Echo

*1*

It was the smell that Mrs. Powell noticed first. Slightly sweet. Slightly unpleasant. She sniffed it on the air one warm June evening as she parked her car in her garage, but she assumed it came from her neighbours' dustbin on the other side of the low wall that divided the properties, and did nothing about it. The next morning the smell of decay eddied out from inside when she putted open the garage doors, and curiosity led her to poke among the stack of boxes at the back after she had reversed her car on to the driveway. Certainly, she didn't expect to find a corpse. If she expected anything, it was that someone had abandoned their rubbish in there, and it shocked her badly to find a dead man huddled on sheets of flattened cardboard in the corner, his head slumped on his knees.

There was a flutter of media interest in the story, largely because of where the man was found-within the boundaries of an exclusive private estate bordering the Thames in London's old docklands-and because the pathologist gave cause of death as malnutrition. That a man should have died of starvation in one of the wealthiest parts of one of the wealthiest capitals of the world as the twentieth century drew to a close was irresistible to most journalists, the more so when they learned from the police that he had passed away beside a huge chest freezer filled with food. The rat-pack arrived in force.

But they were to be disappointed. Mrs. Powell was a reluctant interviewee and had already vanished from her house. Nor was there anyone to flesh out the dead man's life and make it worth writing about. He was one of the army of homeless who haunted the streets of London, an alcoholic without family or friends, whose fingerprints were recorded under the name of Billy Blake as a result of a handful of convictions for petty thieving. Among London's policemen he had a small reputation as a street preacher from his habit of shouting aggressively at passersby about forthcoming doom and destruction whenever he was drunk, but as none of them had ever listened closely to his incoherent ramblings, nothing was added to their knowledge of the man through what he had preached. The only curious fact about him was that he had lied about his age when first arrested in 1991. The police had him on file as sixty-five; while the pathologist's estimate, as officially recorded at the inquest, was forty-five.

Mrs. Powell's involvement in this bizarre tragedy was that she owned the garage in which Billy had died. However, he preyed upon her mind following her return two weeks later after the morbid press interest had died down and, because she could afford it, she put up the money for his cremation when the coroner finally released the body. She had no need to do it-as in other areas of social welfare, the trappings of death were covered by a state benefit-but she felt an obligation to her uninvited guest. She chose the second cheapest package offered, and presented herself at the crematorium on the due date at the due time. As she had expected, she and the vicar were the only people there, the undertaker's men having left after depositing the coffin on the rollers. It was a somewhat harrowing service, conducted to the accompaniment of taped music.

Elvis Presley sang 'Amazing Grace' over the sound system at the beginning, the vicar and she struggled through the service and the responses together (while worrying independently if Billy Blake had even been a Christian), and a Welsh male voice choir gave a harmonious rendition of 'Abide with Me' as the coffin rolled through to the burners and the curtains closed discreetly behind it.

There was little more to be said or done and, after shaking hands and thanking each other for being there, Mrs. Powell and the vicar went their separate ways. As part of the package, Billy Blake's ashes were placed in an urn in a small corner of the crematorium with a plaque giving his name and date of death. Sadly, neither piece of information was accurate, for the dead man had not fact been christened Billy Blake and the pathologist had miscalculated his temperature readings and underestimated the time of death by a few hours, so whoever Billy Blake was, he died on Tuesday, June 13 1995.

The two visitors who came to view Billy Blake's plaque a few days later went unnoticed. The older man jabbed a stubby finger at the words and made a derisory noise in his throat. "See, what did I tell you? Died twelfth of June 1995. The frigging Monday. Okay? Happy now?"

"We ought to've brought some flowers," said his young companion, looking at the profusion of wreaths that other mourners had left in last respects to the recently cremated.

"There'd be no point, son. Billy's dead and I've yet to meet a corpse 'oo appreciates floral arrangements."

