The Echo (35 page)

"It's ten-thirty," said Deacon, tapping his watch. "Why isn't this a reasonable time?"

"
Some
people go to church on Our Lord's birthday" was the sharp response.

"But most people don't," murmured Deacon.

"More's the pity. A God-fearing society has fewer criminals."

"And so many whited sepulchres that you can't believe a word anybody says."

"Do you
want
me to make this phone call, sir?"

"Yes, please," said Deacon meekly.
 

When they were within a mile of the flat, Deacon drew the car into a curb and killed the engine. "You've been lying to me," he said pleasantly. "Now I'd like the truth."

Terry was deeply offended. "I ain't lied to you."

"I'll hand you back to social services if you don't start talking pretty damn quick."

"That's blackmail, that is."

"Exactly."

"I thought you liked me."

"I do."

"Well, then."

"Well, then, what?" asked Deacon patiently.

"I want to stay with you."

"I can't live with a liar."

"Yeah, but if I told the truth, would you let me stay?"

It was a strange little echo of what Barry had said yesterday ... "Will they let me go if I tell the truth?" ... But what was truth? ... Verity?
... "You mean, heads you win, tails I lose."

"I don't get you."

"Presumably you've spent the last three days trying to weasel your way in by
not
telling me the truth." Deacon toyed with the idea of revisiting Terry's behavior of last night, but thought better of it. He knew from his own experience that postmortems were bitter affairs which achieved little beyond continuing warfare.

"I reckoned you needed time to get to know me. It took Billy a couple of months before he realized I was the next best thing to sliced bread. Anyway, you can't kick me out. Not yet. I ain't learnt to read, and I want to earn that money you promised to pay me."

"You've already cost me a fortune."

"Yeah, but you're rich. Your ma's house alone has gotta be worth a bob or two, so you can easily afford another mouth to feed."

"I told her to sell it."

"She won't, though. She's well gutted about tearing up your dad's will and giving your fortune away to your sister. When the time comes-which is the few months she's given herself-she'll fade away. She's made up her mind to it. and there ain't nothing you can do to stop it unless you make it worth her while to stick around a bit longer."

"And how do I do that?"

A sort of ancient wisdom glimmered in the boy's pale eyes. "Billy said it's curiosity that keeps people alive, being as how we all want to know what happens next. And them that kill themselves or lie down and die before they need to reckon there's nothing left to be curious about." He spoke seriously. "You and your ma ain't got nothing to talk about except the stuff that made you angry enough to walk out on her, so you've got to give her something else to think about. Like me. She'd be well excited if you told her you was gonna keep me. She'd be on the phone all the time sticking her nose into our business."

"That's enough to put me off the idea for good."

"Except if you don't give her a reason to talk to you, then another five years'll go by. And you don't want that any more than she does."

"Are you
sure
you're only fourteen?" Deacon asked suspiciously. "You talk like a forty-year-old sometimes."

Terry looked injured. "I'm mature. Anyway, I'm nearer fifteen than fourteen."

"Social services won't allow you to stay with me," said Deacon, handing him a cigarette. "If I expressed even mild interest in taking care of you they'd label me a pedophile. It's dangerous these days for men to like anyone under the age of sixteen." He held a match to the tip. "Also, I'm responsible. I shouldn't let you smoke these damn things for a start."

"Give over. I didn't get none of this grief from Billy. He just took me on board like I was his long lost kid. I ain't asking you to adopt me, and chances are I'll be off out of it in a couple of months. Look, I just want to stay for a while longer, learn to read, meet Mrs. D again. It's a free country and if you ain't doing nothing wrong, 'cept giving a homeless bloke a bed, why should the bastards at social services interfere?"

"Because that's what they're paid for," said Deacon cynically, staring through the windshield. "How much is it going to cost me to keep a six-foot-tall teenager in food, clothes, beer, and cigarettes for weeks on end?"

"I'll go begging. That'll help out."

"No way. I'm not having a beggar in my flat or an illiterate with an impoverished vocabulary. You need educating."
Don't say it, Deacon...
"You're going to bankrupt me, probably land me in prison, and at the end of it all you'll rugger off leaving me to wonder what the hell came over me."

