The Conspiracy Theorist (2 page)

It was for this reason, perhaps, that I
took the train up to London that late summer morning.
 
Something was bugging me about the case of Sir Simeon
Marchant, the client who never made it to Canterbury.
 
I wanted to see what the Coroner’s Court had to say.
 
Something did not smell right with
this, and I could not get the urgency of Sir Simeon’s voice out of my head.
 
In some small way, I felt responsible
for the predicament he had found himself in.
 
I could have gone up to London after all.
 
I had not taken the old man’s concerns
seriously, and now I felt I needed to make amends.

The train followed the Watling Street
up from the coast, rattling alongside the old Pilgrim’s Trail until it reached Rochester,
crossed the river in a sparkle of brass glints, and headed northwest towards
the cream and red suburban sprawl that is south London.

Camden
and St Pancras Coroner’s Court is to the north of Euston Road, just behind St
Pancras Gardens.
 
It is a
non-descript building, and inside like just about every Coroner’s Court I have
ever been in: bare, administrative, a minimalist stage-set ready for the next
tragedy.
 
On a good day, the
courtroom can hold about a hundred, with a table for the press, a box of
Kleenex where the witnesses sat and the usual busy-body clerk standing at the
front, telling people where to put themselves and not to spit on the floor.
 

I knew from my online research that
Marchant was due on first, followed by an infant who had died in a local
hospital and a Polish electrician who had inadvertently wired himself to the
National Grid.
 
The clerk looked
like she had already decided it was going to be a very long day.
 
She bustled over to me and asked if I
was from the press.
 
When I replied
that I was not, she said, ‘Well just sit over there, will you?’
 
I did as I was told.

No sooner had I sat down than the clerk
shouted for everyone to stand for the Coroner.
 
He was a grey-haired, white man—as is usually the
case—dapper, rosy-cheeked and looking very well on his daily diet of
mishap, misadventure, maladministration, malfeasance and, very occasionally,
murder.

I gazed across the empty
courtroom.
 
Apart from the lawyers
with their wheelie-bags, there was a lone hack—local paper by the look of
him—and a copper I knew reasonably well called Doug Richie.

Perhaps Richie had fallen on hard times,
but I was surprised to see him there.
 
Last time our paths had crossed, he was at Scotland Yard, a Detective Inspector
in Serious and Organised Crime, sometimes still known as the Flying Squad; more
often as SCD7, which sounded much more grown up and technocratic.
 
At the time, I was working for the
Met’s Department of Professional Standards, and was investigating Richie’s unit
following a fast-tracked complaint from a Member of Parliament.
 

It was the usual cock up.
 
An undercover officer reporting to
Richie had been arrested for environmental activism—ironically, having
assaulted a local bobby guarding a power station—and his name and photo
published in the local paper.
 
The
alias used was one Alexander Watkins Penwortham—not a common name—and
the court register the following week published his place and date of birth.
 
This resulted in understandable apoplexy
in a Mrs Deirdre Penwortham (née Watkins) of the same town, who twenty-two
years earlier had lost her only son with the same name, place and DOB to whooping
cough (with complications) at the tender age of just thirteen months.
 

A run of the mill case for the DPS and
one allocated to Becket, who investigated it, irritated the hell out of Richie
and his friends and wrote it all up in a 240 page internal report for the
Independent Police Complaints Commission.
 
No criminal action was taken.
 

As I explained to the local MP, whom
the Penwortham family had naively brought into the matter, that this was quite
a common occurrence—how else were the police able to protect the state?
—
but
guidance had been breached in accessing an
alias from so close to the area of operation.
 
Off the record, the Met felt that it indicated
a certain
sloppiness on Richie’s part, but he was, of course,
fully exonerated.
 
It was
a typical
fudge—I was beginning to fall out of love
with my job even then—and the Met left it to the MP to lie to his
constituents about how he had given us all a severe bollocking and had received
assurances that it would never ever happen again.
 
The sacred memory of Alexander Watkins Penwortham was
forever inviolate.

Not long after, I heard Inspector
Richie had been moved to another section, operational not ‘specialist’, presumably
where such mistakes would be less noticeable.
 
Nevertheless it was a sideways move, and one that would not
look too good on his record.
 
However,
I hadn’t realised Richie had fallen so far that he was covering an unlawful
killing plea at a local Coroner’s Court.
 

Of course, Richie clocked me at once
and gave that double-take of recognition that just stops short of a wave; the
one where the person remembers just in time that they never really liked you very
much anyway.
 
He was joined by a
tall woman, expensively dressed, which suggested she was neither copper nor
solicitor—for this sort of court anyway.
 
Richie whispered in her ear—he could just about
reach—and everyone sat down.

The inquest was brief.
 
The Coroner explained that, as there
was an ongoing criminal investigation, proceedings would be adjourned until
such time as these were complete.
 
In the meantime, he checked with Detective Chief Inspector Richie—the
man had been promoted after all— that both a police and an independent
post-mortem had been completed and that the body could be released to the
family.
 
Richie, with customary
efficiency, explained that the independent PM had been delayed due to the Bank
Holiday, something clearly he had no control over.
 
The clerk conferred with the Coroner who informed everyone
that the body could be released just as soon as the second post-mortem was
completed.

The woman next to Richie gave a visible
sigh of relief.
 
I assumed she was the
daughter, Mrs Jenny Forbes-Marchant.
 
The Coroner nodded sympathetically to her and then adjourned the inquest
to ‘date unknown’.
 
Grey-haired,
serene, the Coroner rose and everyone followed like children at school assembly.
 
