The Conspiracy Theorist

by Mark Raven

  Sit.

  I sat, wiping my leg. ‘Your daughter?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, she has an exeat this weekend. It is good of you to come down. Although it wasn’t really necessary.’

  What is? I asked myself. What is really necessary?

  ‘I know. I could have just sent you a cheque as you requested. Or sent your cheque back, because as you know I haven’t cashed it yet.’

  She smiled. It took an effort, but she did it. Gone was the overblown coquettishness and I was just left with words. I preferred this version. It was less work.

  ‘I did wonder,’ she said.

  ‘So you had to give the money back, then? The money for the boat.’

  ‘Well, not back exactly. We had to pay it into the court. We may still get it. Once the case has been heard.’

  I noted the use of ‘we’, and assumed she was back with her ex-husband. I hoped I was right. They seemed well suited for each other.

  I asked, ‘So you are challenging the will?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said briskly. ‘That woman had no...’

  I cut her short. She had no right to talk about Maike Breytenbach in that way. She was the only one in the whole sorry affair who came out of it well. Maike and her son.

  ‘I thought it all went to the boy Jacob?’

  ‘Well it did, but it was really for her. Daddy saw to that. Did you know she is not even a British citizen?’

  I thought about that one for a few seconds.

  ‘And that means...? Sorry I'm slow today. I got up early and forgot to brush my teeth.’

  ‘It makes it harder to challenge if the beneficiary is a British citizen.’

  ‘Which Jacob is,’ I said. ‘I see.’

  I took out my wallet and carefully extracted the cheque.

  ‘It’s for seven thousand pounds, you will recall. The other five hundred was in cash. And it was taken back.’

  Her face flickered at the reference to Lukas Merweville, but she did not say anything. This surprised me. I expected something. Some reference to how silly she was to be taken in, or her vulnerability, or anger. Some nonsense. Something. But she just took the cheque from me.

  She folded it as if to stop it scrabbling back across the table and jumping into my wallet.

  ‘That’s quite all right,’ she said.

  ‘Why didn’t you just stop it?’

  She looked up. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The cheque,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you stop the cheque?’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t want the embarrassment with my bank. It was bad enough withdrawing the seventy-five thousand. Peter had to help me out.’

  ‘I see.’

  The colour rose in her cheeks.

  ‘Yes, you think you see everything, don’t you, Mr Becket. But you really have no idea...’

  I looked at her. This was why I wanted to meet face to face. This moment. She was right, I could have posted the cheque, but I wanted to see her reaction. And I had seen quite enough already.

  ‘So you knew about your father,’ I said slowly. ‘Merweville actually told you.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘You know exactly what I mean. Merweville told you about your father being a suspected Soviet spy, and how he, Sir Simeon, was going to reveal it.’

  ‘No, of course not that!’ she was stammering now. ‘Daddy was old, and confused. He wasn’t sure what he knew anymore. I don’t know why he was going to tell everyone about his past. There was no need to. The past is the past. Simple as that.’

  I didn’t say anything. I was too busy thinking how wrong she was. The past was never simply the past.

  ‘I suspect it was that woman who told him to. And I really thought that man was Mark. Mummy told me that Daddy had been married before and had a son that died. Mark. I thought that was just a lie to stop me finding him.’

  She stopped to dab her eyes. I was sick of her gestures. That’s all they were. They meant nothing. They were there for the sake of appearances. Nothing more. She had no more connection with the truth than I had. No more insight.

  ‘He was old and vulnerable,’ I said. ‘And he wanted to tell the truth.’

  ‘Okay, Mark—I mean that man—had found out that Daddy was a spy and that Daddy was going to make a clean breast of it. That was why he was talking to his solicitors all the time. They were arranging it all.’

  They certainly were, I thought. Arranging everything. Killing several birds with one stone, while they were at it too. The Marchant problem, the Merweville problem, the PiTech problem. Probably a few more problems that I wasn’t aware of. Watterson perhaps? It was a good job I was so low down the food chain, or I could have been a problem too. As it was, I was just collateral damage like Mat Janovitz, or Lee Herbert. Or Meg.

  Jenny Forbes-Marchant started sobbing. We had come full circle. From the first time she rang me a month or so ago. I didn’t want to hear any more. I felt that I had been damaged too much already in the process of looking into the affairs of Sir Simeon Marchant and his family. And I didn’t want to hear where all this was leading. But I couldn’t help myself.

  ‘You knew what they were going to do to your father.’ I said. ‘You knew what Merweville was going to do.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.

  ‘I mean you have been lying to me from the very beginning,’ I said. ‘Right from the first time you rang me. You knew who I was because your father told you, didn’t he? You knew he was making a gift of the boat to Prajapati. Even when I saw you in the pub, you made out that Prajapati had been ‘persuasive’. You tricked me from the very beginning. And that is why I think it was premeditated on your part.’

  She glanced towards the door. Behind her I could see Peter Forbes playing with his daughter in the garden. They were throwing a ball for the chocolate Labrador to retrieve. I knew how the dog felt, except I wasn’t wagging my tail anymore. I went on.

