A Habit of Dying (30 page)

‘I suppose so.’

‘For what it is worth, I think you’ve bound them together with a very pretty ribbon and tied a very neat bow in it. If it was submitted as a thesis, I think you would get a first class degree. I am sure you are right.’

‘Thank you, kind sir,’ she said, making a mock bow. ‘And the journal, what do you make of that?’

‘I wasn’t really prepared for it. I know you had told me about it, but it has to be seen and read. Oh, and now I understand about the little fragments of paper falling out of it. I don’t know what a psychologist would say about it, it could be a very interesting study.’

‘Have you any ideas where I should go with it now? Or should I just drop it, case unsolved.’

‘No, I think there are things that you could do.’

‘Really?’ Lydia could hardly wait.

‘But before I say anything, my ideas are just suggestions, I don’t know if they are right, I’m not saying they are right and you are wrong.’

‘I wouldn’t have asked you if I wasn’t ready to listen.’

‘Alright then,’ he smiled at her. ‘I think you’ll like this. Option one. Andrew, desperate and disturbed, does somehow do away with Susan, he has a master plan, the perfect crime. In which case you have already solved the puzzle, no body, no death to record, maybe a missing person record filed somewhere, but nothing for anybody to care about. And Andrew? Well, he just disappears. All part of the plan, people do it all the time, just look at the streets of London or any big city and you’ll see them, nobody knows or cares who they are or what they are. So, frustrating as it is for you, that’s the answer, you’ve found it. And it has the virtue of fitting with all the known facts and with the
things that he hints at in his journal. More than hints at, almost openly declares.’

Lydia was crestfallen. ‘So you’re saying that I can’t find the answer because what I’ve discovered is actually true and therefore no answer can be found?’

‘If we accept, if you accept, option one.’

‘Go on.’

‘Option two. Susan survives Andrew’s intention or his attempt and they are still out there somewhere living as man and wife. Ex-directory, unregistered to vote, emigrated to Canada, whatever you like, but essentially nothing happened. That too fits with everything you have found. You yourself have said it has seemed easier to find the facts about people long dead than it is about the living’

‘True, but I’m beginning to feel a little bit stupid.’

‘Don’t. You are not, I haven’t finished.’

‘There is, I think, one small problem with both of these possibilities. I don’t know if you will agree. You touched on it yourself a long time ago but in all your work I think it has been overlooked. The problem is simple: how did these albums and the journal come to be a job-lot in a house clearance sale just a year or so ago, twenty or more years after the supposed events.’

Lydia thought for a moment before answering slowly. ‘It fits with option two if they have recently died or emigrated or moved house or whatever else might have happened to them.’

‘Yes, it could, but not with option one. For if that were to hold true then who would have held them all this time. The obvious answer is a son or daughter or some other relative, but what relative? As far as you know their one son died in infancy and they neither of them had anyone else, as you have demonstrated to your own satisfaction at least. And, since I trust your research, to mine too.’

‘So the auction sale is significant. Yes, I see that. Somehow it has always been so, but I lost sight of it.’

‘These are just ideas, Lydia. More coffee?’

While Stephen attended to a fresh brew, she took herself round the path through the rose garden, then along behind the courgettes
and tomatoes to the little orchard. Her head swam with possibilities and probabilities that she couldn’t grasp. The idea that if she was right then by definition she could never prove it, was hard to take in. If ever there was a fool’s errand then this has surely been it. She glanced up across the manicured lawn and saw Stephen looking directly at her. For a few seconds before she rejoined him on the terrace, they both stood still and looked at each other’s figures in the landscape, and each saw how well the other fitted.

‘Stephen, I understand what you have said, but at another level I don’t really know what to make of it. I thought you said there were things that I might do.’

