The Conspiracy Theorist (22 page)

‘Anyway, how’s it going with you?’ I
asked.

‘Oh, you know, good days and bad days.’

She described the arrangements for the
funeral.
 
The local vicar on Hayling
Island was on holiday so the bishop had arranged a locum, who really was not at
all suitable.
 
Not
at all.
 
She had had to
brief him about her father’s life at some length.

‘You're still grieving,’ I observed.
 
‘Putting a brave face on it.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ she replied, her
eyes holding mine.
 
‘In some ways I
feel I lost Daddy a long time ago.’

‘About the time he took up with his
housekeeper?’

There was along pause while she stared
out of the window.
 
St Paul’s
stared back.
 
She gave in first.

‘Is it so obvious?’ she asked.
 
Suddenly, she seemed very sober, on her
guard.
 
‘No,
actually when Mummy died.
 
He took up with a number of females after that.’

Females
was a bit like ‘the man’ when
used—often by other females—in this way.
 
You know the speaker is referring to women, but they keep
the species indeterminate.
 
This is
to leave you in no doubt what they really mean.
 
Female rabbit, female monkey, female dog—bitch.

‘They say it is a way of coping,’ I said.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t mind if he’d paid her the
slightest bit attention while she was alive.
 
If anyone was, Mummy was the Housekeeper.’

‘It’s a nice house.’

She looked at me sharply, and then
smiled.
 
‘I know what you’re trying
to do, Tom.
 
It won’t work.
 
I cannot forgive him.
 
Not yet.’

‘And Mark?’

‘Mark?
 
Forgive Mark?
 
What for?’

Again, there it was.
 
Something had shifted and she was on
her guard.

‘No,’ my hand held hers.
 
‘I meant can Mark forgive him?’

‘Oh, Mark’s issues with Daddy go back
further.
 
Much
further.
 
I’m afraid they
fell out a long, long time ago.
 
Mark won’t talk about.
 
He’s
very similar to Daddy in many ways. Pig-headed...’

‘Is Mark’s mother still alive?’

‘No, she passed away some time
ago.
 
He still blames Daddy, I
think, for leaving her.’

‘Or leaving him?’

‘I guess so, but he never talks about
it.’

‘When did you first meet him?’

‘Mark?
 
Only last year.
 
I didn’t even know about him till
then.
 
That was typical Daddy.
 
Very secretive.’

‘Your father told you about him?’

She laughed bitterly.

‘He most certainly did not!
 
He refused to meet Mark when I
suggested it.’

‘So Mark found you, then?’

‘No, someone a friend of mine who was
visiting South Africa met him, mentioned the surname and hey presto!’

‘Hey presto!’

I held up my glass and we clinked.
 
I went to get another round.
 
When I returned, she was on the
phone.
 
She gave me a little
wave.
 
But the call sounded
personal, so I went down some rather steep stairs to the gents.
 
I could not make her out at all.
 

Perhaps it was the drink, perhaps it
was her presence, but my suspicions were becoming confused.
 
On the one hand, it was entirely
possible that she and her brother had somehow contrived to have their father
bumped off.
 
On the other, she
could be the dupe of Mark Marchant, the black sheep that Sir Simeon would not
acknowledge or even meet.
 
There
was the impending marriage of the old man to Maike Breytenbach, and a possible
loss of inheritance, as motivation.
 
So there was motivation.
 
Cui bono
?
 
That would be Jenny, because from what she had told me I
doubted that Mark was in for an inheritance.
 
After all, his old man would not even meet him.
 
Although stranger things had been known
when wills were concerned.

So, my reasoning went, if Mark and Jenny
had arranged for me to be beaten up, then it was they who slipped Haloperidol
into my drink at Chichester Festival Theatre.
 
Mark had got the drinks.
 
Mark, as I said, could be duping Jenny.
 
It was Mark that Jenny was on the phone
to now.
 
Mark the shadowy security
consultant with very little presence on the
internet
.
 
What started
out
as a conspiracy theory about a Russian take-over of a defence company had
become no more than a pair of middle-aged siblings after Daddy’s cash.
 

