by Mark Raven
‘Wouldn’t stop them seeing each other.’
‘True.’
He finished his last piece of pizza, eyed mine speculatively before giving up. He patted his tummy.
‘And Mr Janovitz thinks PiTech paid up so they could destroy any evidence of missing bugs?’
‘Yes.’
‘He sounds something of a conspiracy theorist too.’
I felt deflated. Suddenly, I realised what I had been pursuing was a pipe dream. It had taken just half an hour with a sane person to tell me so. And, as he said, I had acted out of character. Why was that?
‘There is nothing,’ Anthony went on, ‘terribly unusual in surveillance during a merger process. We have dealt with some of that over the years. The darker side of due diligence.’
‘I thought it a bit OTT to attack Janovitz in the park. If I hadn’t been there, they probably would have killed him. And if the police hadn’t turned up they might have killed me too.’
I couldn’t bring myself to admit how defenceless I had been. It still shamed me. I thought I had got it out of me on the Alconbury Estate. But, if anything, it had made it worse.
Anthony finished his wine. He signalled for the bill.
‘Let’s have our coffee back at the ranch.’
The waiter came over with the card machine and handed it to Carstairs.
‘And was Mr Janovitz threatened before?’ he asked me.
‘No, but he was twitchy.’
‘Twitchy?’
I started to reply but Carstairs held up his hand and entered his number into the machine. It churned out a receipt. He slipped the waiter a tenner.
‘I didn’t add it to the bill as you’ll get taxed on it, old chap.’
The waiter presented the receipt with a flourish, thanked us and left.
‘I do enjoy it,’ Carstairs said, ‘when everyday actions have such elegance. Shall we go?’
I was frustrated. My story had just washed over him. All he had tried to do was pick holes in it or point out my defects. He was more interested in the waiter than what I had to say. We walked in silence back towards chambers.
‘You know,’ he said as we turned the corner of the mews. ‘I’ve always been struck at our capacity to think it won’t happen to us—car crashes, cancer, depression, dementia—and then it does. But until then it is always the other chap. Despite the statistics, despite the evidence. Even the most intelligent amongst us...’
I stopped him, my hand on his arm.
‘Where are you going with this, Anthony?’
‘I was just interested, Tom, why you thought it was Mr Janovitz they were after when you were the one who was told to keep your nose out of other people’s business. It was you that had previously been threatened, you that had the contretemps with the youth in the park, you that had been told to back off by the police, you that had asked all the awkward questions... To an outsider like me, it seems more likely that you, Thomas A Becket, who was the intended target and it was poor Mr Janovitz who was the innocent bystander.’
He touched my sleeve and walked on.
‘Just a thought, Tom’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Just a thought.’
Back at my desk, there was a message to ring Meg. I couldn’t put it off any longer. Might as well get all my daily criticism over in one lot, I thought. I was still stinging from Anthony Carstairs’ remarks and the fact that I had missed the point: someone was trying to stop me being involved. Not just DCI Richie either.
Meg was at home, just about to leave for a two-to-ten shift.
‘I’ve been taking my prescribed medicines,’ I told her.
‘But not returning my calls,’ she said. ‘I assume you were at the pub?’
‘You know me too well.’
‘No wonder your bloods were all over the place. Well I wash my hands of you, Thomas.’
‘My bloods?’
‘You got me worried, fool that I am, with all your talk of illness. So I got them to retest them. More tests. The whole lot. God, I was popular, I can tell you.’
‘And...’
‘Still no Rohypnol, I’m afraid. But they found something else.’
Car crashes, cancer, depression, dementia.
‘Something called Haloperidol. You’re not on anti-psychotics, are you Tom? You would tell me if you were, wouldn’t you? I mean if there was something badly wrong, you would tell me, wouldn’t you? Tom?’
Haloperidol.
‘Tom?’
Haloperidol, according to my ex-wife the clinical pharmacist, was a first generation anti-psychotic. It was available as a colourless, virtually tasteless solution and would sedate, weaken, calm and was also potentially myorelaxant, which meant it stops the muscles reacting to signals the brain sends. It was an older type of treatment for schizophrenia, hence her surprise—not that I might be suffering from the condition—that I could be prescribed it. She said there were more side effects than benefits in its treatment of mental illness: hyperactivity, aggression, delirium, something called ‘muscle rigidity’ and the fact that it locked you down. You could not respond to the simplest of external stimuli. So it was useless alongside talking therapies. In the 1960s and 70s in the US it had been used on radical black men arrested at civil rights marches. Their protest was defined as a mental illness; or rather mental illness was redefined to include them as a brand-new category. Similarly, in the Soviet Union, it was prescribed to dissidents. In veterinary science, it did however appear to be successful as a treatment for parrots which would otherwise continue to pluck their own feathers out.
‘I know how they feel’.
‘At least you didn’t get Rabbit Syndrome,’ Meg had said.
‘What’s Rabbit Syndrome?’
‘It’s characterised by tiny, involuntary sideways movements of the mouth.’
‘I thought that was called talking?’
‘Don’t joke, Tom this is serious. Some say, Haloperidol is used by the police during hostage negotiations. You know, send in a drink or some food with dope in it. Wears people down. Stops them thinking.’
