Page 35 of Murder in the Winter Woods (Julia Bird Mysteries #8)

Lydia was not an investor with Anthony Ardmore.

Julia was on her way home when her phone pinged in her pocket.

She pulled it out and peered at the screen.

She wasn’t wearing her glasses, so she could see well enough to determine from the shape of the words that it was a message from DC Walter Farmer, but not well enough to read the text message itself.

She patted her pockets for her glasses, without any success.

She sighed in frustration, and for about the millionth time, thought to herself that poor eyesight – not being able to read a note, or the ingredient list on packaging, or the price tag or the size on an item of clothing – was possibly the most irritating thing about ageing.

‘I think I’d rather have perfect eyesight again than my twenty-five-year-old figure,’ she’d told Tabitha once.

‘Not me,’ Tabitha had said decisively. ‘Give me that firm young body, and I’ll happily search for those spectacles all day long.’

Sadly, this wasn’t a choice that was available to them in the real world, in which one was stuck with an ageing body and poor eyesight.

Julia moved to the side of the pavement, stood under the awning for the hairdresser’s, and fished around in her handbag. Her fingers made contact with the familiar shape and smoothness of her glasses. She pulled them out, put them on, and read the message :

FYI. DI Gibson checked. Anthony A doesn’t know Lydia, and she wasn’t a client.

Ah well, that was a mystery for the police to solve, Julia thought, placing a thumbs-up next to DC Farmer’s message, and putting the phone and the glasses in her handbag.

Her walk took her down the main road, underneath the Christmas lights which would be turned on in the late afternoon for the enjoyment of locals and tourists alike.

She walked past the butcher’s shop, which was closed.

On the door was a notice advising customers that it would be closed all day because of the funeral of their dear staff member, Lydia Barrow.

The notice featured a picture of Lydia behind the counter, as alive as anything, and laughing heartily.

She was holding a meat cleaver up as if she were threatening the photographer, but the expression on her face confirmed that she’d been snapped in the middle of a joke.

For reasons she couldn’t determine, Julia took out her phone and took a picture of the notice

‘Poor woman,’ she muttered to herself, shaking her head.

‘Yes, poor woman indeed,’ came a voice from close behind her, causing Julia to shout, ‘Good lord!’ and startle so violently that she thought she might be the next person in the village to pass away suddenly and unexpectedly.

She turned to see the wraithlike figure of Aunt Edna standing next to her, leaning perilously in the direction of the door to peer at the poster.

‘No need to shout, young whippersnapper,’ said the old lady, sternly, to Julia.

‘Sorry, Aunt Edna!’ Julia said, at normal volume, her heart still pounding. ‘I didn’t hear you come up behind me. I was looking at the picture of Lydia.’

‘Not a bad sort,’ said Aunt Edna, in what passed for high praise. ‘All sorts, Liquorice Allsorts. Good and bad. Same with people. I like the orange ones myself. But she’s a good sort.’

‘I didn’t know her well, but so I hear.’

‘So you hear? You hear her sing, you say? Singing in the choir like an angel. Not one of those little chubby ones, the singing angels with the wings.’

‘Ah, well, that’s good to know. She was a woman of many talents and good qualities, it seems. I’m sure she will be missed by many people. Anyway, I’ll be on my way. Good to see you, Aunt Edna.’

‘Is it?’ the old woman said, sounding genuinely intrigued by the question.

Continuing down the main road and out of the village, Julia determinedly put all thoughts of dead people from her mind in order to enjoy the walk.

She appreciated the absence of wind for the first time in weeks, and the ever-so-slight almost-warmth of the wan sun on her cheek.

The leafless trees looked elegantly sculptural against the pale blue sky.

It was a fact of Julia’s nature that she could only reflect on the beauty of the day for a minute or two, before her mind wandered back to more prosaic matters.

In this case, Lydia Barrow. Lydia and Ken, Ken and Lydia.

If they weren’t co-investors with Anthony Ardmore, what else did they have in common?

Of course, if Lydia had been born in Berrywick, she and Ken could have known each other in their youth.

Like Lewis and Matthew. Like half the people in the village.

Julia felt the familiar prickle of a question or a vital piece of information trying to elbow its way into her consciousness.

She knew from experience not to chase the elusive thought, but pretend she hadn’t noticed it, and let it make its own way to her.

Like a cat, she thought, bringing to mind Chaplin, who met her advances with a haughty air, but snuck onto her bed or her lap when her attention was elsewhere.

The band.

There it was, the little kitty of a thought, climbing into her head.

Edna! In a snap, her brain made another connection. Aunt Edna had mentioned that Lydia had a lovely voice, that she’d sung in the choir.

