by Mark Raven
The Conspiracy Theorist
A Becket Novel
By
Mark Raven
© Chocolat Noir MMXIV
Third Edition
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, incidents and even most of the places are fictional. History is a fiction most of the time. So any resemblance to persons, quick or dead, actual events or organisations is therefore entirely coincidental.
All rights are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced without the written permission of the author.
Cover design © Henry Alexander 2014
[The] enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him.
Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics.
Chapter One
Nobody knew him, the dead man. Not the fishermen who found him nor the young constable who cycled across from West Thorney with his helmet clipped to the back of his bicycle. The body had been in the water for some time and a good part of it was rotted away. The hands were gone, as was the head. Either the fish had done for them, they said, or the poor chap had been batted about in the Channel long enough to lose them of his own accord. No one knew. No one knew how far the dead man had drifted or where he had come from. The currents were unpredictable and it wasn’t the first time that someone had been washed up on Pilsey Island. It wouldn’t be the last either, they said.
It was the summer of 1957, June 9th to be precise.
Later, someone suggested that the man had been murdered, decapitated and his hands cut off for good measure. Whatever, in those days long before DNA profiling, the lack of teeth and fingerprints made positive identification virtually impossible.
The corpse was dressed in a Pirelli two-piece diving suit and had Admiralty issue swim-fins on the feet. So people started saying the dead man was a Navy frogman by the name of Crabb, who had gone missing in the Solent the year before. Crabb’s wife was brought down to identify the body, but she couldn’t be sure it was her husband—it was a while since she had set eyes upon him. Then they tried his girlfriend who said it definitely wasn’t Crabb: he had brown hairs on his legs, she said, not black. Finally the authorities tried one of the dead man’s colleagues, another diver, who confirmed it was Crabb after all. Some say he was under considerable pressure to do so.
So who was this Crabb? And why were people, powerful people, so interested in him?
Commander (Special Branch) Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb, RNVR, GM, OBE was an experienced frogman, decorated in the Second World War while serving in Naval Intelligence. (Later they made a film about his exploits starring Laurence Harvey. It was called The Silent Enemy.) After the war Crabb served in Palestine—then a British protectorate of course—fighting Irgun, the Zionist terrorist group. In 1955 it was said he was recruited by MI6, the British overseas secret service. In the same year, Crabb and another diver were sent undercover—or underwater as it turned out—to inspect the hull of the cruiser Sverdlov, the first in a class of post-war Soviet ships. Crabb and his colleague found out what had been long suspected: the Russians built better ships than the Royal Navy. Useful intelligence at a time when the British government was busily flushing the National Debt down the toilet that was the Polaris nuclear deterrent.
Then in April 1956 Nikita Khrushchev visited Britain. The Soviet leader was due to meet Prime Minister Macmillan and other British top brass. Of course, Khrushchev’s room at Claridge’s was bugged by MI5, the domestic intelligence service. Khrushchev was too canny to give much away and, much to the frustration of the spooks, confined himself to discussing his appearance with his valet. So the attention of the Boy Scouts turned to the ship Khrushchev had arrived on.
The cruiser Ordzhonikidze was docked in Portsmouth Harbour with two other Soviet destroyers alongside. Unbeknown to anyone else officially, Soviet or British, MI6 decided it would be a good idea to send a frogman down to examine the hull of the Soviet ship for sonar and mine equipment. They chose for the task one Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb, who travelled to Portsmouth with his MI6 handler and checked into the Sally Port Hotel on April 18th 1956.
The next day Crabb disappeared. As did all his clothes and any record of him staying at the hotel—the relevant page having been torn from the register. The Soviet Union lodged a formal complaint that a frogman had been seen diving around the Ordzhonikidze. An MI6 internal inquiry, conducted in camera of course, but leaked like everything else to the Russians and, more importantly, to the Americans, concluded that Crabb was on an unauthorised mission. The convenient rogue agent theory.
When, fourteen months later, Crabb’s body was found on the shoreline of Pilsey Island, the press had a field day and came up with the sort of theories that sold newspapers. Crabb had been captured by the Soviets, they said, interrogated, killed, decapitated and then dumped; Crabb was working for the Russians and had trained their frogmen; Crabb was a Soviet Spy all along, his real name being one Lev Lvovich Korablov, a Commander in the Black Sea fleet. And so on.
The usual conspiracy theories. Speculation.
Whatever the truth, it was clear that the dear old amateurish Brits had blundered yet again, and MI6 got itself a severe bollocking—not least from MI5 who were meant to be the ones doing the spying at home—and a new Director for good measure. Some say the knock-on effect put British espionage back several decades and slowed down the search for the so-called ‘fifth man’—the mole at the heart of our intelligence services.
That was the first occasion that a body was washed up on Pilsey Island. (The first relevant to this story anyway.) The second was in the summer of 2013. It would be a case that taught me that history is never quite finished with us. At least as long as that history is held in the memories of those who experienced it.
