The Conspiracy Theorist (16 page)

And yet, according to Meg, the blood
test had shown nothing.
 

Finally the note to self:

Felt
he was interviewing me.
 
Losing
touch?

The question was whether I ever had a
‘touch’.
 
Richie and others seemed
to doubt it.
 
They suggested that I
was some sort of vindictive sod, a loner, some sad vigilante who persecuted
people until they were sacked or killed themselves.
 
My bosses thought my main weakness was I did not know when
to let go.
 
But the truth was I
felt a different person to the one back then.
 
Richie and others looked at me and still saw DCI
Becket.
 
But that Becket was a
stranger to me.

Dehydrated,
sick of myself, I slept badly and woke up worse.
 
Exhausted by dreams of Clara ringing me from strange hotels
with sunflowers on the wall, calling me ‘Papa’ as she never had done in
life.
 
Then standing outside
Westminster tube, and in my dream looking up at Big Ben cut off half way
up.
 
At first I thought it was on
fire and then I realised it was a bandage, wrapped around it.
 
Dirty, the colour of dried blood, or
faeces.
 
It was unbearable to look
at, so I glanced away.
 
Then I
heard it collapse, and when I looked again it was gone.
 
The whole tower was gone. The Houses of
Parliament looked strange without it.
 
Like they made no sense anymore.

Then Clara again.
 
At a funeral, taller, older, with grey streaks in her hair, shaking
hands with people.
 
It wasn’t a
memory.
 
I don’t know whose funeral
it was.
 
But I suspected it was
mine.

The
next day it was almost a relief to be in the office.
 
A return to normality, or ‘normalcy’ as Calvin C. Coolidge
would have said.
 
Normal would be
nice, I thought.
 
Normal would be
good.
 
I wasn’t feeling wonderful,
but I could not stay another moment in my flat.
 
The headache I attributed to the whisky—you know the
rules, stick to beer, Becket—and the persistent nausea from the
painkillers.
 
It could have been
the hangover, but if anything I looked worse than the day before.

The previous evening I had got back at
ten.
 
En route I treated myself to fish
and chips, eating them from the paper as I wandered the streets of Canterbury.
 
At home I finished the scotch, drank a
pint of water, swallowed some pills, and slept through to seven.

Take
your prescribed medicine, Becket
.

There were several messages from Meg to
that effect on both my landline and mobile, which had been switched off.
 
I listened to the first two and deleted
the rest.
 
It was good to know she
cared about me, but it also made the sense of loss more acute.

Of course, the Iron Law of Sod ordained
that it was a busy Monday morning, with various clerks and interns popping up
to retrieve case files or deliver new ones.
 
I caught up with several that needed a file note or a
countersignature.
 
I read a
particularly horrific autopsy report from a RTA that did not do my equilibrium
any good at all.
 
At one stage I
tried the Prajapati’s home number but the au pair said the family were in
India.
 
I doubted that Annie
Prajapati would talk to me anyway.
 
Then I rang PiTech and asked for Mr Vincent Carmody.
 
I didn’t expect to get him either and,
sure enough, he was ‘out of the country’.
 

‘Which country?’

‘You mean which country is he out of?’

‘Which country is he in?’

‘I’m afraid we don’t give out that sort
of information.’

A fairly typical PiTech conversation.
 
I was getting nowhere.

About lunchtime, Anthony Carstairs put
his head around the door.

‘Just back from court,’ he said.
 
‘I came to look at your shiner.
 
It’s the talk of the office.
 
Are they stitches?’

He pointed at me as if I were something
unpleasant in the Reptile House.

‘I thought I had an unseasonable number
of visitors for the time of year.’

‘Talking of which, fancy a quick nine?’

Sometimes I doubted his intelligence.
 
I stood up.

‘Anthony I have just got out of
hospital, I can barely walk.’

‘Wimp,’ he commented.
 
‘Lunch, then?
 
I assume you are capable of eating.’

We did not often dine together
,
Anthony was usually
too busy
.
 
But that
afternoon, he had a hearing cancelled—
His
Honour is ill, another wimp, although I suspect GPI in his case
—and
even at the best of times Carstairs found the office boring.
 
When we did find time for lunch, we
always went to Pizza Express.
 
I
suspected
he was denied its rustic charms by Lady Carstairs,
his somewhat horsey wife
.
 
It was easy to forget that Anthony was a baronet—he never used the
appellation ‘Sir’—unless you met his wife, who referred to it at every
given opportunity.
 
He was due to
inherit the title of Viscount Redmayne—the family’s estate was near
Rochester—and privately I knew he dreaded the prospect.
 
But it made for interesting
conversation, and although I would never admit it to him I enjoyed hearing
tales of the upper echelons of Kentish society, his daughters’ exploits at the
gymkhana and the truly awful people he had to have round for dinner.
 

‘So,’ he said, after the wine
arrived.
 
‘Tell me how you got
yourself beaten up, arrested and released again.
 
Take your time.
 
I intend to have starters.’

So I started from the beginning: before
I had even heard of Sir Simeon Marchant and Sunny Prajapati.
 
I described the proposed PiTech merger
and Sunny’s ambitions to sail the world.
 
I mentioned Sunny’s suspicions of his wife, and her alleged suspicions
of him.
 
I outlined Mat Janovitz’s
involvement and his discovery of the surveillance devices.

We paused to order the food.

‘That was
after
he went missing, right?’ Carstairs continued.

