Game of Stones

by David Maughan Brown

  ‘Are you trying to be facetious, or are you just rambling?’ Sinclair asked.

  Harriet’s puzzled look when Cameron glanced at her suggested that she was asking herself the same question.

  ‘So you acknowledge that these stones could be lethal projectiles?’ Tyssen asked, sounding as though he’d just played a very successful bridge hand.

  ‘What do you mean “acknowledge”?’ Cameron asked. ‘And why on earth are you so interested in Go stones? I use those stones to replicate the games of Go I’m playing on the internet. I find it easier to visualize the way the game is developing when I can see the stones on my board.’

  ‘We ask the questions here, not you,’ Sinclair said. ‘These weren’t on a board when we found them,’ Sinclair said, ‘they were all over the floor.’

  ‘Last time I saw them,’ Cameron said, ‘some of them were on my board, some of them were in a bowl of white stones and some of them were in a bowl of black stones. If they were all over the floor that can only be because one of your goons deliberately upended the board. It isn’t a chessboard made of cardboard that could be knocked over by mistake, it’s a solid chunk of wood four inches thick.’

  ‘So, if it is a game, who do you play with?’ Tyssen asked. ‘If you can give us their names and addresses we can verify what you are saying. Is that why Mrs Sehene has been visiting you? We are looking for her.’

  ‘Who?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘The Rwandan woman who has the allotment next to yours,’ Tyssen replied. ‘We know she has been to your house. There is no point in pretending you don’t know her. Where is she?’

  ‘I didn’t know her family name, I only know her as Mutoni,’ Cameron replied. ‘I have no idea where she is. Why are you looking for her?’

  ‘I am not at liberty to disclose,’ Tyssen said. ‘Names and addresses, please.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t give you the names and addresses of the people I play with,’ Cameron said. Out of the corner of his eye Cameron could see Harriet turning her head sharply to look at him.

  ‘And why would that be?’ asked Tyssen. The policemen’s body language suggested that Go had suddenly become even more interesting.

  ‘Simply because I haven’t found anyone in Sheffield who plays Go,’ Cameron replied, ‘so if I want to play I can only do so via the internet. We all use pseudonyms when we play, so we don’t know the real names of the people we are playing against, never mind their addresses.’

  ‘Why do you all use pseudonyms?’ Tyssen wanted to know.

  ‘Why do people who play fantasy football use pseudonyms?’ Cameron answered. ‘I don’t know, I’ve never really thought about it. If “pseudonyms” sounds sinister perhaps one should talk about “gaming names” or something similar.’

  ‘So you could be playing with someone from Al Qaeda,’ Sinclair commented. ‘What name do you use and who were you playing with when your board was knocked over – if that is indeed what happened?’

  ‘I suppose it is possible that I might be playing with someone from Al Qaeda,’ Cameron said, ‘Go would certainly help to hone their strategic thinking and tactical skills. But I suspect that members of Al Qaeda are much too busy putting IEDs together and cutting people’s throats to have time to play board games. For that matter, for all I know, I might be playing with the Queen of Denmark, Michael Jackson or the Pope. I don’t actually give a damn as long as I can get a decent game.’

  ‘Would you mind just answering my question?’ Sinclair said. ‘What name do you use and who were you playing against?’

  ‘I play under the name Chris Barratt,’ Cameron said, ‘and the person I most frequently play against calls himself, or possibly herself, Carter George. Why do you want to know? Presumably you didn’t smash my front door in and drag me down here in my pyjamas to ask me questions about Go.’

  ‘We ask the questions here, not you,’ Sinclair repeated. ‘Why do you call yourself Chris Barratt?’

  ‘Only because my initials are CB and using the same initials helps me to remember my gaming name,’ Cameron said. There was no need to mention the extreme circumstances in which the alias had been arrived at.

  ‘So you admit that you could be playing with someone from Al Qaeda and that it wouldn’t bother you if you were helping them to develop their tactical and strategic thinking in the process?’ Sinclair said.