This time, the disappearance at sea was written up in the UK government’s Safety Digest of the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (2013) and would read as follows:
The Cassandra was a 35 foot rigged sloop—the only one in her class—with a 3.9-ton external lead keel. Her new owner, a foreign national, took possession of the craft at Hayling Island and planned to sail her single-handed to his berth at Shoreham-on-Sea. The skipper, although inexperienced in British waters, was keen to make this journey alone. Despite some concerns expressed by the previous owner, who offered to accompany him on the journey to show him the ropes, the yacht was seen to clear the Chichester Bar at low water in good time to catch the eastbound tide…
At this point in the narrative, speculation takes over. Nothing is known about the rest of the passage except the reasonable assumption that she ran into some problems in the Looe Channel. Her speed made good would have been in the order of 4 to 5 knots depending on the tide. The weather was westerly force 5 to 6, and the visibility reported by other crafts was good. However, no one saw the Cassandra run aground on the landward side east of the Mixon Beacon.
No ‘May Day’ or other distress signal was sent. No other vessel reported a collision or any other indication of a yacht in distress. Inspection of the recovered wreckage showed no sign of fire or explosion. The body of the skipper, when recovered four days later, showed no signs of trauma and was not wearing a life jacket.
A black substance on both sails and hull was identified as crude oil. The cause of her loss is a mystery. The balance of probability supports the hypothesis, however, that she was probably in collision with another vessel for reasons that cannot, at present, be explained...
So: two events, two missing sailors, two dead bodies, separated by almost six decades. The first I had vaguely heard about over the years, a notorious spy scandal at the height of the Cold War. The second I had the misfortune to find
out about all by myself.
Chapter Two
For me the case began one warm summer evening in August. I was working late in my office completing an evidence review for a brief that had been fast-tracked to court the following day. It was a rush job and one that I was being well-rewarded for, but somehow I couldn’t concentrate. I had the windows open and, far below in the mews, I could hear people making their way to the pub, their voices carrying up to me in hope and expectation. I remember half-listening to them, thinking I could murder a pint, as I took a call on my mobile.
The caller said his name was Marchant, Simeon Marchant, and he was ringing from London. On the phone, he sounded as old as Methuselah and about as much fun. He told me he’d been given my number by a fellow at his club. An ex-colleague of mine who said Becket’s your man if something had not been investigated thoroughly enough. I didn’t inquire as to which kind soul had made the recommendation. Instead I asked, ‘Which case would that be?’
‘Oh, this blessed missing sailor,’ he replied. ‘If you can call him that.’
He began to explain. He sounded irritated. Very irritated. So irritated, in fact, he had started to irritate me. Evidently he thought I should have known whom or what he was going on about. But I didn’t and it was late, and I had work to do, so I suggested he came into my office in Canterbury the following day.
He was disappointed.
‘I thought you could come up to Town, Mr Becket,’ he said. Despite a slight stutter, it was a voice full of authority. Generally speaking, I’m not that good with authority, so I told him I had another appointment the next day and, besides, there was a fast train from St Pancras every hour.
‘Well, it will need to be f-first thing,’ he said, his stutter getting worse. ‘We really can’t afford to h-hang about.’ Simeon Marchant sounded like a man who was used to getting his own way. So I informed him of my office address, and that I would be there at 9 am sharp in the morning. And I put the phone down on him and got back to work.
The next day, nine o’clock came and went. I waited patiently—not a quality I'm particularly known for—but the phone did not ring. No one sent his apologies, no one rescheduled or postponed. The slow train would get Marchant in just before ten, so I gave him till half past before repairing to the golf course—the other appointment in my diary that day.
‘It is not unusual for clients to decide I cannot help them,’ I said as we stood on the first tee. ‘But generally they come to that conclusion after meeting me first.’
I thought no more of Simeon Marchant—it turned out to be his real name—until a week or so later.
This time the person on the telephone was a woman, her voice as chilly as the tundra on a winter Sunday.
‘Who is this please?’ she asked.
‘You're through to Tom Becket.’
‘And may I ask who you are, Mr Becket?’
‘You may,’ I said. ‘But how about you tell me who you are first?’
There was a lengthy pause. Unable to think of a suitable put-down, she said, ‘Jenny Forbes-Marchant. Mrs Jenny Forbes-Marchant.’
‘Well, Mrs Jenny Forbes-Marchant, I am Mr Thomas A. Becket—one ‘T’ as in the martyr and the ‘A’ stands for Aloysius, if you’re interested. I'm a legal investigator based in Canterbury. You will find my address in the Yellow Pages. I don’t have a website. How can I help exactly?’
There was a sharp intake of breath at the other end. It travelled across several thousand miles of permafrost to reach me. But it no longer sounded like anger. She could even have been crying. It’s hard to tell on the phone. My voice became softer, of its own accord.
‘Mrs Forbes-Marchant?’
‘My father had your number on his phone and I wondered who you were,’ she said in a small voice. ‘I’ve been ringing around all his friends.’
I recalled the phone call from the week before. The client who never showed up: Simeon Marchant.
‘Is something wrong?’ I asked.
‘I’m afraid he has ... passed away. Rather suddenly in fact.’
