The Echo by Minette Walters
-E. M. Forster (1879-1970)
-William Blake (1757-1827)
*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
