Echo

by Minette Walters

  "Why didn't Billy teach you?"

  "He tried once or twice," said the boy dismissively, "but he couldn't see well enough to teach anything 'cept what was in his head. It were another of his punishments. He poked a pin into his eye one time which meant he couldn't read very long without getting a headache." He took another cigarette. "I told you, he were a right nutter. He were only happy when he were hurting himself."

  They were the most meager of possessions: a battered postcard, some crayons, a silver dollar, and two flimsy letters which were in danger of falling apart from having been read so often. "Is this all there was?" asked Deacon.

  "I told you before. He didn't want nothing and he didn't have nothing. A bit like you if you think about it."

  Deacon spread the items across the table. "Why weren't these on him when he died?"

  Terry shrugged. "Because he told me to burn them a few days before he buggered off that last time. I hung on to them in case he changed his mind."

  "Did he say why he wanted them burned?"

  "Not so's you'd notice. It was while he was in one of his mad fits. He kept yelling that everything was dust, then told me to chuck this lot on the fire."

  "Dust to dust and ashes to ashes," murmured Deacon, picking up the postcard and turning it over. It was blank on one side and showed a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's cartoon for The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and the Infant St. John on the other. It was worn at the edges and there were crease marks across the glossy surface of the picture, but it required more than that to diminish the power of da Vinci's drawing. "Why did he have this?"

  "He used to copy it onto the pavement. That's the family he drew." Terry touched the figure of the infant John the Baptist to the right of the picture. "He left this baby out- his finger moved to the face of St. Anne-"turned this woman into a man, and drew the other woman and the baby that's on her knee the way they are. Then he'd color it in. It were bloody good, too. You could see what was what in Billy's picture whereas this one's a bit of a mess, don't you reckon?''

  Deacon gave a snort of laughter. "It's one of the world's great masterpieces, Terry."

  "It weren't as good as Billy's. I mean look at the legs. They're all mixed up, so Billy sorted them. He gave the bloke brown legs and the woman blue legs."

  With a muffled guffaw, Deacon lowered his forehead to the table. He reached surreptitiously for a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose loudly before sitting up again. "Remind me to show you the original one day," he said a little unsteadily. "It's in the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square and I'm not as convinced as you that the legs need-er-sorting." He took a pull at his beer can. "Tell me how Billy managed to do these paintings if he couldn't see properly."

  "He could see to draw-I mean he were drawing every night on bits of paper-and, anyway, he made his pavement pictures really big. It were only reading that gave him a headache."

  "What about the writing that you said he put at the bottom of the picture?''

  "He did it big like the painting, otherwise people wouldn't have noticed it."

  "How do you know what it said if you can't read?"

  "Billy learnt it to me so I could write it myself." He pulled Deacon's notebook and pencil towards him and carefully formed the words across the page: "blessed are the poor.

  "If you can do that," said Deacon matter-of-factly, "you can learn to read in two days." He took up one of the letters and spread it carefully on the table in front of him.

  Cadogan Square

  April 4th

  Darling,

  Thank you for your beautiful letter, but how I wish you could enjoy the here and now and forget the future. Of course I am flattered that you want the world to know you love me, but isn't what we have more perfect because it is a secret? You say "your glass shall not persuade you you are old, so long as youth and I are of one date," but, my darling, Shakespeare never named his love because he knew how cruel the world could be. Do you want me pilloried as a calculating bitch who set out to seduce any man who could offer her security? For that is what will happen if you insist on acknowledging me publicly. I adore you with all my heart but my heart will break if you ever stop loving me because of what people say. Please, please let's leave things the way they are. Your loving, V.

  Deacon unfolded the second letter and placed it beside the first. It was written in the same hand.

  Paris

  Friday

  Darling,

  Don't think me mad but I am so afraid of dying. I have nightmares sometimes where I float in black space beyond the reach of anyone's love. Is that what hell is, do you think? Forever to know that love exists while forever condemned to exist without it? If so, it will be my punishment for the happiness I've had with you. I can't help thinking it's wrong for one person to love another so much that she can't bear to be apart from him. Please, please don't stay away any longer than is necessary. Life isn't life without you. V.