‘Passed away?’
‘Well, he was killed.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Mugged, actually. His heart gave way they said.’
It crossed my mind that Mr Marchant had been on his way to see me when this happened. The sobbing continued at the other end. In such instances, it’s best to keep the questions as simple and factual as possible.
‘When was this, Mrs Forbes-Marchant?’
‘Last Tuesday morning at about seven o’clock. Heaven knows what he was doing down the Euston Road,’ she sighed. ‘His club is on Pall Mall.’
‘Your father had an appointment to see me, Mrs Forbes-Marchant. The fast train to Canterbury goes from St Pancras.’
‘What on earth was he seeing you about?’
‘I don’t know. He never saw me. We only spoke on the phone. Briefly at that.’
She sighed again. Even at a distance, I could tell Mrs Forbes-Marchant had a wide range of expressions.
‘Oh, I quite understand you can’t tell me,’ she said. ‘Client confidentiality and all that.’
‘There’s really nothing to tell you. We hadn’t even met.’
‘I see,’ she said. Her voice had become suddenly brisk and business-like as if someone had just walked into the room and she was aware of being overheard. ‘Well, thank you for your time, Mr—er—Becket.’
And she rang off.
I hate that, don’t you? When someone pauses midway through your name. Mr—er—Becket. I hate that little ‘er’. You always get the feeling that they know your name, but somehow can’t sully themselves by repeating it until, that is, they are ambushed by social convention and the irksome demands of sentence construction. That was what had happened to Mrs Forbes-Marchant and her Mr—er—Becket.
It was partly because she had managed to annoy me, and partly that I disapprove of unfinished business that I decided to find out more about my missing client, Mr Simeon Marchant. With a name like that, I thought, it cannot be too difficult.
I stared at the screen, rubbing my chin. It seemed an appropriate response. The face that stared back from the recent press coverage and minor obituaries was of Sir Simeon Marchant, CB, CBE, a retired Royal Navy officer, submariner and lecturer at Greenwich Naval College. It was a face that had ‘first seen action as a raw recruit’ in 1944 and retired from active service after the Falklands conflict. ‘A long and distinguished career which continued into his seventies by passing on his skills to a future generation officers at Greenwich,’ said the Times.
‘Only recently’, the obituary went on, ‘well into his ninth decade had he given up active sailing.’
I scanned the rest, my attention drawn to the two photographs at the top of the page: the first of a young man ‘up at Cambridge’; the second, the lined and unsmiling face of a person who looked like he had several bones to pick with the world. I liked that face. It seemed uncompromising and opinionated with it. I bet there were few dull moments in the general vicinity of Sir Simeon, and found myself regretting that we had not met.
That he was on his way to see me, I had no doubt. He was attacked on the south side of Euston Road, which probably meant—if his club was on Pall Mall— he got the number 91 bus from Trafalgar Square. I wondered why Sir Simeon had not used the underground. He would have been better getting the slower train to Canterbury East from Charing Cross. On such decisions, it seems, our lives—and deaths— are decided.
The Evening Standard reported that no one had witnessed the actual incident, but a number of hooded youths were observed running away from the scene of the crime. One of them had dropped a mobile phone into a litterbin. This was probably the phone that had since been recovered and returned to Mrs Jenny Forbes-Marchant.
Sir Simeon’s daughter was not mentioned in the article, which majored instead on what it termed ‘the senseless now endemic violence on the streets of our capital at a time when the number of Bobbies on the beat is being cut’. For newspapers, thes
e single events are always indicative of something much larger; some grand narrative, something that manages to detract from the individual tragedy and to diminish the grief faced by the immediate family.
After reading about Sir Simeon for an hour or so, I decided I had done quite enough work for the day. It was late afternoon and the sun had dipped considerately behind the cathedral, so I popped across the road for a pint.
My office is above the chambers of Hunt and Carstairs LLP. In fact, I lease the whole of the third floor from them. In common with many a wise legal partnership, Hunt and Carstairs—Hunt more than Carstairs, I suspect—sensibly purchased the building before the last property boom. It is a thin three-storey mews just within the City Walls, probably unfit for human habitation but adequate as an office. More importantly, it is close to several decent pubs. A good address on headed paper, a cobbled street, a brass name plate outside to impress clients, and for T.A. Becket, Legal Investigator, a very reasonable rent indeed.
The arrangement suits both parties. Anthony Carstairs QC uses me from time to time for cases he is working on. Being a lawyer by training helps as, in theory at least, I understand what Anthony is looking for—what works in court—and how not to mess up the evidence in the manner of your average plod. Often I’m asked to look for signs of conspiracy or cock-up—defence lawyers aren’t fussy—on the part of the police, which is my specialism. For my part, I get the association with an upmarket law firm and access to a garret overlooking the pantiled roofs of the city, complete with stained glass window—St Michael slaying the dragon—and antique office furniture straight out of Dickens or Conan-Doyle.
I like my office. But the next day, instead of going there, I walked along the city wall to the East station and caught the slow train up to Victoria.
