Echo

*17*

When the doorbell rang unexpectedly the three men showed varying degrees of alarm. None of them doubted it was the police. Terry bolted for the lavatory and belatedly flushed his guilt into the sewers; Deacon flung open the kitchen window and sought frantically for an air freshener; but Barry, showing more composure than either of them, turned the gas up under the dirty frying pan, crushed garlic into the sizzling fat, and started chopping onions. "I've been expecting them," he said in resignation. "I'll not forgive myself if they arrest you, too, Mike. None of this is your fault."

Harrison grew tetchy when it seemed clear that Deacon intended to keep him indefinitely on the front step of the ruts. "If you carry on like this," he warned him, "I'll be back in half an hour with an arrest warrant for the whole damn lot of you. Come on, let me in. I need to talk to Barry again, and you're just making me suspicious with these delaying tactics. What the hell's going on up there? Is Barry shafting that little boyfriend of yours?"

Deacon let him pass. "Maybe it's time you retired," he said dispassionately. "Even I wouldn't stoop so low as to make a remark like that, and I'm a journalist."

Harrison surveyed him with weary amusement. "You're an amateur, Mr. Deacon. A raw recruit could get past you." The smell in the flat was revolting, a mixture of burnt fat, garlic, onions, and, overall, the exotic reek of Jazz aftershave, which Terry had sprinkled liberally over Deacon's sofa. The kitchen door was shut and Terry and Barry were sitting, none too relaxed, watching the television in the corner.

The sergeant stood on the threshold for a moment, then took out his cigarettes and offered one to Deacon. "Interesting atmosphere," he said mildly.

Deacon agreed. He accepted a cigarette with some relief. "DS Harrison has a few more questions for Barry," he announced to the room in general. "So maybe Terry and I should make ourselves scarce for ten minutes."

Harrison closed the door of the flat. "I'd rather you stayed, Mr. Deacon. I have some questions for you, too."

"Not Terry, though." He took five pounds from his pocket and jerked his head at the boy. "There's a pub on the corner. We'll join you there when we've finished."

Terry shook his head. "No way. What'll I do if you never turn up?"

"Why wouldn't we?"

Terry flicked a suspicious glance at the sergeant. "He ain't come round to pass the time of day, Mike. My guess is he's going to arrest Barry again over that Powell woman. Am I right, Mr. Harrison?"

The sergeant shrugged noncommittally. "I want some answers to a few more questions, that's all. As far as I'm concerned, you're not involved, so you can go or you can stay. I'm easy either way."

"But I'm not," said Deacon firmly, reaching the spare key off a shelf by the door. "Come on, lad, hop it. If we don't join you in half an hour you can let yourself back in."

"No," said the boy stubbornly. "I'm staying. Billy were a mate, same as you and Barry are, and you don't walk out on mates when they need you."

"Let's get on with it," said Harrison impatiently, lowering himself into a chair and leaning forward to stare at Barry. "Mrs. Powell tells a different story from you, my friend. According to her, you've been stalking her for a couple of weeks, and you're terrifying her out of her wits. She's seen you on at least two occasions, described you down to what color shoes you wear, and denies absolutely that anyone was with her last night or that she was making love on her sitting-room carpet at two o'clock in the morning. She wants you locked up because, until you are, she's too frightened to stay in her house." He switched his gaze to Deacon. "She has also described in meticulous detail how your friend here forced his way in on Thursday night and refused to leave. She says he was drunk, violent, and abusive, and refused to explain at any point why he was there. So? What the hell's going on with you two and this woman?"

There was a short silence.

"She's very beautiful," Deacon said slowly, "and I was very drunk, but she's relying on the fact that I told her the next morning I couldn't remember anything." He strolled across to the television and switched it off before leaning his back against the wall beside it. "It was true at the time, but not after a decent breakfast and several cups of coffee. She can almost get away with saying I forced my way in, because I leaned on her door when she opened it and it would have been difficult for her to shut me out at that point. But I wasn't violent and I wasn't abusive, and there was nothing to stop her calling the police if she was afraid of me. We had a brief conversation before I passed out on her sofa, and the next morning she made me drink a cup of coffee before she let me go. I said sorry so many times that it started to get on her nerves, and when I asked her if I'd frightened her, she said she was long past being frightened of anything." He smiled slightly. "She can accuse me of lousy timing and lousy technique-" his eyes narrowed- "but she can't accuse me of anything else. I hardly ever become aggressive under the influence of alcohol, Sergeant. Merely embarrassing."

