A Habit of Dying (10 page)

‘Lydia, when are you going to really do something?’ Gloria asked. ‘You need to get out more, get in the swim.’

‘I do lots of things, I’m busier than you think.’

When Gloria suggested, as she did regularly, that she should ‘get in the swim’, Lydia knew that what she really meant was ‘get a
man’. Getting a man had never been high on her list of priorities and never lower than it was now. She was completely focused on her box of treasures and every hurdle that was put in her way only made her more determined than ever to unravel their mysteries.

‘Busy? Come on, what’ve you been busy at? We’d love to know, wouldn’t we?’ Gloria included the rest of the section, all female, all younger than Lydia by a decade or more, in her question. Nothing would have pleased them more than for Lydia to be having an affair with a man, maybe a married man. That would have made her conform to their norm, put her back in the swim. She was tempted to hint at what they wanted to hear, for she grew as weary of their continual goading as she did of the chatter about their own sex lives.

Instead, a thought popped into her head and before she knew it, it had found voice. ‘I’m busy with a murder,’ and then, quickly to cover her folly, ‘It’s a family history thing.’

Gloria rolled her eyes. ‘Typical Lydia, that’s just you isn’t it? You need some real interest in you life. I could fix you up with someone, anytime you like.’

Lydia smiled her thank-you and shook her head. She knew that she was going to be busier than ever for a while, far too busy to be thinking about being fixed up by Gloria or any of her workmates.

The spoken words crystallised what she had been gradually working round to ever since she had finished the transcription. Saying out loud what she had not fully admitted to herself, suddenly made it true - she was busy with a murder. But she needed a new approach instead of repeatedly banging her head against the same brick wall of unanswered questions. She reasoned that if all her puzzles were to be solved then there was no hope of solving them individually. She would look at all her evidence again on the assumption that it was a single puzzle, that all the main players were related in some way, even the tormented journal writer and his misunderstood wife. She’d look at all possibilities and probabilities and see if a coherent picture could be made from the pieces.

As a first task Lydia let herself become familiar once again with
all the photographs, feeling for the lives, absorbing the scenes. At the same time she kept her detailed notes handy for reference. Then she opened the journal alongside the printed copy she had made and read through them, taking from the original where it was easy to do so and from her copy where it was not. By putting all the photographs, the captions, the notes and the journal into her head as a whole collection she hoped to gain a different insight. If she absorbed them as a single entity then perhaps she might begin to see where they joined. But instead of seeing where they joined, a solitary thought jumped into her mind as she read the thirtieth entry of the journal. A thought that fixed the journal as being fact and not fiction. To be certain, she read the words again:

‘. . .Always use the back page straight onto the cardboard cover so as to leave no indentation. Written. Read carefully, yes all there all in the right order. Neatly torn off from its spiral binding, all the little flaky pieces removed. The page was never there. Chew until dissolved then spit into the toilet . . .
’

Carefully turning the same page in the journal itself, she examined where it was bound to the spine. Three or four of those tiny little flakes were still there, just the few that had not fluttered out as she had held the pages up to the light. A surge of triumph and excitement swept through her, it was so small a thing and yet it was real physical evidence. This was not a fiction, no author would have gone to such lengths, it was not sheer coincidence, it was real. The probabilities swung in her favour.

With her fresh conviction about the journal, Lydia set to work drawing up a list of possibilities for the names and faces in the albums. To begin with, she concentrated on those who might reasonably be regarded as the core family, who appeared repeatedly and whose names were common to more than one volume. From the Longlands album she had already drawn a rough family tree with Papa and Mama as the head and with the definite children ‘self ’ and Alice, and probable children Albert and Isabella; then, in order of probability, Beatrice, Joseph, James, and Henry. Finally, there were possible children or grandchildren Phoebe, Albert M,
Albert and Harriet. Clearly Albert the son, who looked about thirty-five, would not have a brother Albert, more likely his own son Albert. Albert M, who might be around six or seven, was differentiated by the letter M, possibly suggesting a different surname than the others. If that were so and Albert M were a grandchild, then he was the son of a married daughter. Beatrice and Isabella were the obvious candidates, but that might also imply that their husbands were in the photograph and that did not quite tally with the count of adults. Lydia did not spend any great time considering this, instead she moved back to her original purpose.

The next album was devoted almost entirely to James, the second ‘self’, the son Henry, and presumed children Verity and Bertie. James was the tentative link to Longlands. In this second album, or as Lydia had come to think of it, her ‘RAF’ album, James could be between thirty-five and fifty. The Longlands James might be twenty or so, a difference which was consistent with him being one and the same person. Lydia examined them both under her magnifying glass. Nothing to say they were and nothing to say they weren’t, just a family likeness that could be her imagination. She did the same with ‘self’ from the RAF album and the possible females from the Longlands album with exactly the same result. The RAF album did have the huge advantage of a family name, the Myers name, to give her Mr & Mrs J D of whom the J was surely James, plus Henry, Verity and Bertie. She looked closely at Henry and Verity. Similar ages and brother and sister she was sure, but there might be more to it than that. Might they be twins, and if so then did twins not run in families? She was positive that the Longlands ‘self ’ and Alice were twins. Another possible link danced elusively in the mist.