  ‘You are twisting my words,’ Cameron replied, feeling suddenly anxious that they were trying to trap him into saying something that could be construed as support for a banned organization. He was going to need to be as careful about what he said here as he had had to be not to say anything that could be interpreted as support for the ANC during the 1980s in South Africa. A minimum five-year sentence was the penalty for a misstep then. That made for an uncomfortable parallel with the minimum sentence for possession of a prohibited firearm now. What was this line of questioning about anyway? When were they going to hit him with the much more difficult questions about the Sig Sauer?

  ‘How likely is it,’ Cameron went on after a pause to collect himself, ‘that an Al Qaeda operative would choose to call himself Carter George?’

  The two policemen stayed silent for what felt like half a minute or so – allowing the tension to build – before Sinclair produced what he obviously thought, to judge by his triumphant tone, to be the killer question.

  ‘Why, if everything is above board, do you find it necessary to communicate in code?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you mean “in code”?’ Cameron asked.

  Sinclair reached into his bag again and produced a single sheet of A4 paper which he slapped down on the table.

  ‘That’s what I mean by code,’ Sinclair said, jabbing a nicotine-stained forefinger at one typed line at the top of the sheet. ‘That’s a print-out we found on the floor near the stones – we’ve found pages and pages containing the same code on a shelf of your bookcase.’

  Cameron picked the paper up and smiled as he read what was printed: 1.D4 C6 2.F3 B4 3.C3 C9 or 1.D4 F3 2.C6 D2 3.C3 J3.

  ‘What is so bloody funny?’ Sinclair asked, his voice rising. ‘If that isn’t in code I don’t know what is. What does it say?’

  ‘I suppose it is a kind of code,’ Cameron said, ‘it’s just that I have never thought of it as a code. What is written there is a set of coordinates for two different approaches to a joseki at the beginning of a game of Go.’

  ‘And what the hell is a bloody joseki? We talk English here.’ Whatever the technical decibel level for shouting was, Sinclair must have been getting close.

  ‘The literal translation of the Japanese “joseki” is “settled stones”,’ Cameron answered. ‘It simply means a set pattern of play, like a standard opening in chess – the Sicilian Defence, or the King’s Indian Defence, or whatever. That line of code, as you call it, is simply a description of the moves that can be played in two different ways of handling a particular opening move.’

  ‘Why the hell do they all have to have foreign names even when they are in English?’ Tyssen muttered. ‘But that could still be a code giving instructions about how to commit a terrorist act under the cover of a set of Go coordinates.’

  ‘Don’t you think it is just possible that they have foreign names because some good things and some bright ideas don’t have “made in England” stamped all over them?’ Cameron replied, feeling a sudden familiar surge of anger. ‘It could be a code giving instructions about how to put a bomb together, or a shorthand recipe for a Masterchef gooseberry and elderflower pavlova, or a different way of writing out a knitting pattern, or the sequence of steps for a Paso Doble in Strictly Come Dancing. It could conceivably be code for almost anything, but as it happens it is a set of Go Coordinates.’

  ‘So you admit….’ Tyssen began.

  ‘Enough of this, it has gone on long enough and is getting nowhere,’ Harriet interjected. ‘You need to have goo
d reason to arrest my client, and even better reason to drag him down here in his pyjamas. What was your reason? On what grounds have you arrested Dr Beaumont?’

  Harriet, who had remained silent since the original introductions, was probably worried that he was about to lose his temper, and she could well be right. She might have come to the conclusion that this was going nowhere, but Cameron hadn’t told her about the Sig Sauer. Even if they hadn’t been searching for the gun in the first place, they would certainly use it as the excuse for charging him now. Cameron could feel himself prickling again and his mouth felt dry. He would have asked for a glass of water but they might have interpreted that as a sign of nervousness.

  The two policeman exchanged glances and Tyssen nodded his head slightly – they appeared to be agreeing that it was time to change tack.

