The Conspiracy Theorist (35 page)

He held my arm.
 
I shrugged it off.
 
It hurt.
 
My whole body ached.
 
It made me sweat just to think about smacking Hammonde in the face.

‘No thanks.’

I executed a sedate turn and hobbled
away.

I turned at the door.

‘Meg, I'm sorry,’ I said.
 
‘For everything.’

She stared back silently.
 
I thought of all the things she could
have said.
 
And I realised once
again that I was getting off lightly.

A week later Anthony Carstairs came to
see me in hospital.
 
The infection
had washed through me and my stitches had more or less healed.
 
I was nearly better I told myself.
 
There was no one else to talk to.
 
Even the medical staff had lost
interest in me.
 
Occasionally one
of them would come in with a clipboard and eye my bed covetously.

It seemed the criminal justice system
had forgotten about me, too.
 
Richie was up in London, probably busily being commended or
promoted, or both.
 
DS Singh had popped
in before going on leave.
 
He told
me Jenny Forbes-Marchant had rung to see how I was, but this time she had not asked
to visit me.
  
He said she was
pretty sore about her father leaving all the money in trust for Jacob Breytenbach.

Apparently, Sir Simeon had left his
daughter the house that both she and Maike Breytenbach hated.
 
Their one thing in common, I thought.
 
I had a lot of time for thinking.

No one else came.
 
I realised how few friends I had.
 
The sort I wanted to know that I had
been shot, anyway.

‘I'm sorry I’ve been so long a-coming,’
Anthony said.

The phrase reminded me of Kat
Persaud.
 
I wondered why she hadn’t
been in contact.
 
Out of curiosity,
at least.
 
Or research purposes.

‘It’s nice of you to a-come at all,
Anthony.’
  

‘I brought the old jalopy.
 
I can take you home tomorrow morning,
they say.
 
Recommend a hotel?’

I recommended my budget hotel.

‘It has a Good Night Guarantee,’ I added.

‘Has it got a pool?’

‘It’s got a pool table.’

‘You haven’t changed.’

‘Despite appearances,’ I said, ‘I feel
very changed.’

‘You look... bruised.’

‘Thank you.’

Anthony rang his office to book him into
somewhere decent and not anything with the word ‘budget’ in the description.
 
When he finished, I asked if Richie had been
to interview him.

‘Why would he?’

‘For the burglary?’

‘Well, I didn’t really want that to get
out.
 
Clients would be worried
about confidentiality.
 
Kent’s
Finest made out it was your ‘company’ that had been burgled.
 
That’s what it said in the local rag
anyway.
 
Bless them.’

‘Indeed.
 
You also talked to Sir Peter Watterson about me?’

‘Only to say you worked at our chambers.
 
Ostensibly he rang about something
else. I forget what.’

‘Richie knows.’

‘Well if he knows, I daresay he’ll be
in touch.’

‘Do you think Watterson ordered the
killing of Sir Simeon Marchant?’

‘Think?
 
Think?
 
I'm only interested in what can be
proved
, Tom.
 
As you well know.’

‘Will there be a trial?’

‘A quick one would be my guess, nothing
too fancy.
 
Guilty pleas all
round.
 
No mention of the fact they
were out on bail at the time.
 
Sentencing
when it all dies down and time served taken into consideration.
 
No mention of you and Meg, which will
be a relief, I expect.’

‘She would not see me,’ I said.
 
‘I tried to talk to her one night but
she was let out the next day, before I had...before I could
....’

‘She’ll come round, Tom.’

But for once he didn’t sound too sure
of himself.

Anthony Carstairs was in a good mood
the next day.
 
As I packed my
meagre belongings, Anthony informed me that he had managed to dine at a rather
good French place that I didn’t know, saw a play at the theatre by an up-and-coming
playwright that I hadn’t heard of, before sleeping like a baby—another
thing I was wholly unfamiliar with—in his non-budget, decent hotel.
 
