by Mark Raven
I looked around for the audience but there was none.
‘Oh I was in the area,’ I said. ‘Greater London.’
She shrugged that one off. She was one of those people who pretend they don’t hear anything unpleasant or slightly edgy until it bites them in the arse. Then they tend to bite back. She gestured at the artwork we were stood in front of.
‘I think she put that in to show she can paint.’
‘Oh she can do that all right,’ I said.
It was a full length nude of a woman in her eighties. She was seated, her hands crossed in her lap as if waiting to be bathed, or attended to by a carer. Every wrinkle was lovingly portrayed. The sitter stared hard at the artist as if trying to understand her. There was ferociousness about the gaze—and also a passivity. I half-expected it to be called ‘Woman with Dementia’ but it was simply entitled ‘Mother’.
‘Do you paint, Mr Becket?’
‘I dabble,’ I said, still looking at ‘Mother’. ‘Let me ask you as question. Why doesn’t she fill the gallery with such works?’
Jenny Forbes-Marchant sighed.
‘They are under so much pressure these days. To be different. That one isn’t even for sale. It was what won her the BP.’
‘BP? Isn’t that a petrol station?’
She gave me a tut-tut look and said, ‘National Portrait Award. I insisted that she showed it. To get people in.’
I scanned the empty gallery.
‘Looks like it’s working.’
Jenny Forbes-Marchant didn’t appreciate that. Her air-conditioning clicked on.
‘Have a seat.’ She gestured to a sofa. ‘You’ll have to excuse me if anyone comes in.’
I said I was prepared to take that risk. We sat down and turned to face each other. She looked long and hard at me—mainly hard. She couldn’t quite pull it off. I liked that about her.
‘So you were working for my father after all?’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because you were at the inquest.’
‘Is that what DCI Richie said?’
‘He told me not to talk to you.’
‘So you rang me. Makes sense.’
‘I wanted to hear your explanation,’ she said. ‘Why my father wanted to speak to you.’
My heart sank. We were back at the beginning. I was wasting my time. I couldn’t explain anything. Least of all why an old man would ring me the night before he was killed.
‘I told you I don’t know that,’ I said slowly. ‘We will probably never know.’
She squinted at me as if she mistrusted my words and wasn’t afraid of showing it. I almost laughed in her face. Then she tried a different tack.
‘Was it about the money?’
‘What money?’ I asked back.
‘The money he was meant to get for the yacht?’
‘What yacht?’
‘The one the Indian bought!’
‘What Indian?!’
Jenny Forbes-Marchant gave out a howl of frustration. Her eyes had filled and she gave out a quick sob.
‘Oh this is so irritating!’ she said after a moment or two. ‘They just come from nowhere!’
I let her cry it out. I know all about grief. Ambushed by tears, sneezing tears, tears unreasonable in their demands, your emotions on autopilot, tears taking over. And then, just when you think you are okay, more tears. I stopped having fun at her expense and felt sorry for Mrs Forbes-Marchant. I put my hand on hers. It was a nice hand. And I wanted to hear more about her father as well.
‘You’re probably still in shock,’ I said.
A girl barged her way into the gallery, carrying two take-away coffees. She was the sort of freak of nature that would have not looked out of place on a catwalk—a leggy blonde, with honey cream skin and eyes like sapphires. She took in the scene before her: boss in tears on the sofa, Becket in conciliatory mode, comforting, considerate...
Jenny Forbes-Marchant released her hand from captivity, wiped her eyes delicately and sniffed.
‘This is my intern, Maria.’
I rose. The girl put the coffees down, wiped her hands on her mini skirt and shook hands with me. Like a man. It was an endearing trait. Her accent was foreign but so well schooled that I could not detect where it was from. I didn’t suppose it mattered; the girl oozed wealth—oysters and worlds came to mind—and she belonged to that stateless class who moved in their own multinational bubble of finishing schools and six-star hotels.
I turned to Jenny Forbes-Marchant before I fainted.
‘Look, how about we get a drink?’ I suggested to her.
She straightened her dress and stuck her chest out gamely.
