Echo

*12*

Deacon selected a frozen turkey and chucked it into the supermarket cart. He had been like a bear with a sore head since they'd left the pub, and Terry had been careful not to antagonize him further since remarking in the car that it wasn't surprising Deacon's old man had shot himself if all the women in his family were such cows.

"What would you know about it?'' Deacon had asked in an icy voice. "Did Billy make life so difficult for you that no one wanted to know you? Would it have mattered anyway? You can't get much lower than the gutter in all conscience."

They hadn't spoken for half an hour, but now Deacon leaned on the cart and turned to the youngster. "I'm sorry, Terry. I was out of order. It doesn't matter how angry I was, it was no excuse for rudeness."

"It were true, though. You can't get no lower than the gutter, and it ain't rude to tell the truth."

Deacon smiled. "There's a lot lower than the gutter. There's the sewer and there's hell, and you're a long way from both." He straightened. "You're not in the gutter, either, not while you're under my roof, so choose your favorite foods and we'll eat like kings."

After five minutes, he returned to something that had been nagging at him. "Did Billy ever tell you how old he was?"

"Nope. All I know is, he was old enough to be my grandfather."

Deacon shook his head. "According to the pathologist, he was somewhere in his mid-forties. Not much older than me in fact."

Terry was genuinely astonished. He stood openmouthed with a box of cornflakes in his hand. "You've gotta be joking. Shit! He looked well ancient. I reckoned he was the same age as Tom, near enough, and Tom's sixty-eight."

"But he said it was good to be young in the seventies." He knocked the cornflakes out of the boy's hand into the cart. "And the seventies were only twenty years ago."

"Yeah, but I wasn't born then, was I?"

"What's that got to do with anything?"

"It means it was a long time ago."

"Why did Billy say truth was dead?" asked Deacon, as they drove home after packing the boot with food. "What's that got to do with a postcard?" He recalled a line from Billy's interview with Dr. Irvine: "I am still searching for truth."

"How the hell should I know?"

Deacon held on to his patience with difficulty. "You lived with the man for two years on and off but, as far as I can see, you never questioned a single damn thing he said. Where was your curiosity? You ask me enough bloody questions."

"Yeah, but you answer them," said Terry, smoothing the front of his work jacket with satisfaction. "Billy got really angry if I said 'why' too many times, so I gave up asking. It wasn't worth the aggro."

"Presumably he said it in the present tense?"

"What?"

"Truth is dead so nothing matters anymore."

"Yeah. I already told you that."

"Another word for truth is 'verity,' " mused Deacon, gnawing at it like a dog with a bone. "Verity is a girl's name." He glanced sideways. "Do you think V stood for Verity? In other words when he said 'truth is dead' did he mean 'Verity is dead'?" I am still searching for Verity? "And don't say: 'how the hell should I know?' because I might be inclined to stop the car and ram the turkey down your throat."

"I'm not a fucking mind reader," said Terry plaintively. "If Billy said truth is dead, I reckon he meant truth is dead."

"Yes, but why!" growled Deacon. "Which truth was he talking about? Absolute truth, relative truth, plain truth, gospel truth? Or was he talking about one particular truth-say the murder-where the truth had never been uncovered?"

"How the-" Hastily Terry bit his tongue. "He didn't say."

"Then I'm going with V for Verity," said Deacon decisively. He drew up at a traffic light. "I'll go further. I'm betting she looked like the woman in Picasso's painting. Do you think that's a possibility? You said he loved the postcard and kissed it when he was drunk. Doesn't that imply she reminded him of someone?''

"Don't see why," said Terry matter-of-factly. "I mean one of the guys has a picture of Madonna. He's always slobbering over her, but in his wildest dreams he never had a bird like that. I reckon it's the only way he can get a hard-on."

Deacon let out the clutch. "There's a difference between a photograph of a living woman who enjoys exploiting male fantasies and a portrait painted nearly a hundred years ago."

"There probably wasn't at the time," said Terry, after giving the matter some serious thought. "I bet Picasso had a hard-on when he was painting his bird, and I bet he hoped other blokes'd get one, too, when they looked at her. I mean, you have to admit she's got nice tits."

1:OO p.m.-Cape Town, South Africa

"Who is that woman?" asked an elderly matron of her daughter, nodding towards the solitary figure at a window table. "I've seen her here before. She's always on her own, and she always looks as if she'd rather be somewhere else."

Her daughter followed her gaze. "Gerry was introduced to her once. I think her name's Felicity Metcalfe. Her husband owns a diamond mine, or something. She's absolutely rolling in it, anyway." She looked with some dissatisfaction on her small solitaire engagement ring.

