The Conspiracy Theorist

by Mark Raven

  I shuddered at the recollection of the day before. Was that really me? I asked myself. In the cold light of day my behaviour seemed not only odd but also unreasonable. Even if I scrunched up my eyes a bit and winced, it still seemed pretty unprofessional and selfish. There was no avoiding it. So I got a bottle of Spitfire from the fridge and watched an old war film on TV. In it people were noble and did things with the very best of intentions. But it was easy. As they kept saying: there was a war on.

  Halfway through, Meg called and started to leave a message. I surprised myself by jumping up and taking the call.

  ‘I’m here.’

  I hadn’t heard my voice all day and now it sounded slightly desperate.

  ‘How did it go yesterday?’ she asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The drive home?’

  At least the Met hadn’t rung her as next-of-kin this time. To say I had been a naughty boy. Arrested for attacking another naughty boy.

  ‘Oh, an absolute nightmare. Sheer weight of traffic, as they say. But we made it.’

  ‘Did you?’ she seemed amused for some reason. ‘Any news from Chichester?’

  ‘Chichester?’

  ‘Your friend? Mr Janovitz?’

  ‘I haven’t checked. Christ!’ I felt even worse.

  Silence at the other end.

  ‘Any news on the blood test?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m looking at it now. Nothing.’

  ‘What, you mean: there’s nothing there?’

  ‘Nothing they were looking for.’

  ‘Oh, well. I must be ill after all.’

  ‘Thomas, are you serious?’

  ‘Of course not!’

  Her silence invited a further response.

  ‘I’m not ill, Meg. Thanks for trying anyway.’

  She seemed doubtful, ‘What were you expecting, Thomas?’

  ‘I don’t know. An excuse perhaps.’

  ‘You seem even more down on yourself today. If that’s possible. Are you drinking?’

  ‘Just beer.’

  ‘Not good with painkillers.’

  ‘I haven’t taken any. They make me sleep.’

  ‘I know. They did show up in your bloods.’

  There was more silence at the other end. I had forgotten about her silences.

  ‘Meg?’

  ‘Sorry, just writing myself a note. Listen, I’ll ring Chichester if you want. When I get to work. They’ll be more forthcoming with me.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘And Thomas?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Take your prescribed medicines.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And don’t drink.’

  ‘Yes, Meg.’

  ‘And...’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s not your fault.’

  ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘Everything.’

  The black and white movie played in the background. People were still being very noble and displaying vast reserves of stiff upper lip. One day, a pilot officer would be banging out a tune on the old Joanna in the pub and the next his kite would be cartwheeling across the airfield in a ball of white flame. His girlfriend would shrug and get on with it. My parents had been part of that world. And Sir Simeon Marchant. Different times, Becket. Different norms.

  I took my prescribed medicines, washing the pills down with the yeasty dregs of the Spitfire.

  I thought of what Meg had said. How can everything be your fault? You wouldn’t be able to live with yourself. And yet Meg was right I did see things that way from time to time. People who criticised me didn’t realise that I had got there before them and had already put the boot in on myself.

  Directorate of Professional Standards. Detective Chief Inspector, it says here... that you left under a bit of a cloud... heard an officer you were investigating killed himself... Everyone hates you, by the way. What on earth did you do to upset so many people?

  ‘I did my job,’ I said to the TV screen. ‘I did my bloody job!’

  His name was Elliott Quinn. Only a PC, but he must have been good, because straight after basic training he was fast-tracked to firearms and protection work. Being single and ex-army, he had the right profile for long and unsociable hours, along with the ability to shut off the part of his face that would reveal his thoughts to senior officers. Just what you needed when detailed to protect Ministers of the Crown. People liked him. He was the yes-sir-no-sir type of Protection Officer that politicians, particularly of the centre-left, loved to have around them.

