The Conspiracy Theorist (17 page)

‘You know,’ he said as we turned the
corner of the mews.
 
‘I’ve always
been struck at our capacity to think it won’t happen to us—car crashes,
cancer, depression, dementia—and then it does.
 
But until then it is always the other chap.
 
Despite the
statistics, despite the evidence.
 
Even the most intelligent amongst us...’

I stopped him, my hand on his arm.

‘Where are you going with this, Anthony?’

‘I was just interested, Tom, why you
thought it was Mr Janovitz they were after when you were the one who was told
to keep your nose out of other people’s business.
 
It was you that had previously been threatened, you that had
the contretemps with the youth in the park, you that had been told to back off
by the police, you that had asked all the awkward questions...
 
To an outsider like me, it seems more
likely that you, Thomas A Becket, who was the intended target and it was poor
Mr Janovitz who was the innocent bystander.’

He touched my sleeve and walked
on.
 

‘Just a thought, Tom’ he said over his
shoulder.
 
‘Just a thought.’

Back
at my desk, there was a message to ring Meg.
 
I couldn’t put it off any longer.
 
Might as well get all my daily criticism over in one lot, I
thought.
 
I was still stinging from
Anthony Carstairs’ remarks and the fact that I had missed the point: someone
was
trying to stop me being
involved.
 
Not just DCI Richie
either.

Meg was at home, just about to leave
for a two-to-ten shift.
 

‘I’ve been taking my prescribed
medicines,’ I told her.

‘But not returning my calls,’ she
said.
 
‘I assume you were at the
pub?’

‘You know me too well.’

‘No wonder your bloods were all over
the place.
 
Well I wash my hands of
you, Thomas.’

‘My bloods?’

‘You got me worried, fool that I am,
with all your talk of illness.
 
So
I got them to retest them.
 
More
tests.
 
The whole
lot.
 
God, I was popular, I
can tell you.’

‘And
..
.’

‘Still no Rohypnol, I’m afraid.
 
But they found something else.’

Car crashes, cancer, depression, dementia.

‘Something called Haloperidol.
 
You’re not on anti-psychotics, are you
Tom?
 
You would tell me if you
were, wouldn’t you?
 
I mean if
there
was
something badly wrong, you would tell me,
wouldn’t you?
 
Tom?’

Haloperidol.

‘Tom?’

Haloperidol,
according to my ex-wife the clinical pharmacist, was a first generation
anti-psychotic.
 
It was available
as a colourless, virtually tasteless solution and would sedate, weaken, calm
and was also potentially myorelaxant, which meant it stops the muscles reacting
to signals the brain sends.
 
It was
an older type of treatment for schizophrenia, hence her surprise—not that
I might be suffering from the condition—that I could be prescribed
it.
 
She said there were more side
effects than benefits in its treatment of mental illness: hyperactivity,
aggression, delirium, something called ‘muscle rigidity’ and the fact that it
locked you down.
 
You could not
respond to the simplest of external stimuli.
 
So it was useless alongside talking therapies.
 
In the 1960s and 70s in the US it had
been used on radical black men arrested at civil rights marches.
 
Their protest was defined as a mental
illness; or rather mental illness was redefined to include
them
as a brand-new category.
 
Similarly, in the Soviet Union, it was prescribed to dissidents.
  
In veterinary science, it did
however appear to be successful as a treatment for parrots which would
otherwise continue to pluck their own feathers out.

‘I know how they feel’.

‘At least you didn’t get Rabbit
Syndrome,’ Meg had said.

‘What’s Rabbit Syndrome?’

‘It’s characterised by tiny,
involuntary sideways movements of the mouth.’

‘I thought that was called talking?’

‘Don’t joke, Tom this is serious.
 
Some say,
Haloperidol
is used by the police
during hostage negotiations.
 
You know, send in a drink or some food
with dope in it.
 
Wears people
down.
 
Stops them thinking.’

I knew I had heard of it.

‘The Balcombe Street siege!’ I
said.
 
‘
That
was Haloperidol!’

December 1975, London, a Provisional
IRA cell held two hostages, John and Shirley Matthews, for six days before
surrendering.
 
I had been a
teenager at the time, watching it on TV like everyone else, barely able to
understand what was going on.
 
