The Echo (4 page)

"And, as
I
told you, Mrs. Powell, I don't make a habit of using people."

She had ice-blue eyes which reminded him of his mother's, and that was a shame, he thought, because in other respects she was quite attractive. "Then surely you agree that it's absurd to illustrate an article on poverty and the homeless with a picture of a woman who lives in an expensive house in an expensive part of London." She paused for a moment, inviting him to speak. When he didn't, she went on: "In fact, there are pictures of Billy Blake. I have two which I'm prepared to lend you. One is a mug shot from when he was first arrested and the other was taken in the mortuary. Either would illustrate poverty better than a photograph of me."

Deacon shrugged but didn't say anything.

"You said you were interested in Billy."

She sounded put out, he thought, and that made him curious for he'd been a journalist long enough to recognize that Mrs. Powell was keener to tell her story than he was to hear it.
But why now, when she had refused to talk to the press at the time?
That question intrigued him. "No pictures of you, no story, I'm afraid," he said, reaching forward to switch off the tape. "Editor's instructions. I'm sorry to have wasted your time, Mrs. Powell." He looked with regret at his untouched wine. "And your Rioja."

She watched him as he began to gather his bits and pieces together, clearly weighing something in her mind. "All right," she said abruptly, "you can take your photographs. Billy's story needs to be told."

"Why?" He shot the word at her as he depressed the record button a second time.

It was a question she had prepared for. The words came out so fluently that he was sure she'd rehearsed the answer in advance. "Because we're 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."

"That's a fine sentiment," he said mildly, "but hardly very newsworthy. People die in obscurity all the time."

"But why starve to death? Why here? Why does nobody know anything about him? Why had he told the police he was twenty years older than he actually was?" She searched his face intently. "Aren't you at all curious about him?"

Of course!
Curiosity wormed like a maggot in his brain, but he was far more interested in her than he was in the man who had died in her garage.
Why, for example, did she take Billy's death so personally that she was prepared to be exploited in order to have his story publicized?
"Are you sure you didn't know him?" he suggested with apparent indifference.

Her surprise was genuine. "No. Why would I need answers if I'd known him?"

He opened his notebook on his lap, and wrote:
Why does anyone
need
answers about a complete stranger six months after his death?
"Which would you prefer," he asked, "that Lisa takes her photographs before we talk or while we're talking?"

"While."

He waited as Lisa unzipped her bag and removed her camera. "Do you have a Christian name, Mrs. Powell?"

"Amanda."

"Do you prefer Amanda Powell or Mrs. Powell?"

"I don't mind." She frowned into the camera lens.

"A smile would be better," said Lisa. She snapped the shutter. Click. "That's great." Click. "Could you look at the floor? Good." Click. "Keep your eyes cast down. That's really touching." Click, click.

"Go on, Mr. Deacon," said the woman curtly. "I'm sure you don't want me to be sick over my own carpet."

He grinned. "I prefer Deacon or Mike. How old are you?"

"Thirty-six."

"What do you do for a job?

She glanced at him as Lisa took another photograph. "I'm an architect."

"On your own or with a firm?"

"I'm with W. F. Meredith." Click.

Not bad, he thought. Meredith was about as good as you could get. "What are your political affiliations, Amanda?"

"None."

"How about off the record?"

She gave a faint smile which Lisa caught. "The same."

"Do you vote?" She caught him watching her, and he looked away.

"Of course. Women fought long and hard to give me that right."

"Are you going to tell me which party you usually vote for?"

"Whichever I think will do the least damage."

"You seem to have little time for politicians. Is there a particular reason for that or is it just
fin de siecle
depression?"

The faint smile again as she reached for her wineglass. "Personally, I'd hesitate to qualify a huge abstract concept like
fin de siecle
depression with 'just,' but for the purposes of your article it's as truthful as anything else."

He wondered what it would be like to kiss her. "Are you married at the moment, Amanda?"

"Yes."

"What does your husband do?"