‘Good idea. Are you all right for half an hour or so, Maria?’
‘Or so? You mean an hour? That is fine. I will call you if anyone comes in.’
‘We’ll just be across the road.’
‘Across the road? Where?’
‘The Lamb and Flag.’
‘I see,’ the girl said. ‘But that is not across the road.’
Jenny Forbes-Marchant grabbed her bag, explained it was just a colloquialism, took my arm and led me from the Persimmon Gallery. I looked over at ‘Mother’ as we passed. From the painting, the old woman’s gaze followed us. Perhaps that is how we all look at our children, I thought.
The Lamb and Flag was packed with professional people on day release from their offices. They thought it clever to crowd around the bar, jostling each other, talking at the tops of their voices, hailing confederates across the heads of others, and generally subverting the time-honoured traditions of the English public house.
I bought the drinks and steered Jenny Forbes-Marchant upstairs, where the only other occupants were a group of young women with toddlers in pushchairs. This being Knightsbridge, these were no single mums whiling away a few hours before returning to the delights of daytime television. They were attractive twenty-somethings, pleasantly plump, confident of their place in the world. Each woman had a pint of real ale before her and was either knitting or crocheting. It looked like a scene from a Sunday supplement.
‘Very fashionable,’ Jenny Forbes-Marchant whispered. ‘Knitting circles.’
With a large G&T in front of her, my companion seemed to have composed herself after the scene in the Persimmon Gallery. She smiled at the babies sleeping blissfully under knitted (or crocheted) blankets. Perhaps they were on the beer too.
‘Do you have children, Mr Becket?’
‘No,’ I replied.
She smiled, ‘I have one away at boarding school. I miss her terribly.’
Once more, she began to cry, apologised for doing so, and started crying again. I patted her hand and assured her it was all right. I had seen it before: someone surprised at her own grief. We were starting to attract glances from the Knightsbridge Knitting Circle. Fortunately Jenny Forbes-Marchant was unable to see them nudging each other and nodding over at us. The young mums thought they were witnessing the end of an affair, and one that put Becket in a very bad light.
I wondered why I had lied about not having children. Perhaps because I did not want to explain myself to Jenny Forbes-Marchant. And I wanted to hear to her story however many gins it required.
Chapter Six
The last time Jenny Forbes-Marchant had seen her father alive was the night before his mugging. He had turned up on the doorstep of her London home unannounced. This was not an unusual state of affairs, she told me as we sat in the Lamb and Flag that afternoon. Sir Simeon often popped in to see his daughter when he was in London—he usually stayed at his club—and more frequently since he had become ‘confused.’
‘Confused?’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Nothing sinister. Just the way old people get. That was the reason he was selling his yacht. Said he couldn’t handle her anymore. It was not so much the sailing he said, but the navigation, the charts and suchlike.’
‘And he didn’t seem under threat in any way? Afraid?’
‘No,’
she looked at me sharply. ‘Why would he?’
I did not want to start any hares running so I said: ‘That night on the phone to me, he sounded quite agitated. Something about a missing sailor?’
‘I thought you knew,’ she said. ‘He sold his yacht to this Indian gentlemen, who got himself lost at sea.’
‘He died?’
‘I’m afraid so. People blamed Daddy for selling him the boat.’
‘And what did your father say?’
‘Oh Daddy… I don’t know. He was one of those people who read too much into things. He saw conspiracies everywhere.’
‘Conspiracies?’
‘Oh, you know. Someone had bumped him off. The Indian. That sort of thing.’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Something to do with his business. Business rivals, something like that.’
I recalled Sir Simeon’s phone call to me the night before he died. About how Becket was his man if a case had not been investigated thoroughly enough. His daughter seemed distracted as if she could not understand why I was asking such oblique questions. I put my hand over hers.
‘Tell me about the boat,’ I said. ‘The one the Indian bought.’
The Cassandra had been built shortly after the death of Sir Simeon Marchant’s wife. According to his daughter, her parents had not long moved to Hayling Island from Cheltenham, where she had grown up and gone to school—the famous Ladies’ College, where her own daughter now boarded. ‘It was a wrench uprooting the whole family like that,’ Jenny told me. ‘Mummy never wanted to move. I think it killed her in the end.’
