Echo

by Minette Walters

  It would be true to say that Peter Fenton died on July 3rd, 1988, when he walked out of the family home in Cadogan Square. Certainly, he had no interest in being that man again. Peter Fenton was a professional diplomat, an assured and confident man with an enviable intellect and no obvious vices. By contrast, Billy Blake was a tortured individual, who delighted in self-inflicted pain and preached damnation to anyone who would listen. He was an unrepentant alcoholic, thief and beggar, but he strove, often at terrible cost to himself, to protect others from the evil that he had done himself. The irony was that Billy, destitute, was a good man, and Peter Fenton, advantaged, was not.

  Peter was a murderer who went on to seduce and marry the wife of his victim, Geoffrey Standish. There can be no doubt that he knew exactly who Verity was when he first made love to her, for even if Geoffrey Standish was a stranger when Peter killed him, he will have learned about the man from newspaper reports afterwards. We can speculate that this knowledge added to the thrill of Verity Standish's seduction or we can take a kinder view and say that Peter simply fell in love at first sight with a frail and vulnerable woman whose suffering at the hands of her brutal first husband had left its indelible imprint.

  She was a tiny, fine-drawn woman with huge doe eyes, and Peter was by no means the first man to offer her protection. He was, however, the youngest, and Verity, after years of abuse by Geoffrey who was fourteen years her senior, saw safety in a relationship with a younger man. Nevertheless, she wasn't keen to publicize her love for a toy boy. There is evidence that she didn't want to legitimize the affair because she was afraid of what people might say. But, while she may have married Peter against her better judgment, her fears about the inappropriateness of the match were quickly laid to rest. Their marriage has been described by friends as: "an idyll," "the greatest love since Abelard and Eloise," "sweet to watch," "so intense that it was close to idolatory," "it's hard to say who adored the other more."

  How tragic then that, obsessed with love of Peter, she began to ignore the two children she'd had with Geoffrey. It's easy to understand why. At the time of her marriage, her daughter Marilyn, 20, was at university and her son Anthony, 14, was at boarding school. She was no longer so important to them, and her role as Peter's wife took her overseas.

  "They always paid for us to fly out in the holidays if we wanted to go," says Marilyn, "but it was no fun playing gooseberry for weeks on end. It was harder for Anthony because he was younger. Not that he ever blamed Peter. It was Mother he resented because she never made a secret of how much she'd hated our father. In the end, when Anthony became depressed after his girlfriend walked out on him, his resentment boiled over and he put that advertisement in The Times. He knew Mother would read it, and he wanted to jolt her out of her complacency. We'd both heard the rumors that she'd had Father killed, and Anthony wanted to remind her of them. You see, he was only five in 1971, and he never believed that Geoffrey was as bad as everyone said."

  Anthony Standish was 22 years old in 1988. He was an unhappy young man, whose depression over a failed love affair became confused with a long-standing resentment of his mother's coolness towards him. His bitterness found expression in the following advertisement:

  "Geoffrey Standish. Will anyone knowing anything about the murder of Geoffrey Standish on 10.3.71 please write to Box 431."

  Anne Cattrell first put forward the theory that Peter had murdered Geoffrey in her article "The Truth about Verity Fenton" (Sunday Times, 17th June 1990). She argued that Peter and Verity may have met much earlier than they ever admitted, and that Peter was Verity's avenging arm. There's no evidence of that, but there is a wealth of evidence to show that Geoffrey and Peter had something else in common in 1971. Which was gambling.

  As Billy Blake, Peter confessed to killing a man, and it's reasonable to assume that that man was Geoffrey Standish. Billy's penance was too long and too tortured for his victim to have been unconnected with Verity's suicide. But as Billy Blake, he also preached against the dangers of sudden and uncontrollable anger which lead men to commit acts of violence that they later regret. This would suggest that Geoffrey's murder was the result of a similar anger, making it an unplanned act and not a premeditated one.

  We can only speculate twenty-five years after the event, but university friends of Peter talk about his "illicit Friday night card games at a private house somewhere in Cambridge" which allowed him to pursue his goals of "money" and "the good life." It is certainly possible that Geoffrey, who was on his way to Huntingdon on Friday, March 9th, 1971, learned of such a card game and gained entry to it after phoning his hosts to say he would be delayed. It is also possible that a fight broke out over money and ended, tragically, in death.

