The Echo (39 page)

Best wishes,

Mike

Metropolitan Police-Isle of Dogs-facsimile-10.01.96 09.43

From: Greg Harrison
To: Michael Deacon

1. Hearsay evidence. Amanda denies John Streeter said any such thing. Her version is that he verbally abused her as he has done every Christmas since James vanished.
   
2. We can't prove she didn't meet him in Knightsbridge.
   
3. The cottage in Sway belongs to a Mrs. Agnes Broadbent. The lessee for the past six years has been Amanda Powell.
   
4. She told Nigel she didn't want to see him and said she would call a taxi. He said: "Don't bother, I'm going. The Rolls is parked in Harbour Lane." Then he attacked her. A witness remembers seeing a Rolls-Royce in Harbour Lane that night.
   
5. She thought about lifting Nigel into the trunk of her car but he was too heavy for her. She only just managed to drag him into the garage.
   
6. She is planning to have the patio relaid in the garden. Some of the stones have worked loose.
   
7. Sway doesn't enter the equation. De Vriess's only intention was to rape her, so he forced his way into her house to do just that. His death was an accident! (You understand I don't necessarily believe this, but am merely quoting her!)
   

Have you any idea how much it
costs
to trawl rivers? We've no more reason to search the Thames at Teddington than any other stretch of water. We need evidence that a body is there. You seem to have it in for Amanda. Why is that?

Yours,

Greg

P.S. You're placing a lot of trust in Barry and Lawrence. Their evidence of Nigel's "brutality" towards women is very slight. Are you looking for trouble from his family?

Dated: 15.01.96-Facsimile transmission

THE STREET, FLEET STREET, LONDON EC4

To: DS Greg Harrison
From: Michael Deacon

Lawrence and Barry have no reason to lie, unlike Nigel's family. And far from "having it in" for Amanda, I'm trying to help her so, as Terry would say, I'm "well gutted" about the assistance I gave you in finding her. I should have protected her story as assiduously as I'm protecting Billy's, then I'd have been able to interview her. Why the hell didn't you charge her with manslaughter, on the grounds of provocation, and agree to bail instead of having her banged-up in the nick? That way I could have effected a chance meeting. I guarantee I'd have got more out of her than you lot ever will.

In passing, are
you
to blame for my being designated a potential witness? Get real! What did I ever
see
? Okay, I was in her house on Christmas Eve but as far as I was concerned the poor bitch was trying to cope with the smell that you lot have seen fit to put down to Nigel. Listen, even I, a humble journalist, know that bodies don't go off that badly after 36 hours in the middle of a cold winter.
That
was Billy Blake who has been her constant companion since June in a so-far vain attempt to force her into an admission of murder. Okay, I know it sounds crazy, but "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy," my friend!

Do yourselves a favor, trawl the river by the flats at Teddington and find James. That's her real crime. Losing her temper and striking out at a two-timing bastard who was about to skedaddle off to his mistress with Ł10 million in a numbered Swiss bank account. Not that I blame her, particularly. The more I learn about James, the less I like him, and she's certainly paid her dues by being Nigel de Vriess's plaything for the past five years.

As to that garbage you sent me last week:

John Streeter's wife heard his side of the phone call so
there's independent proof of what he said
; search Nigel's bank accounts for the rent payments on Sway;
Amanda
will have told Nigel to park in Harbour Lane; if Amanda managed to get Nigel atop the sacks of cement, she could get him into her trunk (she's an architect, therefore must know something about the mechanics of lifting); no one relays patio stones in the middle of winter-frost cracks cement. Go with your GUT INSTINCTS. Ask yourself why Nigel raped Amanda. Because he knew she wouldn't report him. Why not? Because THE BASTARD HAD A HOLD ON HER.

I'm guessing that the James scenario went something like this:

• James Streeter was a thief and a liar. He began a mini-fraud in 1985 to fund his stock-market dreams. When he met Marianne Filbert in '88, he learned how to skim millions and the fraud became more sophisticated.
  
• In the meantime he'd married Amanda whom he met through Nigel de Vriess. I can only explain this marriage in terms of "escape'' for her as she must have discovered by then what Nigel was really like. It's harder to say what James's motives were. A bit of social-climbing perhaps? (i.e. if Amanda was good enough for the boss then she was worth having.) His father describes him as "status-conscious.''
  