In the morning, he had risen early, done
thirty lengths of the decent-sized swimming pool before breakfasting on
perfectly grilled Manx kippers.
  
I said I was pleased for him.

We took the coast road home.
 
Miles and miles of
shingle beach, and run-down towns.
 
The weather had changed and the September winds frothed up the metal
grey sea.
 
Despite the Jag’s plush
upholstery, I felt every bump reverberate through my body with a cold
shudder.
 
I had never been more
aware that all my soft and vital parts were encased in a fragile skeleton.
  
I took lunchtime’s sedative by
ten o’clock and felt slightly better.
 
Anthony put on Radio 4.
 
There was an interesting debate about assisted suicide.
 
I turned it off and told him the whole
story.

When I’d finished he said, ‘The one
thing I don’t understand is his motivation.’

‘Motivation?
 
Whose motivation?’

‘Merweville.
 
Why did he approach Simeon Marchant again?
 
He had nothing to gain from it as far
as I can see.
 
The inheritance was
negligible and anyway it was going to be settled on young Jacob any way.
 
And surely, he would have known that
from the surveillance operation.’

‘So you don’t buy the ‘rogue agent’
theory either?’ I asked.

‘To be perfectly frank, Thomas, I do
not.’

‘I thought you were not a conspiracy
theorist.’

‘I’m not.
 
But you have to ask yourself who benefits.’

‘Cui
bono
.’

‘Indeed,’ Carstairs said.

‘Well my theory is that Lukas
Merweville started to do his own research in South Africa.
 
There he saw the link between Sunil and
Arun Prajapati and Sir Simeon Marchant.
 
He would have known that good Sir Simeon did not get his shares for
free, but for advice—insider dealing if you like—knowing how the
MoD worked and how things were commissioned.
  
And Sir Simeon was paying up, through his legal representative,
Hawesworth and Breckenridge, which does suggest an element of guilt.
 
That must be the only reason they were
involved...’

‘Blackmail, then?’ he asked, somewhat
impatiently.

‘That was the beginning.
 
Someone, perhaps Watterson—he was
on PiTech’s advisory board with Marchant—began to fan the flames.
 
It was a useful diversion at a time
when no one in UK Plc wanted to see PiTech fall into Russian hands.
 
It is all right for them to own our
football clubs, it seems, but not UK-based defence companies.’

‘But I thought PiTech is an Indian
firm?’

‘Owned and registered in Mumbai.
 
We—they, the government—had
no control over it.
 
The majority
of shares were with the Prajapati family.
 
Then there was Vincent Carmody and Sir Simeon Marchant.’
 

‘So there was never going to be a
take-over?’

‘No, my guess is Carmody wanted to push
the price up on his Russian subsidy.
 
There never was a threat to PiTech as far as he was concerned.
 
He had his shares in his pocket, and Marchant’s,
and those of Prajapati’s wife.
 
That
is what Janovitz really found out in his surveillance for Sunny.
 
Thanks to Vincent Carmody, Mrs
Prajapati was against it.
 
She
realised they could afford to sail the world and still have the shares.’

Anthony looked over at me.
 
‘So why did Carmody pay up so quickly
for the boat?
 
Surely that suggests
guilt?’

‘I think it just meant he didn’t need
the scandal.
 
And he thought I was
the person to give it to him.
 
Perhaps about the meetings with Prajapati’s wife, behind her husband’s
back.
 
I don’t know.’

‘So who had him killed?
 
Sunil Prajapati.’

‘We will never know.
 
Perhaps it was misadventure after
all.
 
If Simeon Marchant had not
been involved it would not have seemed suspicious at all.
 
But Marchant saw everything as a
conspiracy.
 
He was a conspiracy
theorist.
 
It was impossible to do
his job for fifty years and not have that view.
 
After all, how many real conspiracies had he seen in that
time?
 
How many had he been
personally involved in?
 
No, I
would say Prajapati deserved at least half of the blame for going out to sea so
unprepared.
 
