The Conspiracy Theorist (27 page)

A car drew up opposite.
 
Two men got out: one from the front
passenger seat, the other from the back.
 
The driver stayed put, the engine ticking over.
 
It was the only car on the cobbled
street.
 
‘Deliveries only’, it said
farther down the road, but no one in their right mind wanted to drive down
there anyway.
 
It wrecked your
suspension.
 
You needed a four by
four to cushion you from the cobbles.
 
And it was a black Range Rover stopped outside the front of Hunt and
Carstairs LLP.
 
It might not have
been the same one I saw in Chichester—these were very popular vehicles
after all in the lease car scheme of accountants and salespeople—but one
thing was certain: they were the same guys as in the CCTV stills.

Through the darkened glass I could just
about see the driver gesturing emphatically like he was in charge.
 
The guys in suits, Berenson and Verholen,
looked over at the pub.
 
Despite
the fact I knew they could not possibly see me, I shrank back in my seat.
 
Then the Range Rover edged forward and
obscured them from view.
 
After ten
seconds or so, the vehicle moved off.
 

Berenson and Verholen were gone.

The Range Rover turned the corner of
the road and turned left.
 
It would
be going around the back of the building.
 
To the office car park.

The alarm above the door blinked for
several seconds, and then ceased.
 
This being the ‘tamper proof’ alarm system I had advised Anthony
Carstairs to invest in.
 
Feeling
very foolish, I made an anonymous 999 call from my new mobile, and went
outside.
 
I knew I should wait for
Kent’s Finest to arrive, but if the South Africans got in that quickly then
they would be out just as sharpish.
 
The sensible thing would be to wait...

I jogged across the road and looked
through the window.
 
I could see
nothing inside.
 
So I ran down to
end of the road and turned towards the car park.
 
The Range Rover was parked up close to the rear entrance to
Hunt
and Carstairs.
 

To discourage opportunist shoppers, there
was a large steel barrier across the entrance to the car park.
 
We never really used it—it was a
deterrent that went with a big sign that talked of a ‘release fee’—but we
all had keys to its padlock.
 
Besides
it was an absolute sod to move as it was rusted up and weighed about a
ton.
 

If I could get the barrier closed, I
thought, then nothing short of a tank would get out of the car park.
 
And without the Range Rover, the South
Africans would not get far.
 

To the casual onlooker it must have
looked absurd: middle-aged bloke jogging around the corner, out of breath,
suddenly decides to lift a ton of rusted steel and drag it round towards its
metal post.
 
It was like an episode
of
Jeux Sans Frontières
: man pulls
lever down, lifts it from its holder like the stylus of giant gramophone,
pushes it in an arc, stops to get his breath, pulls the barrier back towards
him and starts pushing again.
 

Meanwhile: man in Range Rover—the
opposing team—realises what is going on, beeps his horn twice and starts
to manoeuvre round.
  
Another
man dashes out of the backdoor of Hunt and Carstairs setting that alarm
off—Becket said they should have parallel systems, not such a failure
after all—and gets in the back of the Range Rover.
 
Meanwhile Becket is still slowly
closing the gate, putting his back into it as slow and stately as a lockmaster
on a canal.
 
The driver revs the
engine and starts driving towards Becket at full speed.
  
Becket jumps out of the way and
the Range Rover bumps past him and stops.
 
The Range Rover is scratched all along its side by the barrier, but it
is through.
 
Becket closes the gate
so they can’t come back.
 
Why, he
is not sure.
 

The guy gets out of the back of the
Range Rover, Verholen I think, and moves towards Becket.
 
Then he hears the sirens and gets back
in the car.
 
The other one—Berenson,
it is—stumbles across the car park, pursued by two uniforms.
 
The Range Rover takes off.
 
Leaving us to it.
 

Obviously
I had some explaining to do.
 
But
not as much as Mr Berenson who was wrestled to the ground and sat on by two of
Kent’s Finest until a van arrived.
 
Even then he didn’t seem that keen on giving up.
 
It took five uniforms to get him in the
back.
 
They could not even get a
restraint vest on him.
 
If they
were zookeepers they would have been able to tranquilise him, but as he was a human
animal, they had to content themselves with slapping him around a bit until he
got the message.

Unfortunately the local plods also
remembered me, and said they had some questions.
 
At the station, I was locked in an interview room while they
thought them up.
 
Fortunately, no
one could get hold of Carstairs this time—he was in some inaccessible
part of Whitstable, thank God—so his head clerk came from his home in the
suburbs.
 
He vouched for me, and to
my surprise I was released once I had signed the scantiest of statements.

