A Habit of Dying (31 page)

Inevitably, Gloria was by her side the moment she stepped into her office. Lydia had not steeled herself for the encounter, not prepared any smart lines to rebut the enquiry that was sure to come. Yes, thank you, she’d had a very good weekend, and no, she looked so awful because she had slept so badly.

‘And did you . . .’ Gloria left the question unasked, without her usual direct and graphic phrasing.

Lydia smiled at her, wondering what possible understanding Gloria would have of the way she and Stephen had spent their time. ‘No, we didn’t.’

‘Oh, well maybe next time. There will be a next time, won’t there?’

‘Yes, I think so. We’ll see.’

‘So he’s not married then?’

‘Was married. His wife died quite a few years ago. One grownup daughter.’

‘Rich?’

Of course he was rich, rich beyond anything that she or Gloria might ever aspire to without a lottery win, but it hadn’t crossed Lydia’s mind the whole time she had been with him. ‘Probably. I mean yes, what you and I would call rich.’

‘You’re a lucky cow then, Lydia,’ Gloria said without a trace of envy, said as a statement of fact. ‘Don’t let him get away. And if he does, then give him my number.’

Lydia wanted to say that she couldn’t imagine anything less likely than Stephen and Gloria getting together, but instead she said ‘I don’t think he’s your type,’ adding to herself, ‘and oh Gloria, you’re certainly not his.’

‘You never know, do you? Anyway, you know me, they’re all my type. Especially if they’re still breathing.’ She laughed at her own weakness and Lydia laughed with her. Straight-to-the-point
Gloria, no messing with compatibility or the love thing, no thought of age or romance. If the sex and money boxes were ticked, that was good enough for her. And yet that very willingness to settle for anything was probably what kept everything beyond her reach.

For the next few evenings Lydia found reasons to be busy, too busy to sit at her computer and revisit the searches for her problem pair. There were the usual household jobs and she stretched these to their limits. Then there were bills to be paid and a birthday card for her sister-in-law Joan, for whom she deliberately chose something quite unsuitably risqué. She started a note to Stephen to thank him for the weekend and spent a whole evening composing it with exactly the right amount of warmth, spontaneity and sincerity, before throwing it in the bin and scribbling ‘Great weekend, thank you’ on a postcard from the Botanic Garden. Neither of them had mentioned it, but she knew that he liked their use of the old-fashioned post.

Not that she let these distractions keep her from thinking. On the contrary, she had Stephen’s page of notes and his third option was ever-present in her mind. She let the concept mature a little, let herself grow accustomed to the possibilities it presented, turning it one way and another to be sure that should it be true, she would be ready for that truth. Slowly she began to accept it as a genuine possibility, but Susan’s motives remained a stumbling block. She stopped being cross that Stephen could have so quickly analysed the complexities of the situation and by the end of the week was ready to start looking. She dived straight in with a search for the deaths of every Susan Myers listed from 1983 to the present day. Not a single entry satisfied a birth date of 1952. Following Stephen’s suggestion, she turned her attention to marriages. Eight theoretical possibilities suggested themselves, but none that showed a middle initial of D, and none in Oxford or the surrounding districts. It would take time and money to check each one and Lydia’s instinct told her they would be irrelevant to her quest. Her original search might have been flawed but it looked as though there was nothing to find after all. The ‘perfect crime’ of option one began to look favourite again. Why did that make her think of the journal? She
had not read it again since Stephen suggested a different slant to the story it told, maybe with that eye she would find some nuance, some answer to the nag in her head. Perhaps one more read through might just be what was needed, even though she almost knew it by heart. She would abandon her fruitless searching and sit with it one more time.

Half way through the pages for the second time, Lydia put the old ledger down and contemplated her empty wine glass. It was Friday and another would not hurt. She had read enough, there was nothing more to be gained from the pages, neither in her typed copy nor the original scrawl. It was what it was, a record of sorts of one man’s pain driving him towards the impossibly perfect crime, whether in deed or purely in thought might never be known. There was no such thing, of course, everyone knew that, there was always a mistake, something was always overlooked. What had Andrew overlooked? He had been so careful not to commit anything specific to his journal, destroying each copy of the plan he wrote out to be sure that he could remember it. Lydia laughed out loud when the realisation struck her. The journal itself was the mistake. The perfect crime demanded that he should have destroyed the journal. As long as it existed there was a chance that someone, as she herself had done, would be able to point a finger at Andrew and demand an explanation. In all that time since he wrote it anybody could have seen it, even Susan could have seen it. That stopped Lydia short in her tracks. Susan could have seen it. What if she had, what would she have done with that knowledge? Confronted him, accused him, flown into a rage, left him, divorced him? Stephen’s option three suddenly came alive. If she had seen the journal, she could have had a motive. Now Lydia turned the search on its head and began looking for Andrew’s death. She had looked before, right up to 1995 and found nothing. Now she checked again as far as the searches allowed - and still she found nothing, no Andrew S Myers with a birth date anything like 1949, a date she had calculated from their marriage certificate. It was late, she was tired, and the prospect of another couple of hours of frustration was too daunting. She would sleep on her ‘imperfect crime’ theory and see how it looked in the morning.

Some dream, some subconscious process of the night gave her unexpected direction the moment she woke. Even though it was early, a quick check beyond her window confirmed the glorious summer would hold for another day. She dressed and coffeed herself quickly to be sure not to lose the moment, not to doubt her intention. She would walk by the river down as far as Iffley and see if some fragment of Susan or the rest of the Inglebys remained. It had no logic, no possibility of yielding any fact or adding any knowledge, but it would take her to a place where she knew Susan would once have been. Like her trip all that time ago to the Lakes and to Longlands, it would take Lydia closer to the heart of the matter.

