The Conspiracy Theorist (5 page)

I bought the drinks and steered Jenny
Forbes-Marchant upstairs, where the only other occupants were a group of young
women with toddlers in pushchairs.
 
This being Knightsbridge, these were no single mums whiling away a few
hours before returning to the delights of daytime television.
 
They were attractive twenty-somethings, pleasantly
plump, confident of their place in the world.
 
Each woman had a pint of real ale before her and was either
knitting or crocheting.
 
It looked
like a scene from a Sunday supplement.

‘Very fashionable,’ Jenny
Forbes-Marchant whispered.
 
‘Knitting circles.’

With a large G&T in front of her,
my companion seemed to have composed herself after the scene in the Persimmon
Gallery.
 
She smiled at the babies sleeping
blissfully under knitted (or crocheted) blankets.
 
Perhaps they were on the beer too.

‘Do you have children, Mr Becket?’

‘No,’ I replied.

She smiled, ‘I have one away at
boarding school.
 
I miss her
terribly.’

Once more, she began to cry, apologised
for doing so, and started crying again.
 
I patted her hand and assured her it was all right.
 
I had seen it before: someone surprised
at her own grief.
 
We were starting
to attract glances from the Knightsbridge Knitting Circle.
 
Fortunately Jenny Forbes-Marchant was
unable to see them nudging each other and nodding over at us.
 
The young mums thought they were
witnessing the end of an affair, and one that put Becket in a very bad
light.
 

I wondered why I had lied about not
having children.
 
Perhaps because I did not want to explain myself to Jenny
Forbes-Marchant.
 
And I
wanted to hear to her story however many gins it required.

The
last time Jenny Forbes-Marchant had seen her father alive was the night before
his mugging.
 
He had turned up on the
doorstep of her London home unannounced.
 
This was not an unusual state of affairs, she told me as we sat in the Lamb
and Flag that afternoon.
 
Sir
Simeon often popped in to see his daughter when he was in London—he
usually stayed at his club—and more frequently since he had become
‘confused.’

‘Confused?’

‘Oh,’ she said.
 
‘Nothing sinister.
 
Just the way old people get.
 
That was the reason he was selling his
yacht.
 
Said he couldn’t handle her
anymore.
 
It was not so much the
sailing he said, but the navigation, the charts and suchlike.’

‘And he didn’t seem under threat in any
way?
 
Afraid?’

‘No,’ she looked at me sharply.
 
‘Why would he?’

I did not want to start any hares
running so I said: ‘
That
night on the phone to me, he
sounded quite agitated.
 
Something
about a missing sailor?’

‘I thought you knew,’ she said.
 
‘He sold his yacht to this Indian
gentlemen, who got himself lost at sea.’

‘He died?’

‘I’m afraid so.
 
People blamed Daddy for selling him the
boat.’

‘And what did your father say?’

‘Oh Daddy… I don’t know.
 
He was one of those people who read too
much into things.
 
He saw
conspiracies everywhere.’

‘Conspiracies?’

‘Oh, you know.
 
Someone had bumped him off.
 
The Indian.
 
That sort of thing.’

‘Why would they do that?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.
 
Something to do with
his business.
 
Business
rivals, something like that.’

I recalled Sir Simeon’s phone call to
me the night before he died.
 
About
how Becket was his man if a case had not been investigated thoroughly
enough.
 
His daughter seemed
distracted as if she could not understand why I was asking such oblique
questions.
 
I put my hand over
hers.

‘Tell me about the boat,’ I said.
 
‘The one the Indian bought.’

The
Cassandra
had been built shortly
after the death of Sir Simeon Marchant’s wife.
 
According to his daughter, her parents had not long moved to
Hayling Island from Cheltenham, where she had grown up and gone to
school—the famous Ladies’ College, where her own daughter now boarded.
 
‘It was a wrench uprooting the whole
family like that,’ Jenny told me.
 
‘Mummy never wanted to move.
 
I think it killed her in the end.’

Jenny had already left home by that
time.
 
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I
was living in London and married to Peter.
 
But the Cheltenham house was still the family home, the
place where one grew up, where one came back to.’
 
