The Conspiracy Theorist (11 page)

‘If I'm working for a legal firm that
is representing a client.’

‘And are you in this instance?’

‘No.’

‘What makes you think you will see
anything when we have not.
 
Is it
arrogance on your part?’

I smiled.
 
I liked that.

‘No, but I might see a connection.’

‘So, you will see a connection where we
have not.
 
Is that right?’

I said nothing.
 
I spread my hands.
 
Singh went on.

‘But, you suspect foul play?
 
Is that right?
 
If so, you need to make clear your
suspicions to me.’

‘Did you know that Sunil Prajapati was
under covert surveillance?’

He paused.

‘That is none of your business, Mr
Becket.’

‘So you do know?’

Singh stood up.
 
‘I really do not have time for this.’

‘Do you not want to know how I know?’ I
asked.

‘We all know about the activities of Mr
Janovitz.
 
I assume that is where
you came across this information.’

I was surprised.
 
‘So he told you too?’

‘To date, he has not come forward with
any information.
 
We got it from
another source.’

‘Mr Vincent Carmody.
 
Makes sense.
 
Large local employer.
 
Civic duty.
 
Local jobs at risk.
 
Politicians involved.
 
All sorts of considerations for the
Chief Constable.’

‘Mr Becket, we will really have to
leave it there.
 
An officer will
come and collect you.
 
Thank you
for your time.’
 
He paused at the
door.
 
‘And your own civic duty.’

I
returned to my budget hotel and booked in for another night.
 
I went up to my room and lay on the
bed.
 
I felt drained, and was just
dropping off when my phone buzzed.

‘Mr Becket.
 
Peter Naismith.
 
Just
ringing to say that’s all gone through for you.’

‘Gone through?’

‘Yes the monies should be in your
client’s account as of half an hour ago.
 
I sorted it myself this afternoon.’

I was stunned.
 
However I knew it was not the wisest
course of action to show it.

‘Good,’ as if I expected this outcome.
 
‘Many thanks.’

‘My pleasure.’

He rang off, no doubt thinking I didn’t
sound grateful enough.
 
Tough.
 
The phone buzzed again.
 
It was Jenny Forbes-Marchant.
 
She sounded elated.

‘Tom, whatever you said to them
certainly worked its magic!
 
I must
admit I took what you said with a pinch of salt.
 
I never really expected you to be successful.’

I could almost hear the champagne corks
popping in the background.

‘I should have asked for twenty percent,
then.’

‘Naughty, naughty,’ she said.
 
‘Now what are you doing for dinner,
Tom?
 
We are going out to
celebrate.’

‘I'm afraid I have an appointment,’ I
said.
 

‘Oh, where?’
 
She sounded cool, like she did not believe me.
 
This only served to irritate me
more.
 

‘Some pub called the George and Dragon,’
I said.
 
It was where I had
arranged to meet Mat Janovitz.
 
‘Know
it?’

‘Oh, that’s not too far from where we
are!
 
At the Festival
Theatre?
 
We’re seeing
Arturo Ui.
 
Come over have a drink and I’ll give you the cheque.’

‘There really is no need.
 
Just pop it in the post.’

‘No, no I insist.
 
Sevenish?
 
Curtain up is not until half past.’

At least, I thought, it sounds like
she’s not on her own.
 

So I accepted the invitation, thinking I
would be safe enough.
 
I set the
alarm for half-past six and closed my eyes.
 
It really was too bad.
 
I would have no excuse now to hang around and find out what Mr Mat
Janovitz was up to.
 
I was not sure
I believed the man when he had said that Sir Simeon Marchant told him to expect
me to come down to Chichester.

I opened my eyes.
 
It was no good I couldn’t sleep.
 
I grabbed my notebook and read the
notes of my interview with Janovitz.

The
day after the CSU & MAIB finished with the Cassandra, Janovitz goes down to
HISC.
 
J supposedly finds evidence
of bugs removed.
 
He has a contact
in Sussex Police who says their CSU people had not picked up anything.
 
Too specialist J says.
 
While there he sees S Marchant who asks
what’s going on.
 
They get
talking.
 
