by Mark Raven
I rang Wing Commander Kenilworth and asked if he knew who Sir Simeon’s lawyer was. He did not. I rang the Marchants’ residence, but no one picked up. So I got out my notebook and tried the number on the side Jacob Breytenbach’s van.
He sounded delighted to hear from me.
‘What do you want? I'm busy right now.’
‘Listen, are you with your mum?’
‘Why?’
‘I need to ask her a question.’
‘What about?’
‘Sir Simeon’s lawyer. His name.’
‘You on this number?’
I looked at the clock on Meg’s kitchen wall.
‘For the next hour or so. Tell her it’s important.’
‘To you maybe,’ he said and rang off.
Jacob Breytenbach had a point. Sir Simeon Marchant—the man he called ‘Stan’—was dead. Maike Breytenbach more than anyone was dispossessed by this fact. To me, he was only the client that never was. My interest was professional, not personal; the loss did not reach into my gut and hollow me out the way it did for her—and perhaps her son, too. That made me think of the other children too. I just could not believe that they had killed their own father. Unless there was something in their past I didn’t know about. What did Wing Commander Kenilworth say?
GCHQ Naval Section. All sorts of goings on. He used to go up to London quite regularly for reunions with the Spooks.
I took the Times obituary from my pocket and smoothed it out on the kitchen table. I marvelled at the research and background knowledge that had gone into it. My eye was drawn as ever to the bottom of the page: ...died from injuries sustained in a street altercation on 20 August 2013. He is survived by a daughter.
I rang the Times, asked for the Register and got the Obituary Editor. I said I admired the obit of Sir Simeon Marchant. She thanked me in the distracted manner of a woman who got many such calls. And then she waited for it.
‘I just have a tiny query,’ I said. ‘You didn’t make much of his service as a Cold Warrior.’
She sighed and explained the paper’s editorial policy as if she was reading from a script in a call centre, but I wasn’t really listening. In the end, she gave me the email address of the person who submitted the obituary. ‘Of course if there are any issues, we will publish a full retraction.’ I said I was sure that would not be necessary, I had always been a great supporter of the freedom of the press to print utter bollocks, and rang off.
Next up was Littlemore. He was back in his Pimlico flat. I asked him how it had gone. He said swimmingly. I told him not to be clever and meet me at 1 pm at Charing Cross.
‘Right you are, Chief Inspector.’
‘I’m not a Chief anything, Littlemore. Look, while you’re on, I need two quick things.’
I gave him the obituary writer’s email address and Jenny Forbes-Marchant’s number and waited while Littlemore tip-tapped away. After about thirty seconds, he gave me both home and mobile telephone numbers, and an address.
‘That’s in London, right?’
‘Kensington.’
‘Can’t you get any more accurate than that?’
‘Sorry, Ch—.’
‘One o’clock, Littlemore. Remember, Charing Cross. Don’t be late.’
I made myself a coffee and noted down: JFM said that her brother was calling from abroad when in reality he was calling from London. Kensington in fact, which would indicate that he was at her gallery perhaps? Her flat is nearby? Either way, she would know MM was in the country and that she was lying to me. If not, MM is lying to her. Why would he do that?
I picked up the phone, thinking there were many reasons to lie to your sister, and not all of them suggestive of criminal activity. But if Mark Marchant was in the country, it shut down one avenue of inquiry, at least.
Someone picked up.
‘Gerard McAllister,’ the man said in a melodic Scots accent, a rare one south of the border.
I gave him my name and explained Sir Simeon Marchant was a client of mine.
‘Lawyer? Funny, he never mentioned you.’
That crossed out another line of inquiry. And he didn’t mention Sir Simeon’s solicitors either. So I told him I was a legal investigator based in...
‘How did you get my number, Mr Becket?’ he interrupted.
‘As I said I am a legal investigator...’
‘Are you aware of the privacy laws in this country?’
‘I am, unfortunately,’ I said. ‘Are you?’
He said nothing, but at least he had stopped interrupting me. I finished my spiel, explaining I was working for Sir Simeon Marchant at the time of his death. At the other end, I could almost feel the phone being crushed in his iron grip. But he did not put it down.
‘I suppose it’s about the obituary,’ he said.
I began by asking if he wrote it.
‘Good God no,’ he laughed as if the very concept was absurd. ‘Simeon wrote most of it.’
‘You just wrote the ending.’
‘Sadly, yes. We were great friends. Comrades.’
‘GCHQ?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Because it would account for him leaving out the juicier parts of his career.’
He chuckled dryly. ‘If you could call them that,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you, Mr Becket?’
The familiar catchphrase. People generally use it when I have succeeded in getting up their noses. It should be a Becketian success criterion.
‘I was wondering why the obituary didn’t refer to his first marriage in South Africa.’
He could barely keep the relief out of his voice, ‘Isn’t it obvious? His family wanted it that way.’
He is survived by a daughter.
‘So, you checked it out with Mrs Forbes-Marchant?’
‘Of course, I did, Mr Becket. What sort of man do you think I am?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ I said.
And he put the phone down before I could become any ruder.
