Echo

Best wishes,

Mike

THE STREET, FLEET STREET, LONDON EC4

Amanda Powell

HM Prison

IX Parkhurst Road

Holloway

London N7 ONU

15th January, 1996 Dear Amanda,

I have no idea if Billy's views on hell and damnation have any validity. He described purgatory as 'a place of eternal despair where love is absent.' However, he saw it not as an eternity of ignorance, but as an eternity of terrifying awareness. The condemned soul knows that love exists, but is condemned forever to exist without it. I believe he was so appalled by this vision that, as Billy Blake, he set out to save sinners from the dangers of unredeemed sin.

For others, he thrust his hands into the fire or subjected himself to intense cold. For you, he died. That is not to say you should carry his death on your conscience because death was what he wanted. Without it, he had no hope of rescuing his much-loved wife, Verity, from the loneliness of the bottomless pit to where, as a suicide, she would have been banished. He believed there was no salvation from that terrible place except through divine compassion, and he hoped that if he led a life of extreme penitence before dying voluntarily of self-neglect, he could achieve the miracle of plucking Verity from hell through God's merciful intervention.

You can argue that his mind was completely unhinged by shock, grief, alcohol abuse, and persistent malnutrition. Certainly, some of his friends believe he was an undiagnosed schizophrenic. But I agree with the sentiments you expressed the first time I met you. 'We are in terrible trouble as a society if we assume that any man's life is so worthless that the manner of his death is the only interesting thing about him.' Billy's 'worth' was in the efforts he made to save you, because the only reason he sought you out was to persuade you to pay in this life for the murder of James, rather than postpone your suffering into eternity.

The irony is that you were prepared to give an unmourned derelict the dignity in death that you had denied to James, and perhaps that was Billy's intention all along. It's what brought me to see you, after all. Billy must have known that walking to Andover in the middle of a hot summer to learn your address from Nigel de Vriess (although Nigel was abroad at the time, and it was Fiona who told him how to find you) would destroy what little reserves of energy he had.

This meant that his death in your garage would be the inevitable consequence of his actions. As you said yourself, he could have attracted your attention, or eaten food from your freezer, but he did neither, just quenched his thirst on ice cubes and quietly died. He wasn't interested in judging you, you see-he was a murderer himself-he was only interested in reminding you of that other man who had gone unburied and unmourned.

I enclose a summary of what I think happened, which I have sent to DS Greg Harrison. I have omitted Billy's part in the proceedings because he never reported it at the time and because I doubt the police will accept a dead man's witness. But I am confident he was watching in the shadows when you killed James. Neighbors in Teddington remember a squatter in the old school, and Tom Beale from the warehouse tells me Billy mentioned 'dossing upriver from Richmond' before he moved to the Isle of Dogs.

You may ask why he didn't come looking for you sooner. The simple answer is that he only knew you as Amanda Streeter, the woman who'd bought the school where he was squatting, and when you reverted to your maiden name and moved, he lost sight of you until he read your name in connection with Nigel de Vriess. But the real answer is that he wasn't ready. An elderly woman talked to me once about suicide. She said: 'Have you taken into account that there may be something waiting for you on the other side, and that you may not be prepared yet to face it?' Billy understood better than anyone, I think, that he needed to be prepared, and his preparation came through suffering. He always said he hadn't suffered enough.

I don't intend to do any more than I have done already-which is to leave justice to the authorities-except to tell the Streeters that their son was murdered. None of us is all bad, Amanda, and we each deserve to be mourned. Billy's salvation I leave to you. My view is that it makes no difference if he was mad or sane, he believed that saving another soul from hell would earn God's compassion.

You asked me to prove that Billy's life had value, but I'm sure you realize now that you're the only person who can do that. It is in your hands whether, through your own redemption, you also redeem him and Verity.

With best wishes,

Michael Deacon

P.S. Please don't think there is any animosity behind this letter. I have always liked you.

Metropolitan Police-Isle of Dogs-facsimile-19.01.96 16.18

From: DS Greg Harrison

To: Michael Deacon

Amanda Powell has come clean about James. We start trawling tomorrow at 8:30 a.m. See you at Teddington!

Yours,

Greg

*22*

As Deacon rounded the corner of the converted school building, he was reminded of the first time he had visited the docklands' warehouse. This was another bleak landscape, enlivened by people in shapeless dark overcoats. A group of men stood in a huddle a few feet from the riverbank, staring out across grey water, coat collars raised against the biting wind. They were younger and more uniform in their dress, but the cold pinched their faces no less fiercely than it had pinched the faces of the warehouse derelicts. Beyond them, police divers in wet suits bobbed beside a dinghy which was holding station against the current some yards out from where a twenty-