by Mark Raven
‘Only the free bit online.’
Kat Persaud looked up and laughed.
‘Ha! Honest, anyway. It would be cheaper to buy it, Mr Becket. Cheaper than a pizza, I mean. Remaindered in all good bookshops. Or can’t a legal investigator put books on expenses?’
She looked at me, smiled and pushed my plate aside. She had finished with it.
‘Okay, the popular use of the term ‘conspiracy theory,’’ she made inverted commas in the air, gave me a significant glance and continued, ‘is often derogatory in connotation. That is to say, the term tends only to be used, these days, for those theories that run counter to accepted knowledge. So once something becomes an accepted truth then it is no longer a conspiracy theory, but ‘investigative journalism’ or even ‘history’. Okay?’
‘So far so good.’
‘So we tend to use the term and, thus, ‘conspiracy theorists’ to denote crackpots. Their crackpottery is known as ‘conspiracy theory’ until, such time as society accepts that it is true and the conspiracy theorists become historians. Like me.’
‘So you are not a conspiracy theorist?’
‘I thought I had already made it clear. I’m interested in them, their crackpot ideas and why we tend not to accept them.’
‘We?’
‘Exactly,’ she said as if she had at last discovered a modicum of intelligence in a particularly dull undergrad. ‘Who ‘we’ are is at the crux of the issue. The ‘we’ in this case tend to be big institutions—universities, research institutes, governments—therefore it is known as an institutional analysis. This is what keeps conspiracy theorists out in the cold, in the same way the Poetry Society used to exclude rappers, and the art establishment pretends not to frown on graffiti. No bad thing in my opinion, but I would say that, wouldn’t I?’
‘Because you are an institutional analyst?’
‘Correct. And, and, and what really frustrates me is that conspiracy theorists contradict themselves, and they just don’t do their homework. It is lazy thinking, for the most part. There were those at ConGress 13 who thought that Osama Bin Laden died prior to the 2011 raid and that he was captured alive and had been turned as a CIA agent, and is now no doubt advising on security matters at Langley. You just could not have a sensible conversation with them. They were like babies; they wanted the world to be explainable. But it just is not. Manifestly.’
She took on board more water.
‘And Simeon Marchant was not like that?’
‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘He was a sceptic. Not a paranoid. What one would call a healthy sceptic, because he actually knew what he was talking about. Remember, this was all before the Edward Snowden affair hit the news.’
She looked at her watch.
‘That was lovely. Thank you. No desert for me.’
The waiter had appeared. I asked if she would like a coffee. To my surprise she accepted.
‘Double espresso, please. Keep me awake. I have a seminar on Weapons of Mass Destruction this afternoon.’
‘You heard how Sir Simeon died?’ I asked.
‘I did,’ she replied, sadly enough. ‘I assumed that was why you wanted to see me today.’
‘What do you make of this..?’
I paused. The coffee arrived. The waiter left. I told her the story of PiTech takeover, the disappearance of Sunny Prajapati, the surveillance devices on board the Cassandra, and the supposed muggings on the Euston Road and in Chichester. I did not mention my suspicions about Sir Simeon’s children. It seemed too awful to talk about. More appalling than everyday corporate intrigue, anyway.
‘Sounds like the plot of cheapo novel,’ Kat Persaud said. ‘But doesn’t everything these days? More to the point, what do you make of it? Or are you asking me what I think Simeon thought about it? There is simply no way to know. He might have had his suspicions. That might have been the reason he brought you in. But we have no means of knowing. We can make up stories and then we would think we knew. That’s another thing about conspiracy theories: how they confirm and reconfirm aspects of ourselves, and our self. The divided self. The good, the bad and the ugly.’
She paused and waited for me to say something.
‘You said he was not paranoid.’
‘I’m not talking about him.’ She smiled, giving me that indulgent look the young sometimes bestow on elderly relatives. ‘Particularly.’
‘Why did you agree to meet me?’ I asked.