It was typical of the
man.
 
He always was a risk-taker.
 
That was what made him successful.
 
But either the weather or his own
friends and family or the British government, or a Russian oligarch conspired
against him.
 
Or, he got lost and a
tanker hit him.
 
Or, something hit
the boat after he fell overboard.
 
We just won’t ever know.
 
My
money is on the British weather.’

Anthony sighed.
 
‘Cock-up or
conspiracy?
 
The age-old question.’

‘Or Act of God.’

‘Indeed.
 
God moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform,’
Anthony said.
 
‘Fancy stopping off
in Hastings for a bite to eat?’

Anthony Carstairs was too easy on me.
 
There was a lot left unsaid.
 
If I were he, I would have asked why I was
so concerned to investigate what happened to Sir Simeon Marchant and not Sunny Prajapati.
 
They were connected after all.
 
Like all of us, their lives were linked
to the lives of others.
 
Where
there was connection, there was the opportunity for conspiracy.
  
In some respects I had thought Prajapati
foolish; that he had effectively conspired against himself.
 
But I suspect the answer was simpler
than that.
 
Sir Simeon Marchant may
not have formally been my client, but he had asked for my help.
 
Prajapati had not.
 
That was why I had got involved.
 
And that was where it had ended.

My flat was covered in plastic like something
from an episode of CSI.
 
A pile of
post was heaped on the kitchen table.
 
Richie and co had been at work.
 
They had removed the surveillance devices they had put there during my last
arrest.
 
The ones I thought had
been put in by Lukas Merweville and Associates of REsurance.
 
And I had given away the evidence, Littlemore’s
disk, which showed Richie’s team in there.
 

Like the fool I was, I had given it to
Richie myself.
 

I awoke in the middle of the night, but
the question was as clear as day:
why did
they kill Sir Simeon Marchant?
 
Not:
why did
he
kill him?
 
Not why did
Lukas Merweville
kill him?
 
But why did
they
kill him?

The answer was there in my own words—the
words I had uttered so blithely to Anthony Carstairs— but I had not been
listening to myself.
 
This was no rogue agent acting alone
.
 
Lukas Merweville had
been accompanied by
two professionals
.
 
Professionals, which meant this was no
individual vendetta.
 
They were
supported every step of the way.
 
They were sprung from jail for Christ’s sake!
 
This had not been so they could lead Watterson to me,
because Watterson was going to do what he has going to do anyway.
 
They thought I knew more than I
knew.
 
They all did.
 
They all looked relieved when I had not
given it away.
 
But I had been too
dumb to see it.
 

All of them had led me down the garden
path.

None of them had shown me the door in
the wall.

They had all played on Becket’s vanity,
his egotism and what one of them called my
inability
to modify my opinions.
 
Both
Watterson and Richie had appeared relieved at the limits of my knowledge, but I
had not been paying attention.
 
At
one point in the conversation they had both seemed relieved, or disappointed in
Becket.
 
Once again, I was
disappointed in Becket too.

I got up.
 
The flat was quiet.
 
Outside my window, the cathedral was luminous in the stillness.
 
It was reassuring.
 
In the kitchen the appliances buzzed as
I rummaged through my post.
 
I tore
open the envelope that I knew would be there.
 
Then I read the report.

Satisfied I made myself a cup of tea
and rang Kat Persaud.
 
After
several minutes she answered.

‘It is 4 am,’ she said.
 
‘Whoever you are, you are one sick...’

‘It’s Becket,’ I said.

‘Becket,’ she groaned.
 
‘Why are you ringing me at 4 am?’

‘I wanted to thank you for the letter.’

‘That was a week ago!
 
Why now?’

‘I’ve been in hospital.’

I gave a brief resume of what had
happened since we last met: my incarceration, being played for a fool by
Richie, even the listening device in my wallet.
 
As I went on, I could hear her running the tap and drinking
water.
 
Lots of
it.

‘You realise if that is the case, you
probably are still bugged,’ she said.
 
