A Habit of Dying (11 page)

Gloria pulled a face of absolute exasperation, an expression that she had practised almost to perfection on Lydia. ‘You want to watch out, you’ll be in one yourself before you know it.’

The Longlands Private Residential Home was located in Bocking, a village close to Braintree, Essex. The pleasant-sounding manager had been very happy to have Lydia visit to see what it could offer when she had called to make an appointment. She may have been less accommodating if she had known the true purpose, although even Lydia was unsure what that was. It had been surprisingly easy to lie in explaining that she was looking for a home for her elderly aunt and Longlands was a possibility. She reconciled these lies with the fact that her grandmother had spent her last years in such a home and that Lydia had helped her select it, so that her lies were not really lies, simply displaced truths.

The journey from Oxford was slow and Lydia was grateful to arrive in Bocking in the early afternoon. Following the directions she had been given, she turned left into Bovingdon Road, past the splendid edifice of St. Mary’s and then immediately right into the short driveway of Longlands. The building was obscured by trees until she stopped outside the modern block, easily recognisable from the picture on the web site. Before going in, Lydia paused a moment to take in the whole aspect. A modern wing had been added to an older building, built to the west and extended more recently across the original frontage. It was not easy to tell the age of that original, but there was nothing to suggest that she had come to the wrong place. Even then, as she stood on the driveway, she was not entirely sure what she was doing there, other than playing detective. For an instant she wobbled, feeling fraudulent and foolish in equal measure.

Celia Barnard was most welcoming and over tea in her little office asked Lydia all the questions she’d anticipated. They were the same questions she’d been asked years ago so with the simplest of adjustments to her supposed aunt’s age, Lydia was able to answer them all truthfully. In her turn, Lydia was able to ask the right questions of Celia, questions recalled from those previous interviews. The home had the same air of quiet that she remembered from those other visits, the same scattering of residents, some asleep, some simply gazing out across the front lawn, perhaps recalling pleasures of younger days, or regretting the loss of someone to share the memories with. Two or three looked up and smiled, pleased at the prospect of a new face, a conversation with a younger mind. But the tour did not include a chance to chat with any of them. Neither did it encompass any part of the old house, which was a great disappointment to Lydia. The manager explained that it held only the offices, staff accommodation and a few larger rooms, reserved for couples. When they passed a corridor into that original Longlands, Lydia could see it was entirely painted white with all the old doors and their frames replaced by the mandatory fire-resistant variety. Perhaps she had lost nothing by being excluded. After what she calculated was a suitable amount of interest, Lydia asked if she might see the gardens, as her aunt was particularly fond of flowers and sitting out whenever possible.

‘Could I have a little while to walk around, try and get the real feel of the place?’

‘Oh yes, of course. There’s not much to see, I’m afraid. It all takes so much to keep up that we don’t have a regular gardener anymore, just someone who comes in to cut the grass and keep it tidy.’

‘I’m sure that it will be fine. I’m quite happy to spend a few minutes out there on my own, I’m sure you must have things to be doing.’

‘Well, I do have a phone call to make, if you’re quite sure. Let me show you out. I’ll need to collect you in a few minutes, the security locks won’t let you back in again without your necklace.’
Celia Barnard indicated a little tube on a loop of cord round her neck. ‘These let you back in to the building without the need to press buttons.’

And, thought Lydia, are probably a very handy way to keep track of exactly who is exactly where. This was a new surveillance method since her grandmother’s time.

When she was a little distance from the house, Lydia looked around to see if she was being watched before pulling the folded copy of the
Longlands 1911
photograph from her bag. From the lawn at the back of the house there was no mistaking it, she was standing maybe twenty yards from where the photographer had stood to capture the family. She adjusted her position as near as possible to align picture with reality. Then for a few moments she stood with her eyes closed, listening for family chatter and summer laughter, the bounce of tennis balls, the rustle of dresses too warm for that baking hot season. When she looked again through half closed eyes a figure was busy adjusting the window in a room on the upper floor, top left as she looked. An elderly resident? Or perhaps the maid in the picture, eternally airing Papa and Mama’s bedroom. In the corner of her eye, the twins leaned towards each other, whispering of Papa and how stuffy he was about Mr Melville coming to visit unannounced. Two of the grandchildren walk hand in hand beside Mama as she points out insects busy in the flowers. A woman’s voice calls for Harriet to come and taste the cool lemonade, freshly made. A tranquil scene, a family at ease with themselves, all is harmony despite the sultry heat. Another voice calls ‘Hello, how’re you getting on?’ and the sounds and images of 1911 slip abruptly away. Celia Barnard had come to collect her visitor.

The trip to Bocking had been most rewarding. Despite the fact that it hadn’t advanced her quest by a single inch, Lydia had found a real connection to her subjects. Prior to those few minutes in the garden at Longlands she had begun to doubt if anything that she
was doing was more than a mental exercise with no place in the real world at all. And she had also begun to feel confined, chained to her desk for want of a concrete action to take. Now back at that desk with her senses sharpened, her next idea was to try to fill in a little of the background to the journal’s author. She had read his employer as ‘Pink on Pink’ but whatever word she might place between the Pinks, it still amounted to a strange name. But a jingle writer, a blurb writer, would be working in advertising, in the media, and such companies often went by the strangest of names, designed to draw attention. Perhaps, Lydia thought, like the coded initials, ‘Pink on Pink’ was not the real name but his slang, his code for them. If so, then why not ‘P P’ or ‘P on P’ or even just ‘P’ which would have been more consistent with his way of writing? No, ‘Pink on Pink’ held within it some significance to the writer, not met by using simply initials.

