The Echo (37 page)

"I'm as embarrassed as Barry."

"But I'm
delighted
with my gnome." His eyes twinkled mischievously. "And I shall do exactly as you suggest and put it on the mantelpiece in my drawing room. It will look very well beside my collection of Meissen porcelain."

Deacon bit off a snort of laughter and pulled the wrapping from his present. He didn't know whether to be relieved or dismayed, for while the gift had no material value its sentimental value was clearly enormous. He turned the pages of a closely written diary, spanning many years of Lawrence's life. "I'm honored," he said simply, "but I'd rather you left it to me in your will as something to remember you by."

"Then there'd be no pleasure in it for me. I want you to read it while I'm alive, Michael, so that I shall have someone to reminisce with from time to time. As far as you are concerned, I have been entirely selfish in my choice of a present."

Deacon shook his head. "You've already hijacked my soul, you old bastard. What more do you want?''

Lawrence reached out a frail hand. "A son to say Kaddish for
my
soul."
 

The smell of decay that poured out through the door like a tide of sewerage when the police ram burst open the door of Amanda Powell's house drove the team of policemen staggering backwards. So thick and putrid was the stench that it stung eyes and nostrils and loosened the contents of stomachs. The very fabric of the house seemed to ooze with the liquid of corruption.

Superintendent Fortune clapped a handkerchief to his mouth and rounded angrily on Harrison. "What the hell kind of fool do you take me for? There's no way you could have missed this if you were here last night."

Harrison dropped to his haunches and attempted to keep his guts from turning inside out. "There was a WPC here as well," he muttered. "I asked her to stay with Mrs. Powell while I spoke to Deacon. Believe me, she didn't notice it, either."

"It's clearing, sir," said Fortune's Hampshire colleague, approaching the doorway warily. "There must be a draft blowing it through." Gingerly, he poked his head into the hall. "It looks like the connecting door to the garage is open."

There was no immediate response from the remaining policemen. To a man they dreaded what they knew they were going to see, for Nature had not endowed its works of beauty with the smell of death. At the very least they expected rivers of blood around a scene of brutal carnage.

However, when they finally found the courage to enter the house and look into the garage, there was a single naked corpse, intact and uncorrupted, propped against a stack of unopened bags of cement in the corner, gazing wide-eyed in their direction. And while no one put the thought into words, they all wondered how something so cold and pure could reek so vilely of corruption.
 

"I'm beginning to wish I'd never met you," said DS Harrison, stepping wearily across Deacon's threshold and introducing his companion. "Chief Superintendent Fortune of Hampshire police."

"I left a message for you to phone."

"Events overtook me," said Harrison laconically.

Deacon took in their somber expressions, and belatedly removed the paper hat from his head and tucked it into his pocket. The all-too simple pleasures of getting gently smashed while eating Barry's turkey dinner and reading dire jokes out of crackers palled rather rapidly in the face of official sobriety. "Is something wrong?"

The superintendent, a lean, somewhat intimidating individual with eyes that had been trained to see more than they gave away, gestured him forward. "After you, Mr. Deacon. If you please."

With a shrug, he led the way upstairs and introduced them to his guests. "If you're from Hampshire," he said to Fortune, resuming his seat, "then this must be to do with Nigel de Vriess."

"How much do you know about him?" asked the superintendent.

"Very little."

"Then why did you phone his house this morning?"

Deacon glanced at Terry, wondering if the boy could be relied on to keep his mouth shut. "Trust me" was the response in his disarmingly innocent expression. ' 'It occurred to me that the man Mrs. Powell's neighbors saw tampering with her garage door yesterday might have been Nigel, so I thought I'd check to see if he ever went home." He stroked his nose. "Apparently he didn't."

"Later you left a message at the station, saying you wanted to contact me on a matter of urgency regarding Amanda and Nigel," said Harrison. "What was that about?"

Deacon consulted his watch. "It's after three. It won't be urgent anymore." He read impatience in Harrison's face and, with an amused smile, outlined his theory that Amanda and Nigel had done a bunk once they knew Barry had seen them together. "Terry and I drove to the docklands and checked her house," he explained. "It was empty and her car had gone. I thought it worth passing on that information if I could, but your desk sergeant was reluctant to bother you."