‘Someone is out there waiting for you, listening.
 
Listening to me, too.’

‘How do you feel about that?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said after a moment
or two.
 
‘Significant?’

It was a strange word, but I understood
what she meant.

‘So you found the answer in the
States?’

‘The answer is always in the States,’
she said.
 
‘I took an hour or so off
from our bid writing to look at some records.
 
All in the public domain.
 
They have proper FOI rules over
there.
 
And I found what I was
looking for.’

‘That Sir Simeon Marchant was a
suspected Soviet spy.’

‘I’m afraid it was the only answer that
made sense.’

The story I had pieced together and
told Sir Peter Watterson—and Richie down the wiretap—was accurate
enough.
 
It just started in the
wrong place: when Marchant went to South Africa.
 
The myriad of South African connections—Mark, Lukas,
Arun, Preeti, Maike,
Jacob
—had distracted
me.
 
No, it started well before
that.
 

Why
had Simeon Marchant gone to South Africa in the first place?

According to Kat Persaud’s report, it
began with Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the UK in April 1956.
 
The Soviet leader was due to meet Prime
Minister Macmillan and other British top brass.
 
He arrived on board the
Ordzhonikidze,
which docked in Portsmouth Harbour with two other Soviet destroyers
alongside.
 
MI6 planned to send a
frogman down to examine the hull of the Soviet ship for sonar and mine
equipment.
 
The frogman they chose was
one Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb.
 
 
An experienced operative, Crabb was
decorated in the Second World War, while serving in Naval Intelligence where he
met young Simeon Marchant.
 
It is
not known who recruited Crabb to MI6, but Kat Persaud suspected it was Marchant
himself.
 
What’s more Marchant was Crabb’s
MI6 handler who had travelled with him to Portsmouth and checked them into a
hotel.
 
Marchant’s
name in the hotel register?
 
Mr. Smith.
 
The CIA found
this hilarious apparently.

The next day, April 19
^th
, we
know Crabb disappeared along with any records of him staying in the hotel.
 
Simeon Marchant had made sure of
that.
 
The Admiralty stuck with its
story that Crabb had been lost while testing certain underwater apparatus in
Stokes Bay, near Portsmouth.
 
Simeon Marchant was told to make himself scarce until the whole thing
blew over.

From South Africa, Marchant watched the
press story run and run.
 
Perhaps
that was the first time he became interested in conspiracy theories.
 
After a while, everyone forgot about
it, it seemed, and Marchant returned from South Africa to resume work at
GCHQ.
 

But no one knows as much about you as
your blackmailer, and it seems when things started hotting up for Lukas
Merweville, when this Simeon Marchant started causing him so much grief, he did
his own digging around.
 
That was
when he began to suspect that it was Sir Simeon who was the Soviet spy.
 
And the records he came across through
his buddies in the CIA confirmed this.
 
Then he went back to his ex-handler in the UK, Watterson, to tell him
this.

Watterson, as is procedure, brought in
the company that deals with the business of ex-employees of the various secret
services, Hawesworth and Breckenridge.
 
It is a real company, with real lawyers, but it has one client only, the
UK government.
 
It manages the
pensions of ex-spies, vets people who want to use their expertise, and
generally keeps them out of scrapes and stops them talking too much.
 
That includes when they get
debilitating conditions.
 
The most
worrying are forms of dementia like Alzheimer’s disease from which Simeon
Marchant suffered.
  
They are
worrying because there is no telling what ex-spies are going to reveal.
 
The Official Secrets Act only reaches
so far.

So Hawesworth and Breckenridge was the solicitors’
office that Sir Simeon Marchant visited every month.
 
Watterson’s company was brought in and people further up the
food chain, all of
whom
knew about Sir Simeon’s past,
wanted to let sleeping dogs lie.
 
After all, the man was a Falklands hero.
 
Imagine the press coverage!
 