‘Yes, sorry.
 
That was after the boat was returned to port.’

‘So he hadn’t searched it before?’

‘No.
 
It was with Marchant.’

His starter arrived.
 
I was not having one.

‘Go on.’

I went on.
 

‘Marchant got flak from his fellow club
members for selling the boat to a novice,’ I said.
 
‘But that could be just bitchiness...’

‘...
a
feature
of every club...’

‘So, Marchant, who is of a naturally
suspicious bent—his daughter referred to him as a conspiracy theorist...’

Anthony held his fork a loft.
 
‘We shall all be judged by our
children.’

I watched him pop a mushroom into his
mouth and wash it down with some Sicilian Red.
 
I continued.

‘Anyway Marchant tells Janovitz that he
is going to make contact with a man called Becket...’

‘A man called Becket,’ he mused.
 
‘Be a good TV series.’

‘
Anthony
.’

‘Sorry.
 
Go on.’

‘And presumably, I was going to be
commissioned to find out whether the case had been investigated
thoroughly enough
—his words.’

‘That was Marchant’s initial call?’

‘Yes, the day before he died.’

‘Under suspicious circumstances,’ he
added.
 
‘And then Becket being
Becket went up to London and annoyed Richie of the Yard?’

‘How did you know about that?’

‘He rang me to check up on you.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘He asked whether you worked for me.
 
I told him the precise nature of our
relationship—leaving out the golf, of course.’

‘He’s causing trouble.’

‘Oh it gets better.
 
Then someone rang Kent’s Finest to ask
them about
me
?’

‘Anthony I'm sorry...’

‘Oh, never mind.
 
One of the first things you learn as a
young barrister is that there is no such thing as guilt by association.
 
Not in the eyes of the law, anyway.’
 
He put his knife and fork down.
 
‘Delicious!’

Then I told him about the Mrs Jenny
Forbes-Marchant’s instructions—which he knew about already—and my
success in getting the cheque honoured, the memorial service at Lancing College
and, before all that, my altercation in the park.

Our pizzas arrived.
 
Anthony asked for a wheel and proceeded
to eat with his hands.
 

I went onto my meeting with Peter
Naismith at Bellwethers LLP, his call to me—‘a remarkably quick
concession,’ Anthony commented—and then the meetings with Janovitz, Singh,
the Marchants, Janovitz again, and finally the attack in the park.’

‘Tell me about why you got arrested in
London?’

I told him.

He listened seriously.
 
‘There’s a worrying pattern developing
here.’

‘I know,’ I said.
 
‘The same modus
operandi for both attacks.
 
Each attempted murder.
 
Getting local youths...’

‘No, I meant your reaction.
 
This is quite unlike you, Tom.
 
I am most surprised at how
angry
you got.’

‘You mean the incident up in London?’

‘Yes, provoking that boy in that way.
 
I assume your plan was to get him arrested,’ he looked hard at me as if
to confirm that.
 
‘I thought
so.
 
To force their hand, as it
were.
 
Quite out of character, if I
may say so.’

I was breathing hard.
 
I pushed my plate away.
 
The food revolted me.
 
I drank some water, hoping I would not
say something I regretted.
 
A heavy
silence sat between us.

‘Tell me,’ he said.
 
‘Why did Marchant go up to London?’

‘Presumably to see his daughter.’

‘But it sounds like they didn’t get
on.
 
Not too well anyway.’

‘Wouldn’t stop them seeing each other.’

‘True.’

He finished his last piece of pizza,
eyed mine speculatively before giving up.
 
He patted his tummy.

‘And Mr Janovitz thinks PiTech paid up
so they could destroy any evidence of missing bugs?’

‘Yes.’

‘He sounds something of a conspiracy
theorist too.’

I felt deflated.
 
Suddenly, I realised what I had been
pursuing was a pipe dream.
 
It had
taken just half an hour with a sane person to tell me so.
 
And, as he said, I had acted out of
character.
 
Why was that?

‘There is nothing,’ Anthony went on,
‘terribly unusual in surveillance during a merger process.
 
We have dealt with some of that over
the years.
 
The darker side of due
diligence.’

‘I thought it a bit OTT to attack
Janovitz in the park.
 
If I hadn’t
been there, they probably would have killed him.
 
And if the police hadn’t turned up they might have killed me
too.’

I couldn’t bring myself to admit how
defenceless I had been.
 
It still
shamed me.
 
I thought I had got it
out of me on the Alconbury Estate.
 
But, if anything, it had made it worse.

Anthony finished his wine.
 
He signalled for the bill.

‘Let’s have our coffee back at the
ranch.’

The waiter came over with the card
machine and handed it to Carstairs.
 

‘And was Mr Janovitz threatened before?’
he asked me.

‘No, but he was twitchy.’

‘Twitchy?’

I started to reply but Carstairs held
up his hand and entered his number into the machine.
 
It churned out a receipt.
 
He slipped the waiter a tenner.

‘I didn’t add it to the bill as you’ll
get taxed on it, old chap.’

The waiter presented the receipt with a
flourish, thanked us and left.

‘I do enjoy it,’ Carstairs said, ‘when
everyday actions have such elegance.
 
Shall we go?’

I was frustrated.
 
My story had just washed over him.
 
All he had tried to do was pick holes
in it or point out my defects.
 
He
was more interested in the waiter than what I had to say.
 
We walked in silence back towards chambers.