The Conspiracy Theorist (23 page)

Someone was listening.
 
Or he thought they were.

At 9 am, I called Rosenberg as
arranged.
 
He said the computer had
thrown up no matches yet, and told me to ring back at the end of his
shift.
 
I was at a dead end for the
time being so I reviewed my case notes.
 

Sir Simeon Marchant was in London to see
his lawyer when he rang me the day before he was killed.
 
Because of his suspicions about the
disappearance of Sunny Prajapati—his body hadn’t been recovered at that
time—I assumed that the link was there.
 
But, if Mark Marchant had indeed organised the killing of
his father, perhaps by bringing some foreign talent in, then it was a
completely different case.
 
Nothing to do with Prajapati or PiTech.
 
It was a mere coincidence that
Prajapati was under surveillance, a coincidence that he bought the
Cassandra
off Sir Simeon, and a
coincidence that Janovitz was attacked in the park, when I, Thomas A Becket had
been the target in reality.
 

Conspiracy theory had got in the way of
a normal investigation into a simple homicide.
 
The oldest kind of murder: parricide, patricide, call it
what you will.

There
was only one conclusion, I kept telling myself.
 
Mark Marchant must have slipped the Haloperidol into my
drink at Chichester Festival Theatre—the only alternatives being my pint
with Janovitz or the cup of the tea with DS Singh—because someone knew I
could defend myself against an attack.
 
That, and the involvement of Lee Herbert, meant they had been watching
me the day before when I had my little run in with him and his dog.

But if it were Marchant, why would he
do it?
 
The inheritance had nothing
to do with me.
 
I didn’t even know
about Maike Breytenbach then.
 
What
had I stumbled upon in my investigation that would merit taking me out?
 
Or had he just looked into my eyes and
realised I was the sort of person who would not let go?
 

You’re
certainly bigging yourself up this morning, Becket
, I thought.

No, if I had been the target, and if it
had been Marchant doing the targeting, then he must have thought I had some
information that could incriminate him.
 
I thought back to that meeting at Chichester Festival Theatre.
 
We had barely exchanged a dozen
words.
 
I was that ‘clever man’ who
got back Daddy’s money, I recalled.
 
So, if Mark did harbour suspicions, then there were two options: he saw
something when he was following me, or Jenny had told him something.
 
Perhaps it was something I asked
her.
 
Perhaps it was something I
said at Camden and St Pancras Coroner’s Court, or my relationship with
Richie.
 
I couldn’t imagine her
talking about either of those in any depth.
 

Or perhaps just because I had gone to
the Alconbury Estate.
 
Who knows?

Everything led me back to the death of Sir
Simeon Marchant.
 
He had been in
London to see his lawyer.
 
He was about
to get married to his housekeeper.
 
Perhaps his other children got wind of that and the loss of their
inheritance.
 
But it was hardly an
unusual predicament.
 
There were
ways around it.
 
What had he
discussed with his solicitor the day before he was killed?

I rang Wing Commander Kenilworth and
asked if he knew who Sir Simeon’s lawyer was.
 
He did not.
 
I
rang the Marchants’ residence, but no one picked up.
 
So I got out my notebook and tried the number on the side
Jacob Breytenbach’s van.
 

He sounded delighted to hear from me.

‘What do you want?
 
I'm busy right now.’

‘Listen, are you with your mum?’

‘Why?’

‘I need to ask her a question.’

‘What about?’

‘Sir Simeon’s lawyer.
 
His name.’

‘You on this number?’

I looked at the clock on Meg’s kitchen
wall.

‘For the next hour or so.
 
Tell her it’s important.’

‘To you maybe,’ he said and rang off.

Jacob Breytenbach had a point.
 
Sir Simeon Marchant—the man he
called ‘Stan’—was dead.
 
Maike Breytenbach more than anyone was dispossessed by this fact.
 
To me, he was only the client that
never was.
 
My interest was
professional, not personal; the loss did not reach into my gut and hollow me
out the way it did for her—and perhaps her son, too.
 
That made me think
of the other children too.
 
I just
could not believe that they had killed their own father.
 
Unless there was something in
their
past I didn’t know about.
 
What did Wing Commander Kenilworth say?
 

GCHQ
 
Naval
Section.
 
All
sorts of goings on.
 
He used
to go up to London quite regularly for reunions with the Spooks.
 

I took the
Times
obituary from my pocket and smoothed it out on the kitchen
table.
 
I marvelled at the research
and background knowledge that had gone into it.
 
My eye was drawn as ever to the bottom of the page: ...
died from injuries sustained in a street
altercation on 20 August 2013.
 
He is survived by a daughter
.

I rang the
Times
, asked for the Register and got the Obituary Editor.
 
I said I admired the obit of Sir Simeon
Marchant.
 