J tells him about the
bugs & SM interested.
 
Says
case not been investigated properly & going up to London to get an ex-Met
copper called Becket to check out Prajapati case.
 
He will send B to see J when he returns.

If Janovitz was being straight with me
then it meant that Marchant thought the ‘bugs’ were indications of foul play in
some way.
 
But when could they have
been fitted?
 
Presumably when the
boat was being valeted?
 
This was
the sort of thing, Marchant was going to discuss with me.
 

It felt like I was getting instructions
from beyond the grave.

I rang one more number.
 
Wing Commander Kenilworth answered on
the first ring.

‘Ah, the young fellow from earlier, the
Warrant Officer from the
Regiment....
Yes we all have them valeted at the same place... bit more to it
than valeting
,
Simeon used Evershed’s
.
 
I don’t.
 
Don’t like the cut of his jib as they say, Evershed, all
Poles there these days... Funny they were up here today picking up the old
Cassandra.
 
 
Gather
she’s been all paid for, now.
 
Signed sealed and delivered.
 
It took them half an hour to get her loaded.
 
At one point I thought she would end up as matchsticks.
 
Glad old Sim wasn’t around to see
it.
 
They made such a hash of it.’

‘You mean they’ve taken the boat away?’
I asked.

‘Every last bit of her.
 
Mast, sails, the lot.
 
They say they will restore her.
 
But I’m not so sure the way she was treated.
 
Very sad.
 
Very sad indeed.’

Finally
I switched off my phone and closed my eyes.
 
As I grow older, I find myself in need of what my father used
to refer to as ‘forty winks.’
 
I
could still see him after lunch sitting down in his armchair and removing his
spectacles, his newspaper rising and falling as he dropped off.
 

No doubt it would all make sense after
a little nap.
 
Although I was not
sure forty winks would be enough.

The
performing arts were obviously alive and well in Chichester, West Sussex.
 
Middle-class couples walked across the car
park in the direction of the theatre.
 
They had the grim determination of people who were intent on enjoying
themselves in a thoroughly respectable way.
 

The Minerva Theatre was being
refurbished—scaffolding hanging off its trendy Sixties facade—and
across Oaklands Park, I could see the space-age marquee that hosted the
festival shows.
 
Jenny
Forbes-Marchant said she’d be in the theatre bar.
 
I only hoped that she was not alone.
 
It had crossed my mind that her friend
might unaccountably not show up and that Becket would be honour bound to take
the ticket.
 
Although I am not
adverse to a spot of Brecht, I don’t think I could have sat through
The Life and Death of Arturo Ui
in her
distracting presence.
 
No, the
sooner I collected my cheque and got back to my hotel the better.

Once again I was at a loose end.
 
I had awoken from my forty winks thinking
there was no way I could pursue the case any further.
 
There was no reason to interview Carmody or anyone at PiTech,
and if I did, there was no traction, nothing to grip onto.
 
Any evidence Mat Janovitz had collected
from the
Cassandra
was now
compromised, if not destroyed.
 
Of
course, it was suspicious that PiTech had paid up so readily and collected the
boat that afternoon.
 
But that, in
itself
, did not mean anything.
 
I could imagine how a conspiracy theorist like Sir Simeon
Marchant might have thought it all very significant.
 
And yet it still bothered me that he had predicted that I
would turn up in Chichester.
 
He
had told Janovitz that.
 
On the
face of it, it meant nothing.
 
If
he had been still alive, it meant nothing.
 
But a prediction from beyond the grave was somewhat spooky.

Becket,
you’re getting as bad as the rest of them
, I told myself as I walked up to Jenny Forbes-Marchant.

She was standing at the bar next to a
tall man in a dark suit.
 
He was
ordering drinks, and she was gazing at him in admiration at him for performing
this difficult and complex task.
 
She saw me and came forward to offer her cheek.
 
It was a nice cheek, which managed to
smell both wholesome and of several gins.
 
Then she spoiled it by speaking.

‘Tom!’ she cried.
 
‘Tom, Tom, Tom!
 
Mark, this is clever man who got
Daddy’s money back.’

The tall man turned from the bar.
 
Military, I thought.
 
