The Conspiracy Theorist (13 page)

Maybe I said that.
 
Maybe I just thought it.
 
But the receptionist gave Meg a sympathetic
glance and left.
 

For my part, I crawled into the bed and
fell fast asleep.

It
was morning.
 
Meg was up and
dressed, standing by the window, sipping tea.
 
Behind her, a Cathedral spire rose behind the trees, as
unreal as a scene from a film.
 
She
had her back to me and for a moment I could not pinpoint where we were in place
or time.
 
Then she turned and
smiled her familiar smile, and the loss came rushing back to me.
 
The self-pity and pain of the last few
days caught up with their real cause and broke over me like a wave.

I had not wept for over a year.
 
I thought I had used up all my tears,
but they came back to me now like an old friend.
 
Meg put her cup down carefully and sat on the bed.
 
She took my hand.

‘I know,’ she said.
 
‘It gets me like that sometimes, too.’

After
breakfast we walked around the Cathedral Close.
 
In my opinion all other English cathedrals seem slightly
puny when compared to Canterbury.
 
But, for me, they all share the same thing: a sense of a world where
faith alone, often over many slow-moving centuries, could create a space of
such ambition and wonder.
 
Inside, we
wandered around with the tourists:
 
flying buttresses, Sutherland’s
Noli
Me Tangere
, Piper’s colourful tapestry, the window by Chagall like it had
been dipped in thick, sticky blood.
 

Meg asked, ‘Do you still go to church,
Thomas?’
 

‘I go in churches,’ I said.
 
‘I like churches.
 
And cathedrals.’

‘But you don’t go to services.’

I thought of Sunny Prajapati’s memorial
service.

‘It used to be such a big part of your
life,’ she said.

The trouble with people who are close
to you
is
that they think they have the right to
remind you of things you would rather forget.
 
About traits in your character, too.
 
I walked away before I made the same
mistake.
 

The stained glass worked on my
concussed brain like a kaleidoscope, and perhaps because of this, I thought of
the past few days not so much as a chain of events but fragments of a
puzzle.
 
Perhaps there was no
picture; perhaps none of it made sense; the pieces were all part of an
illusion, a lie and the act of putting them together would only serve to create
another falsehood.
 
But I had a
strong desire to put them together, nevertheless.

Meg wanted to see the famous Arundel
Tomb, the subject of Philip Larkin’s poem, which someone had thoughtfully
inscribed in their best calligraphy and framed next to the monument.
 
There they were: the knight and his
lady laying side by side, their dogs at the end of the bed, a touching domestic
detail.
 
Her hand
in his.
 
Her
little finger broken off.
 
His knightly foot on his faithful hound.

‘
What
will survive of us is love
,’ Meg quoted.

‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ I thought.

We stood there for a very long
time.
 
She had always wanted to
visit places like this, tourist places—she loved Canterbury before I
spoiled it by living there—I was always the one who wanted to move on, go
somewhere else.
 
She once said that
our differences were our strength.
 
I would have agreed until we reached breaking point.
 
Sometimes I wondered if it was the accumulation
of all those little differences over time that finally did for us
;
the attrition of small misapprehensions wearing us down
over the years.
 
Whatever it was,
when the breaking point came, we had no resilience, or perhaps we just could
not stand the sight of each other anymore.

How can love survive the death of a
child?

A voice in my head told me to leave
it.
 
Leave it, Becket, the voice
said.

I asked Meg which way we would be
driving back.
 
Not taking her eyes
off the tomb, she told me.
 

‘Do you mind if we make a slight
detour?’ I asked.

The
offices of PiTech were set back in their own grounds, parkland by the look of
it, just outside Crawley.
 
It was a
location convenient for the airport, the motorway and, of course, a shortish
drive from Lancing, where the Prajapatis lived.
 
The main building was not dissimilar to a cathedral in its
own way—just of a different age.
 
The sort of place the medieval devout and powerful would have built had
they access to the technology:
 
reinforced
concrete, glass twice as strong as slate and reflecting God’s glory back to the
surrounding woodland, solar panels making use of nature’s benefice, a single
wind-turbine like a slowly spinning cross.
 

Meg waited in the car, saying she had
to catch up with her emails.
 
I
said I would be quick; I just wanted to thank someone in person.
 

The front desk resembled the bridge of
the starship
Enterprise
except that instead
of deep space, 24-hour news scrolled behind the receptionists.
 
It must be very distracting to have
that on all day, I thought, or soul-destroying—one or the other.
 