She must have been early thirties then, I guessed, her
father seventy-five or seventy-six?
 
‘He was quite old when they started a family,’ she told me.
 
‘In the end there was only me, an only
child.
 
Mummy was much younger than
him, for all the good it did her.
 
It was his second marriage.’

I pointed out that there was no mention
of that in the obituaries.
 
Jenny said,
‘Oh, he never talked about it.
 
So
I guess his chums never knew.
 
I
only found out by accident.’

I steered her back to what she knew of
the sale of the
Cassandra
.
 
‘She was his pride and joy.
 
He commissioned her from his own plans
and she was a rather lovely yacht.
 
Cost him all of Mummy’s savings I know that.
 
But as soon as he became slightly ill, he whacked the thing
on eBay and tried to flog it.
 
Have
a look.’

She nodded at my iPad.

I went online.
 
You could still access the eBay listing
for:
Yacht ‘Cassandra’—35ft sloop
rigged sailing yacht
.
  
It
said the item was ‘used’ and that the sale had ‘ended:
 
17 Aug, 2013 0710 BST.’
 
The price: £75,000.
 
I whistled.
 
No wonder Jenny Forbes-Marchant was so exercised about
it.
 
 
I flicked through the photographs—there were twelve of
them—of different aspects of the boat.
 
The exterior was nothing exceptional to my untrained eye.
 
She had a navy blue hull, a varnished
wooden cabin and a single white mast.
 
A red ensign fluttered at the stern, there was a large wooden wheel and
a wooden ladder hung off the port side.
 
Inside, the same varnished wood—Iroko, the listing said, sometimes
known as African teak—in the galley, the two cabins, the impressive
navigation area, even the heads.
 
There was a lot of detail, but then it was a lot of money.
 
To my eye, it was all very impressive
and I could see why someone had fallen in love with it.

That someone was an Indian businessman
called Sunil Prajapati.

Jenny Forbes-
Marchant’s
story of the purchase was based on how her father had described it to her the
evening before he died.
 
It must
have been an interesting conversation, I thought.
 
Sir Simeon telling his daughter how he had sold the boat to
an experienced sailor, and now he
was
being maligned
for it.
 
And she would have been
busily checking that he had received payment before the purchaser had sailed
off into the sunset.
 
Neither issue was fully resolved, it seemed, but there were a
number of facts that seemed incontrovertible.
 

According to Jenny Forbes-Marchant, it
was the fact that Mr Prajapati wanted to sail the
Cassandra
around the world that attracted her father.
 
The thought of the old girl stopping
off in ports across the globe filled Sir Simeon with pleasure—especially
after the Indian had promised to send him a photo from time to time.
 

On their first meeting, Sir Simeon was
impressed by the man and took him out on the
Cassandra
that very afternoon.
 
The prospective purchaser seemed very knowledgeable about
such craft; although Sir Simeon did think it odd he had brought no kit with
him.
 
The old man did not know the
sailing club at Shoreham-on-Sea, and had only put in
there
once, but it seemed that Mr Prajapati was well-regarded in the area.

Sir Simeon, according to his daughter,
thought it a little
infra dig
to
check up on a buyer.
 
After all,
the chap was well educated (Lancing and Oxford, apparently) and ran some sort
of IT company with offices in London and Bombay—or Mumbai as you were
meant to call it these days—as well as down the road at Crawley.

In addition, it seemed, Sir Simeon
spent quite a bit of time with the man—much more than other prospective
buyers—presumably because he wasn’t quite sure as to what he expected of
the man.
 
Prajapati had all the
relevant sailing
bona fides
but they
were all overseas.
 
Marchant who
had sailed across the Bombay Sound pointed out that conditions were very
different in the Solent.
 
The
Indian had laughed as if this were merely an example of English humour.
 
At that it seemed the old man’s hackles
had risen—a thing easily achieved according to his daughter—and he
said he needed to think about it.
 
Prajapati had looked surprised but was suddenly respectful, and had
apparently said, ‘
Whatever
you think is best, sir.’

The phrase played on Sir Simeon’s mind
over the following week.
 
