Echo

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.)

Epilogue

The flat was empty when Deacon returned to it, for which he was grateful. He was in no mood for Terry's cannabis-inspired inanity, having had his third row in as many days with the new editor of The Street.

Who could believe he would ever regret IP's departure?

'Different times, different customs, Mike,' JP had said as he left. 'Anodyne's the word I'd use for the new management. You won't be chasing prostitutes anymore, just sound bites from trained politicians.'

'I can live with that,' Deacon replied.