  There must have been other people present who witnessed what happened. Indeed Peter may not have been alone in the killing which would explain why it was so successfully disguised as a road traffic accident. More likely, perhaps, is that Geoffrey attacked first-his aggressiveness is well documented-which would have exonerated the other participants, at least in their own minds, of murderous intent. Whatever the truth, the decision was made to protect everyone involved by dumping the body as far as possible from the illegal gambling house and make the death look like a hit-and-run accident.

  While there is no evidence to support this theory above any other (except perhaps Peter's abrupt decision to give up gambling "sometime in '71" according to friends) it makes it easier to understand how Verity could have married Peter in ignorance of his crime. For, as Anne Cattrell argued elsewhere in her article: Did Verity kill herself because she learned by accident that she'd married her first husband's murderer?

  The answer is that it was not an accident. Peter told her himself, during a bitter confrontation between Verity and Anthony after the advertisement appeared in The Times. "I accused her of killing my father and when she burst into tears Peter got very angry and said he'd done it. I know it sounds ridiculous," Anthony says now, "but I didn't believe him. I thought he was just trying to diffuse the row. It's what he always did. Every time she and I fell out over anything, Peter would take the blame on to himself. It used to make me so angry. My mother was very childish in many ways. She seemed unable to take responsibility for anything.

  "I've lived with the guilt of that row for eight years. I wish I'd waited until Peter had come back from the States instead of attacking her the day before he left. It's one of those terrible truisms, that you only realize how much you love a person when you've lost them. I was hurting very badly after my girlfriend left me, but it's no excuse for what I did. I never really believed that my mother had killed my father, but when she hanged herself I assumed she must have and that Peter had rejected her as a result. I always hoped he'd come back one day which is why I've never spoken about this before."

  But if Verity didn't hang herself out of guilt, then why? Was it in sudden revulsion against the man she adored? In panic, because she was afraid her husband's crime would catch up with him now that Anthony knew the truth? Either explanation could be true but neither satisfies. For all her frailty, Verity was stronger than that. She had put up with years of abuse from Geoffrey, and it seems unlikely that revulsion or panic would drive her to suicide.

  My own view is that something infinitely more terrible pushed Verity over the edge. It was a secret she had kept for forty years, and I learned of it by chance from a lawyer whom Verity's mother, Mrs. Isobel Parnell, consulted in 1949 about Geoffrey Standish's seduction of her 13-year-old daughter.

  "It was a terrible story," said Lawrence Greenhill. "Isobel had hoped to marry Geoffrey herself, and she hated Verity for causing her so much pain. The baby, a boy, was put up for adoption, and Verity was sent away to boarding school. The tragedy was that no one considered Verity's pain. At one stroke Isobel had bereft her of child, lover, and mother, and one can only wonder what loneliness the poor girl must have suffered. With the benefit of hindsight, it's obvious she would seek to pay Isobel back by marrying the man who had ruined
their lives. How could a disturbed adolescent possibly distinguish between love and lust when the woman who loved her rejected her, and the man who seduced her continued to pursue her?"

  But there are no neat solutions to this story. Peter was not Verity's long lost son, nor could she ever have believed he was. It is the Registrar General's job to check for just such anomalies before granting marriage licenses, and no questions were raised at the time of Peter and Verity's wedding.

  In her rational mind, Verity must have known there was nothing improper about their relationship, despite the intensity of her love for Peter. But in her irrational mind, alone in the awful silence of their empty house after Peter had gone to America, did she start to brood on the unnatural love she had for the murderer of her first husband and did she begin to question the legality of the adoption papers?

  Her suicide note speaks of betrayals, and it's tempting to assume she was thinking of her mother and her adopted son when she wrote it. But perhaps a more likely explanation is that she finally recognized she had betrayed everyone, even Peter, through her inability to express love naturally. For it's unlikely Peter would have been forced to betray himself to Anthony, had Verity loved him less and Anthony more.

