The Conspiracy Theorist

by Mark Raven

‘I’m so thirsty, Thomas. What are they waiting for?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Stop saying I don’t know. It’s pathetic.’

  ‘Maybe, it’s to soften us up a bit.’

  I was wrong. It was not about softening us up. We were soft enough already. They were waiting for someone. An hour or so passed. It gave me time to think. I even could have dropped off, because when I heard a car door slam it seemed to wake me. I had that feeling of surfacing from somewhere deep within myself.

  Now there were footsteps approaching across the gravel, muffled voices, and the door was dragged open. More steps, and I was pulled to my feet.

  Meg cried out. Perhaps she had been asleep, too.

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Water. She needs water.’

  I felt a pin prick at my throat and then a ripping sound as a blade tore through the sacking. I felt air on my lips, but still I couldn’t see anything. A plastic bottle rattled against my teeth. I drank in great gulps. Below me, I could hear Meg spluttering water. Then I was dragged from the building and out into the open air.

  My legs were still tied, so they frogmarched me back across the gravel, pushed my head down as we entered another building. We went through several rooms, each time they dipped my head for me, and then I was pushed down onto a chair and held there.

  A voice said, ‘Please leave us.’

  The hands released me, footsteps receded and a door closed, dragging wood on stone; an old door, warped and aged. An old house. I heard a chair creak and someone moved closer to me. I flinched as he touched my waist and loosened the belt with a jerk. My arms were deadened and ached as I moved them up inside the sack. I heard his feet retreat from me. Leather soled shoes, floorboards.

  ‘You can take it off now,’ he said. ‘Take your time.’

  From the inside, I could work my arms up and through the gap under my mouth. I was in no mood to take my time. The sacking tore with a satisfying rip. I pulled it up over my elbows so I could grip it from the back of the neck and pull. It scratched my face, but I didn’t care. I threw it away from me, a despised thing. It was a restraint vest with ‘US Army’ embossed on the side. It looked unthreatening lying discarded on the floor, this thing that had been the cause of all my fears.

  I gulped air and my eyes took in the light, blinking away tears, trying to focus. Light kaleidoscoped at me as if through stained glass.

  ‘Better now?’ the voice asked.

  Suddenly it all made sense. I wiped at my eyes with the back of my hands. There was a small bottle of water at my feet. I tried to focus on it. Next to the bottle was a clear plastic bag with my possessions: tobacco, lighter, wallet. I bent and picked up the water.

  And finally I turned to look at him.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  ‘So, tell me,’ he said. ‘Am I the person you expected?’

  I looked at him with what I hoped was ‘ill-concealed disgust’, but I probably just looked ill. To be fair, in the state I was in, it was impossible to appear competent enough for the higher emotions. I was at the bottom of the hierarchy of need. I was a long way from self-actualisation, or even sarcasm. I formed words but they came out translated by a tongue that had somehow managed to get itself bitten in the process of incarceration. I sounded like an idiot, a half-wit. That seemed about right.

  ‘Let her go and I will tell you.’

  It was the longest sentence I could manage. I gulped down some water as a reward.

  ‘Your wife,’ he corrected himself, ‘your ex-wife is actually on her way home as we speak. She will not be harmed. And she will not be much use to the police either. She hasn’t seen anyone and she doesn’t know where she has been.’

  He paused. I looked around the room. It seemed to be an extension on the side of an old farmhouse. Low slung doorways, beams etc. We were in a sort of box room, a collection of discarded furniture: an office chair with the back missing, a Chesterfield sofa with ripped cushions, a rowing machine and matching exercise bike. The far wall was covered floor-to-ceiling in mirrored glass. I stared back at myself, a shrunken figure holding a water bottle. I looked like a naughty boy in the headmaster’s study. The back of Sir Peter Watterson’s sleek grey head, his urbane presence, Jermyn Street suit and polished brogues, before me, quite unruffled by my misdemeanours. We were alone: we and our mirrored selves.

  ‘Besides she knows we still have you,’ he said.

  Don’t believe him, I told myself. Don’t believe anything he has to say. He will play on your hopes, however small they are.

