Echo

them.

Harrison sniffed the cold, musty air and looked about him. He was in a time capsule from a forgotten era. Drab velvet curtains hung beside the windows, with pale stripes where the sun had bleached their color, and ancient wallpaper showed a tide mark of rising damp from the ground outside. Photographs of a man in First World War uniform crowded the mantelpiece, and a portrait of a young woman in Edwardian dress smiled sweetly above it. The furniture had the dark and heavy imprint of the Victorian era, and the atmosphere was heavy with the weight of years, as if the door of the room had been closed on a day in the distant past, and never reopened.

He rested a hand on the back of a mildewed chair, feeling its dirt and its dampness soil his palm, and he thought unquiet thoughts about what sort of people chose to inhabit so oppressive an environment.

'You mustn't touch anything,' whispered Barry. 'She'll go mad if she thinks you've touched something. It's her grandparents' room.' He pointed to the photographs and the painting. 'That's them. They brought her up when her own mother ran away and abandoned her.'

He smelt of sickness and stale drink, and presented a pathetic picture in a worn terrycloth robe that barely met across his fat stomach and striped pyjamas. The sergeant was torn between sympathy towards a fellow-traveler- Harrison had been on too many jags himself not to know the pain of the morning after-and a strange flesh-crawling antipathy. Harrison put it down to the bizarreness of the room and the man's unpleasant smell, but his sense of revulsion remained with him long after the interview was over.

'Michael Deacon says you'll confirm that you were with him and a youth called Terry Dalton from eight-thirty last night until approximately one-fifteen this morning. Are you able to do that?'

Barry nodded carefully. 'Yes.'

'Can you tell me what they were doing when you last saw them?'

'Mike stopped a taxi by climbing on the hood, then he and Terry got into it. There was a bit of a row because the driver didn't want to carry drunks, and Mike said it was obligatory as long as the customer could pay. I think he gave the driver the money in advance, and then they left.' He pressed a queasy hand to his stomach. 'What's happened? Were they in an accident or something?''

'No, nothing like that, sir. There was some trouble last night at the squat Terry Dalton's been living in, and we wanted to assure ourselves that he wasn't involved in it. How would you describe his condition when you saw him off in the taxi?'

Barry wouldn't meet his eye. 'Mike more or less had to drag him into the cab and I think he was lying on the floor when it left.'

'And how did you get home, sir?'

The question clearly alarmed Barry. 'Me?' He hesitated. 'I took a taxi, too.'

'From Farringdon Street?'

'No, Fleet Street.' He took off his glasses and started to polish them on his robe hem.

'A black cab or a mini cab?'

'I phoned for a mini cab from The Street offices. Reg Linden let me use the phone in reception.'

'And did you have to pay in advance as well?'

'Yes.'

'Well, thank you for your help, sir. I'll see myself out.'

'No, I'll see you out,' said Barry with an odd little giggle. 'We don't want you turning the wrong way, Sergeant. It wouldn't do at all if you woke my mother.'

Deacon drove through the farmhouse gates and parked in the lee of the red brick wall that bordered the driveway. The drone of motorway traffic was muted behind the baffle and the house slumbered in the winter sunshine that had emerged from the clouds as they traveled north. He peered up at the facade to see if their arrival had been noticed but there was no sign of movement in any of the windows that looked their way. There was a car he didn't recognize outside the kitchen door (which he rightly attributed to the live-in nurse), but otherwise the place looked exactly the same as when he had stormed out of it five years ago, vowing never to return.

'Come on, then,' said Terry when Deacon didn't move. 'Are we going in or what?''

'Or what probably.'

'Jesus, you can't be that nervous. You've got me, ain't you? I won't let the old dragon bite you.'

Deacon smiled. 'All right. Let's go.' He opened his car door. 'Just don't take offense if she's rude to you, Terry. Or not immediately, anyway. Hold your tongue till we're back in the car. Is that a deal?'

'What if she's rude to you?'

'The same thing applies. The last time I came here I was so angry I damn nearly wrecked the place, and I never want to be that angry again.' He stared towards the kitchen door, recalling the episode. 'Anger's a killer, Terry. It destroys everything it touches, including the one it's feeding on.'

'Looks like we've caught our arsonists,' said Harrison's partner as he reentered the station an hour later. 'Three subhumans by the names of Grebe, Daniels, and Sharpe. They were picked up thirty minutes ago still reeking of gasoline. Daniels made the mistake of boasting to his girlfriend about how he and his mates had done the local community a service by getting rid of undesirables, and she rang us. According to her, Daniels heard about the trouble at the warehouse on Friday and decided to go in and torch it last night. He says all homeless people are scum, and he's buggered if their kind should be allowed to infect the streets of the East End. Charming, eh?'

'And I've just wasted six hours chasing after Terry Dalton,' said Harrison sourly, 'ending up with the weirdest bloody bloke you've ever seen in Camden.' He shuddered theatrically. 'You know who he reminded me of? Richard Attenborough playing Christie in the film Ten Rillington Place. If it comes to that the house reminded me of a flaming film set.'

'Who's Christie?'

'A nasty little pervert who killed women so that he could have sex with their corpses. Don't you know anything?'