The Seven Trials of Cameron-Strange

by James Calum Campbell

  Pelvic structures were normal.

  Locomotor system was normal.

  The endocrine system was unremarkable …

  (All of that was a loquacious way of saying everything was normal. Now for the nub of the matter.)

  The brain weighed 1563 gms. There were no focal lesions. There was evidence of widespread cerebral oedema consistent with a global insult such as strangulation hypoxia, abnormal G-force exposure, or heat injury. There was late onset protrusion of cerebellar hemispheres through the foramen magnum consistent with end stage malignant cerebral hypertension.

  Biochemistry revealed the following results:

  (I scanned the numbers …)

  Na 156 mm/L, K 7.2 mm/L, Cl 112 mm/L, Urea 58 mm/L, Creatinine 965 microm/L …

  Arterial blood gases:

  pH 6.9, HC03 3 mm/L, pC02 20 mmHg …

  Toxicology screen is awaited. (Why did it always take so long?)

  Conclusion: the post mortem findings were consistent with the clinical historical record of severe dehydration and heat stroke injury following prolonged and unusual exertion in a hostile environment.

  ‘Found what you’re looking for?’

  ‘I don’t know what I’m looking for. Couple of questions. Did anything stand out, during the autopsy? Any inconsistency, did anything jar?’

  ‘I can’t say it did. I’ve seen a couple of these before. Young guy puts on heavy duty kit, a fifty-kg pack, then goes for a thirty-mile forced march in thirty degrees. Six hours later he’s dead. What do you expect?’

  ‘I guess so. What did you make of the hand trauma?’

  ‘Nothing much. Probably a red herring. It might even be a separate injury that he was carrying at the time. Or maybe he was dragging himself along the ground for a bit when he was delirious. That would fit.’

  ‘Okay. I suppose that about sums it up. Poor bastard. Oh! One other thing. Meant to ask. What do you make of the metabolic acidosis with an anion gap?’

  ‘Is there an anion gap?’

  She took the report back from me and glanced at the Us and Es. ‘Gosh – so there is. Toxicology’s not back. Mm. Uraemia I guess. What do you make of it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Well, thanks for your time! You’ve been a great help.’ I walked out past the shipwreck, not looking that way, back out into the lovely sunshine on the Domain.

  I went down to Mechanics Bay and called in at the Westpac Helicopter Rescue Service.

  I don’t much care for helicopters. It’s a personal thing. Don’t get me wrong – they are amazing machines. Saying that, they’re a bit disruptive. If you’ve ever stood beside one at take-off you’ll know what I mean. The engine is idling and the rotor blades are turning and it’s a bit breezy. Then it revs up to full power and it’s Cyclone Saskia all over again, and the entire neighbourhood gets blown away. I don’t like flying in them. I look out and can’t see any wings, and I get vertigo. To be honest, I’m scared of heights.

  But it was fun to sit down with Dr Millie Diner, tomboyish in her orange overalls, and have a coffee. Yes, she remembered the callout. From Mechanics Bay they’d vacated the Waitemata Harbour, and crossed directly over Browns Island, Motuihe, and Waiheke, and made a beeline for the top of the Barrier. There had been an army guy, in full kit, at the gates to this enormous palatial folly. He’d been moved into the shade but nobody had thought to do anything else by way of first aid. They hadn’t even stripped him off. The guy was delirious. Hot as hell. The thermoscan read off the scale. GCS 10. Eyes open to pain (2), pain localised (5), speech incoherent (3). They got his army fatigues off and hosed him down and got some ice packs but even so, his GCS continued to go down. Shock. Intubated, ventilated. And off to Critical Care at Auckland. But it was really too late. They’d had an M & M about that.

  At the scene, did he say anything? Yes. But nothing sensible. Word salads.

  What did he say? Same thing, over and over again.

  Blue bleak embers gash gold …

  That’s what it sounded like anyway.

  II

  ‘MUDPILES.’

  MacKenzie said, ‘Excuse me, but I could swear you just said “mudpiles”.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Wherefore?’

  ‘It’s a medical mnemonic.’

  ‘To what end?’

  ‘If you must know, it’s the differential diagnosis of a metabolic acidosis with a wide anion gap.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I heard another funny word the other night. Witan. Had to look it up. It’s the quorum of a Witanagemot.’

