Echo

by Minette Walters

  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

  *22*

  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."

  "Wait till we pull James out. You'll think differently then." He offered Deacon a cigarette. "You were right about de Vriess tipping her off," he said, cupping his hands around a match, "except that at the time she didn't know where the information had come from. He sent her a photocopy of the original brief for the bank's in-house investigation with James mentioned as a suspect. It arrived on the morning of Friday, the twenty-seventh of April, and she spent the day in a panic." He broke off to light his own cigarette. "She was due at her mother's that evening, but she rang James at his office and asked him to meet her here at the school at six o'clock, ostensibly to discuss one or two problems that had arisen over the conversion plans. She says her only intention was to find out the truth, but it turned into a fight when James started boasting about how clever he'd been. They were inside the school, and she pushed him down a flight of stairs. She thinks he must have broken his neck on the way down."

  He paused as a second diver surfaced. "According to her, the body's wedged under the boardwalk. That was the obligatory first phase of the construction. Rebuilding the dilapidated towpath in return for the right to convert the school. Supports were driven in to carry the pathway, and she put James in behind them."

  "At six o'clock on an April evening?" said Deacon in disbelief. "It would have been broad daylight."

  "She didn't do it then." Harrison drew heavily on his cigarette, sheltering it from the wind with his coat lapel. "She left James dead at the bottom of the stairs and drove to Kent in a state of shock, expecting the police to be waiting for her when she got there. When they weren't, she began to calm down and realized she'd either have to confess to the murder or get rid of the body. She came back at two o'clock in the morning while her mother was asleep and disposed of it then."

  Deacon was watching Amanda while Harrison spoke. "How? She's no Arnold Schwarzenegger, and she must have been working in the dark."

  "She's a resourceful woman," said Harrison, "and she brought a flashlight with her from her mother's house. As far as I can make out, she rolled him onto an old door and used the lever principle and a pile of breeze blocks to raise the door high enough to slide him into a wheelbarrow. The plan was to tip him off the boardwalk into the river and hope that when his body washed up further down, his death would be put down to a tragic accident. But she was tired, couldn't control the barrow properly and the whole thing tipped over this side of the walkway." He gestured towards the shrubs on the left-hand side. "Six years ago there was a two-yard gap where the bank had eroded, so rather than go through the whole palaver with the door and the breeze blocks again, she launched the body headfirst through the gap, assuming it would be sucked out into the main stream."

  "But it wasn't?" asked Deacon when he didn't go on.

  Harrison shrugged. "He never surfaced, so she thinks he must have got snagged on one of the supports, and was then buried under the ballast and cement that the builders tipped in to fill the gaps along the boardwalk."

  "Wouldn't they have seen the body?"

  "She says she came back on the Monday morning to check, and there was no sign of it. After t
hat, she thought it was just a matter of time before one of us knocked on her door and told her that, far from absconding, James had been dead for weeks."

  "But it never happened?"

  "No. She's a jammy bitch."

  "If he's under a ton of ballast, what are the divers expecting to find?"

  "Anything to indicate she's telling the truth. They're looking for metallic objects, his Rolex watch, belt buckle, shoe studs, buttons, even his fly. If they find them, we start digging out the ballast looking for the poor sod's skeleton."

  Deacon glanced across at Amanda again. "Why wouldn't she be telling the truth?''

  "No one understands why she's suddenly decided to come clean. She has every chance of walking away from the de Vriess murder because Barry's evidence of rape means she can plead self-defense. We're still working on proof of premeditation but we're having very little success. There's no record of any phone calls, no trace of her car in Dover, and if Nigel ever visited Sway then no one saw him here." He jerked his chin towards the river. "So why give us this for free? What does she expect to achieve by it?''

  "A clear conscience?" suggested Deacon.

  Harrison dropped his butt to the grass and ground it out with his toe. "You're a romantic, Mike. This is the end of the twentieth century, and people don't have consciences anymore. They have clever solicitors instead. Do you seriously think Amanda would have told us about James if she hadn't been charged with Nigel's murder?" He shook his head. "The pressure's been building up on her to account for James's disappearance, and she can't afford two separate trials for two separate murders. She might be found innocent once, but never twice, and the last thing she wants is for us to unearth James after she's beaten the de Vriess verdict. I'm betting there won't be enough of him left to show how he died, and she wants an assurance before she goes to court that there'll be no more charges pending. What price conscience then, eh?"

  Deacon didn't answer immediately, and they stood in silence watching the police industry in the river. "How did she find out it was Nigel who sent her the photocopy about the fraud?'' he asked then.

  "He rang to offer his sympathy after James disappeared, and mentioned it then. He said he wanted to warn her that James might be arrested but couldn't do it officially because of his position on the board. She denies your theory about him having a hold over her," he went on. "She says Nigel knew nothing about James's death, and claims their relationship had always been amicable until he forced his way into her house and raped her."

  Deacon gave a low laugh which was whipped away by the wind. "She can't say anything else, not if she wants to plead self-defense."

  Harrison eyed him curiously. "Why are you so keen to prove it wasn't?"

  "I'm not anymore."

  "I don't follow."

  Deacon trod his own butt into the ground. "I'm only interested in her admission that she killed James. As far as Nigel's concerned, I'd say he got what he deserved whether he raped her once or a hundred times."

  "But you're damn sure it was the latter."

