The Conspiracy Theorist (34 page)

Know, that is.

It was clear to me now.
 
Richie had used me as bait.
 
Right from the
beginning.
 
Watterson was
right.
 
I had underestimated the
little twat.
 
And now I was about
to pay for it.

‘Police marksman,’ the warning
came.
 
‘Get on the floor and stay
there.’

I toppled sideways.
 
It was the best I could do.

As I fell, a high velocity round whipped
past my shoulder.
 
I was about to
complain, when I saw it had hit a man coming into the room.
 
He looked as surprised as me for a
second and then lay very still.
 
I
crawled behind the Chesterfield, hoping it was as well-made as advertised, and
tried to see if any more feet were joining him, the dead man.
 

Bullets were pinging around everywhere
now, glass flying and landing on me, but I didn’t want to cower in case anyone
took it into their heads to shoot me when I was not looking.
 
I presumed there were more people
coming into the room, as the shooting continued for about thirty seconds.
 
That was long enough.
 
It reminded me of the end of the film
Bonnie and Clyde,
except I had no car to
hide behind.
 
All the good it did
them
.

When the shooting stopped, I grabbed at
a piece of broken glass and starting sawing at the plastic tie that bound my
ankles.
 
I was not intending on
going anywhere but if I were to be a sitting duck at least I would not be a
trussed one.
 
There were a few more
shots, and I crawled into a corner watching the wall where there used to be a
mirror.
 
Now there was just a
wall—no two-way mirror, no window through which I was being observed—and
a fetching design of bullet holes.
 

Richie came into the room in a combat
vest, followed a veritable phalanx of paramilitaries with ‘SOCA’ or ‘NCA’ on
their backs.
 
They looked
overstaffed, but I wasn’t complaining.
 
DS Singh followed, looking very out of place in his orange turban.

I tried to sit up, but he put his palm
on my chest.

‘Just lay still, everything’s okay,’ he
said.

‘When police say everything is okay,’ I
said, ‘it normally means it is not.’

My voice sounded strange, until I
realised I had been deafened by the gunfire.
 
My words were far away now, as if spoken by someone else, a
person with a mouthful of cotton wool.
 
I needed to listen to this person.
 
I tried to sit up but my elbow slipped in a sticky substance the colour
and consistency of fresh blood.
 

I looked down.
 
It seemed to belong to me.

It was the second time I had woken up
in Chichester hospital.
 
They had
even given me my old room, I thought, until I realised one room in a hospital was
very much like another.
 
Likewise the nurses.
 
They were taking an interest in me now I was ill again.
 
Gunshot wounds are glamorous even when
they miss one’s vital organs.
 
But I
had to behave myself as they told me Meg was just down the corridor.
 
And I didn’t want her to get word about
how frisky her ex-husband was.

Richie told me they had picked Meg up
at the end of the lane.
 
It hadn’t taken
them long to find the house, he said.
 
Not after Watterson arrived.
 
It seemed that Richie’s team had been following him for some time.
 
Lukas Merweville and his buddies had
given up without too much of a struggle.
 
They were now talking.
 
It had only taken two days, but they had agreed to talk.
 
Spill the beans as to the games
REsurance had been playing, home and away.

Richie tried not to look too pleased
with
himself
.
 
He jigged around the room, full of nervous energy.
 
Even without his aviator specs, he still
reminded me of Jimmy Somerville doing ‘Don’t leave me this way’.

‘Doctor tell you when you get out?’ he
asked.

‘Week, at most.
 
Bullet only clipped me.
 
They
can’t tell if it was one of yours or not.’
 

‘Pity, you could have sued us.
 
Got another pay off.’

‘Who’s ‘us’, Richie?’

He smiled enigmatically, ‘Take your
pick.’

‘They were about to let me go.’

‘Only if you agreed to stop, Becket.’

‘You were listening in?’

‘It was getting to a crucial stage.
 
They had found out how much you knew,
and were getting bored.
 
We thought
we better come in before they shot you.’

It was tempting to point out that his
lot had probably shot me.
 
Instead
I asked, ‘You wired me?’

