Echo

He shook his head gently in order not to incite the nausea that was churning in his stomach. 'This must seem very odd to you,' he murmured lamely.

'Good lord, no,' she said with leaden irony. 'What on earth gives you that idea? It's quite the norm for me these days to find middle-aged drunks slumped in heaps on my floors. Billy chose the garage, you chose the drawing room. Same difference, except that you had the decency not to die on me.' Her eyes narrowed, but whether in anger or puzzlement he couldn't tell. 'Is there something about me and my house that encourages this sort of behavior, Mr. Deacon? And will you sit down, for Christ's sake,' she snapped in sudden impatience. 'It's very uncomfortable having you towering over me like this.'

He lowered himself onto the arm of the sofa and tried to reknit the fabric of his tattered memory, but the effort was too much for him and his lips spread in a ghastly smile. 'I think I'm going to be sick again.'

She took a towel from behind her back and passed it over. 'I find it's better to try and hang on, but you know where to go if you can't.' She waited in silence for several seconds while he brought his nausea under control. 'Why did you say you'd devoured your parents and that your unutterable torment was renewing? It seems an odd comment to make.'

He looked at her blankly as he wiped the sweat from his forehead. 'I don't know.' He read irritation in her face. 'I don't KNOW!' he said with a surge of anger. 'I was confused. I didn't know where I was. Okay? Is that allowed in this house? Or does everyone have to be in control of himself at all bloody times?'' He bent his head and pressed the towel over his eyes. 'I'm sorry,' he said after a moment. 'I didn't mean to be rude. The truth is, I'm struggling a bit here. I can't remember anything about last night.'

'You arrived about twelve.'

'Was I on my own?'

'Yes.'

'Why did you let me in?'

'Because you wouldn't take your finger off the doorbell.'

Sweet Jesus! What had he been thinking of? 'What else did I say?'

'That I reminded you of your mother.'

He lowered the towel to his lap and set about folding it carefully. 'Is that the reason I gave for being here?''

'No.'

'What reason did I give?''

'You didn't.' He looked at her with so much relief in his strained, sweaty face that she smiled briefly. 'Instead you called me Mrs. Streeter, talked about my husband, my brother-in-law, and my father-in-law, and implied that this house and its contents came from the proceeds of theft.'

Hell! 'Did I frighten you?'

'No,' she said evenly, 'I'm long past being frightened by anything.'

He wondered why. Life itself frightened him. 'Someone at the magazine recognized your face from when you were questioned at the time of James's disappearance,' he said by way of explanation. 'I was interested enough to follow it up.'

The tic above her lip started working again, but she didn't say anything.

'John Streeter seemed an obvious person to talk to, so I telephoned him and heard his side of the story. He has-er-reservations about you.'

'I wouldn't describe calling your sister-in-law a whore, a murderer, and a thief as 'having reservations,' but perhaps you're more worried about being sued than he is.'

Deacon put the towel to his mouth again. He was in no condition for this conversation, he thought. He felt like something half-alive on a dissecting bench, waiting for the scalpel to slice through its gut. 'You'd win huge damages if you took him to court,' he told her. 'He has no evidence for his accusations.'

'Of course not. None of them are true.'

He drained his coffee cup and put it on the table. ''Devourer of thy parent; now thy unutterable torment renews' is a line from William Blake,' he said suddenly, as if he had been thinking about that and nothing else. 'It's in one of his visionary poems about social revolution and political upheaval. The search for liberty means the destruction of established authority-in other words, the parent-and the push for freedom means every generation suffers the same torment.' He stood up and looked towards the window and its view of the river. 'William Blake- Billy Blake. Your uninvited guest was a fan of a poet who's been dead for nearly two hundred years. Why is this house so cold?' he asked abruptly, drawing his coat about him.

'It isn't. You've got a hangover. That's why you're shivering.'

He stared down at her where she sat like a radiant sun in her expensive designer dress in her expensive, scented environment. But the radiance was skin-deep, he thought. Beneath the immaculate facade of her and her house, he sensed despair. 'I smelled death when I woke up,' he said. 'Is that what you're trying to mask with the potpourri and the air freshener?''

She looked very surprised. 'I don't know what you're talking about.'

'Perhaps I imagined it.'

She gave a ghost of a smile. 'Then I hope your imagination returns to normal when the alcohol's out of your system. Goodbye, Mr. Deacon.'

He walked to the door. 'Goodbye, Mrs. Streeter.'

Outside the estate he found a small grassed area with a bench seat overlooking the Thames. He huddled into his coat and let the wind suck the poisonous alcohol out of his system. The tide was out and on the mud bank in front of him, four men were sorting through the debris that had been washed up overnight. They were men of