"Yeah, but-"

"But nothing," said the old man firmly. "I keep telling you, the bugger's gone." He pushed the youngster forward. "Satisfy yerself I'm right, and then we'll be off." He glanced around with a look of distaste creasing his weathered face. "I never did like these places. It ain't 'ealthy thinking too much on death. It comes soon enough as it is."

Despite having her garage cleansed three times in six weeks by three different cleaning companies, Mrs. Powell disposed of her chest freezer, shopped rather more frequently and started parking her car in the driveway. Her neighbour remarked on it to his wife, and said it was a pity there was no Mr. Powell. No man would allow a perfectly serviceable garage to go to waste simply because a tramp had died in it.

(Extract from

Unsolved Mysteries of the Twentieth Century

by Roger Hyde, published by Macmillan, 1994)

Missing Persons

Precisely how many people leave home for good every year in Britain remains a mystery, but if we define 'missing' as 'whereabouts unknown', then the figure is believed to run into hundreds of thousands. Only a tiny percentage ever hit the headlines, and these are usually children who are abducted and subsequently murdered. Adults rarely attract attention. The most famous missing person of recent years is the Earl of Lucan, who vanished from his estranged wife's house on 7 November 1974, following the brutal murder of Sandra Rivett, his children's nanny, and the attempted murder of Lady Lucan. He was never seen again, nor was his body found, but there seems little mystery about why he chose to vanish. Less explicable were the disappearances of two other 'missing persons': Peter Fenton, QBE, a Foreign Office 'high flyer', and James Streeter, a merchant banker.

The Case of the Vanishing Diplomat Peter Fenton, QBE

The disappearance of Peter Fenton during the evening of 3 July 1988, only hours before his wife's body was discovered in the bedroom of their Knightsbridge home, created a sensation in the British press. The house was less than a mile from where the terrible Lucan tragedy had been played out nearly fourteen years before, and the parallels between Peter Fenton and Lord 'Lucky' Lucan were startling. The two men had moved in similar social circles and both were known to have loyal friends who would help them; each man's car was later found abandoned on the south coast of England, leading to speculation that they had fled across the Channel to France; there was even a bizarre similarity in their appearance, both being tall, dark and conventionally handsome.

But comparisons with the Lucan case ended when the police revealed that, following detailed forensic examination of the house and body, they were satisfied that Verity Fenton had committed suicide. She had hanged herself from a rafter in the attic some time during the evening of 1 July while Peter Fenton was on a five-day visit to Washington. A reconstruction of the evidence suggested that, on his return from America during the afternoon of 3 July, he had found her suicide note on the hall table and then searched the house for her. There seems no doubt that it was he who cut her down and he who laid her out on the bed. Nor is there any doubt that he phoned his stepdaughter and asked her to come to the house that evening with her husband. He did not warn her of what she would find, nor did he mention that he wouldn't be there, but he told her he would leave the door on the latch. She described him as sounding "Very tired."

Unlike Lord Lucan, who was formally committed for trial at the Central Criminal Court after the Inquest into the death of Sandra Rivett, Peter Fenton was effectively absolved of blame for the death of his wife, Verity. A verdict of "suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed" was recorded, following evidence from her daughter that she had been unnaturally depressed while her husband was away. This was borne out by her suicide note which said simply: "Forgive me. I can't bear it any more, darling. Please don't blame yourself. Your betrayals are nothing compared with mine."

However, the question remained: why did Peter Fenton vanish? It seemed logical to many columnists that "betrayals" referred to love affairs, and there was much speculation that he had run to the comforting arms of a mistress. But this did not explain why his car was found abandoned near a cross-Channel ferry port, nor why he continued in hiding after the inquest verdict had been published. Interest began to centre on his job in the Foreign Office and the two postings he had held in Washington (1981-3 and 1985-7), where he was thought to have had access to highly secret information about NATO.

Was it coincidence that Fenton had vanished only weeks after the arrest of Nathan Driberg* in America?