Jenny had already left home by that time. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I was living in London and married to Peter. But the Cheltenham house was still the family home, the place where one grew up, where one came back to.’ She must have been early thirties then, I guessed, her father seventy-five or seventy-six? ‘He was quite old when they started a family,’ she told me. ‘In the end there was only me, an only child. Mummy was much younger than him, for all the good it did her. It was his second marriage.’
I pointed out that there was no mention of that in the obituaries. Jenny said, ‘Oh, he never talked about it. So I guess his chums never knew. I only found out by accident.’
I steered her back to what she knew of the sale of the Cassandra. ‘She was his pride and joy. He commissioned her from his own plans and she was a rather lovely yacht. Cost him all of Mummy’s savings I know that. But as soon as he became slightly ill, he whacked the thing on eBay and tried to flog it. Have a look.’
She nodded at my iPad.
I went online. You could still access the eBay listing for: Yacht ‘Cassandra’—35ft sloop rigged sailing yacht. It said the item was ‘used’ and that the sale had ‘ended: 17 Aug, 2013 0710 BST.’ The price: £75,000. I whistled. No wonder Jenny Forbes-Marchant was so exercised about it. I flicked through the photographs—there were twelve of them—of different aspects of the boat. The exterior was nothing exceptional to my untrained eye. She had a navy blue hull, a varnished wooden cabin and a single white mast. A red ensign fluttered at the stern, there was a large wooden wheel and a wooden ladder hung off the port side. Inside, the same varnished wood—Iroko, the listing said, sometimes known as African teak—in the galley, the two cabins, the impressive navigation area, even the heads. There was a lot of detail, but then it was a lot of money. To my eye, it was all very impressive and I could see why someone had fallen in love with it.
That someone was an Indian businessman called Sunil Prajapati.
Jenny Forbes-Marchant’s story of the purchase was based on how her father had described it to her the evening before he died. It must have been an interesting conversation, I thought. Sir Simeon telling his daughter how he had sold the boat to an experienced sailor, and now he was being maligned for it. And she would have been busily checking that he had received payment before the purchaser had sailed off into the sunset. Neither issue was fully resolved, it seemed, but there were a number of facts that seemed incontrovertible.
According to Jenny Forbes-Marchant, it was the fact that Mr Prajapati wanted to sail the Cassandra around the world that attracted her father. The thought of the old girl stopping off in ports across the globe filled Sir Simeon with pleasure—especially after the Indian had promised to send him a photo from time to time.
On their first meeting, Sir Simeon was impressed by the man and took him out on the Cassandra that very afternoon. The prospective purchaser seemed very knowledgeable about such craft; although Sir Simeon did think it odd he had brought no kit with him. The old man did not know the sailing club at Shoreham-on-Sea, and had only put in there once, but it seemed that Mr Prajapati was well-regarded in the area.
Sir Simeon, according to his daughter, thought it a little infra dig to check up on a buyer. After all, the chap was well educated (Lancing and Oxford, apparently) and ran some sort of IT company with offices in London and Bombay—or Mumbai as you were meant to call it these days—as well as down the road at Crawley.
In addition, it seemed, Sir Simeon spent quite a bit of time with the man—much more than other prospective buyers—presumably because he wasn’t quite sure as to what he expected of the man. Prajapati had all the relevant sailing bona fides but they were all overseas. Marchant who had sailed across the Bombay Sound pointed out that conditions were very different in the Solent. The Indian had laughed as if this were merely an example of English humour. At that it seemed the old man’s hackles had risen—a thing easily achieved according to his daughter—and he said he needed to think about it. Prajapati had looked surprised but was suddenly respectful, and had apparently said, ‘Whatever you think is best, sir.’
The phrase played on Sir Simeon’s mind over the following week. There was other interest in the Cassandra, but it was mainly what could politely be termed ‘enthusiasts’ or impolitely ‘time-wasters.’ The worst, he told his daughter, were the marine equivalent of tyre-kickers, who thought the yacht was between £10k and £15k overpriced. Sir Simeon had soon tired of justifying his pride and joy to them.
