Echo

by Minette Walters

  1:OO p.m.-Cape Town, South Africa

  "Who is that woman?" asked an elderly matron of her daughter, nodding towards the solitary figure at a window table. "I've seen her here before. She's always on her own, and she always looks as if she'd rather be somewhere else."

  Her daughter followed her gaze. "Gerry was introduced to her once. I think her name's Felicity Metcalfe. Her husband owns a diamond mine, or something. She's absolutely rolling in it, anyway." She looked with some dissatisfaction on her small solitaire engagement ring.

  "I've never seen her with a man."

  The younger woman shrugged. "Maybe she's divorced. With a face like that, she's almost bound to be." She smiled unkindly. "You could cut diamonds with it."

  Her mother subjected the lonely figure to a close scrutiny. "She is very thin," she agreed, "and rather sad, too, I think." She returned to her food. "It's true what they say, darling, money doesn't buy happiness."

  "Neither does poverty," said her daughter rather bitterly.

  While Terry decorated the flat that afternoon, Deacon sat at the kitchen table and made a stab at drawing conclusions from what little information he had. He threw out questions from time to time. Why did Billy choose to doss in the warehouse? For the same reason as the rest of us, I guess. Did he have a thing about rivers? He never said. Did he mention the name of a town where he might have lived? No. Did he mention a university or a profession or the name of a company he might have worked for? I don't know any universities, so I wouldn 't know, would I?

  "WELL, YOU BLOODY WELL SHOULD!" roared Deacon, losing his temper. "I have never met anyone who knows as little about what matters as you do."

  Terry poked his head round the kitchen door with a broad grin splitting his face in two. "You'd be dead in a week if you had to live the way I do."

  "Who says?"

  "Me. Any guy who reckons the names of universities are more important than knowing how to graft for food ain't got a chance when the chips are down. What matters is staying alive, and you can't eat fucking universities. D'you want to see what I've done in here? It looks well brilliant."

  He was right. After two years, Deacon's flat had a homey feel about it.

  Deacon simplified his notes down to names, ages, places, and connecting ideas, and grouped them together logically on a piece of paper, putting Billy in the center. He propped the sheet against the wine bottle. "You're the artist. See if you can spot patterns. I'll help you with anything you can't manage." He crossed his arms and watched the boy scrutinize the page, reading words out loud every time Terry pointed a questioning finger.

  "What's this hang-up with rivers?" Terry asked.

  "Amanda said Billy liked to doss down as near the Thames as possible."

  "Who told her that?"

  Deacon checked through a transcript he'd made of his recorded conversation with her. "The police presumably."

  "First I've heard of it. He really hated the river. He moaned about the damp getting into his bones, and said the water reminded him of blood."

  "Why on earth should it remind him of blood?''

  "I dunno. It was something to do with the river being the cord between the mother and the baby but I can't remember its name."

  "The umbilical cord."

  "That's it. He said London's full of shit, and she sends her shit along the river to infect the innocent places further down."

  "You said he had a thing about genes. Was he drawing an analogy?"

  "If you speak English," said Terry scathingly, "then I might be able to give you an answer."

  Deacon smiled. "Do you think he was talking about his own mother? Was he saying that his mother had passed on bad genes to him through the umbilical cord?"

  "He only ever mentioned London."

  "Or maybe he meant all parents pass on bad genes?"

  "He only ever mentioned London," repeated Terry stubbornly.

  "I heard you the first time. It was a rhetorical question."

  "Jesus! You're so like him. Lahdy-bloody-dah, and never mind no one knew what the fuck he was talking about." He pointed to the 45+ beside the name "Verity." "I thought you reckoned V was younger than Billy," he said, "so how come you've made her the same age?"