* Nathan Driberg (b. 1941, Sacramento, California) joined the CIA from Harvard in 1962. Although a man of high intellect he failed to make progress within the CIA and is said to have become increasingly angry with the system. Some time during the early 1980s he conceived the idea of a syndicated spying ring whose aims would be purely profit-making and whose members would be known only to him. Information was supplied by syndicate members and sold on to a selected buyer. Purchasing countries are said to have included Russia, have contained other CIA agents, members of Congress, foreign diplomats, journalists and industrialists, but, as Driberg has consistently refused to name any other person, their identities remain a secret. The syndicate's activities were only discovered when one of its members, Harry Castilli, a CIA agent, began to adopt an overly lavish lifestyle. In return for immunity, he led investigators to Driberg and testified against him at his trial. Shortly after Driberg's arrest, a French diplomat and a prominent US Congressman both committed suicide. A UK diplomat, Peter Fenton, vanished.

Why had he made the five-day trip to Washington alone when it must have been clear to him that his wife was deeply depressed? Could it have been a desperate attempt to find out if Driberg was going to talk in order to then reassure Verity that he was safe? For why had she written of "betrayals" before hanging herself unless she had known that her husband was a spy? Parallels were now drawn, not with Lord Lucan, but with Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, the notorious Foreign Office spies of the 1930s and 1940s, who disappeared in 1951 after being warned by Kirn Philby that a counter-intelligence investigation by British and American agencies was closing in on them. Had Peter Fenton, like Donald Maclean, used his position of trust in our Washington Embassy to betray his country?

Sadly, we shall probably never know because, if Peter Fenton was a traitor, then he did it for the money and he is unlikely to resurface as Burgess and Maclean did in Moscow in 1956, claiming a long-standing allegiance to communism. With the sort of wealth that the Driberg syndicate is said to have made, he could have had millions stashed away in Switzerland with which to fund a new identity for himself. But, according to his stepdaughter, Marilyn Burghley, it would be wrong to assume that he benefited from his treachery. "You have to understand that Peter adored my mother. I never believed that "betrayals" meant he'd had affairs. Which means, I suppose, that I have to accept he was betraying his country, and that she knew about it. Perhaps he asked her to run away with him, and when she refused, he accused her of not loving him. I think they must have had a terrible row for her to kill herself like that. Whatever the truth, life without her would have been something he couldn't bear. My mother's death was a far worse punishment than anything the courts could have given him."

An examination of Peter Fenton's earlier life and background sheds little further light on the mystery. Born on 5 March 1950, he was the adopted son of Jean and Harold Fenton of Colchester, Essex. Jean always described him as her "little miracle" because she was forty-two at the time of the adoption and had given up hope of a child. She and her husband were both teachers and lavished time and effort on their son. Their reward was a gifted child who won scholarships first to Winchester and then to Cambridge, where he read classics. However, he became gradually estranged from his parents during his teenage years, spending fewer vacations in Essex and preferring whenever possible to stay with friends in London. There is evidence that he resented his humble background and set out to rise above it. He showed little love for his adoptive parents.

In a letter to his brother in 1971, Harold Fenton wrote: "Peter has broken Jean's heart and I shall never forgive him for it. When I tackled him about his gambling, he asked me if I'd rather he stole to buy his way out of our lives and our house. He's ashamed of us. Apparently, he intends joining the Foreign Office when he leaves Cambridge and he wanted to 'warn' us that we will see very little of him once that happens. His career must come first. I asked him if he had any explanation for why God saw fit to bless us with so objectionable a child and he said: 'I made you proud. What more did you want?' I would have struck him had Jean not been present."