  As Lawrence Greenhill suggests, Verity Fenton's real tragedy was her confusion of love with desire. She couldn't adequately express her love for Anthony because desire for a son is illegal, so she chose to consume her surrogate son, Peter, with all the passion in her nature. But, as she dwelled on the consequences of his admission of murder, alone and isolated in Cadogan Square, did it begin to dawn on her that her worship of the man who'd killed the father of all her children was a betrayal too far?

  And did she decide to kill herself because she realized it made no difference, and that she would want this man to possess her as long as she lived?

  Be he father-slayer or son?

  (Extracts taken from: Oedipus by Michael Deacon due to be published by Macmillan, 8th November, 1996.)

  Epilogue

  The flat was empty when Deacon returned to it, for which he was grateful. He was in no mood for Terry's cannabis-inspired inanity, having had his third row in as many days with the new editor of The Street.

  Who could believe he would ever regret IP's departure?

  "Different times, different customs, Mike," JP had said as he left. "Anodyne's the word I'd use for the new management. You won't be chasing prostitutes anymore, just sound bites from trained politicians."

  "I can live with that," Deacon replied.

  "Don't be too sure," JP had warned prophetically. "You may not have shared my ideas on what made a good story, but you were always free to write it in any way you chose." He picked up Deacon's copy on Peter Fenton, which was lying on the desk, and isolated the final two pages which discussed why Billy Blake had died in Amanda Powell's garage. "I can guarantee you won't get these last seven hundred words into print. I know you want to go public on why and how the poor bastard died, but there's no way the new lot will risk being sued, and particularly not by a prisoner on remand. It's too damned contentious. It almost certainly infringes the sub judice rules and it's bound to damage Amanda's rights to a fair trial for the murder of de Vriess. And that's not to mention the trouble you'll have with de Vriess's family when you accuse him of being a multiple rapist."

  "Would you have risked it?"

  "Of course. I'd argue that the matter isn't sub judice yet because Amanda hasn't been charged with James's murder." His expression grew cynical. "And won't be, unless the boffins can come up with a cause of death. Is it true she's withdrawn her confession?" Deacon nodded.

  "Even more reason to publish and be damned. Then if and when we raised enough steam to force a prosecution, I'd make hay out of the fact that our efforts resulted in her being convicted of both murders instead of walking away scot-free as she looks like doing at the moment."

  "And if the magazine got taken to the cleaners for libel?"

  "We'd have served a kind of justice, both on her and that bastard de Vriess." JP chuckled. "It's why they've kicked me out, of course. It's all about profit these days, and social consciences like mine come expensive."

  Deacon pressed the messages button on his answering machine. "Barry's been arrested again," said Greg Harrison's unemotional voice. "Drunk and disorderly right on our doorstep this time. His mother's adamant she won't have him back, so he wants to give your address in case he's bound over. You're going to have to sort this, Mike. He says he only gets drunk because he's in love with you." There was a short pause. For laughter? Deacon wondered sourly. "Look, call me back when you can."

  Lawrence's voice next. "I'm so sorry, my dear fellow. I see your article has had its teeth drawn. How very disappointing for you. I know how much you wanted to demonstrate that Billy's life had a purpose. Is it any consolation to think of him as Terry's mentor? In the end, surely, that is where Billy's true value lay."

  As the messages came to an end, the emptiness of the flat began to make itself felt. Picasso's Woman in a Chemise had gone, along with the television and the stereo that Terry had moved from the bedroom into the sitting room. Big Ben and the conch shell no longer stood on the mantelpiece, and Turner's The Fighting Temeraire was just a memory on a blank wall. Deacon went into the kitchen and inspected the biscuit jar. It contained a folded piece of paper.

  Cheers, mate. I reckon I've earned what I've taken by learning to read and write. Anyway, it's a lot less than the five hundred quid I could have had off you at the beginning. Give my love to Lawrence and Mrs. D. They're good people. You, too. I'll look you up some time. Your friend, Terry

  P.S. Tell that editor to get stuffed and concentrate on book-writing. Do your own thing, mate. I mean, like Billy always said: Any man who dies in chains probably deserves to.

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  Minette Walters

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