Her first searches of web sites produced little encouragement. ‘Pink on Pink’ brought her ninety-nine thousand results, other combinations brought several hundred thousand more. Predictably, a high percentage appeared to concern girls and clothing. Lydia was also a little shocked to find that many had a sexual undertone, and the word ‘lesbian’ appeared more than once. She quickly qualified the query with ‘advertising’. This severely reduced the results to a few hundred, as did using the word ‘media’ instead of ‘advertising’. But even though she carefully scanned anything that looked promising, nothing of any value emerged. Most likely, she thought, if there ever had been such a company, it had long since been dissolved or renamed. If she were to follow this any further, what she really needed was a directory of businesses for the 1980’s. But for what area? She was familiar with finding old trade directories for a hundred years ago, but not for modern times. She searched again, and yes, there were dozens of trade directories covering every town in the country, but apart from the ones people had neglected to update, they were all for the present or the more distant past. Quite reasonably, there were none for the dates she was interested in.

The question of where the journal writer had lived re-surfaced
in her mind. Cumbria had been a long drive, an overnight stay. To go on holiday to France had been another long drive but doable in a day. So somewhere in the south of England pleased her sense of probability. Essex would fit well enough, as would anywhere in the south-east. He’d lived close enough to be able to walk to the unnamed river. Unnamed because to him it needed no name. There was a park nearby and convenient shops. It could fit a hundred or more towns. But not a village, no, it was an urban area. There was nothing to prompt her closer than that. Except that the journal had been sold to her in an Eynsham sale room. Where better to start a search than right there on her doorstep. And what she did have access to, thanks to the world’s unquenchable thirst for information, were some of the old telephone directories, scanned and made available to her right there in her back room in West Street. She started with 1980 because it felt right, no science to the choice, just her sense for the possible and the probable. Oxford Area September 1980 could not be any closer. Page 477 Pilling to Pitcher contained the Pinks. There jumping right out at the top of the list was the entry
‘Pink 2, Adv. Agts, Seacourt Tower Oxford 402291’
. A direct hit in one try? Well, she was certainly due a little luck. And why not Oxford, the choice was not random, and the chances of getting a hit from a random list would have been very great. This was a good omen. And when she looked further, the latest available was for 1982. Sure enough, Pink 2 were still there, still in the tower, less than a mile from where she sat. It remained a hideous building whose only nod to Oxford’s classic skyline was the addition of a steel pylon to top out the roof. For this reason it was sometimes referred to with a certain irony as Botley Cathedral.

If the tormented author lived in Oxford, then so too did his wife, and H and J. In itself this was not hugely significant, they had to live somewhere, so why not Oxford. But it if she were to find a little more concrete evidence then some lines of enquiry might be undertaken far more easily right there on her doorstep than at even a modest distance. Popping in to the local library, newspaper office, or even the record office could be done in a lunchtime and would not involve planned expeditions, too much cost or tedious
correspondence. Should she need to, it would also give her the chance to browse for some event, when she did not know exactly what she was looking for.

Lydia knew very well that, pleased with herself as she was, all she had done was take the seemingly obscure reference to ‘
Pink on Pink
’ and make a tentative link to another name. Simply finding the name of a company that fitted, at least to her own satisfaction, a reference to the author’s employer amounted to nothing at all in the larger scheme of things. As with her visit to Longlands, it advanced her enquiry hardly a jot. But, taken together with the Oxford link, it gave her encouragement to continue, and in her own mind it all fitted. She was lining up the possibilities so that when a sufficient number of them were all neatly arranged in a row, the whole became a probability. Any one of them could be wrong, they could all be wrong, but it seemed highly improbable that all those wrong things would come together and still fit the picture she was building.

With these small progressions, and being overdue a little leave from work, Lydia resolved on her next course of action. Even as she considered it and sketched the outlines of her trip, she smiled at the prospect of explaining herself to her colleagues in the office. What she was going to do was on the edge of ridiculous, and to say it out loud would make it even more so. She was going to Cockermouth to see if she could find a grave, the one that the journal writer and his wife had stood beside, watching the earth rattle down onto the coffin lid. She would make a list of all the graveyards near the town centre, map them all out and plan a day’s tour of them all. The priority would be church burial grounds since the journal specifically mentioned a church and a burial. The reference had been in the earlier and, dare she say it, saner, part of the journal. The writer had been quite specific, and no attempt had been made to obscure the name of the place with a cryptic reference. It was the one solid event in which she could put any faith. All this she would do while staying in a modest country hotel she would find nearby, and from there perhaps she could also do a little walking, a little exploration, once her detective work was done. She
would take the whole week as leave and stay for as many days as she wished, recharging her batteries. She might even find time for a little reflection on precisely where she was in her life, and what she might do with it between then and the care home that Gloria had predicted for her.