A Habit of Dying (35 page)

Coming together easily in a gentle embrace, they exchanged their first kiss worthy of the name while the wood crackled in the grate.

‘We’ve shifted Christmas by a day. I had my Christmas lunch yesterday, Mrs Webb came in and got it going then Jacqueline and I finished it off. We generally do that, only this year we did it a day early. So today is the twenty-sixth as far as food is concerned, it’s cold leftovers.’

They helped themselves to what Jacqueline had set out for them in the kitchen before she had disappeared to Ely, then ate in the dining room where a second fire burned. In time, their conversation turned to the Joslins, to Dorothy, and to the binder that Lydia had sent to her.

‘You felt it was time.’ Again, Stephen made an observation where another might have asked a question.

‘Yes, I did. I’d been putting it off, half thinking that there might be something that you would find, but then I realised whatever
there was didn’t alter what I would give to Dorothy. I didn’t tell you before, but I think I found out what GCS means, and once I knew that, I knew I wouldn’t be adding anything to the history for her. Even then I took a while to get it done, then along came Christmas and it seemed a good time.’

‘What did you make of GCS?’

‘It wasn’t difficult really. I think it’s the Glasgow Coma Scale and is used to describe how deep a patient’s coma is.’ Stephen was nodding in agreement. ‘But I expect you knew that.’

‘Not really, I’d seen it somewhere before, but I wasn’t sure until my medical friend explained it.’

‘I can’t make up my mind if it is a good way to go or a terrible way to go. It could be either, I suppose. But you said that you had some news, a discovery.’ Lydia had wanted to know the details when Stephen mentioned a discovery, all the more so because he had been non-specific, almost casual in telling her. In the busyness of the season, the work on Dorothy’s report, its importance had been lost.

‘A discovery. Yes, but before I tell you, there are a couple of things.’ He paused a moment and looked past her out to the grey stillness of the day. ‘I have to say this, although I know I don’t need to,’ his eyes returned to hers, ‘I hope you don’t mind. You can never tell anyone about it. It’s not secret, it’s just that you, that is we, shouldn’t know.’

Lydia’s mind raced ahead over the most improbable ideas, but she held her impatience in check. ‘Go on, and the other thing?’

‘It doesn’t change anything, it’s not an answer, just another fact, another set of facts.’

‘Stephen, just tell me, please,’ she implored.

‘Andrew Myers died after being in a coma for eight years. At his death he was assessed on the scale as being at level three, the deepest level.’

‘Eight years?’ Lydia quickly did the calculation. ‘You mean he was in a coma since 1984?’

‘Yes.’

As she struggled to appreciate the significance of what he was
saying, another question formed itself, a question she was wary of asking, a question that even in the asking she understood why she would not be able to tell anyone the answer. ‘How do you know this?’

‘I have seen his medical records.’

‘But you can’t do that, it’s private,’ she exclaimed, ‘You can’t just look at people’s records. Can you?’

‘You can, if you have good reason and if you do so anonymously and you know how to. And as for privacy, it doesn’t really arise. Andrew’s dead.’

Lydia was even more mystified.

‘Let me explain. I have slightly cheated. I have seen his medical record, but I have not seen his name. The doctors are all there, the dates, the drugs, the doses, everything, but not his name. It is all anonymous.’

‘Then how on earth do you know it’s Andrew Myers?’

‘Because you told me when he died and the cause of death, it’s there on the certificate you sent me. That’s how I know whose record I was looking at.’

‘Stephen, you’ll have to explain more, I still don’t follow.’

‘There are not many people who die in the way that Andrew Myers died. So, I suggested, without actually saying so, that a post graduate student was thinking of preparing a paper on the incidence of coma deaths and wanted some background medical information. I proposed a period from 1990 to 1999 and signed off the request in the usual way. It took a long time to come through, but I received the documents a few weeks ago, when I spoke to you. Some poor soul had found all the records of all the people who died in such circumstances, copied them and then laboriously removed all reference to the patients’ names with a black marker. It makes it all anonymous, all ready for a research worker to use for whatever purpose they have in mind.’

Lydia was astonished. ‘You said ‘in the usual way’, what did you mean, does this happen often?’