‘You haven’t worked it out? No? You really should have read the rest of my book. Epilogue to the second edition, 2008. From 9/11 to 7/7 to 12/12, I called it. Good, eh? That was the real reason they invited me to ConGress 13. Jean Charles de Menezes. The unlawful killing of. And the police cover-up. But you would know all about that wouldn’t you, Mr Becket?’
For Dr Kat Persaud, or at least her thesis, the Menezes case was indicative as to how the world had ‘changed immeasurably’ since September 11th 2001. For me, it was much more up close and personal, and, indeed, measurable. It became, for me, an indication of how the Metropolitan Police, my employer at the time, failed to measure up to what was expected of it.
But, as she said, it went back far beyond July 2005, to the post-2001 War on Terror and in particular the Madrid bombings of 2004. What police forces had learnt then was that it was absolutely wrong to approach suicide bombers and say ‘you’re under arrest’. In Spain, several officers and innocent bystanders were killed when that tactic was tried. The only way to avoid terrorists blowing themselves up when challenged was, it seemed, not to challenge them at all. A fundamental change in the way police services were meant to protect their citizens, but one it was deemed necessary in the new context. This was the so-called ‘shoot to kill policy’ codenamed Kratos—fully compliant with the Human Rights Act, of course—using 9 mm soft-cased bullets preferably via a Glock 17 self-loading handgun and delivered up close and personal.
Some critics saw the Kratos policy as capital punishment before the fact. Before any criminal act was committed. But, few of us in law enforcement, particularly those who had attended the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings—I remember standing in Tavistock Square looking at an open-topped bus that wasn’t meant to be open-topped at all—had strong objections to the policy. Naturally, we assumed it would only be used on people with several kilos of Semtex belted to them.
But it was a strange time. First, there were the 7/7 bombings and then, two weeks later, the failed attempts in south London. One of the principal suspects left his gym card at the scene of one of these. The gym gave officers the man’s address and a surveillance team staked it out. The next day, a Brazilian electrician, Menezes, left the same block of flats and made his way to a job in east London. He took the bus to Brixton underground station, found it was closed so caught another bus to Stockwell tube. Not knowing that Brixton station was shut, ironically due to the previous day’s attempted bombings, his watchers saw this as classic counter-surveillance behaviour, and called in the firearms team that was on standby. The watchers were still not able to give a positive identification of Menezes as their real target. (‘Positive’ was later emended to ‘possible’ in their logs.) His complexion was variously described as ‘Asian’ or ‘Arab’, but his identification code was IP1 (i.e. white). All this was to come to light, gradually, later.
Before all that, the electrician, lightly dressed and carrying no bag—he had left his tools with a work colleague—boarded a train followed by eight officers. In the carriage, the watchers identified Menezes and the firearms officers pushed him to the floor and shot him seven times in the neck and shoulder. No challenge, no warning. Shoot to kill. Kratos.
I was not on duty that morning. When I got into New Scotland Yard later that day, one of my colleagues, a detective superintendent in the Special Investigations Section of the DPS, had left for Stockwell with a small team. The word in the office was that SO13, the Anti-Terrorist Command would have primacy at the scene but we would have access. It didn’t matter anyway, everyone said, as th
e case would be handed over to the IPCC like all cases involving a death by shooting.
But this was not to be. By mid-afternoon, an examination of Mr Menezes’ wallet and phone indicated he was not a terrorist, and ‘primacy’ was handed from SO13 to the DPS. Still the IPCC was not called in.
What we didn’t know at the time was that the Commissioner himself was blocking their involvement and bringing in some political big guns to support him. Of course, they all had to give in eventually, too much media interest from around the world. And, by that time, two days later, a lot of the evidence was missing—like CCTV recordings—or compromised as in the case of the surveillance team’s log books, where words had been added that changed the entire meanings of sentences. Words like ‘not’ tend to do that. Someone who was positively identified suddenly was ‘not’ so. In short, it was your classic bureaucratic dog’s breakfast. As someone said, you could feel the corporate carapace closing over the officers’ heads. Despite the fact they may have acted out of the best of intentions, it was still the wrong thing to do.