"I ain't like that. I stood by Billy, didn't I? And he weren't half as easy to like as you are."

Deacon glanced at him. "If you put one foot out of line and drop me in it with social services or the police, I'll come after you with an axe the minute I'm out of prison. Is that a deal?'' He held out his hand, palm up.

Terry gripped it excitedly. "It's a deal. Now can I phone Mrs. D and wish her Happy Christmas?" He reached for the mobile. "What's her number?"

Deacon gave it to him. "You really like her, don't you?" he said curiously.

"She's an older version of you," said Terry matter-of-factly, "and I ain't never met two people who treated me straight off with respect. Even old Hugh was okay, so maybe you're none of you as bad as you like to make out. Have you ever thought of
that?
"
 

What Terry had withheld was that he
had
seen Billy W again before he died, just once, at the warehouse. It was early in the morning and the boy had been sitting on the scrubland at the back, staring out over the river. There had been a dawn mist over the water, which the warming sun had begun to burn off. He described himself as feeling "fucking depressed."

"Life weren't the same when old Billy weren't around. Okay, he were a pain in the butt most of the time, but I'd kind of got used to him. Know what I mean? Lawrence got it about right. It were like having a dad about the place-nah, more like a granddad. Anyway, I turned round at one point and the bastard was sitting next to me. It gave me a shock because I hadn't heard him coming. Matter of fact, I don't know how I didn't have a heart attack." He paused to reflect. "To be honest, I thought he were a ghost," he went on. "He looked about as bad as I'd ever seen him-with white skin and lips that looked as if there was no blood in them." He shuddered at the memory. "So I asked him what he'd been doing and he said 'toning.' "

Deacon waited. "Did he say anything else?" he asked when Terry didn't go on.

"Yeah, it didn't make much sense, though. He said 'un-toned sin's the invisible worm."

Pensively, Deacon stroked his jaw. "I should think he said 'atoning' and 'unatoned.' The atonement of sins is the same as repentance." He brooded for a while, searching through his memory for word associations. "Blake wrote a poem called
The Sick Rose
," he said at last. "It's about a beautiful rose that's dying inside because an invisible worm is eating away at its heart." He stared out of the windshield. "You can interpret its symbolism any way you like, but Billy presumably interpreted the worm as unexpiated sin." He paused again. "He can't have been talking about his own atonement because he was torturing himself for his sins," he said slowly, "which leaves only Amanda. Do you understand all that?''

"Sure, I'm not totally dumb, you know, and you said she reeked of roses. In any case, it was her place he made me take him to."

"How do you mean '
made
'?"

"He just set off. All I could do was follow. He didn't say a word the whole way, then just walked in her garage and shut the door behind him."

Deacon regarded him curiously. "Did you know it was her house?"

"No. It was just a house."

"How did Billy know the garage door would be open?"

Terry shrugged. "Luck?" he suggested. "None of the others were."

"Did he say anything before he went into it?"

"Only goodbye."

Deacon shook his head in bewilderment at the boy's apparent acceptance of Billy's bizarre behavior. "Didn't you ask him what he was doing? Why he wanted to go there? What it was all about?''

" 'Course I did, but he didn't answer. And he looked that ill, I thought he'd peg out on me at any moment, so I weren't keen to make matters worse by pestering. You couldn't never stop Billy doing what he wanted to do."

"But weren't you worried when he didn't come back to the warehouse? Why didn't you go and fetch him?"

The injured look reappeared on Terry's face. "I did, sort of. I went and hung around the entrance to the estate the next day but there weren't no sign of him, and I was too scared to go in there two days in a row in case the cops came down on me like a ton of bricks for casing the joint. Anyway, I was afraid of getting Billy in shit if he were holed up somewhere cozy. So me and Tom talked it over and we'd got to the point of thinking we'd go round and suss the place out, when Tom read in a newspaper that Billy'd snuffed it in Amanda's garage." He shrugged. "And that were the end of it."

"Can you remember which day you took Billy there?"

