The Conspiracy Theorist (4 page)

Symonds steered me through to a tiny
office that he unlocked with a key attached to his belt.
 
He reminded me of a prison warder, but
somehow I refrained from saying so.
 
There were three chairs and a computer station.
 
A homemade poster on the wall said:
Have you saved your work
?
 
Symonds put his briefcase on one chair
and offered me another.
 
I sat
down.

‘Used to be my office,’ he said.
 
‘They converted it to a training room
while I was on holiday.
 
They said
I was always out anyway.’

He chuckled.

I said, ‘I'm just glad Pete didn’t take
up your offer to join us.’

Reuben Symonds smiled.
 
‘Bit tight in here, isn’t it?
 
Yeah well you see the problem is Big Pete
is Darren’s brother.
 
So I thought
it was only polite.’

‘Kids, eh?’

‘Yes, the last they need is unnecessary
trouble.
 
Just got most of them all
back to school.’

‘That where you’ve been?’

‘Yeah, you know the usual talk.
 
Put the frighteners on Year 11.
 
Pete, Calvin and me do our bit for
Community Safety, alongside the local Bobbies.’

He leant back in his chair, regarding me
evenly.

‘That’s where I remember you from!
 
It was bugging me.
 
British Library few years back.
 
You asked me a question.’

‘I remember your answer. ‘

He laughed, not so cautious now.

‘It was the best question I have
ever
had from a group of coppers, any
group.
 
You said you liked my
response
to the government but you asked
when I thought someone like me would ever
write
a community policing strategy.
’

‘Never.’

‘Exactly.
 
I was right.
 
People like me didn’t even get asked our views, let alone write them
down.
 
Although
things are changing now.
 
Now
I
do
get invited to the
meetings.
 
The
ones where they do write things down.
 
True, everyone is paid two or three times as much as me to
be there, but our
opinions
are
equal.
 
So they say.
 
I heard you got kicked out of the Met.’

‘I was asked to leave.’

‘Sounds like a party.’

‘It wasn’t.
 
Who told you?’

‘Chief Inspector Richie.
 
He said you might come round asking questions.
 
Did he give you the boys’ names?’

‘No.
 
And he told me
not
to come round asking questions.’

‘Why you got kicked... sorry
asked to leave
,’ he observed.

‘Well, I guess these days I don’t have
to answer to the likes of DCI Richie.’

Reuben Symonds sighed regretfully.

‘What can I tell you?
 
It was me that told Richie to lay off
them.’

‘I don’t need to see them exactly.
 
Especially if they
are at school.
 
I just
wanted to hear their side of the story.’

‘Hasn’t Richie told you?’

‘No.’

Symonds seemed pleased with this.

‘Well, if I tell you what I told him,
will you be happy?’

‘I hope so.’

He sighed.

‘Okay, there were about seven of
them—not just the two of them.
 
Been down to get a McMuffin down Kings Cross.
 
That bit was just the two of them: Djbril and Darren.
 
That’s where they were identified.
 
That’s why only they
was
identified.
 
CCTV.
 
No hoods or caps in McDonalds, you see.’

‘Up early, weren’t they?’

Symonds laughed.
 
‘Hadn’t been to bed.
 
The little rascals.’

‘Bit young to be out all night?’

‘They weren’t out.
 
Not out-out.
 
Round Darren’s gaming.’

‘After McDonalds they walked home?’

‘Some walked.
 
Some on bikes.
 
You know these kids.’

‘And they witnessed the mugging?’

‘Witnessed is big word.
 
They see the
end
of it.
 
So they
say.
 
Just these guys in suits,
they say, batting an old man on the floor.
 
They thought he was a tramp, as if that mattered.’

‘What did they do?’

‘They started to go over.
 
God knows what was in their little minds.
 
We tell them to stay away from that
stuff.
 
Do not get involved.’

‘But they didn’t?’

‘No, these guys—shaven headed,
white guys in suits, suits with red linings—one of them stands up and
shows them he was carrying a gun.
 