I knew I had heard of it.
‘The Balcombe Street siege!’ I said. ‘That was Haloperidol!’
December 1975, London, a Provisional IRA cell held two hostages, John and Shirley Matthews, for six days before surrendering. I had been a teenager at the time, watching it on TV like everyone else, barely able to understand what was going on. But later I had studied it during a course on hostage negotiation. The Bomb Squad had used a combination of psychological pressure, misinformation (using the mass media) and a drug called Haloperidol in the food taken in. Unable to make proactive decisions and destabilised by the negotiators the Provos surrendered. In the write ups of the case, you will find reference to any number of things: the twenty-six concurrent life sentences, the terrorists’ release under the Good Friday agreement—Gerry Adams called them ‘our Nelson Mandelas’—and even their confessions for the Guildford and Woolwich Bombings for which innocent people would serve life sentences for another fifteen years. But in all of that, you will see no reference to the use of Haloperidol by our security forces.
‘It is still used, my colleagues tell me,’ Meg said. ‘But it is not routinely tested for. And even if it were, apparently it is difficult to detect without the patient being present.’
‘Would they have found it at Chichester Hospital? I had enough blood taken.’
‘I doubt it. But it is possible.’
There was silence at the other end.
‘Tom, why would the police want to drug you?’
I told her I did not have an answer to that question.
I tried Jenny Forbes-Marchant. Her mobile wasn’t being picked up so I rang the gallery. An eastern European voice diluted by the English public school system said, ‘She is not in today. Can I help?’
I attempted to recall the intern’s name, but I had been hit on the head several times since we last met. I did remember how she looked though. Funny thing: memory. I told her who
I was. I didn’t expect she’d recall Becket.
‘Oh, how are you? I heard that you were in the hospital.’
I said I was fine—liar.
‘Jenny, she is down at the Hayling Island. You know the house?’
At least that accounted for the lack of signal. I thanked her.
‘You look after yourself, okay?’ she sang out and put the phone down.
Sure, I thought. Look after myself.
An hour or so later, the phone rang. It was reception downstairs. There was a police officer who would like to talk to me. I said I would pop down. There was a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach and it wasn’t the after effects of too much pizza. I put the case files and notepad into my small safe. I put my jacket on, patted my pockets for keys and tobacco, and left the office. Briefly I thought about using the fire escape, but I trudged down the three flights to reception.
In fact, there were two of them there. Both uniforms, and both standing up, which is never a good sign.
‘Mr Thomas Becket?’ one of them said. ‘Kent Constabulary. I’m afraid we have to ask you accompany us to the station.’
I followed them to the back entrance of Hunt and Carstairs LLP. The car park was empty apart from Anthony’s Jag and a police car.
I got in the back and they drove me away.
Chapter Eighteen
If they planned to make me think, make me consider the entire range of possibilities for my incarceration, then it was a decent plan. The fact I knew it wasn’t a plan, that they were just waiting for someone further up the food chain to turn up, didn’t stop me thinking. They had been told to locate Becket and lock him up. Why? I asked myself.
See, I had little choice but to think.
This time they had provided a cell for the purpose. I had not only been deprived of my liberty, but also my phone, the contents of my pockets, my belt and shoelaces. It was almost as bad as going through airport security. When I asked the reason for the somewhat heavy-handed approach, they said it was a murder inquiry and they’d been told I could be a danger to myself and to others.
Provoking that boy...that was quite out of character, if I may say so, Tom.
I asked them to ring Anthony Carstairs, but I was not sure they would. Later it would be easy to deny that I had made a request, easier to deny than giving me a new shiner anyway. The point was the same: I was powerless. I only hoped the chambers receptionist had had the wit to tell the head clerk. And for the head clerk to have the courage to wake Anthony from his postprandial slumber.
So, if they planned to make me think—if it really was conspiracy and not the usual cock-up—then it worked. I thought about how I had become an actor in the case. No mere observer, not just a legal investigator raking over dead coals, but lighting fires of my own. Not good practice. I thought of how Haloperidol had come to be in my bloodstream, and who had the opportunity to put it there. But more intriguing was the reason why. I longed to ask Carstairs that question. Partly to vindicate his belief that I was the target. And partly to say, You see it was planned. There is conspiracy. I was not attacked randomly. I was targeted by people who knew I could defend myself if they didn’t drug me to the eyeballs first.
And now I was being held in a cell while someone came down from London to interview me. My money was on DCI Richie.
I was wrong. The detective inspector’s name was Nick Spittieri. He was six-four, overweight, with a swarthy, pock-marked skin, three days’ growth of stubble, and the air of man very easily pissed off. He was accompanied by a young DC who looked uncomfortable and said nothing. Later, I came to the conclusion that the lad was in a mild state of shock. Every young copper has been there. Just seen his first violent death. So violent, he couldn’t quite shake it, no matter how hard he stared at normal things: walls, tables, chairs, his own hands, his wrists...