If they had put Haloperidol in my drink
at the theatre in Chichester—the only alternative was poor Mat
Janovitz—then it could be in my drink now.
 
Mark was sitting in a van outside waiting for me.

You’re
paranoid, Becket
.
 
I’ve
told you before about making assumptions, the wrong ones.

I needed time to think.

I washed my hands and looked in the
mirror.
 
I scratched my head.
 
The stitches were itching.
 
So I picked at them until they bled a
little, and then I returned to the bar.
 
Jenny was still on the phone, saying, ‘Okay, okay see you
tomorrow’.
 

She smiled at me and put her hand over
the phone to explain: ‘Mark, he’s flying in tomorrow.’

Then on the phone, ‘No, no.
 
Tom Becket.
 
You remember
him.
 
From the
theatre?
 
Yes, in London.’

After a few more farewells, she rang
off.

‘He thought I was with Peter.
 
He doesn’t approve of Peter,’ she said.
 
‘Mark sends his regards.
 
Says come to the funeral.
 
Oh, look!’

She got out her handkerchief and dabbed
at my forehead.

‘Tom, you’re bleeding.’

I looked bemused.
 
She showed me the blood on her hankie.
 
QED.

‘They said that might happen.
 
I better go and get patched up.’

We stood up, regretfully, like the adults
we were, and made our way outside.
 
On Queen Victoria Street I hailed her a cab.
 
We exchanged affectionate kisses and after one more playful
dab at my ‘poor forehead’, she was gone.
 
I walked across the road and found the only public phone-box that had
not been used as a public convenience recently.
 
I rang a familiar number.

‘I’m in need of medical assistance,’ I
said.

‘I’m off duty,’ she replied.
 
‘And you sound drunk.’

‘My stitches have come apart.’

‘How tragic for you.’

‘Are you alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I come round?’

There was a pause.
 
The crackle of
static.
 

‘If you bring ice-cream.’

‘I’m on my way.’

‘Thomas,’ she said.
 
‘Decent ice-cream, no cheap stuff.’

‘Just get the steri-strips ready.’

I rang off before Meg asked for
something more expensive than Ben and Jerry’s.

We
sat at her kitchen table and ate rum-and-raisin ice cream and drank rich, dark
Armagnac, her favourite drink.
 
I
was an astronaut, and I had landed on a different world to that inhabited by Jenny
Forbes-Marchant and her brother.
 
For me, if there is a thing that defines the nature of intimacy, it is
the ability to forgive.
 
Forgetting
is harder, of course.
 
The fact
that Meg and I shared certain memories made it harder still.
 
But like familiar dancing partners, we
knew how to avoid the cracks in the parquet.
 
But that night the Armagnac loosened our tongues and we
ended up talking about Clara for the first time in years.

Of course, it had not started that
way.
 
My head was still full of Sir
Simeon Marchant, and his children who may or may not have bumped him off.
 
I told her about my suspicions and
latterly my escape from the clutches of Jenny Forbes-Marchant.
 
It was an expurgated version—one
that didn’t include the possible administration of Haloperidol—and it had
Meg in stitches, while she steri-stripped mine.
 

This was new.
 
We had never talked about my work in this way.
 
Meg had not approved of my role in the
Met, as if catching bent coppers was somehow dishonourable.
 
But I suspected what she really hated
was the politics of it all.
 
How could
I deal with some cases and not others?
 
How, on some cases, my wariness of the Official Secrets Act left my
conversation heavily redacted and bureaucratic.
 
She had warned me to get out of the job, long before it came
to a head, long before—quite out of the blue—our daughter killed
herself.

‘She used to ring you all the time,’
she said abruptly.

‘Who did?’

But I knew the answer.
 
A jolt to the heart.

‘Clara,’ she said.

Long silence.
 
Broken rules.
 
Betrayal.
 
I sat there,
breathless, unable to look at her, unable to respond.

‘Tom?
 
Please say something.’

I looked out of the window, and the
sheen of the streetlamps in the square below.
 