She thanked me in the
distracted manner of a woman who got many such calls.
 
And then she waited for it.

‘I just have a tiny query,’ I
said.
 
‘You didn’t make much of his
service as a Cold Warrior.’

She sighed and explained the paper’s editorial
policy as if she was reading from a script in a call centre, but I wasn’t
really listening.
 
In the end, she
gave me the email address of the person who submitted the obituary.
 
‘Of course if there are any issues, we
will publish a full retraction.’
 
I
said I was sure that would not be necessary, I had always been a great supporter
of the freedom of the press to print utter bollocks, and rang off.

Next up was Littlemore.
 
He was back in his Pimlico flat.
 
I asked him how it had gone.
 
He said swimmingly.
 
I told him not to be clever and meet me
at 1 pm at Charing Cross.
 

‘Right you are, Chief Inspector.’

‘I’m not a Chief anything, Littlemore.
 
Look, while you’re on, I need two quick
things.’

I gave him the obituary writer’s email
address and Jenny Forbes-Marchant’s number and waited while Littlemore
tip-tapped away.
 
After about
thirty seconds, he gave me both home and mobile telephone numbers, and an
address.

‘That’s in London, right?’

‘Kensington.’

‘Can’t you get any more accurate than
that?’

‘Sorry, Ch—.’

‘One o’clock, Littlemore.
 
Remember, Charing Cross.
 
Don’t be late.’

I
made myself a coffee and noted down:
 
JFM said that her brother was
calling from abroad when in reality he was calling from London.
 
Kensington in fact, which would indicate
that
he
was at her gallery perhaps?
 
Her flat is nearby?
 
Either way, she would know MM was in
the country and that she was lying to me.
 
If not, MM is lying to her.
 
Why would he do that?

I picked up the phone, thinking there
were many reasons to lie to your sister, and not all of them suggestive of
criminal activity.
 
But if Mark
Marchant was in the country, it shut down one avenue of inquiry, at least.
 

Someone picked up.

‘Gerard McAllister,’ the man said in a
melodic Scots accent, a rare one south of the border.

I gave him my name and explained Sir
Simeon Marchant was a client of mine.
 

‘Lawyer?
 
Funny, he never mentioned you.’

That crossed out another line of
inquiry.
 
And he didn’t mention Sir
Simeon’s solicitors either.
 
So I
told him I was a legal investigator based in
..
.

‘How did you get my number, Mr Becket?’
he interrupted.

‘As I said I am a legal
investigator...’

‘Are you aware of the privacy laws in
this country?’

‘I am, unfortunately,’ I said.
 
‘Are you?’

He said nothing, but at least he had
stopped interrupting me.
 
I
finished my spiel, explaining I was working for Sir Simeon Marchant at the time
of his death.
 
At the other end, I could
almost feel the phone being crushed in his iron grip.
 
But he did not put it down.

‘I suppose it’s about the obituary,’ he
said.
 

I began by asking if he wrote it.

‘Good God no,’ he laughed as if the
very concept was absurd.
 
‘Simeon
wrote most of it.’

‘You just wrote the ending.’

‘Sadly, yes.
 
We were great friends.
 
Comrades.’

‘GCHQ?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Because it would account for him
leaving out the juicier parts of his career.’

He chuckled dryly.
 
‘If you could call them that,’ he
said.
 
‘What can I do for you, Mr
Becket?’

The familiar catchphrase.
 
People generally use it when I have succeeded in getting up their
noses.
 
It should be a Becketian
success criterion.

‘I was wondering why the obituary
didn’t refer to his first marriage in South Africa.’

He could barely keep the relief out of
his voice, ‘
Isn’t
it obvious?
 
His family wanted it that way.’

He
is survived by a daughter
.

‘So, you checked it out with Mrs
Forbes-Marchant?’

‘Of course, I did, Mr Becket.
 
What sort of man do you think I am?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ I said.
 

And he put the phone down before I
could become any ruder.

Midday.
 
I let myself out of the flat well before
Meg was due to return from her early shift.
 
Down in the square, the first leaves were falling from the
trees.
 
I looked up at the picture
window, where I had been so clearly framed the night before.
 
Man
in Boxer Shorts
, by Lucien Freud.
 
Becket Staring
at Blurred Reflection
, by Francis Bacon.

I turned and walked west towards
Lancaster Gate.

The
London
Evening Standard
no longer
comes out in the evening and certainly doesn’t set any standards.
 
But it is free, these days, and
therefore freely available on every seat of my underground train.
 
As I travelled east along the Central
Line, I read about the
Standard’s
exposé of what it termed ‘illiterate London’.
 
Besides the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the newspaper
proposed a new War on Illiteracy.
 
What
this entailed exactly I was not sure.
 
It could not be based on locking people up who could not read or write
very well; we already did that.
 