  "I've added a plus sign," said Deacon, "which means I'm now convinced she was older than he was." He pulled forward V's letters. "I was thinking about it last night. There are two ways of reading 'your glass shall not persuade you you are old, so long as youth and I are of one date.' Either she took the quote verbatim from her correspondent's letter or she reinterpreted it for her purposes. When I first read it, I assumed it was an interpretation because she didn't put it into quotation marks, and in Shakespeare's sonnet it reads: 'my glass shall not persuade me I am old' etcetera, etcetera. Now I'm more inclined to think it was a direct quote and her correspondent was talking about her age and her glass." He shook his head at Terry's obvious incomprehension. "Forget it, sunshine. Just accept that the letter makes more sense if V was older than her correspondent. Youth is eternally optimistic, and age is wary, and V seems to be a damn sight warier of revealing their affair than whoever she was writing to."

  "Which was Billy?"

  "Probably."

  "But not definitely?"

  "Right. He could have found the letters anywhere."

  Terry whistled appreciatively. "This is well interesting. I'm beginning to wish I'd asked the old bugger a few more questions."

  "Join the club," murmured Deacon sarcastically.

  Terry demanded an explanation of the lower half of the page. Who were de Vriess, Filbert, and Streeter? Why were W. F. Meredith, Teddington flats, and Thamesbank Estate included? Deacon gave him a summary of the Streeter connection with Amanda Powell.

  "Thamesbank Estate is where Amanda lives and Billy died," he finished. "Teddington is where she and James were planning a development of flats, and W. F. Meredith is the firm she works for. Its offices are in a converted warehouse about two hundred yards from yours."

  "So, are you saying Billy was this Streeter guy?"

  "Not unless he had some pretty radical plastic surgery."

  "But you reckon there's a connection?"

  "There has to be. The odds against one woman being associated with two men who both dropped out of their lives are so high they're not worth considering. There are a thousand garages between the warehouse and Amanda's estate, so Billy must have had a reason for going all the way to hers." He ran a thoughtful hand around his jawline. "I can think of three possible explanations. First, some of the letters he liberated from the trash were hers and he found out her address and who she was by reading them. Second, he saw her coming out of the Meredith building, recognized her as someone he'd known in the past, and followed her home. Third, somebody else recognized her and followed her, then handed that information on to Billy."

  Terry frowned. "The second one can't be right. I mean if he recognized Amanda, then she'd've recognized him. And she wouldn't've come round asking about him if she already knew who he was, would she?"

  "It depends how much he'd changed. Don't forget, you thought he was twenty years older than he actually was. It may have gone something like this. Out of the blue, Amanda finds a dead wino in her garage who's known to the police as Billy Blake, aged sixty-five. She's sorry but not unduly concerned until she learns that his name was assumed, his age was forty-five, he was dossing near her offices, and there was a good chance he had chosen her garage deliberately, at which point she pays for his cremation and goes to great lengths to find out something about him. What does that suggest to you?"

  "That she thought Billy was her old man."

  Deacon nodded. "But she must have realized she was wrong the minute she got hold of the police photographs. So why is she still obsessed with Billy?"

  "Maybe you should ask her."

  "I have." He threw the boy a withering look. "It's not a question she wants to answer."

  Terry shrugged. "Maybe she can't. Maybe she's as puzzled by i
t all as you and me. I mean, she told us she didn't know he was there till he were dead, so he can't have spoken to her. And see, you've not explained why he went there. If he did recognize her, why should that make him want to die in her garage? And if he didn't recognize her-well, why'd he want to die in a stranger's garage? Do you get what I'm saying?"

  "Yes, but you're assuming she told you the truth. Supposing she was lying about not speaking to him?" Deacon stretched his hands towards the ceiling, easing the muscles of his shoulders. He watched the boy for a moment out of the corner of his eye. "He must have been in a pretty bad way to die as quickly as he did, so why did you let him go off on his own like that?''

  "You can't blame me. Billy never listened to anything I said. In any case, he was okay the last time I saw him."

  "He can't have been, not if he was dead of starvation a few days later."