"That's true," said Terry. "He told me and Barry he wanted babies when he got drunk last night. He were weeping all over the bloody shop."

Deacon looked at him with disfavor. "I was not weeping."

"Near enough," said Terry with a wicked smile.

Harrison ignored this exchange and turned to Barry. "You swore you hadn't been near Mrs. Powell's house before last night."

Barry flushed guiltily. "I hadn't."

"I don't believe you."

The little man shook with nerves. "I hadn't," he repeated.

"She described you in detail, told me where you were standing when she saw you. How could she do that if she didn't see you?"

"I don't know," said Barry helplessly.

"Did she say when she saw him?" asked Deacon.

"She's not sure of the exact dates, but the first occasion was about ten days ago, and the second two or three days later." He took a notebook from his pocket and flipped over the pages. "She described him as a short man with glasses, wearing a blue anorak, grey slacks, and light-colored shoes which were probably suede. She said he was standing outside her house when she approached it in her car, but walked away when she turned into her drive. Do you still deny that it was you, Barry?"

"Yes." He looked in desperation towards Deacon. "It can't have been me, Mike. I never went there before "

Deacon frowned. "It sounds like you," he pointed out wondering if he had been wrong and Harrison right "It's one hell of an accurate description."

"Jesus, it's a good thing I didn't go for that drink " said Terry scornfully. "You two'd be lost without me." He turned aggressively on Barry. "What was it I said to you in the kitchen? Sad people wear anoraks, but really sad people wear suede shoes. And what did you say to m? It's a pity you didn't meet me on Thursday, because that's when you bought the shoes. I told you that bitch was clever. She's got one of those coppers to give her a description of you and fed it back to Mr. Harrison here. If you paid for those shoes with a credit card, mate, you're in the clear, ain't you? There's no way you could've been wearing them ten days ago."

Barry's sad face brightened. "I did," he said. "I've even got the receipt. It's in my room at home."

"And how many other pairs of suede shoes do you own?" asked Harrison, unimpressed by Terry's reasoning.

"None," said Barry with rising excitement. "I bought these as a Christmas present to myself because all my shoes are black. Mike knows that. He's the one who told me black shoes were boring."

"Yes," said Deacon thoughtfully, "I did." He bent to flick ash into the ashtray on the coffee table, using the pause for some rapid thinking. "Give me a description of the man she was with last night, Barry," he said, "the one she's denying was there."

"I've already told you," said Barry uncomfortably.

"Tell me again."

"Fair, good-looking-" he petered into an embarrassed silence, unwilling to revisit his shameful voyeuristic excitement. The thrill of the experience had long since vanished for him.

"The description Barry gave me this afternoon," Deacon told Harrison, "was toff, slim, blond, tanned, and with a tattoo or birthmark on his right shoulder blade. He didn't recognize him, and I don't recognize the description, but let's say that I can prove to you that such a man exists and that Amanda Powell is well acquainted with him?"

Harrison wasn't against the proposition. He still smarted from the drubbing he had received when he dared to question her denial. But... "What difference would it make?"

It might persuade you to ask her why she's lying about him being there."

"I repeat what difference does it make? There's no law against her having a man in her house, and Barry could have seen him on one of the other occasions she says he was there. In itself, the man's existence proves nothing."

"But just for the moment, assume Barry's telling the truth. Accept that he hadn't been to Mrs. Powell's house before and that he did see a man there last night. Aren't you curious about why she's lying? I know I am."

Harrison held his gaze for a moment. "Mrs. Powell is very-" he sought for a word-"convincing." He looked as if he were about to say something else, then thought better of it.

"Too convincing?" Deacon suggested.

"I didn't say that."

Deacon stubbed out his cigarette, then moved to the telephone and consulted the address book beside it. He dialed a number. "Hello, Maggie, it's Mike Deacon here. Yes, I know it's late but I really do need to talk to Alan rather urgently." He waited, then smiled into the receiver. "Yes, you old buzzard, it's me again. How are you feeling?" He laughed. "She let you have a Bell's? Things are looking up, then. A small favor over the phone, that's all. I'm going to switch over to the loudspeaker because there are three other people in the room, and they're all interested in what I hope you're about to say. I want you to describe Nigel de Vriess for me." He pressed the loudspeaker button and replaced the handset.

