The Conspiracy Theorist (36 page)

‘Of course,’ she said briskly.
 
‘That woman had no
..
.’

I cut her short.
 
She had no right to talk about Maike
Breytenbach in that way.
 
She was
the only one in the whole sorry affair who came out of it well.
 
Maike and her son.

‘I thought it all went to the boy
Jacob?’

‘Well it did, but it was really for
her.
 
Daddy saw to that.
 
Did you know she is not even a British
citizen?’

I thought about that one for a few
seconds.

‘And that
means...?
 
Sorry I'm slow today.
 
I got up early and forgot to brush my
teeth.’

‘It makes it harder to challenge if the
beneficiary is a British citizen.’

‘Which Jacob is,’ I said.
 
‘I see.’

I took out my wallet and carefully extracted
the cheque.
 

‘It’s for seven thousand pounds, you
will recall.
 
The other five
hundred was in cash.
 
And it was
taken back.’

Her face flickered at the reference to
Lukas Merweville, but she did not say anything.
 
This surprised me.
 
I expected something.
 
Some reference to how silly she was to be taken in, or her
vulnerability, or anger.
 
Some
nonsense.
 
Something.
 
But she just took the cheque from
me.
 

She folded it as if to stop it scrabbling
back across the table and jumping into my wallet.

‘That’s quite all right,’ she said.

‘Why didn’t you just stop it?’

She looked up.
 
‘What do you mean?’

‘The cheque,’ I said.
 
‘Why didn’t you stop the cheque?’

‘Oh, I didn’t want the embarrassment
with my bank.
 
It was bad enough
withdrawing the seventy-five thousand.
 
Peter had to help me out.’

‘I see.’

The colour rose in her cheeks.

‘Yes, you think you see everything,
don’t you, Mr Becket.
 
But you
really have no idea...’

I looked at her.
 
This was why I wanted to meet face to
face.
 
This moment.
 
She was right, I could have posted the
cheque, but I wanted to see her reaction.
 
And I had seen quite enough already.

‘So you knew about your father,’ I said
slowly.
 
‘Merweville actually told
you.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You know exactly what I mean.
 
Merweville told you about your father
being a suspected Soviet spy, and how he, Sir Simeon, was going to reveal it.’

‘No, of course not that!’ she was
stammering now.
 
‘Daddy was old,
and confused.
 
He wasn’t sure what
he knew anymore.
 
I don’t know why
he was going to tell everyone about his past.
 
There was no need to.
 
The past is the past.
 
Simple as that.’

I didn’t say anything.
 
I was too busy thinking how wrong she
was.
 
The past was never simply the
past.

‘I suspect it was that woman who told
him to.
 
And I really thought that
man
was
Mark.
 
Mummy told me that Daddy had been
married before and had a son that died.
 
Mark.
 
I thought that was
just a lie to stop me finding him.’

She stopped to dab her eyes.
 
I was sick of her gestures.
 
That’s all they were.
 
They meant nothing.
 
They were there for the sake of
appearances.
 
Nothing more.
 
She had no more connection with the
truth than I had.
 
No more insight.

‘He was old and vulnerable,’ I
said.
 
‘And he wanted to tell the
truth.’

‘Okay, Mark—I mean that
man—had found out that Daddy was a spy and that Daddy was going to make a
clean breast of it.
 
That was why
he was talking to his solicitors all the time.
 
They were arranging it all.’

They certainly were, I thought.
 
Arranging everything.
 
Killing several birds with one stone,
while they were at it too.
 
The Marchant problem, the Merweville problem, the PiTech problem.
 
Probably a few more
problems that I wasn’t aware of.
 
Watterson perhaps?
 
It was a
good job I was so low down the food chain, or I could have been a problem too.
 
As it was, I was just collateral damage
like Mat Janovitz, or Lee Herbert.
 
Or Meg.

Jenny Forbes-Marchant started
sobbing.
 
We had come full
circle.
 
From the first time she
rang me a month or so ago.
 
I
didn’t want to hear any more.
 
I
felt that I had been damaged too much already in the process of looking into
the affairs of Sir Simeon Marchant and his family.
 
And I didn’t want to hear where all this was leading.
 
But I couldn’t help myself.

‘You knew what they were going to do to
your father.’ I said.
 
‘You knew
what Merweville was going to do.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.

‘I mean you have been lying to me from
the very beginning,’ I said.
 
‘Right
from the first time you rang me.
 
You knew who I was because your father told you, didn’t he?
 
You knew he was making a gift of the
boat to Prajapati.
 
Even when I saw
you in the pub, you made out that Prajapati had been ‘persuasive’.
 
You tricked me from the very
beginning.
 
And that is why I think
it was premeditated on your part.’

She glanced towards the door.
 
Behind her I could see Peter Forbes
playing with his daughter in the garden.
 
They were throwing a ball for the chocolate Labrador to retrieve.
 
I knew how the dog felt, except I
wasn’t wagging my tail anymore.
 