Probably army.
 
He was tanned and had that wiry, whiplash
type of build that comes from spending too much time in the Great Outdoors, all
coiled aggression and thousand yard stares.
 
His handshake was firm, very firm.
 

‘Mark Marchant,’ he said.
 
‘What’s your poison, Tom?’

I said a beer would be nice.
 
It was odd he hadn’t waited for me to
introduce myself.
 
Not quite
English officer class.
 
And the
accent wasn’t quite right either.

‘You guys go and sit down.
 
I will bring them over when I’ve sorted
out the interval drinks.’

Duly dismissed, Jenny and I went and
sat down.

‘My big brother,’ she apologised.
 
‘Somewhat bossy.’

‘I didn’t read about him in your
father’s obituaries.’

‘Oh, we don’t talk about that,’ she
said, reaching into the purse and drawing out a chequebook.
 
The last time I had seen it was in her
father’s house and she hadn’t managed to complete the task that time.
 
So I sat still and didn’t interrupt.
 
I looked at the posters from past shows:
actors declaiming, or fighting, or singing, or dancing, or weeping, or doing
sundry other thespian things.
 
They
looked like they were thoroughly enjoying themselves while they were at
it.
 
Theatre posters always leave
me feeling depressed and inadequate.
 
As if my life should be like that, too.
 
Significant.
 

Mark Marchant came over with tray.
 
He carefully laid the drinks on the
table.
 

‘Paying up time,’ he observed.

I felt embarrassed.
 
Perhaps he thought I was the sort of
man to doorstep his sister while still elated by her windfall.
 
A seedy little
private eye.

‘I'm sorry for your loss,’ I said.

‘Oh, the old man and I didn’t get on,’
he said.
 
‘But thanks anyway.’

South African, I thought.
 
Thinks
anyway.

‘Mark’s just flown in from Jo’burg,’ Jenny
said.

Sir Simeon had been stationed in South
Africa in the early Sixties, I recalled, just before they left the Commonwealth.
  
This man didn’t look old enough.

‘Gatwick?’ I asked.

He paused and said, ‘Correct.’

That put an end to small talk.
 
Jenny Forbes-Marchant signed the cheque
and tore it from the book with a flourish.
 

‘Seven thousand pounds.
 
I still don’t know how you did it!’

She handed it to me.
 
I looked at it.
 
I was about to say something, but big
brother jumped in.

‘Jen, you’ve made it for the wrong
amount, you dope!
 
Ten percent of
£75k is seven thousand five hundred.’

‘I’m not stupid.
 
I gave him a retainer’—
him
being me—‘five hundred wasn’t
it, Tom?’

‘Well, you never actually handed it
over.
 
You took a call.’

‘Typical!’
 
Mark Marchant laughed.

Although I agreed with the sentiment, I
was beginning to dislike him.
 
There
was
a nastiness
about his humour, like a little boy
who enjoyed pulling the wings off bluebottles.

‘Oh, so I did!’ his sister
exclaimed.
 
‘And look it’s my last
cheque too.’

I said it didn’t matter and sipped my
beer.
 
It wasn’t bad for bottled
stuff—Adnams or Theakstons, I suspected—yeasty, and quite a kick to
it.
 
All in all, it was preferable
to family dramas.

Mark Marchant got out his wallet and
counted out ten fifties.
 
He handed
them to me, saying, ‘Apologies for my dimwit sister.’

I was about to object, but she seemed delighted
by the compliment, so I decided the best thing to do was to leave them to
it.
 
Big brother
flashing his cash, not so little sister simpering.
 
Besides, getting another cheque off Jenny
Forbes-Marchant might require seeing her again and I wasn’t sure I was quite up
to that.
 
I put the notes away.
 
One of the posters caught my eye.
 
A blonde actress addressed a skull in the
palm of her outstretched hand.
 
Perhaps a woman playing Hamlet, I thought, or Ophelia with a twist in
the plot?
 
Something about the
actor reminded me of Clara.

‘Are you quite all right, Tom?’

She was looking at me strangely.
 
She was alone.
 
Her brother was back at the bar.
 
I wasn’t sure what had happened.