"What he looks like, you mean?" barked Alan Parker's gravelly voice.

"Yes. You might just confirm that you've never given me a description of him before."

"Only if you tell me what this is all about. I may be on my last legs, but I'm still a journalist. What's the oily toad been up to?"

"I'm not sure yet. You'll be the first to know after me."

"And pigs might fly." Alan chuckled. "All right, I've never given you his description before. To the best of my recollection he's about my height-which is five-eleven-and has blond hair which he dyes to cover the grey. He's always impeccably dressed in dark suits, probably from Harrod's. Wears a white carnation in his buttonhole. Good-looking, suave. Think of Roger Moore as James Bond, and you won't go far wrong. Anything else you want to know?"

"We were given a description of a man we believe to be him." Deacon's grin reflected itself in his voice. "But he was ballock-naked at the time so how he dresses doesn't help us much. He was described as having an all-over body tan and a tattoo or a birthmark on his right shoulder blade. Can you verify either of those facts?' '

"Hah! I can't speak for the tan, but he certainly has a birthmark on his shoulder blade. Legend has it, put about by him, of course, that it's shaped in the devil's number-six-six-six-which is why he was a millionaire by the age of thirty, the devil looking after his own and all that twaddle. But one of his floozies described it as looking more like a dog's pizzle. Never seen it myself, so can't say either way." His voice took on a wheedling tone. "Come on, Mike. What is all this? I'll have your hide if DVS is on the skids, and you've kept it to yourself. I've got shares in the bloody thing."

"To the best of my knowledge, this has nothing to do with his business, Alan." With renewed promises to keep his old friend posted, Deacon cut the line and lifted an eyebrow in Harrison's direction. "Amanda's in-laws have been claiming for five years that she and Nigel de Vriess conspired to defraud Lowenstein's Bank of ten million pounds, then made a scapegoat of her husband by murdering him. No one, including the police, has ever taken the claims seriously because there was no evidence that Nigel and Amanda had anything to do with each other after she married James."

Harrison digested this in silence for a moment. "There still isn't," he pointed out. "Everything your friend said is presumably in the public domain. What was to stop you or Barry from looking it up and then using it to compromise Mrs. Powell?"

"Nothing at all," said Deacon evenly, lighting another cigarette. "In fact, that's exactly what I was planning to do after Christmas. The first opportunity I had I intended to make an appointment to interview de Vriess. You'll have to take my word for it that the only research I've done on him so far was to treat Alan Parker to a drink last Sunday and ask him how de Vriess funded the purchase of his mansion in Hampshire, which is the area that's been exercising the brains-and curiosity-of the Streeter family."

"And I'd never even heard of him before last night," put in Barry tentatively.

Deacon retrieved his notes from the kitchen, and shut the door hurriedly on the heavy fetid air that seeped out of it like sump oil. He handed the Mail Diary piece to Harrison and explained briefly why he'd been looking for it, or something like it. "We're after anything that might connect Billy Blake to Amanda Powell," he finished.

"Have you found a connection?"

Deacon's expression was neutral. "We're still working on it. As I told you this afternoon, the most likely explanation is that Billy was her husband. But we can't prove it."

There was a long pause while Harrison considered the implications of what Deacon had told him.

"If Billy was James, then her in-laws are wrong," he pointed out. "She and de Vriess couldn't have murdered him five years ago if he was still alive in June."

Deacon grinned. "Even we amateurs worked that one out, so I'm beginning to think it's the crux of the whole thing. It's so blindingly obvious, after all."

He resumed his position against the wall and told Harrison at length how he believed Amanda had seized upon the fortuitous death of a strange man in her garage, who bore an odd resemblance to her husband, to clear herself of lingering suspicions of murder and at the same time formalize her position as a widow. "My only role, as I see it, was to be the objective observer who generated official interest," he finished. "But she must be very worried now if she thinks Barry saw her and Nigel together. She can't afford doubts being raised about her relationship with him."

Harrison clearly found the arguments convincing and asked if he could borrow the photographs of Billy's mug shot and the young James Streeter. "How would you expect her to react when I show her these?" he queried, tucking them into his coat pocket.