Imagine the reaction of the Yanks to yet another public
humiliation of the British secret services:
was
anyone working for you guys who
was
not
a double agent?
 
Imagine the problems, right at the heart
of the Snowden affair, of a GCHQ bod being compromised.
 
The Crabb files remain classified until
2057.

So Watterson’s problem was to contain
Marchant.
 
And the problem for DCI
Richie newly of the National Crime Agency was to contain Watterson, and whoever
else was involved.

This was the scenario that I had
stumbled into.
 
I had stumbled onto
it because Simeon Marchant, bless him, did not trust any of them: the doctors,
the solicitors,
the
spooks…

‘But it didn’t work,’ Kat Persaud said.

‘No, it didn’t work,’ I said.
 
‘They killed him.
 
Perhaps because
finally Sir Simeon was going to tell the truth.
 
Perhaps because he really thought they
had killed Sunny Prajapati.
 
Perhaps
Marchant thought it was just too much of a coincidence that Prajapati had been
washed up on the same beach as Buster Crabb all those years before.
 
Crabb, the man that
Simeon Marchant betrayed.
 
Perhaps he even thought that this was his day of reckoning, of chickens
coming home to roost.’

I paused.

‘Whatever, Marchant certainly didn’t
kill himself.
 
They were complicit
in it: Richie, Watterson, Hawesworth and Breckenridge, the lot.’

I thought I had finished with Hayling Island,
but it seemed it had not finished with me.
 

I drove down on one of those warm
September mornings that have a sort of acidic brightness about them.
 
The sort of morning that reminds you
there is six long months of low cloud and hard winter to follow.
 
I started early and missed most of the
traffic until I got past Brighton, where I came off the A27 and made my way
along the coast road through Shoreham, Lancing and then the succession of
Sussex resorts that manage to look rundown and elegant at the same time.
 
Well, in the sunlight anyway.

It began to cloud over as I approached
Chichester, and although the weather was still fine, it suddenly felt cold and
inhospitable.
 
A good preparation,
as it turned out, for my meeting with Jenny Forbes-Marchant.
 

I don’t know what I expected, besides
the contents of her letter to me—she had written basically asking for her
money back—but Peter Forbes answering the door to the Marchant residence
was not one of them.
 
Our last
meeting has been at the gallery in Southwark, when I had whisked his ex-wife
off to a pub near St Paul’s Cathedral.
 
He greeted me with the exaggerated solemnity of someone who was going to
give you bad news and didn’t particularly see why he had to do it in
person.
 
He took me through to the
kitchen where Jenny was sitting at the table with a young girl.
 
They looked like they were doing her
homework.
 
(The girl’s that is.)
 
A chocolate coloured Labrador got to
its feet and sniffed my crotch in a friendly fashion.
 
(It was doing
its
homework.)
 
The girl was told to
run along with Daddy.
 
Daddy was
told take Charlie with them.
 
Charlie
had a valedictory sniff, slobbered on my trousers and accompanied them to the
garden.

‘Mr Becket, please sit down.’

Sit.

I sat, wiping my leg.
 
‘Your daughter?’ I asked.

‘Yes, she has an exeat this
weekend.
 
It is good of you to come
down.
 
Although it wasn’t really
necessary.’

What
is?
I asked myself.
 
What
is really necessary?

‘I know.
 
I could have just sent you a cheque as you requested.
 
Or sent your cheque back, because as
you know I haven’t cashed it yet.’

She smiled.
 
It took an effort, but she did it.
 
Gone was the overblown coquettishness and I was just left
with words.
 
I preferred this
version.
 
It was less work.

‘I did wonder,’ she said.

‘So you had to give the money back,
then?
 
The money for the boat.’

‘Well, not back exactly.
 
We had to pay it into the court.
 
We may still get it.
 
Once the case has been heard.’

I noted the use of ‘we’, and assumed
she was back with her ex-husband.
 
I hoped I was right.
 
They
seemed well suited for each other.
 

I asked, ‘So you are challenging the
will?’