Corpsing (12 page)

Someone had used her mobile, after she died – within an hour of her death.

As no further calls had been made since then, I had no reason for suspecting the phone had been stolen – not unless it had been assigned another number.

Obviously, now, the police would have the mobile somewhere in a plastic evidence bag. But just to check, I dialled Lily’s number – having first shielded my own. All I got was
This mobile phone has been disconnected.

I looked at the time of the calls again: 21.52 and 21.54. I remembered what the doctor had told me, back when I’d just come out of my coma. Lily had died in the restaurant. She’d then been taken, like me, to University College Hospital. Whoever it was that had used the phone had probably done so from there. That suggested two groups of people: police and hospital staff. Of the two, I immediately suspected the latter. Somehow the blaséness of using a dead person’s mobile recalled the sick humour of medical students – tales of locking fellow students up in crates full of detached arms or dressing up real corpses and taking them down to the college bar…

Lily always kept her mobile in her handbag – and she’d had her handbag with her when she was shot, hung over the back of the chair.

Assuming that Lily’s stuff had been taken along with her to the hospital, the likeliest maker-of-the-call seemed to be some cash-strapped assistant nurse left alone with the bag for five minutes.

Again, shielding my own, I phoned up the first of the two posthumous numbers.

A young woman answered.

‘Who is that?’ I asked.

‘Who are you?’ she said.

‘Is that Anne-Marie?’

‘No, you’ve got a wrong number.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Fuck off, creep.’

She put the phone down.

That hadn’t gone very well. Before calling the second number, I formulated a plan. It was only very rough, but as things turned out, I didn’t need anything more elaborate.

‘Hello-yes?’

It was a woman’s voice. Middle-aged.

‘I’m phoning from the hospital.’

‘Asif’s on his way. He left all of fifteen minutes ago.’

Asian.

‘Ah,’ I said, assuming an authority I didn’t have. ‘Well, that’s good.’

‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said.

‘You’re Asif’s mother, I take it.

‘I am.’

‘Can’t you do anything about getting him here on time?’

‘I’m very sorry. And I had promised Doctor Calcutt it wouldn’t happen again.’

‘Asif does
have
an alarm clock, doesn’t he?’

I was enjoying this.

‘But he falls asleep before he remembers to set it. He’s so tired.’

‘Wonderful.’

‘Do you work in the pathology department, too?’

‘No, I’m just a faceless manager, trying efficiently to deploy very limited resources. Asif’s resources seem more limited than most, I must say.’

‘Please don’t be too hard on him.’

‘Don’t worry, I won’t.’

‘He’s been trying his best, ever since the police spoke to him…’

‘Ah, yes…’

‘He works very hard.’

‘I’m sure he does.’

An approach suggested itself – and I decided to pursue it immediately. Shielded, I phoned University College Hospital. When I got the switchboard, I asked for Pathology. When I got Pathology, I tricked Asif’s surname – Prakash – out of them. (They also told me that he was an Assistant Pathologist.) Then I called up a second time and asked for him by name. He’d just arrived, and came to the phone guilty and out of breath.

‘Yes?’

‘Asif Prakash?’

‘Yes?’

‘Is it standard Hospital Trust procedure for pathologists to use the mobile phones of –’

‘Shit.’

‘– recently deceased persons?’

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m a freelance journalist. I work for the tabloids.’

Words he must have been dreading ever since.

‘What do you want?’

‘Do you have any comment?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Do you deny using Lilian Irish’s mobile phone to make two phonecalls, the first to a young woman, the second to your mother?’

I could hear his breath wheezing across the receiver, although he didn’t speak.

‘Asif?’

‘No comment.’

‘People who say
No comment
always come across as guilty, Asif. Take my advice – say something. Deny it if you want, but I know you did it. The police have spoken to you about it. You’ve already been disciplined by the hospital. I’ll bet they don’t want the story to get out. It won’t look good for the police or for you. But it’s going to get out – and you’re going to look bad if you don’t help me.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Look, it’s probably not a good time for you, right now. I know you were late again for work today. Talking on the phone too long isn’t a good idea. Let’s say I call in a couple of days, then –’

Then I had a thought.

‘Or maybe I’ll just drop in at the hospital and see you. This story isn’t exactly hot at the moment. But they’ll run it whenever it’s ready. The news desk’s keen. If you want to talk, fine. But I’ve got more than enough already. See you, Asif.’