Peter Fenton joined the Foreign Office from Cambridge in 1972, and was spotted early by Sir Angus Fraser, then ambassador in Paris. With Fraser's backing, Fenton seemed set for a glittering career. However, his marriage to Verity Standish in 1980 was seen by many as a mistake, and his meteoric rise appeared to falter. Verity, a widow with two teenage children, was thirteen years older than Fenton and, because of her age, was considered an unsuitable wife for a future ambassador. Interestingly, in view of what he had said to his father ten years earlier, Fenton chose to put his love for Verity before his career, and his decision would seem to have been vindicated when he won his first posting to Washington in September 1981.

There followed seven years of apparently blameless marriage and dedicated work. Fenton was awarded the QBE in 1983 for services to Her Majesty's government during the Falklands War, and Verity proved a loyal wife and much-sought-after hostess for official functions. Her children, who spent their vacations with the couple in whichever part of the world they were, remember Fenton with affection. "He was always very kind to us," said Verity's son, Anthony Standish. "He told me once that he always thought money and ambition were the only things that mattered in life until my mother showed him how to love. That's why I don't believe he was a traitor. The money wouldn't have attracted him. If you want my opinion, it was she who was having the affair. She was the sort of woman who needed constant demonstrations of love, probably because my real father was a womanizer and their marriage had been an unhappy one. Perhaps she felt neglected because Peter was working so hard at that time, and she slid into infidelity by default. If Peter found out about it and threatened to leave her, it would explain why she hanged herself."

But, unfortunately, it explains nothing else. Why did Peter Fenton vanish? Is he alive or dead? Was he a spy, a philandering husband or a cuckold? Can we really believe that love for Verity transformed him from ambitious materialist to loving husband and stepfather? And, if he loved her as much as his stepchildren claim he did, what did he do before he left for Washington that sent his wife into such a spiral of despair that she killed herself? More intriguingly, in view of its anonymity and the absence of an envelope, was Verity's suicide note addressed to him or to someone else?

The truth may well lie in what Jean Fenton wrote in her diary on his fifth birthday: "How Peter does love acting. Today he's playing the part of the perfect child. Tomorrow it will be the devil. I wish I knew which of these various Peters is the real one."

The Case of the Absconding Merchant Banker-James Streeter

James Streeter was born on 24 July 1951, the elder son of Kenneth and Hilary Streeter of Cheadle Hulme in Cheshire. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and Durham University, where he read modern languages. On graduation, he took a job in Paris with Le Fournet, a French merchant bank, where he remained for five years before moving to a sister bank in Brussels. While there, he met and married Janine Ferrer, but the marriage lasted less than three years and, following his divorce in 1983, he returned to Britain to take a job with Lowenstein's Merchant Bank in the City of London. In 1986 he married a promising young woman who was seven years his junior. Kenneth and Hilary Streeter describe the marriage as a bad one. "They had very little in common," said Hilary, "which led to rows, but it's ridiculous to suggest that depression over his marital problems prompted James to become a thief. In any case, if the police are to be believed, he began embezzling before his marriage, so the facts don't even add up. It makes us so angry that our son's reputation can be destroyed like this simply because they have taken everything at face value. It's his employer who deserves to be reviled, not James." Taken at face value, James Streeter's disappearance is as self-explanatory as Lord Lucan's for, within days of deserting his desk at Lowenstein's Merchant Bank on Friday, 27 April 1990, and in his absence, he was charged with defrauding his employers of ten million pounds. The case against him appears a strong one. Only weeks before he vanished, certain irregularities were noticed by the bank's auditors and were drawn to the attention of the board. At issue was a ten million pound discrepancy which seemed to stem from Streeter's department and, worse, to stretch back over a period of five years. In simple terms, the theft involved the creation of fraudulent accounts which were set up as conduits for large international transactions and then creamed of interest. Their operation relied on the bank's failure to introduce proper security functions into its computer system, with the result that the false accounts went unnoticed and the interest creamed over the years was substantial.

