by Mark Raven
‘They say it is a way of coping,’ I said.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t mind if he’d paid her the slightest bit attention while she was alive. If anyone was, Mummy was the Housekeeper.’
‘It’s a nice house.’
She looked at me sharply, and then smiled. ‘I know what you’re trying to do, Tom. It won’t work. I cannot forgive him. Not yet.’
‘And Mark?’
‘Mark? Forgive Mark? What for?’
Again, there it was. Something had shifted and she was on her guard.
‘No,’ my hand held hers. ‘I meant can Mark forgive him?’
‘Oh, Mark’s issues with Daddy go back further. Much further. I’m afraid they fell out a long, long time ago. Mark won’t talk about. He’s very similar to Daddy in many ways. Pig-headed...’
‘Is Mark’s mother still alive?’
‘No, she passed away some time ago. He still blames Daddy, I think, for leaving her.’
‘Or leaving him?’
‘I guess so, but he never talks about it.’
‘When did you first meet him?’
‘Mark? Only last year. I didn’t even know about him till then. That was typical Daddy. Very secretive.’
‘Your father told you about him?’
She laughed bitterly.
‘He most certainly did not! He refused to meet Mark when I suggested it.’
‘So Mark found you, then?’
‘No, someone a friend of mine who was visiting South Africa met him, mentioned the surname and hey presto!’
‘Hey presto!’
I held up my glass and we clinked. I went to get another round. When I returned, she was on the phone. She gave me a little wave. But the call sounded personal, so I went down some rather steep stairs to the gents. I could not make her out at all.
Perhaps it was the drink, perhaps it was her presence, but my suspicions were becoming confused. On the one hand, it was entirely possible that she and her brother had somehow contrived to have their father bumped off. On the other, she could be the dupe of Mark Marchant, the black sheep that Sir Simeon would not acknowledge or even meet. There was the impending marriage of the old man to Maike Breytenbach, and a possible loss of inheritance, as motivation. So there was motivation. Cui bono? That would be Jenny, because from what she had told me I doubted that Mark was in for an inheritance. After all, his old man would not even meet him. Although stranger things had been known when wills were concerned.
So, my reasoning went, if Mark and Jenny had arranged for me to be beaten up, then it was they who slipped Haloperidol into my drink at Chichester Festival Theatre. Mark had got the drinks. Mark, as I said, could be duping Jenny. It was Mark that Jenny was on the phone to now. Mark the shadowy security consultant with very little presence on the internet. What started out as a conspiracy theory about a Russian take-over of a defence company had become no more than a pair of middle-aged siblings after Daddy’s cash.
If they had put Haloperidol in my drink at the theatre in Chichester—the only alternative was poor Mat Janovitz—then it could be in my drink now. Mark was sitting in a van outside waiting for me.
You’re paranoid, Becket. I’ve told you before about making assumptions, the wrong ones.
I needed time to think.
I washed my hands and looked in the mirror. I scratched my head. The stitches were itching. So I picked at them until they bled a little, and then I returned to the bar. Jenny was still on the phone, saying, ‘Okay, okay see you tomorrow’.
She smiled at me and put her hand over the phone to explain: ‘Mark, he’s flying in tomorrow.’
Then on the phone, ‘No, no. Tom Becket. You remember him. From the theatre? Yes, in London.’
After a few more farewells, she rang off.
‘He thought I was with Peter. He doesn’t approve of Peter,’ she said. ‘Mark sends his regards. Says come to the funeral. Oh, look!’
She got out her handkerchief and dabbed at my forehead.
‘Tom, you’re bleeding.’
I looked bemused. She showed me the blood on her hankie. QED.
‘They said that might happen. I better go and get patched up.’
We stood up, regretfully, like the adults we were, and made our way outside. On Queen Victoria Street I hailed her a cab. We exchanged affectionate kisses and after one more playful dab at my ‘poor forehead’, she was gone. I walked across the road and found the only public phone-box that had not been used as a public convenience recently. I rang a familiar number.
