The Conspiracy Theorist (3 page)

‘I was just paying my respects,’ I said
to Jenny Forbes-Marchant.
 
‘I wish
I had met your father.
 
He was a great
man.’

Her eyes softened, ‘Thank you.’

‘Yes, I wish I’d known him, too,’
Richie said.
 

And he pushed past me, leading Mrs
Forbes-Marchant to his car.
 

I
went for a coffee at St Pancras station and stared up at the departures board.
 
The concourse was thronged with people
waiting for the Eurostar.
 
Foreign
students, middle-aged French couples bemused by how much better the London station
is than Gare du Nord—cleaner, cheaper, classier—people of various
hues and races sitting on their suitcases or leaning against their rucksacks,
the whole world seemed to be travelling.
 
It would be nice to travel, I thought.
 
I can afford to.
 
I do not need to earn money.
 
I have my pensions.
  
Yes, I could
travel
.
 
But where
would I go?
 
And why?

It seemed to me that the most tempting
destination on the board was Canterbury.
 
I could be home for lunch.
 
A ploughman’s and a pint in the Cheker of Hope.
 
Three buckets of balls on the driving
range to work off my frustration.
 
But
still I did not move.

Eventually I rang my contact at the
Yard.
 
She confirmed, after a quick
look at the system, that DCI Richie was indeed assigned to the Marchant case
and that the only suspects listed were a gang of youths—‘known
offenders’— from the Alconbury Estate in Camden.
 
There was no record yet of them being
interviewed, but that didn’t mean anything, she said.
 
Just that no one had bothered to update the system.

‘Why are SCD7 involved?’
 
I asked.
 
‘Seems quite low-level for them.’

‘There’s a political connection,’ she
said.
 
‘Special Intelligence
Section
are
leading.’

SIS was the most cerebral section of
the Flying Squad, ex-Special Branch some of them, the ones who had not moved over
to Anti-Terrorist Command.
 
If SIS
was involved, there had to be something else going on.

‘How do you know?’ I asked.

‘Case officer has to tick a box these
days.’
 
She laughed and added,
‘Richie of Special Intelligence, they call him.
 
You are
so
out of
date, Becket.’

‘I never had the training.’

‘Why am I not surprised?
 
Well, us poor mortals have to complete
a field if there’s a MP or Peer involved, even a senior civil servant, or
adviser.
 
The list gets longer every
day.’

‘Any names?’

‘What?
 
MPs?
 
You're
joking!’

‘No, the suspects, of course.’

‘Tom!’
 
She pretended to be shocked.
 
‘You know I can’t give you that information.’

‘Of course you can’t.
 
Tell me, does everyone hate me at the
Yard?’

‘Only those that remember you, Mr
Becket.’

There was laughter at the other
end.
 
Then she added, ‘I’ll text
them to you.’

The
Alconbury Estate is a series of seven horseshoe shaped low-rises—four levels,
mid-Sixties chic, Grade 2 listed, wooden doors, in primary colours like an
architectural version of a Mondrian painting—all of them still publicly
owned.
 
The London Borough of
Camden has named each apartment block after an American president.
 
The central block is currently attributed
to Calvin B. Coolidge, the man responsible for the phrase ‘return to normalcy.’
 
It has always been a favourite of mine.

Contrary to popular belief, serious
crime is rare in places like the Alconbury Estate.
 
It migrates to the main roads, the pubs, clubs and parks in
the vicinity.
 
Criminal activity on
estates like the Alconbury tends to be low-level, and boredom induced: excessive
noise, partying, minor acts of extortion, threatening behaviour, loan-sharking
and any combination of the above that makes people’s lives a misery.
 
The Police of the Metropolis retreats to
their patrol vehicles to allow residents to get on with it, if not with each
other.
 
In the hot weather, one of
the main aims of policing is to avoid sparking a riot—an expensive
business—among people who have very little to lose and yet see how the
other half lives on a daily basis.
 
London is different from other English cities in that extreme
wealth and poverty co-exist, often within the same postcode, smooth cheek by unshaven
jowl.

That morning the Alconbury was
quiet.
 
It was 11 o’clock and the local
citizenry was a-bed or at work.
 
There were few passers-by.
 
The
first three people I approached ignored me completely, and the fourth advised me
to do something that, on the face of it, seemed a physical impossibility.
 
