The Echo

by Minette Walters

  Jesus wept! Was his life really as empty—and as worthless—as Billy Blake's ...

  He arrived at the office early, consulted the phone book and an A to Z of London, left a message at the front desk to say he would be back later, then retrieved his car and headed east along the river towards what had once been the thriving port of London. As in so many other ports around the world, the shipping fleets and working docks had long since given way to pleasure vessels, expensive housing, and marinas.

  He made his way down the western shores of the Isle of Dogs and located the refurbished warehouse where W. F. Meredith, architects, had their offices, then drove on towards a filthy, boarded-up building that bore no resemblance to its neighbors except in its rectangular lines and gabled roof. Not that it required much imagination on his part to picture what this sad relic of Victorian London could become. He had lived in the capital long enough to witness the transformation of the old docklands' buildings into things of beauty, and he had only to look at the converted warehouses around him to remind himself of what was achievable.

  He parked his car, took a flashlight and a bottle of Bell's whiskey from the glove box, and made his way through a gap in the fence to the front of the building. He tested the boarding on the doors and windows before making his way round to the back. Five or six meters of exposed scrubland separated the rear wall from the river, and he pulled his coat tighter about him as a bitterly cold wind whipped across the surface of the Thames and flayed the skin of his face. How anyone could expose themselves to such conditions was beyond him, yet a small group of men, apparently impervious to the morning cold and damp, sat huddled about a brazier of burning wood in an open doorway in the warehouse wall. They regarded him with suspicion as he approached.

  "Hi," he said, squatting down in a gap in the circle with the bottle between his feet, "my name's Michael Deacon." He took out his cigarette packet and offered it around. "I'm a reporter."

  One of the men, much younger than the rest, gave a short laugh and mimicked Deacon's educated diction. "Hi. My name's R. S. Hole. I'm a bum." He took a cigarette. "Ta. I'll save it for drinkies before dinner if you've no objections." "None at all, Mr. Hole. Seems a shame to wait for dinner, though."

  The lad had a thin, washed-out face beneath a crudely shaven head. "The name's Terry. What are you after, you bastard?"

  He really was very young, thought Deacon, but there was street wisdom in the aggressive tilt of his jaw and a terrible cynicism in the narrowed eyes. With a slight shock, it occurred to him that Terry thought he was a middle-class homosexual in search of a rent-boy. "Information," he said matter-of-factly. "About a man called Billy Blake who used to doss here when he wasn't in prison."

  "Who says we knew him?"

  "The woman who paid for his funeral. She tells me she came here and got answers to some of her questions."

  "Aye-mander," said one of the others. "I remember 'er. Saw 'er on the corner not so long ago and she gave me a fiver."

  Terry cut him off with an impatient hand. "What does a reporter want with Billy? He's been dead six months."

  "I don't know yet," said Deacon honestly. "Maybe I just want to prove that Billy's life had value." He clamped his hands over the bottle. "Whichever one of you can tell me something useful gets the whiskey."

  The older men watched the bottle, Terry watched Deacon's face. "And what exactly does 'useful' mean?" he asked with heavy irony. "I know he couldn't give a shit about anything. Is that useful?"

  "I could have guessed that, Terry, from the way he died. Useful means anything I don't know already, or anything that will lead me towards someone who might have information on him. Let's start with his real name. Who was he before he became Billy Blake?"

  They shook their heads.

  "E did pavement paintings," said one old man. " 'Ad a pitch down near the cruisers."

  "I know about that. Amanda tells me he always painted the same nativity scene. Does anyone know why?"

  More shakes of heads. They were like something out of a Star Wars film, thought Deacon irrelevantly. Wizened little monkey-men, swathed in overcoats that were too big for them, but with bright, beady eyes that spoke of a cunning he would never possess.

  "It were just a picture of a family that everyone would recognize," said Terry. "He weren't stupid, and he needed money. He wrote 'blessed are the poor' underneath then lay beside it. He looked so fucking ill most of the time that people felt guilty when they saw the painting and read the message. He did pretty well out of it and he were only aggressive when he'd had a skinful and started preaching at the punters. But that just frightened them off, and he'd come home skint those days and have to sober up."

