The Conspiracy Theorist (18 page)

Spittieri made a note.

Richie stood, ‘Here we go again.
 
Get him out of here.’

Spittieri didn’t look too pleased.
 
Richie said he would brief him in
private.
 
I was about to say something.
 
I wasn’t sure what—always a bad
sign—but probably something to do with not being too pleased about being
a murder suspect either.
 
Once
again, Carstairs put his hand on my arm.
 
And I shut up before I made it worse.
 
We stood to leave, but Richie had to have the final word.

‘You look after yourself, Becket,’ he
said.
 
‘We wouldn’t want you going
mental again.’

It
was dark.
 
Anthony insisted on
driving me home.
 
The deep, leather
seats of the Jag made me want to weep with gratitude.
 
We parked outside my flat.

‘Perhaps, you’re wondering what Richie
meant?’ I asked.

‘It was a despicable thing to say,’
Anthony said.

He continued staring ahead.

‘You already knew,’ I said.
 
‘Meg?’

He nodded.
 
A minute passed.

‘Did she tell you how it got me?’

‘No,’ he said.
 
‘No, she didn’t.’

‘Well, it wasn’t like this.
 
I realised I was powerless.
 
I couldn’t stop crying.
 
It was as if it was the only thing I
could
do.’

I
was a vessel leaking tears, sneezing tears, tears ripped from me in great
anguished cries...

‘It was nothing like this, Anthony.’

‘Tom, I can’t imagine what it was like...’

I had a momentary vision of his
daughter on a pony as it jumped a red-and-white barred fence.

I shook his hand and got out.

Sometimes it is better to say nothing.

The
flat felt different.
 
I wandered
about a bit, drawing curtains, putting the kettle on, checking the fridge,
normal stuff.
 
But it did no good.
 
Nothing did any good.

So I rang Meg.

‘You told Carstairs.
 
About us.
 
About Clara.’

I was gasping.
 
It no longer sounded like me.

‘Calm down, Thomas!
 
He asked me.
 
He was concerned,’ she said.
 
‘What is strange is that you do not tell your friends.’

‘Oh no, what is strange is having
Hammonde crawling all over your emotions and then propositioning you.
 
That is really strange!
 
And hardly ethical either.’

‘Thomas, I'm going to put the phone
down now.’

Neither of us said anything.
 
But she didn’t put the phone down.
 
A minute ticked by.

I could hear my own breathing echoing
back at me.

‘Meg?’

‘Yes?’

She sounded calm.
 
No tears.
 
I hated her for it.
 
I hated her strength.

‘I told them about the
Haloperidol.
 
I told the police.’

She sighed as if I had missed the
point.

‘Now you will leave it, right?
 
Tom?
 
It is really not good for your health.’

‘Perhaps I should stick to matrimonial
cases...’

‘Your record is not so good on them
either.’

I laughed politely.
 
I didn’t feel like it, but I wanted to
erase the memory of my anger with her.
 

‘So, you’re giving up?’

It was a question she had asked me once
before.
 
A long
time ago.

‘Yes, I’m giving up.’

Next
I rang Jenny Forbes-Marchant’s mobile.
 
I expected to get her answerphone but she took it.
 
There was a hubbub of chatter in the
background, the clink of glasses like she was in a pub or restaurant.
 
She sounded guarded and then apologised
for not recognising my landline number.
 
She was at some dreary private view, and needed to find a quiet
corner.
 

I heard her heels click on the parquet
or whatever it was.
 
I imagined her
in full sail and almost regretted what I had to say to her.

‘So how are you?’ she asked.
 
‘The police came and took my
statement.
 
They said you were
mugged but you were all right.’

‘Just a few cuts and bruises.
 
And they got your £500, by the way.’

‘I see.’

I am always surprised by people saying
that, when they don’t.
 
See, that
is.

‘No, I’m not calling to ask you to
replace it.
 
It was my fault I lost
it.’

She sounded relieved.
 
‘The police contacted Mark to see if he
knew the serial numbers.’

‘Did he?’

‘I don’t know.
 
He flew out that night.
 
After the theatre.
 
He has such a busy life.’