I
went on.

‘You see, I checked.
 
He did not stay at his club the night
before he was killed.
 
There was
nothing in the register at his club.
 
He stayed with you in London.
 
Maike told him to do that at least.
 
And he, your father, told you exactly what he was going to
do.
 
That he was going to make a
clean breast of it.
 
He was going
to Canterbury to tell a man called Becket.
 
He was going to tell me about how someone had done away with
Prajapati and now was spreading false rumours about him.
 
He was going to say how shocked he was
that Prajapati’s body was washed up in the same place as a man called Crabb
whom your father sent to his death in the 1950s.
 
He was going to tell me all this.
 
But first he told you.’

She stared at me hardly breathing.
 
I went on.

‘And for whatever reason, you told
Mark, or the man you thought was Mark, Lukas Merweville.
 
One thing was for sure; when your
father left, you were pretty sure he was going to his death.
 
Perhaps you even put Haloperidol in his
breakfast tea.
 
I wouldn’t put it
past you.
 
At first I thought it
was about the money, but that was not reason enough for you.
 
You always had poor Peter in
reserve.
 
It was that your father
was going to reveal everything about his past.
 
That he was a Russian spy, a double agent, and that he had
betrayed an MI6 frogman called Lionel Crabb.
 
And you neglected to tell me that he moved to Hayling Island
so that he could visit the place where poor old Crabb was washed up.
 
They are still making documentaries about
him.
 
Crabb.
 
You envisaged TV crews camped outside
your house, your gallery,
your
daughter’s school.
 
That is what you couldn’t stand.’

I stopped.
 
I was sick of myself.
 
Sick of the knowledge that the people you most trust could do such
things.
 
I also knew that
throughout the whole sorry affair, like all of them—Merweville,
Watterson, Miles Breckenridge and the rest of the secret state—his
daughter had been wondering if Sir Simeon had already told me his secret over
the telephone.
 
Or whether they had
stopped him in time.

Jenny Forbes-Marchant looked like she
was sick of me too.
 
Her face had
hardened and for a moment I wondered if anyone else had ever seen the
expression that flickered across it.
 
It was specifically for me.
 
And it told me she loathed me.
 

‘I couldn’t stand the shame of it,’ she
said slowly.
 
It was almost as if
she was talking to herself, sleepwalking into her own thoughts.
 
‘But he really deserved no better.
 
He had deceived us all along, pretending
to be something he was not.
 
The
great war
hero, the pillar of the community.
 
In a sense, I had lost him a long time
ago.
 
He was never there for
us.
 
Ever.’

The kitchen clock ticked.
 
I found nothing to say.
 

‘Well, it doesn’t matter now,’ she
added.
 
‘Besides you cannot prove
anything.’

It was the same brisk tone she had used
that first time she called me.
 
I was amused by her
at first, even attracted by her
absurdity, but now I found myself appalled.
 
Sickened by her and the fact she could carry on while
knowing this about herself.
 
But whom
did you confess to these days?
 
Who
was there to absolve your sins?

‘You’re right,’ I said.
 
‘I can’t prove anything.
 
And if I could, no one out there would
care anyway.’
 

I picked up my empty wallet from the
table and leant close to her.

‘But
I
know,’ I whispered.
 

I drove down to the sailing club and
parked by the shoreline.
 
I got out
of the Spider and lit a cigarette.
 
Then I threw it away.
 
The
weather was turning.
 
Far out to
sea the sky was a dark bruise.
 
Had
I been a sailor I would have known if a storm was coming in or not.
 
But as it was I just felt cold and
shivered into my suit.
 

I thought about Sir Simeon Marchant
standing here and looking out to sea.
 
Of an old man sailing his yacht around the islands and inlets of
Chichester Harbour until he came to that place where a dead frogman called
Crabb had been washed up, headless, handless, dishonoured, stripped of identity,
some sixty years before.

I wondered how he saw it, or began to
see it as his dementia gradually stripped him of the connections that tell us
the past is the past and it is done with.
 
That we have to move on.
 
That, in fact, we have no choice but to
move on.
 
But also that we too are
driven by tides, by currents that sometimes fold in upon themselves and reveal
strange connections that make us think it is all planned.
 
Fated.

I thought too about what his daughter had
said to me.
 
How the Simeon
Marchant she knew had turned out to be someone else.
 
Not her father at all really, but a stranger.
 
Someone she had no compunction about
sending to his death that morning he was meant to come to Canterbury.
 

What do you call a conspiracy when it’s
so close to home?
 
There’s no way
of knowing for certain what those nearest and dearest to you are thinking.
 
The fact of our separate entities, our
divided selves, makes that impossible, especially when our own motivations are so
often concealed from us.
 
And so
you never really know if your father is a spy, or a fraud, or a fake, or a
philanderer.
 
Or your daughter is
so ashamed that she plots to have you killed, or even, one bright and sunny
morning, steps off a balcony into clear, blue air.