Echo

always assumed that Billy had gone directly from the warehouse to the garage. 'Do you know where he went?'

'At the time we thought he was probably banged up in one of the London nicks, but thinking about it after'-he hesitated-'well, like Tom said, no nick would have let him starve himself, so I guess he was holed up in a place where he just stopped eating.'

'Had he done that before?''

'Sure. Loads of times when he was depressed or he'd had enough of the likes of Denning. But it was never for more than a few days and he always came back. Then I'd take him down to a soup kitchen and feed him up again. I used to look after him pretty damn well, you know, and I was gutted about the way he died. There weren't no need for it.'

'Do you know where he might have gone?'

Terry shook his head. 'Tom reckoned he went out of town, seeing as no one saw hide nor hair of him.'

'Do you know why?'

Another shake of his head.

'What was he doing before he left?'

'Got rat-arsed, same as always.'

'Anything else?'

'Like what?'

'I don't know,' said Deacon, 'but something must have persuaded him to up stumps and vanish for four weeks.' He cupped his hands and beckoned with his fingers. 'Talk to me. Was he begging that day? Did he speak to anyone? Did he see someone he recognized? Did he do anything unusual? Did he say anything before he left? What time did he go? Morning? Evening? Think, Terry.'

'The only thing I remember that were different,' said Terry, after obliging Deacon with several seconds of eye-screwing concentration, 'was that he got pretty excited about a newspaper he found in a bin. He used to flick through them, looking at headlines, but this time he read one of the pages and gave himself a headache. He were in a bloody awful mood for the rest of the day, then he passed out on a bottle of Smirnoff. He were gone by the next morning, and we never saw him again.'

*13*

As near as Terry could remember, Billy had left sometime during the week beginning the fifteenth of May. Having pried this piece of information out of him, Deacon bundled him into the car and drove to The Street offices. Terry grumbled the entire way, complaining that pubs and clubs were supposed to be the order of the evening, not looking through newspapers ... Deacon's trouble was he was so old he'd forgotten how to enjoy himself ... The fact that he hated Christmas didn't mean everyone else had to be miserable with him...

'ENOUGH!' roared his long-suffering host as they approached Holborn. 'This won't take long, so for Christ's sake, shut it! We can go to a pub afterwards.'

'All right, but only if you tell me about your mother.'

'Does the word 'silence' make up part of your vocabulary, Terry?'

'Course it does, but you promised to answer my question about not giving her a chance to stop your dad killing himself.'

'It's simple enough,' said Deacon. 'She hadn't spoken to him for two years, and I couldn't see her starting that night.'

'Didn't they live in the same house?'

'Yes. One at each end. She looked after him, did his washing, cooked his meals, made his bed. She just never spoke to him.'

'That sucks,' said Terry indignantly.

'She could have divorced him and left him to fend for himself,' Deacon pointed out mildly, 'or even had him institutionalized if she'd tried hard enough. That sort of thing was easier twenty years ago.' Briefly, he glanced at the boy's profile. 'He was impossible to live with, Terry-charming to people one day, abusive the next. If he didn't get his own way, he became violent, particularly if he'd been drinking. He couldn't hold down a job, loathed responsibility, but complained endlessly about everyone else's mistakes. Poor old Ma put up with it for twenty-three years before she retreated into silence.' He turned down Farringdon Street. 'She should have done it sooner. The atmosphere improved once the rows stopped.'

'How come he had all this money to leave if he didn't work?''

'He inherited it from his father who happened to own a piece of land that the government needed for the Ml. My grandfather made a small fortune out of it and willed it to his only child, along with a rather beautiful farmhouse which has a six-lane, nonstop motorway at the bottom of its garden.'

'Jesus! And that's what your mother's nicked off of you?'

Deacon turned into Fleet Street. 'If she has, she earned it. She sent me and Emma away to boarding school at eight years old so that we wouldn't have to spend too much time under the same roof with Pa.' He drove down the alleyway beside the offices and parked in the empty parking lot at the back. 'The only reason he and I were still speaking at the end was because I had less to do with him than either Ma or Emma. I avoided the place like the plague, and only ever went home for Christmas. Otherwise I stayed with school and university friends.' He switched off the engine. 'Emma was far more supportive, which is why Pa left her only twenty thousand. He grew to hate her because she took Ma's side.' He turned to the youngster with a faint smile, only visible in the backwash of the headlamps. 'You see, none of it's the way you thought it was, Terry. Pa only made that second will out of spite, and the chances are he was the one who tore it up anyway. Hugh knows that as well as I do, but Hugh's in a mess and he's looking for a way out.'