The Conspiracy Theorist (20 page)

‘I knew he was contacting someone,’ she
said.
 
‘When he
was in London.
 
Jacob, he
said it to Jacob.’

‘Your son?’

She nodded and started to cry slowly,
rhythmically, methodically as if she was pacing herself in her grief.
 
The son came through the front door,
looked at us and went on up the stairs, as if we were a tableau he expected to
see.
 
The old man tried to comfort
her, his frail arm barely touching her shoulder.
 
I went upstairs.

Jacob Breytenbach was not difficult to
locate.
 
I followed the noise of
empty boxes being thrown around.
 
Whatever
he was angry about, a lot of cardboard was paying the price.
 
He scowled at me.

‘Come to make sure we’re not nicking
the family silver?’

Again the trace of an accent.

‘Where are you from?
 
South Africa?’

‘What’s it to you?’

I shrugged.
 
‘Just curious.’

‘Look my address is on the side of the
van.
 
It’s genuine.
 
If anything’s missing just tell the
police.’

‘You sound worried.’

‘I wouldn’t put anything past that
woman.’

‘Mrs Forbes-Marchant?’

‘Yes, soon as Stan died she was right
down here, man.
 
Shit off a shovel,
she was.
 
Gave mum her marching
orders.’

‘Who’s Stan?’

‘Simeon.
 
I called him Stan.
 
Always did.’

His face softened at the memory.
 

‘He set me up in business you know?’

‘When you got out?’

‘Is it that obvious?’

I picked up a book and put it in the
box.
 
It was a romantic novel.
 
He knelt and started to roll a rug.

‘Hard to get a job.
 
Unless you work for yourself.
 
Stan understood. ’

‘Plumbing,’ I said.
 
‘Good money.’

‘My old mates still laugh at me.
 
Say they can earn in a week what I get
in a year.’

‘Crack?’

He didn’t reply, as if it was too
obvious.

‘Hold that,’ he said.

I held the rolled rug while he wrapped
gaffer tape around it.
 
I asked, ‘Did
you ever see a guy up here called Prajapati?’

‘He came here once or twice.
 
He died too.
 
Stan was upset.’

‘Upset?’

‘You know, bothered by it.
 
Really bothered.
 
Got to him, it did.’

‘Did he say why?’

‘Not to me, he didn’t.’

He continued packing, his back to me.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘if you want me to
sign an inventory, I could.
 
Might
be useful if they say something’s missing.’

He turned and looked up at me.
 
‘Nah, you’re all right.
 
If they say anything I’ll enjoy going
to court and saying a few things myself.’

I offered my hand down to him.
 
It seemed the right thing to do.

‘Nice to meet you...’

He thought about it and then shook
hands with me.

‘Jacob,’ he said.

‘Tom,’ I said.
 
‘Sorry for your loss.’

Downstairs,
Wing Commander Kenilworth was sitting alone looking somewhat forlorn.
 
I wondered if he had anyone who cared
for him.
 
Perhaps he was just
wondering where the next drink was located.

‘She’s gone to her room,’ he said.

I was about to say that I had just come
from her room when the truth struck me.
 
Maike Breytenbach was more than Sir Simeon Marchant’s housekeeper.
 
That was why the old man was going up
to London to sort out her sister’s visa.
 
For the wedding.
 
Sir Simeon Marchant was going to make an honest woman of
Maike Breytenbach.

In
the end, I called a cab to take me back to Chichester Station.
 
I thought it was safer that way.
 
Wing Commander Kenilworth was no longer
competent to drive; even in a state of sobriety he rarely attained these days.
 
As for me, I was still too tipsy to
administer CPR to him if the Sprite collided with another vehicle.
 

A sound decision, as it turned
out.
 
There was a police patrol car
waiting at the train station.
 
A
young female officer came over to me.
 
Her blonde hair tied back, she looked resplendent in her stab vest.

‘Mr Becket?’

‘That’s me.’

She handed me an A4 envelope.

‘Your statement.
 
DS Singh said you wanted a copy.’

I was about to say something when she
cut in, ‘
You
want to hurry, sir.
 
You’ll miss your train.’

The
London train was delayed again at Gatwick, where there was either a bomb alert,
an intruder on the line, or the wrong sort of sun on the tracks.
 
It didn’t matter.
 
I was getting off anyway.
 

I didn’t like Gatwick.
 
It had bad memories for me.
 
One morning five years ago, PC Elliott
Quinn of SO18 Aviation Security Command checked in to work, was issued with his
Mauser lightweight sub-machine gun as usual, and calmly splattered himself all
over the Plexiglas of the smoking area.
 
