The Echo (8 page)

"It's not what he
thought
," said Terry with careful emphasis, "it's what he
knew
." He reached out and gripped the air with his fingers. "He strangled someone because the gods wrote it into his fate. That's why he stuck his hand in the fire. He called it the 'offending instrument' and said 'such sacrifices were necessary if the gods' anger was to be directed somewhere else.' Poor bastard. He didn't know his arse from his elbow most of the time."

On Terry's instructions, Deacon gave the bottle of Bells whiskey into the care of the old man in the balaclava, before following Terry into the warehouse to see where Billy had slept. "It's a waste of time," the lad grumbled. "He's been dead six months. What are you expecting to find?"

"Anything."

"Listen, there've been a hundred derelicts in his space since he kicked it. You won't find nothing." But despite this he led Deacon into the gloom. "You nuts or what?" he said in amusement as Deacon lit a small pool of light at their feet with his flashlight. "That's not going to help you see a damn thing. Just wait, okay. Your eyes'll soon adjust. There's enough light comes through the door."

A grey lunar landscape slowly developed in front of Deacon, a wasteland of twisted metal, piled bricks, and abandoned warehouse wreckage. It was the aftermath of war where nothing recognizable existed anymore, and only the acrid smell of urine suggested human presence. "How long have you been here?" he asked Terry, as he began to pick out sleeping bodies among the rubble.

"Two years on and off."

"Why here? Why not a squat or a hostel?"

The young man shrugged. "I've done them. This ain't so bad." He led the way past a pile of bricks and gestured to a makeshift structure, made out of plastic and old blankets. He pulled one of the blankets aside and reached in to light a battery-operated hurricane lamp. "Take a look," he invited. "This is my pitch."

Deacon experienced a strange sort of envy. It was a cobbled-together tent in the middle of a urine-smelling bomb site, but it had personality in a way his flat did not. There were posters of seminude women pinned to the plastic walls, a mattress on the floor with a handmade patchwork quilt, ornaments on a metal filing cabinet, a wicker chair with a dressing gown on it, and a jam jar of plastic red roses on a small painted table. He went in and sat on the chair, carefully folding the dressing gown onto his lap. "This is good. You've done it up well."

"I like it. Got most of this stuff off the council tip. It's fucking amazing what people chuck out." Terry squeezed in beside him and lay on the bed. He looked younger in repose than he did in tense concentration against the wind. "It's freer than a hostel and not so cramped as a squat. People can get on your nerves in a squat."

"Don't you have any family?"

"Nah. Been in and out of homes since I was six. One bloke told me once that my mother went to prison which is why I ended up in care, but I've never tried to find her. She's a loser, so it's no good looking. I get by."

Deacon made a point of examining the young face in order to remember it afterwards. But there was nothing memorable about the lad. He was like a hundred shaven-headed boys of the same age, uniformly colorless, uniformly unattractive. He wondered why Terry hadn't mentioned a father, but guessed the father was anonymous and therefore irrelevant. He thought of all the women he himself had slept with over the years. Had one of them fallen pregnant by him and given birth to a Terry whom she subsequently abandoned?

"Still, it can't be much fun living rough like this."

"Yeah, well, I'm not the first to do it, and I sure as hell won't be the last. Like I said, I get by. Whatever man has done, man can do."

The expression seemed an unlikely one for a youngster like Terry to use. "Is that something Billy used to say?"

The lad gave an indifferent shrug. "Maybe. He were always fucking preaching at me." His voice took on a more refined tone. '"You cannot have rights without responsibility, Terry. Man's greatest sin is pride because he dethrones God at his peril. Be prepared-the day of judgment is closer than you think.' " He reverted to his own, rougher accent. "I'm telling you, it did your head in to listen to him. He were a right nutter most of the time, but he meant well and I reckon I learnt a thing or two off of him."

"Like what?"

Terry grinned. "Like, fools ask questions that wise men cannot answer."

Deacon smiled. "How old are you?"

"Eighteen."