If there was a conspiracy to fool the IPCC by the officers, it was not done to protect criminals but brave men who risked their lives—and got it badly wrong. The Met did everything they could to protect their own, and in doing so misled the Menezes family. In the end they nailed the Commissioner through the Health and Safety at Work Act, but there were no criminal prosecutions. The evidence threshold used by the IPCC—it was noted by all and sundry, as well as in many internal reports and memoranda—was much lower than the one needed by the Crown Prosecution Service, particularly with the right wing press baying at their heels.
What got to me was how my own service, the Directorate of Professional Standards, was complicit in this. You would expect firearms officers to close ranks and protect their backs, particularly when the commands coming down the line from HQ turned out to be so garbled. But it is a matter of public record that at least one of the DPS interviewers led a witness, interviewing her in a pub with the TV on. A news programme was reporting from the crime scene in one ear, and in the other my colleague was telling her that the real victims were the families of the poor firearms officers who would now no doubt be out of a job. As the IPCC report said, such poor practice should be dealt with as a ‘local management issue’, which we called a ‘naughty boy bollocking’ as it meant nothing. Nothing at all.
All this I told Dr Katherine Persaud of King’s College, London. There was nothing there that was not in the public domain, and she didn’t make notes. But she nodded as if it confirmed her own theories. She said she was actually writing a book about whistleblowers—more references here to the zeitgeist—and was more interested in the only casualty of the whole affair, the IPCC administrator sacked for leaking documents to a broadcaster. I told her I knew nothing of that side of things.
I didn’t tell her the more interesting story. One, of how later that month, DCI Becket had presented his own evidence and got moved sideways to Interpol for an enforced sabbatical. Two, how, a few years later, the whole sorry affair influenced how Becket went after PC Elliott Quinn of a different firearms unit, giving him no space until he blew his own head off before he could take someone else’s life.
That was how I sold it to myself, anyway.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I rang Rosenberg from a payphone at Charing Cross Station. He was at work. Outside the terminal building by the sound of it as I could hear planes taking off in the background. He said he had a positive ID on the photos but nothing on the name I’d given him. He said he would text the names through when he got back into the office. I was about to offer to ring him back, and then I thought it might not be so bad to receive a text after all. See if they were tracking my new phone yet.
You're paranoid, Becket. I’ve told you before you make assumptions.
I walked down Whitehall, past the gated entrance to Downing Street—policemen with machineguns and active imaginations—past Parliament Square where the tourists and the protesters gather, past Westminster Abbey with its schoolboys dressed like junior barristers, and down the relative sanity of Victoria Street to where New Scotland Yard crouched behind its seawall of concrete terrorist barriers. I gave my name to the copper on the gate, the receptionist and, finally, a minion from the Special Intelligence Section, who came down, rang Richie’s office, verified my identity and informed me I could have five minutes with the great man.
Richie had a large corner office on the tenth floor—north facing—impressive to visitors, but also one I knew would be freezing in cold weather. Senior management were located farther down Broadway, with a view of the park and, in winter, Horseguards’ Parade. But as this was high summer, few of the top brass would be around—another reason for Richie letting me pollute the building with my presence—and taking well-deserved rests at their retreats in France or at law enforcement conventions in the States. I was in no position to criticise; the old Becket had been on any number of those jollies himself. Had listened to many an interesting case study, very few applicable to his work on a small island off the coast of mainland Europe. If the economy class travel wasn’t such a pain in the arse, the trips were almost perks. Decent hotels with swimming pools, freebies from computer companies, private security firms pitching their latest profiling software or location methodologies, even telling you in the bar they were looking for a chap with just your type of experience. All in all, we were profoundly grateful to the British taxpayer for sending us to Miami or New Orleans. I was even nostalgic at times for my time in Paris or Quantico. But I never felt the same affection for New Scotland Yard. Familiarity sure bred contempt—oodles of it.
