Waking Up Dead by Nigel Williams

Author:Nigel Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250092472
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Chapter Thirteen

George was not really obliged to wait in a room that contained the hanged body of his sister. He had always tried to cut short his encounters with her when the two of them had been alive and there seemed no reason whatsoever for prolonging the present meeting. She was not in any way improved by being suspended from a hook in the ceiling.

He was dead. He could, theoretically, go anywhere he liked. He could take a bus to Heathrow and slip on to a flight to Málaga. He had always liked Málaga. He wouldn’t even have to go through security. Perhaps it was Esmeralda who kept him there. The way she had kept him in that shabby one-bedroom flat in Southfields, the tiny house off Lacy Road where Maurice and Barry had been born and, finally, the comparative dignity of 22 Hornbeam Crescent. The perfect place for an Englishman to die.

He still did not quite understand the power she seemed to have over him. It must be more than the blowjobs. We were getting into a tricky area here for a dead person. Something spiritual? George had never been a big fan of the spiritual, unless it was being sung by large African-American men. If they did have a spiritual rapport, surely this would have meant that George would sometimes have been swept away by love and found himself possessed by an overmastering urge to, say, buy her flowers! He had, he recalled now, once been possessed by an overmastering urge to buy her flowers. It had been, he thought, some time in August 1998, but there did not seem to be any florists within easy reach.

Nobody in their right mind would have called Esmeralda spiritual. She was, thought George, borderline coarse. Like him. Why did the sight of this small, dumpy woman, with her shock of black hair, her rather too prominent nose and her fine brown eyes conjure up feelings that he could not put into words without seeming sloppily sentimental or comprehensively pretentious?

He didn’t know. He couldn’t express the emotions she inspired in him. Perhaps there were simply too many of them.

The doorbell rang. Stephen froze. Esmeralda jumped. Mabel Dawkins slumped. Veronica gave a small squeal. Nat folded his arms, unfolded them again and then, with the air of a man who was going to get the gesture right this time, folded them for a second time.

After that, somehow, Inspector Hobday and Pawlikowski were in the room.

‘Who found her?’ said Hobday to Esmeralda.

Stephen seemed, as usual, keen to be the one in charge. ‘I was first into the room,’ he said. ‘There is a note pinned to her dress. A suicide note.’

Hobday began to read it aloud. He did not attempt to put much colour into it. As an audition piece it would have got him waved on after the first sentence, but what his voice lacked in expressiveness, it more than made up for in clarity and volume. As he went on he allowed

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