Echo

'Or maybe he meant all parents pass on bad genes?'

'He only ever mentioned London,' repeated Terry stubbornly.

'I heard you the first time. It was a rhetorical question.'

'Jesus! You're so like him. Lahdy-bloody-dah, and never mind no one knew what the fuck he was talking about.' He pointed to the 45+ beside the name 'Verity.' 'I thought you reckoned V was younger than Billy,' he said, 'so how come you've made her the same age?'

'I've added a plus sign,' said Deacon, 'which means I'm now convinced she was older than he was.' He pulled forward V's letters. 'I was thinking about it last night. There are two ways of reading 'your glass shall not persuade you you are old, so long as youth and I are of one date.' Either she took the quote verbatim from her correspondent's letter or she reinterpreted it for her purposes. When I first read it, I assumed it was an interpretation because she didn't put it into quotation marks, and in Shakespeare's sonnet it reads: 'my glass shall not persuade me I am old' etcetera, etcetera. Now I'm more inclined to think it was a direct quote and her correspondent was talking about her age and her glass.' He shook his head at Terry's obvious incomprehension. 'Forget it, sunshine. Just accept that the letter makes more sense if V was older than her correspondent. Youth is eternally optimistic, and age is wary, and V seems to be a damn sight warier of revealing their affair than whoever she was writing to.'

'Which was Billy?'

'Probably.'

'But not definitely?'

'Right. He could have found the letters anywhere.'

Terry whistled appreciatively. 'This is well interesting. I'm beginning to wish I'd asked the old bugger a few more questions.'

'Join the club,' murmured Deacon sarcastically.

Terry demanded an explanation of the lower half of the page. Who were de Vriess, Filbert, and Streeter? Why were W. F. Meredith, Teddington flats, and Thamesbank Estate included? Deacon gave him a summary of the Streeter connection with Amanda Powell.

'Thamesbank Estate is where Amanda lives and Billy died,' he finished. 'Teddington is where she and James were planning a development of flats, and W. F. Meredith is the firm she works for. Its offices are in a converted warehouse about two hundred yards from yours.'

'So, are you saying Billy was this Streeter guy?'

'Not unless he had some pretty radical plastic surgery.'

'But you reckon there's a connection?'

'There has to be. The odds against one woman being associated with two men who both dropped out of their lives are so high they're not worth considering. There are a thousand garages between the warehouse and Amanda's estate, so Billy must have had a reason for going all the way to hers.' He ran a thoughtful hand around his jawline. 'I can think of three possible explanations. First, some of the letters he liberated from the trash were hers and he found out her address and who she was by reading them. Second, he saw her coming out of the Meredith building, recognized her as someone he'd known in the past, and followed her home. Third, somebody else recognized her and followed her, then handed that information on to Billy.'

Terry frowned. 'The second one can't be right. I mean if he recognized Amanda, then she'd've recognized him. And she wouldn't've come round asking about him if she already knew who he was, would she?'

'It depends how much he'd changed. Don't forget, you thought he was twenty years older than he actually was. It may have gone something like this. Out of the blue, Amanda finds a dead wino in her garage who's known to the police as Billy Blake, aged sixty-five. She's sorry but not unduly concerned until she learns that his name was assumed, his age was forty-five, he was dossing near her offices, and there was a good chance he had chosen her garage deliberately, at which point she pays for his cremation and goes to great lengths to find out something about him. What does that suggest to you?'

'That she thought Billy was her old man.'

Deacon nodded. 'But she must have realized she was wrong the minute she got hold of the police photographs. So why is she still obsessed with Billy?'

'Maybe you should ask her.'

'I have.' He threw the boy a withering look. 'It's not a question she wants to answer.'

Terry shrugged. 'Maybe she can't. Maybe she's as puzzled by it all as you and me. I mean, she told us she didn't know he was there till he were dead, so he can't have spoken to her. And see, you've not explained why he went there. If he did recognize her, why should that make him want to die in her garage? And if he didn't recognize her-well, why'd he want to die in a stranger's garage? Do you get what I'm saying?'

'Yes, but you're assuming she told you the truth. Supposing she was lying about not speaking to him?' Deacon stretched his hands towards the ceiling, easing the muscles of his shoulders. He watched the boy for a moment out of the corner of his eye. 'He must have been in a pretty bad way to die as quickly as he did, so why did you let him go off on his own like that?''

'You can't blame me. Billy never listened to anything I said. In any case, he was okay the last time I saw him.'

'He can't have been, not if he was dead of starvation a few days later.'

'You've got that wrong. None of us'd seen him for about three, four weeks before he pegged it.' The memory seemed to worry him, as if he knew that it was his own apathy that had killed Billy. Just as Deacon's apathy had killed his father. 'He buggered off in May sometime, and the next I knew was when Tom read in a newspaper that he'd turned up dead in this woman's garage.'

Deacon digested this surprising piece of information in silence for a moment or two. For some reason he had