Casually I asked, ‘Oh, what does he
do?’

‘He’s in security.
 
Big companies, that
sort of thing.
 
Lots of travelling.
 
But he’ll be back for the funeral...’

She trailed off again,
interrupted.
 
I waited.
 
I heard her greet someone; call them
‘darling’ in the generic sense.
 
Kisses were exchanged.

‘Sorry about that.’

‘Look, Jenny, I can hear you’re
busy...’

‘No, it is fine, really.’

‘So, the funeral.
 
Your father’s body has been released?’

‘Yes, it’s all over thank god.
 
We can lay him to rest.
 
This Friday.
 
The thirteenth.’

‘Indeed.’

‘No more conspiracy theories, Tom?’

I think it was a question, but it was
hard to tell.

‘Not from me,’ I said.
 
‘The case is over for me.’

‘Well,’ she sighed.
 
‘We must have dinner sometime.
 
When you’re up in Town.’

‘Great!
 
I’ll ring you when I'm next up.’

‘It’s date,’ she laughed.
 
‘Whenever it is!’

‘Goodbye,’ I cooed.
 
‘See you soon, I hope.
 
Jenny.’

I put the receiver down.
 
I had said what I wanted to say.
 
The cooing was for whoever was
listening in.
 
It was important for
them to think my motives were thoroughly ignoble.

My
final call was mobile-to-mobile, although I suspected that line would be tapped
as well.
 
He picked up immediately,
as if he was on call.

‘It’s Thomas Becket,’ I said.

‘The martyr,’ he said.

‘Has DCI Richie been in touch?’

‘Look, I thought this was over, man.
 
I thought you were gonna leave things
be.’

‘That’s what I'm ringing about.
 
Someone is not leaving things be.’

I explained about the death of Lee
Herbert.
 
Someone was covering
their tracks, getting rid of witnesses, and I thought it might be of interest
to him.
 
He listened
patiently.
 
I had the sense he did
not really believe me, but he was obliged to listen.

‘Okay, I get the message, Becket.
 
Bad people might come for Darren and
Dee.
 
We’re onto it.
 
And thanks, but Becket?’

‘Yes?’

‘Stay out of it.
 
I have the feeling you’re the sort of person who just makes
things worse.’

‘That’s gratitude for you.’

‘I said thanks.
 
And I mean it.
 
Just...’

‘I know: ‘stay out of it’... Don’t
worry I will.
 
I have had enough of
the whole thing.’

‘Right,’ he said.

The best thing was that Reuben Symonds
sounded disappointed.
 
It almost
made my day.
 

But, all the same, it had been a bad
one.

Paranoia
means being out of your mind.
 
Literally:
para
‘beyond’,
noia
‘the mind’.
 
The
medical definition is linked to conditions like schizophrenia and a whole
Pandora’s
Box
of symptoms you would not wish on your
worst enemy.
 
Of course, paranoia
is also a symptom itself, of diseases like Alzheimer’s and other forms of
dementia, including those affecting the young.
 
In common parlance it suggests having unfounded or
exaggerated fears, but also having some control over the process.
 
There is always something pejorative
about being called ‘paranoid’.
 
That it is somehow your own fault,
a self
-indulgence
in that you see a sinister reason behind an everyday action; where a normal
person sees coincidence, someone suffering from paranoia sees a plan, a
conspiracy.

I knew all that, but the next day, I
read up on paranoia in the office, where I assumed my
internet
access was not compromised, and then in the public library where they still had
things called ‘books’.
 
I read
about conspiracy theories till I was sick of them, and suspected an evil cabal
of publishers was responsible for promoting mass paranoia.

Routine is everything when you are
under surveillance.
 
So I had gone into Hunt and Carstairs despite having no caseload
that week, and I made some phone calls to indicate ‘a return to normalcy’ on
the part of Becket.
 
My
final feeble effort at legerdemain was a message to Anthony Carstairs’
mobile—I knew he was in court and wouldn’t be able to answer—that gave
the impression that I was working on something of his that needed me to go to the
Public Records Office in Canterbury.
 
From there, I hopped out of the back door, down a back alley or two to
the city wall, and the East station.
 