‘You looked miles away.’

‘Sorry, I don’t think I slept very
well.
 
Just now,’ I added.

She put her hand on mine.
 
The bell rang and said there was
fifteen minutes to curtain.
 
Mark
Marchant came back.
 
This time with just two gins.
 
Once again, it was clear I was being dismissed.
 
And I was glad of it.

We
met, as arranged, at the George and Dragon, despite there being no point to
it.
 
No point at all.

‘What’s more I think I am being
followed,’ Mat Janovitz was saying.

I did not reply.
 
I looked around the empty pub, nursing
my beer.
 
It was a nice pint, but
for some reason I had no thirst on me, no appetite.
 
Perhaps I was coming down with something.
 
Perhaps Sir Simeon Marchant’s
conspiratorialism was catching.
 
Mat Janovitz seemed to have caught it.
 
I could see no one who could possibly be following him or
anyone.

The George and Dragon
was
half empty.
 
No one looked suspicious to me.
 
Everyone looked like locals.
 
Midweek drinkers.
 
I
wondered how long Janovitz had been waiting.
 
There were a number of empty glasses in front of him.
 
British lager used to be a weak gassy
beer deserving nobody’s respect or indeed caution, but not these days.
 
Perhaps he was pissed.
 
He certainly sounded it.

‘Well, I
know
I am being followed—after all it is my specialist
subject,’ Janovitz went on.
 
‘I
just don’t know
who
is doing the
following.
 
Perhaps I'm just
paranoid.’

‘It doesn’t mean they’re not out to get
you,’ I joked.

Somehow he refrained from laughing.

‘Sorry,’ I said.
 
‘But have you thought of trying another
profession?
 
It is not as if this
one is particularly well-paid.’

‘Don’t you wonder what happened to Sir
Simeon Marchant?’

‘What
I
think—and the police do not share this view, incidentally—is
that someone made it look like a mugging.
 
Why they did it, I do not know.
 
What I do know is that now we don’t have access to the boat, there’s no
way we can prove anything.
 
As I
told you earlier, I tried the witnesses in London, but it was no good.’

‘So you are just going to leave it?’
Janovitz asked.
 
‘Just like that?’

He looked at me, as if I had gone down
in his estimation.
 

‘I’m like you.
 
I have no client.
 
No one has asked me to do anything.’

He stood up.
 
‘I’m going for a piss,’ he said.
 
‘No, I’m not, I’m leaving.’
 
He held out his hand formally.
 
‘Goodbye, Mr Becket.
 
It was nice nearly working with you.’

It was a crap line, so I didn’t
respond.
 
I stared at the hand
until it disappeared.
 
I tried to
shake the cobwebs from my head.
 
I
watched Janovitz lurch across the room to the door.
 
After thirty seconds, two guys downed their pints and
followed him.
 
I stood up, feeling
unsteady on my legs.
 
I felt like I
had the flu.
 
People cheered as I left
the George and Dragon, leaving my half-full pint behind.

Just
because you're paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you
.

The street was empty: long shadows, the
dying sun making a lemony wash on the white, stucco walls of the houses.
 
I could see Mat Janovitz by the park
gates as if trying to make up his mind.
 
I looked around.
 
No one was
tailing him.
 
In fact, there was no
one else in sight.
 
After a moment
or two Janovitz entered the park.
 
Alone.
 

I sighed.
 
I really was getting paranoid in my old age.
 
What I needed was a good night’s
sleep.
 
Go back to the hotel and
get into bed.
 
But to do that I
would have to cross the park, so I followed Janovitz at a discreet distance.
 

It was a similar evening to the day
before, but the heat had gone out of it.
 
There were less people around: no barbeques, no youths sitting in
circles drinking, just a few folk walking dogs, no Staffordshire Bull Terriers.
 
I hung back in case Janovitz saw me and
assumed that I had a change of heart: that I wanted to help him.
 
When the only thing I really wanted was
my bed.
 
I was sure I would feel
better in the morning.
 
Drive home a
few grand richer and forget all about Sir Simeon Marchant’s theories about the
disappearance of Sunil ‘Sunny’ Prajapati.