About two thirds of prisoners in the UK, as Reuben Symonds would testify
to, had the reading age of an eleven year old.
 
Or what an eleven year old was meant to have.
 
The
Standard’s
answer seemed to involve teaching eleven year olds.
 

Like most people the press thought if
you only sorted schools out, society’s problems would be over.
 
And yet, there are over three hundred
languages spoken in London, most of them by people who did not go to school
here.
 
Schools are clearly not the
answer.
 
Families are the answer,
churches are the answer, mosques, community centres, colleges are the answer,
but journalists don’t understand that.
 
Most journalists, like politicians, go to school and then they go to
university—usually an elite one—so they only understand other
institutions.
 
They cannot comprehend
that anyone else learns stuff in different ways.
 

The rest of the newspaper, it being the
11
^th
of the 9
^th
, focused on the event known around the
world as 9/11.
 
It asked sundry
Londoners what they were doing on September 11
^th
2001.
 
A famous actress was rehearsing her new
play on Broadway, a Muslim stand-up comedian was surfing TV channels looking
for new gags, a woman in Ealing was in labour having her first child etc
..
.
 
The point
being people could always recall where they were ‘when those planes hit the
twin towers.’
 
There was that
quasi-religious tone hacks use when they pontificate about 9/11, but they were
right; even Becket could remember where his younger self was that afternoon
twelve years before.

I
had left the RAF in summer of 2001 and decided to take the remainder of my
leave right up to my formal demob date of 28
^th
September, when I
turned forty.
 
At that stage, I had
not applied to join the Met.
 
In
fact, I did not know what I wanted to do.
 
We lived in Buckinghamshire, in a sleepy village, not far from
Operational Command.
 
Clara was in
her final year at school in High Wycombe.
 
It was a boarding school, but in the sixth form she attended as a
daygirl.
 
Every afternoon I
indulged myself by picking her up after school as if that act made amends for
not being around for most of her childhood.
 
In the manner of such things, I got to know the other
parents waiting for their charges, admittedly much younger ones.
 
One of the women couldn’t believe that
trim military Becket with his close cropped hair—then still
dark—was old enough to have a sixth form daughter.
 
Sometimes she and I met for a coffee
beforehand.
 
Once, only once, we
met in a hotel room.
 
11
^th
September 2001.

The TV came on as we were dressing
afterwards—I must have touched the remote control—and at first I
thought it was showing a movie.
 
It
wasn’t.
 
It had no soundtrack.
 
And it had the words ‘breaking news’
scrolling underneath it.

I drove Clara home in a state of
shock.
 
We were both in shock.
 
I never knew how she found out about
her father’s brief affair.
 
But
before she left for Hong Kong, she made it clear that she did.
 

And
I thought you were paying some attention to me at last.

I
missed my change at Oxford Circus and got off at Tottenham Court Road.
 
I caught the Northern Line down to
Charing Cross.
 
I was early but
then so was Littlemore, holding a red Costa carton this time, no doubt one of
his five-a-day.
 
He was busy scrutinising
the offers in the window of WH Smiths.
 
Despite their complexity—two for one, buy one get one for £1 or
free or half price or 20% off your next purchase over £20 etc—they really
didn’t deserve that level of attention.
 
Littlemore was in fact busily avoiding eye contact with a party of
schoolchildren in purple blazers.
 
He always maintained he had never touched a child, just looked at them
online.
 
He had confessed to
storing and selling images to people immeasurably more perverted than him.
 
I had told him all the evidence was
that ‘just looking’ led to other things.
 
He said he knew that.
 
It
just didn’t apply to him.

‘How do you solve a problem like Littlemore?’
I asked as I approached him.

He nearly jumped through the plate
glass window.

‘Chief’ –he stopped himself.

‘Not an illiterate Londoner then, Littlemore?’

I held out my hand.
 
He juggled the coffee and handed me my
flat keys.

‘How was the trip?’

He brightened up.

‘V-very good.
 
I have not been on a t-train for years.’

‘And my flat?
 
You did remember to go there?’

‘Look, Mr Becket, I wish...’

‘What do you wish for, Littlemore?’ I
stopped myself.
 
I was taking it
out on him.
 
He was the target for
my own shame and self-loathing at that moment in time.
 
I put my hand on his arm.
 
He flinched.
 

‘Let’s sit down.’

We sat side by side on a metal
bench.
 
It was meant for three
people but Littlemore took up sixty percent of the space.
 
If anyone glanced at us, they would
think he was out with his care worker.
 
Not a particularly caring one either.

‘Find anything?’

‘No,’ he said, and caught the look in
my eye.
 
‘Not at
first.
 
Then I had the idea
of fusing the system.’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve wrecked my home.’

He laughed.
 
It wasn’t a pleasant laugh.
 
It was probably a laugh that found Dungeons and Dragons
entertaining.
 