Doesn’t even get it out.
 
Just shows them the holster.
 
Clear warning to go away.’

‘And they did?’

‘Course they didn’t.
 
They waited, and then they went
over.
 
They had enough sense not to
touch the old guy.
 
They pick up
the mobile.
 
One
of the little kids.
 
Darren
tells him to drop it.
 
So the kid
drops it into a bin.
 
Keep Britain
Tidy.
 
Another bus was coming along
now so they leg it.’

‘Quite a lot there.
 
I still can’t understand why Richie didn’t follow it up with the
boys.
 
Take statements.
 
No disrespect to you.’

‘None taken.’ Reuben Symonds looked
pained.
 
‘It is a difficult time at
the moment, what with the hot weather.
 
The community don’t want to see anything pinned on one of their own.
 
Besides I get the sense Richie knows who
done it.
 
Might need the boys as
witnesses later but not till he’s got them guys under lock and key.’

‘Who do you think they are?’

‘No idea.
 
Could be anyone these days the way London is.’
 
He looked up.
 
‘What about you?’

‘Me?
 
I’m out of date.
 
One thing I do know is that most muggings don’t become murders.
 
This isn’t New York or Bogota.
 
In London, most serious crime is
professionalised.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ he said.
 
‘A hit.’

‘Even so,’ I said.
 
‘Richie would need the
boys’ statements now.
 
It
doesn’t make sense.’

‘Nothing you guys do makes sense to
me,’ Reuben Symonds said.
 
‘That’s
one of the problems.’

When
I left the Community Office, I rolled a cigarette and lit it.
 
My phone buzzed in my breast pocket
like a heart tremor.
 
There were
three missed calls on my mobile.
 
They were all from Mrs Jenny Forbes-Marchant.
 
On the third occasion she had left a rather exasperated message
asking me to call her back.
 
I
figured she had something to tell me, so I thought I’d go and hear it first
hand while I was in London.
 
See if
she could tell me anything about her father’s death and why the police were not
investigating it.
 
But mostly I
wanted to know if Doug Richie was back to his old tricks.
 
His involvement didn’t exactly make it
personal, but
my
involvement did.
 
I could not get over the fact that Sir
Simeon Marchant was on his way to see me when he was killed.
 
And the fact that I could have done
something to stop it still rankled with me—badly.
 

Like her father before her Jenny
Forbes-Marchant was not a difficult person to locate.
 
Sometimes I wonder what investigators did before the
internet
.
 
Probably spent a lot of time on the phone, or tapping other
people’s.
 

Covert surveillance had been in the
news all summer.
 
First, the
ongoing saga of tabloid newspapers hacking the mobile phones of celebrities or
victims of crime, allegedly with the support of the Metropolitan Police.
 
More recently, the revelations of a
defence contractor working for the US National Security Agency, one Edward
Snowden, who said the
NSA
had access to the
unencrypted files of all internet service providers.
 
Like a lot of people, I was not surprised the spooks were
doing it, just that they were dumb enough to get caught.
 

But that was whistleblowers for you, and
it was also what you got for subcontracting your work to clever people with an
axe to grind.
 
The newspapers were
obsessed by conspiracies, but all I saw was the usual bureaucracy and cock-ups.

I
decided to get a bus to Marble Arch and walk across the park to Mrs Jenny
Forbes-Marchant’s place of gainful employment.
 
The Persimmon Gallery was farther along Knightsbridge than I
expected—Kensington Road end—so I was very hot and marginally bothered
by the time I’d crossed the Serpentine, skirted Rotten Row and found my way out
of Prince of Wales Gate.
 
I felt
out of place.
 
People in this part
of London did not look like they perspired.
 
If they did, it was fragrant variety of sweat and probably marketed
in chunky bottles by Christian Dior or Tommy Hilfiger.
 
I took my jacket off, realised my shirt
was wet through, and promptly put it back on again.
 
This is it, I thought.
 
