Echo

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