The fifth, an old lady carrying a
shopping bag, took pity on me and enquired gently if I was ‘filth’. She put her
bag down and asked to see some ID.
 
I gave her my business card.
 

‘Oh, you’re a brief,’ she said.
 
‘My son’s up Pentonville, no thanks to
you lot.
 
Who you looking for, then?’

I gave her two names.
 
She shook her head.
 
Twice.

‘Never heard of them.
 
Sound foreign to me, but then they all
do these days, even the English ones.
 
You want to try Reuben up at Coolidge.
 
He will know who they are.’

‘Who’s Reuben?’

‘Community worker, they call him.
 
If you’re going there, you could carry my
bag as far as Kennedy.’

Silently I kept pace with her until we
reached a row of shops—a bookmaker’s, a kebab shop, a newsagent—and
she pointed at a sign that said ‘Community Office’.
 

‘You’ll find him in there.’

She retrieved the bag from my grasp as
if she doubted my intention to return it.

‘There aren’t many people round here
you’d trust to carry your shopping these days,’ she said by way of thanks.
 
‘That’s Kennedy. I can manage from
here.’

‘Have you lived here long?’ I asked.

‘Since they were built.
 
September Sixty-Four it was.’

‘So the Council renamed Kennedy Court,
then?’

‘No flies on you, is there?
 
Yes, it was ‘Roosevelt’ when I moved
in, but no one could spell it.
 
Now
they want to call Coolidge ‘Obama’.
 
The Council has voted on it.’

She hobbled off.
 
I went into the Community Office, where
I was greeted by a young black woman sat behind a metal grille
.

‘He’s not in,’ she said as soon as she
laid eyes on me.

‘Who’s not in?’ I asked.

The woman glittered with much jewellery
in the gloom.
 
Her eyes flashed
antipathy.
 
She glowered at me.

‘Reuben.
 
You’ll
be wanting
to see him.
 
I can tell by the way you are dressed.
 
He’ll be back about twelve I expect.
 
Sit down if you want.’

It was half-eleven, so I sat down.
 
Through a security door I could see
office staff drifting by.
 
The
Community Office was a hive of activity.
 
It also housed the Citizens’ Advice Bureau and local Credit Union,
organisations that I thoroughly approved of.
 
People came to the grille, made an appointment or were
buzzed right through.
 
If they had
not got an appointment, they needed a very good reason to get past the
receptionist.
 
I began to feel
fortunate that I was allowed to stay in reception.
 
Few others were.
 

In my black suit and tie, I felt conspicuous.
 
Supplicants would glance at me as they
made their case for admission to the inner sanctum of the Alconbury Community
Credit Union.
 
I heard
whispered—and sometimes not so
sotto
voce
—imprecations that told of delayed benefits payments, loan
sharks, Pay Day or Log-Book Lenders, credit card hounds, monies stranded
overseas or in missing partners’ pockets.
 
People pleaded and received little sympathy.
 
They got ‘
So
you’re
really okay
till Thursday?
 
Let’s book you in for tomorrow.’
 
Spoonfuls of tough
love were dispensed like cod liver oil by the receptionist behind the metal
grille
.
 
It was like
eavesdropping on confession at the local church.

Dealing with this on a daily basis
probably makes you like that, I thought.
 
But after a while I could stand no more of it.
 
I felt uncomfortable, like I had no right to be there.
 
So I went over to her.

‘I’m just going out for a cigarette.’

The woman nodded back.
 
I stopped.

‘Reuben’s surname.
 
It’s Symonds, right?’

The woman looked at me oddly and nodded
again.
 

No one seems to want to talk to me
today, I thought.
 
Strange that.

I
had met Reuben Symonds once before, while I was still in the force.
 
Well actually, I had asked him a
question at a conference, which is not quite the same as meeting someone.
 
The subject of the event had been
community policing, and it coincided with the launch of a new government
strategy on the subject or, more accurately, something called ‘Community Safety’.
 
I am sure there is a department in
the Home Office that comes up with new names for old failures.
 
If they are really worried they put the
‘P’ word next to whatever the new initiative is.
 
The ‘P’ word means it is someone else’s fault.
 
Society
is to blame
, as Monty Python once said,
so
we will be charging them too
.
 
So the conference where Reuben Symonds spoke, all those years ago, was
on the subject of Community Safety Partnerships.
 

Reuben had been an impressive
speaker.
 
