justice to what he was doing. He was gawping. He was gawking. He was goggling. He was staring. He was gazing, ogling and peering. When he finally spoke it was in a sort of shocked, tentative tone that was utterly untypical of the policeman.

  ‘Here, boy!’ he said. ‘Here, boy!’

  For a moment, George thought he was talking to him. If he was, he didn’t like the man’s tone. He might be dead but that was no reason to talk to him as if he were a bloody dog. He—

  ‘Over there,’ Hobday was saying. ‘Over there by the fence. I thought I saw an Irish wolfhound.’

  ‘Not a lot of them about, Boss,’ said Purves.

  ‘It was there!’ said Hobday. ‘It was right there. Next to the camera!’

  For a moment he didn’t seem to realize what he had said. Then, as the other police officers followed his gaze and saw the camera, the tripod (although not, as far as George could make out, him or his dog), the presence or absence of Partridge at the crime scene was completely forgotten. He had, thought George, served his purpose, as dogs do, and Hobday, Purves and the other two – Mabel Dawkins forgotten for the moment – clustered round George’s Panasonic in the grip of mystification, then, as Hobday started to rewind and images began to appear on the screen, excitement.

  ‘Jesus, Boss!’ said Purves. ‘Jesus!’

  George positioned himself between Hobday and his detective constable. As the inspector ran the tape forward he felt a quiet pride in what he had done. The framing was first class. The exposure, given the prevailing conditions, was perfectly judged. There was no loss of focus. He had refrained from zooming in on the gory bits. It was, even unedited, a compelling piece of cinema. It had a quality, he thought, of Cartier-Bresson or Kieślowski, a restrained wide shot giving the audience an authoritative, detached and yet somehow compassionate account of a sixty-year-old woman hacking an unarmed pensioner to death.

  ‘My God!’ said Purves. ‘My God! And I used to listen to her on the radio! I really liked Come Sit On My Knee!’

  ‘I think,’ said Hobday, ‘that Lulu Belhatchett’s television career is probably over.’

  George was not at all sure this was the case. In his experience convictions for a violent murder could be just the thing to revive a flagging media career. From the look of them, Hobday’s two sidekicks were perfectly capable of flogging his footage to YouTube before the night was out. He was not going to take that lying down. He might be dead but his work should remain in copyright for the next seventy-five years.

  Hobday turned towards where Mabel Dawkins had been lying only to find she had been watching George’s footage with the others.

  ‘Fuckin’ ’ell!’ she whispered. ‘She’s a sickoperth! She’s a strawberry short of a punnet, she is! She is a homosexual maniac!’

  Hobday looked at her with a certain degree of sympathy. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘you may have a point, Mrs Dawkins.’

  Pawlikowski was coming down the garden towards them. As soon as Hobday saw him, the pathologist’s body started to quiver. The man seemed to know, without even asking, that his colleague had momentous news for him. Hobday, as he had done in the morgue, raised his hand and the two high-fived each other. Then, without going into any details, the inspector simply said, ‘Result!’

  ‘Result!’ echoed Pawlikowski.

  ‘Am I the best or am I the best?’ said Hobday.

  In no time at all the two men were doing their Gathering Peascods routine all round the rough grass. It was wilder and more abandoned than the dance they had done in the morgue. At times Hobday would leap into the air with a kind of scissor-kick and, although he had not seen any of George’s footage and could have had no idea what they were celebrating, the pathologist seemed to understand immediately how important it was. At one stage he loosened the belt of his trousers and George had the impression he was about to take out his penis.

  Hobday, perhaps to head off this development, went into the mime version of a knife fight. Again, it was more furious and abandoned than the routine in the morgue. Pawlikowski feinted left. Hobday feinted right. Then Hobday waggled his head from side to side. This time his chanting had a more African than Arab tonality. Pawlikowski picked this up and started to waggle his behind in a manner that George found particularly offensive.

  ‘You is de be-e-est, Boss!’ he moaned.

  ‘I is de be-e-e-st!’ responded Hobday.

  They had all, quite clearly, forgotten that Mabel Dawkins was there. Quite suddenly, Hobday stopped. There was total silence. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Hobday. ‘I’m very, very sorry, Mrs Dawkins.’

  ‘Not at all!’ said Mabel. ‘I was enjoyin’ it.’

  When Hobday had recovered himself he turned to the pathologist. ‘She’ll have wiped the handle clean,’ he said, ‘the way she did with the suicide note, but I don’t think we need worry too much about that. I’d like to see her posh fucking lawyers argue their way out of that footage.’

  ‘How,’ said Purves, ‘did it get there, Boss? The camera?’

  ‘The husband?’ The inspector shrugged. ‘Don’t ask, Barbara. Never look a gift horse in the mouth, eh? And now perhaps all you lads and lasses would like to come inside and watch me arrest someone. I haven’t done that in ages. And it will give me particular pleasure to do it for Ms Belhatchett. I’m not a fan of her interviewing style. She was, I thought, very rude to Barbara Cartland.’

  With that, he marched off down the garden, leaving George alone with a dead lesbian and the spectre of a deceased wolfhound. Partridge did not seem to have any more to say for himself and, as there was no sign of a wraith-like version of Mullins climbing out of her corpse to join in the fun, George took himself off in their direction. He, too, was looking forward to seeing Lulu getting booked for homicide. Perhaps she would shed some light on who had tipped hemlock leaves into his parsnip wine.

  As he came back into the kitchen, he saw that people were sitting or standing in small groups. No one was talking. Beryl Vickers was crying quietly as Esmeralda, holding her hands, made small, wordless noises of sympathy. George stared at Lulu. It was amazing, really, how quickly she had managed to return to looking as if she was just about to read the six o’clock news. She fluttered her eyelashes lightly in the inspect
or’s direction as he came into the room.

  ‘Any clues, Inspector?’ she said, with the same honeyed insincerity with which she had begun the interview that had become known in the business as ‘Belhatchett 4 Miliband 0’.

  ‘We have some very interesting evidence,’ said Hobday. ‘Very interesting indeed. In relation to which I am now obliged to say…’ He cleared his throat and looked round, briefly, at his team. Pawlikowski glanced sideways at Purves. They exchanged furtive, complicit half-smiles. Hobday’s voice dropped nearly an octave and his right foot moved forward as if he was about to present arms on a military parade. ‘… Lulu Belhatchett,’ he continued, in what was still a surprisingly conversational tone, ‘I am arresting you for the murder of Audrey Mullins on the sixth of September 2013 in the rear garden of twenty-two Hornbeam Crescent, Putney. You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you may later rely on in court. Anything you do say, now or later, may be given in evidence.’

  Nobody moved to handcuff her. Nobody spoke, except Stephen’s daughter (George had forgotten she was still there), who put her hand to her mouth and said, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ!’ Otherwise, there was total silence in the room. After Hobday had uttered the familiar yet strangely unfamiliar words, it was as if he had never spoken.

  Lulu stretched like a cat. She yawned elaborately. ‘I have always thought,’ she said, ‘that there was something clumsy about the British caution. “It may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you may later rely on in court.” Is that clear? Do you think it is clear, Inspector?’

  Stephen’s mouth was open. His right hand seemed to be shaking badly. He, too, had been out in the rain and the weather had not been kind to his toupee. It looked, George thought, like a detail from a not very distinguished Victorian painting. Hay Making Interrupted by the Storm. Or A Gillie Rescued from the Flood near Loch Lomond. There was a puzzled, peasant quality about him suddenly. He looked at Hobday. He looked at his wife. Then he looked at his phone.