  "You've got that wrong. None of us'd seen him for about three, four weeks before he pegged it." The memory seemed to worry him, as if he knew that it was his own apathy that had killed Billy. Just as Deacon's apathy had killed his father. "He buggered off in May sometime, and the next I knew was when Tom read in a newspaper that he'd turned up dead in this woman's garage."

  Deacon digested this surprising piece of information in silence for a moment or two. For some reason he had always assumed that Billy had gone directly from the warehouse to the garage. "Do you know where he went?"

  "At the time we thought he was probably banged up in one of the London nicks, but thinking about it after"-he hesitated-"well, like Tom said, no nick would have let him starve himself, so I guess he was holed up in a place where he just stopped eating."

  "Had he done that before?''

  "Sure. Loads of times when he was depressed or he'd had enough of the likes of Denning. But it was never for more than a few days and he always came back. Then I'd take him down to a soup kitchen and feed him up again. I used to look after him pretty damn well, you know, and I was gutted about the way he died. There weren't no need for it."

  "Do you know where he might have gone?"

  Terry shook his head. "Tom reckoned he went out of town, seeing as no one saw hide nor hair of him."

  "Do you know why?"

  Another shake of his head.

  "What was he doing before he left?"

  "Got rat-arsed, same as always."

  "Anything else?"

  "Like what?"

  "I don't know," said Deacon, "but something must have persuaded him to up stumps and vanish for four weeks." He cupped his hands and beckoned with his fingers. "Talk to me. Was he begging that day? Did he speak to anyone? Did he see someone he recognized? Did he do anything unusual? Did he say anything before he left? What time did he go? Morning? Evening? Think, Terry."

  "The only thing I remember that were different," said Terry, after obliging Deacon with several seconds of eye-screwing concentration, "was that he got pretty excited about a newspaper he found in a bin. He used to flick through them, looking at headlines, but this time he read one of the pages and gave himself a headache. He were in a bloody awful mood for the rest of the day, then he passed out on a bottle of Smirnoff. He were gone by the next morning, and we never saw him again."

  *13*

  As near as Terry could remember, Billy had left sometime during the week beginning the fifteenth of May. Having pried this piece of information out of him, Deacon bundled him into the car and drove to The Street offices. Terry grumbled the entire way, complaining that pubs and clubs were supposed to be the order of the evening, not looking through newspapers ... Deacon's trouble was he was so old he'd forgotten how to enjoy himself ... The fact that he hated Christmas didn't mean everyone else had to be miserable with him...

  "ENOUGH!" roared his long-suffering host as they approached Holborn. "This won't take long, so for Christ's sake, shut it! We can go to a pub afterwards."

  "All right, but only if you tell me about your mother."

  "Does the word 'silence' make up part of your vocabulary, Terry?"

  "Course it does, but you promised to answer my question about not giving her a chance to stop your dad killing himself."

  "It's simple enough," said Deacon. "She hadn't spoken to him for two years, and I couldn't see her starting that night."

  "Didn't they live in the same house?"

  "Yes. One at each end. She looked after him, did his washing, cooked his meals, made his bed. She just never spoke to him."

  "That sucks," said Terry indignantly.

  "She could have divorced him and left him to fend for himself," Deacon pointed out mildly, "or even had him institutionalized if she'd tried hard enough. That sort of thing was easier twenty years ago." Briefly, he glanced at the boy's profile. "He was impossible to live with, Terry-charming to people one day, abusive the next. If he didn't get his own way, he became violent, particularly if he'd been drinking. He couldn't hold down a job, loathed responsibility, but complained endlessly about everyone else's mistakes. Poor old Ma put up with it for twenty-three years before she retreated into silence." He turned down Farringdon Street. "She should have done it sooner. The atmosphere improved once the rows stopped."

  "How come he had all this money to leave if he didn't work?''

  "He inherited it from his father who happened to own a piece of land that the government needed for the Ml. My grandfather made a small fortune out of it and willed it to his only child, along with a rather beautiful farmhouse which has a six-lane, nonstop motorway at the bottom of its garden."

  "Jesus! And that's what your mother's nicked off of you?"