Somehow Deacon doubted that. For all Terry's readiness of speech and mind, which allowed him to dominate the derelict old men he was living with, the fluff on his chin was still downy and he was growing too fast for his thin frame to keep pace. His great bony hands hung out of his sleeves like paddles, and it would be a while yet before maturity bulked his chest and shoulders. It made Deacon all the more curious about the preacher-
and teacher?
-who had befriended him.

"How long did you know Billy?" he asked.

"A couple of years."

Since he'd been in the warehouse then. "Was his doss as good as this?"

Terry shook his head. "He wanted to suffer. I told you, he was a real head case. I found him prancing around in the fucking nude this time last year. You wouldn't believe how cold it was. He was blue from head to toe. I said, what the fuck are you doing, you fucking idiot, and he said he was mortifying the flesh-" he paused, unsure if he'd used the right word-"or something like that. He never built himself a place, just used to roll in an old blanket and bed down by the fire. He didn't have nothing, you see, didn't want nothing, didn't see the point in making himself comfortable. He knew the gods would get him in the end, and he reckoned he'd make it as easy for the rotten bastards as he could."

"Because he was a murderer?"

"Maybe."

"Did he say if it was a man or a woman that he killed?"

Terry linked his hands behind his head. "I don't remember. "

"Why did he tell you and not the others?"

"How do you know he didn't tell them?"

"I was watching their faces."

"They're so drunk most of the time they don't remember nothing." Terry closed his eyes. "It might come back for a tenner."

Deacon's snort of laughter fanned the corner of one of the posters. "I wasn't born yesterday, sunshine." He took a card from his wallet and flipped it onto Terry's chest. "Give me a ring any time you can come up with something I can verify, but don't ring me with crap. And the information had better be good if you want money for it." He stood up and looked down on the youthful face. "How old are you really, Terry?" Sixteen was his guess.

"Old enough to recognize a tightfisted bastard when I meet one."

On his return to the office, Deacon found a note from Barry Grover on his desk with the original prints of Billy Blake in a transparent plastic envelope.
I cannot trace this man in my files
, he'd written,
but I've passed the negatives and fresh prints to Paul Garrety. He is seeing what he can do with them on the computer. B. G.

Paul Garrety, the art editor, shook his head when Deacon sought him out and asked him how he was getting on with the Billy Blake pictures. JP had been persuaded to invest heavily in computer equipment for the art department on the promise that technology could do for
Street
style and design, and therefore improved sales, what an army of graphics artists had previously failed to do. But he was too attached to the old look of the magazine to give Paul free reign with the equipment, and Garrety, like Deacon, spent most of his working day at loggerheads with his boss.

"You need an expert, Mike," he said now. "I can give you a hundred different versions of him, but it'll take someone with a knowledge of physiognomy to tell you which is the most accurate." He pointed to his computer screen. "Watch this. You can have a fuller face, which is just fattening up the whole thing. You can have fuller cheeks, which is puffing up the lower half. You can have double chins, you can have fleshy eyes, you can have thicker hair. The permutations are endless, and every one looks different."

Deacon watched the alternatives appear on the screen. "I see what you mean."

"It's a science. Your best bet is to find yourself a pathologist or an identikit artist who specializes in faces. We could choose any one of these variations but the chances are it'll look nothing like your dead guy."

"Any hope of JP running the original alongside my copy?"

Garrety laughed. "None at all, and for once I'd agree with him. It'd put the punters right off their breakfast. Be fair. Who wants to eat cornflakes looking at a shriveled old wino who died of starvation?"

"He was only forty-five," said Deacon mildly. "Three years older than I am, and ten years younger than you. It's not so funny when you think of it in those terms, is it?"

Michael Deacon's feature on poverty and homelessness appeared in that week's
Street
without any mention of Amanda Powell or Billy Blake. Indeed, the final draft was precisely as he had envisioned it at the outset. A thoughtful analysis of changing social trends which concentrated on causes and long-term solutions. JP doubted it would appeal to their readers. ("It's bloody boring, Mike. Where's the human interest, for God's sake?") But, without a decent photograph of either Billy or Mrs. Powell, there seemed little point in going with the uninspired statements that Mrs. Powell had made on the subject of homelessness in general. JP repeated his threats on the nonrenewal of Deacon's contract if he didn't recognize that political mudslinging was the magazine's stock in trade, and Deacon answered sarcastically that if the sales figures were anything to go by,
The Street
readership enjoyed having its intelligence insulted about as much as the rest of the electorate did.
 

