Echo

*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 "For my personal collection and not for publication.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 that, 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 PARABLE 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.

It would be true to say that Peter Fenton died on July 3rd, 1988, when he walked out of the family home in Cadogan Square. Certainly, he had no interest in being that man again. Peter Fenton was a professional diplomat, an assured and confident man with an enviable intellect and no obvious vices. By contrast, Billy Blake was a tortured individual, who delighted in self-inflicted pain and preached damnation to anyone who would listen. He was an unrepentant alcoholic, thief and beggar, but he strove, often at terrible cost to himself, to protect others from the evil that he had done himself. The irony was that Billy, destitute, was a good man, and Peter Fenton, advantaged, was not.

Peter was a murderer who went on to seduce and marry the wife of his victim, Geoffrey Standish. There can be no doubt that he knew exactly who Verity was when he first made love to her, for even if Geoffrey Standish was a stranger when Peter killed him, he will have learned about the man from newspaper reports afterwards. We can speculate that this knowledge added to the thrill of Verity Standish's seduction or we can take a kinder view and say that Peter simply fell in love at first sight with a frail and vulnerable woman whose suffering at the hands of her brutal first husband had left its indelible imprint.

She was a tiny, fine-drawn woman with huge doe eyes, and Peter was by no means the first man to offer her protection. He was, however, the youngest, and Verity, after years of abuse by Geoffrey who was fourteen years her senior, saw safety in a relationship with a younger man. Nevertheless, she wasn't keen to publicize her love for a toy boy. There is evidence that she didn't want to legitimize the affair because she was afraid of what people might say. But, while she may have married Peter against her better judgment, her fears about the inappropriateness of the match were quickly laid to rest. Their marriage has been described by friends as: "an idyll," "the greatest love since Abelard and Eloise," "sweet to watch," "so intense that it was close to idolatory," "it's hard to say who adored the other more."

How tragic then that, obsessed with love of Peter, she began to ignore the two children she'd had with Geoffrey. It's easy to understand why. At the time of her marriage, her daughter Marilyn, 20, was at university and her son Anthony, 14, was at boarding school. She was no longer so important to them, and her role as Peter's wife took her overseas.

"They always paid for us to fly out in the holidays if we wanted to go," says Marilyn, "but it was no fun playing gooseberry for weeks on end. It was harder for Anthony because he was younger. Not that he ever blamed Peter. It was Mother he resented because she never made a secret of how much she'd hated our father. In the end, when Anthony became depressed after his girlfriend walked out on him, his resentment boiled over and he put that advertisement in The Times. He knew Mother would read it, and he wanted to jolt her out of her complacency. We'd both heard the rumors that she'd had Father killed, and Anthony wanted to remind her of them. You see, he was only five in 1971, and he never believed that Geoffrey was as bad as everyone said."

Anthony Standish was 22 years old in 1988. He was an unhappy young man, whose depression over a failed love affair became confused with a long-standing resentment of his mother's coolness towards him. His bitterness found expression in the following advertisement:

"Geoffrey Standish. Will anyone knowing anything about the murder of Geoffrey Standish on 10.3.71 please write to Box 431."

Anne Cattrell first put forward the theory that Peter had murdered Geoffrey in her article "The Truth about Verity Fenton" (Sunday Times, 17th June 1990). She argued that Peter and Verity may have met much earlier than they ever admitted, and that Peter was Verity's avenging arm. There's no evidence of that, but there is a wealth of evidence to show that Geoffrey and Peter had something else in common in 1971. Which was gambling.

As Billy Blake, Peter confessed to killing a man, and it's reasonable to assume that that man was Geoffrey Standish. Billy's penance was too long and too tortured for his victim to have been unconnected with Verity's suicide. But as Billy Blake, he also preached against the dangers of sudden and uncontrollable anger which lead men to commit acts of violence that they later regret. This would suggest that Geoffrey's murder was the result of a similar anger, making it an unplanned act and not a premeditated one.

We can only speculate twenty-five years after the event, but university friends of Peter talk about his "illicit Friday night card games at a private house somewhere in Cambridge" which allowed him to pursue his goals of "money" and "the good life." It is certainly possible that Geoffrey, who was on his way to Huntingdon on Friday, March 9th, 1971, learned of such a card game and gained entry to it after phoning his hosts to say he would be delayed. It is also possible that a fight broke out over money and ended, tragically, in death.