‘There is more, and this is more difficult. Option three. When you look at the whole story as you have done, and rightly done, you had no other way of looking at it, when you look through the lens of the journal there is an obvious logic to the lack of any information about Susan’s death. After all, his plan worked, as in option one. Option one takes what Andrew has written as true and as possible. We are taking it not quite at face value because he doesn’t actually say ‘kill’ or ‘murder’, but the inference is clear. He says many other things too, not least about Susan, and we have an insight into how she felt about him. Naturally we think he is unbalanced and his view is distorted, as well it might be, but if we are to take a part of what he says as true, then why not all of it? And if not true, then at least true from his point of view. After all, he had no motive for deliberate deception, even though he may have been deceiving himself.’

‘Ok, but how does it help? I went through it several times and tried to extract every possible fact. I even made a list of facts, most of which are untested because I can’t find anything about them from the records.’

‘A question first. Susan and Andrew were related, fourth cousins you said?’

‘Yes and no, fourth cousins but twice removed.’ From Stephen’s expression she saw a fresh explanation was required. ‘The generations in each side of the family got out of synch, so although they were of similar age, Susan had more generations back to their
common ancestor, John Jolly, than Andrew does. If Alethia had been Andrew’s grandmother instead of his step-grandmother they would have been once removed.’ Stephen looked even more puzzled, so Lydia added, ‘Forget that last bit, it doesn’t matter.’

‘Good,’ he said and they both laughed.

‘The question is, do you think they knew they were related?’

Lydia thought for a moment before answering. ‘I have no way of knowing. If I had to guess I would say probably not. Why?’

‘It might not be anything. I was trying to imagine what it would feel like to meet and marry someone and then find out you were already related. I couldn’t really get any sense of it. You hear of men marrying their long-lost sisters, but that’s not the same thing at all.’

‘Do you think he might have mentioned it in his journal if he had known?’

‘Yes, you’re right, he might have done. And going much further back there was a lot of intermarriage within the family?’

‘I haven’t gone that far with it, but for sure the Joslins, the Jollys and the Dixes were linked one way and another in the 1800s, so probably before that too. Land-owning farmers wanting to keep the property in the family, looking for alliances that would protect their investments. But that’s no more than guessing.’

‘Educated guessing, though. Next question. You looked for a record of Susan’s death from what you estimate to be the date of the last entry in the journal up to when?’

‘I’d have to check, but around 1995 I think.’

‘Alright, so point number one would be to look right up to the present day, because if you found it then you would know that he did not kill her, maybe didn’t even try to kill her when he said.’

‘Ok, yes, a good point. I can do that easily enough.’

‘And while you’re at it, did you ever look for a marriage for Susan over that period?’

‘A marriage? No, it didn’t occur to me.’ Then, as she looked at him calmly sitting there giving his considered judgement on her private project, for a brief moment she felt like his student in a tutorial. A pet student certainly, but a student none the less, and for an instant she was back at the lunch in Magdalen College, with
Stephen the lauded master disappointed at his protégé. The old uncertainties, kept at bay since her arrival, threatened to surface again.

Unknowingly, Stephen came to her rescue. ‘No, and in your place it would not have occurred to me. Let me tell you the idea that is option three. It struck me that your Susan had been particularly unfortunate.’

‘In what way unfortunate?’

‘I say that to put the kindest possible interpretation on the misfortune to have seen her brother drown, watched her father die of cancer and seen her new-born son suddenly succumb to what we would call today ‘sudden infant death syndrome’. And to top it off, she had a husband who appeared to be planning to kill her. Even if she did not know it.’

‘I hadn’t thought of it that way,’ she said flatly. Lydia hadn’t thought of it in any way, the deaths of the male members of Susan’s family had been just deaths, like all the others she had tracked and carefully recorded. But she did not see quite where Stephen was leading. ‘So how is this option three?’

‘It goes back to the journal and taking what Andrew has to say about her as true. The business of the affair with another man while she was away on a course, the idea that she was trying to somehow poison him, and the constant theme that she was trying to mentally destabilise him. We see him as a troubled man, driven almost literally to his wits’ end and we imagine a loving and long-suffering wife, the potential victim of his paranoia. What if he wasn’t paranoid, what if she was having an affair, what if she was slowly poisoning him, what if she encouraged his paranoia, who is the victim then?’

