Page 65 of Murder in the Winter Woods
He picked up a bulging folder markedLONDON, 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’sface 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. TheSouthern 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 thechurch 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.
31
Julia was greeted at the gate by a writhing furry blur, yellow, black and brown, emitting yelps of delight.
‘Come in, chaps,’ called Pippa from the front door. ‘Give Julia some space.’
A black blur broke away from the mass of blur and ran back down the path towards the front door, followed by two golden blurs. Julia opened the gate. The three blurs resolved into three little dogs that sat at Pippa’s feet, their tails wagging proudly, while the fourth, chocolate brown one, affected deafness and continued to hurl itself at Julia’s legs.
‘Oh, the dear boy, isn’t he just like you, Jakey?’ Julia said to Jake, who was leaning against her leg, looking slightly wary of the frenzy of puppies. The puppy was, like Jake, brown and cute and friendly and clumsy, and the least obedient of the lot. But she didn’t say that, she just fondled the silky ears. Jake sniffed and nuzzled his miniature like a kindly uncle.
‘Come on in, Julia, the kettle’s on. And you can tell me about this mysterious mission of yours, and what you want to know.’
Julia followed Pippa into the house, with the dogs trailing after them. She felt like the Pied Piper, but with dogs instead of rats, the furballs tumbling over each other and hangingonto Jake’s tail. Pippa shooed the puppies and Jake straight outside to play in the back garden, which calmed things down considerably.
Over big mugs of Earl Grey tea, Julia gave Pippa an abridged version of her mission: ‘I’m trying to find someone who might be able to solve a mystery. I’m looking for someone who used to live near here a long time ago, and I’m hoping you might be able to help me find her.’
