The Conspiracy Theorist (12 page)

Ahead, Janovitz had stopped to light a
cigarette by the exit to the park.
 
I paused and waited.
 
Strangely I didn’t feel like a smoke.
 
There definitely was something wrong with me.
 
I looked ahead.
 
A young man was asking Janovitz for a
light.
 

He had his shirt on this evening, and a
splint on the finger that I had twisted the night before.
 
Perhaps I had broken it after all.
 
Lee, his name was.
 
Leave
it, Lee.
 
He
ain’t
worth it.

I started to turn—I wasn’t going
to make the same mistake twice—when I saw that Lee was asking Janovitz
something else.
 
Janovitz was
shaking his head and reaching into his pocket.
 
He was being mugged.
 
Politely.
 
I knew Lee would
be saying he just needed a few quid for a pint, and then seeing the colour of
Janovitz’s money, adding that he was insulted by receiving such a small
amount.
 
And so on.

My legs were leaden as I jogged up to
them.
 

‘Problem, Mat?’
 

I hoped that would be enough.
 
But it wasn’t.
 
Lee looked neither surprised to see me
nor afraid.
 
He smirked and backed
off, holding his hands aloft.
 
It
was only then that I saw the other two guys.
 
They were getting out of a black Range Rover.
 

The linings to their coats were red, and
each had a baseball bat in his hand.

I
woke up in hospital.
 
You can
always tell it is hospital, because of the smell: a thin aroma, like rarefied
air, air distilled in antiseptic.
 
I felt like someone had removed my head and had managed to sew an
inferior version back on in its place; one that could not see things in
Technicolor or work out how or why they got there.
 
A woman in a nurse’s white uniform told me I’d had an
accident but I suspect she was letting me down gently.
 

The next time I opened my eyes, a man
in an orange turban loomed above me.
 
The last occasion I remembered seeing him, DS Singh had been leaning
over me asking if I was all right.
 
Now he was just staring, waiting for me to say something.
 
I could smell mints on his breath.
 
It made me thirsty.

‘What happened?’ I croaked.

My voice was far off, and as thin as
parchment.

‘You were mugged,’ Singh replied.

He offered me a drink.
 
I took it, but my hand shook.
 
A nurse appeared and guided it to my
lips.
 
I drank until the effort was
too much.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said to DS
Singh.
 
‘Mugged.’

‘I saw it.’

It took a while for the cogs to turn in
my brain.
 
When they did, it hurt.

‘You were following Janovitz.’

‘Good job we were,’ he said.
 
‘Those guys were playing for keeps.’

The
police had seen Mat Janovitz enter the park.
 
One followed on foot—not DS Singh, as he was too
distinctive—and the car had driven round to the other exit.
 
They were planning on bringing Janovitz
in for questioning.
 
But the car
had got snagged up behind a minor accident where an argument between motorists
was taking place.
 
Handbags at thirty places,
as Singh
described it.
 

But it meant they were late.
 

The detective constable on Janovitz had
seen me following and sensibly lagged behind us both.
 
He radioed as much to his DS.
 
Singh told him to hold back.
 
Then he had seen me start to run, oddly he thought, like I
was drunk, to where Janovitz was in conversation with a local youth ‘known to
the police’, one Lee Herbert.
 

‘Right little Herbert he is too
,
’ Singh said.
 
‘Then my guy saw two fellas get out of an SUV and start
laying into you with bats.
 
He did
the right thing and radioed to me, before shouting a warning.
 
He said they kept hitting both of you on
the ground despite his warning and he was not even sure they would have stopped
if I had not put the siren on two streets away.
 
They were gone, before we got there.’

‘Number plate?’

‘Obscured, my guy said.
 
Mud or oil.
 
Looked thorough.
 
Deliberate.’

‘You got Lee, though?’

‘No, they took him with them.’

I thought.
 
My head ached.
 
I felt nauseous.
 

‘Well, at least that part is
different.’

‘Different?’

‘From what happened to Sir Simeon
Marchant.
 
They didn’t take the kids with them that
time.
 
Too many of them, perhaps.’

‘What time?’

‘Doesn’t Richie tell you anything?’
 

He didn’t reply, so I told him about
the circumstances of Sir Simeon Marchant’s mugging in London.
 
Their modus operandi was to get local
youths to waylay the intended victim until the cavalry came along with baseball
bats.
 

DS Singh looked sceptical.
 
He stood to go.

‘What about Janovitz?’ I asked.

He paused at the door, ‘Not woken up
yet.’

Alongside
my physical injuries, I had to deal with the shame and that was a whole lot
worse.
 
There were two sources to
it: one, I had not believed Janovitz, and two, for some unaccountable reason I had
not been able to protect him.
 
What had happened to me?
 
As I relived the incident, I still saw
myself freezing as the men with baseball bats approached.
 
They were yelling and swinging the bats
in a way designed to intimidate—and I froze.
 
It had never happened before.
 
Well, not for long time, anyway.
 
I had not reacted other than in the most perfunctory way,
the way any civilian would have reacted, raising my arm to take the first blow,
and then crumbling as someone swiped at the back of my legs.
 
I knew that their target was Janovitz
but they had neutralised me first.
 
I had tried to crawl over to Janovitz to protect him where he had curled
up in a foetal position.
 
I have no
doubt that Singh was right; if the police had not come along when they did, both
Janovitz
and I would have been killed.
 
This was no mugging.
 
It was a contract killing.
 
And I was collateral damage.

The police came back the next
day—the detective constable this time—and I remembered to thank
him.
 
I liked him.
 
He was Scottish and referred ironically
to the ‘mean streets of Chichester’ as he took my statement.
 
I kept it as factual as possible and
all reference to conspiracy or other cases was duly suppressed.
 
