"So you were lying when you said you were visiting your mother?"
"No. We'll be leaving as soon as you've gone, but I will admit we were woken rather earlier than I'd intended. If you hang around my alarm will go off in approximately"-he consulted his watch-"thirty minutes."
"When do you expect to be back?"
"This evening."
"And you're happy for us to check your story with Barry Grover and the taxi driver?''
"Be our guests," said Deacon. "You can do more. Check that we were in the Lame Beggar until ten-thirty, and then at Carlo's in Farringdon Street until one in the morning when we were finally thrown out."
"Your mother's address please, sir."
"I don't want to see your mother," said Terry morosely, hunched in the corner of the passenger seat as they set off for the Ml after collecting Deacon's car from The Street parking lot following yet another taxi ride, "and she won't want to see me."
"She probably won't want to see me, either," murmured Deacon, calculating that he'd shelled out a fortune in incidental expenses since Terry had moved in. He was coming to the conclusion that teenagers cost more than wives. Terry's appetite alone-he'd eaten enough breakfast to sink a battleship-would beggar most people.
"Then why are we going?"
"Because it seemed like a good idea when I first thought of it."
"Yeah, but that was just an excuse for the old Bill."
"It's good for the soul to do something you don't want to do."
"Billy used to say that."
"Billy was a wise man."
"No, he weren't. He were a bloody pillock. I've been thinking about it, and d'you know what I reckon? I reckon he never starved himself to death at all but let someone else do it for him. And if that ain't stupid, I don't know what is."
Deacon glanced at him. "How could someone else do it for him?''
"By keeping him permanently pissed so he didn't think to eat. See, food were only important to him when he was sober-like when he were in the nick-otherwise he'd forget that it's eating that keeps you alive."
"Are you saying someone kept him supplied with booze for four weeks so that he'd drink himself to death?"
"Yeah. I mean it's the only thing that makes sense, isn't it? How else could he've stayed rat-arsed long enough to starve? He couldn't've bought the sodding stuff because he didn't have no money, and if he'd been sober he'd've come back to the warehouse. Like I said, he used to bugger off from time to time, but he always came back when the booze ran out and he started to get hungry again."
DS Harrison had rung the bell of the Gravers' terraced house in Camden several times before it opened a crack and Barry's sweaty face peered through it. "Mr. Grover?" he asked.
He nodded.
"DS Harrison, sir, Isle of Dogs police station. May I come in?"
"Why?"
"I'd like to ask you a few questions about Michael Deacon and Terry Dalton."
"What have they done?"
"I'd rather discuss this inside, sir."
"I'm not dressed."
"It'll only take a minute."
There was a pause before the security chain rattled and Barry opened the door wide. "My mother's asleep," he whispered. "You'd better come in here." He opened the door of the front parlor, then closed it quietly behind them.
Harrison sniffed the cold, musty air and looked about him. He was in a time capsule from a forgotten era. Drab velvet curtains hung beside the windows, with pale stripes where the sun had bleached their color, and ancient wallpaper showed a tide mark of rising damp from the ground outside. Photographs of a man in First World War uniform crowded the mantelpiece, and a portrait of a young woman in Edwardian dress smiled sweetly above it. The furniture had the dark and heavy imprint of the Victorian era, and the atmosphere was heavy with the weight of years, as if the door of the room had been closed on a day in the distant past, and never reopened.
He rested a hand on the back of a mildewed chair, feeling its dirt and its dampness soil his palm, and he thought unquiet thoughts about what sort of people chose to inhabit so oppressive an environment.
"You mustn't touch anything," whispered Barry. "She'll go mad if she thinks you've touched something. It's her grandparents' room." He pointed to the photographs and the painting. "That's them. They brought her up when her own mother ran away and abandoned her."
He smelt of sickness and stale drink, and presented a pathetic picture in a worn terrycloth robe that barely met across his fat stomach and striped pyjamas. The sergeant was torn between sympathy towards a fellow-traveler-Harrison had been on too many jags himself not to know the pain of the morning after-and a strange flesh-crawling antipathy. Harrison put it down to the bizarreness of the room and the man's unpleasant smell, but his sense of revulsion remained with him long after the interview was over.
"Michael Deacon says you'll confirm that you were with him and a youth called Terry Dalton from eight-thirty last night until approximately one-fifteen this morning. Are you able to do that?"
Barry nodded carefully. "Yes."
"Can you tell me what they were doing when you last saw them?"
"Mike stopped a taxi by climbing on the hood, then he and Terry got into it. There was a bit of a row because the driver didn't want to carry drunks, and Mike said it was obligatory as long as the customer could pay. I think he gave the driver the money in advance, and then they left." He pressed a queasy hand to his stomach. "What's happened? Were they in an accident or something?''
"No, nothing like that, sir. There was some trouble last night at the squat Terry Dalton's been living in, and we wanted to assure ourselves that he wasn't involved in it. How would you describe his condition when you saw him off in the taxi?"
Barry wouldn't meet his eye. "Mike more or less had to drag him into the cab and I think he was lying on the floor when it left."
"And how did you get home, sir?"
The question clearly alarmed Barry. "Me?" He hesitated. "I took a taxi, too."
"From Farringdon Street?"
"No, Fleet Street." He took off his glasses and started to polish them on his robe hem.
"A black cab or a mini cab?"
"I phoned for a mini cab from The Street offices. Reg Linden let me use the phone in reception."
"And did you have to pay in advance as well?"
"Yes."
"Well, thank you for your help, sir. I'll see myself out."
"No, I'll see you out," said Barry with an odd little giggle. "We don't want you turning the wrong way, Sergeant. It wouldn't do at all if you woke my mother."
Deacon drove through the farmhouse gates and parked in the lee of the red brick wall that bordered the driveway. The drone of motorway traffic was muted behind the baffle and the house slumbered in the winter sunshine that had emerged from the clouds as they traveled north. He peered up at the facade to see if their arrival had been noticed but there was no sign of movement in any of the windows that looked their way. There was a car he didn't recognize outside the kitchen door (which he rightly attributed to the live-in nurse), but otherwise the place looked exactly the same as when he had stormed out of it five years ago, vowing never to return.
"Come on, then," said Terry when Deacon didn't move. "Are we going in or what?''
"Or what probably."
"Jesus, you can't be that nervous. You've got me, ain't you? I won't let the old dragon bite you."
Deacon smiled. "All right. Let's go." He opened his car door. "Just don't take offense if she's rude to you, Terry. Or not immediately, anyway. Hold your tongue till we're back in the car. Is that a deal?"
"What if she's rude to you?"
"The same thing applies. The last time I came here I was so angry I damn nearly wrecked the place, and I never want to be that angry again." He stared towards the kitchen door, recalling the episode. "Anger's a killer, Terry. It destroys everything it touches, including the one it's feeding on."