The board's decision, a mistaken one as events proved, was to authorize a clandestine in-house investigation in order to avoid panicking the bank's customers. It was badly handled, with its secrecy compromised from the start, and the outcome was a failure to identify the responsible employee, while at the same time alerting him/her to the existence of the investigation. When James Streeter chose to run on the night of 27 April, the conclusion drawn was that he had 'got away' with a fortune, particularly as his abrupt departure followed within hours of the board's reaching its belated decision to turn the investigation over to the police.

However, despite lengthy questioning of his wife and a prolonged investigation into his financial affairs, no trace of Streeter or the stolen money has ever been found. Sceptics argue that his escape route was in place for weeks, months or even years, and that the ten million pounds were transferred out of the country into a safe haven abroad. Supporters, most notably his parents and brother, argue that James was a scapegoat for someone else's criminal activity, that he was murdered to shield the real culprit further investigation. In defence of their son, they quote a handwritten facsimile that was sent from James's office at 3.05 p.m. on Friday, to his brother's office in Edinburgh.

Dear John [it reads], Dad's pushing me to rent a room for the Ruby Wedding 'do'. He's suggesting the Park Lane, but I remember Mum saying that if they ever celebrated a major anniversary she'd like to go back to the hotel in Kent where they had their reception. Am I imagining this? And did she ever mention the name of the hotel to you? Dad says it was somewhere in Sevenoaks but, needless to say, can't remember details. He claims his memory's going, but I suspect he was pissed as a rat the whole day and never knew where he was. I've tried the aunts and uncles, but none of them can remember either. Failing all else, I think we'll have to blow the surprise and ask Mum. You know what she's like. It'll offend her Puritan soul if we spend a fortune on something she doesn't really want, and then she won't enjoy herself. I know it's still a long way off, but the earlier we book the less likely we are to be disappointed. I shall be home all weekend, so give me a bell when you can. I've told Dad I'll call back Sunday lunchtime. Cheers. James.

"Whatever the police may argue," says John Streeter, "my brother would not have written that fax if he was planning to leave the country the same evening. There were a hundred better ways of allaying official suspicion about his alleged intentions. More likely he'd have referred to the visit that I and my family were making to him in May. 'See you in two weeks' would have been far more telling than 'give me a bell when you can.' And why mention Dad? He couldn't afford to have two members of his family worried about nonexistent phone calls."

The police take a more sceptical view. They cite the climate of suspicion that already existed in Lowenstein's and James's need to neutralize concern about his movements that weekend. Despite the supposed secrecy of the bank's in-house investigation, most of the employees noticed that security had been stepped up and that reports and transactions were being closely monitored. Gossip suggested at least two people in Streeter's department are on record as saying they knew before he fled that some kind of fraud had been done and that suspicion centred on them. If, as police believe, Streeter was biding his time until the investigation became serious enough to him to run, then the fax to his brother was part of the smoke-screen he threw up to the Lowenstein investigation. Almost every call in the weeks preceding his disappearance contained invitations to business colleagues for dates in April, May and June. His wife told that around the beginning of April James was uncharacteristically sociable, encouraging her to organize dinner parties and weekend visits with friends, work colleagues and relations until July. According to the police, he was working to an agenda. They point to the fact that his secretary was instructed very early on in the investigation to keep his desk diary up to with social engagements, including private ones, and it is noticeable that April, May, June and July 1990 are significantly fuller than in the previous year. His brother admits this behaviour was unusual.

"We were surprised when they invited us to stay over. James always said he found entertaining tiresome. The police argue that it was a successful ruse to lull the investigators into believing he had no idea the fraud had been discovered and would still be available for questioning through to July. But it is equally logical to argue that, because he was as worried by the rumours as everyone else at Lowenstein's he acted out of character in trying to prove his commitment and dedication. Certainly, he wasn't the only employee to up his work schedule during that period and most of those diary dates refer to business meetings."