‘I’m in need of medical assistance,’ I said.
‘I’m off duty,’ she replied. ‘And you sound drunk.’
‘My stitches have come apart.’
‘How tragic for you.’
‘Are you alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can I come round?’
There was a pause. The crackle of static.
‘If you bring ice-cream.’
‘I’m on my way.’
‘Thomas,’ she said. ‘Decent ice-cream, no cheap stuff.’
‘Just get the steri-strips ready.’
I rang off before Meg asked for something more expensive than Ben and Jerry’s.
Chapter Twenty-One
We sat at her kitchen table and ate rum-and-raisin ice cream and drank rich, dark Armagnac, her favourite drink. I was an astronaut, and I had landed on a different world to that inhabited by Jenny Forbes-Marchant and her brother. For me, if there is a thing that defines the nature of intimacy, it is the ability to forgive. Forgetting is harder, of course. The fact that Meg and I shared certain memories made it harder still. But like familiar dancing partners, we knew how to avoid the cracks in the parquet. But that night the Armagnac loosened our tongues and we ended up talking about Clara for the first time in years.
Of course, it had not started that way. My head was still full of Sir Simeon Marchant, and his children who may or may not have bumped him off. I told her about my suspicions and latterly my escape from the clutches of Jenny Forbes-Marchant. It was an expurgated version—one that didn’t include the possible administration of Haloperidol—and it had Meg in stitches, while she steri-stripped mine.
This was new. We had never talked about my work in this way. Meg had not approved of my role in the Met, as if catching bent coppers was somehow dishonourable. But I suspected what she really hated was the politics of it all. How could I deal with some cases and not others? How, on some cases, my wariness of the Official Secrets Act left my conversation heavily redacted and bureaucratic. She had warned me to get out of the job, long before it came to a head, long before—quite out of the blue—our daughter killed herself.
‘She used to ring you all the time,’ she said abruptly.
‘Who did?’
But I knew the answer. A jolt to the heart.
‘Clara,’ she said.
Long silence. Broken rules. Betrayal. I sat there, breathless, unable to look at her, unable to respond.
‘Tom? Please say something.’
I looked out of the window, and the sheen of the streetlamps in the square below. But I saw nothing. I was conscious of seeing nothing.
‘Say something,’ I repeated. ‘I still dream about her ringing me. That’s something.’
She reached her hand across the table. A familiar hand. Warm, coarse to the touch.
‘That is something,’ she said.
In the middle of the night, I awoke in the spare bedroom. I padded through to the living room and stood by the window, looking out on my reflection and the deserted square below. If anyone bothered to look up, they would see a middle-aged man in his boxer shorts. Not a prepossessing sight.
Meg’s door was ajar. She was sleeping on the far side of the bed. Her side. Her back to me. From her hunched shoulders I could tell she was awake. I expected any moment for her to say something. She would either turn or she would not turn, and she would say something. Something that would begin or end with the word ‘Thomas.’ Something that woul
d contain the word ‘leave’ and hopefully not include the words ‘me’ or ‘alone’. Some combinations of words are more hurtful than others.
But she didn’t say anything.
I got in beside her. Still she did not move. Still she did not turn and spit words in my face. I placed one hand flat on the back of her cotton nightdress. She shivered.
I pressed my hot cheek against the back of her neck and held her breasts. Still she said nothing. I expected her to turn and face me. At the very least to say this was not a good idea, but instead she pressed herself into me. My hand moved under her nightdress and caressed her stomach, and moved down between her legs. She arched slightly, pressing herself harder into my shame and my fear. But still she didn’t say anything.
I wanted her to slip my grasp, to escape, to turn and acknowledge me, to say my name, for better or for worse—get out of here now, how dare you, Thomas, how dare you presume? —face me and tell me it was not a dream.