This said that Becket had just happened
to be having a pint in the pub across the road when he witnessed a break
in.
 
The call was anonymous because
Becket was in state of shock.
 
Foolishly Becket had tried to stop them—that was true, at
least—and he didn’t know what had come over him.
 
Being an ex-copper, Becket knew he should
have just left it to the police, but he just couldn’t help himself.
 

That went down well.
 
Reluctant have-a-go
hero.
 
Should have left it
to the professionals.

I didn’t say that these were the guys
who attacked me in Chichester or killed Lee Herbert in London.
 
If I had, I would not have got out of
there before midnight.
 
Nor did I
say that I had attracted the burglars to the premises of Hunt and Carstairs, as
this too would have led to a whole set of other questions.
 
These would have led, as sure as eggs
are scrambled, to the desk of DCI Richie, and if I wanted to achieve one thing
it was to keep him out of it, for the time being at least.

Instead I asked if someone could take
me to hospital as I had landed rather heavily.
 
The head clerk kindly volunteered for this task and the
local force was relieved, internal injuries being what they are, that I
wouldn’t snuff it in their care.
 
When we got to the car, I asked my colleague to just take me home.
 
He was only too keen, he said.
 
There was a rerun of
Morse
on ITV 4.

I
stood outside my flat, looking up.
 
There were no lights on, but that meant nothing.
 
There were not meant to be any lights
on.
 
There was no black Range Rover
on the street.
 
That meant nothing
too.
 
I’m sure they would have had
a backup vehicle.
 
So I waited just
to be sure.

After five minutes or so I rang Littlemore.

‘Any news for me?’
 
I asked, keeping my voice low.

‘Two of them were in there,’ he almost
yelled.
 
‘I think...’

‘Keep your voice down,’ I hissed.
 
I backed into a doorway, and looked
around.
 
‘Go on.’

‘I think,’ Littlemore whispered, ‘it
was one of the guys in the CCTV stills...’

‘You think?’

‘They didn’t put the light on.
 
They used night vision...’

‘So how did you know?’

‘Just as he was opening the door.
 
Light from the stairwell.
 
Shaved head, no mask.’

‘I see.
 
And the other?’

‘I don’t know.
 
Taller, thinner.
 
I’m working on it now.’

‘What did they do?’

‘They took everything.
 
All the stuff in your
flat.
 
All
the bugs.
 
Cleared them
out.
 
The lot.’

‘Okay, get it all onto a disk.
 
I’ll pick it up tomorrow.’

‘Okay.’

‘And Littlemore...’

‘Yes?’ he whispered.

‘Thanks.’

The
flat was empty.
 
You would not have
known anyone had been there at all.
 
It was certainly a contrast to the approach at Hunt and Carstairs LLP.
 
I called Anthony’s mobile.
 

‘I’m surveying a scene of devastation,’
he said.
 
‘Fortunately for you, it
is just your office they took apart.’

‘So you are there?’

‘Now, if they had touched my abode I
would have been compelled to kill you, old boy.’

‘They didn’t because I interrupted
them.’

‘Thomas, they were only here in the
first place because you invited them.
 
I really don’t mind you using yourself as bait, but to use my chambers,
well I take a very dim view of it.’

‘I’m sorry, Anthony.’

‘But you are not ringing to apologise,
Tom.
 
I know you too well.
 
Now, what can I do for you?’

I told him.

There
was one message on the answerphone.
 
It was from DS Singh and he left his mobile number.
 
He said to ring whatever time.
 
It was just after nine.
 
I rang.

‘Hello, Daddy’s phone,’ a young girl’s
voice said.

There was a struggle and I could hear
Singh say, ‘Give it here,’ in an undertone.
 
A door was closed firmly.
 
Then, ‘Mr Becket?
 
Thanks for ringing back.
 
I’m afraid I have some bad news for
you.’

What
happened next turned out to mean nothing at all.
 
Turned out to?
 
Who am I kidding?
 
I even knew it at the time: what I was
about to do meant nothing to me, or in the scheme of things, nothing at
all.
 
Nothing to
anyone.

I was in a pub in New Cross, South
London.
 
Not quite collective kicking
out time, but individually I had been close on a number of occasions.
 
The bar staff looked at me with the
exasperated patience of people who know they have created the problem they now
face.
 
I had shown the CCTV stills of
my attackers to a number of the self-styled anarchists who shared the squat,
albeit briefly, with the late Lee Herbert.
 
To put it mildly they were not too enthusiastic to talk to
me.
 