• The marriage was a stormy one and James was soon casting around for someone more amenable. Meanwhile, he encouraged Amanda to pursue the Teddington flats project, possibly to legitimize some of his "dirty" money. (The title deeds were registered in her name only-
  for tax purposes?
  -which was why she had no trouble exchanging the property for the house in Thamesbank.)
  
• As soon as the fraud came to light, Nigel, from his position on the Lowenstein board, guessed that James was responsible. He may even have sussed him through the Marianne Filbert/Softworks/DVS connection-the bank's in-house investigation will have unearthed the abandoned Softworks security report. Either way, there's a good chance he took a "cut" in return for tipping James off about when to run.
  
• I think he also "tipped off" Amanda out of spite because she certainly learned that James was about to vanish and leave her to face the music alone.
  
• She killed James in anger, then sheltered behind the fact that all the evidence pointed to him absconding. Her problem was that Nigel knew what she'd done and held the knowledge over her. I'm guessing he
  did
  tip Amanda off and
  did
  take a "cut" off James and Marianne. When Marianne contacted him to say that James had failed to arrive, he realized that James had never left the U.K. After that he put two and two together, worked out that Amanda had disposed of James in the river, weighted down with bags of cement from the building site, and threatened to go to the police. (The MO was so effective, she was going to repeat it with Nigel.)
  
• The evidence for all of this lies in Nigel's treatment of Amanda, as witnessed by Barry. How could a man like de Vriess afford to do what he did
  unless
  he knew she wouldn't go to the police? Dammit, he had
  everything
  to lose if she screamed rape the minute he left the house.
  

Best wishes,

Mike

THE STREET, FLEET STREET, LONDON EC4

Amanda Powell
HM Prison
IX Parkhurst Road
Holloway
London N7 ONU

15th January, 1996 Dear Amanda,

I have no idea if Billy's views on hell and damnation have any validity. He described purgatory as "a place of eternal despair where love is absent." However, he saw it not as an eternity of ignorance, but as an eternity of terrifying awareness. The condemned soul knows that love exists, but is condemned forever to exist without it. I believe he was so appalled by this vision that, as Billy Blake, he set out to save sinners from the dangers of unredeemed sin.

For others, he thrust his hands into the fire or subjected himself to intense cold. For you, he died. That is not to say you should carry his death on your conscience because death was what he wanted. Without it, he had no hope of rescuing his much-loved wife, Verity, from the loneliness of the bottomless pit to where, as a suicide, she would have been banished. He believed there was no salvation from that terrible place except through divine compassion, and he hoped that if he led a life of extreme penitence before dying voluntarily of self-neglect, he could achieve the miracle of plucking Verity from hell through God's merciful intervention.

You can argue that his mind was completely unhinged by shock, grief, alcohol abuse, and persistent malnutrition. Certainly, some of his friends believe he was an undiagnosed schizophrenic. But I agree with the sentiments you expressed the first time I met you. "We are in terrible trouble as a society if we assume that any man's life is so worthless that the manner of his death is the only interesting thing about him." Billy's "worth" was in the efforts he made to save you, because the only reason he sought you out was to persuade you to pay in this life for the murder of James, rather than postpone your suffering into eternity.

The irony is that you were prepared to give an unmourned derelict the dignity in death that you had denied to James, and perhaps that was Billy's intention all along. It's what brought me to see you, after all. Billy must have known that walking to Andover in the middle of a hot summer to learn your address from Nigel de Vriess (although Nigel was abroad at the time, and it was Fiona who told him how to find you) would destroy what little reserves of energy he had.

This meant that his death in your garage would be the inevitable consequence of his actions. As you said yourself, he could have attracted your attention, or eaten food from your freezer, but he did neither, just quenched his thirst on ice cubes and quietly died. He wasn't interested in judging you, you see-he was a murderer himself-he was only interested in reminding you of that other man who had gone unburied and unmourned.

