by Mark Raven
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 oppor
tunity 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.
Chapter Thirty-One
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 19th, 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.’