But I saw nothing.
 
I was conscious of seeing nothing.

‘Say something,’ I repeated.
 
‘I still dream about her ringing
me.
 
That’s something.’

She reached her hand across the
table.
 
A
familiar hand.
 
Warm, coarse
to the touch.

‘That is something,’ she said.

In
the middle of the night, I awoke in the spare bedroom.
 
I padded through to the living room and
stood by the window, looking out on my reflection and the deserted square below.
 
If anyone bothered to look up, they
would see a middle-aged man in his boxer shorts.
 
Not a prepossessing sight.

Meg’s door was ajar.
 
She was sleeping on the far side of the
bed.
 
Her side.
 
Her back to me.
 
From her hunched shoulders I could tell
she was awake.
 
I expected any
moment for her to say something.
 
She would either turn or she would not turn, and she would say
something.
 
Something that would
begin or end with the word ‘Thomas.’
 
Something that would contain the word ‘leave’ and hopefully not include
the words ‘me’ or ‘alone’.
 
Some
combinations of words are more hurtful than others.
 

But she didn’t say anything.

I got in beside her.
 
Still she did not move.
 
Still she did not turn and spit words
in my face.
 
I placed one hand flat
on the back of her cotton nightdress.
 
She shivered.

I pressed my hot cheek against the back
of her neck and held her breasts.
 
Still she said nothing.
 
I
expected her to turn and face me.
 
At the very least to say this was not a good idea, but instead she
pressed herself into me.
 
My hand
moved under her nightdress and caressed her stomach, and moved down between her
legs.
 
She arched slightly,
pressing herself harder into my shame and my fear.
 
But still she didn’t say anything.

I wanted her to slip my grasp, to
escape, to turn and acknowledge me, to say my name, for better or for
worse—
get out of here now, how dare
you, Thomas, how dare you presume?
—
face
me
and tell me it was not a dream.

A dream that we were back in a world
that we both knew was, in reality, in a thousand little pieces and could only,
occasionally,
be
reconstituted in sleep.

Meg
left for her early shift.
 
I
feigned sleep.
 
It was not that I
was ashamed or afraid of recriminations, it was that I feared her saying it was
one big mistake, and that it should not happen again, that Hammonde was terribly,
terribly important to her, and that she just felt sorry for me.

When she had slammed the front
door—did that in itself mean something? —I got up and
showered.
 
The small bathroom still
smelled of her.
 
What have you
done, Becket? I thought.
 
This was
not the game plan.
 
This is not the
stability and peace of mind you need.
 
In every mannerism, every look, you see Clara.
 
Her shadow moving between rooms, her
hand raising a glass to her lips, the tilt of her bony wrist.
 
And you are unable to forgive
yourself.
 
All of it shouted out
one thing at me.
 

The thing that Meg will never say to
you.

When she most needed you, Becket, you
were not there.

People
do not really understand suicide.
 
All cases are different, of course.
 
I had seen enough of them, both in the RAF and civilian
life.
 
Some in police cells, too.
 

Some wanting an end to pain and
suffering, whether it is physical or mental.
 
Some wanting to avoid some insurmountable shame
or disgrace, or to punish someone for not caring enough, or far too much.
 
For some, it really was ‘a cry for
help’ that no one heeded, and no one responded to.
 
For others, it was just resolving the pointlessness of
existence.
 
Their lover or partner
leaving for work and leaving them alone, and with the realisation that nothing
mattered.
 
Nothing existed when
they were left alone.
 

It is so fundamental to the human
condition that there is some meaning to life that we ignore it, almost like
breathing, so that it becomes something we take for granted.
 
And then we develop a sort of moral emphysema,
where every breath, every thought comes hard and slow.
 

That was how it had got me.

Becket,
I thought you
was
dead.

Understandable, given the
circumstances.

No, cry for help in my case, just a lot
of booze and pills.
 
The coward’s way out.
 
Not as brave as Clara stepping off her balcony in Hong Kong one bright
and sunny morning.
 
A sense of an ending.
 
Finality.
 