The clerk said there would be a fifteen-minute
recess before the next case.

There
was only one exit from the courthouse, so I went outside and stood by it.
 
I rolled myself a cigarette and lit it
with my brass Zippo.
 
Inhaling the
petrol was almost as pleasurable as the first drag of the day.
 
The smoking ban was turning out to be a
good thing for me.
 
Pubs and cafes
had more seating outside these days, and it did stop you inhaling other
people’s inferior tobacco when you had no choice.
 
The other benefit was that there was nothing unusual in
loitering by doorways anymore.
 
You
just stood there and lit up.
 
Sooner or later someone would talk to you.
 
If information is currency, as many people have observed, smokers
are profligate.
 
They are the
prodigal sons of the knowledge economy, worse than teenagers or cab drivers.
 
You have some useful chats in the amiable
fraternity of nicotine addicts.
 
In
terms of starting a conversation, smoking is the next best thing to walking a
dog.
 

But I wasn’t waiting for that sort of
information.
 
I was waiting for
Richie.

He came out with Mrs Jenny
Forbes-Marchant at his side.
 
Hers
was the sort of figure more admired than desired these days: big chest, thinish
waist,
pleasantly
wide hips.
 
Something anachronistic about her: film noir, knitting
patterns, Dorothy Lamour on the road to Rio, Julie London singing ‘My Heart
Belongs to Daddy’.
 
Fortyish, I
guessed, brunette dyed auburn, in full sail, in a double-breasted navy trouser
suit and red high heels.
 
She was
texting something as she strode along.
 
I only hoped she didn’t stumble; if she fell on Richie, it would take
some time to recover the body.
 

For a moment, I thought they would
breeze right past.
 
But in the end,
Richie could not resist it and planted himself in front of me.

I looked him up and down—mainly
down.
 
I had forgotten how short he
was—a little, shaven-headed bull terrier of a man—until he came up close,
smelling of cheap aftershave and menthol chewing gum.

‘Becket,’ he said with his usual charm,
‘I thought you was dead.’

‘Still here, Richie.
 
How about you?’

The policeman produced a
best-you-can-do
snort.
 
He considered me as he chewed slowly.
 
Perhaps it helped him think.

‘Still very much here, Becket.
 
Back at SCD7 for the time being.’

‘The Lying Squad?
 
Thought it was being disbanded.’

He ignored that.

‘I was sorry to hear you left, Becket.
 
Everyone at the Yard hates you, by the
way.
 
What on earth did you do to
upset so many people?’

I shrugged.
 
‘I'm sure any competent detective could find out.’

Richie squinted into the distance, as
if to retrieve some very obscure fact.

‘I heard you was in Canterbury or
something, Becket?’

At this, Mrs Forbes-Marchant started to
pay attention.
 
She put away her mobile
and stepped forward.

She asked, ‘Are you the man I spoke to yesterday
on the telephone?’

DCI Richie was clearly surprised by
this information.
 
He looked at Mrs
Forbes-Marchant with renewed interest.
 
I could almost see the cogs in his little head turning over laboriously.
 
The digital switchover hadn’t happened
up there yet.
 
He looked at her the
way some dogs look at their owners.

Had she commissioned me to get a second
opinion on the investigation?
 
Posh
people were known to indulge in that sort of thing.
 
They thought Scotland Yard was the NHS and wanted a view
from Harley Street too.
 
How could
a public service possibly be good?
 
It was a contradiction in terms.
 
I felt for Richie.
 
It used to madden me too.

Mrs Forbes-Marchant must have sensed
this as she proceeded to inform Richie that Mr-er-Becket—there
it was again—was contacted by her father
shortly before his
death.
 
The day
before, in fact.

I hoped she would say more—something
I didn’t know—but she left it at that.

Richie seemed unsurprised.
 
‘That so?’ he asked me.

‘Sir Simeon called to make an
appointment, that’s all.’

‘Oh yes?
 
What about?
 
It
could be useful for the investigation.’

‘Oh, there
is
one, is there?’ I asked.

‘You know what the penalties are for withholding
information, Becket.
 
What was it
about, this phone call?’

Richie stared at me as hard as he could
without combusting.
 
Somehow I
didn’t buckle under the pressure.
 
I
told him I had no idea what it was about.
 
That was what the appointment was for—to find out what it was
about.
 
That was what I had told Mrs
Forbes-Marchant the night before.
 
That was why I had come up to London.
 
It seemed the least I could do.
 
To
find out
.
 
I liked
finding things out.
 
That was why I
had left the Metropolitan Police Service.

There were many things Richie could have
said in reply to all that but he contented himself with looking up at Sir Simeon
Marchant’s daughter.
 
She was
almost as tall as me, five-eleven perhaps.
 
Outwardly confident and yet, under all the accoutrements of her
class—the nicely cut Jaeger suit, the scarf, the pearly necklace, the
watch, the shoes, the Caribbean tan—she had a sort of flickering
vulnerability, I thought, like one of those very English actresses, a Kristin
Scott Thomas or a Penelope Keith.
 
Or even a young Maggie Thatcher.

I shuddered.

‘His number was on Daddy’s phone,’ she
explained.

Richie asked, ‘The one the muggers
threw away?’

She nodded.
 
I stubbed out my cigarette on the wall and put the tab in the
metal grille provided for such purposes.
 
Mrs Forbes-Marchant eyed me with distaste.

‘Any news on
who
they are?’ I asked Richie.
 
‘The
muggers, I mean.’

‘Not for you there isn’t.
 
Stay out of this, Becket.’