Echo

*10*

Three miles away in Fleet Street, Barry Grover skulked in the shadows, waiting for Glen Hopkins's shift to finish. Only when the replacement, Reg Linden, had been in situ for fifteen minutes did he scuttle across the road and let himself in. Reg, who as night watchman had very little contact with Street employees, had long since ceased to question Barry's nocturnal visits to the offices, even looked forward to them for the company they offered. He took as much interest in Barry's researches as Barry did himself, and his view-untarnished by female gossip-was that the little man's problem was a tendency to insomnia. In that peculiarly uncomplicated way reserved to men who don't seek to know too much about each other, he and Barry were friends.

He smiled affably. "Still trying to identify your dead wino?" he asked.

Barry nodded. Had Reg been a little more perceptive, he might have wondered at the little man's agitation, he might even have questioned why Barry's fly was undone, but fate had ruled him an unobservant man.

"This might help," he said, producing a paperback from under the desk. "You want chapter five-'Missing Persons.' No pictures, I'm afraid, but some useful information on James Streeter. Mrs. Linden came across it in a bookshop and thought you might like it. She's always been interested in your projects." He waved Barry's thanks aside, and promised to bring him a cup of tea when he made one for himself.

Deacon emptied another bag of washing into the machine. "You said there was stuff in the warehouse that belonged to Billy," he reminded Terry. "Was that a ploy to get me down there or was it true?"

"True, but you'll have to pay if you want to see it."

"Where is it?"

Terry jerked his head towards the sitting room, where the suitcases stood in a corner. "In there."

"What's to stop me going through the cases myself?"

"One of these." The lad clenched his right hand into a fist. "I'll lay you flat, and if you hit me back, I'll have proof of assault." He smiled engagingly. "Sexual or the other kind, depending on my mood."

"How much do you want?"

"My mate got five hundred off of his old geezer."

"Bog off, Terry. Billy can go hang for all I care. I'm bored with him."

"Like hell you are. He's bugging you, same as he bugs me. Four hundred."

"Twenty."

"One hundred."

"Fifty, and it'd better be good-" Deacon clenched his own hand into a fist-"or you'll be on the receiving end of one of these. And to hell with the consequences frankly.''

"It's a deal. Give us the fifty." Terry uncurled his palm. "Cash only, or all bets are off."

Deacon nodded towards the kitchen cabinets. "Third cupboard along, biscuit tin on the second shelf, take five tens and leave the rest." He watched the boy locate the tin, remove the wad of notes inside it, and peel off fifty pounds.

"Jesus, but you're a weird bastard, Mike," he said resuming his seat. "There must be another two hundred in there. What's to stop me nicking it, now you've shown me where it is?''

"Nothing," said Deacon, "except it's mine, and you haven't earned it. Not yet, anyway."

"What'd I have to do to earn it?"

"Learn to read." He saw the cynical look in Terry's eyes. "I'll teach you."

"Sure you will, for two miserable days. And when I still can't read at the end of it, you'll get mad and I'll've wasted my time for nothing."

"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 creative 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...

Out of interest, Barry searched the microfiche files for the Sunday Times of 17th June, 1990. He held his breath as Anne Cattrell's feature appeared with a full-face photograph of Peter Fenton, OBE.

He was as sure as he could be that he was looking at Billy Blake.

THE TRUTH ABOUT VERITY FENTON

There have been few more effective smoke screens than that thrown up by Peter Fenton when he vanished from his house on July 3rd, 1988, leaving his wife's dead body on the marital bed. It began as a sensational Lucan-style murder hunt until Verity Fenton was found to have committed suicide. There followed a rampage through Peter's history, looking for mistresses and/or treachery when it was discovered that he had access to NATO secrets. Interest centered on his sudden trip to Washington, and easy links were drawn with the anonymous members of the Driberg syndicate.

And where did Verity Fenton's suicide feature in all this? Barely at all is the answer because minds were focused on Peter's inexplicable disappearance and not on the reasons why a "neurotic" woman should want to kill herself. The coroner's verdict was "suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed" relying largely on her daughter's evidence that she had been "unnaturally depressed" while Peter was in Washington. Yet no real explanation for her depression was sought as the assumption seems to have been that Peter's disappearance meant that her reference in her suicide note to his betrayals was true, and these were shocking enough to drive a woman to suicide.

Two years on from these bizarre events of July 1988, it is worth reassessing what is known about Peter and Verity Fenton. Perhaps the first thing to strike anyone researching this story is the complete lack of evidence to show that Peter Fenton was a traitor. He certainly had access to confidential NATO information during '85-'87, but sources within the organization admit that three different investigations have failed to trace any leakage of information to him or to his desk.

By contrast, there is a wealth of evidence about his "sudden" trip to Washington at the end of June which was painted as a fishing expedition to find out if Driberg was about to name his associates. The details of the trip were made available at the time by his immediate superior at the Foreign Office but they were ignored in the scramble to prove Fenton a traitor. The facts are that he was briefed on June 6th to attend high-level discussions in Washington from June 29th to July 2nd. It is difficult now to understand how three weeks' notification came to be interpreted as "sudden" or why, if he were part of the Driberg syndicate, he should have waited until eight weeks after Driberg's arrest to go "fishing."