  ‘Wita what?’

  ‘… nagemot. It’s a kind of ancient Anglo-Saxon privy council. I think I’ve just been seconded.’

  I had met up with MacKenzie for a pre-concert dinner in a café on Lorne Street behind Queen Street just down from Auckland Museum. She had dressed down. Jeans and T-shirt. She has that ability some celebs have of making themselves anonymous and invisible in a public place. I’ve always been amazed by her sang froid. In just over an hour she and her viola would have to play Auckland Town Hall. I was anxious for her. I must make sure she gets there in plenty of time. I kept glancing at my watch but she was as usual totally unfazed by any impending challenge. She ate a hearty bowl of lasagne al forne washed down with tonic water, and blethered away. MacKenzie has the performer’s temperament. I envy her because it’s something I never had. Bundle of nerves. In contrast, she just loves to perform. Up on stage, she is completely in her element. Of course, she can be psyched up, she can be keen. She would call it nerves. But it’s not. Nerves cripple you. People who get nervous don’t get nervous in case they make a mistake; they get nervous in case they get nervous.

  It’s funny how you look upon another person’s talent with awe and admiration, yet regard your own with indifference. I’m hopeless on stage and I’m hopeless on the dance floor. The goddess of the terpsichorean art stood me up. What else? I don’t think I’m very good with kids, except as their doctor. Mary used to have kids climbing all over her. Kids are very astute when it comes to detecting tension. With me, they cry inconsolably and wet themselves.

  ‘Got some news. But first you tell. You’re up to something. I recognise that preoccupied look.’

  I told her about my plan to run the forty-eight volcanoes of Auckland but she shook her head. ‘No. It’s a work thing. I can tell.’

  So I told her how I was in limbo, perhaps purgatory, and had time on my hands, and somebody had offered me a job.

  ‘What sort of job?’

  ‘Short-term. Zero hours contract. It’s a kind of post mortem.’ And I gave her a potted account of Captain O’Driscoll’s demise, and the suggestion that it looked suspicious. The suspicious people had wanted me to take a look. I’d made a start but wasn’t sure if I wanted to go any further with it. What did MacKenzie think?

  She answered without any hesitation. ‘Stick with it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if you don’t a committee will traipse round en masse ticking boxes and come up with some kind of anodyne report. And that will be that. But if you run with it, you’ll slouch in your chair in committee and grow grumpy and then become a maverick and go off on your own private investigation and in the end you’ll file a minority report. If there’s something to find, you’ll find it.’

  Her mobile went. It was Caitlin, phoning from Cheltenham. Caitlin and MacKenzie are great pals. I let them blether away and sat and mused over MacKenzie’s advice. MacKenzie eventually gave me a nudge and offered the phone to me.

  ‘Caitlin wants to talk to you.’

  ‘Katie.’

  ‘Ally-Bally.’

  ‘How’ve you been?’

  And there was a torrent of news all about school and swimming and music and mostly about oboe playing, and I knew she was okay. I had a sudden thought.

  ‘Met the sister of a pal of yours. Tamsin Fox.’

  ‘Not Tams’n,’ she corrected me. ‘Tamsin.’

  ‘T’msin?’

  ‘
No, stupid. Tam-sin. A true spondee.’ And for the rest of the conversation we referred to Tamsin, after the fashion of adolescent drollery, as the true spondee, Truly Spondee, and, surreally, Truce Pondy. ‘She’s in the year behind me. I don’t really know her. Her father’s always dragging her out of school to go off to exotic locations. Is she in New Zealand?’

  ‘Yep. With her father. I met him.’

  ‘Weirdo,’ was Caitlin’s assessment. I handed the phone back to MacKenzie. And after they’d hung up I said to my sister, ‘What was your news?’

  ‘Got to tell you about my new acquisition. I came across it in Dresden. Last month. We travelled up from Leipzig. I was doing Brandenburg 6, with the Gewandhaus. There was a huge conference of gynaecologists in town, and no accommodation. I ended up in a guest house run by an ancient Westphalian captain of industry and his frau. Charming lady. She gave me a room at the back of the house where I could practise and then she told me she had an old viol up in the attic and would I be interested to see it?