"We're talking quite an epidemic here," said Harrison. "First James absconds, then Amanda and Nigel. Is this a serious theory you're proposing, Mr. Deacon?"

Terry grinned. "I told you you'd look a plonker."

Deacon offered the two policemen drinks, which they refused. "I'm sorry to have wasted your time," he said refilling the glasses of the others. "Put it down to the fact that I've had missing persons on the brain for weeks."

"Meaning James Streeter?"

"Among others."

Lawrence stirred. "I doubt you'd be here, gentlemen, if you knew where Amanda and Nigel were, so are we to be given an explanation or left in the dark? I should add that I think it's a little unfair to pour scorn on Michael's theory if you have none of your own."

The two policemen exchanged glances. "After all, I think I will have that drink," said the superintendent unexpectedly. "It's been a bugger of a twenty-four hours."

Harrison looked relieved, although whether because he needed a drink or because his colleague had shown a weakness, Deacon couldn't tell. "I wouldn't say no, either."

They chose beer and, as Terry poured it for them, Fortune gave a brief account of the events that had brought him to London to consult with DS Harrison. "A short while ago we took the decision to enter Amanda Powell's house." He paused to drink from the glass Terry handed him. "We found Nigel de Vriess dead in the corner of her garage," he went on bluntly. "He was naked and appears to have died from a blow to the back of his head. It's a rough estimate but we're looking at death occurring approximately thirty-six hours ago, presumably during the hours following Mr. Graver's sighting of him in the sitting room."

There was a long silence.

Deacon wondered what the reaction would be if he admitted that he, too, had visited Amanda's house. He suspected that theories on the inexorability of fate would go down like a lead balloon with London and Hampshire's finest, particularly as Harrison already had his doubts about his and Barry's involvement with the damn woman. He thought of her pallor, and the way her eyes had watched his every movement. Was she afraid he would stumble across the corpse? How close had he come to it, for God's sake?
And how the hell could she have been so calm and collected when the body of her dead lover was secreted in her house and on her conscience?

He rolled the stem of his wineglass between his finger and thumb, turning it in a slow circle on the tablecloth. "If she had a dead body on the premises, then I'm surprised she complained to you about Barry," he said to Harrison. "She's either very cool or very stupid."

"Cool," said Harrison, recalling his own impressions of a woman who had calmly allowed the police into her house with a dead man in the garage. "I'm guessing she wanted to find out how much he'd told us before deciding what to do next. Presumably the original idea was to abandon his car in Dover before disposing of the body somewhere else, but she did a bunk when she realized she couldn't discredit Barry's evidence." He paused. "It still gives us a logistical problem. Who drove the Rolls-Royce to Kent if its owner was lying dead in a London garage?"

No one answered.

"If Amanda took it there," he continued, "how did she get back in time for her neighbors to speak to her at nine o'clock and then watch her drive away to spend Christmas with her mother? She certainly couldn't have done it afterwards because she was in her mother's house at midday when Kent police informed her of Barry's arrest. Which makes the time frame too narrow to switch cars, drive the Rolls to Dover, and return for the BMW."

"She could have left home at three o'clock in the morning and caught an early train to London from Dover," Deacon pointed out. "That would have got her back by nine o'clock, wouldn't it?"

The sergeant shook his head. "The first train on a Sunday doesn't reach Waterloo until after nine o'clock."

"She could have hitched a lift."

"In the early hours of Christmas Eve? In the dark? Right to her doorstep in time to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for her neighbors?"

Lawrence was watching him closely. "What's your theory, Sergeant?"

"We think there was someone else involved, sir. Admittedly this is pure speculation but let's say de Vriess was struck on the back of the head
while
he was making love to Amanda, which is the only sensible explanation for his nudity. Let's say then that it was the accomplice who collected de Vriess's Rolls-Royce from wherever he had left it-it certainly wasn't parked outside her house or her neighbors would have noticed it-and drove the Rolls to Dover. I think you'd agree that's a more likely sequence of events, given what we have."