  "Did Billy read these to you, Terry?"

  The boy shook his head.

  "They're love letters. Rather beautiful love letters in fact. Do you want to hear them?" He took Terry's shrug for assent and read the words aloud. He waited for a reaction when he'd finished, but didn't get one. "Did you ever hear him talking about someone whose name began with ' V ?" he asked then. "It sounds as if she was a lot younger than he was."

  The boy didn't answer immediately. "Whoever she is, I bet she's dead," he said. "Billy told me once that hell was being left alone forever and not being able to do nothing about it, and then he started to cry. He said it always made him cry to think of someone being that lonely, but I guess he was really crying for this lady. That's sad, isn't it?"

  "Yes,'' said Deacon slowly, "but I wonder why he thought she was in hell." He read through the letters again but found nothing to account for Billy's certainty about V's fate.

  "He reckoned he'd go to hell. He kind of looked forward to it in a funny sort of way. He said he deserved all the punishment the gods could throw at him."

  "Because he was a murderer?"

  "I guess so. He went on and on about life being a holy gift. It used to drive Tom up the wall. He'd say-"he fell into a fair imitation of Tom's cockney accent-" 'If it's so effin' 'oly, what the fuck are we doing livin' in this soddin' 'ell of a cesspit?' And Billy'd say-" Terry now adopted a classier tone-" 'You are here by choice because your gift included free will. Decide now whether you seek to bring the gods' anger upon your heads. If the answer's no, then choose a wiser course.' "

  Deacon chuckled. "Is that what he actually said?"

  "Sure. I used to say it for him sometimes when he was too pissed to say it himself." He returned to his mimicking of Billy's voice. " 'You are here by choice because your gift included free will.' Blah-blah-blah. He were a bit of a pillock really, couldn't see when he was annoying people. Or if he did, he didn't care. Then he'd get rat-arsed and start yelling, and that was worse because we couldn't understand what he was on about."

  Deacon fetched another two beer cans from the fridge, and chucked the empties into the bin. "Do you remember him saying anything about repentance?'' he asked, propping himself against the kitchen worktop.

  "Is that the same as repent?"

  "Yes."

  "He used to shout that a lot. 'Repent! Repent! Repent! The hour is later than you think!' He did it that time he took all his clothes off in the middle of the fucking winter. 'Repent! Repent! Repent!' he kept screaming."

  "Do you know what repentance is?"

  "Yeah. Saying sorry."

  Deacon nodded. "Then why didn't Billy follow his own advice and say sorry for this murder. He'd have been looking to heaven then instead of hell." Except that he'd told the psychiatrist his own redemption didn't interest him...

  Terry pondered this for some time. "I get what you're saying," he declared finally, "but, see, I never thought about it before. The trouble with Billy was he was-well-noisy most of the time, and it did your head in to listen to him. And he only
spoke about the murder once, when he were really worked up about something." His eyes screwed in concentrated reflection. "In any case, he stuck his hand in the fire straight afterwards and wouldn't take it out till we all pulled him off of it, so I guess no one thought to ask why he didn't repent himself." He shrugged. "I expect it's quite simple. I expect it was his fault his lady went to hell, so he felt he ought to go there, too. Poor bitch."

  Deacon remembered his suspicions the first time he heard this story, when it was obvious to him that Terry was relating an incident that the other men at the warehouse knew nothing about. They had recalled the hand in the fire, but not the revelations of murder. "Or maybe there was nothing to repent," he suggested. "Another way to go to hell is to destroy the gods' gift of life by killing yourself. For centuries, suicides were buried in wasteland to demonstrate that they had put themselves beyond the reach of God's mercy. Isn't that the path Billy was taking?"

  "You asked me that one already, and I already told you, Billy never tried to kill himself."

  "He starved himself to death."

  "Nah. He just forgot to eat. That's different, that is. He were too drunk most of the time to know what he was doing."