  ‘Well, I wasn’t paying much attention, but I said okay. She took me up two flights of stairs and opened a trap door in the ceiling and let down a step-ladder from the loft. Up we went. Hell of a place to keep an instrument. It was damp and perishing cold. The viola was in an old case buried under a heap of mildewed blankets. I had a quick look thinking I could make some polite noises and get back downstairs. But even in the half-light I could see that it was actually rather a handsome instrument. So we took it down.

  ‘It wasn’t remotely playable. It did have a couple of old gut strings – the C and the D. But there was no bridge, and the ebony tailpiece was all perished. There was no bow.

  ‘Still it was easy to see it was a terribly well-made instrument, and rather old. Something about the contour of the pine belly, the grain of the maple on the back, really brought me up short. The volute of the scroll carved to perfection. But most of all, the varnish. There was something deeply mysterious and enigmatic about it.

  ‘So instead of making a few polite noises I found myself being rather more effusive and enthusiastic. The old Frau said, “Take it with you.” I said I couldn’t do that, said I thought the instrument after all might be quite valuable, and that she should take it to a dealer and find out how much it was worth.

  ‘She listened to all this quite impassively, and then she said something which I thought was rather touching. She said that she thought an old musical instrument was like a piece of land, that the idea of owning it was really rather absurd. It wasn’t a matter of ownership, but of stewardship. “I have listened to you play,” she said. “You make a wonderful sound. If you, or perhaps one of your pupils, can bring such a sound from this instrument, then it will have been well served. I’m afraid we have not looked after it well. No doubt it will cost something to repair. If you will take it and see to it, it is payment enough.”

  ‘Sagacious old bird. She made me feel I wasn’t swindling her out of a family heirloom. Quite the opposite. I had a moral responsibility to take the thing on.

  ‘We played the Brandenburg that evening. I thought it went okay. Then there was a late supper and it was after midnight by the time I got back to the guest house. The old Frau had gone to bed, but the proprietor, the big fat ugly Westphalian, had stayed up. I got the impression he’d sat by the window waiting for my return. He ambushed me on the stairway and invited me into the front room for a glass of wine. It seemed churlish to refuse.

  ‘The old man held up two bottles, and sort of leered. “Gewürztraminer or hock?” He wouldn’t look me straight in the eye. He had a slack, wet lower lip. “Personally, I think there’s nothing like a good hock.” I chose the Gewürztraminer.

  ‘I think he’d been at the hock for most of the evening because he was slurring his words a bit, but he made perfect sense and his eyes never lost that awful, sly, lusty look. Anyway, it soon became clear that it wasn’t my body he was after. It was my money. And there was a grotesque sentimental story about the viola having been in his family for two hundred years. His wife didn’t know much about these things and, in short, he couldn’t really let it go for less than a thousand euros.

  ‘Well, what a bargain that was! I took out my cheque book there and then and asked him if US dollars would be all right. I could see him eyeing the cheque and wondering if he hadn’t miscalculated. “Fraulein, I said I couldn’t let it go for less than a thousand. It may be worth” – he shrugged and tried to gauge my reaction – “10,000? 20,000?”

  “So I closed the cheque book and told him that, all in all, it would be better if he held on to something whose sentimental value probably far exceeded its market value. He backtracked like mad and said one thousand would be enough. By then I’d taken such a dislike to him I thought of knocking him down to five-hundred, but decided to quit while I was ahead. We shook hands on it “after the English fashion of fair play”. Then he wrote out a receipt for me on some cheap stationery and I gulped down the rest of the Gewurtz and scarpered.

  ‘The following morning I skipped breakfast and made an early start as I was booked on a commuter flight to Berlin. The old monster, true to his word, had parked the viola in the hallway but he wasn’t around to help and I struggled to get my luggage and two instruments into the taxi. Just as we were pulling away the old Frau came running out in her apron waving a scrap of paper. I could see she had been crying. The scrap of paper was my cheque. She leaned in through the window and gave it back to me. She said something in German I didn’t quite catch but it included a name. Heydrich. It only occurred to me later that Heydrich had been the man who oversaw the Nazi’s systematic plundering of the great art houses of Europe, before he was assassinated in Prague, in 1944. She said to me again, “I told you you could take it. Only one thing I ask. When, many years from now, you are old and arthritic and unable to play, I ask that you hand the instrument on to somebody, as I have done to you.” And she kissed me on the cheek and pressed my hand. Then the taxi pulled away.’