There must have been other people present who witnessed what happened. Indeed Peter may not have been alone in the killing which would explain why it was so successfully disguised as a road traffic accident. More likely, perhaps, is that Geoffrey attacked first-his aggressiveness is well documented-which would have exonerated the other participants, at least in their own minds, of murderous intent. Whatever the truth, the decision was made to protect everyone involved by dumping the body as far as possible from the illegal gambling house and make the death look like a hit-and-run accident.

While there is no evidence to support this theory above any other (except perhaps Peter's abrupt decision to give up gambling "sometime in '71" according to friends) it makes it easier to understand how Verity could have married Peter in ignorance of his crime. For, as Anne Cattrell argued elsewhere in her article: Did Verity kill herself because she learned by accident that she'd married her first husband's murderer?

The answer is that it was not an accident. Peter told her himself, during a bitter confrontation between Verity and Anthony after the advertisement appeared in The Times. "I accused her of killing my father and when she burst into tears Peter got very angry and said he'd done it. I know it sounds ridiculous," Anthony says now, "but I didn't believe him. I thought he was just trying to diffuse the row. It's what he always did. Every time she and I fell out over anything, Peter would take the blame on to himself. It used to make me so angry. My mother was very childish in many ways. She seemed unable to take responsibility for anything.

"I've lived with the guilt of that row for eight years. I wish I'd waited until Peter had come back from the States instead of attacking her the day before he left. It's one of those terrible truisms, that you only realize how much you love a person when you've lost them. I was hurting very badly after my girlfriend left me, but it's no excuse for what I did. I never really believed that my mother had killed my father, but when she hanged herself I assumed she must have and that Peter had rejected her as a result. I always hoped he'd come back one day which is why I've never spoken about this before."

But if Verity didn't hang herself out of guilt, then why? Was it in sudden revulsion against the man she adored? In panic, because she was afraid her husband's crime would catch up with him now that Anthony knew the truth? Either explanation could be true but neither satisfies. For all her frailty, Verity was stronger than that. She had put up with years of abuse from Geoffrey, and it seems unlikely that revulsion or panic would drive her to suicide.

My own view is that something infinitely more terrible pushed Verity over the edge. It was a secret she had kept for forty years, and I learned of it by chance from a lawyer whom Verity's mother, Mrs. Isobel Parnell, consulted in 1949 about Geoffrey Standish's seduction of her 13-year-old daughter.

"It was a terrible story," said Lawrence Greenhill. "Isobel had hoped to marry Geoffrey herself, and she hated Verity for causing her so much pain. The baby, a boy, was put up for adoption, and Verity was sent away to boarding school. The tragedy was that no one considered Verity's pain. At one stroke Isobel had bereft her of child, lover, and mother, and one can only wonder what loneliness the poor girl must have suffered. With the benefit of hindsight, it's obvious she would seek to pay Isobel back by marrying the man who had ruined their lives. How could a disturbed adolescent possibly distinguish between love and lust when the woman who loved her rejected her, and the man who seduced her continued to pursue her?"

But there are no neat solutions to this story. Peter was not Verity's long lost son, nor could she ever have believed he was. It is the Registrar General's job to check for just such anomalies before granting marriage licenses, and no questions were raised at the time of Peter and Verity's wedding.

In her rational mind, Verity must have known there was nothing improper about their relationship, despite the intensity of her love for Peter. But in her irrational mind, alone in the awful silence of their empty house after Peter had gone to America, did she start to brood on the unnatural love she had for the murderer of her first husband and did she begin to question the legality of the adoption papers?

Her suicide note speaks of betrayals, and it's tempting to assume she was thinking of her mother and her adopted son when she wrote it. But perhaps a more likely explanation is that she finally recognized she had betrayed everyone, even Peter, through her inability to express love naturally. For it's unlikely Peter would have been forced to betray himself to Anthony, had Verity loved him less and Anthony more.

As Lawrence Greenhill suggests, Verity Fenton's real tragedy was her confusion of love with desire. She couldn't adequately express her love for Anthony because desire for a son is illegal, so she chose to consume her surrogate son, Peter, with all the passion in her nature. But, as she dwelled on the consequences of his admission of murder, alone and isolated in Cadogan Square, did it begin to dawn on her that her worship of the man who'd killed the father of all her children was a betrayal too far?

And did she decide to kill herself because she realized it made no difference, and that she would want this man to possess her as long as she lived?

Be he father-slayer or son?

(Extracts taken from: Oedipus by Michael Deacon due to be published by Macmillan, 8th November, 1996.)