  Deacon thought back. "You said he strangled someone because the gods had written it in his fate. Were those the actual words he used?"

  "I can't remember."

  "Try."

  "It were that or something like it."

  Deacon looked skeptical. "You also said he burnt his hand as a sacrifice to direct the gods' anger somewhere else. But why would he do that if he wanted to go to hell?''

  "Jesus!" said Terry in disgust. "How should I know? The guy was a nutter."

  "Except your definition of a nutter isn't the same as mine," said Deacon impatiently. "Didn't it occur to you that Billy was ranting and raving all the time because he was with a bunch of bozos who couldn't follow a single damn word he was saying? I'm not surprised he was driven to drink."

  "It wasn't our fault," said the boy sullenly. "We did our best for the miserable sod, and it wasn't easy keeping our cool when he was having a go at us."

  "All right, try this question. You said he was worked up about something just before he told you he was a murderer, so what was he worked up about?''

  Terry didn't answer.

  "Was it something personal between you and him?" said Deacon with sudden intuition. "Is that why the others didn't know about it?" He waited for a moment. "What happened? Did you have a fight? Perhaps he tried to strangle you and then thrust his hand in the fire out of remorse?"

  "No, it were the other way round," said the boy unhappily. "It were me tried to strangle him. He only burnt his bloody hand so I'd remember how close I came to murder."

  The awful irony of Barry's situation came home to him forcibly in the semidarkness of the cuttings' library when he realized he was no longer content to look at photographs of beautiful men and fantasize harmlessly about what they could do for him.

  His hands trembled slightly as he separated out the photographs of Amanda Powell.

  He knew everything about her, including where she lived and that she lived alone.

  As far as Terry could remember it had happened two weeks after his fourteenth birthday, during the last weekend in February. The weather had been bitter for several days, and tempers in the warehouse were frayed. It was always worse when it was cold, he explained, because if they didn't go daily to one of the soup kitchens for hot food, survival became impossible. More often than not, the older ones and the madder ones refused to emerge from whatever cocoon they had made for themselves, so Terry and Tom took it upon themselves to bully them into moving. But, as Terry said, it was a quick way to make enemies, and Billy was more easily riled than most.

  "One of the reasons Tom didn't want me calling the coppers this afternoon was because of what's stashed away in that warehouse." He produced a small wad of silver foil from his pocket and placed it on the table. "I do puff-" he nodded to the wad-"and maybe some E if I go to a rave. But that's kid's stuff compared to what some of them are on. There's bodies all over the shop most days, stoned on anything from jellies to H, and half the bastards don't even live there but come in off the streets for a fix where they reckon it's safer. And then there's the nicked stuff-booze and fags and the like-that people have hidden in the rubble. You have to be bloody careful not to go stumbling on someone's stash or you get a knife in the ribs the way Walter did. It can get pretty bad sometimes. This last week, there's been two beatings and the stabbing. It gets to you after a while."

  "Is that why you called the police today?''

  "Yeah, and because of Billy. I've been thinking about him a lot recently." He returned to his story. "Anyway, it were no different last February, worse if anything because it were colder than now, so there were more bodies than usual. If they slept on the streets they froze where they lay so Tom and the others let them doss inside."

  "Why didn't they go to the government-run hostels? Surely a bed there has to be better than a floor in a warehouse?"

  "Why'd you think?" said Terry scathingly. "We're talking druggies and psychos who don't even trust their own fucking shadows." He fingered the silver-foil wad. "Tom was doing really well out of it. He'd let any sodding bastard in as long as he got something in exchange. He even took a guy's coat once because it was the only thing he had, and the poor bloke froze to death during the night. So Tom had him carried into the street-like he was going to do with Walter-in case the cops came in. And that's what made Billy flip his lid. He went ballistic and said it all had to stop."

  "What did he do?" prompted Deacon when the boy didn't go on.