So after a week or so, Marchant called Prajapati to see if he was still interested and was willing to pay the asking price. The younger man arrived almost immediately—certainly within the hour—and was in a business suit, having been in Chichester with his lawyers. It was a stroke of luck really; he was able to write a cheque for £75,000 on the spot.
Prajapati had seemed distracted when he was shown the boat again. Sir Simeon insisted on showing him the navigation area in detail and the ‘little wrinkles’ every yacht had. Prajapati, his mind elsewhere, said it was quite all right he was familiar with the type of boat. Sir Simeon had reminded him that the Cassandra was most definitely not of any sort of ‘type’—she was in a class of her own—and if Mr Prajapati was not interested, perhaps they should call the whole thing off.
Jenny Forbes-Marchant found it amusing—after two gins, anyway—how the poor man must have got it in the neck from her father. But when she described the financial arrangements, she became more serious.
Prajapati wanted to take possession of the Cassandra on his birthday, which was, as fate would have it, the very next day. It was an auspicious day, he informed Sir Simeon. He had handed over the cheque as an article of faith, he said. But Sir Simeon said he would not cash it until the registration papers had been formally transferred—it would not be right to do so—and this would not happen, realistically, until after the weekend. Prajapati said it did not really matter as the cheque was ‘as good as cash’, but Sir Simeon might as well do it now. The old man relented and said Prajapati could pick up the Cassandra tomorrow, in good time to catch low water and take advantage of the eastbound tide towards Shoreham-on-Sea.
‘All I can say is, he must have been very persuasive,’ Jenny Forbes-Marchant had said to me. ‘Getting round Daddy in that way. No one else managed it.’
The next day Prajapati had finally turned up at 2 pm in a car driven by ano
ther man, also Indian apparently, also very enthusiastic about the boat. He apologised for getting ‘Sunny’ to him late, as there had been a large family lunch at the Shoreham Sailing Club, were everyone was awaiting the hero’s return. Sir Simeon asked if Prajapati had been drinking, but he denied it. The other man verified this. Prajapati said they were late because he had stupidly forgotten to bring his ‘kit’ from his other boat. They had to stop and buy something en route. He took a brand-new pair of deck shoes and a buoyancy aid from the boot of the car. The other man hugged his friend and drove off.
At the sight of the equipment—or lack of it—Sir Simeon became worried again. He informed Prajapati where the life jackets and severe weather clothing were stowed. The old man repeated his offer to accompany him on his maiden voyage in the Cassandra to Shoreham. In reply, Prajapati asked him how this would look to his awaiting family and friends.
Sir Simeon said he understood, but quite frankly he had not. In his opinion, there could be no pride where the sea was concerned. Prajapati changed the subject by asking if the cheque had cleared okay.
‘The man was always more comfortable with business matters,’ Sir Simeon had told his daughter.
But he had not cashed the cheque, as the registration papers had not been amended yet. Prajapati seemed disconcerted when he heard this, but then repeated that it was the same as cash.
‘I promise to pay the Bearer on demand!’ he joked.
‘Yes, what a joke!’ Jenny Forbes-Marchant commented.
After the disappearance of the Cassandra and it was all over the news, she had rung her father to get the whole story. She advised him to cash the cheque immediately. But Sir Simeon said he felt honour bound to hold on until the missing sailor was found. Jenny had argued with her father. It was Mummy’s money after all, not his. It would be her money one day, she told him, so he must not just think of himself and his own honour.
Of course by then, the papers were beginning to make a big deal of ‘Sunny’ Prajapati’s supposed inexperience as a sailor. Even without this element, it was good media fodder: the birthday, the waiting family, the photogenic wife, the successful businessman, quite apart from the whole ‘missing at sea’ angle. This they blamed on his lack of experience, the testimony of club members who had ‘watched appalled’ as he put on his brand new buoyancy aid and deck shoes, while Sir Simeon waited.
