by Mark Raven
Just because you're paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
The street was empty: long shadows, the dying sun making a lemony wash on the white, stucco walls of the houses. I could see Mat Janovitz by the park gates as if trying to make up his mind. I looked around. No one was tailing him. In fact, there was no one else in sight. After a moment or two Janovitz entered the park. Alone.
I sighed. I really was getting paranoid in my old age. What I needed was a good night’s sleep. Go back to the hotel and get into bed. But to do that I would have to cross the park, so I followed Janovitz at a discreet distance.
It was a similar evening to the day before, but the heat had gone out of it. There were less people around: no barbeques, no youths sitting in circles drinking, just a few folk walking dogs, no Staffordshire Bull Terriers. I hung back in case Janovitz saw me and assumed that I had a change of heart: that I wanted to help him. When the only thing I really wanted was my bed. I was sure I would feel better in the morning. Drive home a few grand richer and forget all about Sir Simeon Marchant’s theories about the disappearance of Sunil ‘Sunny’ Prajapati.
Ahead, Janovitz had stopped to light a cigarette by the exit to the park. I paused and waited. Strangely I didn’t feel like a smoke. There definitely was something wrong with me. I looked ahead. A young man was asking Janovitz for a light.
He had his shirt on this evening, and a splint on the finger that I had twisted the night before. Perhaps I had broken it after all. Lee, his name was. Leave it, Lee. He ain’t worth it.
I started to turn—I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice—when I saw that Lee was asking Janovitz something else. Janovitz was shaking his head and reaching into his pocket. He was being mugged. Politely. I knew Lee would be saying he just needed a few quid for a pint, and then seeing the colour of Janovitz’s money, adding that he was insulted by receiving such a small amount. And so on.
My legs were leaden as I jogged up to them.
‘Problem, Mat?’
I hoped that would be enough. But it wasn’t. Lee looked neither surprised to see me nor afraid. He smirked and backed off, holding his hands aloft. It was only then that I saw the other two guys. They were getting out of a black Range Rover.
The linings to their coats were red, and each had a baseball bat in his hand.
Chapter Thirteen
I woke up in hospital. You can always tell it is hospital, because of the smell: a thin aroma, like rarefied air, air distilled in antiseptic. I felt like someone had removed my head and had managed to sew an inferior version back on in its place; one that could not see things in Technicolor or work out how or why they got there. A woman in a nurse’s white uniform told me I’d had an accident but I suspect she was letting me down gently.
The next time I opened my eyes, a man in an orange turban loomed above me. The last occasion I remembered seeing him, DS Singh had been leaning over me asking if I was all right. Now he was just staring, waiting for me to say something. I could smell mints on his breath. It made me thirsty.
‘What happened?’ I croaked.
My voice was far off, and as thin as parchment.
‘You were mugged,’ Singh replied.
He offered me a drink. I took it, but my hand shook. A nurse appeared and guided it to my lips. I drank until the effort was too much.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said to DS Singh. ‘Mugged.’
‘I saw it.’
It took a while for the cogs to turn in my brain. When they did, it hurt.
‘You were following Janovitz.’
‘Good job we were,’ he said. ‘Those guys were playing for keeps.’
The police had seen Mat Janovitz enter the park. One followed on foot—not DS Singh, as he was too distinctive—and the car had driven round to the other exit. They were planning on bringing Janovitz in for questioning. But the car had got snagged up behind a minor accident where an argument between motorists was taking place. Handbags at thirty places, as Singh described it.
But it meant they were late.
The detective constable on Janovitz had seen me following and sensibly lagged behind us both. He radioed as much to his DS. Singh told him to hold back. Then he had seen me start to run, oddly he thought, like I was drunk, to where Janovitz was in conversation with a local youth ‘known to the police’, one Lee Herbert.
‘Right little Herbert he is too,’ Singh said. ‘Then my guy saw two fellas get out of an SUV and start laying into you with bats. He did the right thing and radioed to me, before shouting a warning. He said they kept hitting both of you on the ground despite his warning and he was not even sure they would have stopped if I had not put the siren on two streets away. They were gone, before we got there.’
‘Number plate?’
‘Obscured, my guy said. Mud or oil. Looked thorough. Deliberate.’
‘You got Lee, though?’
‘No, they took him with them.’
I thought. My head ached. I felt nauseous.
‘Well, at least that part is different.’
‘Different?’
‘From what happened to Sir Simeon Marchant. They didn’t take the kids with them that time. Too many of them, perhaps.’
‘What time?’
‘Doesn’t Richie tell you anything?’
He didn’t reply, so I told him about the circumstances of Sir Simeon Marchant’s mugging in London. Their modus operandi was to get local youths to waylay the intended victim until the cavalry came along with baseball bats.
DS Singh looked sceptical. He stood to go.
‘What about Janovitz?’ I asked.
He paused at the door, ‘Not woken up yet.’