Midday. I let myself out of the flat well before Meg was due to return from her early shift. Down in the square, the first leaves were falling from the trees. I looked up at the picture window, where I had been so clearly framed the night before. Man in Boxer Shorts, by Lucien Freud. Becket Staring at Blurred Reflection, by Francis Bacon.
I turned and walked west towards Lancaster Gate.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The London Evening Standard no longer comes out in the evening and certainly doesn’t set any standards. But it is free, these days, and therefore freely available on every seat of my underground train. As I travelled east along the Central Line, I read about the Standard’s exposé of what it termed ‘illiterate London’. Besides the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the newspaper proposed a new War on Illiteracy. What this entailed exactly I was not sure. It could not be based on locking people up who could not read or write very well; we already did that. About two thirds of prisoners in the UK, as Reuben Symonds would testify to, had the reading age of an eleven year old. Or what an eleven year old was meant to have. The Standard’s answer seemed to involve teaching eleven year olds.
Like most people the press thought if you only sorted schools out, society’s problems would be over. And yet, there are over three hundred languages spoken in London, most of them by people who did not go to school here. Schools are clearly not the answer. Families are the answer, churches are the answer, mosques, community centres, colleges are the answer, but journalists don’t understand that. Most journalists, like politicians, go to school and then they go to university—usually an elite one—so they only understand other institutions. They cannot comprehend that anyone else learns stuff in different ways.
The rest of the newspaper, it being the 11th of the 9th, focused on the event known around the world as 9/11. It asked sundry Londoners what they were doing on September 11th 2001. A famous actress was rehearsing her new play on Broadway, a Muslim stand-up comedian was surfing TV channels looking for new gags, a woman
in Ealing was in labour having her first child etc... The point being people could always recall where they were ‘when those planes hit the twin towers.’ There was that quasi-religious tone hacks use when they pontificate about 9/11, but they were right; even Becket could remember where his younger self was that afternoon twelve years before.
I had left the RAF in summer of 2001 and decided to take the remainder of my leave right up to my formal demob date of 28th September, when I turned forty. At that stage, I had not applied to join the Met. In fact, I did not know what I wanted to do. We lived in Buckinghamshire, in a sleepy village, not far from Operational Command. Clara was in her final year at school in High Wycombe. It was a boarding school, but in the sixth form she attended as a daygirl. Every afternoon I indulged myself by picking her up after school as if that act made amends for not being around for most of her childhood. In the manner of such things, I got to know the other parents waiting for their charges, admittedly much younger ones. One of the women couldn’t believe that trim military Becket with his close cropped hair—then still dark—was old enough to have a sixth form daughter. Sometimes she and I met for a coffee beforehand. Once, only once, we met in a hotel room. 11th September 2001.
The TV came on as we were dressing afterwards—I must have touched the remote control—and at first I thought it was showing a movie. It wasn’t. It had no soundtrack. And it had the words ‘breaking news’ scrolling underneath it.
I drove Clara home in a state of shock. We were both in shock. I never knew how she found out about her father’s brief affair. But before she left for Hong Kong, she made it clear that she did.
And I thought you were paying some attention to me at last.
I missed my change at Oxford Circus and got off at Tottenham Court Road. I caught the Northern Line down to Charing Cross. I was early but then so was Littlemore, holding a red Costa carton this time, no doubt one of his five-a-day. He was busy scrutinising the offers in the window of WH Smiths. Despite their complexity—two for one, buy one get one for £1 or free or half price or 20% off your next purchase over £20 etc—they really didn’t deserve that level of attention. Littlemore was in fact busily avoiding eye contact with a party of schoolchildren in purple blazers. He always maintained he had never touched a child, just looked at them online. He had confessed to storing and selling images to people immeasurably more perverted than him. I had told him all the evidence was that ‘just looking’ led to other things. He said he knew that. It just didn’t apply to him.
‘How do you solve a problem like Littlemore?’ I asked as I approached him.
He nearly jumped through the plate glass window.
‘Chief’ –he stopped himself.
‘Not an illiterate Londoner then, Littlemore?’
I held out my hand. He juggled the coffee and handed me my flat keys.
‘How was the trip?’
He brightened up.
‘V-very good. I have not been on a t-train for years.’
‘And my flat? You did remember to go there?’
‘Look, Mr Becket, I wish...’
‘What do you wish for, Littlemore?’ I stopped myself. I was taking it out on him. He was the target for my own shame and self-loathing at that moment in time. I put my hand on his arm. He flinched.
‘Let’s sit down.’
We sat side by side on a metal bench. It was meant for three people but Littlemore took up sixty percent of the space. If anyone glanced at us, they would think he was out with his care worker. Not a particularly caring one either.
‘Find anything?’
‘No,’ he said, and caught the look in my eye. ‘Not at first. Then I had the idea of fusing the system.’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve wrecked my home.’
He laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant laugh. It was probably a laugh that found Dungeons and Dragons entertaining. Or just dungeons, possibly. His breath stank of caffeine and rust. So pungent it made my eyes swim.