‘All the time, not by me, but the drug companies, government departments, and of course, the universities.’

‘You did it through the university?’

‘In a way, that’s why I said I cheated a little. Not really my department, but there is some overlap with medicine.’

‘I don’t know what to say. Will it be a problem? Will someone ask about the paper?’

‘No, but I will salve my conscience by giving it all to just such a student who was looking for a research model for a funding proposal. In fact I already have.’

Lydia had been so taken up by the process, the revelation so shocking and amazing he could just call for information and have it delivered to his doorstep, that she almost overlooked the information itself. ‘So, you just matched Andrew’s death to an anonymous medical record, as easy as that.’ It was her turn to make a statement that needed no confirmation, then after a moment’s thought she added, ‘Did it take long?’

Stephen smiled. ‘Probabilities, Lydia. How many records do you think there were? Let me tell you. There were one hundred and twenty seven for the ten years. And in 1992 only six, one of which was in Oxford. So, no, it did not take long, only a few minutes.’

‘You said that it didn’t change anything.’

‘Well, you may think it does, but in essence it remains that Andrew Myers died on the date you found, in the way that is recorded, his wife re-married and properly referred to herself as a widow.’

‘There’s a ‘but’ in here somewhere,’ Lydia said cautiously.

‘No there isn’t. More of an ‘and’ than a ‘but’. We now know he was in a coma for eight years having been admitted with liver failure. And we now know that was caused by a mixture of alcohol and Veratin poisoning. Apparently that was an anti-depressant drug, amitriptyline. The version that Andrew was taking was called Veratin.’

‘Alcohol poisoning? And this drug? That means an overdose, does it?’

‘Yes, but I’d guess that the mixture of the two was probably a factor as well.’

Lydia tried to take in what he was saying, trying to divine some extra meaning, some new alternative to the events she had played through her mind so often. It came back to her idea of suicide, the idea that she had grasped so quickly only to discard on finding the date of Andrew’s death.

‘I did have another thought, I was going to tell you, then when I found his death it seemed irrelevant. Now I wonder about it again.’ Stephen waited for her to tell him. ‘The last time I read his journal I thought I saw the very opposite of what I’d seen all along. I thought I saw a suicide note. The overdose, then the coma, it seems possible again now.’

Silence settled round them again as the day beyond the windows began to fade into misty gloom. The house lay still, no board creaked, no clock ticked, no tap dripped.

‘You may be right,’ Stephen said quietly, then almost apologetically added, ‘There’s one last thing, one detail more to add to the picture. As I have said, Andrew finally died from pneumonia. The extra detail is that he died ten days after all treatment was stopped.’ He let this fact sink in for a moment. ‘They stopped treating him, stopped keeping him alive. The signature on the consent form was S. D. Ingleby.’

A little before five the telephone rang. Lydia could only hear one side of the conversation, but it could only be Jacqueline. Yes, everything was fine, yes, a good lunch, very pleasant, yes, yes, no, you stay and enjoy yourself, we’re fine. Yes, I will, and you. The choreography in action: she had said she would call and see how things were then come back if he wanted her to, if Lydia should not have arrived for some reason, if her father was in need of excuse or escape. But he had no need of rescue, ‘we’re fine’ he’d said. And so we are, thought Lydia.

When she had hung up her few clothes, she stayed a while in her room staring out into the darkness. Across the bottom of the garden, where she knew the paddock began, the mist had closed in
and hung in a damp shroud, dimly reflecting back the light from the house. Save for that faint illumination there was nothing but her reflection and that of the room around her. It struck her again how still the house was, even though she knew it to be alive with glowing fires, mince pies warming in the kitchen, a glass of wine and Stephen’s good company waiting for her downstairs. And she wondered if this stillness, this comfortable quiet, was a reflection of the man who lived here, or whether he had taken on the persona of the house.

When she returned to the sitting room, she found Stephen had started reading her present.

‘Any good?’ she asked.

‘Hopeless,’ he replied without looking up at her.