I expected them to say they
were sick of coppers hanging around asking them questions—it is amazing
how often you hear such clichés—but their reticence went deeper than
that.
 
They just hated the State,
they said.
 
They could see why they
needed to catch Lee’s killers, but not why they took poor Sistina into
detention.
 
I said that was the
problem with the State: one thing came with another.

As I say, I knew it meant nothing.
 
Lee Herbert meant nothing, it
seemed.
 
To the
Met, anyway.
 
But at least I
was going through the motions of asking questions—unlike the local police,
DI Spittieri and his shocked, young acolyte.
 
What hope did we have if law enforcement was in their hands?
 
It was clear to me they had been told
to rein in their investigations into Lee Herbert’s death.

So I bought people drinks and drank
doubles myself.
 
I had another
thought deep inside of me, another desire that I found I could not resist.
 
The bar staff frowned, mistrust grew
around me like bacteria in a Petri dish, or moss on
a stonewall
.
 
And I was stonewalled any number of
times as I asked my uncomfortable questions.
 
But I had just enough whiff of the Old Bill about me that no
one offered to punch my lights out.
 
For the time being, anyway.

It ended with the landlord—the
old fashioned sort you so rarely see these days—making use of another
clichéd phrase you so rarely
hear
these days either: don’t you think you’ve had enough, son?
 
Landlords
and priests
, I shouted as I left.
 
Landlords and fucking
priests, the only people who call you ‘son’.
 

I went to a pub down the road, and then
another.
 
I left that one, walked
back to the one before, was thrown out, was distracted by the smell of food, bought
a kebab from a take-away and went for a piss down a back alley.

That was where they caught up with me.

There were a couple of them, which was
a relief.
 
I was hoping for one,
but I would accept two.
 
There
could have been more.
 
There would
have been enough takers, but who wants to share out the proceeds more than two
ways?
 
They had seen plenty of
blokes like me, on their way home from their cosy little office jobs, having a
few drinks with their mates, deciding to have a few more, getting cut off from
the crowd, or the others going home.
 
Pissed as a newt and easy pickings.

That was Becket.

Except they were wrong.
 
I was waiting for them.
 
I
didn’t know who they would be exactly.
 
They were what they call ‘randoms’.
 
Like I said, it didn’t matter.
 
But I knew someone would try and roll me.
 
Perhaps I wanted punishing for letting
Mat Janovitz get killed, or for Meg, or for Clara, or for letting Anthony Carstairs
down.
 
Perhaps I just wanted to see
if anyone was following me in a black Range Rover.
 

But these two were none of the
above.
 
They were a couple of
junkies, I guessed, perhaps even from Lee Herbert’s squat—it didn’t
matter—faded T-shirts of forgotten bands, painfully thin arms and one sorry
blade between them.
 
Just for
show.
 
I wasn’t sure either of them
was strong enough to pierce someone else’s skin.

At last, I felt a calm descend on
me.
 
I handed over my wallet to the
one without the knife.
 
Then I
rubbed the kebab in the other one’s face.
 
Legerdemain.
 
I took the
knife from him and snapped it against the wall next to his head.
 
I swivelled and kicked the arm holding
the wallet.
 
He screamed like he
had been burnt and dropped it.
 
The
other one staggered off down the alley, so I had to take out my frustration on
his mate.
 

I pressed his sorry little head against
the wall, wanting to smash it out of its pointless existence.
 
But I just held him there, my thumb in
his sternal notch, his pulse racing away under the skin, and whispered in his
ear.
 
I told him this was the
turning point everyone told him about.
 
This was it.
 
He would not
get another chance.
 
I could kill
him tonight or let him go.
 
He had
a choice.
 
If I let him go, he had
to change.
 
He knew how to change,
didn’t he?
 
People had told him
that.
 
People he knew.
 
They were the people he should talk
to.
 
Not the guy who had run
away.
 
He had left him to die.
 
That was his choice.
 
I increased the pressure and felt him
fade, his pulse flutter.
 
This was
the choice, I said, right now.
 
This
was the time of choice.

I went on like that for some time.
 
He trembled and wet himself.
 
So I picked up my wallet and left him
there.
 
I had no hope he would
change.
 
Or that once the adrenalin
stopped flowing, it would not mean anything more to him than yet another
disaster in his short pitiful life.
 
Just another lie to tell himself.
 

As I said, it meant nothing to me at
all.
 
But, at least, I felt better.

Mat
Janovitz’s death had hit me hard.
 
It was just so undeserved.
 
Despite all my criticisms of him—he was in the wrong job, he was
playing at it, you could not do this work at a distance, from a computer, it
was in your face, dirty and real—it was not his fault he was killed.
 