Richie did not look up as I walked in, contenting himself with gesturing to a seat opposite him. I almost laughed. He really did have Small Man Syndrome. Here was an important man of business, surrounded by his sizeable desk, the crates he was packing and a shredding machine the size of a pillar-box. So big in fact, Richie could have probably shredded himself. I amused myself with this thought while he pretended to work.
After he had finished checking a report critical to national security, he signed it with a fountain pen that was almost as long as his arm. I felt like taking it from him and snapping it before his eyes.
‘Moving house, Richie?’ I asked. ‘National Crime Agency not based here, then?’
He closed the file, and was finally able to pay some attention to lesser matters, like Becket.
‘Round the corner,’ he said.
‘That’s what they do, Richie. They keep you moving. First principle of British government. Move jobs, move offices, move departments.’
He fixed me with his lashless gaze and summoned up a world-weary expression.
‘If you must know, I applied for a secondment. What can I do for you, Becket?’
‘I wondered how you were getting on.’
‘With what exactly?’
‘Lee Herbert’s killers,’ I said. ‘The ones who put my business card on him.’
‘It didn’t cross your mind that you might have dropped one? When you was mugged.’
‘It did but I didn’t. Have any on me, that is. I gave my last one to Janovitz.’
‘Who else?’
‘As I told you, Wing Commander Sydney Kenilworth, Mr Mat Janovitz, a receptionist at PiTech, and Mrs Jenny Forbes-Marchant. Have you followed any of those up?’
‘It’s DI Spittieri’s case. No doubt he will be in touch.’
‘So it is no longer a serious and organised crime, then?’
‘I’m not with you.’
I pushed the CCTV photograph across the desk.
‘My assailants,’ I said, reading Rosenberg’s text from my mobile phone. ‘One is called Stein Berenson, the other Paul Verholen. I don’t know which is which. I think they are contract killers, likely associates of Mark Marchant who had his father killed, most probably for the inheritance.’
If Richie could have looked less impressed he would have. ‘Any evidence of all this, Be
cket?’
‘Just supposition at this stage. I was hoping you had found something. At the very least you could run these guys through the computer and see what pops out.’
He uncapped his pen, ‘Give me their names again.’
I did so. He wrote, slowly, copperplate, not what I expected, and left-handed. It was like watching a child copying someone else’s homework.
‘Where did you get this information?’ he asked.
‘I couldn’t say.’
‘Have you given it to Sussex Police?’
‘No, I wanted to see your reaction first.’
‘My reaction? My reaction? What on earth are you talking about, Becket?’
‘See if you knew who they were.’
‘And why would I know who they were?’
Richie was developing a nice line in anger. It looked genuine enough. I pedalled back before he flicked ink at me, or hit me with his ruler.
‘Well, just supposing that they are the same people who attacked Sir Simeon Marchant, as well as poor Lee Herbert. I was wondering why they were so important that your soon-to-be-disbanded section—sorry, soon to be seconded section—was not pursuing them. Or indeed putting any resources into their apprehension...’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘No, I don’t know that. How could I know that? I'm assuming that they are part of a wider investigation that got out of hand. Am I right? Something that was the province of the SCD7 but now isn’t.’
He swivelled in his chair and looked out of the window. It looked like it needed a good clean—inside and out. London was a myopic blur of red buses and grey-brown river. No sound just the noise of Richie breathing through his nose. Perhaps he was meditating.
‘What is it, Wednesday? Must be two whole days since you was last arrested, Becket.’
‘Oh, great,’ I said. ‘A threat.’
‘No, I just mean we only seem to see you when you get involved in something you can’t handle. That was always the case with you, wasn’t it? Getting in over your head and regretting it, I heard. Not a team player, I heard.’