  ‘You don’t know her,’ I said. ‘Meg will still go to the police.’

  ‘A touching faith in the criminal justice system,’ he said lightly. ‘I thought you would have cured her of that by now, Becket.’

  ‘As you said she is my ex-wife.’

  He thought about that one. ‘So, she got out,’ he said. ‘I’m interested. Were you surprised? When you saw me just now?’

  ‘Not really. I just hoped it wasn’t true. I don’t like my illusions being shattered.’

  He smiled thinly. I went on.

  ‘As you know, it is relatively hard to tell when someone is lying. Especially when they have had a lot of practice.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I think.’

  ‘You see...’

  I paused and drank some water. My head ached and I was thoroughly pissed off. But I had to keep talking. I knew it wasn’t for his benefit, but for whoever was behind the mirror. Richie, the spooks, the NCA, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was I had got to the bottom of it—rock bottom.

  ‘You see, there was just one thing that didn’t make sense,’ I said. ‘You told me Sir Simeon Marchant asked your advice on two occasions. A couple of occasions, you said. So I began to think what the other time could have been. It took me a while to figure it out. But there were too many distractions.’

  ‘And your conclusion?’ He sounded impatient.

  ‘It’s a long story. I’ve only just figured it out. When I saw you.’

  ‘So, I wasn’t expected,’ Sir Peter Watterson said. ‘Good. Tell your story. We have time.’

  I took a sip of water. My whole body ached. I looked past him at my own reflection. A man talking to a mirror.

  ‘The first bit you know. It is in the public domain, although the obit writers did their best to conceal it. Young Simeon Marchant was stranded in France in the war. He posted Morse signals back, and generally did a jolly good job. He hoped to get a boat out. At first he was told to go to Lisbon, and then, later, he was told to stay. He was too useful. The Admiralty found he had a knack for it. Spying. He had found his vocation.’

  Another sip of water.

  ‘Then, after the war, he finished his training as a submariner and was stationed at Cheltenham. Not a well-known naval base, you’d think. But it was GCHQ, of course. There were all sorts of people there in the early Fifties: the best of Bletchley Park, the eggheads, the computer scientists, the freaks, and the dyslexics like Simeon Marchant. He was one of the first to spot how useful they were at dismantling codes. They saw things in different ways. They were wired differently. Saw patterns, the ones other people missed. He was put in charge of a section of them: they were known as the Dizzies. Marchant made sure the equipment was modified to suit their needs. He is still fondly remembered for it—the British Dyslexia Association named an award after him—not for the cryptography but for the fact he found a position for all those people who felt they were wired wrongly. As he said at the time, they were just wired differently. One of his team was a young South African of Indian extraction called Arun Prajapati. His job was to come up with new and interesting algorithms, but he also took a keen interest in the way the dyslexics thought. Of course, there was no way computers could learn from them at that time. They were too basic, too linear. It was only years later that Prajapati put the theory to good use.’

  Watterson looked sceptical. I hoped Kat Persaud’s research was correct. It had enough footnotes.


  ‘But Simeon Marchant did not really know Arun Prajapati that well back then. They were no more than acquaintances. It was only after Prajapati had returned to his native South Africa that Marchant really got to know him. Marchant was stationed in Cape Town in the early Sixties. He was shocked by the pre-apartheid regime as much as the world would be shocked by what was to follow. He watched Prajapati play cricket—it was a passion they shared—at his club, the same club the great Basil D’Oliveira played at before he came to England in 1960. At the time, South African Indians, no matter how good they were, could not play against their white countrymen, and yet it was often the best cricket. D’Oliveira was also captain of his country’s ‘Non-White’ football team. Imagine a concept like that now!