  Before the cost-cutting at the Yard, protection was the job of well-spoken Special Branch types—the sort of coppers who drank red wine and knew not to use their knife as a spoon—now the politicos got the likes of Elliott Quinn. But, they liked his Belfast accent and the fact he didn’t use it very often. He never seemed to be listening to their conversations, and on the one occasion a PPS asked him his opinion on some matter, he declined to comment. His colleagues never saw Quinn out of work, and it was rumoured he was either gay or celibate. They were wrong on both counts.

  Quinn liked to mix business with pleasure. That was how he later described it to ‘DCI Becket, sir’. He started with the constituency press officer of the Minister of Health. They would ‘get it on’, as Quinn called it, in the back of the ministerial limousine while the old idiot was on stage explaining away his health cuts. Then he moved onto the young wife of a junior Treasury minister, while he was in Brussels discussing farming subsidies. Then, the wife of a Cabinet Minister, a Right Honourable with around the clock protection for immediate family.

  Quinn said he was always interested in the weaknesses of those on power—it had been the same in the Army—how the Ruperts could not see what was going on right under their noses. DCI Becket knew what he was talking about. But I also remember thinking Elliott Quinn stupid to think that a politician of all people would not find out—or be told. For the Met it was ‘discreditable conduct’ and Quinn was duly sanctioned. He was taken off protection duties and was moved to airport security. It was brushed under the carpet. But I thought the man unstable and not suitable to be hanging around a crowded airport with an automatic weapon in his hands.

  Unfortunately, not for the first time, I was alone in that opinion. Quinn had atoned for his sins and undergone any number of Psych tests that underlined his stability and fitness for duty. Besides, as someone asked, had DCI Becket any idea of how much it cost to train a firearms officer? You have got a number of them suspended already.

  ‘Yes, for shooting a member of the public,’ I had pointed out. ‘I feel Quinn could do the same.’

  I was wrong. One morning, PC Elliott Quinn of SO18 Aviation Security Command had checked in to work at the police station at London Gatwick Airport, was issued with his firearm as usual, gone to the rest area for a quick smoke, he said, and calmly blown his head off.

  Literally. Just a body sitting on a bench and, where Quinn’s head should have been, some Plexiglas looking like it had been designed by Marc Chagall.

  People were divided on the matter: the top brass—few had had the three weeks firearms training that they considered so expensive—made out it was an accident; his fellow coppers, and my own union, were of the opinion that I had hounded him to death.

  In my defence, I pointed out that Quinn didn’t smoke—on my many interviews with him he told me he abhorred my habit—and that he was clearly unstable. If he was hounded by the likes of me, then he was easily destabilised. But no one was listening; they were either busily protecting their own backs or engaged on a witch-hunt against my unit.

  I hung around for a year, so as not to give them the satisfaction of pushing me out or sending me off to the naughty corner with Interpol again. But in the next round of cuts, guess who got the offer of a generously enhanced early pension? Guess who got an offer he couldn’t refuse?

  About 4pm it started to rain, the sort of soft, fat rain that you get in late summer, gently pattering on the car roofs in the str
eet outside. The cathedral was already lit up in the gloom. I dressed and went down to the Spider. The roof seemed secure enough, but the last time any rain had got on the leather, she had smelled like a wet dog for weeks. I fired her up and drove the half-mile to the garage where I kept her. I emptied the glove compartment, and rolled a cigarette. I started walking back but soon got fed up with the rain and, throwing away my sodden fag, I stopped off for a drink.

  It was a crowded pub, football on the television, not the sort of place I normally frequented. It took an age to be served and I had too long to appraise the beers on offer—and reject them. So I ordered a double malt and retreated to a corner. At least this will warm me up, I thought.

  My case notes were as I had left them outside Meg’s flat: Vincent Carmody’s suggestion that Prajapati’s wife had him under surveillance; the oblique discussion of the modus operandi of muggers in public spaces.

  ‘Town centre like that, too many variables,’ Carmody had said. Question is: how do you minimise the variables?

  And yet, according to Meg, the blood test had shown nothing.

  Finally the note to self:

  Felt he was interviewing me. Losing touch?