  The faces around him split into grins of reminiscence.

  " 'E was a good artist when 'e was sober," said the same old man who'd spoken before. "Bloody awful when 'e was drunk." He cackled to himself, his leathery skin creasing inside the frame of a matted balaclava. "Drew 'eaven when 'e was sober and 'ell when 'e was pissed."

  "You mean he did two different pictures?"

  " 'E did 'undreds, s'long as 'e could get the paper." The old head jerked towards the office blocks. "Used to take piles of old letters out of the bins of an evening, draw his pictures all night on the backs, then abandon 'em in the morning."

  "What happened to them?"

  "We burned 'em the next day."

  "Did Billy mind?"

  "Nah," said another. "He needed to keep warm like the rest of us. Matter of fact, it used to make him laugh." He screwed his finger into his forehead. "He was mad as a sodding hatter. Always screaming about hellfire and being cleansed by the devil's flames. Stuck his hand in the middle of a mound of blazing paper once and kept it there for ages before we dragged him off."

  "Why did he do that?"

  A shrug of indifference rippled round the group like a muted Mexican wave. There was no logic to the actions of a madman seemed to be their common thinking.

  "He were always doing it," said Terry. "Sometimes it were both hands, more often just the right. It really used to bug me. There were days when he couldn't move his fingers at all because the blisters were so bad, but he'd still draw his sodding pictures. He'd stick the crayon between two fingers and move his whole hand to do the drawing. He said he needed to feel the pain of creation."

  "Young Terry reckoned 'e was schizo," declared the leathery-faced ancient in the balaclava. "Told 'im 'e should get medication, but Billy weren't interested. 'E said 'e didn't suffer from anyfing mental and 'e weren't going near no doctors. Death was the only cure for what ailed 'im."

  "Did he ever try to kill himself?"

  Terry gave another short laugh and gestured around him. "What d'you call this? Living or dying?"

  Deacon acknowledged the point with a nod. "I meant did he make specific attempts on his life?"

  "No," said the boy flatly. "He said he hadn't suffered enough and needed to die slowly." He drew his coat about his spare frame as another blast of wind whistled across the water and drew sparks from the blazing wood. "Listen, mate, the poor bastard had galloping schizophrenia, just like Walt here." He nudged the muffled shape beside him who sat, much as Billy must have done when Amanda Powell found him, with head slumped on knees. "Walt gets medication, but half the time he forgets to take it. By rights he should be in hospital but there ain't no hospitals anymore. He stayed with his old Mum for a while when the doctors said he was okay to live on the out, but he scared the poor old biddy out of her wits and she barred the door on him." He turned to look into the warehouse. "There's twenty more like him inside. It's us sane ones who're looking after them, and it's a bloody joke, if you ask me."

  Deacon agreed with him. What was society coming to when it was the down-and-outs who offered care in the community to the mentally ill? "Did Billy ever mention being in a hospital?"

  Terry shook his head. "He never talked much about the past."

  "Okay. How about prison? Do you know which one he did his time in?"

&
nbsp; Terry nodded towards the leathery-faced old man. "Tom and him did a month in Brixton once."

  "Where did they keep him?" Deacon asked Tom. "On the hospital wing or in a cell?"

  "Cell, same as me."

  "Was he given any medication?"

  "Not that I remember."

  "So he wasn't diagnosed schizophrenic in prison?"

  Tom shook his head. "The screws ain't got the time or the inclination to worry about a wino doing four weeks in the nick. It'd take 'im that long to dry out so, if 'e screams 'is 'ead off on a regular basis, they just put it down to DTs or anything else they fancy."

  "Did he act as crazy inside as he did on the out?"

  Tom made a rocking motion with his hand. "Bit up and down, got depressed every so often, but otherwise 'e was okay. Went to chapel like a good'un and be'aved 'isself. Reckon it was the drink made 'im mad. 'E was only ever off his 'ead when e'd 'ad a skinful. Sane as you an' me when 'e was sober."

  Deacon offered his cigarettes round a second time, then raised his coat flap against the wind to light one for himself. "And none of you knows where he came from, or who he might have been, or why he called himself Billy Blake?"