His family go on to quote Streeter's computer illiteracy as further evidence of his innocence in this unsolved mystery. "James simply didn't have the skill to work that fraud," says John. "His complete aversion to modern technology became something of a joke over the years. He could use a calculator and a fax machine but the idea of him being able to reprogram the bank's computer is laughable. When and where did he learn how to do it? He had no computer at home, and no one has ever come forward claiming to have taught him."

But others have raised doubts about Streeter's alleged ignorance. There is evidence that he had an affair with a woman called Marianne Filbert, who was employed as a computer programmer by Softworks Limited. Softworks was invited to produce a report on Lowenstein's computer security in 1986, but they failed to complete the task and the report was never presented. James Streeter's detractors point to Marianne Filbert's access to that half completed report as the key to the fraud, while his supporters dispute that he even knew Filbert. Alleged or otherwise, the affair was certainly over before the fraud was discovered because Filbert moved to America in August 1989. However, James Streeter's secretary has stated that on several occasions she found him using her word processor for personal correspondence, and colleagues testify easy understanding of the computer spread function. "It took him no time at all to find an entry I'd made," claimed one member of his department. "He said any fool could work the system if you told him which buttons to press."

Nevertheless, there remain several unanswered questions about James Streeter's disappearance that, in the opinion of this author, have never been adequately addressed. If we assume he was guilty of embezzling 10 million pounds from Lowenstein's Merchant Bank, how did he know that the decision to involve the police was taken by the board on 27th April? The police allege that he had always planned to abscond if his fraud came to light and it was mere coincidence that his escape was scheduled for the day of the decisive board meeting. But, if that was true, why did he wait out the six weeks of the "in-house" investigation? Unless he had access to documents, which the police admit is unlikely, then he could not have known the investigation was failing. And isn't it pushing the bounds of coincidence a little far that the last weekend in April, as recorded in James's office diary, was also the only weekend in April when his wife would be away, fulfilling a long-standing engagement with her mother, thus giving James-or someone else-two whole days to 'make good' his disappearance before his absence was reported?

The police argue that he chose that weekend to run because his movements could not be monitored, and that he would have gone whatever decision the board had reached, but this is to ignore the relationship that existed between James and his wife. According to Kenneth, one of the reasons the marriage was stormy was because the two people involved had more commitment to their careers than they had to each other. "If James had said he had to fly to the Far East on Friday for a business meeting the following Monday, his wife wouldn't have turned a hair. That was what their lives were like. He didn't need to choose the one weekend she was away. Her absence only becomes important if someone else chose it."

The police argument also ignores the fax James sent to his brother: "I shall be home all weekend, so give me a bell when you can. I've told Dad I'll call back Sunday lunchtime." The fact that John did telephone, but wasn't worried when there was no answer, may, as the police claim, have been entirely predictable, but it was a strange gamble for a guilty man to take. If we put that beside Kenneth Streeter's claim, tested and verified by a lie detector, that James promised to phone him on the Sunday with John's contribution to the Ruby Wedding debate, then the gamble becomes entirely unnecessary. Had John and Kenneth followed up the promised phone calls, then James's absence might have been discovered earlier.

The Streeters' defence of their son relies heavily on a conspiracy theory-someone more highly placed than James and with access to privileged information manipulated decisions and events to exposure-but without evidence to prove their case, their campaign to clear their son's name was a hopeless one. Sadly, conspiracy theories work better in fiction than they do in real life, and on any objective reading of the evidence the conclusion must be that James Streeter did steal ten million pounds before running away and leaving his family to reap the bitter harvest of his betrayal.

Despite the Streeters' claims to the contrary, both James Streeter and Peter Fenton would appear to be genuine abscondees. They were mature men with settled backgrounds whose disappearances were bound to cause a stir within their communities and so provoke exhaustive investigations. However this is not true of the next two 'missing persons': Tracy Jevons, a troubled fifteen-year-old with a known history of prostitution; and Stephen Harding, a backward seventeen-year-old with a string of convictions for car theft...