Echo

'Are all families like yours?'

'No.'

'Well, I don't get it. You sound as though you quite like your mother, so why aren't you speaking to her?'

Deacon switched off the headlights and plunged them into darkness. 'Do you want the twenty-page answer or the three-word answer?'

'Three-word.'

'I'm punishing her.'

'What's up with everyone tonight?' asked Glen Hopkins as Deacon signed in. 'I've had Barry Grover here for the last two hours.' He studied Terry with interest. 'I'm beginning to think I'm the only person whose home holds any charms for him.'

Terry smiled engagingly and leaned his elbows on the desk. 'Dad here'-he jerked a thumb at Deacon-'wanted me to see where he worked. You see, he's pretty choked about the fact Mum's been on the game since he kicked her out, and he wants to show me there are better ways of earning a living.'

Deacon seized his arm and spun him round towards the stairs. 'Don't believe a word of it, Glen. If this git carried even one of my genes, I'd throw myself off the nearest bridge.'

'Mum warned me you'd get violent,' whined Terry. 'She said you always hit first and asked questions later.'

'Shut up, you cretin!'

Terry laughed, and Glen Hopkins watched the two of them vanish up the stairs, with a look of intense curiosity on his usually lugubrious face. For the first time that he could remember, Deacon had looked positively cheerful, and Glen began to imagine similarities of bone structure between the man and the boy that didn't exist.

Barry Grover was equally curious about Terry, but he had spent a lifetime masking his true feelings and merely stared at the two men from behind his pebble glasses as they barged noisily through the door into the clippings library. He made a strange sight, isolated as he was at a desk in the middle of the darkened room with a pool of lamplight reflecting off his lenses. Indeed his resemblance to some large shiny-eyed beetle was more pronounced than usual and, with an abrupt movement, Deacon snapped on the overhead lights to dispel the uncomfortable image.

'Hi, Barry,' he said in the artificially hearty tone he always used towards the man, 'meet a friend of mine, Terry Dalton. Terry, meet the eyes of The Street, Barry Grover. If you're even remotely interested in photography and photographic art, then this is the guy you should talk to. He knows everything there is to know about it.'

Terry nodded in his friendly fashion.

'Mike's exaggerating,' said Barry dismissively, fearing he was about to be made to look a fool. He had already suffered the humiliation of Glen's knowing looks and poorly disguised curiosity when he arrived. Now he turned his back on the newcomers and pushed the photographs of Amanda Powell under a sheaf of newspaper clippings.

Terry, who was largely insensitive to undercurrents of emotion unless they had a basis in paranoid schizophrenia or drug addiction, wandered over to where Barry was sitting while Deacon got to work on the microfiche monitor in search of newspaper files from May 1995. This was not an environment Terry knew, so it didn't occur to him to question why this fat, bug-eyed little man with his pernickety gestures should be closeted alone in the semidarkness of a large room. If he and Deacon were there, then, presumably, it was quite natural for Barry Grover to be there, too.

He perched on the side of the desk. 'Mike told me you were the best in the business as we were coming up the stairs,' he confided. 'Says you've been trying to work out who Billy Blake was.'

Barry drew away a little. He found the youngster's casual invasion of his work space intimidating, and suspected Deacon of putting him up to it. 'That's right,' he said stiffly.

'Billy and me were friends, so if there's anything I can do to help, just say the word.'

'Yes, well, I usually find I work better on my own.' He made sweeping gestures with his hands, as if to clear the desk of obstruction, and in the process uncovered an underexposed print of Billy's mug shot in which the eyes, the nostrils, and the line between the lips were the only clearly defined features.

Terry picked it up and examined it closely. 'That's clever,' he said with frank admiration in his voice. 'No fuss means you can see what you're looking for.' He picked up another similarly underexposed print and laid the two side by side. They were very alike, with only minor variations in the spatial relationships between the features. 'That's amazing.' Terry touched the second photograph. 'So who's this geezer?'

Barry took off his glasses and polished them on his handkerchief. It was an indication of mental torment. He couldn't bear to have his painstaking efforts pawed by this shaven-headed thug. 'He's a truck driver called Graham Drew,' he snapped, moving the photographs out of Terry's reach.

'How did you know he looked like Billy?'

'I have his photograph on file.'

'Jesus! You really are something else. You mean you can remember all the pictures you've got?'

'It would be irresponsible to rely on memory,' Barry said severely. 'Naturally, I have a system.'

'How does that work?'

It didn't occur to Barry that the youngster's interest might be genuine. He assumed, because he had come with Deacon, that he was more sophisticated than he was and interpreted his persistent questioning as a form of teasing. 'It's complicated. You wouldn't understand.'

'Yeah, but I'm a fast learner. Mike reckons my IQ's probably above average.' Terry hooked a spare chair forward with his foot and dropped into it beside his new guru. 'I'm not promising anything, but I reckon I'd be more use helping you than helping him.' He jerked his head towards Deacon. 'Words aren't my thing-know what I'm saying?-but I'm good with pictures. So, what's your system?'

Barry's hands trembled slightly as he replaced his glasses. 'On the assumption that Billy Blake was an alias, I'm working through photographs of men who have avoided police capture in the last ten years. One is looking,' he