  ‘We received information that Dr Beaumont was putting together an explosive device at his house,’ Sinclair said. ‘The source, who we have no reason to believe is unreliable, said that he would be targeting a police station because he had a bee in his bonnet about policemen. Dr Beaumont’s letters to the newspapers and other articles show it to be true that he has some kind of axe to grind with the police, and Constable Hudson’s report of a recent interaction with Dr Beaumont further confirmed it.’

  ‘I suppose the “reliable source” your information came from was another man with an IQ of 69 who was considered as an “utter incompetent” by his own defence lawyer, as was the case with Forest Gate,’ Cameron interjected. ‘The pattern of my arrest followed the Forest Gate debacle in almost every respect. So why would anyone imagine that the source of your information – assuming you had any such tip-off at all and aren’t just lying – wasn’t also some kind of cretin? There are thousands of people who know that the police lied about Hillsborough, Phil Scraton has written a whole book about that, but that doesn’t mean that he is going to plant a bomb at a police station. This is bloody ridiculous. So anyone with a grudge can dream up a story and send the police off on a wild-goose chase to drag someone off to the police station in his pyjamas and smash up his house looking for an imaginary bomb?’

  ‘Who do you imagine might bear such a grudge against you?’ Sinclair asked.

  ‘I have no idea,’ Cameron said. ‘Perhaps Constable Hudson, perhaps the man I was arrested for allegedly assaulting on Saturday – how would I know? The main question is why the hell would you choose to believe them? Just because it gave you an excuse to stuff-up my life? Just because…’

  ‘So what relevance do the Go stones have to any of this?’ Harriet interrupted quickly.

  ‘Our informant said that Dr Beaumont was planning to use specially made small round stones as shrapnel in the bomb he was making,’ Sinclair said. ‘He said that Dr Beaumont had read that the stones would be more effective than the nails and nuts and bolts usually used for that purpose. We thought that sounded very unlikely but then found the stones at his house.’

  ‘So now you have completed your search of his house and have found the stones,’ Harriet said, ‘but nothing else. No explosives, no detonators, no timing mechanism, no fertilizer, no pool chemicals, no caustic soda …’

  ‘No nuclear warheads, no poison gas,’ Cameron chimed in. ‘Although, to do them justice, your storm troopers were only dressed up and kitted out to recapture the Falklands, they weren’t wearing their full Chemical, Biological, Nuclear and Radiological suits and respirators, as they were for Forest Gate.’

  Harriet sent Cameron another don’t-provoke-them-unnecessarily-if-you-want-to-get-out-of-here look before picking up from where she had been interrupted.

  ‘So you have found nothing that could be used for building a bomb,’ she said, ‘nothing that Dr Beaumont shouldn’t possess, nothing remotely sinister. You have been given a perfectly straightforward reason for Dr Beaumont’s possession of the stones – he plays Go with them. You have no reason not to release him. In fact you don’t just need to release him – you need to make sure he is driven back to his house so that he doesn’t have to walk back in his pyjamas. There was no justification whatever for dragging him down here without allowing him time to get dressed.’

  ‘Drive me back to what is left of my house, if Forest Gate is anything to go by,’ Cameron said.

  ‘Wait here for a minute or two,’ Sinclair said. He switched off the tape recorder, caught Tyssen’s eye and inclined his head towards the door. Both men pushed their chairs back and left the interview room.

  Harriet smiled at Cameron and murmured, ‘We’ll be out of here in a few minutes.’

  It was all Cameron could do to summon up a smile in return. What the hell was going on? Why hadn’t they said anything about the gun? He felt even more anxious about their not saying anything about it than he had felt before the questioning started. They must have found it, why weren’t they making a meal of it? There was certainly a meal to be made.

  It took no time at all for the two policemen to return and sit down.

  ‘We are prepared to release Dr Beaumont on police bail,’ Sinclair said addressing Harriet. ‘He is free to go now, but needs to report here once a week. We will call a taxi to take him home. The South Yorkshire Police isn’t a taxi service. It might be advisable for him to arrange to sleep somewhere else for a few days as his house needs a bit of straightening out.’