  ‘You see, I checked. He did not stay at his club the night before he was killed. There was nothing in the register at his club. He stayed with you in London. Maike told him to do that at least. And he, your father, told you exactly what he was going to do. That he was going to make a clean breast of it. He was going to Canterbury to tell a man called Becket. He was going to tell me about how someone had done away with Prajapati and now was spreading false rumours about him. He was going to say how shocked he was that Prajapati’s body was washed up in the same place as a man called Crabb whom your father sent to his death in the 1950s. He was going to tell me all this. But first he told you.’

  She stared at me hardly breathing. I went on.

  ‘And for whatever reason, you told Mark, or the man you thought was Mark, Lukas Merweville. One thing was for sure; when your father left, you were pretty sure he was going to his death. Perhaps you even put Haloperidol in his breakfast tea. I wouldn’t put it past you. At first I thought it was about the money, but that was not reason enough for you. You always had poor Peter in reserve. It was that your father was going to reveal everything about his past. That he was a Russian spy, a double agent, and that he had betrayed an MI6 frogman called Lionel Crabb. And you neglected to tell me that he moved to Hayling Island so that he could visit the place where poor old Crabb was washed up. They are still making documentaries about him. Crabb. You envisaged TV crews camped outside your house, your gallery, your daughter’s school. That is what you couldn’t stand.’

  I stopped. I was sick of myself. Sick of the knowledge that the people you most trust could do such things. I also knew that throughout the whole sorry affair, like all of them—Merweville, Watterson, Miles Breckenridge and the rest of the secret state—his daughter had been wondering if Sir Simeon had already told me his secret over the telephone. Or whether they had stopped him in time.

  Jenny Forbes-Marchant looked like she was sick of me too. Her face had hardened and for a moment I wondered if anyone else had ever seen the expression that flickered across it. It was specifically for
me. And it told me she loathed me.

  ‘I couldn’t stand the shame of it,’ she said slowly. It was almost as if she was talking to herself, sleepwalking into her own thoughts. ‘But he really deserved no better. He had deceived us all along, pretending to be something he was not. The great war hero, the pillar of the community. In a sense, I had lost him a long time ago. He was never there for us. Ever.’

  The kitchen clock ticked. I found nothing to say.

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter now,’ she added. ‘Besides you cannot prove anything.’

  It was the same brisk tone she had used that first time she called me. I was amused by her at first, even attracted by her absurdity, but now I found myself appalled. Sickened by her and the fact she could carry on while knowing this about herself. But whom did you confess to these days? Who was there to absolve your sins?

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I can’t prove anything. And if I could, no one out there would care anyway.’

  I picked up my empty wallet from the table and leant close to her.

  ‘But I know,’ I whispered.

  I drove down to the sailing club and parked by the shoreline. I got out of the Spider and lit a cigarette. Then I threw it away. The weather was turning. Far out to sea the sky was a dark bruise. Had I been a sailor I would have known if a storm was coming in or not. But as it was I just felt cold and shivered into my suit.

  I thought about Sir Simeon Marchant standing here and looking out to sea. Of an old man sailing his yacht around the islands and inlets of Chichester Harbour until he came to that place where a dead frogman called Crabb had been washed up, headless, handless, dishonoured, stripped of identity, some sixty years before.

  I wondered how he saw it, or began to see it as his dementia gradually stripped him of the connections that tell us the past is the past and it is done with. That we have to move on. That, in fact, we have no choice but to move on. But also that we too are driven by tides, by currents that sometimes fold in upon themselves and reveal strange connections that make us think it is all planned. Fated.

  I thought too about what his daughter had said to me. How the Simeon Marchant she knew had turned out to be someone else. Not her father at all really, but a stranger. Someone she had no compunction about sending to his death that morning he was meant to come to Canterbury.

  What do you call a conspiracy when it’s so close to home? There’s no way of knowing for certain what those nearest and dearest to you are thinking. The fact of our separate entities, our divided selves, makes that impossible, especially when our own motivations are so often concealed from us. And so you never really know if your father is a spy, or a fraud, or a fake, or a philanderer. Or your daughter is so ashamed that she plots to have you killed, or even, one bright and sunny morning, steps off a balcony into clear, blue air.

  THE END

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Although most of The Conspiracy Theorist was written in the summer of 2013—the Snowden affair, GCHQ spookery, the establishment of the National Crime Agency, Villa beating Arsenal at the Emirates—I have been interested in the subject for some time. I first came across the Crabb affair in Dominic Sandbrook’s elegant history of the period 1956-63, You’ve Never Had It So Good (Little, Brown 2005). After I had written most of the novel (including the insightful Dr Katherine Persaud) I came across Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory Has Shaped Modern History by David Aaronovitch (Jonathan Cape 2009). This is a great read and in my view the most thoughtful book on the subject. I also feel a debt of gratitude to John Lewis Gaddis for The Cold War (Penguin 2005) and his portrait of a generation shaped by paranoia; one we have more in common with than we think. Of course the rest is due to Wikipedia—Kat Persaud is a contributor—and the mad, diverse and always contradictory world of the internet. There are many versions of history there.

  Thanks to Becket’s first readers, technical advisers and critics: Railton and Pam and Andrew and Henry and Elaine. Any mistakes have nothing to do with them. As someone once said, there is no such thing as guilt by association. In the eyes of the law anyway.

  Mark Raven

  2014