His commanding officer that morning was Inspector Niall Rosenberg, a
small fiercely intelligent man in his early thirties.
 
Rosenberg was a graduate fast tracker who had turned down
MI5—I had seen his file—in favour of routine ploddery.
 
He ran the SO18 surveillance section at
Gatwick and was, by all accounts, very good at it.
 
Despite the routine interference of our security services,
UK Border Agency and Special Branch in his work, he had detected no fewer than
five serious terrorist suspects entering the airport in the year before I met
him.
 
These were individuals that others
had missed.
 
After a period on
secondment on the West Bank, he brought in Israeli methods of spotting
psychological traits known as ‘giveaways’.
 
He then used UK face recognition software on those
identified as possible suspects.
 
All very innovative.

Rosenberg knew that apprehending people
at the airport was often the least risky option—terrorists don’t tend to have
weapons with them in Arrivals and the police most certainly do—but
sometimes he had to let known operatives through so the spooks could track
them.
 
Once or twice, when the
direct order had not come through his chain of command, Rosenberg had refused
and arrested dangerous individuals that the security forces would have
preferred to have at large.
 
In
short he was from my school of policing: deal with what is in front of
you.
 
It didn’t make him popular
with the pen pushers and players of the Great Game in Whitehall and New
Scotland Yard.

All this meant that when, that morning five
years ago, the very disturbed PC Elliott Quinn blew his own head off, certain
people wanted Rosenberg’s too.
 
On a plate.
 

Becket of the Awkward Squad refused to
give it to them.
 
True, Rosenberg
was not the strongest of operational commanders, and had very little interest
in or understanding of people like Elliott Quinn, but there was no way he could
have stopped the man.
 
If anything,
Quinn’s direct superior, his sergeant, was to blame for not spotting the
ex-soldier’s increasingly erratic behaviour.
 
Or the people who gave him a loaded weapon in the first
place, instead of cutting him loose to work for G4S or in his local charity
shop.

Whatever, Rosenberg was grateful for me
for saving his career—I took most of the flak myself—and had sent
me a note late last year when he finally got his promotion.

Dear
Becket
, he wrote,
you were wrong.

He meant that I was wrong in saying he
would never get promoted.
 
For
once, I was pleased I was wrong.

I
could not ring ahead—my new phone had no charge—so I had them page Rosenberg
from the Police Information Desk.
 
He
met me in a quiet corner of an airport coffee shop, where I was charging my new
mobile at the expense of a multi-national—probably the same one that sold
me the phone in the first place.
 

I thought Rosenberg would whisk me off somewhere
more prosaic, but we stayed put.
 
Rosenberg
put his BlackBerry on the table and spun it around with a finger.
 
It was a characteristic he’d had when I
was interviewing him five years ago.
 
It was irritating then, too.

‘I would take you upstairs,’ he said,
referring to the Border Agency’s Operations Room.
 
‘But we are on Severe at the moment, so no visitors.’

In security
speak,
Severe is one below Critical and one above Substantial.
 
I’m told Moderate and Low featured so
rarely these days that they were thinking of getting rid of them as categories.
 
Never a dull
moment in the War on Terror.
 

‘It’s all right,’ I said.
 
‘I’m not nostalgic.
 
How are things?’

‘The usual chaos,’ he said.
 
‘This Snowden thing isn’t helping.
 
GCHQ is all in a tizzy.
 
MI5 has got its knickers in a
twist.
 
And UKBA are like headless
chickens over this new National Crime Agency coming in.’

‘Our very own FBI at last.’

‘People don’t realise how big it is
going to be.
 
Four
thousand officers—mostly on secondment—half a billion budget.
 
Replaces SOCA next
month—about time too, in my opinion—plus child exploitation and
online protection, IT and cyber crime, police training, Hendon, even parts of
the Border Agency here.
 
Causing no end of grief and back-watching, I can tell you.’

‘There has been hardly anything about
it in the press,’ I said.

‘I know.
 
All very low key.
 
Under the radar.
 
Top-brass hoped it would go away, I
think.’

‘Did you apply?’ I asked.
 
‘For a secondment.’

‘You’re joking!
 
Everyone had to be vetted.’

‘Didn’t stop you getting promoted,’ I
said.
 
‘You were right, I was
wrong.’

He stared at me for a long moment.

‘Whatever happened to the old Becket?’
he asked.
 
‘Your evil twin?’

‘Well, he mainly does matrimonials
these days,’ I said.
 
‘And evidence
reviews.’