Thence, the slow train to London.

No one followed me.
 
Of course, no one might have been
following me at all.
 
I might not
have been tracked, and it was a complete waste of time leaving my mobile
blinking away on a metal shelf in the Public Records Office.

There
were a total of nineteen stations between Canterbury East and my destination,
not counting the change at Victoria—where I paid paranoid cash for a
pay-as-you-go mobile—and we stopped at all of them.
 
Most I had never heard of.
 

I read a little to kill the time.
 
Then I sat between carriages and used
the free wifi ‘available for first class customers’.
 
I reread the
Times
obit
of Sir Simeon Marchant, cross-checked it against other information on the man
in the public domain—apparently he was known as the Navy’s ‘first
computer admiral’—and even stumbled on a reference to Jenny Forbes-Marchant’s
gallery.
 
I suspected the old man
had stumped up some of the cash for the place.
 
It could not have been cheap.

Either that or her husband.
 
It was hard to find out anything about Peter Forbes—it was too
common a name—not quickly anyway.
 
Perhaps that was why Jenny called herself Forbes-Marchant.
 
Or maybe that was just after the
divorce.
 
I didn’t know.
 
Part of me didn’t care.
 
The rest of me had lost the will to
live a long time ago.
 
Surfing the
internet
does that to you.

Of Mark Marchant too, there was very
little information.
 
I even tried
Google South Africa, but only got his listing as a director for a company
called REsurance.
 
Then the train
lost power, the
internet
connection went down, and we
were stranded at Gatwick for half an hour.

I returned to my seat and nodded off to
the distant thunder of aeroplanes taking off.

That’s
3 hours 52 minutes of your life you’ll never get back, Becket, I thought as we
pulled into Chichester station.

But at least it had given me plenty of
time to think.

Gone was the sleepiness of the last few
days
;
the desire for pills and alcohol.
 
Somehow, being accused of murder,
however half-heartedly, had galvanised me into action.
 
The continual probing from Richie and
his friends had the exact opposite of the effect they hoped to achieve.
 
I was more committed than ever to
getting to the bottom of the whole mess.
 
Call it paranoia if you want, I thought.
 
Call it conspiracy theory, if you want.
 
I don’t care.

Go on, I thought, just call it what you
want.

Mat
Janovitz was still on a ventilator.
 
It didn’t suit him.
 
When he
woke up, I would tell him that he really was not cut out for this line of
work.
 
He didn’t even get beaten up
that well.
 
The nurse on duty remembered
me as his co-victim, took no absolutely interest in my stitches, but brought me
that universal panacea of the NHS, a cup of weak tea.

I sat in a high-backed chair and gazed
up at her.
 
I have always enjoyed
looking at nurses.
 
Meg had been
one when we met.

‘So, I hear you’re both private
detectives?’ she asked.

‘Well, he is.
 
I’m a legal investigator.’

‘Oh,’ she said, rapt with inattention.
 
‘Another of your colleagues came to see
him.
 
But the doctor sent him
away.’

‘Detective Sergeant Singh?’

‘No, no.
 
Not the police.
 
Another
detective, like you.’

‘As I said I’m...’

But she was gone.
 
I was alone, not even CCTV for company,
so I checked the bedside cabinet.
 
It was locked—an unfortunate necessity in hospitals these
days—but fortunately easily opened.

I got what I needed and closed the
drawer just as Detective Sergeant Singh walked in.

He was sporting a sky-blue turban and
did not seem surprised to see me there.

‘Coventry City,’ I said.
 
‘Like it.’

He pointed to his head.
 
‘What this?
 
I'm a Villan actually.’

‘Aston Villa, a noble club.
 
You beat us the other week.’

‘Arsenal.’

‘How did you guess?’

‘The only team we’ve beat this season,’
he said.
 
‘So it’s memorable.’

Football bonding over, he nodded over at
Janovitz.

‘I thought he was awake.’

‘They said he’s had a relapse, but is
stable.’

‘Anyway, I'm glad I’ve seen you,’ Singh
said, not sounding glad at all.
 
‘I
need to get you to sign your statement.
 
Are you able to come in to the station?’