But
later I had studied it during a course on hostage negotiation.
 
The Bomb Squad had used a combination
of psychological pressure, misinformation (using the mass media) and a drug
called Haloperidol in the food taken in.
 
Unable to make proactive decisions and destabilised by the negotiators
the Provos surrendered.
 
In the
write ups of the case, you will find reference to any number of things: the
twenty-six concurrent life sentences, the terrorists’ release under the Good
Friday agreement—Gerry Adams called them ‘our Nelson Mandelas’—and
even their confessions for the Guildford and Woolwich Bombings for which
innocent people would serve life sentences for another fifteen years.
 
But in all of that, you will see no
reference to the use of Haloperidol by our security forces.

‘It is still used, my colleagues tell
me,’ Meg said.
 
‘But it is not
routinely tested for.
 
And even if
it were, apparently it is difficult to detect without the patient being present.’

‘Would they have found it at Chichester
Hospital?
  
I had enough blood
taken.’

‘I doubt it.
 
But it is possible.’

There was silence at the other
end.
 

‘Tom, why would the police want to drug
you?’

I told her I did not have an answer to
that question.

I
tried Jenny Forbes-Marchant.
 
Her
mobile wasn’t being picked up so I rang the gallery.
 
An eastern European voice diluted by the English public
school system said, ‘She is not in today.
 
Can I help?’

I attempted to recall the intern’s
name, but I had been hit on the head several times since we last met.
 
I did remember how she looked though.
 
Funny thing: memory.
 
I told her who I was.
 
I didn’t expect she’d recall Becket.
 

‘Oh, how are you?
 
I heard that you were in the hospital.’

I said I was fine—liar.

‘Jenny, she is down at the Hayling
Island.
 
You know the house?’

At least that accounted for the lack of
signal.
 
I thanked her.

‘You look after yourself, okay?’ she
sang out and put the phone down.
 

Sure, I thought.
 
Look after myself.

An
hour or so later, the phone rang.
 
It was reception downstairs.
 
There was a police officer
who
would like to
talk to me.
 
I said I would pop
down.
 
There was a bad feeling in
the pit of my stomach and it wasn’t the after effects of too much pizza.
 
I put the case files and notepad into
my small safe.
 
I put my jacket on,
patted my pockets for keys and tobacco, and left the office.
 
Briefly I thought about using the fire
escape, but I trudged down the three flights to reception.
 

In fact, there were two of them there.
 
Both uniforms, and both standing up,
which is never a good sign.

‘Mr Thomas Becket?’ one of them said.
 
‘Kent Constabulary.
 
I’m afraid we have to ask you accompany
us to the station.’

I followed them to the back entrance of
Hunt and Carstairs LLP.
 
The car
park was empty apart from Anthony’s Jag and a police car.
 

I got in the back and they drove me
away.

If
they planned to make me think, make me consider the entire range of
possibilities for my incarceration
,
then it was a decent
plan.
 
The fact I knew it wasn’t a
plan, that they were just waiting for someone further up the food
chain to turn up,
didn’t stop me thinking.
 
They had been told to locate Becket and lock him up.
 
Why?
 
I asked myself.
 

See, I had little choice but to think.

This time they had provided a cell for
the purpose.
 
I had not only been
deprived of my liberty, but also my phone, the contents of my pockets, my belt
and shoelaces.
 
It was almost as
bad as going through airport security.
 
When I asked the reason for the somewhat heavy-handed approach, they
said it was a murder inquiry and they’d been told I could be a danger to myself
and to others.

Provoking
that boy...that was quite out of character, if I may say so, Tom.

I asked them to ring Anthony Carstairs,
but I was not sure they would.
 
Later it would be easy to deny that I had made a request, easier to deny
than giving me a new shiner anyway.
 
The point was the same: I was powerless.
 
I only hoped the chambers receptionist had had the wit to
tell the head clerk.
 
And for the
head clerk to have the courage to wake Anthony from his postprandial
slumber.
 

So, if they planned to make me
think—if it really was conspiracy and not the usual cock-up—then it
worked.
 
I thought about how I had
become an actor in the case.
 
No mere
observer, not just a legal investigator raking over dead coals, but lighting
fires of my own.
 
Not good
practice.
 