  * * *

  It’s only a five minute walk from Lorne Street to the Town Hall. We got there at five past seven. I think MacKenzie would quite happily have stayed in the café for another twenty minutes, then wandered back over, tuned up her viola, played an E major scale in four octaves, taken a couple of deep breaths, and walked on stage. I was the nervous one. So I was relieved to deposit her at the stage door with some time to spare, and go back round to front of house.

  Built just over a century ago on the wedge of land between Queen Street and Grey Street on the south-west corner of Aotea Square, the town hall is a beautiful and much loved edifice. The ground floor is in dark volcanic basalt contrasting with the paler Oamaru limestone of the upper part of the building. The interior was extensively restored in the 1990s, partly to meet earthquake standards, but lots of period features – English ceramic surfaces, tessellated floors, and glazed ceramic wall tiles – have been retained.

  The grand hall itself is modelled on the Gewandhaus, with a balcony extending round three sides. I wondered if MacKenzie would appreciate the resemblance. The stage is dominated by the magnificent organ, itself very recently rebuilt by Orgelbau Klais of Bonn. The ceiling is ornately beautiful.

  I bought a programme, walked upstairs, and took my seat, on the left, towards the rear of a hall that was already well filled. They’d opened the choir stalls beneath the organ where people were filing in. A sell-out. I wasn’t surprised. Kiwi girl with an international reputation. Also, it has to be said, MacKenzie is very marketable. Even her twin brother can see she’s easy on the eye. Whilst no doubt this contributes to her commercial viability, it hasn’t always been plain sailing for her. Once she started to expand her solo horizons and step out from the cloister of the Bax Quartet, it took a long time for the pundits to believe she was a serious musician. Well, as MacKenzie said, ‘I’m not going to apologise for the way I look.’

  I skim-read the programme notes. For the first half, she was entirely on her own. Unaccompanied Stravinsky, and J.
S. Bach, both her own transcriptions. I marvelled at her naked courage. Girl and a viola.

  By 7.30 the hall was filled, all but for a phalanx of about ten front-row seats across the rear balcony. I thought I knew what this meant, and clicked my teeth with annoyance. It would be some corporate junket. Some conglomerate with more money than sense would have bought up a swag of the best seats in the house for some jamboree and then not bothered turning up to use them, while students queuing outside wouldn’t be able to get in.

  The house lights dimmed and the tall girl with the long black hair walked on. She had discarded the jeans and T-shirt for a very beautiful floor-length evening dress in black and gold. The rich, deep, brown-red varnish of the belly of the viola was almost luminescent in the limelight. Then the graceful but unstudied bow, and the dazzling, incandescent smile. My nerves suddenly vanished. She was in her element.

  She had transcribed the Stravinsky ‘Three Pieces for Clarinet’. I thought they worked very well on the viola. She played the first movement low-key, moderato, with the utmost simplicity. It seemed to be a kind of exposition of the genius of the viola from its dark low register through its mellow middle range and up into the poignant, passionate upper echelons. Then the second movement exploded in a virtuoso display punctuated by quirky adaptations of Russian folk melody before returning to the opening virtuosity. The last movement was funny and jazzy, and I swear MacKenzie made her viola sound like Benny Goodman. The touch of ribaldry that closed the piece made the audience laugh. Warm applause. The house lights went up. MacKenzie took her bow and left the stage, presumably to prepare to climb a mountain. The Bach ‘Partita No. 2’. MacKenzie had transposed it down a fifth into G minor, and hang the consequences.

  There was a slight hiatus. The corporate conglomerate arrived. I’d done them an injustice; they were merely fashionably late. It was a replica of the group I’d seen traipsing through Auckland International a few days before. Phineas Fox had booked the best seat in the house. Once again the entourage formed a symmetrical array around him. I noticed they all remained standing until Fox himself sank into the plush red upholstery, then they all sat down in synchrony. It was like watching a head of state occupy a royal box. It was a performance. I found it utterly absurd. Then I forgot all about them.