Besides, the same critique could be
applied to me these days.
 
I was
the one who did not want be drawn in.
 
I was the moth to the flame.
 
What did Carstairs say?
 
Janovitz was my collateral damage.
 

The fact that someone, according to DS
Singh, had gone into his room at Chichester hospital and administered a lethal
dose of something or other meant they were worried about a positive ID.
 
And this also meant they would be after
me, too.
 

So I had left my flat and the new
mobile phone just in case they had a trace on that by now, and gone up to
London.
 
I thought about going to Littlemore’s
place to retrieve the disk but then I thought it would be better to leave it
with him for the time being.
 
Hopefully the trail did not lead to him as well.
 
I didn’t want another death on my
conscience.

There was no reason why they would
think I would go to Meg’s.
 
I just
wanted to be with her.
 
To turn up and see what happened.
 
But I couldn’t do it.
 
To see her meant I would have to explain the state I was in.
 
So I found myself in New Cross,
pretending to investigate something, but all the time looking for someone
stupid enough to take on the mood that flowed through my veins like battery
acid.

I caught the overground to central
London and checked into the same chain of budget hotels as the one I used in
Chichester.
 
It even had the same
acrylic sunflower prints on the wall.
 
The only difference was the London version was twice the
price.
 
Breakfast was the same however.
 
But, in morning, I still had no
appetite—for continental or full English.

I walked along the Embankment, past the
London Eye and crossed Westminster Bridge.
 
The Houses of Parliament stood before me.
 
I thought about my dream of a few days
before, the truncated and strangely bandaged Big Ben, glad that I wasn’t a
prophet, after all.
 
So many people
had dreamt of towers falling or of planes hitting skyscrapers just before
9/11.
 
But then I suppose people do
that all the time.
 
It is only when
an event actually occurs, that you get a sense of déjà vu.
 

That’s
just broken my dream
, we say.

The
offices of Hawesworth and Breckenridge LLP were on Victoria Street.
 
I walked past the entrance three or
four times before realising they were located in a new office block just along
from Microsoft’s HQ.
 
The building
was ex-government, half empty according to the board in reception, and there
were the usual efficient and directive East European receptionists on the front
desk.
 
I rather expected a more old
fashioned setting for Sir Simeon Marchant’s solicitors, but that just shows you
should never trust your assumptions.
 

I was surprised that Miles Breckenridge
was prepared to see me at all.
 
I
really should start paying Anthony Carstairs a retainer, I thought, as I took
the lift up to the third floor—stairs were not an option.
 
It was the sort of place that your pass
programmed the lift to let you off at one floor and one floor only.
 
The sort of security that put up the
costs and kept half the building untenanted.
 
But also an indication of the sort of legal practice I was
dealing with.
 
No
one wandering off the street to be dealt with by interns here.

Miles Breckenridge was younger than what
I had in my mind.
 
Grey suit, white
shirt, blue tie, black shoes—the very model of a corporate clone.
 
I knew it would upset him but I had to
check if he was personally dealing with Sir Simeon Marchant’s affairs.
 
He smiled as if he had heard it all
before.

‘You think I’m too young,’ he said.

‘You’re just not what I expected.’

‘And in your job you are used to being
fobbed off with the help?’

Again the sort of smile that suggested
he was about as far from ‘the help’ as could be achieved.
 
I suspected that Miles Breckenridge had
never been the help, and had a lot of help not to be.
 

‘I didn’t mean to be rude.
 
It’s just I expected someone more Sir
Simeon’s vintage.’

‘Most people of his vintage have
retired by now, or passed away.’

He sounded regretful but it left
nothing on him.
 
There were no
traces of regret.
 
No lines at the
corners of his eyes.
 
It was like
staring at an amiable mask.
 
His
eyes twinkled with amusement as he looked at me.
 
I suddenly felt very shabby and worn in my black suit.
 
I had managed to get most of the signs
of last night’s tussle out of it, but I still felt dirty.

‘So, you work for Anthony Carstairs?’
he asked.

‘Well, I work with him.
 
I'm freelance.
 
This case has nothing to do with him.’

‘Except his chambers were burgled last
night I understand?’ he said, in the manner of one who had just won a trick at
some card game I hadn’t heard of.
 
‘And that had something to do with this case?’

There was no point in arguing.

‘Yes.’

‘And Mrs Forbes-Marchant engaged you to
retrieve payment for her father’s boat.
 
A feat I understand you achieved with some aplomb.
 
Remarkable, in fact.’