She raised the glass to her lips, momentarily forgetting the camera lens pointing at her, then lowered it with a frown as Lisa took another photograph. "My husband wasn't here when I found the body," she said, "so what he does is irrelevant."

Deacon caught the look of amused cynicism on Lisa's face. "It's human interest," he countered lightly. "People will want to know what sort of man a successful architect is married to."

Perhaps she realized that his curiosity was personal, or perhaps, as Lisa had guessed, there
was
no Mr. Powell. In either case, she refused to expand on the matter. "It was I who found the body," she repeated, "and you have my details already. Shall we continue?"

The pale eyes, so like his mother's, rested on Deacon's craggy face too long for comfort, and his mild fantasy about kissing her shifted from harmless fun to sadistic revenge. He could imagine what JP's reaction was going to be to the paucity of information that he'd managed to drag out of her so far.
Name, rank, and number
. And he had little optimism that the photographs would be any better. Her features were so controlled that she might as well be a poker-faced prisoner of war backed against a wall. He wondered if fires had ever burned in her cool little face, or if her life had been entirely passionless. Predictably, the idea excited him.

"All right," he agreed, "let's talk about finding the body. You said you were shocked. Can you describe the experience for me? What sort of thoughts went through your mind when you saw him?"

"Disgust," she said, careful to keep her voice neutral. "He was behind a stack of empty boxes in the corner and he'd covered himself in an old blanket. The smell was really quite awful once I'd pulled it away from him. Also, his body fluids had seeped out all over the floor." Her mouth tightened in sudden distaste and she blinked as the flash of the camera stung her eyes. "Afterwards, when the police told me that he'd died of self-neglect and malnutrition, I kept wondering why he'd made no attempt to save himself. It wasn't just that I found him beside my freezer-" she gestured unhappily towards the window-"everyone's so affluent on this estate that even the trash cans have perfectly edible food in them."

"Any ideas?"

"Only that he was so weak by the time he found my garage that he hadn't the energy to do more than crawl into the corner and hide himself."

"Why would he want to hide?"

She studied him for a moment. "I don't know. But if he wasn't hiding, why didn't he try to attract my attention? The police think he must have entered the garage on the Saturday, because his only opportunity to get inside was when I went to the shops that afternoon and left the doors unlocked for half an hour." Insofar as she was capable of showing emotion, she did. Her hand flickered nervously towards her mouth before she remembered the camera and dropped it abruptly. "I found his body on the following Friday and the pathologist estimated he'd been dead five days. That means he was alive on the Sunday. I could have helped him if he'd called out and let me know he was there. So why didn't he?"

"Perhaps he was afraid."

"Of what?"

"Being turned over to the police for trespassing."

She shook her head. "Certainly not that. He had no fear of the police or of prison. I understand he was arrested quite regularly. Why should this time have been any different?"

Deacon made shorthand notes on his pad to remind himself of the nuances of expression that crossed her face as she talked about Billy.
Anxiety. Concern. Bewilderment even.
Curiouser and curiouser.
What was Billy Blake to her that he could inspire emotion where her husband couldn 't?
"Maybe he was just too weak to attract your attention. Presumably the pathologist can't say if he was conscious on the Sunday?"

"No," she said slowly, "but I can. There was a bag of ice cubes in the freezer. Someone had opened it, and it certainly wasn't me, so I presume it must have been Billy. And one corner of the garage had been urinated in. If he was strong enough to move around the garage, then he was strong enough to bang on the connecting door between the garage and my hall. He must have known I was there that weekend because he could have heard me. The door's not thick enough to block out sound."

"What did the police make of that?"

"Nothing," she said. "It made no difference to the pathologist's verdict. Billy still died of malnutrition whether through willful self-neglect or involuntary self-neglect."

He lit another cigarette and eyed her through the smoke. "How much did the cremation cost you?"

"Does the amount matter?"

"It depends how cynical you believe the average reader to be. He might think you're being coy about the figure because you want everyone to assume you spent more."

"Four hundred pounds."

"Which is a great deal more than you would have given him alive?"

