The Conspiracy Theorist

by Mark Raven

  ‘Both, I think. Mark or Lukas is a remarkably effective asset. Or was. It is a pity he won’t listen to reason. He shares that trait with you, Becket.’

  It dawned on me.

  ‘You will have him killed.’

  He smiled and his shook slowly. It could have been an expression of disbelief, or frustration at my naivety. It didn’t matter. His actions meant about as much as his words.

  ‘I have never had anyone killed as you put it, Becket. I am only here because certain people thought you might listen to me.’ He paused. ‘And stop.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’

  ‘Look, you have no hard evidence. You have some circumstantial detail. Some leaps of faith and opinion. With Lukas Merweville out of the picture you have absolutely nothing to go on.’

  I breathed hard. I felt I was still locked inside that bag. Like Harry Houdini, except I did not have the key hidden under my tongue.

  ‘What did you tell Merweville?’

  ‘To get out of the country. That you would be dealt with.’

  ‘Killed?’

  ‘He may have assumed that. It is his world, after all.’

  ‘Instead, you will kill him and his accomplices. Perhaps not immediately. But in South Africa, or Baghdad, wherever they end up. Somewhere where it is a daily fact of life.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Tell me,’ I asked. ‘What happened to justice in all this?’

  ‘Justice? Simeon's killers will be punished. I have assured you of that.’

  I snorted in derision.

  ‘You know that is not right, Watterson. It is not justice because it is not publicly visible. People can’t just be attacked in a London street or in Chichester then privately assured that the perpetrators will be punished or held accountable when you see fit. Accountability has to be public for justice to work, you know that. How will this play in somewhere like the Alconbury estate? You attack someone and you are never found...’

  ‘Christ, I had forgotten how fucking naive you are, Becket! Do really think that is the way complex societies work?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t actually. But that is how they are meant to work. Once you stop believing in that, anything can happen. You are one step away from totalitarianism. Ruled by people who take you aside and say: You know what? Just leave it to us, we know best.’

  Watterson shrugged and smiled as if to say it had ever been so. Deep down, I knew he was right and the sooner I got down from my high horse, the better it was for everyone concerned. I had sounded off, and we were no nearer the truth of the matter. All I needed to do was to assure Meg’s safety and get out of there. I had only his word that they had released her.

  ‘So, what do you want from me?’ I asked.

  ‘That this stops now, Becket. In this room. Sir Simeon was never your client. You never even knew him. You drop the case. You have my personal assurance that justice will be done.’

  ‘A sort of wild justice.’

  ‘Becket, these are reasonable people. They have released your wife in advance. You are not bargaining with anything. There is no blackmail, here.’

  The people behind the mirror, I thought. Watching Sir Peter Watterson’s attempt at the part of good cop. I suspected that they would have less patience with me. I knew I had lost, but I didn’t want to give in too easily.

  ‘Except that I know you can come and get me any time,’ I said. ‘An eye for an eye.’

  ‘That has always been the case. Nothing has changed in that respect. If you annoy the wrong people...’

  ‘When did you start dealing with the wrong people, Watterson? Or does it happen to everyone in your position?’

  He paused as if he found the question intriguing. I was not sure if he was going to reply or just call me ‘naive’ again.

  But he never got the chance.

  Even through the megaphone, I could tell it was Richie’s voice. In fact the distorting effect made him sound clearer, less nasal then he usually was.

  He told us via the Metropolitan Police school of clichés that we were to vacate the building immediately as it was surrounded by armed marksmen. In the process, weapons should be relinquished and hands should also be clearly raised above the head.

  These instructions had the opposite effect on Watterson. Without looking at me, he turned and left the room through a door in the two-way mirror. I thought I discerned some movement back there and that in all probability that the shadowy figures were coming in for me.

  The situation had changed now; I was evidence and had to be removed. I stood up, but my feet were still bound. I fell over and pushed myself up with a chair. Still holding it, I hopped over to the window. I remembered enough about hostage situations to know they needed to locate where I was being held. I smashed the window with the chair. Perhaps they didn’t even know I was being held hostage but I suspected they did.

  Know, that is.

  It was clear to me now. Richie had used me as bait. Right from the beginning. Watterson was right. I had underestimated the little twat. And now I was about to pay for it.

  ‘Police marksman,’ the warning came. ‘Get on the floor and stay there.’

  I toppled sideways. It was the best I could do.

  As I fell, a high velocity round whipped past my shoulder. I was about to complain, when I saw it had hit a man coming into the room. He looked as surprised as me for a second and then lay very still. I crawled behind the Chesterfield, hoping it was as well-made as advertised, and tried to see if any more feet were joining him, the dead man.

  Bullets were pinging around everywhere now, glass flying and landing on me, but I didn’t want to cower in case anyone took it into their heads to shoot me when I was not looking. I presumed there were more people coming into the room, as the shooting continued for about thirty seconds. That was long enough. It reminded me of the end of the film Bonnie and Clyde, except I had no car to hide behind. All the good it did them.

