"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?"
*19*
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?"