"I've never seen her with a man."

The younger woman shrugged. "Maybe she's divorced. With a face like that, she's almost bound to be." She smiled unkindly. "You could cut diamonds with it."

Her mother subjected the lonely figure to a close scrutiny. "She is very thin," she agreed, "and rather sad, too, I think." She returned to her food. "It's true what they say, darling, money doesn't buy happiness."

"Neither does poverty," said her daughter rather bitterly.

While Terry decorated the flat that afternoon, Deacon sat at the kitchen table and made a stab at drawing conclusions from what little information he had. He threw out questions from time to time. Why did Billy choose to doss in the warehouse? For the same reason as the rest of us, I guess. Did he have a thing about rivers? He never said. Did he mention the name of a town where he might have lived? No. Did he mention a university or a profession or the name of a company he might have worked for? I don't know any universities, so I wouldn 't know, would I?

"WELL, YOU BLOODY WELL SHOULD!" roared Deacon, losing his temper. "I have never met anyone who knows as little about what matters as you do."

Terry poked his head round the kitchen door with a broad grin splitting his face in two. "You'd be dead in a week if you had to live the way I do."

"Who says?"

"Me. Any guy who reckons the names of universities are more important than knowing how to graft for food ain't got a chance when the chips are down. What matters is staying alive, and you can't eat fucking universities. D'you want to see what I've done in here? It looks well brilliant."

He was right. After two years, Deacon's flat had a homey feel about it.

Deacon simplified his notes down to names, ages, places, and connecting ideas, and grouped them together logically on a piece of paper, putting Billy in the center. He propped the sheet against the wine bottle. "You're the artist. See if you can spot patterns. I'll help you with anything you can't manage." He crossed his arms and watched the boy scrutinize the page, reading words out loud every time Terry pointed a questioning finger.

"What's this hang-up with rivers?" Terry asked.

"Amanda said Billy liked to doss down as near the Thames as possible."

"Who told her that?"

Deacon checked through a transcript he'd made of his recorded conversation with her. "The police presumably."

"First I've heard of it. He really hated the river. He moaned about the damp getting into his bones, and said the water reminded him of blood."

"Why on earth should it remind him of blood?''

"I dunno. It was something to do with the river being the cord between the mother and the baby but I can't remember its name."

"The umbilical cord."

"That's it. He said London's full of shit, and she sends her shit along the river to infect the innocent places further down."

"You said he had a thing about genes. Was he drawing an analogy?"

"If you speak English," said Terry scathingly, "then I might be able to give you an answer."

Deacon smiled. "Do you think he was talking about his own mother? Was he saying that his mother had passed on bad genes to him through the umbilical cord?"

"He only ever mentioned London."

"Or maybe he meant all parents pass on bad genes?"

"He only ever mentioned London," repeated Terry stubbornly.

"I heard you the first time. It was a rhetorical question."

"Jesus! You're so like him. Lahdy-bloody-dah, and never mind no one knew what the fuck he was talking about." He pointed to the 45+ beside the name "Verity." "I thought you reckoned V was younger than Billy," he said, "so how come you've made her the same age?"

"I've added a plus sign," said Deacon, "which means I'm now convinced she was older than he was." He pulled forward V's letters. "I was thinking about it last night. There are two ways of reading 'your glass shall not persuade you you are old, so long as youth and I are of one date.' Either she took the quote verbatim from her correspondent's letter or she reinterpreted it for her purposes. When I first read it, I assumed it was an interpretation because she didn't put it into quotation marks, and in Shakespeare's sonnet it reads: 'my glass shall not persuade me I am old' etcetera, etcetera. Now I'm more inclined to think it was a direct quote and her correspondent was talking about her age and her glass." He shook his head at Terry's obvious incomprehension. "Forget it, sunshine. Just accept that the letter makes more sense if V was older than her correspondent. Youth is eternally optimistic, and age is wary, and V seems to be a damn sight warier of revealing their affair than whoever she was writing to."

"Which was Billy?"

"Probably."

"But not definitely?"

"Right. He could have found the letters anywhere."

Terry whistled appreciatively. "This is well interesting. I'm beginning to wish I'd asked the old bugger a few more questions."

"Join the club," murmured Deacon sarcastically.

Terry demanded an explanation of the lower half of the page. Who were de Vriess, Filbert, and Streeter? Why were W. F. Meredith, Teddington flats, and Thamesbank Estate included? Deacon gave him a summary of the Streeter connection with Amanda Powell.