  ‘I am present, in case you hadn’t noticed,’ Cameron said. ‘There is no need to talk to my solicitor as though she were my carer and I were the cretin who sent you off on this wild-goose chase. The house isn’t my house, it belongs to my landlord. So if your people have taken their irritation with me out on his house, the way your colleagues destroyed the two houses they raided in Forest Gate, there will be hell to pay.’

  ‘Don’t bother to phone a taxi,’ Harriet said, ‘I’ll see that Dr Beaumont gets home. Far too much public money has already been wasted on what looks very much like a fishing expedition.’

  It didn’t take long for Cameron to sign for his watch and to find himself in Harriet’s small Lexus – small being relative – being driven back to his house. Apart from Cameron’s initial ‘Thank you’, the journey was made in silence. As they approached the house they could see that the police tape was still in place, a police car was parked in front of the house, now with its blue light turned off, and a uniformed constable was standing near the smashed-in front door.

  As she pulled up and turned the engine off, Harriet turned and studied Cameron, who made no attempt to open the door and get out of the car.

  ‘You aren’t nearly as relieved and pleased to be out of that cell as I would have expected,’ she said. ‘I’m not looking for more effusive thanks – I’m just doing my job – but something is still troubling you. If anything, you seem more worried now than you were when I first saw you this morning.’

  ‘I am worried,’ Cameron acknowledged. ‘What I didn’t tell you, because I was sure the cell would be bugged, was that I keep an automatic that I don’t have a licence for under my mattress. There is no question that they will have found it. Nobody doing a thorough search of my house, which they will have done, could possibly have missed it. Yet they said nothing about it. Why would that be? If they want a perfect excuse to make life difficult for me, and some of them certainly must, that gun was a gift from the gods, yet they didn’t mention it.’

  ‘Why on earth do you keep it?’ Harriet said after a few seconds pause during which she appeared lost for words.

  Cameron didn’t say anything. Suddenly feeling utterly exhausted, he just sat staring through the windscreen, not so much lost for words as too tired to rummage through his vocabulary to find any that might sound vaguely coherent.

  ‘What did you keep it for?’ Harriet tried again, after a considerate pause.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cameron said eventually, putting words together carefully, a few at a time. ‘It’s complicated. I had to use it once to protect my wife. I shou
ldn’t have kept it. It was stupidly sentimental. I’ll tell you all about it sometime, but not now.’

  ‘Well, I just hope you didn’t kill anyone with it,’ Harriet said. ‘Anyway, they can’t have discovered it; it must still be where you left it. All I can do if they have found it is work with Jenny, the advocate I usually engage, to develop a plea in mitigation. We would have to base it on the PTSD Brian told me about. I’m sure we could argue paranoia, or diminished responsibility, or something.’

  ‘Paranoia probably,’ Cameron said, the adrenalin suddenly flowing again. ‘But I’m not being paranoid when I say that whoever is sitting in that white Volvo down the road there is being paid to watch my house. It’s worrying that I’ve only just noticed the car. He should be grateful that we put on a police raid to keep him entertained last night.’

  ‘How do you know he’s watching your house?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘He has given up even pretending that he isn’t,’ Cameron said. ‘I’ve no idea what it is about. At first I thought he was keeping an eye out for a Rwandan woman who has the allotment beside mine and who has visited me here a couple of times, but it has since become clear that it is, in fact, me he is watching.’

  ‘We could get an order to stop him harassing you, it you are sure,’ Harriet said. ‘I’m sure there would be no difficulty with that.’

  ‘No, I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ Cameron said. ‘It’s a bit like the old saying “keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” If he thinks he has a good reason for following me, which he must, and he suddenly stopped following me, I would wonder what he was up to. When he is sitting over there in his car I know he isn’t doing something more sinister. It’s like the telephone calls. I don’t unplug my telephone because if they are harassing me by phone it means they aren’t finding some other way to harass me.’