I’m going to ask a few questions just to put my mind at rest and then catch
the first train back to Canterbury.

The gallery was wedged between two
similar establishments that provided the sort of goods the wealthy just could
not do without.
 
One sold the most
expensive kitchen utensils I have ever seen—there was a wire eggcup
retailing at forty pounds sterling—the other specialised in the sort of
antiques that do not have prices on them.
 
I wondered if these places were shops at all or merely works of art in
their own right—they were so beautifully laid out and so
empty
.
 
The Persimmon Gallery was deserted too.
 
Plenty of fashionable white space,
black leather sofas and the odd painting dotted around the walls for the sake
of appearances.

Before going in I did a fly past and
saw Mrs Forbes-Marchant at the far end of the gallery sitting at a desk.
 
She was lit by the computer
screen she was looking at
.
 
Intently,
I thought.
 
You learn a lot about
people when they think they are unobserved.
 
Unless they are online.
 
Then they all look the same.

I went in.

The gallery’s website had said that the
Persimmon was committed to supporting developing artists.
 
At least it didn’t specialise in the
type of Brit Art that cut animals in half and put them in aspic, or glued the
artist’s fingernails to a map of Auschwitz.
 
I was not up to speed with the latest fashions in the art
world, but I was familiar enough with the sort of things represented in Mrs
Forbes-Marchant’s gallery.
 
The
current show consisted of self-portraits of the artist taken on her mobile
phone then transferred as a series of dots to large Daler boards.
 
The artist had created the final image
through a collage of photographs of mobile phones that were cut up to give the palette
needed.
 
The exhibition was called
‘Selfies’ and, even I had to admit, it was very clever.
 
There was one large painting—oil
on canvas—that caught my eye and I stopped at it.
 
Despite its size, it had the most
delicate brushstrokes all going in the same direction, horizontally across the
canvas.
 

Jenny Forbes-Marchant came over.
 
She was still the tall, rather elegant
woman I had met that morning at St Pancras Coroner’s Court.
 
But this was a more relaxed version and
seemed, on the face of it at least, marginally less inclined to scratch your
eyes out.
 
She had changed out of
her Jaeger suit and was now in her work clothes: a tight black dress and a
single row of pearls that accented her tan, bare legs—also
tanned—and black court shoes.
 
She looked confident and expensive, and she didn’t seem at all surprised
to see me.

‘Mr Becket,’ she said, holding out her
hand.
 
‘Thank you for coming.’

I looked around for the audience but
there was none.

‘Oh I was in the area,’ I said.
 
‘Greater London.’

She shrugged that one off.
 
She was one of those people who pretend
they don’t hear anything unpleasant or slightly edgy until it bites them in the
arse.
 
Then they tend to bite
back.
 
She gestured at the artwork
we were stood in front of.

‘I think she put that in to show she
can paint.’

‘Oh she can do that all right,’ I said.

It was a full length nude of a woman in
her eighties.
 
She was seated, her
hands crossed in her lap as if waiting to be bathed, or attended to by a
carer.
 
Every wrinkle was lovingly
portrayed.
 
The sitter stared hard
at the artist as if trying to understand her.
 
There was ferociousness about the gaze—and also
a passivity
.
 
I
half-expected it to be called ‘Woman with Dementia’ but it was simply entitled
‘Mother’.

‘Do you paint, Mr Becket?’

‘I dabble,’ I said, still looking at
‘Mother’.
 
‘Let me ask you as question.
 
Why doesn’t she fill the gallery with
such works?’

Jenny Forbes-Marchant sighed.
 

‘They are under so much pressure these
days.
 
To be
different.
 
That one isn’t
even for sale.
 
It was what won her
the BP.’

‘BP?
 
Isn’t that a petrol station?’

She gave me
a tut-tut
look and said, ‘National Portrait Award.
 
I insisted that she showed it.
 
To get people in.’

I scanned the empty gallery.

‘Looks like it’s working.’

Jenny Forbes-Marchant didn’t appreciate
that.
 