But the
staff were
very professional and did not bat a false eyelash at a man with a bandaged head
who looked like he had just limped off the set of
The Mummy
in the studio next door.
 
I handed over my card, made my request and was directed to a
leather sofa the size of a double bed.
 

Resisting the temptation to fall
asleep, I watched the receptionist make some perplexed calls.
 
After a while she stood and sashayed
over to me.

‘I know,’ I said.
 
‘He’s out of the country, in a meeting,
on the golf course, with his accountants, or all of the above.’

She looked at me strangely.

‘Mr Carmody will see you now, sir.
 
I will take you up.
 
It is only one floor.
 
Are you able to use the stairs?’

I had another octogenarian moment.

‘If I take them one at a time,’ I
replied.

We took the lift to the Mezzanine
floor.
 
It was scattered with
beanbags in green, red, orange faded by the sunlight from the high
windows.
 
Games consoles lay
discarded on the floor, screens blinked on the walls—no, 24 hour news up
here—there was a pool table, air-hockey, a pinball machine, an old Space
Invaders unit and so on.
 
All of it decidedly retro.

It was deserted.
 
I thought of the PiTech whizzkids at
Sunny Prajapati’s memorial service.

‘Playtime over?’ I asked the
receptionist.

She looked at me dryly.

‘It’s never over,’ she said.

I liked her.
 
She had a good line in put-downs.
 
She needed it, I suppose, with her looks.
 

‘Most of them are out enjoying the
sunshine,’ she added.
 
‘Or at
lunch.’

She left her words hanging in the air
and strode through them like perfume.

The cafeteria was at the back of the
building, facing north, so it was not as hot here despite the floor-to-ceiling
windows.
 
They looked out over the
parkland and a ruined folly on the hill.
 
Inside the seating area was as big as a football pitch: white tables,
white chairs, minimalist art on the white walls, it only needed Swedish
meatballs and it could have been IKEA.

‘There’s Mr Carmody over there,’ the
receptionist said.
 

Vincent Carmody sat alone by the window
with a tray of food in front of him.
 
The receptionist waved informally at her CEO.
 
The place was full of contradictions.
 
He waved back and gestured for me to
join him.

‘Can I get you some food or
refreshments?’ she asked.
 
‘It’s
all free.’

‘One of the perks of the job?’

‘Mr Carmody doesn’t believe in charging
people to come to work.’

It sounded pat, like she had learnt it
at her induction, but the sentiment seemed genuine enough.

‘I’ll just go and grab a coffee, I
said.
 
‘Just to be polite.’

‘I’ll bring it across.
 
What type?’

‘Instant,’ I said.
 
‘Nescafe, water, milk, two sugars that
sort of thing.’

‘How exotic,’ she said.
 
‘I’ll do my best.’

I limped over to Carmody.
 
He was taking a call on a Bluetooth
device tucked behind his ear.
 
He
held it there like a Bee Gee trying to reach a Scouse falsetto.
 
If he was surprised by my appearance,
he didn’t show it.
 
He shook my
hand without getting up, and continued speaking.
 
In Russian.
 
He gestured for me to sit down before turning
in his seat to look out of the window.
 

Carmody was wearing a pink open-necked
shirt that accented a deep tan from his throat to the top of his shaven
head.
 
I guessed he was early to
mid forties and attended a gym regularly—on the days he wasn’t doing
triathlons.
 
Any fat on his stomach
was compacted behind ridges of muscle that pressed against his pink shirt like
wet sand.

The coffee arrived.
 
The receptionist stalked away.
 
I sipped with the side of my mouth that
still worked.
 
I didn’t know what
the coffee was, but it wasn’t Nescafe.
 
The call ended abruptly without valedictions.
 
Vincent Carmody focused on me.

‘That all you’re having?
 
Get yourself some food.
 
It’s all free.’

‘So I’ve been told.
 
You don’t believe in charging people to
come to work.’

He smiled without the light in his eyes
changing.
 
‘Or my visitors, Mr
Becket.’

I resolved to be polite for the time
being.

‘Thanks for seeing me.’

‘Always pleased to meet a local hero.’

‘So, you know what happened to me?’

‘And Mr Janovitz.
 
He works for us from time to time.
 
How is he, by the way?’

‘I think they call it a ‘minimally
conscious state’,’ I said.

‘Not a full coma then?’ he looked me hard
in the eyes and saw what he was looking for.
 
‘You did what you could.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Yes, well, if it’s any consolation I
have beaten myself up on this sort of thing before, too.
 