‘First your phone—which you kept
losing—then your wallet.
 
Wasn’t easy.
 
Fortunately
you also kept getting arrested.
 
So
we had plenty of time to do it.’

Watterson was right: I had
underestimated Richie.
 
He had been
tracking me throughout the case.
 
My case.
 
Except it was his
case all along and Becket was his pawn.
 
I felt like the village idiot in a village of idiots.

‘We have all the evidence we need,
Becket.
 
It helped that he agreed
to your version of events.’

‘Watterson?’

‘Dead, I’m afraid.
 
And his associates,
the ones who were about to come in and beat seven shades of shit out of you.
 
We haven’t got all of them so we still
need to be careful.’

‘You mean you’re offering me witness protection?
 
And Meg?’

‘Your wife did not see them and besides
she said would not accept it.
 
Anyway
it won’t get to that.
 
Merweville,
Berenson and Verholen will plead guilty to the murders of Sir Simeon Marchant,
Lee Herbert and Mathew Janovitz and everyone will be happy.’

‘Ecstatic,’ I said.

‘Otherwise they go back to an Iraqi
jail or South Africa.
 
Not a choice
I would make.

‘I take it they have been bad boys.’

‘Very,’ he said.
 
‘Murder and blackmail is just the tip
of their particular iceberg.
 
They will
be out in 8-to-10 over here, if they plead guilty.
 
It will seem like a holiday camp.
 
By the time they are deported, everyone at home will have
forgotten about them.’

‘And they can start again,’ I
said.
 
‘So much for justice.’

‘Don’t get on your high horse with this,
Becket.
 
It has taken me years to
get that bastard.’

High horse, I thought.
 
It reminded me of Sir Peter Watterson.

‘Watterson,’ I said.
 
‘You took the fall for him first time round,
didn’t you?
 
With the Penwortham
case.’

All those years I had thought Richie
was a bad cop when he really was just an ordinary cop in a bad system.
 
He did not challenge the system, or it
would have just spat him out in the same way it had spat me out.
 

‘Of course I did,’ he said.
 
‘Otherwise, no career.’
 

He sighed and walked over to the
window.
 
‘How I have waited for
this day.’

‘The day you got him.’

‘The day I could tell
you
, you moron.
 
You always thought I was totally in the
wrong, a bad apple that was allowed to stay in the barrel.
 
But it was not like that.
 
I was just a young copper who was told
what to do.’

‘Just following orders.’

‘Yes and I'm not proud of it.
 
You were right I should not have done
it.
 
That is why I have cleaned
this up.’

‘And you used me to do it.
 
Neat.
 
What I deserved I guess.’

‘I saw the opportunity with Sir Simeon’s
involvement.
 
I just did not know
they would kill him.
 
I almost told
you but...’

‘You thought I would not listen.
 
That I was prejudiced
against you.
 
You were right,
Richie.’

There was a long silence, while we both
looked out of the window.
 
There
was not much to look at, but it held us the way memories do.
 
All the energy had gone from him.
 
I knew he felt he was at the end of
something.
 

I added, ‘And I was wrong.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.
 
He turned and walked to the door.
 
‘Now we are quits, or
we would be if your wife had not become involved.
 
I'm sorry about that, and I’ve
apologised to her for it.
 
I didn’t
expect it.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She said she didn’t expect it either.’

‘So she said it was my fault.’

‘Something
like
that.’

Richie smiled enigmatically and left.
 
As usual he had the final word.

They would not let me get out of bed
and I had no visitors—even to watch me pee into a bottle—so I read
the pile of newspapers that DCI Richie had left me.
 
I guess Richie knew it would amuse me to see how the arrest
had been portrayed in the media.
 
They contrived to make it sound like Sir Peter Watterson was the victim
of the kidnapping and was unfortunately killed by his kidnappers—who also
died, conveniently—in a
firefight
with armed
police.
 
There was no mention of an
obscure legal investigator or a clinical pharmacist being held at the same time.
 
Chichester hospital must be the
least leaky ship in the NHS, I thought.
 