Or
just dungeons, possibly.
 
His breath stank of caffeine and rust.
 
So pungent it made my eyes swim.

‘Not at all,’ he said.
 
‘You see most systems make a noise of
some kind when they reset.
 
And it
did...’

‘Are you saying there was some kind of
surveillance device in there?’

‘Yes.’

‘And it was attached to the mains?’

‘Of course not.
 
It was attached to your broadband.’

He looked at me like I was an
idiot.
 

‘And what did you do?’ I asked.

‘I left it alone like you said.’

‘Just like I said?’

He smiled.

‘Precisely, Ch—’

I gave him a twenty.
 
He looked at it nonplussed.

‘For your train fare,’ I explained.
 
‘And a toothbrush.’

‘No,
I’m not a conspiracy theorist as such.
 
More of a theorist who writes about conspiracy theorists—you
understand the distinction? —
a
thinker who
thinks conspiracy theorists have something to say about the
zeitgeist
, the way we live our lives
today.’

‘The spirit of the age,’ I said.

She folded another piece of Romana
Rusticella into her mouth, chewed thoughtfully, and took a slurp of San
Pellegrino.
 

‘Just because I have read a lot of
conspiracy theories,’ she said, picking up her pizza wheel and waving at me,
‘doesn’t mean I believe any of them, other than in the sense I believe
anything.
 
I believe that they are
believed and that is enough.
 
It is
therefore, like any other form of knowledge, worthy of study.’

‘Epistemology,’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ she replied, tucking away
another slice.

Her name was Kat Persaud, and for some
reason she had agreed to meet me.
 
Perhaps she just liked pizza, as after I had called her the day before
from my new mobile, she rang me back and suggested a restaurant between Charing
Cross and Trafalgar Square.
 
She
was late twenties I guessed, rake thin, wearing faded jeans, and an even more
faded hippy look: long, lank hair, Lennon specs and warm, hazelnut eyes that
reminded me of Clara.
 
About Clara’s age, too.
 
Perhaps Clara would have also ended up as an academic at King’s
College, being able to wander down The Strand at lunchtime and meet legal
investigators who wanted to pick your brains about conspiracy theorists.

Of course, it wasn’t like that at
all.
 
Dr Persaud’s book was called
Conspiracism and the Sense of the Contemporary.
 
It retailed at £29.95 on Amazon, and she
told me it had ‘sold in its tens’ and was on nobody’s reading list—even
in China, where apparently there were so many undergraduates that you could
make a course out of almost anything.
 
But the book had got her onto the bill earlier in the year at ConGress
13 in San Francisco, where she had met Sir Simeon Marchant, CB,
CBE
.
 

‘It was absolutely hilarious,’ she
said.
 
‘All expenses paid, and a
hotel room with a view of the Golden Gate.
 
Poor old Simeon was as lost as me.
 
Neither of us could figure out why we were there.
 
That was the first thing he said to me:
You know, my dear, I'm here under quite
false pretences.’

With this she did a passable imitation
of the voice I had heard on the phone a few weeks before.
 
Thoughtfully, she avoided the stutter.
 
It just wasn’t PC.

‘I never met him,’ I said.

But Kat Persaud hadn’t finished her
anecdote, ‘I said something like we are the only two Brits here and we are both
fakes!
 
You know what he said?
 
Indeed
we are both flying under black flags, my dear.
 
Priceless!
 
I would have gone there just to meet him.’

Again I got that vague sense of regret
that I hadn’t met Sir Simeon Marchant.

‘Why was he there then?’ I asked.
 
‘Why did he go?’

‘Curiosity?
 
Because he’d been invited?
 
Bored?
 
I don’t know.’

‘Why was he invited?
 
Did he say?’

‘Well they had him down for a seminar
about the role of the NSA and GCHQ.
 
Someone must have known he used to work for them.’

‘GCHQ?’

‘Yes, he was terribly
knowledgeable.
 
And interesting.
 
You see he had kept up.
 
With the post-internet world, the world
where the
internet
turned out to be something
different to what was intended.
 
He
found that interesting.
 
He was
interested in everything.
 
Fascinating to talk to.’

‘Did you find him at all confused?’

‘How do you mean ‘confused’?
 
You mean any more that the rest of the
folk at ConGress 13?’

‘I mean…’

‘I know what you mean.
 
Was he going doolally?’

I nodded.
 
You didn’t hear the word ‘
doolally
’
very often.
 
I wondered if it was
politically correct.
 
Kat Persaud
continued.

‘Funny you should say that.
 
He asked me if there had been any
research linking Alzheimer’s with the Official Secrets Act!
 
How do you ensure secrecy when people
begin to lose their marbles?
 
That
is the question.
 
It is not so much
that people want to give away secrets, but that they can’t help themselves.’