Stepping off in
the certainty that it would end her life, there and then, three thousand miles
from home.
 
She knew she would not
wake up in her own vomit, and the phone ringing too loud.
 

They blamed it on stress, the long
hours at her merchant bank, falling out with her new boyfriend.
 
A combination of factors, they
said.
 
I went to see for
myself.
 
The local police were
thorough—the sturdy balcony rail, the note, painfully genuine, how she had
made her bed first—all of it done by the book, I could not fault them:
the process, their sympathy.
 
I
wanted to find holes in their investigation—to unpick the fabric of lies
until the truth was revealed—but I only found my daughter, and the truth
about her.
 
The
final truth.

Meg couldn’t believe it.
 
Couldn’t believe I had investigated it
thoroughly enough.
 
That in the case of my own daughter I had been negligent.
 
When I was so assiduous in those cases
I talked about (
endlessly
, she said)
where the police were corrupt.
 
Now
I had a chance to prove it.
 
But I
could not.
 
I was
passive—according to Meg anyway—and was only too willing to accept
the official version of events.

But she was wrong.
 
I had gone over it all: the weeks and
days leading up to Clara’s suicide.
 
Gone over it with her work colleagues, the ex-boyfriend, the police… And
all I found was the truth waiting for me.
 
It was one I could not share with Meg.

It was something that Meg could not
understand.
 

None of it, the detail, an
understanding of her last hours, could lend any meaning to her act.
 
You have a child, you try to instil
meaning into their lives, but for some people it is just not there.
 
Just as some of us
are born with webbed feet or an extra toe.
 
Babies with a hole in their heart or in a
kidney.
 
The
thousands of sons and daughters of Mr and Mrs Down.
 
All in our DNA; or the accident of
circumstance, or a chromosome.
 
Just as some of us are born without a sense of meaning.
 

That emptiness is what my daughter
inherited from me.
 
Not from Meg
who laboured day in day out against the unfairness of the world without
doubting for a second that it made sense.
 
Clara got it from me.
 
Her
emptiness.
 
I knew it from the
inside.
 
And still I could not
protect her from it.

One doctor said, when it all hit me,
that I had reached my ‘day of reckoning’.
 
She meant that a lot of small actions had pushed me over the edge.
 
But she was wrong.
 
It was a reckoning, I told her, because
I was now paying up for not paying attention.
 
The old meaning of a ‘reckoning’ was of a bill, an account
to pay.
 
Christopher Marlowe was
stabbed in the eye in a Shoreditch tavern over the reckoning.
 
I still had not reached my day of
reckoning I told her.

That remark kept me sectioned a little
while longer.

When I got out and moved to Canterbury,
I discovered that it was simpler then to live your life by routine, by the
book, going into the office and carrying out tasks that did not involve me too
much.
 
I saw people as evidence and
their testimony as words that I had to unpick the meaning of.
 
I had put up a barrier between Becket
and the world.
 
I reviewed
evidence.
 
It was like seeing life
second-hand.
 
In my few cases, I began
to see people as clients.
 
Ciphers
for the mysteries I had to uncover, when they were real like me, people with
their own aches and pains, plights and gripes as mad as Achilles, or more often
as dull as ditchwater.

The
only thing I had left was the investigation, this investigation, what was
before me.
 
It gave me a purpose of
sorts.
 
Meaning.
 

So I sat in Meg’s kitchen, in her pink
bathrobe like some cross-dressing giant, and made some phone calls on her
landline.

First, Chichester Hospital.
 
Mat Janovitz could not talk to me, the nurse said, and was unable to
tell me anything further about his progress.
 
Sounded ominous, so I rang DS Singh who told me that
Janovitz had taken a turn for the worse.
 
Not sure what it was, but he had been moved to Intensive Care.
 
Shocked by the news, I asked if Singh knew
who had visited Janovitz in hospital, the mystery detective, but Singh could
not or would not tell me.
 
I told
him that I was checking out the identity of the people in the CCTV stills.
 
DS Singh said he did not have a clue
what I was talking about and rang off.