Then I read the obituaries about Watterson’s long and distinguished
service.
 
Continued after he left
the Metropolitan Police as chair of charities and a board member of a well-known
security firm with contracts in the Middle East and Africa.

As Sir Simeon Marchant would have said,
someone was managing the media.

I waited until nightfall when no one
would see if I tore any stitches.
 
I
waited until shifts changed over before I tried standing up.
 
It took some time.
 
I waited for the feeling to return to my
feet—they appeared to be bruised, perhaps from being so long without
shoes—then my body decided to sit down again.
 
I waited some more, breathing hard for a minute or ten.
 
Waiting was no problem.
 
There was no pain, just a general numbness
paining my sense.
 
Perhaps I have drunk hemlock
, I thought
woozy with morphine,
or emptied some dull
opiate to the drains one minute past.
 
Perhaps I am just going nuts.
 

I needed to talk to Meg.

I wheeled my best friend, the saline
drip, along with me.
 
Excepting
medical staff, it had been the only visitor to my bedside, since Richie.
 
I was ill apparently.
 
Even when a bullet misses your vital
organs, it creates a vacuum into which is sucked all the germs and clothing
near the wound.
 
Often this causes
an infection that makes you weak for a few days.
 
My body wasn’t happy with that prognosis, and was holding
out for a full week.
 
This was the
second occasion I had been shot, and I was not enjoying it anymore than the
first time.

Several eternities later, after
shuffling down the longest, telescoped corridor in history, I found Meg not
alone, as I expected, but with the dumpy, reliable, bearded and tweedy figure
of Hammonde in attendance.
 
Sitting
bedside, he was asleep as I entered, making him seem almost human, his beard
resting on one hairy fist.
 

‘It’s Professor Plum in the study with a
candlestick,’ I said for no apparent reason.

Hammonde looked up.

‘Tom, are you quite all right?’

He asked, I think, not out of any
concern for my health but as a means of insulting me.

‘How was the conference, Hammonde?
 
Tweedledum or Tweedledee, this time was
it?’

‘Both,’ he replied not to be outdone.

Even I had to admit it was a good
answer.
 
Then Hammonde rather
spoiled it by saying there is no longer such a major distinction between the psychoanalytical
work of Herr Jung and Herr Freud.

‘Glad to hear it.
 
Can I talk to my wife?’

‘She’s asleep and you should not be out
of bed.
 
I will go and get a nurse.’

Hammonde left the room.
 
I noticed he was not wearing shoes.
 
It seemed an unbearably intimate thing
to do at someone’s bedside.
 
It
sickened me.

‘Meg,’ I said as quietly as possible.

She opened her eyes.

I expected her to say something.

Her face was bruised and swollen like mine.
 

‘We look a pair,’ I said.
 

She said nothing.
 
I wondered if she was all right.
 
Richie seemed to suggest she was.

I added, ‘Both of us look better than Hammonde,
though.’

She showed no reaction.
 
No amusement or anger.
 
She stared at me evenly, before picking
up her book as if I wasn’t there.
 
I
moved closer to the bed.
 
She
stopped reading again when she saw the athletic figure I cut.
 
But her expression did not change.

‘Meg?’

My voice sounded far off now, like in a
dream.

‘Are you all right, Meg?’

‘Of course, she’s not all right.’
Hammonde said, standing at the door.
 
‘Thanks to you.
 
She’s in shock.’

I ignored him.
 
There was no nurse with him, so he
didn’t count.

‘Meg. I'm sorry.’

She stared back at me.

‘I did not know that it was going to happen,
Meg.’

She looked down at her book.
 
It seemed to make her sad.
 
Her eyes refused to focus on it.

Hammonde’s voice sounded sympathetic.
 
Perhaps because it was so obvious he had
won after all.
 
‘Look, Tom, I will
take you back to your room.
 
You’re
bleeding.’

I looked down.
 
There were some tiny drops of blood on
the floor.

‘Thought you had gone to tell teacher?’

‘It didn’t seem right,’ he said.
 
‘Come on.
 
We’ll talk tomorrow.’