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘You see most systems make a noise of some kind when they reset. And it did...’
‘Are you saying there was some kind of surveillance device in there?’
‘Yes.’
‘And it was attached to the mains?’
‘Of course not. It was attached to your broadband.’
He looked at me like I was an idiot.
‘And what did you do?’ I asked.
‘I left it alone like you said.’
‘Just like I said?’
He smiled.
‘Precisely, Ch—’
I gave him a twenty. He looked at it nonplussed.
‘For your train fare,’ I explained. ‘And a toothbrush.’
‘No, I’m not a conspiracy theorist as such. More of a theorist who writes about conspiracy theorists—you understand the distinction? —a thinker who thinks conspiracy theorists have something to say about the zeitgeist, the way we live our lives today.’
‘The spirit of the age,’ I said.
She folded another piece of Romana Rusticella into her mouth, chewed thoughtfully, and took a slurp of San Pellegrino.
‘Just because I have read a lot of conspiracy theories,’ she said, picking up her pizza wheel and waving at me, ‘doesn’t mean I believe any of them, other than in the sense I believe anything. I believe that they are believed and that is enough. It is therefore, like any other form of knowledge, worthy of study.’
‘Epistemology,’ I said.
‘Exactly,’ she replied, tucking away another slice.
Her name was Kat Persaud, and for some reason she had agreed to meet me. Perhaps she just liked pizza, as after I had called her the day before from my new mobile, she rang me back and suggested a restaurant between Charing Cross and Trafalgar Square. She was late twenties I guessed, rake thin, wearing faded jeans, and an even more faded hippy look: long, lank hair, Lennon specs and warm, hazelnut eyes that reminded me of Clara. About Clara’s age, too. Perhaps Clara would have also ended up as an academic at King’s College, being able to wander down The Strand at lunchtime and meet legal investigators who wanted to pick your brains about conspiracy theorists.
Of course, it wasn’t like that at all. Dr Persaud’s book was called Conspiracism and the Sense of the Contemporary. It retailed at £29.95 on Amazon, and she told me it had ‘sold in its tens’ and was on nobody’s reading list—even in China, where apparently there were so many undergraduates that you could make a course out of almost anything. But the book had got her onto the bill earlier in the year at ConGress 13 in San Francisco, where she had met Sir Simeon Marchant, CB, CBE.
‘It was absolutely hilarious,’ she said. ‘All expenses paid, and a hotel room with a view of the Golden Gate. Poor old Simeon was as lost as me. Neither of us could figure out why we were there. That was the first thing he said to me: You know, my dear, I'm here under quite false pretences.’
With this she did a passable imitation of the voice I had heard on the phone a few weeks before. Thoughtfully, she avoided the stutter. It just wasn’t PC.
‘I never met him,’ I said.
But Kat Persaud hadn’t finished her anecdote, ‘I said something like we are the only two Brits here and we are both fakes! You know what he said? Indeed we are both flying under black flags, my dear. Priceless! I would have gone there just to meet him.’
Again I got that vague sense of regret that I hadn’t met Sir Simeon Marchant.
‘Why was he there then?’ I asked. ‘Why did he go?’
‘Curiosity? Because he’d been invited? Bored? I don’t know.’
‘Why was he invited? Did he say?’
‘Well they had him down for a seminar about the role of the NSA and GCHQ. Someone must have known he used to work for them.’
‘GCHQ?’
‘Yes, he was terribly knowledgeable. And interesting. You see he had kept up. With the post-internet world, the world where the internet turned out to be something different to what was intended. He found that interesting. H
e was interested in everything. Fascinating to talk to.’
‘Did you find him at all confused?’
‘How do you mean ‘confused’? You mean any more that the rest of the folk at ConGress 13?’
‘I mean…’
‘I know what you mean. Was he going doolally?’
I nodded. You didn’t hear the word ‘doolally’ very often. I wondered if it was politically correct. Kat Persaud continued.
‘Funny you should say that. He asked me if there had been any research linking Alzheimer’s with the Official Secrets Act! How do you ensure secrecy when people begin to lose their marbles? That is the question. It is not so much that people want to give away secrets, but that they can’t help themselves.’
‘They no longer know what is real.’
‘You show me your reality and I’ll show you mine.’
‘What did you tell him?’ I asked.
‘Not my subject. But it was a fascinating thought: were Burgess, Maclean, Philby etc all suffering from pre-senile dementia? Are you leaving that?’
She eyed the rest of my pizza in a predatory fashion.
‘Go ahead.’
She did.
‘Nice choice,’ she commented. ‘Pollo ad astra. Chicken to the stars. Never had it before. Love the peppers. Where was I?’
‘San Francisco. You said you were both there under false pretences?’
‘Well, we were both interested in the subject, but this was a conference for conspiracy theorists. Not for academics studying them or, for that matter, nice old gentlemen with bees in their bonnets about the way their country is run. Our country that is, not America, although the distinction is a fine one these days. Culturally and politically.’
‘You wouldn’t say he was a conspiracy theorist himself?’
‘Depends what you mean by the term?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I thought you said you’d read my book.’