‘Go back a minute, back to her brother and father. Misfortune is one thing but you are saying something else.’

‘Her brother died of drowning as we know, but I would love to see the post mortem report. He was in the river a good while before he was found and it would be interesting to see if there were any head injuries too. They would easily have been overlooked or explained as having been sustained after he went in the water. Her
father died of cancer but there is a suggestion from the death certificate that he also had an excess of dimorphone. I was looking it up when you came in this morning. It’s a kind of morphine. So one could imagine that someone might have helped him along to spare him pain. It has always happened, people have always done it, even doctors. It’s known, it’s accepted, but it is rarely spoken of. Although less so these days, after the Shipman murders.’

Lydia was reeling. All this seemed a leap too far, a step into pure conjecture. She wanted to counter the idea but couldn’t find the right words to object.

Stephen saw her frowning disbelief and continued, ‘Lydia this is just an idea, but it comes from you, it is about probabilities. Let’s go on to her son, Simon. He died aged two days of what the doctor has recorded as ‘respiratory failure from unknown causes’. This is in 1978 when cot death, as it was called then, would have been recorded just like that. It is only more recently that it’s been more deeply investigated and given a syndrome. Cot death was just one of those awful things that happened sometimes.’ He paused a fraction before adding, ‘Like drowning and like helping someone on their way. And the common factor here is Susan.’

Lydia held up a hand to stop him. ‘Yes, but why would she do these things? This is still a huge jump.’

‘Before I answer that, and you’re right, motive is important, let me ask this. Suppose you found a death entry for Andrew and you found it was something like, I don’t know, let’s say an overdose of whatever drug he was on. What are the chances she would have the four significant males in her life die in these particular circumstances?’

‘I don’t know, but I can guess that it would be pretty rare. But that doesn’t prove anything.’

‘No, and if I can turn that round on you, your whole construction does not prove anything, but you think, and I think, that it is highly likely, highly probable. And option three has a little way to go yet, so bear with me. Remember the auction? Suppose it were Susan who was the survivor, then she would be the one who has held the albums all this time, and it could be Susan who has recently died or emigrated and had her house cleared. It is all just a
possible option. But one I thought you could investigate. Actually,’ he looked straight at her, ‘I thought it might be an option that would really appeal to you.’

Sleep came in snatches for Lydia that Sunday night, back in her suddenly cramped little bed. Her whole house seemed to have shrunk, she was the Gulliver in the Lilliputian world of Osney, her garden a mere window box, her bedroom a broom cupboard. The journey home had been grindingly slow, her own fault for leaving much later than intended. But her mind raced on despite her tiredness, the possibilities and probabilities of Susan and Andrew throwing up first one solution and then another before they melted away to be replaced by a third and a fourth. Mixed in with that blighted relationship were thoughts of Stephen, thoughts of his world and whether she would have any place in it, would want any place in it. They had parted with affection, exchanged a single kiss to the cheek that lasted a fraction of a second longer than it might have done, the same small pressure in the small of her back as they embraced. Had she returned it with a squeeze of his hand? She might have done, she was not sure. And all the while she knew she must sleep because she must work tomorrow and the more she worried about that, the less she could sleep, the eternal catch-22 for insomniacs. Like investigating the perfect murder, so perfect that it cannot be found so cannot be investigated. She could see the logic, understand the conundrum, see that it could not be solved, but her mind refused to accept it, still searched for answers. An idea winked into her head, an idea about the journal, the journal and perfection, and it seemed important, but its importance evaporated as she reached to grasp it and the idea was gone, overlaid with the notion of Susan’s re-marriage. She knew she would have to fill the gaps Stephen had found in her searches, see if there was some record waiting where she hadn’t looked, an answer that would tie a loose string, but she did not want to find it. She wanted to be right, even though it was the ultimate dead end, and she wanted to be wrong so
that her puzzle might be solved. Tonight it had been easy to excuse herself through tiredness, but she would have to do it, and soon.