I thought of how
Haloperidol had come to be in my bloodstream, and who had the opportunity to
put it there.
 
But more intriguing
was the reason
why
.
 
I longed to ask Carstairs that
question.
 
Partly
to vindicate his belief that I was the target.
 
And partly to say,
You
see it was
planned.
 
There is conspiracy.
 
I was not attacked randomly.
 
I was targeted by
people who knew I could defend myself if they didn’t drug me to the eyeballs
first
.
 

And now I was being held in a cell
while someone came down from London to interview me.
 
My money was on DCI Richie.

I
was wrong.
 
The detective
inspector’s name was Nick Spittieri.
 
He was six-four, overweight, with a swarthy, pock-marked skin, three days’
growth of stubble, and the air of man very easily pissed off.
 
He was accompanied by
a young DC who looked uncomfortable and said nothing
.
 
Later, I came to the conclusion that the
lad was in a mild state of shock.
 
Every young copper has been there.
 
Just seen his first violent death.
 
So violent, he couldn’t quite shake it, no matter how hard he stared at
normal things: walls, tables, chairs, his own hands, his wrists...

We sat in an interview room.
 
Spittieri asked me a few preliminaries about
myself.
 
His demeanour seemed to
say: so this is how you end up when you join the private sector.
 
I asked to see Anthony Carstairs
again.
 
The DC didn’t seem to even
hear the question.
 
The local bobby
studied the wallpaper.
 
Spittieri
just ignored me.
 

‘So,’ he said.
 
‘You’ll be familiar with things like
this.’

He pushed an A4 envelope across the
table.

‘Open it.’

The envelope contained five large
colour prints.
 
I shuffled them.

Glass, blood, the close up of an eye,
bloodshot.
 
Sunlight.
 
More glass.
 
Next
photograph: a man was hanging limp and very dead.
 
Someone had propped him up, there.
 
He stood at a window—no, not windows, French
doors—they must have put his head through the pane first, and then his
arms, further down.
 
Punched them
through while holding his wrists.
 
Noli me tangere
.
 
Not quite a crucifix but it held him
up.
 
The window frame was holding
him there.
 
Next photo: a chair
wedged against him, just to make sure.
 
His head slumped forward as if he had fallen asleep.
 
I flicked through the others.
 
More angles on the
same scene.
 
I put the
photographs back before the young DC fainted.

Spittieri asked, ‘
You
don’t seem very surprised, Mr Becket.’

‘As you say I’m familiar with such
things.’

‘Are you ‘familiar’ with the victim?’

‘His first name is Lee.
 
Surname’s Herbert, I think.’

‘And how do you know, Mr Herbert?’

‘He attacked me with two other men in a
park in Chichester.’

‘After you assaulted him the day before
in the same park.’

‘I was getting to that bit.
 
After I
defended
myself from him the day before.
 
Who killed him?’

‘We thought you would be able to tell
us that.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You didn’t kill him then?’

‘I suppose you had to ask me that,’ I
said.
 
‘But no, I didn’t kill
him.
 
I didn’t even know he was
dead.’

I pushed the envelope back across the
table.
 
Spittieri took a plastic
evidence bag out of his pocket and held it up.
 
Inside was a business card.
 
Blood stained.

‘Recognise this?’

‘Looks like my card.’

Spittieri said, ‘Found on the body.’

I summoned up my reserves of sarcasm.

‘How clumsy of me.’

The young DC started.

‘That was a joke,’ I added for his
benefit.

Spittieri stared.
 
It was a good stare.
 
Honed in places where stares, and other
forms of non-verbal communication, really mattered.

He said, ‘I don’t think you are in any
position to joke, Mr Becket.’

‘Clearly not,’ I said.
 
‘You have had me arrested without
making it clear what for.
 
You have
denied lawful access to legal representation on two occasions, and now you have
shown me pieces of evidence that indicate that you don’t really think it was me
who killed him, but that I might know who did it.
 
My best guess, like yours, is the other two guys who
attacked me.
 
They probably rightly
came to the conclusion that he would get himself arrested sooner or later and
that at that stage might be stupid enough to give them up.
 
Now can I see my brief?’

The
story was this.
 
About the same
time as I sat in that pub in Canterbury the day before, Lee Herbert was leaving
one in New Cross, South London.
 