The better option is the coma, any day.’

I recalled his army record and the
suggestion from Janovitz that Carmody had been in the SAS.

‘The country is going to the dogs,’ he
added.
 
‘Nowhere is safe these
days.
 
Not even Chichester.
 
These random attacks...’

‘It wasn’t random.’

He sighed like he had also seen that
sort of thing before.
 
The paranoia of victims.

‘Believe me if it wasn’t random,’ he
said, ‘they would have chosen another place for it.
 
Town centre like that, too many variables.’

‘They wanted it to appear random.
 
That’s their MO.’

Again,
that stare
.

‘Interesting,’ he said, but left it at
that.
 
He didn’t say which part he found
interesting: the facts of the case or my many delusions.
  
I let him muse on it, and went
on.

‘I also wanted to thank you for paying
my client.
 
I know you didn’t have
to...’

‘We most definitely had to.
 
Sunny made a commitment—perhaps
he shouldn’t have from the company account—and we had to honour it.
 
My finance team never brought the
matter to me.’

‘Understandable.’

‘Yes, understandable.
 
But I pay them to think as well as save
me money.
 
However, it is all
sorted now, I trust?’

‘Yes, and for you?
 
Now the boat has been delivered...’

His face went blank.
 
I knew it was a trick intelligence
trainers teach you.
 
Either that, or
he really hadn’t a clue what I was talking about.

‘The boat,’ I said.
 
‘Did it arrive okay?’

Now his look suggested that my bang on the
head was worse than he thought.
 
‘Haven’t the foggiest.
 
I
assume someone’s sorting it out.’
 

I could see that, in his head at least,
he had moved onto the next meeting.
 
I pushed my chair back and stood to go.
 

‘Well, I'm sorry I interrupted your
call.
 
Good news from MoEx, anyway.’

He looked up.
 
‘You speak Russian?’

‘Enough to get by.
 
I did a stint with Interpol when I was with the Met.’

‘When?’

‘2006-8.’

He smiled, ‘Interesting times.’

He waited for me to say more, but I
didn’t.
 
There was no point.
 
For some reason, I had a feeling he
knew all about me, anyway.
 
There
was no point heading up a defence contractor if you couldn’t find out about
people.

‘I will walk you to the door,’ he said.

The cafeteria was almost empty
now.
 
Out in the mezzanine, there
were a few people lounging on the beanbags playing computer games, or
recharging their creativity in other ways.
 
They paid their boss absolutely no attention.

‘So PiTech was floated on the Moscow
Stock Exchange?’
I asked.

‘No, no, no.
 
That’s
our subsidiary.
 
Just called ‘Pi’,
but as in the symbol.
 
That’s how
we came to the attention of Vassiliov in the first place.’

‘I thought the failed take-over and
Sunny’s death would have been a drag on your value?’

‘We are not floated in this
country.
 
But our subsidiary’s
value went up because we resisted Vassiliov.
 
They think a higher bidder will come in.’

‘That was the plan all along?’

‘Heavens, no!
 
I was against the merger from day one.
 
It was our Indian investors and Sunny
of course.’

‘Sunny?’ I asked.
 
‘He was
for
the merger?’

He didn’t answer until we were in the
lift.

‘Sunny wanted to cash in.
 
His old man had died and there was no
need to carry on.
 
He could have
the sort of life he always wanted.
 
Good luck to him.’

‘Sailing.’

‘Among other things.’

‘And you were split on the matter?’

‘Split is the wrong word.
 
We disagreed, yes.
 
But we had not fallen out over it.
 
It was business.
 
What you need to understand about Sunny
is that he had not one iota of business sense in that great brain of his.
 
Fundamentally he didn’t know his arse
from his elbow.’

‘Nicely put,’ I said.
 
‘I’m glad you didn’t say that at his
memorial service.’

The lift doors opened.
 
Several faces stared in.
 
Carmody pressed the button to close the
doors.
 
He kept his finger there.

‘What’s going on here, Mr Becket?’
 
His voice had gone hard and deadly
serious.
 
It was perhaps the way he
used to speak to his NCOs when they got out of line.
 
It only served to provoke me further.

‘I think there’s a link between Sunny’s
disappearance and the murder of Sir Simeon Marchant, the man who sold him the
boat.’

He looked away.

‘If you had any concerns you should
have raised them with the police.
 
Or at Sunny’s inquest.’

‘I missed it,’ I said acidly.
 
‘I was in hospital.’