But Deacon shook his head. "I've no idea," he said honestly, remembering how her nails had dug into his chin when he had made the suggestion himself.

"Why didn't you tell Mr. Harrison about Billy being this Fenton geezer?" asked Terry after the DS had gone.

"Do you know what a scoop is?"

"Sure."

"That's why I didn't tell him."

"Yeah, but you just gave him a load of bull instead. I mean, Amanda ain't stupid, is she? She can't never have thought it'd be that easy to have James declared dead. The old Bill'd need loads more proof than a couple of snapshots."

Deacon grinned. "She called me a clever man when I put the theory to her."

"Do you fancy her?"

"What on earth makes you think that?''

"Why else'd you want to pass out on her sofa?"

Deacon rubbed his jaw. "She has the same blue eyes as my mother," he said reflectively. "I felt homesick."

Harrison dropped in at the station before going on to Amanda's house. He made a few inquiries of his colleagues, then put through a call to PC Dutton in Kent. Had Mrs. Powell been informed of Barry Grover's release? Yes. And how much information had Dutton given her about him? A full description, was the answer, and details of when he had been outside her house. Was this wrong? There had been nothing on the faxed information requesting confidentiality, and Mrs. Powell had pointed out quite reasonably that she needed to know who to look for in case he troubled her again.

Harrison had worked himself into a fine fury by the time he reached the Thamesbank Estate.

The WPC, who was minding Amanda pending Harrison's return from reinterviewing Barry, answered the door. "Where is she?'' demanded the sergeant, pushing past her.

"In the sitting room."

"Right. I want a witness to this. You'll make notes of everything she says and if you bat one eyelid at what I say, you'll damn wish you hadn't. Have you got that?" He shouldered open the door to the sitting room and sat himself squarely on the sofa facing Amanda. "You've been lying to me, Mrs. Powell."

She drew away from him.

"There was a man in this house last night."

She leaned forward to sift the rose-petal potpourri, scattering the scent through her slender fingers. "You're quite wrong, Sergeant. I was on my own."

Harrison ignored this. "We've tentatively identified your-" he chose the next word carefully-"companion-as Nigel de Vriess. Will he also deny being here?''

Something shifted at the back of her eyes, and he felt his vestigial hackles rise in response. She reminded him suddenly of a bad-tempered Siamese cat his grandmother had once owned. As long as it was left alone, it had been beautiful; touched, it had clawed and spat. When it tore deep tramlines in her face one day, his grandmother had had it put down. "Beauty is as beauty does," she had remarked without regret.

"I would imagine so," Amanda remarked.

"When did you last see him?"

"I've no idea. It's so long ago I couldn't possibly say."

"Before or after your husband went missing?"

"Before." She shrugged. "Long before."

"So if I ask his partner where Nigel was last night, she'll probably say he was at home with her?"

The tip of her pink tongue played across her lips, moistening them. "I wouldn't know."

"I will be asking her, Mrs. Powell, and I'm sure she'll ask me why I'm asking."

She shrugged again. "I have no interest in either of them."

"Then why were you so determined to discredit Barry Grover earlier?"

She didn't answer.

Harrison dipped a hand into his pocket. "Tell me about Billy Blake," he invited. "Did you recognize him when you found him in your garage?"

She took the change of tack with only the mildest of frowns. "Billy Blake?" she echoed. "Of course I didn't recognize him. Why would I? He was a stranger."

He produced the borrowed photographs, and aligned them carefully on the coffee table. "The same man?" he suggested.

Her shock was so extreme that he couldn't doubt it was genuine. Whatever else she might be guilty of, he thought, it had clearly never crossed her mind that Billy Blake might be mistaken for her missing husband.

But then Deacon had omitted to mention that she'd heard that very same theory on Thursday night.

Deacon replaced the telephone receiver with a gleam of amusement in his dark eyes. "Harrison's pissed off with being sent on wild-goose chases," he remarked. "Apparently, Mrs. Powell looked poleaxed when he showed her the photos."

"I'm not surprised," said Terry. "Like Barry said, if you forget the difference in age, it takes a computer to tell them apart. Maybe she's shitting bricks right this minute because she's suddenly clicked that it might've been James after all."

