The Echo (23 page)

"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 it 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."
 

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 bone 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.