According to her notes, the next album in sequence would be the one without photographs, her ‘VE Day’ album as she had christened it. From the little she could gather from the brevity of the captions, it covered the years from the late 30’s to the early 50’s. Albert needed no prompting to be considered first. An Albert who was present in the captions before 1945 but not after, so an Albert of an age to have died in the war, one who might have had children
called Ethel, Violet and Rose in the 30’s. Assumptions certainly, but the name Albert was a link with Longlands. Either one of the Albert grandsons would have been in their mid twenties and perfectly placed to be have children at that time. The Essex connection was there again, in the name Coggeshall. Lydia checked her gazetteer. Sure enough there it was, just a few miles from Braintree. The idea that three random photograph albums should all have links to so small an area and end up together in an Oxfordshire saleroom was unlikely. Once again, Lydia considered the probabilities to be favourable.

The last album, her ‘sandcastles’ album, had no discernable reference to Essex. But it did have a Fred to go with the pictureless caption ‘
Ethel and Fred, Chelsea August 1952
’ in the VE Day album. It also had Susan and Paul and yet another ‘self’, plus the usual cast of extras, a handful of appearances by Tommy and Mick, and various picnics with ‘the Arncliffes’. Although the ‘self ’ in each of the albums was certainly not the same ‘self’, Lydia wondered how unusual it might be to caption a photograph in this way. How did people identify themselves, if not their name? Might ‘self ’ be something unconsciously learned from a mother, or was it so common as to be unimportant? Having no way of answering her question, Lydia let it drop. The dates and places identified were those of holidays such as ‘
Margate ’58’
and
‘The Dales’
‘. The possibilities for this album amounted to just one; Fred was the same Fred as the Chelsea 1952 Fred in which case it was just conceivable that ‘self’ was the Chelsea Ethel. Lydia reminded herself that ‘just conceivable’ did not offer the balance of probability she was seeking, but she still noted it down.

Finally she gave similar consideration to the journal. In doing so, Lydia realised that she had only looked at words and handwriting, trying to decipher their sad and seemingly awful meanings. She hadn’t really thought about dates, places, and clues to identity. It seemed clear that the book itself was a good deal older than the handwritten entries within it. The author had used at least four different ball-point pens for the most part, with a sprinkling of pencils which had their points broken at regular intervals. Now she
read the whole account once more, looking not for clues to the outcome, but to see if people, dates and places could be narrowed down. The author was educated, had a good vocabulary, worked with words, wrote jingles or advertising slogans. The use of ‘
jingles
’ suggested a date after the 1960’s, but it was a tentative marker at best. When she read the reference to a film about suspended animation and the word that she’d interpreted as ‘comatose’, a quick search on her computer came up with ‘
Coma
’ which dated to the late 70s. There was a reference to ‘
user-trialled
’ which she felt must be later still, possibly a buzzword from the 80’s. The only places mentioned by name were Brighton, Bournemouth, La Rochelle, probably Harrogate, and Cockermouth. As for time span, she noted a summer holiday and two distinct references to Valentine’s Day, and one between them to a Christmas, although admittedly that was in the least reliable entry, the illegible twenty-fourth. But it was followed by a reference to New Year, so a year had passed between the eleventh and the twenty-sixth entries. If that was the pattern for the whole journal then it covered about two years. Some entries, she was sure, were only a day apart, may even have been the same day, others were more separated. By how long was uncertain but, if she needed to, Lydia reasoned that she could get a closer approximation. The company that made the author redundant as his illness - it was surely an illness – progressed, he’d referred to as ‘Pink on Pink’ although on checking she saw that the tiny scribble she’d read as ‘on’ could be any single letter or two letter word. It could also be ‘and’.

Of the people who featured, none were named. They were identified only by an initial and even those single letters might not represent names but codes. H and J might be Henry and June just as easily as a fevered mind might have them down as Handsome and Jealous. It was clear that his wife became S after that initial entry and she was specifically noted as being aged thirty-one. There was also the funeral of ‘her precious B’ in Cockermouth, or at least somewhere nearby. It was the only fixed event in a specific location, yet it too suffered from the individual being identified by yet another initial. In her road atlas Lydia
noticed that it was on the same page as Whitehaven. Three postcards, Whitehaven, Braintree and Oxford. If instead of ‘Whitehaven’ and ‘Cockermouth’ she read ‘Cumbria’ then there was a glimmer of a connection between every volume in her collection. Just how tenuous can it get? She could not suppress a smile at her own devious thinking.

‘How’s your murder going, Lydia?’ Gloria hissed in a mock whisper, loud enough for all to hear.

‘It’s ok,’ was the guarded reply.

‘Found your man yet?’

Lydia could see the conversation was about to turn abruptly in another, all too familiar, direction. ‘More a case of finding the victim,’ she countered.

‘You can’t have a murder without a corpse can you, I mean they can’t get you for it without a body, can they?’

Lydia was about to correct this widely held belief but stopped herself in time. ‘Oh, all this happened a long time ago, I’m just trying to put the story together, that’s all.’

‘So, what’s the next step?’

For once Gloria sounded interested, but Lydia was not ready to let anybody else, and certainly not Gloria, into her private world of puzzles and mind games. For one, she doubted there were many who would remotely understand her fascination, and for another, the history that she was constructing would sound too far fetched in its present tentative state.

‘C’mon Lydia, tell us the juicy details,’ she pleaded, which only made Lydia all the more resistant.

‘I have some more checking to do. I’ll see how that goes.’

‘What’re you going to check then?’

What indeed. Closed up in her back room with her notes and files and her laptop, she’d had run low on inspiration if not determination. She needed somehow to find a new spark, something in the real world away from her census searches, her
trawling through dozens of pages of Google results with their inevitable meanders and sidetracks.

‘I’m going to look at a care home in Essex,’ Lydia replied, for no apparent reason that she could think of afterwards.