"No," said Deacon slowly, "she didn't blink an eyelash when I suggested it to her. She's always known it wasn't him, so why throw a wobbly for Harrison?" He looked at his watch. "I'm going out," he said abruptly. "You two can watch a late movie till I get back."

"Where are you going?'' demanded Terry.

"Never you mind."

"You're planning a Peeping Tom act like old Barry, ain't you? You're going to sneak into her garden and drool while she gets rogered by Nigel."

Deacon stared him down. "You've got a grubby little mind, Terry. Unless Sergeant Harrison's blind as a bat, Nigel de Vriess is long gone." He leveled a finger at the boy. "I won't be more than a couple of hours, so behave yourself. I'll skin you alive if you try anything while I'm out of this flat."

Terry flicked a thoughtful glance in Barry's direction. "You can trust me, Mike."

The traffic was thin at that time of night, and it took only half an hour to drop down through the City and head east along the river to the Isle of Dogs. He kept a wary eye on his rearview mirror, regretting his decision to open the second bottle of wine. Lights blazed in Amanda's house, and he toyed with the idea of acting out Terry's fantasy by sneaking round the back and peeping through her sitting-room windows. The idea was more attractive than he liked to admit, but he abandoned it for fear of the consequences. Instead he fulfilled one of Billy's prophecies. "You will never do what you want because the tribe's will is stronger than yours.''

He rang the doorbell and listened to the sound of her footsteps in the hall. There was a brief silence while she put her eye to the peephole. "I'm not going to open this door, Mr. Deacon," she said from the other side, "so I suggest you leave before I call the police."

"I doubt they'll come," he said, stooping to smile amiably into the peephole. "They're bored with the both of us. At the moment they can't decide which of us is telling more lies, although you seem to have the edge. Sergeant Harrison's deeply put out by your refusal to admit that Nigel de Vriess was in this house last night."

"He wasn't."

"Barry saw him."

"Your friend's sick."

He leaned his shoulder against the door and took out a cigarette. "A little confused, perhaps, like me. I had no idea I'd frightened you so much on Thursday night, Amanda, not when you were so charming to me the next morning." He paused, waiting for an answer. "Sergeant Harrison's surprised you didn't call the police when I passed out on the sofa. It's what most women would have done when faced with a violent and abusive intruder."

"What do you want, Mr. Deacon?"

"A chat. Preferably inside, where it's warmer. I've found out who Billy was."

There was a long silence before the chain rattled and she opened the door. The light in the hall was very bright and he was taken aback by her appearance. She seemed unwell. Her face was drawn and colorless, and she looked nothing like the radiant woman in the yellow dress who had dazzled him three days ago.

He frowned. "Are you all right?"

"Yes." She was staring at him rather oddly, as if she expected to see a reaction in his eyes, and relaxed visibly when he showed none. She stepped back. "You'd better come in."

He looked around the hall and noticed a suitcase at the bottom of the stairs. "Going somewhere?''

"No. I've just come back from my mother's."

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing."

He followed her into the sitting room and noticed immediately that the scent of roses was absent. Instead, the window was open and the rotten smell of the exposed riverbanks seemed to be drifting in on the night air. "The tide must be out," he said. "You should have kept one of the flats in Teddington, Amanda. There's no tide above the locks."

What little color remained in her face leached out of it. "What are you talking about?"

"The smell. It's not very pleasant. You should shut your window." He lowered himself onto the sofa and lit his cigarette, watching her as she sprayed the room with air freshener before fluttering the potpourri between her fingers to disperse its scent.

"Is that better?'' she asked him.

"Can't you tell?"

"Not really. I'm so used to it." She took the chair opposite. "Are you going to tell me who Billy was?"

The tic was working furiously at the corner of her mouth, and he wondered why she was so agitated and why she looked so deathly pale. Whatever he may have told Harrison, it would take more than Barry's chance sighting of her with Nigel de Vriess to give credence to the Streeters' theories of conspiracy to murder. She had impressed him as a woman of cool composure, and he was puzzled by her lack of it now. The paradox was that he found her infinitely less attractive in despair-so much so that he wondered why he had ever lusted after her-but a great deal more likable. Vulnerability was a quality he recognized and understood.

"His name was Peter Fenton. You probably remember the story. He was a diplomat-believed to have been a spy-who vanished from his house in nineteen eighty-eight and was never seen again. Not as Peter Fenton, anyway."