Terry looked uncomfortable. "Yeah, but Tom reckons I was stoned most of that week and got everything muddled. It ain't true, but it's the only thing that makes sense. Me and him went all the way to the cemetery after Amanda told us she'd done the honors for Billy, just to make sure she weren't lying about it, and it was there in black and white. Billy Blake, died June twelfth, nineteen ninety-five."

Deacon flicked through his diary. "The twelfth was a Monday, and the pathologist estimated he'd been dead five days when the body was found on the following Friday. So, which day did you see him?"

"The Tuesday. And it was the Wednesday I hung about outside the estate, the Thursday me and Tom talked it over, and the Friday we reckoned we'd go round to take a butcher's. It were about eight o'clock at night, we was on our way, Tom lifts an
Evening Standard
from a bin, and there's this steaming great headline saying: Homeless man starves to death. So he reads it and goes: 'Jesus, you're an arsehole, Terry, the bastard's been dead for days and you've suckered me into looking for a corpse.' "

Deacon was silent for so long that Terry eventually spoke again. "Yeah, well, maybe Tom was right. Maybe it was the Tuesday before, and I was so stoned I let a whole week go by before I did anything."

"According to the police he went into the garage on Saturday the tenth."

"It weren't a Saturday when I saw him," said the boy decidedly. "Saturdays are good tourist days, so I'd've been out begging."

Deacon felt for the key in the ignition. "How long after Billy died did Amanda come asking questions?"

"A few weeks. She'd paid for his cremation by then because she told us about it."

The engine fired and he put it into gear. "Why didn't you tell her Billy was still alive on the Tuesday?"

Terry stared despondently out of the window. "For the same reason I didn't tell you. I don't reckon he was, see. Matter of fact I don't like to think about it too much. I mean,
d'you
believe in ghosts?"

Deacon recalled the smell of death that had been in Amanda's house and wondered uneasily about the nature of Billy's
deus ex machina .... I believe in hell ... I have nightmares sometimes where I float in black space beyond the reach of anyone's love ... only divine intervention can save a soul condemned forever to exist in the loneliness of the bottomless pit ... please, please don't stay away longer than is necessary...
 

DS Harrison slept badly. At the back of his mind all night was the disturbing knowledge that he had missed something. He was temporarily distracted by the mayhem of Christmas morning, as his excited children opened their presents and his wife set to work on the lunch preparations but, shortly after eleven o'clock, a call came through from the station relaying Deacon's message.

"He refused to explain what this matter of urgency was," said the desk sergeant, "and to be honest I didn't take it too seriously. But this name, Nigel de Vriess, has now come up in another connection. Hampshire and Kent are alerting forces across the South to watch out for him. Apparently, his Rolls-Royce was reported abandoned last night in a field inside Dover. What do you want me to do about it? Pass this Deacon's number on to the DCI?"

"No, I'm coming in. Tell the DCI I'm on my way."
 

"Amanda must've done something pretty bad to get old Billy worked up like that," said Terry suddenly. "I mean he didn't rate stealing and drugs too high, but he didn't lose his rag overly much at the guys who did them. Do you get what I'm saying? It were murder that made him go ape-shit and stick his hands in the fire and talk about sacrifices. Like the time Tom took the geezer's coat off of him and the geezer froze to death in the night. That's when Billy spent the night in the nude to take the blame on himself. He damn near died for it. It were only because Tom got really upset about what he'd done that we were able to get Billy back in his clothes again. So do you reckon she killed Billy by letting him starve to death?''

"No," said Deacon whose thoughts had been following similar lines. "Barry's right. She wouldn't have told me Billy's story if she was afraid of what I'd find out. In any case, I can't see Billy caring too much about his own death."

...my own redemption doesn't interest me...

"Whose, then?"

...I'm still searching for truth ... there's no way out of hell except through God's mercy ... I'm searching for truth ... why enter hell at all ... I'm searching for Verity...

"Verity's?" suggested Deacon.

Terry shook his head. "Verity murdered herself."

...you and I will be judged by the efforts we make to keep another's soul from eternal despair... do you enjoy suffering...? yes, if it inspires compassion ... there's no way out of hell except through God's mercy ... I'm searching for Verity...