She sat opposite him and took up her copy of
Excursion to Loweswater
, but left it unopened on her lap. Instead she stared into the fire, letting the flames mesmerise her. The Joslins, the Myers and the Inglebys, all seemed to swirl and dance in time with the flickering fire. She could feel them slipping away from her, waiting only for the last puzzle piece to be put in place. For no apparent reason, Dorothy floated back into her mind, sitting at home alone, Lydia presumed, with a magazine or even with the her family history and the albums spread out beside her. What had become of Susan’s property, who had she left it to? If there were no will, Dorothy might have a claim to the estate, a claim that could now be supported by a wealth of evidence. The thought pleased Lydia so much so that she said it out loud and looked up to see that Stephen had stopped reading and was also gazing into the fire.

‘I thought you were reading.’

‘I was, then I saw that you were deep in thought. It’s a great thing about an open fire isn’t it?’

‘A great thing.’

‘What did you say about a claim?’

‘I was thinking that if Susan left no will, then Dorothy might have a claim on the estate.’

‘She might. Will you tell her?’

‘Probably not. No, I don’t think so.’ Lydia hesitated a moment
before asking, ‘What do you think about the suicide idea, you didn’t say?’ Stephen’s expression gave her the answer. ‘You don’t like it.’

‘You know his journal better than I do and if you see it there, then it has to be possible, but that would make . . . ah, I knew there was something else I meant to tell you. My statistical friend, I mentioned him I think. He set his students the problem of Susan’s chances of such great, er . . . misfortune. Well, he was very pleased with what they came up with in the way of how to calculate such a thing. The general consensus was that the number lay somewhere between winning the lottery and winning the lottery three times. That was without Andrew’s particularly unfortunate end factored in. In short, the answer was likely to be one in many millions, billions perhaps.’

‘Against that you might ask, what are the chances that Susan could have had a hand in the death of her brother, father, son and two husbands, and never been suspected?’

‘True.’

‘And suicide, you said you didn’t like it?’

‘Well, let’s suppose that you are right, Andrew’s carefully rehearsed plan, his perfect method of being rid of Susan, was to kill himself in some fantastically cunning way. If we accept that, then we have to admit that downing a bottle of scotch with a handful of his medication was not the most original idea in the world. But only you and I might see that, at the time it may have been what people thought. So, no, personally I don’t think he tried to kill himself, at least not by the method that eventually did for him.’

‘When you put it like that, I have to agree, but I don’t really want to.’

‘You might still be right, he might have tried suicide, or taken a drink too much in desperation when the careful plan he had nurtured for so long had failed.’

‘Either way it would mean that Susan had not killed him.’

‘Ironically enough, in a way she definitely did. She signed the paper that led to his certain death. It wasn’t murder, no one would even call it killing, but however you look at it she had a hand in his
death. And if I were to let my imagination run on a little further, then who is to say that she did not give him a little push towards an overdose, a push towards mixing it with alcohol. Who is to say that she didn’t give him a big push in a moment of spite, a flash of anger at his state of mind, his clawing dependency on her. It still might not be murder, might not even be manslaughter. But these are just my imaginings.’

Lydia thought back to her walk to Iffley, how she had caught echoes of the Inglebys, and now here was Stephen, of all people, catching echoes of his own. Not only that, but they resonated with hers, the flash of anger, the push into the water, the extra dose to speed the way, he saw them as his imaginings, she as the flickers of another time in the corner of her eye. There was the baby Simon, struggling briefly as his mother kept the breath from his lungs to silence his cries. No harm meant, just a moment to change a life, a moment to take a life, then a suitable pause, a few minutes to be sure that he was quiet before a call to the nurse, the frantic action to revive the child, the curtains drawn round her, she distraught and all the while knowing the script, remembering how it all played out with her brother Paul. What tripped the switch again with Andrew, what demand did he make, what action was misplaced just enough to tip the balance? Have another drink Andrew, don’t forget your pills Andrew, I read your journal Andrew, can you hear me Andrew, be careful what you wish for Andrew, just one more Andrew, go to sleep Andrew, you’ll feel better in a while. How easily he slips away, how easily her father slipped away, gently down the stream with no fuss, no complaint. But with the aid of science Andrew hung on somehow, hung on to a gossamer thread of life for eight years until she was finally persuaded that the kindest thing, the very best thing, the loving thing, was to let him go, let him quietly slide the last inch down into the abyss.