Rosenberg looked sceptical, nodded at
my bruised face.

‘Looks like dangerous work.’

I described the attack, leaving out the
context, saying I was carrying £500 in cash.

Rosenberg appeared to believe about
half it, but couldn’t be bothered to find out which half was true.
 
He asked to see the CCTV stills,
regarding them in the manner of an archivist or a curator in a museum: the
definition of the image, the weight of the paper.
 
The first showed two shaven headed men in suits walking
towards the park gates with baseball bats.
 
The second, Lee Herbert getting into the
Range Rover.
 
The third, the vehicle driving away.
 
DS Singh hadn’t printed off the one
with Becket being beaten to a pulp.
 
Perhaps that was on the staff room wall.

‘Where did you get them?’ Rosenberg
asked.

‘I can only assume they were attached
to my statement by mistake.’

He laughed.
 
‘The British police must be the leakiest organisation in the
world.’

I realised that DS Singh was taking
some kind of risk in helping me.
 
I
wondered if the blonde constable had known what she’d delivered to me at
Chichester station.
 
Onto the copy
of my statement, the CCTV photographs and Jenny Forbes-Marchant’s police
interview notes had been carelessly stapled.

‘Makes you wonder why they ever try to
cover things up.’

‘These guys who mugged you,’ Rosenberg
said.
 
‘They don’t look much like
muggers to me.’

‘The linings of their suits were red.’

‘Nice.
 
And you think they could be foreign nationals?’

‘South African or Russian, perhaps.’

‘Arriving when?’

I counted back to the date of Sir
Simeon Marchant’s death.
 

‘Sometime around the 19
^th
or
20
^th
.
 
August.’

‘Why Gatwick?’

‘Close to Chichester,’ I said.
 
‘And I don’t know anyone at Heathrow.’

Rosenberg shook his head.

‘Honest, anyway.
 
Well, I shall try Terminal 3, first off.
 
That’s a lot of footage but the system is so quick these
days.’

He made a note on the envelope.

‘These are copies,’ he said.
 
‘Do you need them?’

‘Yes.’

‘Copies of copies is no good for me.
 
How about if I copy them and give you back
the copies?’

‘Fine.’

He stood up.

‘Wait here.’

‘Can I borrow your phone?
 
My battery’s gone.’

‘Sure.’

Rosenberg looked at me strangely and left.
 
Never lie to a copper, I thought.
 

I looked around the concourse.
 
People hurrying to make their flights,
or killing time shopping for things they didn’t really need.
 
The fake English pub, all dark wood and
cheerful stained glass, was packed.
 
No one paid me any attention.
 
So I made a few phone calls, safe in the knowledge I could not be
overheard.

I
arrived in London just after eight and met Colin Littlemore on the concourse at
Victoria Station.
 
He was drinking
from a Caffe Nero carton the size of a small bucket.
 
Littlemore—he was never ‘Colin’ to me—was a
known caffeine addict when he was not studying photographs of young boys, his
other addiction.
 
It was a
compulsion, he assured me from time to time, which he was entirely cured of, in
the thoroughly convincing manner of an Italian gourmand who tells you he
doesn’t appreciate Tuscan truffles anymore.
 
There was also something of the gourmand about Littlemore in
girth if not in diet.
 
As far as I
knew he subsisted entirely on take-outs and TV dinners ordered online.
 
This was because he rarely went out
after dark, and when he did he got nosebleeds—usually from the sort of
ex-con who can spot a nonce at thirty paces.

So it was quite a big thing for Littlemore
to come and meet me at Victoria Station.
 
It took several threats to get him there.
 
Becket wasn’t proud of himself, but times were hard.

‘Chief Inspector Becket,’ he said in
his oily manner.
 
‘Can I get you a
four shot Cappuccino, perhaps?’

I didn’t want us to get off on the
wrong foot, so I told him I’d rather eat my own liver.
 
That was the other thing that annoyed
me about Colin Littlemore; he still called me Chief Inspector Becket.
 
It dated from the time I was
investigating two undercover officers who had got so much into their roles as
local hard men that they had trounced Littlemore and several thousand pounds’
worth of computers in his flat.
 
That act, in itself, might not have been serious enough to be drawn to
my attention had not, the following evening, one of the officers shot his
colleague in the thigh, allegedly during a dispute over who got the final
drumstick in a KFC Bargain Bucket.
 
Like I say they were very much in role—presumably in the manner of
the great Stanislavski or Lee Strasberg of the New York School—and I was
therefore more interested in them than the child sex offender they had beaten
up to impress some local youths.