He asked me about the cheque in my
wallet for £7,000 but did not mention any cash.
 
Neither did I.
 
I
assumed it was gone, and I didn’t want it to sound like a possible motive for a
mugging.
 
Besides, it would drag my
client into the inquiry.
 
No, I
told him, I could not think of any reason why someone would want to attack Mr
Janovitz or, indeed, me except that I had tried, rather pathetically, to defend
the man.

‘Don’t feel too bad about it,’ the
young copper said.
 
‘Those guys
were professionals.’

I felt so bad that I wanted to change
the subject.

‘Found Lee Herbert yet?’

‘Done a runner.
 
His flat’s been cleared out.’

With my £500 in cash, I thought.

‘What about Janovitz?’

He frowned.
 
‘No news yet, I think.’

The
worst thing about concussion is that it does not go away quickly.
 
The best cure is sleep, lots of
it.
 
In fact, very soon sleep became
my favourite activity.
 
For the
next few days, when they weren’t running tests on me—bloods, an MRI scan,
optical charts,
the
lot—I slept.
 
The doctors had little time for me, as
if they suspected I had got myself into a fight after the pub through sheer
belligerence.
 
Or
that I was responsible for Janovitz’s more serious injuries.
 
They were not far wrong.
 
I felt I had brought this down upon
myself, and not acquitted myself very well either.
 
Never get into a fight
you can’t win
, my old dad used to say to me.
 
Never lose, son.
 
Never lose.

Although I didn’t mind escaping the
guilt by sleeping ten hours at a stretch, I hated feeling groggy for those few
hours I was awake.
 
I pleaded the
same grogginess when DS Singh came back to interview me a second time.
 
He never explained why he was following
Janovitz but I assumed he thought there was more to things than Richie and his
bosses were telling him.
 
But now the
Met could not tell him to close down the case as long as Lee Herbert, a known
local felon, was on the run.
 

And the shaven headed men in the suits
with the red linings?
 
They had
disappeared, along with their Range Rover into the thin air.
 
Nothing yet on CCTV even as far as the
A27, which suggested they were holed up locally.
 
Or, at least they had a place to stash the Range Rover.

Anthony Carstairs had rung several
times to talk to me, but I couldn’t face it.
 
I knew I needed to explain myself.
 
But how could I explain the powerlessness I felt?
 
The complete and
utter disgust with myself?

On
the fourth day, Meg came to see me.
 
She had about as much sympathy as I expected or deserved from someone
who had cut short her holiday, flown into Gatwick on the red-eye and caught the
first train down.
 
It wasn’t the only
time she had visited me in hospital.
 
I thought those days were over.
 
Her visits were marginally worse than getting beaten up or, on one previous
occasion, shot.

‘I suppose I have Anthony Carstairs to
thank for this?’ I asked.

She was as brisk and businesslike as
you’d expect from someone who worked in a hospital.
 
She studied the chart at the end of my bed as if I were her
patient.

‘No, someone from Scotland Yard called.
 
They still have me down as Next-of-Kin,
apparently.’

Her accent has never changed.
 
Still the same Dagenham girl I first
met as an RAF nurse.
 
A girl with few qualifications from one of the toughest schools in
the country.
 
And yet she worked
her way through a degree in Pharmacy while bringing up a
child—single-handed for a lot of the time.
 
Still the same figure she had when we first met.
 
Cyprus.
 
Nineteen Eighty-Something.

‘You are looking well, Margaret.’

‘I wish I could say the same for
you.
 
What on earth have you got
yourself into this time, Thomas?’

Still the same voice—despite her middle-class
job—a lack of compromise deep in her character.
 
Still the assumption that it was
all my
fault.
 
I only hoped her patients
saw a different bedside manner.
 
Fortunately
we were interrupted by the nurse who was discharging me
.
 
Meg examined the stitches on my
forehead, planted a perfunctory kiss on them and then left with the car keys.

She collected the Alfa from the car
park and my baggage from the budget hotel.
 
When she returned, I was sitting on the side of the bed,
feeling about ninety.

She got me to the car in a wheelchair
and squeezed me in the passenger seat.
 
Then she took the wheelchair back to A&E.
 
I sat there feeling pathetic.

She returned saying, ‘Christ!
 
You’d think there was a shortage of
beds or something.
 
It’s like
Beirut in there.’

‘It’s the sunshine that does it,’ I
said.
 
‘The English can't cope with
it.’

As we drove out of the car park, she
said, ‘Now, tell me what happened.’

I gave her the expurgated version:
Becket trying to save a fellow being mugged in the park, but failing
miserably.
 
I kept it brief saying
I was in Chichester on a legal case, and not making a link with the mugging.
 
She nodded from time to time, as if
analysing my story for discrepancies.
 
Meg had never been the most attentive of drivers and I had to breathe in
once or twice as she passed a lorry or overtook a bus.
 

She was driving into the city centre
for some reason.
 
When I pointed
this out, she said, ‘Look at yourself, Thomas!
 
You are in no fit state to travel.
 
I’ve booked us into a B&B.’

I kept quiet for the rest of the
journey.
 
It was mercifully short
and involved not more than one unintended detour.
 
The George Bell House was situated in the precincts of
Chichester Cathedral.
 
It was a substantial
flint and stone building with a sloping orangery on the side.
 
Meg explained that her husband was
unwell and we needed a twin room.
 
The receptionist looked at me like I was the living dead and helped us
upstairs with the luggage.
 
Meg had
thoughtfully booked us into the only hotel in Chichester without a lift, but
the room had a view of the Cathedral spire above some sycamores.
 
The bed was made up with crisp white
sheets and a white counterpane.
 
It
looked like a bank of snow and I wanted to bury myself in it like a drunken Inuit
after a night on the firewater.