Tall, thin, ebony black,
with the healthy amber glow of an athlete, and greying peppercorn hair cut
close to the head.
 
He began by
telling his story—always a good opener at such gatherings—and not
without emotion in his case.
 
He stressed
how his criminal actions had affected those around him: his brothers, sisters,
cousins, and his mother (breaking into tears at this point).
 
It was something he called ‘the ripple
effect’: how if you did one bad thing, it was shown to affect twelve other
people in your life.
 

It was a hot day.
 
One of the coppers behind me—a
nascent Richie by the sound of him—had whispered to his mate that he
could ‘just do with a raspberry ripple’.
 
I had turned and made a note of the man’s number—he was in uniform
fortunately—and that had sufficed to keep him quiet for the rest of the
talk.
 

Everyone
hates you at the Yard, Becket.

The event had been in the British
Library, not far from the Alconbury Estate but culturally on another
planet.
 
Symonds talked about how he
had passed Pentonville on the way there that day.
 
He had even looked up at the cell he used to be in.
 
He described the view and the desire to
be in the normal world outside and the fact that there were people just like
him there now looking out.
 
He went
on to outline his recidivism, the inability to keep down a job, and the easy
route of slipping back into crime.
 

On his second stretch (this time for
armed robbery), he was diagnosed with dyslexia and he began to understand why he
had felt frustrated at school, his sense of anger and resentment at not being
able to succeed.
 
However Reuben Symonds
was not one for using this as an excuse—in his book there was no excuse
for criminal behaviour—and he decided to pursue what he called his ‘redemption’.
 
The Prisoners’ Education Trust talked
to him.
 
He got help with his
reading.
 
He described how he got
the learning bug, going from one course to another, to doing his ‘A’ levels, to
taking a degree in English Literature with the Open University.
 
He won a national adult learner of the
year award and, on release, volunteered at his local community centre in
Tottenham.
 
The housing association
saw his talents and employed him.
 
He
had helped with something called the Reduced Crime Initiative and crime had
duly seen a reduction.
 
He had been visited there by the Home Secretary, the Prime Minister,
the London Mayor, and even the Prince of Wales, who gamely attempted to compose
a few lines of rap poetry
.
 
A number of celebrities visited—musicians, athletes,
footballers—and not all of them black.
 

Reuben Symonds had clearly gone onto
better things since.
 
He was now
the Community Coordinator at the Alconbury.
 
And it was quite a community to coordinate.

I
was stubbing out my cigarette as Symonds turned the corner of Coolidge Court
and walked in my direction.
 
He was accompanied on either side by two men—one black, one
white—who looked like they spent a considerable amount of their leisure
time lifting weights
.
 
They
were all dressed in black t-shirts.
 
Reuben Symonds wore black shorts and no socks.
 
It looked odd that he also carried a briefcase.
 
His companions carried nothing but
their arms, but they looked heavy enough.
 
All three were staring at me like they could not quite comprehend my
existence.

‘I heard I had a visitor,’ Symonds
said.
 
‘But they didn’t say your
name.’

‘Becket.’

‘That it?
 
Becket?
 
Just that?’

‘Tom Becket.
 
One T as in the martyr.’

‘What martyr?’

‘Thomas A Becket.
 
You know, Archbishop of Canterbury?
 
Murdered by Henry the Second?’

‘Oh that martyr!’ one of the
weightlifters said sarcastically.

I offered my hand.
 
Reuben Symonds shook it lightly.
 
The other guys did not offer
theirs.
 
They contented themselves with
staring at the side of my head.

‘What can I do for you, Tom Becket?’ Symonds
asked.
 
‘You're not the police as
we’ve just come from there.’

‘Can we talk inside?’

‘What about?
 
That’s my point, man.
 
We are busy people.
 
What
about?’

I gave him three names: Sir Simeon
Marchant, Djbril Mustapha, and Darren Patterson.

‘Marchant was my client,’ I added.

‘You better come in.
 
Do you want to sit in on this, Pete?’

He was addressing the white guy.

‘No, you’re all right, Rube, man.
 
Leave it to you.’

Inside we were buzzed through immediately.
 
I could feel the place come alive with
Reuben Symonds’s presence.
 
It
became more focused; people looked his way, or shouted out a greeting.
 
Several petitioners for credit stood up
and shook his hand like they were extremely grateful for something.
 
It was impressive, if slightly creepy.