Had Lydia been in the band with Lewis and Matthew and Ken and Dominic?

Could Lydia be the mysterious girl who was simply called Egg, in the caption of the band photo Julia had seen?

It made sense. Both Egg and Lydia sang. Both Egg and Lydia grew up in Berrywick, but then disappeared.

And both Egg and Lydia knew Ken. It seemed more and more likely to Julia that Egg and Lydia were one and the same.

If only there was someone that Julia could ask.

Dominic Ardmore selected a smoky grey document box from a shelf of identical smoky grey document boxes neatly stacked in the attic, each with a label on the front, attesting to their contents.

The label on the box Dominic pulled out read: Old photographs – Dom .

When he opened it, the contents of the box belied the neat and organised exterior.

Julia suspected that Molly had been behind the purchasing of the boxes, and Dominic had been responsible for filling this one with the mismatched envelopes and sleeves and folders, and the drift of loose prints at the bottom.

‘I’ve been meaning to sort through these,’ he said, somewhat shamefacedly scratching through the box. ‘One day I’ll file all the pictures, or digitise them. That would be a good plan.’ It was unclear if he realised, as Julia did, that this would absolutely never happen.

He picked up a bulging folder marked LONDON , a rather broad organisational category that didn’t inspire great optimism in Julia.

From amongst the yellowing A4 envelopes inside, he pulled a scrapbook with the Red Berries scrawled on the front.

‘Ah, here’s something that looks promising,’ he said.

‘Let’s see if we can find one of Egg. Or Lydia, if that’s her name. ’

‘It’s just a hunch I have. She died recently, and I started wondering about her past. So you never recognised Lydia from the butcher’s as Egg?’

‘We don’t go to that butcher much. Molly uses the free-range one out near Malmesbury. Buys in bulk.’

‘And Lydia only seems to have come back to town recently,’ said Julia. ‘She’d probably changed a lot.’

‘We’ve all aged,’ said Dominic with a sigh, unaware that he had probably aged less than most and was still a very good-looking man.

‘What about before the band? Did you know Egg from the village? Weren’t you at school together?’

‘If we were, I don’t remember She was Matthew’s girlfriend. Egg was younger than the rest of us. A couple of years is like a lifetime when you’re eighteen.’

‘True.’

‘I can tell you that if her real name was Lydia, I never once heard it. Everyone in the band called her Egg. Even the promotional material used the name. It was, like, her stage name, too.’

‘It’s a funny nickname, I wonder how she got it. Egghead? Good egg? Scrambled egg? Peggy?’

He paged through the scrapbook. Many of the photographs looked to be from the same series Julia had seen earlier. Egg’s face was one tiny pale oval amongst four other pale ovals. Much like, it had to be said, an egg.

Julia had an idea. She took out her phone and found the picture of the poster from the butcher’s. She held it up next to the photograph.

‘This is what Lydia looks…looked like…recently. Do you think there’s any chance that she could be the same person?’ asked Julia, looking at the photo of Egg next to the more recent one of Lydia.

Dominic frowned. ‘It’s hard to tell. It’s possible. She’s older and, um…rounder in the face. The nose seems like a different shape.’

‘I understand,’ said Julia, her eyes flickering from the lithe young woman in the photograph, to the cheerful butcher in the printed poster. They certainly bore little resemblance to each other. ‘It’s difficult to tell after all these years. People change so much. Even their noses.’

‘I can’t tell,’ he said, and went back to flipping through the scrapbook. ‘Maybe I can find a better one from back then.’

‘What’s that?’ Julia asked, pointing to what looked like a newspaper clipping, pasted onto the page.

‘Oh, it’s an article they did on us in the local paper. The Southern Times . I remember it because my mum was so proud! That’s me on the left of the photograph…God, what was I thinking with that hair? Not to mention the trousers. And there’s Egg…’

He handed the paper to Julia. She studied the picture. Then she turned her attention to the text, scanning it for any mention of Egg. She found a short paragraph referring to the singer:

The girl singer, who goes only as ‘Egg’, says she was inspired to start singing by listening to the choir at the church next door to the home where she grew up. Well, Egg certainly sings like an angel!

Julia cringed momentarily at the term ‘girl singer’, remembering those days when almost everything was the domain of men, and, in the unlikely event of a woman partaking, the word ‘girl’ or ‘woman’ or ‘female’ or – heaven help us – ‘lady’ was inserted as a sort of prefix.

Lady doctor. Female lawyer. But now wasn’t the time for nursing old irritations.

Now was the time for clues and connections!

Egg had lived next door to a church. There were only two churches in Berrywick.

And funnily enough, Julia knew someone who lived right next door to one of them. At least it was a place to start.

First thing tomorrow, she would investigate.