  ‘At Prajapati’s club, Marchant was sometimes the only white in the small crowd. Of course, at first they thought he was a Government spy, an irony that made Arun Prajapati laugh. He told his friends it was okay, Marchant was an old friend from England. One of the club members had a daughter called Preeti, described by Arun Prajapati’s wife ‘as a flighty girl just 19’. Marchant was 35. They married, some say so she could get a British passport. (Marchant, as you know, looked for conspiracy in everything.) But, it was more likely that he took her fancy and she became pregnant. Of course, by then he realised that she was promiscuous—he was not alone in her favours—but honour dictated he married her. Their son was born while Marchant was at sea and he never saw the child. The boy lived just long enough to be christened. It was Marchant’s great regret and source of guilt. By the time the child died, Marchant had never met his son, never touched him. They divorced—quick and easy then with the racial laws back then—and Preeti remarried. She died in childbirth a few years later. Perhaps there had always been complications. It didn’t matter. Marchant referred to it as the lost part of his life.’

  I paused, and drank some more water. Watterson had a faraway look, like he wasn’t really listening. I continued, picking up the pace, wanting to get to the end.

  ‘Arun Prajapati moves to India and works for Tata. He travels around Africa selling trucks, sometimes tractors. It must have been purgatory for him but he has a family to support now so needs must. Meanwhile, Marchant goes back to GCHQ, but now ostensibly he is teaching at Greenwich. He is on their staff list anyway. We suspect it is a cover, but we don’t know with any certainty. He marries again. His wife has a daughter, Jenny. At Greenwich, he teaches systems thinking, counter intelligence, all the Cold War skills naval officers needed at the time. Once again, he was too useful to send to sea, but it was a requirement to see active service and he got his three-month tour every year on a nuclear sub. Ironically, these were the happiest times for him. While the other officers hated the long stints away from home, Marchant thrived on them. He wasn’t popular with the other officers but they appreciated his presence kept them safe. We do tend to get our husbands back when Marchant sails with them, one of the wives observed. He was known as ‘the first computer admiral’ and he would see the patterns where no one else saw them.

  ‘When the Falklands came along he was the first one to plan the logistics of the ‘window of opportunity’ theory before the Antarctic winter set in. He was hit badly by the loss of HMS Coventry, which he thought could have been averted. It was as if the politicians were cutting through the crap of the systems, cutting the Gordian knot when not attacking the Belgrano could have led to a better long term solution. He was shocked when he read the popular press on his return. He saw the manipulation behind the headlines. Reading all of them one after another, not each day, he could see the pattern of misinformation fed by the government. But he didn’t resign. That would have been the easy way out. It interested him. And it was gone. He could learn from it. So he did. He continued to lecture. Post Cold War, it got even more interesting, he thought. There was more complexity. Sometimes his students could not even follow him, they said. His reasoning. Once or twice, he was firmly told to stick to the script. Being Marchant, he didn’t of course. He couldn’t, it just wasn’t in his nature. Post 9/11 he saw many conspiracies at work. He wondered which were put up as genuine smoke screens and which were genuine. He was fascinated by it. The shadowiness of the enemy was interesting. The way they existed in cyber space made him think there was more at stake more than met the eye. He briefed one or two top Whitehall committees, including Cobra itself.

  ‘That was when he heard from Arun Prajapati again. Congratulations on the knighthood and his condolences—perhaps, the other way round—Sir Simeon's wife had recently died. Arun Prajapati’s son, Sunil, had set up a company and was looking for investors. It was a sure-fire success: surveillance devices that degraded when they touched water. The boy was a genius. There were already contracts with the UK and US government. Sir Simeon knew once the MoD committed to anything then it was guaranteed for a long time, the sheer bureaucracy of vetting a new supplier made it easier to stick with what you knew. Marchant invested. Modestly at first. More bullishly after he met Sunil, a young man he was very impressed by.

  ‘It was about that time that there was a parallel development—a coincidence!—Mark Marchant’s identity was stolen. We all know that was common enough at the time, probably still is. Sir Simeon Marchant heard through a friend visiting South Africa. Bumped into Number One Son in Cape Town, old chap. You’re a dark horse, Marchant. Perhaps even then Mark was letting people know who his famous father was. And at that stage, early 2006 or 2007 I guess, while you will still at the Yard, Marchant came to see you.’