  "What makes you think it wasn't his real name?" asked Terry. This time he chose to smoke his cigarette, pulling a brand from the fire to light it.

  Deacon shrugged. "I'm guessing." He drew heavily on his cigarette in order to keep the tip alight. "How did he speak? Did he have an accent?"

  "Not so's you'd notice. I asked him once if he was an actor because he sounded pretty classy when he was raving. But he said no."

  "What did he do when he was raving?"

  "Shouted anything that came into his head. Some of it rhymed, but I don't know if he was making it up himself or if he was quoting someone else. I remember some of it—and one bit more or less because he said it over and over again. It was bloody weird stuff, all about his mother groaning, his father weeping, and demons leaping out of clouds."

  "Can you quote it?"

  Terry looked at the others for inspiration. "Not really," he said when he didn't find any. "He always began with 'my mother groaned, my father wept' but I forget what came after."

  Deacon cupped his cigarette in his hands and dredged deep into his memory. " 'My mother groaned, my father wept,' " he murmured, " 'Into the dangerous world I leapt;/ Helpless, naked, piping loud,/ Like a fiend hid in a cloud."

  "Yeah," said the young man with surprised respect. "How the hell did you know that?"

  "It's a poem entitled Infant Sorrow by a man called William Blake. I wrote a thesis on him years ago. He was an eighteenth century poet and artist who was considered off the wall by his contemporaries because he claimed to see visions." Deacon gave a faint smile. "William wrote some wonderful poetry, but lived and died in virtual poverty because no one recognized his genius until after he was dead. I suspect your friend knew William and his work rather well."

  "Yeah," said Terry with quick intelligence. "William Blake. Billy Blake. What else did this guy write?"

  " 'Tyger! Tyger! burning bright/ In the forests of the night,' " Deacon paused, inviting the lad to finish it.

  " 'What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?' " said the youngster in triumph. "Yeah, Billy were always spouting that one. I told him it didn't rhyme properly, and he said you had to stress thy, which was where the rhyme was."

  Deacon nodded. Had Billy Blake been a teacher? he wondered. "There's a line in the next verse that goes: 'What the hand dare seize the fire?' Was he thinking of that, do you suppose, when he tried to burn his own hand?"

  "I dunno. It depends what it means."

  "The tiger represents power, energy, and cruelty. The poem describes this beautiful but uncontrollable creature being forged in flames and then goes on to question why his creator was brave enough to manufacture anything so dangerous." Deacon could see he'd lost the others but there was keen interest still in Terry's face. "It's the creator's hand that dared 'seize the fire,' so perhaps Billy thought he'd started something that he couldn't control."

  "Maybe." A faraway look came into the young man's eyes as he stared across the river. "Is the creator God?"

  "A god. Blake doesn't specify which one."

  "Billy reckoned there were loads of gods. Gods of war. Gods of love. Gods of rivers. Gods of every bloody thing. He used to swear at them all the time. 'It's your fault, you buggers,' he used to shout, 'so let me alone and let me die.' I said he should just stop believing that the gods were there, then he wouldn't have to hate them. Makes sense, doesn't it?" The pinched face turned back towards the brazier.

  "What did he think was the gods' fault?'

  "It's not what he thought," said Terry with careful emphasis, "it's what he knew." He reached out and gripped the air with his fingers. "He strangled someone because the gods wrote it into his fate. That's why he stuck his hand in the fire. He called it the 'offending instrument' and said 'such sacrifices were necessary if the gods' anger was to be directed somewhere else.' Poor bastard. He didn't know his arse from his elbow most of the time."

  On Terry's instructions, Deacon gave the bottle of Bells whiskey into the care of the old man in the balaclava, before following Terry into the warehouse to see where Billy had slept. "It's a waste of time," the lad grumbled. "He's been dead six months. What are you expecting to find?"

  "Anything."

  "Listen, there've been a hundred derelicts in his space since he kicked it. You won't find nothing." But despite this he led Deacon into the gloom. "You nuts or what?" he said in amusement as Deacon lit a small pool of light at their feet with his flashlight. "That's not going to help you see a damn thing. Just wait, okay. Your eyes'll soon adjust. There's enough light comes through the door."