  When the shooting stopped, I grabbed at a piece of broken glass and starting sawing at the plastic tie that bound my ankles. I was not intending on going anywhere but if I were to be a sitting duck at least I would not be a trussed one. There were a few more shots, and I crawled into a corner watching the wall where there used to be a mirror. Now there was just a wall—no two-way mirror, no window through which I was being observed—and a fetching design of bullet holes.

  Richie came into the room in a combat vest, followed a veritable phalanx of paramilitaries with ‘SOCA’ or ‘NCA’ on their backs. They looked overstaffed, but I wasn’t complaining. DS Singh followed, looking very out of place in his orange turban.

  I tried to sit up, but he put his palm on my chest.

  ‘Just lay still, everything’s okay,’ he said.

  ‘When police say everything is okay,’ I said, ‘it normally means it is not.’

  My voice sounded strange, until I realised I had been deafened by the gunfire. My words were far away now, as if spoken by someone else, a person with a mouthful of cotton wool. I needed to listen to this person. I tried to sit up but my elbow slipped in a sticky substance the colour and consistency of fresh blood.

  I looked down. It seemed to belong to me.

  Chapter Thirty

  It was the second time I had woken up in Chichester hospital. They had even given me my old room, I thought, until I realised one room in a hospital was very much like another. Likewise the nurses. They were taking an interest in me now I was ill again. Gunshot wounds are glamorous even when they miss one’s vital organs. But I had to behave myself as they told me Meg was just down the corridor. And I didn’t want her to get word about how frisky her ex-husband was.

  Richie told me they had picked Meg up at the end of the lane. It hadn’t taken them long to find the house, he said. Not after Watterson arrived. It seemed that Richie’s team had been following him for some time. Lukas Merweville and his buddies had given up without too much of a struggle. They were now talking. It had only taken two days, but they had agree
d to talk. Spill the beans as to the games REsurance had been playing, home and away.

  Richie tried not to look too pleased with himself. He jigged around the room, full of nervous energy. Even without his aviator specs, he still reminded me of Jimmy Somerville doing ‘Don’t leave me this way’.

  ‘Doctor tell you when you get out?’ he asked.

  ‘Week, at most. Bullet only clipped me. They can’t tell if it was one of yours or not.’

  ‘Pity, you could have sued us. Got another pay off.’

  ‘Who’s ‘us’, Richie?’

  He smiled enigmatically, ‘Take your pick.’

  ‘They were about to let me go.’

  ‘Only if you agreed to stop, Becket.’

  ‘You were listening in?’

  ‘It was getting to a crucial stage. They had found out how much you knew, and were getting bored. We thought we better come in before they shot you.’

  It was tempting to point out that his lot had probably shot me. Instead I asked, ‘You wired me?’

  ‘First your phone—which you kept losing—then your wallet. Wasn’t easy. Fortunately you also kept getting arrested. So we had plenty of time to do it.’

  Watterson was right: I had underestimated Richie. He had been tracking me throughout the case. My case. Except it was his case all along and Becket was his pawn. I felt like the village idiot in a village of idiots.

  ‘We have all the evidence we need, Becket. It helped that he agreed to your version of events.’

  ‘Watterson?’

  ‘Dead, I’m afraid. And his associates, the ones who were about to come in and beat seven shades of shit out of you. We haven’t got all of them so we still need to be careful.’

  ‘You mean you’re offering me witness protection? And Meg?’

  ‘Your wife did not see them and besides she said would not accept it. Anyway it won’t get to that. Merweville, Berenson and Verholen will plead guilty to the murders of Sir Simeon Marchant, Lee Herbert and Mathew Janovitz and everyone will be happy.’

  ‘Ecstatic,’ I said.

  ‘Otherwise they go back to an Iraqi jail or South Africa. Not a choice I would make.

  ‘I take it they have been bad boys.’

  ‘Very,’ he said. ‘Murder and blackmail is just the tip of their particular iceberg. They will be out in 8-to-10 over here, if they plead guilty. It will seem like a holiday camp. By the time they are deported, everyone at home will have forgotten about them.’

  ‘And they can start again,’ I said. ‘So much for justice.’

  ‘Don’t get on your high horse with this, Becket. It has taken me years to get that bastard.’

  High horse, I thought. It reminded me of Sir Peter Watterson.

  ‘Watterson,’ I said. ‘You took the fall for him first time round, didn’t you? With the Penwortham case.’

  All those years I had thought Richie was a bad cop when he really was just an ordinary cop in a bad system. He did not challenge the system, or it would have just spat him out in the same way it had spat me out.

  ‘Of course I did,’ he said. ‘Otherwise, no career.’

  He sighed and walked over to the window. ‘How I have waited for this day.’

  ‘The day you got him.’

  ‘The day I could tell you, you moron. You always thought I was totally in the wrong, a bad apple that was allowed to stay in the barrel. But it was not like that. I was just a young copper who was told what to do.’

  ‘Just following orders.’

  ‘Yes and I'm not proud of it. You were right I should not have done it. That is why I have cleaned this up.’