Her air-conditioning clicked
on.
 

‘Have a seat.’
 
She gestured to a sofa.
 
‘You’ll have to excuse me if anyone
comes in.’

I said I was prepared to take that
risk.
 
We sat down and turned to
face each other.
 
She looked long and hard at me—mainly hard.
 
She couldn’t quite pull it off.
 
I liked that about her.

‘So you were working for my father
after all?’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because you were at the inquest.’

‘Is that what DCI Richie said?’

‘He told me not to talk to you.’

‘So you rang me.
 
Makes sense.’

‘I wanted to hear your explanation,’
she said.
 
‘Why my father wanted to
speak to you.’

My heart sank.
 
We were back at the beginning.
 
I was wasting my time.
 
I couldn’t
explain
anything.
 
Least of all why an old man would ring me the night before he was
killed.
 

‘I told you I don’t know that,’ I said
slowly.
 
‘We will probably never
know.’

She squinted at me as if she mistrusted
my words and wasn’t afraid of showing it.
 
I almost laughed in her face.
 
Then she tried a different tack.

‘Was it about the money?’

‘What money?’ I asked back.

‘The money he was meant to get for the
yacht?’

‘What yacht?’

‘The one the Indian bought!’

‘What Indian
?!’

Jenny Forbes-Marchant gave out a howl
of frustration.
 
Her eyes had
filled and she gave out a quick sob.

‘Oh this is so irritating!’ she said
after a moment or two.
 
‘They just
come from nowhere!’

I let her cry it out.
 
I know all about grief.
 
Ambushed by tears, sneezing tears,
tears unreasonable in their demands, your emotions on autopilot, tears taking
over.
 
And then, just when you
think you are okay, more tears.
 
I
stopped having fun at her expense and felt sorry for Mrs Forbes-Marchant.
 
I put my hand on hers.
 
It was a nice hand.
 
And I wanted to hear more about her
father as well.

‘You’re probably still in shock,’ I
said.

A girl barged her way into the gallery,
carrying two take-away coffees.
 
She was the sort of freak of nature that would have not looked out of
place on a catwalk—a leggy blonde, with honey cream skin and eyes like sapphires.
 
She took in the scene before
her:
 
boss in tears on the sofa, Becket
in conciliatory mode, comforting, considerate...

Jenny Forbes-Marchant released her hand
from captivity, wiped her eyes delicately and sniffed.
 

‘This is my intern, Maria.’

I rose.
 
The girl put the coffees down, wiped her hands on her mini skirt
and shook hands with me.
 
Like a man.
 
It
was an endearing trait.
 
Her accent
was foreign but so well schooled that I could not detect where it was from.
 
I didn’t suppose it mattered; the girl
oozed wealth—oysters and worlds came to mind—and she belonged to
that stateless class who moved in their own multinational bubble of finishing
schools and six-star hotels.
 

I turned to Jenny Forbes-Marchant
before I fainted.

‘Look, how about we get a drink?’ I
suggested to her.

She straightened her dress and stuck
her chest out gamely.

‘Good idea.
 
Are you all right for half an hour or so, Maria?’

‘Or so?
 
You mean an hour?
 
That is
fine.
 
I will call you if anyone
comes in.’

‘We’ll just be across the road.’

‘Across the road?
 
Where?’

‘The Lamb and Flag.’

‘I see,’ the girl said.
 
‘But that is not across the road.’

Jenny Forbes-Marchant grabbed her bag,
explained it was just a colloquialism, took my arm and led me from the
Persimmon Gallery.
 
I looked over
at ‘Mother’ as we passed.
 
From the
painting, the old woman’s gaze followed us.
 
Perhaps that is how we all look at our children, I thought.

The
Lamb and Flag was packed with professional people on day release from their
offices.
 
They thought it clever to
crowd around the bar, jostling each other, talking at the tops of their voices,
hailing confederates across the heads of others, and generally subverting the time-honoured
traditions of the English public house.