  Deacon turned into Fleet Street. "If she has, she earned it. She sent me and Emma away to boarding school at eight years old so that we wouldn't have to spend too much time under the same roof with Pa." He drove down the alleyway beside the offices and parked in the empty parking lot at the back. "The only reason he and I were still speaking at the end was because I had less to do with him than either Ma or Emma. I avoided the place like the plague, and only ever went home for Christmas. Otherwise I stayed with school and university friends." He switched off the engine. "Emma was far more supportive, which is why Pa left her only twenty thousand. He grew to hate her because she took Ma's side." He turned to the youngster with a faint smile, only visible in the backwash of the headlamps. "You see, none of it's the way you thought it was, Terry. Pa only made that second will out of spite, and the chances are he was the one who tore it up anyway. Hugh knows that as well as I do, but Hugh's in a mess and he's looking for a way out."

  "Are all families like yours?"

  "No."

  "Well, I don't get it. You sound as though you quite like your mother, so why aren't you speaking to her?"

  Deacon switched off the headlights and plunged them into darkness. "Do you want the twenty-page answer or the three-word answer?"

  "Three-word."

  "I'm punishing her."

  "What's up with everyone tonight?" asked Glen Hopkins as Deacon signed in. "I've had Barry Grover here for the last two hours." He studied Terry with interest. "I'm beginning to think I'm the only person whose home holds any charms for him."

  Terry smiled engagingly and leaned his elbows on the desk. "Dad here"-he jerked a thumb at Deacon-"wanted me to see where he worked. You see, he's pretty choked about the fact Mum's been on the game since he kicked her out, and he wants to show me there are better ways of earning a living."

  Deacon seized his arm and spun him round towards the stairs. "Don't believe a word of it, Glen. If this git carried even one of my genes, I'd throw myself off the nearest bridge."

  "Mum warned me you'd get violent," whined Terry. "She said you always hit first and asked questions later."

  "Shut up, you cretin!"

  Terry laughed, and Glen Hopkins watched the two of them vanish up the stairs, with a look of intense curiosity on his usually lugubrious face. For the first time that he could remember, Deacon had looked positively cheerful, and Glen began to imagine similarities of bon
e structure between the man and the boy that didn't exist.

  Barry Grover was equally curious about Terry, but he had spent a lifetime masking his true feelings and merely stared at the two men from behind his pebble glasses as they barged noisily through the door into the clippings library. He made a strange sight, isolated as he was at a desk in the middle of the darkened room with a pool of lamplight reflecting off his lenses. Indeed his resemblance to some large shiny-eyed beetle was more pronounced than usual and, with an abrupt movement, Deacon snapped on the overhead lights to dispel the uncomfortable image.

  "Hi, Barry," he said in the artificially hearty tone he always used towards the man, "meet a friend of mine, Terry Dalton. Terry, meet the eyes of The Street, Barry Grover. If you're even remotely interested in photography and photographic art, then this is the guy you should talk to. He knows everything there is to know about it."

  Terry nodded in his friendly fashion.

  "Mike's exaggerating," said Barry dismissively, fearing he was about to be made to look a fool. He had already suffered the humiliation of Glen's knowing looks and poorly disguised curiosity when he arrived. Now he turned his back on the newcomers and pushed the photographs of Amanda Powell under a sheaf of newspaper clippings.

  Terry, who was largely insensitive to undercurrents of emotion unless they had a basis in paranoid schizophrenia or drug addiction, wandered over to where Barry was sitting while Deacon got to work on the microfiche monitor in search of newspaper files from May 1995. This was not an environment Terry knew, so it didn't occur to him to question why this fat, bug-eyed little man with his pernickety gestures should be closeted alone in the semidarkness of a large room. If he and Deacon were there, then, presumably, it was quite natural for Barry Grover to be there, too.

  He perched on the side of the desk. "Mike told me you were the best in the business as we were coming up the stairs," he confided. "Says you've been trying to work out who Billy Blake was."