  Still there was no flicker of recognition or surprise on Watterson’s face. It was as if he was waiting for a part of the story, one part, and I had missed it out. I drained the water bottle and let it fall to the floor.

  ‘So, that was first time,’ I said. ‘At first, Marchant thought it was a criminal enterprise and you would know what to do. Someone was impersonating his son. Someone had stolen Mark’s identity. That was when he sought your advice, Sir Simeon. It was about the time I was investigating Richie’s unit. You told Marchant you’d spoken to your senior investigator about it—you hadn’t, but it hardly mattered—and he would contact the South African authorities and it would stop. You gave him reassurances. You had your best man on it. A man called Becket. You lied.’

  ‘A bit harsh, Becket. We confined the activity, as you know. As you would have expected us to. We couldn’t close down the whole operation just because someone got a bit upset. However important he was.’

  He smiled and added: ‘And you were our best man.’

  I tried to scowl back, but it used too many muscles and my face ached from all the talking. But I had to keep going. The longer I talked for, the more chance I would have to figure out what was really going on.

  ‘Fast forward five years. Sir Simeon is recently widowed. He’s given up sailing. Sunil Prajapati visits him at Hayling Island Sailing Club and tells him... What? Sunil says he wants to sell the business. Marchant tries to persuade him against it, but he understands when the boy—he still thought of him as a boy, despite Sunny being in his forties—says he just wants to sail. Marchant had only wanted that for himself, but had been forced into GCHQ, into espionage. He relented and sold the boat to Sunil. Marchant never cashed the cheque, it was not returned at all. That was a lie, a very distracting lie. Distracted from distraction by distraction...’

  Watterson sighed impatiently. I went on.

  ‘The cheque had been found on his body. He was not the doddery old man his daughter thought he was. Yes, he had the early stages of Alzheimer’s, but that is not the reason he didn’t cash the cheque. I suspect he simply saw the boat as a gift—to Sunil Prajapati. After all Sunny was about to make him very rich. So, off Prajapati sails into the sunset, never to return. When his boat is brought back to the sailing club, it is searched by an expert called Mat Janovitz who discovers the removed, or more likely degraded, surveillance devices and asks Sir Simeon about them. Janovitz assumed that they were in place to keep an eye on Prajapati, but Sir Si
meon knew better. He starts digging around and discovers that ‘Mark Marchant’ is still up to his old tricks.’

  ‘And what old tricks do you think they were, Becket?’

  ‘The most obvious is blackmail,’ I said, watching his eyes. ‘The question is what for. But I haven’t finished yet.’

  He shrugged. ‘Go on.’

  ‘When it started up again—when Mark Marchant contacted him— Sir Simeon came to see you. You had left the Met but you were on the same board or advisory group together, whatever. He said he wanted to complain about me: Becket. This man, Becket, hadn’t stopped the identity theft of his son. For some reason he remembered my name. Sir Simeon Marchant wasn’t one to forget a detail like that. He asked where this Becket fellow was now. He had a bone to pick with him. You said you didn’t know. Another lie. Becket had left the force just like you had. But, for some reason you gave him Richie’s name. And from Richie, Sir Simeon got my number. What I don’t understand is why you rang Anthony Carstairs? To check up on me?’

  ‘Curiosity, Becket, no more. My Achilles’ heel. It was a mistake.’

  ‘And Richie? Why did you give him Richie’s name? Does he still work for you?’

  ‘That is the one bit of the story that worries me,’ Watterson said. ‘Why Richie gave him your whereabouts.’

  ‘Probably just slipped out.’

  He looked thoughtful. A minute passed.

  ‘You know, it was your only weakness, Tom. As an investigator. You underestimate people. Or rather you don’t reappraise your original view of them. DCI Richie has moved on.’

  I repeated the question: ‘Does he still work for you?’

  He thought about it for a few seconds.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t sound so sure.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure,’ he said. ‘I’m just thinking.’

  ‘Richie said Mark Marchant was out of control. Or did he mean he was under your control?’

  Watterson looked surprised, as if a thought had ambushed him. He stood up and stretched his legs. He went to the window. I could see a number of vehicles out there. But the van had gone.