A dream that we were back in a world that we both knew was, in reality, in a thousand little pieces and could only, occasionally, be reconstituted in sleep.
Meg left for her early shift. I feigned sleep. It was not that I was ashamed or afraid of recriminations, it was that I feared her saying it was one big mistake, and that it should not happen again, that Hammonde was terribly, terribly important to her, and that she just felt sorry for me.
When she had slammed the front door—did that in itself mean something? —I got up and showered. The small bathroom still smelled of her. What have you done, Becket? I thought. This was not the game plan. This is not the stability and peace of mind you need. In every mannerism, every look, you see Clara. Her shadow moving between rooms, her hand raising a glass to her lips, the tilt of her bony wrist. And you are unable to forgive yourself. All of it shouted out one thing at me.
The thing that Meg will never say to you.
When she most needed you, Becket, you were not there.
People do not really understand suicide. All cases are different, of course. I had seen enough of them, both in the RAF and civilian life. Some in police cells, too.
Some wanting an end to pain and suffering, whether it is physical or mental. Some wanting to avoid some insurmountable shame or disgrace, or to punish someone for not caring enough, or far too much. For some, it really was ‘a cry for help’ that no one heeded, and no one responded to. For others, it was just resolving the pointlessness of existence. Their lover or partner leaving for work and leaving them alone, and with the realisation that nothing mattered. Nothing existed when they were left alone.
It is so fundamental to the human condition that there is some meaning to life that we ignore it, almost like breathing, so that it becomes something we take for granted. And then we develop a sort of moral emphysema, where every breath, every thought comes hard and slow.
That was how it had got me.
Becket, I thought you was dead.
Understandable, given the circumstances.
No, cry for help in my case, just a lot of booze and pills. The coward’s way out. Not as brave as Clara stepping off her balcony in Hong Kong one bright and sunny morning. A sense of an ending. Finality. Stepping off in the certainty that it would end her life, there and then, three thousand miles from home. She knew she would not wake up in her own vomit, and the phone ringing too loud.
They blamed it on stress, the long hours at her merchant bank, falling out with her new boyfriend. A combination of factors, they said. I went to see for myself. The local police were thorough—the sturdy balcony rail, the note, painfully genuine, how she had made her bed first—all of it done by the book, I could not fault them: the process, their sympathy. I wanted to find holes in their investigation—to unpick the fabric of lies until the truth was revealed—but I only found my daughter, and the truth about her. The final truth.
Meg couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe I had investigated it thoroughly enough. That in the case of my own daughter I had been negligent. When I was so assiduous in those cases I talked about (endlessly, she said) where the police were corrupt. Now I had a chance to prove it. But I could not. I was passive—according to Meg anyway—and was only too willing to accept the official version of events.
But she was wrong. I had gone over it all: the weeks and days leading up to Clara’s suicide. Gone over it with her work colleagues, the ex-boyfriend, the police… And all I found was the truth waiting for me. It was one I could not share with Meg.
It was something that Meg could not understand.
None of it, the detail, an understanding of her last hours, could lend any meaning to her act. You have a child, you try to instil meaning into their lives, but for some people it is just not there. Just as some of us are born with webbed feet or an extra toe. Babies with a hole in their heart or in a kidney. The thousands of sons and daughters of Mr and Mrs Down. All in our DNA; or the accident of circumstance, or a chromosome. Just as some of us are born without a sense of meaning.
That emptiness is what my daughter inherited from me. Not from Meg who laboured day in day out against the unfairness of the world without doubting for a second that it made sense. Clara got it from me. Her emptiness. I knew it from the inside. And still I could not protect her from it.
One doctor said, when it all hit me, that I had reached my ‘day of reckoning’. She meant that a lot of small actions had pushed me over the edge. But she was wrong. It was a reckoning, I told her, because I was now paying up for not paying attention. The old meaning of a ‘reckoning’ was of a bill, an account to pay. Christopher Marlowe was stabbed in the eye in a Shoreditch tavern over the reckoning. I still had not reached my day of reckoning I told her.