Alongside my physical injuries, I had to deal with the shame and that was a whole lot worse. There were two sources to it: one, I had not believed Janovitz, and two, for some unaccountable reason I had not been able to protect him. What had happened to me? As I relived the incident, I still saw myself freezing as the men with baseball bats approached. They were yelling and swinging the bats in a way designed to intimidate—and I froze. It had never happened before. Well, not for long time, anyway. I had not reacted other than in the most perfunctory way, the way any civilian would have reacted, raising my arm to take the first blow, and then crumbling as someone swiped at the back of my legs. I knew that their target was Janovitz but they had neutralised me first. I had tried to crawl over to Janovitz to protect him where he had curled up in a foetal position. I have no doubt that Singh was right; if the police had not come along when they did, both Janovitz and I would have been killed. This was no mugging. It was a contract killing. And I was collateral damage.
The police came back the next day—the detective constable this time—and I remembered to thank him. I liked him. He was Scottish and referred ironically to the ‘mean streets of Chichester’ as he took my statement. I kept it as factual as possible and all reference to conspiracy or other cases was duly suppressed. He asked me about the cheque in my wallet for £7,000 but did not mention any cash. Neither did I. I assumed it was gone, and I didn’t want it to sound like a possible motive for a mugging. Besides, it would drag my client into the inquiry. No, I told him, I could not think of any reason why someone would want to attack Mr Janovitz or, indeed, me except that I had tried, rather pathetically, to defend the man.
‘Don’t feel too bad about it,’ the young copper said. ‘Those guys were professionals.’
I felt so bad that I wanted to change the subject.
‘Found Lee Herbert yet?’
‘Done a runner. His flat’s been cleared out.’
With my £500 in cash, I thought.
‘What about Janovitz?’
He frowned. ‘No news yet, I think.’
The worst thing about concussion is that it does not go away quickly. The best cure is sleep, lots of it. In fact, very soon sleep became my favourite activity. For the next few days, when they weren’t running tests on me—bloods, an MRI scan, optical cha
rts, the lot—I slept. The doctors had little time for me, as if they suspected I had got myself into a fight after the pub through sheer belligerence. Or that I was responsible for Janovitz’s more serious injuries. They were not far wrong. I felt I had brought this down upon myself, and not acquitted myself very well either. Never get into a fight you can’t win, my old dad used to say to me. Never lose, son. Never lose.
Although I didn’t mind escaping the guilt by sleeping ten hours at a stretch, I hated feeling groggy for those few hours I was awake. I pleaded the same grogginess when DS Singh came back to interview me a second time. He never explained why he was following Janovitz but I assumed he thought there was more to things than Richie and his bosses were telling him. But now the Met could not tell him to close down the case as long as Lee Herbert, a known local felon, was on the run.
And the shaven headed men in the suits with the red linings? They had disappeared, along with their Range Rover into the thin air. Nothing yet on CCTV even as far as the A27, which suggested they were holed up locally. Or, at least they had a place to stash the Range Rover.
Anthony Carstairs had rung several times to talk to me, but I couldn’t face it. I knew I needed to explain myself. But how could I explain the powerlessness I felt? The complete and utter disgust with myself?
On the fourth day, Meg came to see me. She had about as much sympathy as I expected or deserved from someone who had cut short her holiday, flown into Gatwick on the red-eye and caught the first train down. It wasn’t the only time she had visited me in hospital. I thought those days were over. Her visits were marginally worse than getting beaten up or, on one previous occasion, shot.
‘I suppose I have Anthony Carstairs to thank for this?’ I asked.
She was as brisk and businesslike as you’d expect from someone who worked in a hospital. She studied the chart at the end of my bed as if I were her patient.
‘No, someone from Scotland Yard called. They still have me down as Next-of-Kin, apparently.’
Her accent has never changed. Still the same Dagenham girl I first met as an RAF nurse. A girl with few qualifications from one of the toughest schools in the country. And yet she worked her way through a degree in Pharmacy while bringing up a child—single-handed for a lot of the time. Still the same figure she had when we first met. Cyprus. Nineteen Eighty-Something.
‘You are looking well, Margaret.’
‘I wish I could say the same for you. What on earth have you got yourself into this time, Thomas?’
Still the same voice—despite her middle-class job—a lack of compromise deep in her character. Still the assumption that it was all my fault. I only hoped her patients saw a different bedside manner. Fortunately we were interrupted by the nurse who was discharging me. Meg examined the stitches on my forehead, planted a perfunctory kiss on them and then left with the car keys.
She collected the Alfa from the car park and my baggage from the budget hotel. When she returned, I was sitting on the side of the bed, feeling about ninety.
She got me to the car in a wheelchair and squeezed me in the passenger seat. Then she took the wheelchair back to A&E. I sat there feeling pathetic.
She returned saying, ‘Christ! You’d think there was a shortage of beds or something. It’s like Beirut in there.’
‘It’s the sunshine that does it,’ I said. ‘The English can't cope with it.’
As we drove out of the car park, she said, ‘Now, tell me what happened.’
I gave her the expurgated version: Becket trying to save a fellow being mugged in the park, but failing miserably. I kept it brief saying I was in Chichester on a legal case, and not making a link with the mugging. She nodded from time to time, as if analysing my story for discrepancies. Meg had never been the most attentive of drivers and I had to breathe in once or twice as she passed a lorry or overtook a bus.