  ‘And you used me to do it. Neat. What I deserved I guess.’

  ‘I saw the opportunity with Sir Simeon’s involvement. I just did not know they would kill him. I almost told you but...’

  ‘You thought I would not listen. That I was prejudiced against you. You were right, Richie.’

  There was a long silence, while we both looked out of the window. There was not much to look at, but it held us the way memories do. All the energy had gone from him. I knew he felt he was at the end of something.

  I added, ‘And I was wrong.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. He turned and walked to the door. ‘Now we are quits, or we would be if your wife had not become involved. I'm sorry about that, and I’ve apologised to her for it. I didn’t expect it.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said she didn’t expect it either.’

  ‘So she said it was my fault.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Richie smiled enigmatically and left. As usual he had the final word.

  They would not let me get out of bed and I had no visitors—even to watch me pee into a bottle—so I read the pile of newspapers that DCI Richie had left me. I guess Richie knew it would amuse me to see how the arrest had been portrayed in the media. They contrived to make it sound like Sir Peter Watterson was the victim of the kidnapping and was unfortunately killed by his kidnappers—who also died, conveniently—in a firefight with armed police. There was no mention of an obscure legal investigator or a clinical pharmacist being held at the same time. Chichester hospital must be the least leaky ship in the NHS, I thought. Then I read the obituaries about Watterson’s long and distinguished service. Continued after he left the Metropolitan Police as chair of charities and a board member of a well-known security firm with contracts in the Middle East and Africa.

  As Sir Simeon Marchant would have said, someone was managing the media.

  I waited until nightfall when no one would see if I tore any stitches. I waited until shifts changed over before I tried standing up. It took some time. I waited for the feeling to return to my feet—they appeared to be bruised, perhaps from being so long without shoes—then my body decided to sit down again. I waited some more, breathing hard for a minute or ten. Waiting was no problem. There was no pain, just a general numbness paining my sense. Perhaps I have drunk hemlock, I thought woozy with morphine, or emptied some dull opiate to the drains one minute past. Perhaps I am just going nuts.

  I needed to talk to Meg.

  I wheeled my best friend, the saline drip, along with me. Excepting medical staff, it had been the only visitor to my bedside, since Richie. I was ill apparently. Even when a bullet misses your vital organs, it creates a vacuum into which is sucked all the germs and clothing near the wound. Often this causes an infection that makes you weak for a few days. My body wasn’t happy with that prognosis, and was holding out for a full week. This was the second occasion I had been shot, and I was not enjoying it anymore than the first time.

  Several eternities later, after shuffling down the longest, telescoped corridor in history, I found Meg not alone, as I expected, but with the dumpy, reliable, bearded and tweedy figure of Hammonde in attendance. Sitting bedside, he was asleep as I entered, making him seem almost human, his beard resting on one hairy fist.

  ‘It’s Professor Plum in the study with a candlestick,’ I said for no apparent reason.

  Hammonde looked up.

  ‘Tom, are you quite all right?’

  He asked, I think, not out of any concern for my health but as a means of insulting me.

  ‘How was the conference, Hammonde? Tweedledum or Tweedledee, this time was it?’

  ‘Both,’ he replied not to be outdone.

  Even I had to admit it was a good answer. Then Hammonde rather spoiled it by saying there is no longer such a major distinction between the psychoanalytical work of Herr Jung and Herr Freud.

  ‘Glad to hear it. Can I talk to my wife?’

  ‘She’s asleep and you should not be out of bed. I will go and get a nurse.’

  Hammonde left the room. I noticed he was not wearing shoes. It seemed an unbearably intimate thing to do at someone’s bedside. It sickened me.

  ‘Meg,’ I said as quietly as possible.

  She opened her eyes.

  I expected her to say something.

  Her face
was bruised and swollen like mine.

  ‘We look a pair,’ I said.

  She said nothing. I wondered if she was all right. Richie seemed to suggest she was.

  I added, ‘Both of us look better than Hammonde, though.’

  She showed no reaction. No amusement or anger. She stared at me evenly, before picking up her book as if I wasn’t there. I moved closer to the bed. She stopped reading again when she saw the athletic figure I cut. But her expression did not change.

  ‘Meg?’

  My voice sounded far off now, like in a dream.

  ‘Are you all right, Meg?’

  ‘Of course, she’s not all right.’ Hammonde said, standing at the door. ‘Thanks to you. She’s in shock.’

  I ignored him. There was no nurse with him, so he didn’t count.

  ‘Meg. I'm sorry.’

  She stared back at me.

  ‘I did not know that it was going to happen, Meg.’

  She looked down at her book. It seemed to make her sad. Her eyes refused to focus on it.

  Hammonde’s voice sounded sympathetic. Perhaps because it was so obvious he had won after all. ‘Look, Tom, I will take you back to your room. You’re bleeding.’

  I looked down. There were some tiny drops of blood on the floor.

  ‘Thought you had gone to tell teacher?’

  ‘It didn’t seem right,’ he said. ‘Come on. We’ll talk tomorrow.’

  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.