We sat in an interview room. Spittieri asked me a few preliminaries about myself. His demeanour seemed to say: so this is how you end up when you join the private sector. I asked to see Anthony Carstairs again. The DC didn’t seem to even hear the question. The local bobby studied the wallpaper. Spittieri just ignored me.
‘So,’ he said. ‘You’ll be familiar with things like this.’
He pushed an A4 envelope across the table.
‘Open it.’
The envelope contained five large colour prints. I shuffled them.
Glass, blood, the close up of an eye, bloodshot. Sunlight. More glass. Next photograph: a man was hanging limp and very dead. Someone had propped him up, there. He stood at a window—no, not windows, French doors—they must have put his head through the pane first, and then his arms, further down. Punched them through while holding his wrists. Noli me tangere. Not quite a crucifix but it held him up. The window frame was holding him there. Next photo: a chair wedged against him, just to make sure. His head slumped forward as if he had fallen asleep. I flicked through the others. More angles on the same scene. I put the photographs back before the young DC fainted.
Spittieri asked, ‘You don’t seem very surprised, Mr Becket.’
‘As you say I’m familiar with such things.’
‘Are you ‘familiar’ with the victim?’
‘His first name is Lee. Surname’s Herbert, I think.’
‘And how do you know, Mr Herbert?’
‘He attacked me with two other men in a park in Chichester.’
‘After you assaulted him the day before in the same park.’
‘I was getting to that bit. After I defended myself from him the day before. Who killed him?’
‘We thought you would be able to tell us that.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You didn’t kill him then?’
‘I suppose you had to ask me that,’ I said. ‘But no, I didn’t kill him. I didn’t even know he was dead.’
I pushed the envelope back across the table. Spittieri took a plastic evidence bag out of his pocket and held it up. Inside was a business card. Blood stained.
‘Recognise this?’
‘Looks like my card.’
Spittieri said, ‘Found on the body.’
I summoned up my reserves of sarcasm.
‘How clumsy of me.’
The young DC started.
‘That was a joke,’ I added for his benefit.
Spittieri stared. It was a good stare. Honed in places where stares, and other forms of non-verbal communication, really mattered.
He said, ‘I don’t think you are in any position to joke, Mr Becket.’
‘Clearly not,’ I said. ‘You have had me arrested without making it clear what for. You have denied lawful access to legal representation on two occasions, and now you have shown me pieces of evidence that indicate that you don’t really think it was me who killed him, but that I might know who did it. My best guess, like yours, is the other two guys who attacked me. They probably rightly came to the conclusion that he would get himself arrested sooner or later and that at that stage might be stupid enough to give them up. Now can I see my brief?’
The story was this. About the same time as I sat in that pub in Canterbury the day before, Lee Herbert was leaving one in New Cross, South London. The rainstorm that was falling on Canterbury had passed over the capital some time ago and had left an oily sheen on the wet pavements. In the Marquis of Queensbury, the same match played on the television, but Lee was not much interested in football, he wanted to get his end away.
He was staying in a squat on Charles Adamson Crescent. It was occupied, in part, by some people he knew from Chichester, students at Goldsmiths. He didn’t know them that well, just from school and pubs in town, but well enough for them to put him up for a few days. They called themselves anarchists, DI Spittieri said, so they could hardly refuse.
Charles Adamson Crescent was semi-circle of late Georgian houses, probably built for merchants. A degree of gentrification had occurred along the road, farther away from a council estate that pulsated aggro on a regular basis. The squat was civili
sed compared to some others in the area. The anarchists paid the electricity bills and council tax. There was even a rota to take out the rubbish or recycling every other week. A poster on the kitchen wall advocated interracial tolerance in fifteen languages—some of them in scripts Spittieri had never even known existed.
They had given Lee a room on the ground floor. It faced out onto the overgrown garden and had old French windows that rattled in the breeze. The usual occupant, a girl, was away with Greenpeace. She had left her summer frocks hanging side by side on the picture rail so that they reminded Spittieri of a paper chain.
The other kids in the squat said Lee liked the room so much that he wanted to stay. The students intimated that it would be time for Lee to move on once the Greenpeace girl came back from Russia or wherever she was. The house is full, bro’, they told him and besides some of the girls felt a little uncomfortable around Lee. Sure, they enjoyed it when he splashed his cash around the pub, when he bought them decent weed or paid them into a warehouse party. But he was also paying a lot of attention to a black girl called Sistina. When the police turned up, they found her rocking in the corner of Lee’s room, her legs curled up under her. At first they thought that she had killed him.
The others said Sistina wouldn’t talk much: just her name, a hoarse whisper, now and then: yes or thank-you like it was one word. They said she had lost her voice in some war-torn part of Africa, that her family had been kicked out of England for something or other. The Greenpeace girl had found Sistina on the street and brought her home. She had slept in the Greenpeace girl’s bed until a room came free.
Before leaving the pub, Lee had said Sistina would be at home waiting for him back at the squat. After a while, some of the girls insisted they went home in case Lee did something to Sistina. But Sistina told the police that she had not let Lee in. He had gone round the back of the house and broken in. She had heard broken glass. And then she had heard Lee scream. Just once.
When she went downstairs she found him like that. Crucified, she said.