Amanda Powell, who had received her garage keys and the two photographs of Billy through the post with an anonymous
Street
complimentary slip, was disappointed, but not surprised, to find herself and Billy excluded from Deacon's article. But she read it with interest, particularly the paragraph describing a derelict warehouse and its community of mentally disturbed residents who were being cared for by a handful of old men and a young boy.

There was a look of relief in her eyes as she laid the magazine aside.

A little research during a quiet afternoon produced the names and addresses of James Streeter's parents and brother, plus some imaginative-
and deliberately libelous?
- press releases from the Friends of James Streeter Campaign, which was based at the brother's address in Edinburgh. The last one was dated August, 1991.

Despite twelve months of determined lobbying, not a single newspaper has followed up the claims of the Friends of James Streeter Campaign that James was murdered on the night of Friday, April 27, 1990, in order to protect a member of Lowenstein's Board and save the bank from the catastrophic collapse that would inevitably result from loss of confidence in its management.

In the interests of justice, the following facts must be investigated:

• James Streeter did not have the knowledge to work the fraud of which he's accused. It is alleged that he gained his computer skills while abroad in France and Belgium. The FoJSC has collected witness evidence from his previous employers and his first wife that he did not. (See enclosures)
  James Streeter had no access either to the progress of Lowenstein's in-house investigation or to Board decisions, therefore he could not have known the "ideal" date to leave the country. The FoJSC has witness statements to this effect from his secretary and members of his department. (See enclosures)
  James Streeter made reference to friends and colleagues in the six months before his disappearance about the incompetence of Nigel de Vriess, his line manager, who was a member of the Lowenstein Board in 1990 and who has since left the bank. The FoJSC has three sworn statements which testify that James said in January, 1990, that Mr. de Vriess was "at best incompetent and at worst criminally motivated." (See enclosures)
  Much reliance has been placed on the damaging allegations made by Amanda Streeter against her husband in a written statement to police. They were: 1) That James was having an affair with a woman who worked for a computer software company-name, Marianne Filbert, whereabouts unknown. 2) That he once remarked "any fool could work the system if someone told him which buttons to press." 3) That he was obsessed with wealth.
  The FoJSC refutes all three allegations. (1) and (3) depend entirely on the word of Amanda Streeter. (2) refers to a statement made by one of James's colleagues who has since admitted that he wasn't sure even in 1990 if it was James who made the remark.

Further:

•The FoJSC has obtained proof that it was Amanda herself who was having the affair and that her lover was Nigel de Vriess. We have photocopies of bills and eye witness statements which refer to two secret meetings the couple had in 1986 and 1989 at the George Hotel. Bath. The first occurred only weeks before her marriage to James, the second three years after it. (See enclosures)

We accuse Amanda Streeter and Nigel de Vriess.

James Streeter's murder has gone unpunished. Unless the Press shakes off its apathy and acts now, the guilty will continue to profit from an innocent man's death. The FoJSC urges, indeed demands, a proper inquiry into the activities of Nigel de Vriess and his lover, Amanda Streeter. Please fax or phone on the above numbers for assistance and/or further information. John and Kenneth Streeter are available for interview at any time.

Two evenings later, and because he had nothing better to do, Deacon dialed John Streeter's number in Edinburgh. A woman answered.

"Hello," she said in a soft Scottish accent.

Deacon introduced himself as a London-based journalist who was interested in talking to a spokesman from the Friends of James Streeter Campaign.

"Oh Lord!"

He waited a moment. "Is this a problem for you?"

"No, it's just-well, to be honest, it's over a year since-look, just hang on a moment, will you?" A hand went over the receiver. "JOHN! JO-OHN!" The hand was removed. "It's my husband you need to talk to."