  The question was whether I ever had a ‘touch’. Richie and others seemed to doubt it. They suggested that I was some sort of vindictive sod, a loner, some sad vigilante who persecuted people until they were sacked or killed themselves. My bosses thought my main weakness was I did not know when to let go. But the truth was I felt a different person to the one back then. Richie and others looked at me and still saw DCI Becket. But that Becket was a stranger to me.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dehydrated, sick of myself, I slept badly and woke up worse. Exhausted by dreams of Clara ringing me from strange hotels with sunflowers on the wall, calling me ‘Papa’ as she never had done in life. Then standing outside Westminster tube, and in my dream looking up at Big Ben cut off half way up. At first I thought it was on fire and then I realised it was a bandage, wrapped around it. Dirty, the colour of dried blood, or faeces. It was unbearable to look at, so I glanced away. Then I heard it collapse, and when I looked again it was gone. The whole tower was gone. The Houses of Parliament looked strange without it. Like they made no sense anymore.

  Then Clara again. At a funeral, taller, older, with grey streaks in her hair, shaking hands with people. It wasn’t a memory. I don’t know whose funeral it was. But I suspected it was mine.

  The next day it was almost a relief to be in the office. A return to normality, or ‘normalcy’ as Calvin C. Coolidge would have said. Normal would be nice, I thought. Normal would be good. I wasn’t feeling wonderful, but I could not stay another moment in my flat. The headache I attributed to the whisky—you know the rules, stick to beer, Becket—and the persistent nausea from the painkillers. It could have been the hangover, but if anything I looked worse than the day before.

  The previous evening I had got back at ten. En route I treated myself to fish and chips, eating them from the paper as I wandered the streets of Canterbury. At home I finished the scotch, drank a pint of water, swallowed some pills, and slept through to seven.

  Take your prescribed medicine, Becket.

  There were several messages from Meg to that effect on both my landline and mobile, which had been switched off. I listened to the first two and deleted the rest. It was good to know she cared about me, but it also made the sense of loss more acute.

  Of course, the Iron Law of Sod ordained that it was a busy Monday morning, with various clerks and interns popping up to retrieve case files or deliver new ones. I caught up with several that needed a file note or a countersignature. I read a particularly horrific autopsy report from a RTA that did not do my equilibrium any good at all. At one stage I tried the Prajapati’s home number but the au pair said the family were in India. I doubted that Annie Prajapati would talk to me anyway. Then I rang PiTech and asked for Mr Vincent Carmody. I didn’t expect to get him either and, sure enough, he was ‘out of the country’.

  ‘Which country?’

  ‘You mean which country is he out of?’

  ‘Which country is he in?’

  ‘I’m afraid we don’t give out that sort of information.’

  A fairly typical PiTech conversation. I was getting nowhere.

  About lunchtime, Anthony Carstairs put his head around the door.

  ‘Just back from court,’ he said. ‘I came to look at your shiner. It’s the talk of the office. Are they stitches?’

  He pointed at me as if I were something unpleasant in the Reptile House.

  ‘I thought I had an unseasonable number of visitors for the time of year.’

  ‘Talking of which, fancy a quick nine?’

  Sometimes I doubted his intelligence. I stood up.

  ‘Anthony I have just got out of hospital, I can barely walk.’

  ‘Wimp,’ he commented. ‘Lunch, then? I assume you are capable of eating.’

  We did not often dine together, Anthony was usually too busy. But that afternoon, he had a hearing cancelled—His Honour is ill, another wimp, although I suspect GPI in his case—and even at the best of times Carstairs found the office boring. When we did find time for lunch, we always went to Pizza Express. I suspected he was denied its rustic charms by Lady Carstairs, his somewhat horsey wife. It was easy to forget that Anthony was a baronet—he never used the appellation ‘Sir’—unless you met his wife, who referred to it at every given opportunity. He was due to inherit the title of Viscount Redmayne—the family’s estate was near Rochester—and privately I knew he dreaded the prospect. But it made for interesting conversation, and although I would never admit it to him I enjoyed hearing tales of the upper echelons of Kentish society, his daughters’ exploits at the gymkhana and the truly awful people he had to have round for dinner.