I told him I was booked on the six
o’clock train.
 
Then I asked him if
Richie had briefed him about what had happened in London.

‘Well, I know what happened to Lee
Herbert.
 
DI Spittieri called when
he saw we were looking for him.’

‘Did he mention Haloperidol?’

‘What?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

I nodded at Janovitz.

‘Have you interviewed him yet?’

‘No.’

‘The nurse said someone else came to
see him.’

‘Shouldn’t have.
 
They need to check with me first.
 
I’ll go and check.
 
Don’t go anywhere.’

He left.
 
I didn’t go anywhere.
 
I locked the drawer of the bedside cabinet.
 
My arm was beginning to ache from keeping it closed.
 
I patted Janovitz’s leg.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said to him.
 
‘I’ll bring them back.’

But he didn’t say anything.
 
He didn’t so much as bat an eyelid.

Detective
Sergeant Singh drove us through the streets of Chichester.
 
The place was similar to Canterbury in
many ways—ring road, one-way systems and city walls—not designed
for the Age of Petrol.
 
The town planners
had done their best to make it as complicated to navigate as possible.
 
None of this fazed DS Singh.

‘You used to be a traffic cop,’ I said.

‘You can tell?’

‘You don’t drive like CID.
 
You haven’t endangered any pedestrians
yet.’

He smiled.
 
‘I was warned about you.’

‘DCI Richie.
 
I bet you’ve seen a few like him in your time on the force.’

Singh looked ahead.
 
‘Oh yes.’

‘I always thought it was hard for women
to get on, but ethnic minorities...’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, cutting me
short.
 
‘It has its
advantages.
 
Women still get it
worse.
 
Except, of course, women
from ethnic minorities.’

He smiled again.
 
I liked his attitude.
 
He had one.
 

‘The Sikhs are a warrior class,’ I
said.

He laughed.
 
‘Remarks like that can get you suspended these days.’

‘Good job I’ve left then.
 
What did Richie say?’

‘Not to listen to you.
 
Said you have an axe to grind.’

‘Several.
 
What do you think was the motivation for the attack?’

‘Motivation?’ he paused.
 
‘It was obviously premeditated.
 
Something to do with Janovitz’s
research?’

‘You interviewed PiTech?’

‘Yes but that doesn’t square with the
attack in London.’

‘So, there
is
a link.
 
You do know
that Janovitz was in contact with Sir Simeon Marchant?’

‘That’s not in your statement.’

‘I had just been hit on the head at the
time.’

‘Well you can amend it when we get to
the station.’

‘Did you get a statement from Mrs
Forbes-Marchant?’

‘Yes, she said she’d given you £500 in
cash.
 
She thought that must have
been the motivation for the attack.’

‘Can I see the statement?’

‘You know you can’t.
 
Why?’

He took his eyes off the road.
 
I looked away.

‘I don’t know,’ I lied.

After
leaving the police station I caught a minicab over to Janovitz’s office.
 
I had the key I had taken from his
drawer but I didn’t need it.
 
The
street door was unlocked, and the office door had been kicked in.
 
The same approach to interior
decoration had been employed throughout to telling effect.
 
Box files littered the floor, their
springs open or askew, and their contents fanned out on the carpet as if
someone was searching for something.
 
The small wall safe was ajar and empty.
 
The desktop computer was only a screen; the entire hard drive
unit had been removed.
 
Thorough.
 
It certainly did
not look like amateur hour.
 
There
was no way I was going to find any photographs here.
 
Anything that had been here was long gone.

DS Singh had shown me some CCTV stills
of our attackers at the police station.
 
They had just got them from outside the same multi-storey car park where
I had parked the Spider.
 
I asked
for copies but Singh refused, of course.
 
My only hope was that Janovitz had managed to photograph them, or their
Range Rover at Prajapati’s memorial service.
 
Now that hope was well and truly gone, along with most of
Janovitz’s office.

I had no problem establishing the time
of the break in, as someone had considerately ripped the clock from the wall
and the batteries had popped out.
 
So I had the time and date: 11.07 pm on the day of the mugging.
 
As I say, thorough.
 
Quick, too.
 
And just a tiny bit careless.