Game of Stones

by David Maughan Brown

  The slight catch in Ellen’s voice at the beginning of the call had developed to the point where she clearly found it a struggle to get the last couple of sentences out. She sounded to be on the verge of tears. There wasn’t a lot Cameron could do to console her, but he thought it might help if he could get her to talk about Mutoni.

  ‘You are obviously very fond of Mutoni,’ he said. ‘How long have you known her?’

  ‘I’m not just “fond of Mutoni” as you put it,’ Ellen said sharply, ‘I love her. We’ve been together for four years and eleven months. Didn’t she tell you?’

  ‘No,’ Cameron replied, ‘I didn’t ask her about any current relationships. I’m not sure I know her well enough for that. She told me about the genocide and what happened to her children. She was rather dismissive of her husband.’

  ‘That’s an understatement,’ Ellen said. ‘She thought he was a waste of space. He certainly didn’t deserve her. I can’t begin to tell you how warm and generous and loving she is behind that reserved exterior. It seems extraordinary to me that anyone can hold it all together so well after what she went through. She is unbelievably brave. She got so nervous that she couldn’t sleep when the time came to testify in the war crimes tribunal, but she forced herself to go through with it because she knew it was the right thing to do. I saw all that first-hand when I went with her to Arusha. We shared a room in the hotel.’

  ‘I’ll bet that raised a few eyebrows,’ Cameron said. ‘Rwanda is one of the very few countries in Africa where gay relationships aren’t illegal, but Tanzania isn’t as enlightened – to the extent of having a maximum penalty of life imprisonment on its statute books. Not that it is much comfort to know that: if it turns out to be Rwandan thugs who have been following her, it won’t have been because she’s gay.’

  ‘No,’ Ellen said. ‘Mutoni was sure it had to do with the tribunals. But being gay certainly won’t help.’

  ‘Of course it is none of my business,’ Cameron said, ‘but can I ask why, if you are so close, you live so far apart?’

  ‘You are right,’ Ellen said, ‘it isn’t any of your business. But Mutoni obviously likes you and trusts you, and there isn’t any secret about it. We first met when Mutoni rented a room in the digs in Sheffield I was living in. She had struggled to find somewhere to live while her asylum application went through. You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is for a black person to rent a room in this part of the world. Eventually she found a room in the same huge old house I was lodging in. Our landlady almost matched the house for size, and looked equally lived-in. She might have been unusually liberal where race was concerned, but she was as Victorian as the house when it came to gay relationships. One morning she discovered that we were sleeping together and we found ourselves out on the street the same afternoon. It took a while, but we eventually found somewhere we could stay together until Mutoni had to go to Arusha for the tribunal. I went with her and when we got back we found our room had been let to someone else. I got a job in Leeds but Mutoni wanted to stay in Sheffield, partly because she didn’t want to give up the allotment that had been allocated to her through the asylum programme. She comes over to Leeds as often as she can.’

  ‘I’m really sorry I haven’t been any help whatever with finding her,’ Cameron said. ‘I expect she has had to go to ground somewhere where she hasn’t any means of contacting you. People don’t just disappear in England the way they used to in South Africa. Do you have something to write with to hand? The number where I’m staying is 0114-6272800. Please let me know when you find her, and don’t hesitate to phone me if there is anything I can do to help.’

  As Cameron gave Ellen his phone number and ended the conversation, two strands of thought followed one another in quick succession. People do just disappear in England – missing persons files would have hundreds of names in them. What was different about England was that it wasn’t usually the police who were responsible for the disappearances. And that brought Mirambo back to mind. The night before he disappeared had been spent at Cameron’s house. Could the same have happened to Mutoni? Was he jinxed? The ‘vu’ part of ‘déjà vu’ seemed to involve seeing through an ever-darkening lens.

  A distracted day’s teaching ground itself out after the phone-call. Cameron felt desperate to run Mutoni’s disappearance past Brian, but Brian was unreachable in Cyprus. It was completely irrational – and Brian would have said it was paranoid – but Mutoni’s disappearance made Cameron feel suddenly very vulnerable. They had been following her, whoever “they” were, and now she had disappeared. They had also been following him. He didn’t know whether it was the same “they” in each case, but that didn’t make him feel any less anxious, and he felt reluctant to go back to Brian’s flat by himself. A couple of pints of cider in a pub and something to eat surrounded by strangers felt like a better option.

  The pub nearest to Brian’s flat was one Cameron hadn’t been to before. Its naively optimistic name – the Rising Sun – seemed perfectly in keeping with its overgrown dolls-house appearance. If its crowded interior was anything to go by, there was a gap in the market for optimism.

  When it was Cameron’s turn to be served, he ordered a pie and chips, and took his pint of draught cider and the wooden spoon with his number on it off to the only unoccupied table he could see – a table for two in the corner furthest from the bar. As he sat down, Cameron reflected that there were times when being handed a wooden spoon seemed entirely appropriate.

  Cameron had barely sat down when there was a general stirring and at least half the people in the bar started to get to their feet, shuffle into coats and anoraks and straggle out of the door. The ones who departed, universally middle-aged men, couldn’t have had anything against Cameron: he didn’t recognize any of them. But the departing backs of the mass exodus brought vividly to mind the events at the African History conference in Sussex more than twenty years before. Neil had suggested that it wasn’t just the Special Branch harassment and the visceral fear for himself and his family that had occasioned Cameron’s PTSD; the social isolation and systematic ostracism had also played its part. It didn’t lessen the acute sense of isolation to tell himself that the men must all have belonged to some club or tour party whose schedule just happened to have required them to leave as soon as he sat down.