He spluttered something but the phone went down anyway.

The best thing, I thought, would be to get really nerdy on it with some colour-coded fluourescent marker-pens: identify as many of the numbers as possible (paying special attention to Alun’s), then trace them all back – in yellow, pink, blue and green.

First off, I fetched my address book and made a list of the numbers we might both have called. Quite a few I recognized immediately: Lily’s mother, her agent, her analyst. The others I dialled, pretending to be a telemarketer.

‘Hello,’ I’d say. ‘I’m Marcus Fishbourne from Direct Telesales International. Am I speaking to Made-Up Name?’

With many, I recognized their voices the moment they answered. With most of the rest, Marcus Fishbourne from Direct Telesales eventually extracted their real name from them.

Lily, as it turned out, had made the kind of calls you’d expect from anyone – to girlfriends, acquaintances, family. Then she’d made the calls of an actress – to her agent, to casting directors, to theatres. There were even some of her calls to me – at home and at work.

However, a few numbers continued to baffle me – there was a mobile number which Lily had called twice on her final day (once at 11.00 and once at 19.55)

I thought this might be important. Particularly as the printout revealed she’d never phoned this number before – at least, not during the month before she died.

The second call was to my flat in Mortlake – a number which she’d also called earlier in the day (16.25). When she hadn’t found me there, she’d immediately called the Discovery Channel (16.27). She knew I’d be working there – when I
was
working – for at least three months after we split. I’d only just started on the temporary contract. So she hadn’t had to try the other cable places.

(This is how dead relationships continue for a while, in zombie form – each knowing the other’s movements and being able to anticipate them. Slowly, though, the zombie-knowledge becomes out-of-date and the relationship becomes rancid and clumsy. Mine and Lily’s zombie, at the time of her death, was still fairly fresh – its face had yet to fall off, its eyes still worked.)

The question now was: why had Lily bothered to phone me at my house when she knew I definitely wasn’t going to be there?

For the first time in a long while I was grateful for my mother’s meticulous attention to detail. From a drawer in the hall, I pulled out her list of Messages Left On Your Machine While You Were Away.

As I’d guessed, the first message dated not from the last time I set the answerphone (Thursday evening) but from the following Monday, a couple of days after I’d been shot.

Now, although I wasn’t exactly Mr Popular, I knew that I would have received at least one call during that time. Sunday evening was the most acceptable time of the week for people to appear to be at home with nothing better to do than phone other people they didn’t really give a shit about. As lots of people didn’t really give a shit about me, someone would almost certainly have called me on Sunday evening.

Checking further down the list, I saw that a couple of my genuine friends were missing completely. These were friends I spoke to almost every day, and they didn’t appear to have called once. This might be because they didn’t phone on Friday and, by Saturday afternoon, had heard of my condition. But even after Monday some friends were still calling my answerphone to speak to it, as if to me. One message my mum had noted down read: ‘Distraught sobbing, female, one minute, no name left.’ I wished I knew who that had been. Anne-Marie, maybe? Or some other secret admirer, regretting a romantic opportunity perhaps for ever missed.

These calls, according to my mum, had only started to arrive on Tuesday afternoon – which was hardly likely.

It seemed there was only one conclusion to draw. I went to my answerphone and confirmed it: the police had taken away my original answerphone and replaced it with an identical one.

One thing was certain: the police knew what it was that Lily had wanted to say to me only minutes before we met up for real.

I could make a few guesses at what this might be. She would have known that what she was about to tell me (the pregnancy, the abortion) was more than likely to make me very upset – in which case, it was quite possible that she’d phoned to leave a placatory message on my phone.

But why do that before the meeting even took place? There would surely have been time afterwards to call up and deal with a specific situation.

Another guess was that it was something she found too embarrassing to discuss in public, but needed to convey to me somehow. Also unlikely.

Another that she was phoning to cancel, but, when she found I hadn’t gone home to change, she gave up and accepted that our dinner was fated to go ahead. Maybe not.

And there another possibility occurred to me – perhaps she hadn’t, after all, been intending to break the news about the baby
in person. It seemed rather cowardly for Lily, but this was an unprecedentedly awful situation. Perhaps she would just have said, ‘I’ve left a message on your answerphone. It explains everything.’

In one minute seven seconds? Everything?

I dismissed this theory, as well as all the others.

The truth was, it was a mystery. I really didn’t know, and the police really did.