  "The worst thing he could've done. He started breaking people's bottles, and searching the rubble for stashes, and yelling that we had to get rid of the evil before it swallowed us up. So I jumped the silly bugger and tied him up in my doss before one of the psychos could kill him, and that's when he started on me." Terry reached for another cigarette and lit it with a hand that shook slightly. "Even you'd've said he was a nutter if you'd seen him that day. He was off 'is sodding rocker-shaking, screaming-" the boy made a wry face. "See, once he got going he couldn't stop. He'd go on and on till he got so tired he'd give up. But he couldn't give up this time. He kept spitting at me, and saying that I was the worst kind of scum, and when I didn't take no notice of that, he started yelling out that I was a rent-boy and that anyone who wanted a bit of my arse should just come in the tent and take it." He drew heavily on his cigarette. "I wanted to kill him, so I put my hands 'round his neck and squeezed."

  "What stopped you?"

  "Nothing. I went on squeezing till I thought he was dead." He fell into a long silence which Deacon let drift.

  "Then I got scared and didn't know what to do, so I untied 'im and pushed him about a bit to see if he really was dead, and the bugger opened his eyes and smiled at me. And that's when he told me about this bloke he'd killed, and how anger made people do things that could ruin their lives. Then he said he wanted to show the gods that it was his fault and not mine, so he went outside and stuck his hand in the fire."

  Deacon wished there had been a woman there to hear Terry's story, one who would have wrapped him in her arms and petted him, and told him there was nothing to worry about, for that most obvious course of action was denied to him. He could only look away from the tears that brightened the boy's eyes and talk prosaically about the mechanics of how to dry Terry's wet clothes overnight without the benefit of a tumble dryer.

  Reg brought up Barry's tea and placed the mug on the desk beside the book his wife had bought. It was lying facedown and he pointed to a quote on the back of it.

  "Immensely readable." Charles Lamb, The Street.

  "The wife is always happier with a recommendation," he said, "but as I pointed out it's surprisingly short for Mr. Lamb. If he likes a book he tends to go overboard. Could 'immensely readable' be the only words of praise in the review I wonder? An example, perhaps, of a publisher's creati
ve discounting?"

  One of the reasons why Reg enjoyed Barry's company so much was that Barry allowed him to practice his ponderous wit, and Barry chuckled dutifully as he picked up the paperback and turned to the copyright page. "First published by Macmillan in nineteen ninety-four, so the review will have come out last year. I'll find it for you," he offered. "Consider it a small thank-you for the book and the tea."

  "It could be interesting," said Reg prophetically.

  ...Another mixed-bag of a book is Roger Hyde's

  Unsolved Mysteries of the 20th Century

  (published by Macmillan at Ł15.99). Immensely readable, it nevertheless disappoints because, as the title suggests, it raises too many unanswered questions and ignores the fact that other writers have already shed light on some of these "unsolved" mysteries. There are the infamous Digby murders of 1933 when Gilbert and Fanny Digby and their three young children were found dead in their beds of arsenic poisoning one April morning with nothing to suggest who murdered them or why. Hyde describes the background to the case in meticulous detail-Gilbert and Fanny's histories, the names of all those known to have visited the house in the days preceding the murders, the crime scene itself-but he fails to mention M. G. Dunner's book

  Sweet Fanny Digby

  (Gollanz, 1963) which contained evidence that Fanny Digby, who had a history of depression, had been seen to soak fly paper in an enamel bowl the day before she and her family were found dead. There is the case of the diplomat, Peter Fenton, who walked out of his house in July 1988, after his wife Verity committed suicide. Again, Hyde describes the background to these events in detail, referring to the Driberg Syndicate and Fenton's access to NATO secrets, but he makes no mention of Anne Cattrell's

  Sunday Times

  feature

  The Truth About Verity Fenton

  (17th June, 1990) which revealed the appalling brutality suffered by Verity at the hands of Geoffrey Standish, her first husband, before his convenient death in a hit-and-run accident in 1971. If, as Anne Cattrell claims, this was no accident, and if Verity did indeed meet Fenton six years earlier than either of them ever admitted, then the solution to her suicide and his disappearance lies in Geoffrey Standish's coffin and not in Nathan Driberg's prison cell...