I enclose a summary of what I think happened, which I have sent to DS Greg Harrison. I have omitted Billy's part in the proceedings because he never reported it at the time and because I doubt the police will accept a dead man's witness. But I am confident he was watching in the shadows when you killed James. Neighbors in Teddington remember a squatter in the old school, and Tom Beale from the warehouse tells me Billy mentioned "dossing upriver from Richmond" before he moved to the Isle of Dogs.

You may ask why he didn't come looking for you sooner. The simple answer is that he only knew you as Amanda Streeter, the woman who'd bought the school where he was squatting, and when you reverted to your maiden name and moved, he lost sight of you until he read your name in connection with Nigel de Vriess. But the real answer is that he wasn't ready. An elderly woman talked to me once about suicide. She said: "Have you taken into account that there may be something waiting for you on the other side, and that you may not be prepared yet to face it?" Billy understood better than anyone, I think, that he needed to be prepared, and his preparation came through suffering. He always said he hadn't suffered enough.

I don't intend to do any more than I have done already-which is to leave justice to the authorities-except to tell the Streeters that their son
was
murdered. None of us is
all
bad, Amanda, and we each deserve to be mourned. Billy's salvation I leave to you. My view is that it makes no difference if he was mad or sane, he believed that saving another soul from hell would earn God's compassion.

You asked me to prove that Billy's life had value, but I'm sure you realize now that you're the only person who can do that. It is in
your
hands whether, through your own redemption, you also redeem him and Verity.

With best wishes,

Michael Deacon

P.S. Please don't think there is any animosity behind this letter. I have always liked you.

Metropolitan Police-Isle of Dogs-facsimile-19.01.96 16.18

From: DS Greg Harrison
To: Michael Deacon

Amanda Powell has come clean about James. We start trawling tomorrow at 8:30 a.m. See you at Teddington!

Yours,

Greg

As Deacon rounded the corner of the converted school building, he was reminded of the first time he had visited the docklands' warehouse. This was another bleak landscape, enlivened by people in shapeless dark overcoats. A group of men stood in a huddle a few feet from the riverbank, staring out across grey water, coat collars raised against the biting wind. They were younger and more uniform in their dress, but the cold pinched their faces no less fiercely than it had pinched the faces of the warehouse derelicts. Beyond them, police divers in wet suits bobbed beside a dinghy which was holding station against the current some yards out from where a twenty-foot stretch of lawn sloped down towards the river, ending at a wooden walkway that formed a towpath along the front of the property. The lawn was planted with shrubs and flower beds, curving in to give a framed perspective across the water, and Deacon wondered if this had been Amanda's vision when she drew up the plans for the conversion.

He noticed her suddenly, dressed in black, standing slightly apart with a prison officer and staring as intently at the river as the policemen were. She turned to look in Deacon's direction as he approached across the grass, a faint smile of recognition lifting the corners of her mouth. She raised a hand in greeting, then let it drop, afraid perhaps that she'd put herself beyond the pale of human sympathy. He raised his own hand in acknowledgment.

DS Harrison peeled off from the group to steer him away from contact with Amanda. He glanced at the camera in Deacon's hand and shook his head. "No photographs this time, old son," he said.

"Just one?" murmured Deacon, nodding towards the woman. "For my personal collection and not for publication. She looks great in black."

"She would," said the sergeant. "She kills her lovers after copulation."

"Is that a yes or a no?''

He shrugged. "It's a 'be it on your own head.' She's trouble, Mike."

Deacon grinned. "You're a red-blooded male, for Christ's sake. Haven't you ever wanted to live a little? Don't you think the quid pro quo for the male black widow getting eaten is the best fucking sex he's ever had in his life?"

"It'll be the
only
sex he ever has," said Harrison sourly. "In any case, she'll be an ugly old woman by the time she's served two life sentences."

A wet-suited diver lifted a glistening seal-like head above the surface of the river, and made a thumbs-down gesture to the watchers on shore. The scene was both colorless and beautiful. Grey sky over grey water, with the black silhouette of the dinghy against a white winter sun. Before Harrison could stop him, Deacon raised his camera and recorded the moment for posterity. "Nothing in life is ugly," he said, swiveling the lens towards Amanda and using the zoom to bring her close, "unless you choose to see it that way."