  "Yes." He thrust his hands into his pockets to keep them warm. "I think he owned her body and soul because he knew she'd murdered her husband. I've spoken to Lawrence's partner and he describes de Vriess as an animal. He says Nigel wouldn't have hesitated to abuse a woman he had a hold over." He lifted an amused eyebrow. "Look, there had to be some reason for the bastard's murder. You may believe she killed two men in accidental self-defense, but I don't. I think she's probably been planning how to get rid of Nigel for the last six years, but when John Streeter phoned to announce a change of tactics it was the push she needed. It's one thing to be the butt of libelous press releases that no sensible editor has ever touched with a barge pole, quite another to sit idly by while people you fear form alliances on the advice of a journalist."

  Harrison made a wry face. "Where's the evidence? Justice isn't served by idle speculation."

  "It is in this case," countered Deacon amiably. "Justice was served the minute she admitted to killing James, and you can thank Billy Blake for that. He's the one who persuaded her to talk."

  "You're not going to tell me she killed him as well?"

  "No. Billy died of self-neglect."

  "What's your theory on why Nigel gave Billy her address?"

  "He didn't. Nigel was abroad the last two weeks in May." He thought back to the bitter woman who had spilled her heart out to him a few days before. "It was Fiona who told Billy how to find Amanda."

  God knows, I hate her ... She's ruined my life ... Nigel and I were divorced because of her, and now she's killed him ... Yes, I did tell that old tramp where she lived ... He was completely mad ... He said he was an instrument of God ... And then he asked for her address ... Did it worry me that I was sending a madman after her?... Not in the least. It amused me ... Oh, I've always known where she was and what she was calling herself ... I'd have been mad not to...

  There was sudden activity in the water as a diver surfaced and gestured excitedly to the watchers on the bank. Harrison moved forward with the group of policemen, leaving Deacon free to cross the twenty-yard gap that separated him from Amanda Powell. She was watching him, not the river, and he felt the pull of her attraction just as he had the first time he met her.

  He often wondered why he didn't go to her.

  Instead, he retraced his steps up the slope without a backward glance.

  THE STREET, FLEET STREET, LONDON EC4

  Lawrence Greenhill

  23 Wharf Way

  London E14

  22nd January, 1996

  Dear Lawrence,

  What can you tell me about the following? I came across it last night in your diary.

  "London-19th December, 1949: A new client, Mrs P, a war widow, came to me today, seeking advice about her 13-yr-old daughter's pregnancy. Should she seek to prosecute the man in question or keep quiet for the sake of her child? At 7+ months the pregnancy is too advanced for abortion-dear God, the poor soul thought it was puppy fat and my heart bleeds for her. She welcomed GS to her home as a friend. He is 27, only five years younger than she is, and she was flattered by his attentions. Her confusion is the greater because she clearly entertained hopes of marriage herself and is devastated to find that he was more interested in seducing her daughter, V. I have advised silence and adoption, and given her the address of a convent in Colchester where her daughter can retreat before her condition becomes noticeable to friends and teachers. The nuns will find suitable parents when the time comes. But I am at war with myself tonight. What sort of world are we living in where innocent children, orphaned by war, become the prey of monsters? Surely such a man should be prosecuted, even if at the expense of his wretched victim's reputation?"

  Terry says it's fate. Is it? Or is this your God at work? I should have put you at the center of my chart, and not Billy Blake, for it was you who held the key to both stories. Billy was "still searching for truth" while you have always known it.

  Yours ever,

  Mike

  P.S. I've taken your advice and sent Barry home to his mother after he got drunk for the third night on the trot. It's Terry's fault. He teases the poor little sod unmercifully. That being said, I can't take any more protestations of love!

  Wednesday, 7th February, 1996-9:00 p.m.-Cape Town, South Africa

  The young waiter shrugged expressively, and jerked his head towards the figure at the window table. "She's been crying ever since she got here," he said. "I don't know what to do. She won't order, and she won't go."

  The older man approached the table. "Are you all right, Mrs. Metcalfe? Is there anything I can do for you?"

  She raised drowned eyes to his face, then rose unsteadily to her feet. "No," she said. "I'm fine."

  As she walked away, he looked down at the English newspaper that she'd taken from the hotel rack when she'd arrived. But he was none the wiser for the banner headline.

  DNA PROVES BONES IN RIVER

  WERE JAMES STREETER

  A PARA
BLE OF OUR TIME

  by Michael Deacon

  The tragic story of Verity Fenton's suicide and Peter Fenton's subsequent disappearance is well known. Unknown until recently is what happened to Peter because the truth was buried in a suicide's grave.

  "BILLY BLAKE-died 12th June, 1995, of starvation." So says the plaque at a London crematorium which commemorates the death of a homeless man. It should read: "PETER FENTON O.B.E. Born 5th March, 1950- died 13th June, 1995, of mortification."

  It's hard to conceive how a man like Peter Fenton, so prominent in the twin environments of Knightsbridge and the Foreign Office, could walk out of his house and vanish into thin air unless one understands why he did it. At the time, it was assumed he had run away, so the search was concentrated abroad. What never occurred to anyone was that he had chosen the life of a penitent by embracing poverty in the gutters of London.

  Is it any wonder he vanished so successfully when none of us looks too long on the destitute in case eye contact proves dangerous or embarrassing?

  But transformations take time, and Peter, a handsome, dark-haired, 38-year-old, should have been recognizable for weeks until poor hygiene and diet reduced him to the skeletal figure of Billy Blake, well-known to the police as a 60-year-old human derelict and street preacher. How could he have changed so radically and in so short a time? The answer, I think, is that the shock of Verity's suicide destroyed him. He was already aged beyond recognition when he entered the anonymous world of the vagrant.