Lawrence smiled. "I'm a lawyer, my dear fellow. You can't expect me to agree with any such thing. An equally likely sequence of events is that de Vriess was so aroused by Amanda that he forgot to lock his car, and it was subsequently hijacked by joyriders. Meanwhile, following their satisfactory session on the sitting-room floor, he took a shower, slipped on the tiles and killed himself accidentally. Amanda, appalled at what had happened, hid the body in the garage, and has now fled to think things over. Have you any evidence to disprove my version of events?"

Both policemen looked at Barry. "Perhaps Mr. Grover can help us," suggested Superintendent Fortune. "How long did you watch what was going on in that sitting room, sir?"

Barry looked at his hands. "Not long."

"You left before they finished?"

He nodded.

"Are you sure about that, sir? Most men in your situation would have waited till the end. You were unobserved. You stumbled on it by accident. You said yourself it was exciting. So much so-" he glanced briefly at the other three, as if wondering how graphic he could be-"that you went back a few hours later for a second helping. Why leave before you had to?''

Barry licked his lips. "I thought she'd seen me. She made him get up suddenly and pull the curtains."

Fortune showed him a photograph of Nigel de Vriess. "Was this the man?"

"Yes."

"Why did you think Amanda had seen you?"

"Because he only got up after she looked at the window."

"Was there anyone else in the room?"

Barry shook his head.

"Did you look in any of the other windows?"

"No. I was scared of being caught. I went straight back to the main road and took a taxi home."

"You can't have been that scared," Harrison said bluntly. "You were there again in under eight hours."

"He left his folder of photographs behind," said Deacon reasonably. "That's why he went back." He looked thoughtfully across at Barry. "She drives a black BMW which she always parks in her driveway. Was it there that night?"

Barry shook his head.

"Then it was premeditated murder and she didn't need an accomplice," he said matter-of-factly. "She made two trips to Dover. The first on Saturday in her own car which she left down there, returning to London by train, and the second early on Sunday morning in the Roller, returning in her BMW." He fingered a cigarette from the packet on the table, wondering if she'd made the same round-trip five years ago. "The interesting question is what was she planning to do with Nigel's body?" He held the lighter to the tip of his cigarette. ' 'She must have been very sure of her hiding place or she wouldn't have gone to the trouble of leaving his car near a ferry port."

The superintendent was watching him closely. "The only problem with that scenario, sir, is that her neighbors recollect her car being outside her house all Saturday."

Deacon shrugged. "If Barry says it wasn't there, then it wasn't there."

"Sounds to me like they're trying to frame him for the murder," said Terry aggressively. "I mean he's a sitting duck if they reckon she had some patsy helping her." He nudged Lawrence in the ribs. "You shouldn't let them question him like this. They ain't given him a caution or nothing."

"Oh, I think you do our police friends an injustice, Terry. They know as well as you and I that Barry would not have told them he'd seen a man in Amanda's house if he were guilty of murdering him." He frowned slightly. "It's quite a problem, isn't it? Assuming Nigel was murdered, then one must accept that Amanda was party to the murder. Yet, she's such a lovely young woman."

"Do you know her, sir?"

"I've seen her once or twice. She and I are distant neighbors and, as Michael will tell you, I like to sit on the riverbank and watch the world go by."

"Go on, sir," said Fortune when Lawrence came to a halt.

"Forgive me. I was wondering how far human depravity can sink without its showing. You see, if Michael is right, then Mrs. Powell must have encouraged Nigel to make love to her in order to facilitate his murder, and that would make her very depraved indeed." He smiled a little wistfully. "By and large, I prefer to think well of people."

The superintendent smiled politely, hiding his impatience over an old man's ramblings. "In my experience there's no relationship between how a person looks and how they behave."

"Normally I would agree with you." He took the photograph of Nigel de Vriess from Barry and examined it with interest. "It's a cruel face, don't you think? But then he was a very arrogant man, and arrogance is a dangerous quality. I can say quite truthfully that Nigel de Vriess was one of the nastier by-products of a civilized society."