Echo

'Did he say if it was a man or a woman that he killed?'

Terry linked his hands behind his head. 'I don't remember. '

'Why did he tell you and not the others?'

'How do you know he didn't tell them?'

'I was watching their faces.'

'They're so drunk most of the time they don't remember nothing.' Terry closed his eyes. 'It might come back for a tenner.'

Deacon's snort of laughter fanned the corner of one of the posters. 'I wasn't born yesterday, sunshine.' He took a card from his wallet and flipped it onto Terry's chest. 'Give me a ring any time you can come up with something I can verify, but don't ring me with crap. And the information had better be good if you want money for it.' He stood up and looked down on the youthful face. 'How old are you really, Terry?' Sixteen was his guess.

'Old enough to recognize a tightfisted bastard when I meet one.'

On his return to the office, Deacon found a note from Barry Grover on his desk with the original prints of Billy Blake in a transparent plastic envelope. I cannot trace this man in my files, he'd written, but I've passed the negatives and fresh prints to Paul Garrety. He is seeing what he can do with them on the computer. B. G.

Paul Garrety, the art editor, shook his head when Deacon sought him out and asked him how he was getting on with the Billy Blake pictures. JP had been persuaded to invest heavily in computer equipment for the art department on the promise that technology could do for Street style and design, and therefore improved sales, what an army of graphics artists had previously failed to do. But he was too attached to the old look of the magazine to give Paul free reign with the equipment, and Garrety, like Deacon, spent most of his working day at loggerheads with his boss.

'You need an expert, Mike,' he said now. 'I can give you a hundred different versions of him, but it'll take someone with a knowledge of physiognomy to tell you which is the most accurate.' He pointed to his computer screen. 'Watch this. You can have a fuller face, which is just fattening up the whole thing. You can have fuller cheeks, which is puffing up the lower half. You can have double chins, you can have fleshy eyes, you can have thicker hair. The permutations are endless, and every one looks different.'

Deacon watched the alternatives appear on the screen. 'I see what you mean.'

'It's a science. Your best bet is to find yourself a pathologist or an identikit artist who specializes in faces. We could choose any one of these variations but the chances are it'll look nothing like your dead guy.'

'Any hope of JP running the original alongside my copy?'

Garrety laughed. 'None at all, and for once I'd agree with him. It'd put the punters right off their breakfast. Be fair. Who wants to eat cornflakes looking at a shriveled old wino who died of starvation?'

'He was only forty-five,' said Deacon mildly. 'Three years older than I am, and ten years younger than you. It's not so funny when you think of it in those terms, is it?'

Michael Deacon's feature on poverty and homelessness appeared in that week's Street without any mention of Amanda Powell or Billy Blake. Indeed, the final draft was precisely as he had envisioned it at the outset. A thoughtful analysis of changing social trends which concentrated on causes and long-term solutions. JP doubted it would appeal to their readers. ('It's bloody boring, Mike. Where's the human interest, for God's sake?') But, without a decent photograph of either Billy or Mrs. Powell, there seemed little point in going with the uninspired statements that Mrs. Powell had made on the subject of homelessness in general. JP repeated his threats on the nonrenewal of Deacon's contract if he didn't recognize that political mudslinging was the magazine's stock in trade, and Deacon answered sarcastically that if the sales figures were anything to go by, The Street readership enjoyed having its intelligence insulted about as much as the rest of the electorate did.

Amanda Powell, who had received her garage keys and the two photographs of Billy through the post with an anonymous Street complimentary slip, was disappointed, but not surprised, to find herself and Billy excluded from Deacon's article. But she read it with interest, particularly the paragraph describing a derelict warehouse and its community of mentally disturbed residents who were being cared for by a handful of old men and a young boy.

There was a look of relief in her eyes as she laid the magazine aside.

*5*

A little research during a quiet afternoon produced the names and addresses of James Streeter's parents and brother, plus some imaginative-and deliberately libelous?- press releases from the Friends of James Streeter Campaign, which was based at the brother's address in Edinburgh. The last one was dated August, 1991.

Despite twelve months of determined lobbying, not a single newspaper has followed up the claims of the Friends of James Streeter Campaign that James was murdered on the night of Friday, April 27, 1990, in order to protect a member of Lowenstein's Board and save the bank from the catastrophic collapse that would inevitably result from loss of confidence in its management.

In the interests of justice, the following facts must be investigated:

? James Streeter did not have the knowledge to work the fraud of which he's accused. It is alleged that he gained his computer skills while abroad in France and Belgium. The FoJSC has collected witness evidence from his previous employers and his first wife that he did not. (See enclosures)

  James Streeter had no access either to the progress of Lowenstein's in-house investigation or to Board decisions, therefore he could not have known the 'ideal' date to leave the country. The FoJSC has witness statements to this effect from his secretary and members of his department. (See enclosures)

  James Streeter made reference to friends and colleagues in the six months before his disappearance about the incompetence of Nigel de Vriess, his line manager, who was a member of the Lowenstein Board in 1990 and who has since left the bank. The FoJSC has three sworn statements which testify that James said in January, 1990, that Mr. de Vriess was 'at best incompetent and at worst criminally motivated.' (See enclosures)

  Much reliance has been placed on the damaging allegations made by Amanda Streeter against her husband in a written statement to police. They were: 1) That James was having an affair with a woman who worked for a