That remark kept me sectioned a little while longer.
When I got out and moved to Canterbury, I discovered that it was simpler then to live your life by routine, by the book, going into the office and carrying out tasks that did not involve me too much. I saw people as evidence and their testimony as words that I had to unpick the meaning of. I had put up a barrier between Becket and the world. I reviewed evidence. It was like seeing life second-hand. In my few cases, I began to see people as clients. Ciphers for the mysteries I had to uncover, when they were real like me, people with their own aches and pains, plights and gripes as mad as Achilles, or more often as dull as ditchwater.
The only thing I had left was the investigation, this investigation, what was before me. It gave me a purpose of sorts. Meaning.
So I sat in Meg’s kitchen, in her pink bathrobe like some cross-dressing giant, and made some phone calls on her landline.
First, Chichester Hospital. Mat Janovitz could not talk to me, the nurse said, and was unable to tell me anything further about his progress. Sounded ominous, so I rang DS Singh who told me that Janovitz had taken a turn for the worse. Not sure what it was, but he had been moved to Intensive Care. Shocked by the news, I asked if Singh knew who had visited Janovitz in hospital, the mystery detective, but Singh could not or would not tell me. I told him that I was checking out the identity of the people in the CCTV stills. DS Singh said he did not have a clue what I was talking about and rang off.
Someone was listening. Or he thought they were.
At 9 am, I called Rosenberg as arranged. He said the computer had thrown up no matches yet, and told me to ring back at the end of his shift. I was at a dead end for the time being so I reviewed my case notes.
Sir Simeon Marchant was in London to see his lawyer when he rang me the day before he was killed. Because of his suspicions about the disappearance of Sunny Prajapati—his body hadn’t been recovered at that time—I assumed that the link was there. But, if Mark Marchant had indeed organised the killing of his father, perhaps by bringing some foreign talent in, then it was a completely different case. Nothing to do with Prajapati or PiTech. It was a mere coincidence that Prajapati was under surveillance, a coincidence that he bought the Cassandra off Sir Simeon, and a coincidence that Janovitz was attacked in the park, when
I, Thomas A Becket had been the target in reality.
Conspiracy theory had got in the way of a normal investigation into a simple homicide. The oldest kind of murder: parricide, patricide, call it what you will.
There was only one conclusion, I kept telling myself. Mark Marchant must have slipped the Haloperidol into my drink at Chichester Festival Theatre—the only alternatives being my pint with Janovitz or the cup of the tea with DS Singh—because someone knew I could defend myself against an attack. That, and the involvement of Lee Herbert, meant they had been watching me the day before when I had my little run in with him and his dog.
But if it were Marchant, why would he do it? The inheritance had nothing to do with me. I didn’t even know about Maike Breytenbach then. What had I stumbled upon in my investigation that would merit taking me out? Or had he just looked into my eyes and realised I was the sort of person who would not let go?
You’re certainly bigging yourself up this morning, Becket, I thought.
No, if I had been the target, and if it had been Marchant doing the targeting, then he must have thought I had some information that could incriminate him. I thought back to that meeting at Chichester Festival Theatre. We had barely exchanged a dozen words. I was that ‘clever man’ who got back Daddy’s money, I recalled. So, if Mark did harbour suspicions, then there were two options: he saw something when he was following me, or Jenny had told him something. Perhaps it was something I asked her. Perhaps it was something I said at Camden and St Pancras Coroner’s Court, or my relationship with Richie. I couldn’t imagine her talking about either of those in any depth.
Or perhaps just because I had gone to the Alconbury Estate. Who knows?
Everything led me back to the death of Sir Simeon Marchant. He had been in London to see his lawyer. He was about to get married to his housekeeper. Perhaps his other children got wind of that and the loss of their inheritance. But it was hardly an unusual predicament. There were ways around it. What had he discussed with his solicitor the day before he was killed?