There was
other interest in the
Cassandra,
but
it was mainly what could politely be termed ‘enthusiasts’ or impolitely
‘time-wasters.’
 
The worst, he told
his daughter, were the marine equivalent of tyre-kickers, who thought the yacht
was between £10k and £15k overpriced.
 
Sir Simeon had soon tired of justifying his pride and joy to them.

So after a week or so, Marchant called
Prajapati to see if he was still interested and was willing to pay the asking
price.
 
The younger man arrived
almost immediately—certainly within the hour—and was in a business
suit, having been in Chichester with his lawyers.
 
It was a stroke of luck really; he was able to write a
cheque for £75,000 on the spot.
 

Prajapati had seemed distracted when he
was shown the boat again.
 
Sir
Simeon insisted on showing him the navigation area in detail and the ‘little
wrinkles’ every yacht had.
 
Prajapati, his mind elsewhere, said it was quite all right he was
familiar with the type of boat.
 
Sir Simeon had reminded him that the
Cassandra
was most definitely not of any sort of ‘type’—she was in a class of her
own—and if Mr Prajapati was not interested, perhaps they should call the
whole thing off.
 

Jenny Forbes-Marchant found it
amusing—after two gins, anyway—how the poor man must have got it in
the neck from her father.
 
But when
she described the financial arrangements, she became more serious.

Prajapati wanted to take possession of
the
Cassandra
on his birthday, which
was, as fate would have it, the very next day.
 
It was an auspicious day, he informed Sir Simeon.
 
He had handed over the cheque as an
article of faith, he said.
 
But Sir
Simeon said he would not cash it until the registration papers had been
formally transferred—it would not be right to do so—and this would
not happen, realistically, until after the weekend.
 
Prajapati said it did not really matter as the cheque was
‘as good as cash’, but Sir Simeon might as well do it now.
 
The old man relented and said Prajapati
could pick up the
Cassandra
tomorrow,
in good time to catch low water and take advantage of the eastbound tide
towards Shoreham-on-Sea.

‘All I can say is, he must have been
very persuasive,’ Jenny Forbes-Marchant had said to me.
 
‘Getting round Daddy in that way.
 
No one else managed it.’

The next day Prajapati had finally
turned up at 2 pm in a car driven by another man, also Indian apparently, also
very enthusiastic about the boat.
 
He apologised for getting ‘Sunny’ to him late, as there had been a large
family lunch at the Shoreham Sailing Club, were everyone was awaiting the
hero’s return.
 
Sir Simeon asked if
Prajapati had been drinking, but he denied it.
 
The other man verified this.
 
Prajapati said they were late because he had stupidly
forgotten to bring his ‘kit’ from his other boat.
 
They had to stop and buy something en route.
 
He took a brand-new pair of deck shoes
and a buoyancy aid from the boot of the car.
 
The other man hugged his friend and drove off.

At the sight of the equipment—or
lack of it—Sir Simeon became worried again.
 
He informed Prajapati where the life jackets and severe
weather clothing were stowed.
 
The
old man repeated his offer to accompany him on his maiden voyage in the
Cassandra
to Shoreham.
 
In reply, Prajapati asked him how this
would look to his awaiting family and friends.

Sir Simeon said he understood, but
quite frankly he had not.
 
In his
opinion, there could be no pride where the sea was concerned.
 
Prajapati changed the subject by asking
if the cheque had cleared okay.

‘The man was always more comfortable
with business matters,’ Sir Simeon had told his daughter.
 

But he had not cashed the cheque, as
the registration papers had not been amended yet.
 
Prajapati seemed disconcerted when he heard this, but then
repeated that it was the same as cash.

‘
I
promise to pay the Bearer on demand
!’ he joked.

‘Yes, what a joke!’ Jenny
Forbes-Marchant commented.

After the disappearance of the
Cassandra
and it was all over the news,
she had rung her father to get the whole story.
 
She advised him to
cash the cheque immediately.
 
But
Sir Simeon said he felt honour bound to hold on until the missing sailor was
found.
 
Jenny had argued with her
father.
 
It was Mummy’s money after
all, not his.
 
It would be her
money one day, she told him, so he must not just think of himself and his own
honour.