"Thamesbank Estate is where Amanda lives and Billy died," he finished. "Teddington is where she and James were planning a development of flats, and W. F. Meredith is the firm she works for. Its offices are in a converted warehouse about two hundred yards from yours."

"So, are you saying Billy was this Streeter guy?"

"Not unless he had some pretty radical plastic surgery."

"But you reckon there's a connection?"

"There has to be. The odds against one woman being associated with two men who both dropped out of their lives are so high they're not worth considering. There are a thousand garages between the warehouse and Amanda's estate, so Billy must have had a reason for going all the way to hers." He ran a thoughtful hand around his jawline. "I can think of three possible explanations. First, some of the letters he liberated from the trash were hers and he found out her address and who she was by reading them. Second, he saw her coming out of the Meredith building, recognized her as someone he'd known in the past, and followed her home. Third, somebody else recognized her and followed her, then handed that information on to Billy."

Terry frowned. "The second one can't be right. I mean if he recognized Amanda, then she'd've recognized him. And she wouldn't've come round asking about him if she already knew who he was, would she?"

"It depends how much he'd changed. Don't forget, you thought he was twenty years older than he actually was. It may have gone something like this. Out of the blue, Amanda finds a dead wino in her garage who's known to the police as Billy Blake, aged sixty-five. She's sorry but not unduly concerned until she learns that his name was assumed, his age was forty-five, he was dossing near her offices, and there was a good chance he had chosen her garage deliberately, at which point she pays for his cremation and goes to great lengths to find out something about him. What does that suggest to you?"

"That she thought Billy was her old man."

Deacon nodded. "But she must have realized she was wrong the minute she got hold of the police photographs. So why is she still obsessed with Billy?"

"Maybe you should ask her."

"I have." He threw the boy a withering look. "It's not a question she wants to answer."

Terry shrugged. "Maybe she can't. Maybe she's as puzzled by it all as you and me. I mean, she told us she didn't know he was there till he were dead, so he can't have spoken to her. And see, you've not explained why he went there. If he did recognize her, why should that make him want to die in her garage? And if he didn't recognize her-well, why'd he want to die in a stranger's garage? Do you get what I'm saying?"

"Yes, but you're assuming she told you the truth. Supposing she was lying about not speaking to him?" Deacon stretched his hands towards the ceiling, easing the muscles of his shoulders. He watched the boy for a moment out of the corner of his eye. "He must have been in a pretty bad way to die as quickly as he did, so why did you let him go off on his own like that?''

"You can't blame me. Billy never listened to anything I said. In any case, he was okay the last time I saw him."

"He can't have been, not if he was dead of starvation a few days later."

"You've got that wrong. None of us'd seen him for about three, four weeks before he pegged it." The memory seemed to worry him, as if he knew that it was his own apathy that had killed Billy. Just as Deacon's apathy had killed his father. "He buggered off in May sometime, and the next I knew was when Tom read in a newspaper that he'd turned up dead in this woman's garage."

Deacon digested this surprising piece of information in silence for a moment or two. For some reason he had always assumed that Billy had gone directly from the warehouse to the garage. "Do you know where he went?"

"At the time we thought he was probably banged up in one of the London nicks, but thinking about it after"-he hesitated-"well, like Tom said, no nick would have let him starve himself, so I guess he was holed up in a place where he just stopped eating."

"Had he done that before?''

"Sure. Loads of times when he was depressed or he'd had enough of the likes of Denning. But it was never for more than a few days and he always came back. Then I'd take him down to a soup kitchen and feed him up again. I used to look after him pretty damn well, you know, and I was gutted about the way he died. There weren't no need for it."

"Do you know where he might have gone?"

Terry shook his head. "Tom reckoned he went out of town, seeing as no one saw hide nor hair of him."

"Do you know why?"

Another shake of his head.

"What was he doing before he left?"

"Got rat-arsed, same as always."

"Anything else?"

"Like what?"

"I don't know," said Deacon, "but something must have persuaded him to up stumps and vanish for four weeks." He cupped his hands and beckoned with his fingers. "Talk to me. Was he begging that day? Did he speak to anyone? Did he see someone he recognized? Did he do anything unusual? Did he say anything before he left? What time did he go? Morning? Evening? Think, Terry."

"The only thing I remember that were different," said Terry, after obliging Deacon with several seconds of eye-screwing concentration, "was that he got pretty excited about a newspaper he found in a bin. He used to flick through them, looking at headlines, but this time he read one of the pages and gave himself a headache. He were in a bloody awful mood for the rest of the day, then he passed out on a bottle of Smirnoff. He were gone by the next morning, and we never saw him again."