  ‘So,’ he said, after the wine arrived. ‘Tell me how you got yourself beaten up, arrested and released again. Take your time. I intend to have starters.’

  So I started from the beginning: before I had even heard of Sir Simeon Marchant and Sunny Prajapati. I described the proposed PiTech merger and Sunny’s ambitions to sail the world. I mentioned Sunny’s suspicions of his wife, and her alleged suspicions of him. I outlined Mat Janovitz’s involvement and his discovery of the surveillance devices.

  We paused to order the food.

  ‘That was after he went missing, right?’ Carstairs continued.

  ‘Yes, sorry. That was after the boat was returned to port.’

  ‘So he hadn’t searched it before?’

  ‘No. It was with Marchant.’

  His starter arrived. I was not having one.

  ‘Go on.’

  I went on.

  ‘Marchant got flak from his fellow club members for selling the boat to a novice,’ I said. ‘But that could be just bitchiness...’

  ‘... a feature of every club...’

  ‘So, Marchant, who is of a naturally suspicious bent—his daughter referred to him as a conspiracy theorist...’

  Anthony held his fork a loft. ‘We shall all be judged by our children.’

  I watched him pop a mushroom into his mouth and wash it down with some Sicilian Red. I continued.

  ‘Anyway Marchant tells Janovitz that he is going to make contact with a man called Becket...’

  ‘A man called Becket,’ he mused. ‘Be a good TV series.’

  ‘Anthony.’

  ‘Sorry. Go on.’

  ‘And presumably, I was going to be commissioned to find out whether the case had been investigated thoroughly enough—his words.’

  ‘That was Marchant’s initial call?’

  ‘Yes, the day before he died.’

  ‘Under suspicious circumstances,’ he added. ‘And then Becket being Becket went up to London and annoyed Richie of the Yard?’

  ‘How did you know about that?’

  ‘He rang me to check up on you.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘He asked whether you
worked for me. I told him the precise nature of our relationship—leaving out the golf, of course.’

  ‘He’s causing trouble.’

  ‘Oh it gets better. Then someone rang Kent’s Finest to ask them about me?’

  ‘Anthony I'm sorry...’

  ‘Oh, never mind. One of the first things you learn as a young barrister is that there is no such thing as guilt by association. Not in the eyes of the law, anyway.’ He put his knife and fork down. ‘Delicious!’

  Then I told him about the Mrs Jenny Forbes-Marchant’s instructions—which he knew about already—and my success in getting the cheque honoured, the memorial service at Lancing College and, before all that, my altercation in the park.

  Our pizzas arrived. Anthony asked for a wheel and proceeded to eat with his hands.

  I went onto my meeting with Peter Naismith at Bellwethers LLP, his call to me—‘a remarkably quick concession,’ Anthony commented—and then the meetings with Janovitz, Singh, the Marchants, Janovitz again, and finally the attack in the park.’

  ‘Tell me about why you got arrested in London?’

  I told him.

  He listened seriously. ‘There’s a worrying pattern developing here.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘The same modus operandi for both attacks. Each attempted murder. Getting local youths...’

  ‘No, I meant your reaction. This is quite unlike you, Tom. I am most surprised at how angry you got.’

  ‘You mean the incident up in London?’

  ‘Yes, provoking that boy in that way. I assume your plan was to get him arrested,’ he looked hard at me as if to confirm that. ‘I thought so. To force their hand, as it were. Quite out of character, if I may say so.’

  I was breathing hard. I pushed my plate away. The food revolted me. I drank some water, hoping I would not say something I regretted. A heavy silence sat between us.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Why did Marchant go up to London?’

  ‘Presumably to see his daughter.’

  ‘But it sounds like they didn’t get on. Not too well anyway.’