She was driving into the city centre for some reason. When I pointed this out, she said, ‘Look at yourself, Thomas! You are in no fit state to travel. I’ve booked us into a B&B.’
I kept quiet for the rest of the journey. It was mercifully short and involved not more than one unintended detour. The George Bell House was situated in the precincts of Chichester Cathedral. It was a substantial flint and stone building with a sloping orangery on the side. Meg explained that her husband was unwell and we needed a twin room. The receptionist looked at me like I was the living dead and helped us upstairs with the luggage. Meg had thoughtfully booked us into the only hotel in Chichester without a lift, but the room had a view of the Cathedral spire above some sycamores. The bed was made up with crisp white sheets and a white counterpane. It looked like a bank of snow and I wanted to bury myself in it like a drunken Inuit after a night on the firewater.
Maybe I said that. Maybe I just thought it. But the receptionist gave Meg a sympathetic glance and left.
For my part, I crawled into the bed and fell fast asleep.
It was morning. Meg was up and dressed, standing by the window, sipping tea. Behind her, a Cathedral spire rose behind the trees, as unreal as a scene from a film. She had her back to me and for a moment I could not pinpoint where we were in place or time. Then she turned and smiled her familiar smile, and the loss came rushing back to me. The self-pity and pain of the last few days caught up with their real cause and broke over me like a wave.
I had not wept for over a year. I thought I had used up all my tears, but they came back to me now like an old friend. Meg put her cup down carefully and sat on the bed. She took my hand.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘It gets me like that sometimes, too.’
After breakfast we walked around the Cathedral Close. In my opinion all other English cathedrals seem slightly puny when compared to Canterbury. But, for me, they all share the same thing: a sense of a world where faith alone, often over many slow-moving centuries, could create a space of such ambition and wonder. Inside, we wandered around with the tourists: flying buttresses, Sutherland’s Noli Me Tangere, Piper’s colourful tapestry, the window by Chagall like it had been dipped in thick, sticky blood.
Meg asked, ‘Do you still go to church, Thomas?’
‘I go in churches,’ I said. ‘I like churches. And cathedrals.’
‘But you don’t go to services.’
I thought of Sunny Prajapati’s memorial service.
‘It used to be such a big part of your life,’ she said.
The trouble with people who are close to you is that they think they have the right to remind you of things you would rather forget. About traits in your character, too. I walked away before I made the same mistake.
The stained glass worked on my concussed brain like a kaleidoscope, and perhaps because of this, I thought of the past few days not so much as a chain of events but fragments of a puzzle. Perhaps there was no picture; perhaps none of it made sense; the pieces were all part of an illusion, a lie and the act of putting them together would only serve to create another falsehood. But I had a strong desire to put them together, nevertheless.
Meg wanted to see the famous Arundel Tomb, the subject of Philip Larkin’s poem, which someone had thoughtfully inscribed in their best calligraphy and framed next to the monument. There they were: the knight and his lady laying side by side, their dogs at the end of the bed, a touching domestic detail. Her hand in his. Her little finger broken off. His knightly foot on his faithful hound.
‘What will survive of us is love,’ Meg quoted.
‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ I thought.
We stood there for a very long time. She had always wanted to visit places like this, tourist places—she loved Canterbury before I spoiled it by living there—I was always the one who wanted to move on, go somewhere else. She once said that our differences were our strength. I would have agreed until we reached breaking point. Sometimes I wondered if it was the accumulation of all those little differences over time that finally did for us; the attrition of small misapprehensions wearing us down over the years. Whatever it was, whe
n the breaking point came, we had no resilience, or perhaps we just could not stand the sight of each other anymore.
How can love survive the death of a child?
A voice in my head told me to leave it. Leave it, Becket, the voice said.
I asked Meg which way we would be driving back. Not taking her eyes off the tomb, she told me.
‘Do you mind if we make a slight detour?’ I asked.
Chapter Fourteen
The offices of PiTech were set back in their own grounds, parkland by the look of it, just outside Crawley. It was a location convenient for the airport, the motorway and, of course, a shortish drive from Lancing, where the Prajapatis lived. The main building was not dissimilar to a cathedral in its own way—just of a different age. The sort of place the medieval devout and powerful would have built had they access to the technology: reinforced concrete, glass twice as strong as slate and reflecting God’s glory back to the surrounding woodland, solar panels making use of nature’s benefice, a single wind-turbine like a slowly spinning cross.
Meg waited in the car, saying she had to catch up with her emails. I said I would be quick; I just wanted to thank someone in person.
The front desk resembled the bridge of the starship Enterprise except that instead of deep space, 24-hour news scrolled behind the receptionists. It must be very distracting to have that on all day, I thought, or soul-destroying—one or the other. But the staff were very professional and did not bat a false eyelash at a man with a bandaged head who looked like he had just limped off the set of The Mummy in the studio next door. I handed over my card, made my request and was directed to a leather sofa the size of a double bed.