She didn't say anything.

"You don't seem very impressed."

She pressed her hands to her lips for a moment, and he realized that her silence owed more to the fact that she couldn't speak than that she didn't want to. "Why did he come here?" she managed at last.

"I don't know. I hoped you would tell me. Did you or James know him?"

She shook her head.

"Are you sure? Do you know everyone James knew?"

"Yes."

Deacon took the Mail Diary piece on de Vriess from his pocket and handed it to her. "Billy read that three weeks before he ended up dead in your garage. Let's say he went to Halcombe House with the intention of getting Amanda Streeter's address out of Nigel because he didn't know you were calling yourself Amanda Powell, or that you lived and worked within a mile or so of where he was dossing." He thought for a moment, and, in the absence of an ashtray, tapped ash into his palm. "The fact that he arrived here meant Nigel must have told him how to find you, which makes your lover a bit of a bastard, Amanda. Firstly, for giving out your address to the first drunken bum who asks for it, and secondly, for not telling you to expect a visitor. He didn't, did he?"

She licked her lips. "How do you know Billy read this?"

Deacon lied. "One of the men at the warehouse told me. So what's it all about? Why should Peter Fenton be so intent on finding Amanda Streeter? And why would Nigel help him? Did they know each other?"

She rubbed her temples with trembling fingers. "I don't know.''

"Okay, try this. What might Peter have known about you that sent him chasing after you when he read your name in the newspaper? Maybe he had something on you and Nigel, and Nigel wriggled out by persuading him it was you he needed to talk to?"

She withdrew into her chair and closed her eyes. "Billy never spoke to me. I didn't know he was here until he was dead. I don't know who he was, or why he came to my house. Most of all, I don't know why-" She fell silent.

"Go on."

"I feel ill."

Deacon glanced towards the window. "Tell me about Nigel," he prompted. "Why would he give your address to Peter without telling you he'd done it?"

"I don't know." She gave a troubled shake of her head. "Why do you think he knew him as Peter Fenton? It was Billy Blake who died in my garage."

"Okay. Why give your address to Billy?"

"I don't know," she said again. "What sort of man was he?" Her eyes opened wide, and Deacon feared she was about to vomit.

"If you mean Billy, he was a fine man." He took a handkerchief from his pocket. "I find it's easier to hold on," he said with a faint smile, "but you know where the lavatory is if you need it." He waited till her gagging ceased. "A psychiatrist who had three sessions with him described him as half-saint, half-fanatic. I've read a transcript of part of their interview. Billy believed in the salvation of souls and the mortification of the flesh, but he felt himself to be personally damned." He studied her for a moment. "From my own experience of him, through the medium of Terry Dalton-a youngster he befriended and cared for-I'd say Billy was a man of honor and integrity despite being a drunk and a thief."

"Why should any of that make him want to come here?''

Deacon got up and went to the window to toss his cigarette butt into the garden. The air that blew in was sweet and clean and smelled faintly of the sea. He turned back into the cloying atmosphere of her spare, minimalist surroundings and he began to understand why her car was always parked in her driveway, why she drenched the rooms in rose-scented spray, and, ultimately, why six months after Billy's death she had been so desperate to find out who her uninvited guest had been. He had had an inkling of it once before, but hadn't believed it. He held the back of his hand to his nose, and he saw recognition in her eyes because he was reacting the way she had expected when he first entered the house. "What did you do to him, Amanda?"

"Nothing. If I'd known he was there, I'd have helped him as I helped you."

She had put on a hell of a performance for Harrison in the last few hours, but was she acting now? Deacon didn't think so, but then he was no judge. "Why did you lie to Harrison about me and Barry?" he asked, opening all the windows to let in the freezing air. Anything was better than the sweet, sickly smell of death.

She shook her head, unable to cope with the sudden switch of direction.

"Are the Streeters right? Did you and Nigel work the fraud and then murder James?''

She lowered the handkerchief. "James worked the fraud. Everyone knows that except his family. They were so proud of the success he made of his life that they forgot what he was really like. He loathed them, never went near them in case their penny-pinching poverty rubbed off on him." She sounded very bitter. "He was always on the make, always after insider knowledge of stocks that might double in value overnight. I've never been less surprised about anything than when the police told me he'd embezzled ten million pounds."

