"I'm glad you said that," murmured Deacon, putting the glass on a table at Lawrence's knee and retrieving his own. "I've been racking my brains for something to give you, and we wouldn't miss the gnome, would we, Terry?"
"Mike hates it," confided the boy, reaching it down, "probably because I nicked it out of somebody's garden. Here, it's yours, Lawrence. Happy Christmas, mate."
Deacon gave his evil grin. "I tell you what, if there's a mantelpiece in your sitting room, then that's the place for it. As Terry says, you can't go wrong with spots of bright color about the place." He raised his glass to their guest.
Lawrence placed it on the table. "I'm overwhelmed by so much generosity," he said. "First a party, then a present. I feel I don't deserve either. My gifts to you are so humble by comparison."
Deacon's lip curled. He had a nasty feeling the old buzzard was about to shame them.
"Can we open them now?" asked Terry.
"Of course. Yours is the largest one, Barry's is the one wrapped in red paper, and Michael's is in green paper."
Terry handed Deacon and Barry theirs and ripped open his own. "Shit!" he said in amazement. "What d'you reckon to this, Mike?'' He held up a worn leather bomber jacket with a sheepskin collar and the Royal Air Force insignia sewn onto the breast pocket. "These cost a packet down Covent Garden."
Deacon frowned as the boy thrust his arm into a sleeve, then glanced towards the old man with a questioning look in his eyes which said, Are you sure? Lawrence nodded. "You'd never find that in Covent Garden," Deacon said then. "That's the real thing. What did you fly?" he asked. 'Spitfires?"
Lawrence nodded again. "But it's a long time ago, and the jacket has been looking for a home for many years." He watched Barry finger his package on his lap. "Aren't you going to open yours, Barry?"
"I wasn't expecting anything," said the little man shyly.
"Then it's a double surprise. Please. I can't bear the suspense of not knowing if you like it."
Barry carefully slit the cellotape, as was his character, and unfolded the paper neatly to reveal a Brownie box-camera wrapped in layers of tissue paper. "But this is prewar," he said in amazement, turning it over with immense care. "I can't possibly accept this."
Lawrence raised his thin hands in protest. "But you must. Anyone who can tell the age of a camera just by looking at it should certainly possess it." He turned to Deacon. "Now it's your turn, Michael."
"I'm as embarrassed as Barry."
"But I'm delighted with my gnome." His eyes twinkled mischievously. "And I shall do exactly as you suggest and put it on the mantelpiece in my drawing room. It will look very well beside my collection of Meissen porcelain."
Deacon bit off a snort of laughter and pulled the wrapping from his present. He didn't know whether to be relieved or dismayed, for while the gift had no material value its sentimental value was clearly enormous. He turned the pages of a closely written diary, spanning many years of Lawrence's life. "I'm honored," he said simply, "but I'd rather you left it to me in your will as something to remember you by."
"Then there'd be no pleasure in it for me. I want you to read it while I'm alive, Michael, so that I shall have someone to reminisce with from time to time. As far as you are concerned, I have been entirely selfish in my choice of a present."
Deacon shook his head. "You've already hijacked my soul, you old bastard. What more do you want?''
Lawrence reached out a frail hand. "A son to say Kaddish for my soul."
The smell of decay that poured out through the door like a tide of sewerage when the police ram burst open the door of Amanda Powell's house drove the team of policemen staggering backwards. So thick and putrid was the stench that it stung eyes and nostrils and loosened the contents of stomachs. The very fabric of the house seemed to ooze with the liquid of corruption.
Superintendent Fortune clapped a handkerchief to his mouth and rounded angrily on Harrison. "What the hell kind of fool do you take me for? There's no way you could have missed this if you were here last night."
Harrison dropped to his haunches and attempted to keep his guts from turning inside out. "There was a WPC here as well," he muttered. "I asked her to stay with Mrs. Powell while I spoke to Deacon. Believe me, she didn't notice it, either."
"It's clearing, sir," said Fortune's Hampshire colleague, approaching the doorway warily. "There must be a draft blowing it through." Gingerly, he poked his head into the hall. "It looks like the connecting door to the garage is open."
There was no immediate response from the remaining policemen. To a man they dreaded what they knew they were going to see, for Nature had not endowed its works of beauty with the smell of death. At the very least they expected rivers of blood around a scene of brutal carnage.
However, when they finally found the courage to enter the house and look into the garage, there was a single naked corpse, intact and uncorrupted, propped against a stack of unopened bags of cement in the corner, gazing wide-eyed in their direction. And while no one put the thought into words, they all wondered how something so cold and pure could reek so vilely of corruption.
*20*
"I'm beginning to wish I'd never met you," said DS Harrison, stepping wearily across Deacon's threshold and introducing his companion. "Chief Superintendent Fortune of Hampshire police."
"I left a message for you to phone."
"Events overtook me," said Harrison laconically.
Deacon took in their somber expressions, and belatedly removed the paper hat from his head and tucked it into his pocket. The all-too simple pleasures of getting gently smashed while eating Barry's turkey dinner and reading dire jokes out of crackers palled rather rapidly in the face of official sobriety. "Is something wrong?"
The superintendent, a lean, somewhat intimidating individual with eyes that had been trained to see more than they gave away, gestured him forward. "After you, Mr. Deacon. If you please."
With a shrug, he led the way upstairs and introduced them to his guests. "If you're from Hampshire," he said to Fortune, resuming his seat, "then this must be to do with Nigel de Vriess."
"How much do you know about him?" asked the superintendent.
"Very little."
"Then why did you phone his house this morning?"
Deacon glanced at Terry, wondering if the boy could be relied on to keep his mouth shut. "Trust me" was the response in his disarmingly innocent expression. ' 'It occurred to me that the man Mrs. Powell's neighbors saw tampering with her garage door yesterday might have been Nigel, so I thought I'd check to see if he ever went home." He stroked his nose. "Apparently he didn't."
"Later you left a message at the station, saying you wanted to contact me on a matter of urgency regarding Amanda and Nigel," said Harrison. "What was that about?"
Deacon consulted his watch. "It's after three. It won't be urgent anymore." He read impatience in Harrison's face and, with an amused smile, outlined his theory that Amanda and Nigel had done a bunk once they knew Barry had seen them together. "Terry and I drove to the docklands and checked her house," he explained. "It was empty and her car had gone. I thought it worth passing on that information if I could, but your desk sergeant was reluctant to bother you."
"We're talking quite an epidemic here," said Harrison. "First James absconds, then Amanda and Nigel. Is this a serious theory you're proposing, Mr. Deacon?"
Terry grinned. "I told you you'd look a plonker."
Deacon offered the two policemen drinks, which they refused. "I'm sorry to have wasted your time," he said refilling the glasses of the others. "Put it down to the fact that I've had missing persons on the brain for weeks."