The rainstorm that was falling on Canterbury had passed over the capital
some time ago and had left an oily sheen on the wet pavements.
 
In the Marquis of Queensbury, the same
match played on the television, but Lee was not much interested in football, he
wanted to get his end away.
 

He was staying in a squat on Charles
Adamson Crescent.
 
It was occupied,
in part, by some people he knew from Chichester, students at Goldsmiths.
 
He didn’t know them that well, just
from school and pubs in town, but well enough for them to put him up for a few
days.
 
They called themselves
anarchists, DI Spittieri said, so they could hardly refuse.

Charles Adamson Crescent was
semi-circle of late Georgian houses
, probably built for
merchants.
 
A degree of
gentrification had occurred along the road, farther away from a council estate
that pulsated aggro on a regular basis.
 
The squat was civilised compared to some others in the area.
  
The anarchists paid the
electricity bills and council tax.
 
There was even a rota to take out the rubbish or recycling every other
week.
 
A poster on the kitchen wall
advocated interracial tolerance in fifteen languages—some of them in
scripts Spittieri had never even known existed.
 

They had given Lee a room on the ground
floor.
 
It faced out onto the
overgrown garden and had old French windows that rattled in the breeze.
 
The usual occupant, a girl, was away
with Greenpeace.
 
She had left her
summer frocks hanging side by side on the picture rail so that they reminded
Spittieri of a paper chain.
 

The other kids in the squat said Lee
liked the room so much that he wanted to stay.
 
The students intimated that it would be time for Lee to move
on once the Greenpeace girl came back from Russia or wherever she was.
 
The
house is full, bro’,
they told him and besides some of the girls felt a
little uncomfortable around Lee.
 
Sure,
they enjoyed it when he splashed his cash around the pub, when he bought them
decent weed or paid them into a warehouse party.
 
But he was also paying a lot of attention to a black girl
called Sistina.
 
When the police
turned up, they found her rocking in the corner of Lee’s room, her legs curled
up under her.
 
At first they
thought that she had killed him.

The others said Sistina wouldn’t talk
much: just her name, a hoarse whisper, now and then: yes or thank-you like it
was one word.
 
They said she had
lost her voice in some war-torn part of Africa, that her family had been kicked
out of England for something or other.
 
The Greenpeace girl had found Sistina on the street and brought her
home.
 
She had slept in the
Greenpeace girl’s bed until a room came free.
 

Before leaving the pub, Lee had said Sistina
would be at home waiting for him back at the squat.
 
After a while, some of the girls insisted they went home in
case Lee did something to Sistina.
 
But Sistina told the police that she had not let Lee in.
 
He had gone round the back of the house
and broken in.
 
She had heard
broken glass.
 
And then she had
heard Lee scream.
 
Just once.

When she went downstairs she found him
like that.
 
Crucified, she said.

An
hour later, I had given a statement to DI Spittieri with Anthony Carstairs
present and was ready to leave when DCI Richie turned up.
 
He was not in his motorcycle outfit
this time, which was a pity as I have a soft spot for fancy dress.
 
He read my statement seriously.
 
It was nothing that I had not told the
police in Chichester, except I had accounted for my movements the previous
evening.
 
No doubt, sooner or later,
someone in Kent Constabulary would check out whether I had sat in a pub for
five hours drinking one expensive single malt whisky after another.
 
I said some of this, but Anthony
Carstairs had put his hand on my arm.
 
It reminded me that I had his reputation to think of as well as my own.

Richie asked, ‘So you think the men who
mugged you also murdered Lee Herbert?’

‘And Sir Simeon Marchant.’

He sighed.
 
Spittieri looked confused.

Richie said to him, ‘
This
is Becket’s conspiracy theory.
 
No
one else’s.’

‘Have you done a PM on Herbert?’ I
asked.

‘He’s in the queue,’ Spittieri said.

‘Get them to check for Haloperidol.’

‘What’s that?’ he asked.
 
I watched a flicker of interest pass
over Richie’s face before he looked away.

‘It is what they gave me.
 
It slows you down.
 
Means you can’t fight back.
 
Can’t think.
 
Get them to test for it.
 
H-a-l-o-p-e-r-i-d-o-l.’