"Where did he get the knowledge to bypass the computer system? Did Marianne Filbert help him?''

Amanda shrugged. "She must have. Who else was there?"

"Nigel de Vriess?" he suggested. "It's too much of a coincidence that he bought out Softworks after James and Marianne disappeared."

She rested her head against the back of her chair. "If Nigel was involved," she said wearily, "then he covered his tracks extremely well. He was investigated along with everyone else, but all the evidence pointed to James. I'm sorry the Streeters can't see that, but it is the truth."

"If you dislike James so much, why are you still married to him?"

"I didn't want any more publicity. And why get divorced if you don't want to marry again?" Unexpectedly she smiled. "There's a simple explanation for everything, Mr. Deacon, even this house. Lowndes, the company who developed the Teddington flats, also built this estate. I negotiated a straightforward exchange. I gave them full title to the Teddington property in return for full title to this house. And they did rather better out of the deal than I did. Converting the school was easy because I'd already done the drawings and obtained planning permission, and the flats were sold even before they were finished. Lowndes had far more trouble shifting these houses because they'd over-priced them, and the housing market was in the doldrums in nineteen ninety-one. You may not believe it, but I did them a favor by taking this one off their hands." Her voice took on its bitter note again. "If the bank hadn't threatened to pull the rug out from under me because of the uncertainty over James, I'd have made a great deal more by seeing the development through than accepting this house in lieu."

Were explanations ever that simple? Why hadn't she fought harder to see her project through? She was no pushover, in all conscience.

And once she'd cleared herself of involvement in the fraud... "You told me Billy liked to doss down as near the river as possible," he said, "but the same is true of you. Teddington's on the river. This house is on the river. Your office is on the river. Could the river be the connection between you?"

She raised the handkerchief to her mouth. There was still no color in her face except in the blue of her eyes, which followed every movement he made. "If I knew the answer to that-" She paused. "I thought-well, I hope it's enough just to identify him. If I can put the right name on his plaque-" she fell silent.

"He'll rest in peace?"

She nodded. "It's not always like this, you know." She gestured unhappily towards the window. "It's been worse since you came to the house."

"Has he ever spoken to you?"

"No."

"I think I heard him," Deacon said matter-of-factly. "Either that or I was dreaming. 'Devourer of thy parent, now thy unutterable torment renews'," he explained. "I heard that."

"Why would Billy say that?"

"I don't know. He was obsessed with religion. I think he may have murdered somebody and that's why he believed he was damned. Both he and his wife seemed to see hell as their inevitable destiny." My own redemption doesn't interest me ... Whose then? Verity's? Amanda's? He eyed her curiously. "He preached repentance to others but seemed to see his own salvation in terms of a divine hand reaching down into the bottomless pit to pull him out. He said there's no way out of hell except through God's mercy."

Her fingers tightened round the handkerchief, compressing it into a tight ball. "What does that have to do with me?''

Or me, thought Deacon. Why do I get the feeling that my fate is inextricably linked with Billy's ... he said London was full of shit ... I've watched men die violently ... the water reminded him of blood ... she sends her shit along the river to infect the innocent places further down...

"I need to talk to Nigel de Vriess," he said abruptly. "If he gave Billy your address, then Billy may have explained why he wanted it-" he paused to reflect-"although it doesn't explain why Nigel didn't warn you to expect him." He smiled slightly. "I would have said he didn't like you, Amanda, if Barry hadn't witnessed what you and he were up to last night."

She shrugged indifferently. "Your friend's quite capable of coming up with sick fantasies about what he saw through my window. What he did to my photograph was disgusting. Even you must recognize he's an unreliable witness."

Deacon drew his coat about him. It was very cold, although Amanda seemed unaffected by it. "I don't. He's totally reliable when it comes to anything visual. Is the Streeters' conspiracy theory right? Is that why it's so important to keep denying that Nigel was here?''

"You've already asked me that, and I've already given you my answer."

"Do you have de Vriess's telephone number?"

"Of course not. I haven't seen him in five years."

He gave a low laugh. "Then for your sake, I hope he's as good a liar as you are. You're too elegant to end up with egg on your face." He raised a hand in farewell. "Happy Christmas, Amanda."

"Happy Christmas, Mr. Deacon." She held out his handkerchief.

"You keep it," he said. "Something tells me you'll be needing it more than I do."