It was too early for anybody but joggers and the occasional dog walker to be about on the towpath, which was a quiet place at the best of times. The river’s summer traffic of cruisers and narrowboats had not begun to stir as she followed the path to Grandpont and the busyness of Folly where the punts and skiffs were being made ready for the day’s tourists. Down past Christ Church meadow on the opposite bank to where she had walked from her conference day with Stephen, on through the illusion of open country even though she was still in the city, one of Oxford’s great charms. Past Donnington she took a detour along Weirs Lane and then left along the footpath by the houseboats near the weir pool. An odd way to live, Lydia had always thought, squashed into tiny quarters, half connected to the world and half removed.

At Iffley she stopped to sit awhile and let the sights and sounds wash over her. The place was deserted save for the lock keeper pottering about his business. The Thames was at its summer low, but beyond the lock the steady flow of water over the weir was unabated. A few yards from where she sat was the boat slide. Where had Paul Ingleby entered the water? Where was sister Susan when he did so? A little down from the slide was a footbridge. Under it a tongue of the river lapped dark and secluded. Lydia half closed her eyes, listening for the shouts, the demand that he should come home with her, his plea for a little longer with the water, she walking away telling him she would go without him, then turning
and calling him, telling him to stop fooling about. He gives no answer and her voice rises, angry that he will not comply, anxious that he might have come to harm. She runs to where she last saw him. Louder she calls, screaming his name and all the while the rush of water and the steep banks conceal the sound. Yes, this was the spot, this was the story from the newspaper, this was the story that the family heard, that the inquest heard, this was the way that Paul Ingleby died. Until Stephen had sown the seed of doubt with his third option. It was the same story, everything was the same, it was still all true, everything in exactly the same place and in exactly the same order. It just needed the addition of a sudden flash of anger, a shove, a missed footing, a head that cracked on an unseen stone beneath the water. Little things, tiny differences that change the world.

Stirring from her reverie, Lydia walked on, across the weir and up the path into the village. Before setting out she had reminded herself of the address. The Ingleby house, where Fred and Ethel had died, the house Susan had run back to without her brother. Now she walked round the streets until she came to it, a narrow Edwardian house, a straight path from the front door to the road, a narrow strip of lawn, brown in the August sun. The house was mute, no sign of life from within, no secrets given away. Lydia walked on and then, at a suitable distance, turned and retraced her steps to hesitate once again as she passed the old Ingleby home. Had Susan lived there after her father’s death, inherited it all? Most probably. Independent, young, carefree -the world would have been her oyster, she could have lived any life she wanted. Lydia looked up at the windows of the front bedroom, curtains drawn closed. It would have been her parent’s bedroom, it would have been where Fred died, peacefully for sure with the morphine numbing his senses, floating him away down the stream. Susan, attentive as ever, held his hand, told him everything would be fine, he just needed to rest, to sleep, she would get the doctor round in a little while, there was nothing to worry about. Is the pain bad again? Let me get your medicine, it’s not quite time but it won’t matter, there, it will work in a minute.
Little differences, that was all it took. Get me a drink, Susan. Get me to the toilet, Susan. Sit here, Susan. Where’s your brother, Susan, where’s my Paul?

Two letters were waiting on her doormat when she returned, both junk mail she guessed, and she put them aside while making a belated breakfast. Orange juice, toast and coffee would remind her of last weekend, the comfort and pleasure of breakfast with Stephen on the terrace. She wondered what he might be doing today, right now, while she spread her toast. Then she remembered that his daughter would be with him, waking in the same bed she had woken in, watching the same net curtain dance in the same breeze at the same window. With a start she realised Jacqueline was not much younger than she was. To distract herself from this train of thought she turned to her post. One junk, one not. The one that was not was from National Savings, who wrote to her every now and again regarding her long ago purchased Premium Bonds. They had never won anything and she did not expect them to have done so this time. She had written to tell them when she reverted to her maiden name but the letters still came addressed to Mrs L Fordham. Lydia looked at the envelope for a few moments, then cast the letter aside and went to her computer. If she had reverted to her maiden name then so would Susan, independent, carefree, world-is-my-oyster Susan. Come to that, she might never have been Mrs Andrew Myers at all. She had been a teacher, hadn’t she, and there was many a teacher who stayed as Miss something to the children in her class rather than confuse them with a change to Mrs something-else. And even after years of marriage, her husband had initially identified her by her unmarried initials, SDI. Even before she had the first results on her screen, Lydia knew that Susan Dorcas Ingleby had never taken her husband’s name.

Lydia was so excited at the discovery she was tempted to call Stephen immediately, to share the excitement with him. She was at the point of dialling when she remembered Jacqueline and thought better of it. Even so, she had to tell him right away, and another postcard just would not do. She emailed him a
simple message
‘SDI married James Victor Watson, Oxford, June quarter 1992. Hooray! L.’
When he would read it she did not know, but she had sent it as soon as she had discovered the truth, and in that way shared the moment with him. Waiting to check the certificate was not needed, even though through good habit she ordered a copy. Next, she would see if there was a death entry for Susan or James Watson, then check the telephone directory.

In her excitement she quite forgot that if Susan had married James Watson in 1992 then her husband Andrew had not killed her in 1984.

Finding Susan’s marriage immediately opened the door to the bare details of what remained of her life. She had died in 2006, eleven years after her husband James. In the week while Lydia waited for the certificates and the vital information they might reveal, she revisited the newspaper archive at the local studies centre near the Westgate. She could see no reference to the marriage, even though she diligently checked through the announcement columns for April, May and June 1992. Susan’s passing was similarly unremarked by the press. The death of James Watson, however, had attracted a couple of fascinating column inches on March 17
^th
1995.