She nodded. Click. "If I'd met him as a beggar in the street, I'd have thought I was being generous if I gave him five pounds." Click. Click. She glanced with irritation at Lisa, looked as if she were about to say something, then thought better of it. Her face took on its closed expression again.

"You said yesterday that you felt you owed him something. What exactly?"

"Respect, I suppose."

"Because you felt he hadn't been shown any in life?"

"Something like that," she admitted. "But it sounds ridiculously sentimental when it's put into words."

He wrote for a moment. "Do you have a religion?"

She turned away as another flash exploded in her eyes. "Surely she's taken enough by now?"

Lisa kept the camera lens on her face. "Just a couple more shots with the eyes cast down, Amanda." Click. "Yes, that's really nice, Amanda." Click. "More compassion maybe." Click. "Great, Amanda." Click, click, click.

Deacon watched increasing irritation gather in the woman's eyes. "All right, Smith. Let's call a halt, shall we?"

"How about a few more in the garage?" suggested the girl, reluctant to waste the end of the film. "It won't take a minute."

Mrs. Powell stared into the blood-red depths of her glass before taking a sip. "Be my guest," she said without raising her head. "The keys are on the table in the hall, and the light comes on automatically when the garage door is lifted. I don't use the connecting door anymore."

"I meant a few more of you," said Lisa. "I'll need you to come with me. If it's cold and damp out there a few atmospheric shots could be really good. More in tune with a wino dying of starvation."

The woman's stillness following this remark persuaded Lisa she hadn't been listening. She tried again. "Five minutes, Amanda, that's all we'll need. You might like to stand near where you found him, look a bit upset, that sort of thing."

The only sound in the room was the ticking of a clock on the mantelpiece, and it grew louder as Mrs. Powell's silence lengthened. She seemed to Deacon to be waiting for something, and he held his breath and waited with her. It startled him to hear her speak. "I'm sorry," she said to the girl, "but you and I are very different animals. I could no more pose weepy-eyed over where Billy died than I could wear your fuck-me clothes or your fuck-me makeup. You see, I'm neither so vulgar nor so desperate to be noticed."

There were too many sibilants in the last sentence, and her careful diction abandoned her. With a slight shock, Deacon realized she was drunk.
 

It was dangerous to allow a silence to go on too long. The impact of her words did not diminish in a vacuum, instead they grew and gained in authority. Deacon was drawn to see Lisa through her eyes, and he was struck by how appropriate her description of the girl was. Compared with the snow queen in the chair opposite, Lisa's outlined pouting lips and bottom-hugging skirt were blatantly provocative, and he felt himself belittled to have lusted after her so long in silence when lust was what she was inviting. He saw himself as one of Pavlov's dogs, lured into salivating every time his greed was stimulated, and the idea offended him.

He took his keys from his pocket and suggested that Lisa use the car to drive herself back to the office with her equipment. "I'll grab a taxi when I'm through," he said. "Leave the keys with Glen at the front desk and I'll pick them up from him."

She nodded, glad of an excuse to leave, and immediately he regretted his perfidy. It wasn't a crime to display bright plumage, rather it was a celebration of youth. She left the camera out as she repacked the case, then with a curt nod in the older woman's direction let herself out of the sitting-room door.

They both heard the rattle of garage keys being lifted from the hall table. Amanda sighed. "I was rude to her. I'm sorry. I find it hard to treat Billy's death quite as casually as you and she do." She examined her glass for a moment, as if aware that she'd given herself away, then abandoned it on the coffee table.

"You certainly seem to take it very personally."

"He died on my property."

"That doesn't make you responsible for him."

She looked at him rather blankly. "Then who is responsible?"

The question was simplistic--it was what a child would ask. "Billy himself," said Deacon. "He was old enough to make his own choices in life."

She shook her head then leaned forward, searching his face earnestly. "You said yesterday that you were moved by Billy's story, so could we talk about his life instead of his death? I know I said there was nothing I could tell you, but that wasn't strictly accurate. I know at least as much as the police do."