Deacon studied him curiously. "What do you expect me to achieve by talking to her? If she won't listen to you, she certainly won't listen to me."
Hugh sighed. "The obvious way out of the mess is for her to sell the farm, invest the capital, and move into a nursing home somewhere. But Emma thinks she's more likely to accept that suggestion if it comes from you."
"Particularly if I hold Pa's will over her head?"
Hugh nodded.
"It might work." Deacon reached for his coat and stood up. "Assuming I was remotely interested in helping you and Emma out of your hole. But I have a real problem understanding why you think you're entitled to so much of Pa's wealth. Here's an alternative suggestion. Sell your own house and pay Ma back what you owe her." His smile was not a friendly one. "At least it means you'll be able to look her in the eye the next time you call her a bitch."
*12*
Deacon selected a frozen turkey and chucked it into the supermarket cart. He had been like a bear with a sore head since they'd left the pub, and Terry had been careful not to antagonize him further since remarking in the car that it wasn't surprising Deacon's old man had shot himself if all the women in his family were such cows.
"What would you know about it?'' Deacon had asked in an icy voice. "Did Billy make life so difficult for you that no one wanted to know you? Would it have mattered anyway? You can't get much lower than the gutter in all conscience."
They hadn't spoken for half an hour, but now Deacon leaned on the cart and turned to the youngster. "I'm sorry, Terry. I was out of order. It doesn't matter how angry I was, it was no excuse for rudeness."
"It were true, though. You can't get no lower than the gutter, and it ain't rude to tell the truth."
Deacon smiled. "There's a lot lower than the gutter. There's the sewer and there's hell, and you're a long way from both." He straightened. "You're not in the gutter, either, not while you're under my roof, so choose your favorite foods and we'll eat like kings."
After five minutes, he returned to something that had been nagging at him. "Did Billy ever tell you how old he was?"
"Nope. All I know is, he was old enough to be my grandfather."
Deacon shook his head. "According to the pathologist, he was somewhere in his mid-forties. Not much older than me in fact."
Terry was genuinely astonished. He stood openmouthed with a box of cornflakes in his hand. "You've gotta be joking. Shit! He looked well ancient. I reckoned he was the same age as Tom, near enough, and Tom's sixty-eight."
"But he said it was good to be young in the seventies." He knocked the cornflakes out of the boy's hand into the cart. "And the seventies were only twenty years ago."
"Yeah, but I wasn't born then, was I?"
"What's that got to do with anything?"
"It means it was a long time ago."
"Why did Billy say truth was dead?" asked Deacon, as they drove home after packing the boot with food. "What's that got to do with a postcard?" He recalled a line from Billy's interview with Dr. Irvine: "I am still searching for truth."
"How the hell should I know?"
Deacon held on to his patience with difficulty. "You lived with the man for two years on and off but, as far as I can see, you never questioned a single damn thing he said. Where was your curiosity? You ask me enough bloody questions."
"Yeah, but you answer them," said Terry, smoothing the front of his work jacket with satisfaction. "Billy got really angry if I said 'why' too many times, so I gave up asking. It wasn't worth the aggro."
"Presumably he said it in the present tense?"
"What?"
"Truth is dead so nothing matters anymore."
"Yeah. I already told you that."
"Another word for truth is 'verity,' " mused Deacon, gnawing at it like a dog with a bone. "Verity is a girl's name." He glanced sideways. "Do you think V stood for Verity? In other words when he said 'truth is dead' did he mean 'Verity is dead'?" I am still searching for Verity? "And don't say: 'how the hell should I know?' because I might be inclined to stop the car and ram the turkey down your throat."
"I'm not a fucking mind reader," said Terry plaintively. "If Billy said truth is dead, I reckon he meant truth is dead."
"Yes, but why!" growled Deacon. "Which truth was he talking about? Absolute truth, relative truth, plain truth, gospel truth? Or was he talking about one particular truth-say the murder-where the truth had never been uncovered?"
"How the-" Hastily Terry bit his tongue. "He didn't say."
"Then I'm going with V for Verity," said Deacon decisively. He drew up at a traffic light. "I'll go further. I'm betting she looked like the woman in Picasso's painting. Do you think that's a possibility? You said he loved the postcard and kissed it when he was drunk. Doesn't that imply she reminded him of someone?''
"Don't see why," said Terry matter-of-factly. "I mean one of the guys has a picture of Madonna. He's always slobbering over her, but in his wildest dreams he never had a bird like that. I reckon it's the only way he can get a hard-on."
Deacon let out the clutch. "There's a difference between a photograph of a living woman who enjoys exploiting male fantasies and a portrait painted nearly a hundred years ago."
"There probably wasn't at the time," said Terry, after giving the matter some serious thought. "I bet Picasso had a hard-on when he was painting his bird, and I bet he hoped other blokes'd get one, too, when they looked at her. I mean, you have to admit she's got nice tits."
1:OO p.m.-Cape Town, South Africa
"Who is that woman?" asked an elderly matron of her daughter, nodding towards the solitary figure at a window table. "I've seen her here before. She's always on her own, and she always looks as if she'd rather be somewhere else."
Her daughter followed her gaze. "Gerry was introduced to her once. I think her name's Felicity Metcalfe. Her husband owns a diamond mine, or something. She's absolutely rolling in it, anyway." She looked with some dissatisfaction on her small solitaire engagement ring.
"I've never seen her with a man."
The younger woman shrugged. "Maybe she's divorced. With a face like that, she's almost bound to be." She smiled unkindly. "You could cut diamonds with it."
Her mother subjected the lonely figure to a close scrutiny. "She is very thin," she agreed, "and rather sad, too, I think." She returned to her food. "It's true what they say, darling, money doesn't buy happiness."
"Neither does poverty," said her daughter rather bitterly.
While Terry decorated the flat that afternoon, Deacon sat at the kitchen table and made a stab at drawing conclusions from what little information he had. He threw out questions from time to time. Why did Billy choose to doss in the warehouse? For the same reason as the rest of us, I guess. Did he have a thing about rivers? He never said. Did he mention the name of a town where he might have lived? No. Did he mention a university or a profession or the name of a company he might have worked for? I don't know any universities, so I wouldn 't know, would I?