  A grey lunar landscape slowly developed in front of Deacon, a wasteland of twisted metal, piled bricks, and abandoned warehouse wreckage. It was the aftermath of war where nothing recognizable existed anymore, and only the acrid smell of urine suggested human presence. "How long have you been here?" he asked Terry, as he began to pick out sleeping bodies among the rubble.

  "Two years on and off."

  "Why here? Why not a squat or a hostel?"

  The young man shrugged. "I've done them. This ain't so bad." He led the way past a pile of bricks and gestured to a makeshift structure, made out of plastic and old blankets. He pulled one of the blankets aside and reached in to light a battery-operated hurricane lamp. "Take a look," he invited. "This is my pitch."

  Deacon experienced a strange sort of envy. It was a cobbled-together tent in the middle of a urine-smelling bomb site, but it had personality in a way his flat did not. There were posters of seminude women pinned to the plastic walls, a mattress on the floor with a handmade patchwork quilt, ornaments on a metal filing cabinet, a wicker chair with a dressing gown on it, and a jam jar of plastic red roses on a small painted table. He went in and sat on the chair, carefully folding the dressing gown onto his lap. "This is good. You've done it up well."

  "I like it. Got most of this stuff off the council tip. It's fucking amazing what people chuck out." Terry squeezed in beside him and lay on the bed. He looked younger in repose than he did in tense concentration against the wind. "It's freer than a hostel and not so cramped as a squat. People can get on your nerves in a squat."

  "Don't you have any family?"

  "Nah. Been in and out of homes since I was six. One bloke told me once that my mother went to prison which is why I ended up in care, but I've never tried to find her. She's a loser, so it's no good looking. I get by."

  Deacon made a point of examining the young face in order to remember it afterwards. But there was nothing memorable about the lad. He was like a hundred shaven-headed boys of the same age, uniformly colorless, uniformly unattractive. He wondered why Terry hadn't mentioned a father, but guessed the father was anonymous and therefore irrelevant. He thought of all the women he himself had slept with over the years. Had one of them fallen pregnant by him and give
n birth to a Terry whom she subsequently abandoned?

  "Still, it can't be much fun living rough like this."

  "Yeah, well, I'm not the first to do it, and I sure as hell won't be the last. Like I said, I get by. Whatever man has done, man can do."

  The expression seemed an unlikely one for a youngster like Terry to use. "Is that something Billy used to say?"

  The lad gave an indifferent shrug. "Maybe. He were always fucking preaching at me." His voice took on a more refined tone. '"You cannot have rights without responsibility, Terry. Man's greatest sin is pride because he dethrones God at his peril. Be prepared—the day of judgment is closer than you think.' " He reverted to his own, rougher accent. "I'm telling you, it did your head in to listen to him. He were a right nutter most of the time, but he meant well and I reckon I learnt a thing or two off of him."

  "Like what?"

  Terry grinned. "Like, fools ask questions that wise men cannot answer."

  Deacon smiled. "How old are you?"

  "Eighteen."

  Somehow Deacon doubted that. For all Terry's readiness of speech and mind, which allowed him to dominate the derelict old men he was living with, the fluff on his chin was still downy and he was growing too fast for his thin frame to keep pace. His great bony hands hung out of his sleeves like paddles, and it would be a while yet before maturity bulked his chest and shoulders. It made Deacon all the more curious about the preacher—and teacher?—who had befriended him.

  "How long did you know Billy?" he asked.

  "A couple of years."

  Since he'd been in the warehouse then. "Was his doss as good as this?"

  Terry shook his head. "He wanted to suffer. I told you, he was a real head case. I found him prancing around in the fucking nude this time last year. You wouldn't believe how cold it was. He was blue from head to toe. I said, what the fuck are you doing, you fucking idiot, and he said he was mortifying the flesh—" he paused, unsure if he'd used the right word—"or something like that. He never built himself a place, just used to roll in an old blanket and bed down by the fire. He didn't have nothing, you see, didn't want nothing, didn't see the point in making himself comfortable. He knew the gods would get him in the end, and he reckoned he'd make it as easy for the rotten bastards as he could."