The Fenton tragedy takes on a very different perspective if suggestions that Peter was a traitor are dismissed. The question that must then be asked is: What were the betrayals Verity talked about in her suicide note? She wrote: "Forgive me. I can't bear it anymore, darling. Please don't blame yourself. Your betrayals are nothing compared with mine.

But why have Verity's own betrayals been so consistently underexamined? The simple answer is that, as the wife of a diplomat, she was always less interesting than her husband. What or who could a "neurotic" woman possibly have betrayed that could compete with treachery in the Foreign Office? Yet it was imperative, even in '88, that her betrayals be examined because she claimed they were worse than her husband's, and he was branded a spy.

Born Verity Parnell in London on September 28th, 1937, she was brought up alone by her mother after her father. Colonel Parnell, died in 1940 during the evacuation from Dunkirk. She and her mother are believed to have spent the war years in Suffolk but returned to London in 1945. Verity was enrolled at a preparatory school before transferring to the Mary Bartholomew School for Girls in Barnes in May 1950. Although considered bright enough to go on to university, she chose instead to marry Geoffrey Standish, a handsome, thirty-two-year-old stockbroker who was fourteen years her senior, in August 1955. The marriage caused an estrangement between herself and her mother, and it is not clear whether she saw Mrs. Parnell again before the woman's death some time in the late '50s. Verity gave birth to a daughter, Marilyn, in 1960 and a son, Anthony, in 1966.

The marriage was a disaster. Geoffrey was described, even by close friends, as "unpredictable." He was a gambler, a womanizer and a drunk, and it soon became clear to those who knew him that he was taking out his frustrations on his young wife. There was a history of "accidents," days of indisposition, a reluctance to do anything that might upset Geoffrey, an obsessive protectiveness towards her children. It is not surprising then that, according to one of her neighbors, Verity described her husband's death in March 1971 as a "blessed relief."

Like so much in this story, the details surrounding Geoffrey's death are obscure. The only verifiable facts are these: he had arranged to spend the weekend alone with friends in Huntingdon; he phoned them at 5:00 p.m. on the Friday night to say he wouldn't be with them until the following day; at 6:30 a.m. on the Saturday, a police patrol recorded his car abandoned with an empty gas tank beside the All near Newmarket; at 10:30 a.m. his bruised and battered body was found sprawled in a ditch some two miles up the road; his injuries were consistent with having been run over by a car.

On the face of it, it was a straightforward case of hit-and-run while Geoffrey was walking through the dark in search of gas, but because of the last-minute alterations in his plans, the police attempted to establish why he was in the vicinity of Newmarket. They had no success with that line of inquiry but, in the course of their investigation, they unearthed the unpalatable details of the man's character and lifestyle. Although they were never able to prove it, it is clear from the reports that the Cambridgeshire police believed he was murdered. Verity herself had a cast-iron alibi. She was admitted to St. Thomas's Hospital on the Wednesday before Geoffrey's death with a broken collarbone, fractured ribs, and a perforated lung, and was not discharged until the Sunday. Her children were being cared for by a neighbor, so there is some doubt about Geoffrey's whereabouts on the Friday. Certainly he did not go to work that day, and this led to police speculation that someone, whose sympathies lay with Verity, removed him from his house during the Thursday night and cold-bloodedly planned his murder over the Friday.

Unfortunately, from the police point of view, no such sympathizer could be traced, and the file was closed due to lack of evidence. The coroner recorded a verdict of "manslaughter by person or persons unknown," and Geoffrey Standish's premature death remains unpunished to this day.

Now, however, with our knowledge of the events of July 3rd, 1988, it is logical to look back from the suicide of a desperate woman and the disappearance of her second husband to Geoffrey's death in 1971, and ask whether the person whose sympathies lay with Verity was a young and impressionable Cambridge undergraduate called Peter Fenton. Newmarket is less than 20 miles from Cambridge, and Peter was known to make frequent visits to the family of a friend from his Winchester College days who lived ten doors away from Geoffrey and Verity Standish in Cadogan Square. There is no evidence to rebut Peter and Verity's own claims that their first meeting was at a party at Peter's friend's house in 1978, but it would be curious if their paths hadn't crossed earlier. Certainly, the friend, Harry Grisham, remembers the Standishes being regular guests at his parents' dinner parties.

But, assuming Peter's involvement, what could have happened seventeen years after Geoffrey's murder to drive Verity into killing herself and Peter into vanishing? Did one of them betray the other inadvertently? Had Verity been ignorant of what Peter had done, and learned by accident that she'd married her first husband's murderer? We may never know, but it is a strange coincidence that two days before Peter left for Washington the following advertisement appeared in the personal column of the Times:

"Geoffrey Standish. Will anyone knowing anything about the murder of Geoffrey Standish on the All near Newmarket 10/3/71 please write to Box 431."

Anne Cattrell