  Sitting in his corner, idly making circles on the table with a beer mat and wondering how things had reached the point where even minding his own business having a pint in a pub had become so stressful, Cameron suddenly became aware of a large figure looming over him. Looking up, he was surprised to see that it was Constable Hudson, now wearing jeans, a green checked shirt and a brightly coloured Fairisle tank top jumper which made him look even bigger than his ill-fitting uniform had. Big as he was, though, he didn’t seem threatening – in spite of being a policeman.

  ‘Good evening,’ Cameron greeted him. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Would you mind if I sat down?’ Hudson asked. ‘I would like to have a word with you.’

  ‘When a policeman wants to have a word with a member of the public,’ Cameron said, gesturing without much enthusiasm towards the empty chair opposite him, ‘it usually means he is in trouble. I’m having a quiet drink in a pub. What am I supposed to have done wrong this time?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Hudson replied, pulling the chair opposite Cameron out and easing himself down on it. ‘I’m sorry. I should just have asked whether you would mind if I joined you.’

  ‘If you want to berate me about my unprovoked verbal assault on you when you came to my allotment,’ Cameron replied, ‘there’s no need. I’m sorry about that. It’s just that I had some rather unpleasant experiences with the apartheid police; I allow injustices to get under my skin; and I am allergic to establishment lies and cover-ups, particularly when it is the tabloid newspapers either reporting the lies or telling them themselves. Hillsborough presses all those buttons, but you obviously weren�
��t responsible for what happened.’

  ‘It was Hillsborough I wanted to talk to you about,’ Hudson said. ‘I was there, as I told you. But we aren’t all the same. What I didn’t tell you was that I have been having nightmares about it ever since.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this now then?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘You really are very suspicious of policemen, aren’t you?’ Hudson asked in turn. ‘I wanted to talk to you because you are obviously very wound-up about it, even if it is obvious from your accent that you couldn’t have been directly involved in any way yourself.’

  ‘Is that a polite way of saying it isn’t any of my business?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘No, not at all,’ Hudson replied. ‘Injustices and establishment lies and cover-ups, as you put it, are everyone’s business. It’s just that if you aren’t directly involved you aren’t likely to run off and tell my superiors that I have been talking to you. I’ve had enough crap from them to last a lifetime. It was clear from what you said on your allotment that you aren’t a fan of the tabloids and aren’t likely to run off to them either. Not that they would be remotely interested in changing their minds about the Liverpool fans.’

  ‘So why have you been having nightmares?’ Cameron asked. Although Hudson was a policeman, and a very large one at that, Cameron didn’t feel in the least threatened by him. The intricate pattern of bright colours made the wide expanse of jumper facing him look like a travelling fairground. Could one ever feel threatened by a man wearing a Fairisle jumper?

  ‘Before the match I’d been outside Hillsborough, about a quarter of a mile along the main road, keeping an eye on the crowds as they made their way towards the ground. It was a beautiful afternoon. There was a blackbird singing fit to burst in the top of a tree just above me. Everyone was in a good mood and spirits were high, it was an FA semi-final so why wouldn’t they be? The fans were doing some singing too and some of them would have had something to drink with their dinner, but I didn’t spot anyone who seemed the worse for wear. There was a lot of banter and I chatted to some of them as they walked past. Lots of them were just kids … just kids enjoying themselves and looking forward to the football.’

  Hudson’s voice faltered and he took a couple of sips of his beer before he went on.

  ‘You’ve read Phil Scraton’s book, so you know what happened next. I had been assigned to pitch-side duty at the Leppings Lane end once the main body of spectators had passed where I was standing. As far as my senior officers were concerned that involved making sure at all costs that the football hooligans – and all fans were seen as potential football hooligans – didn’t make it onto the pitch to disrupt the match. I could see that the pens were getting very crowded. When the gate was opened and people flooded down it was painfully obvious to me, and should have been to everyone else, that something was going badly wrong in pen 3. I could see people being pressed up against the fence and trying to climb out, and at the back I could see people starting to try to hoist children up onto the stand above. I ran to the nearest gate to try to open it to relieve the pressure by letting people out onto the pitch, but a sergeant nearby shouted at me and told me get away and leave the gate.’

  Hudson paused to take another gulp of beer.

  ‘I stood back,’ he went on. ‘But I saw that the face of one of the young girls pressed against the fence was turning blue and knew that she was going to die unless somebody did something. The only way to save her was to open the gate. So I ignored the sergeant, who was shouting that he would have me disciplined if I allowed a pitch invasion, and tried to force the gate. But he was bigger and stronger than I was – don’t look surprised, I wasn’t this size then – and he wrestled me away from the gate. He literally dragged me away to stop me from trying to save her. When the gates were eventually opened I helped to carry victims out onto the grass. I’d had CPR training – we all had – and I spent I don’t know how long trying to revive a lad of about eighteen … but I couldn’t. His eyes were open – I didn’t want to shut them because that would have meant I hadn’t been able to save him. It’s his eyes that haunt me – they are so full of reproach.’

  Hudson’s voice had fallen to a whisper so soft that Cameron could hardly hear him. He fell silent and sat staring into what was left of his beer while Cameron reflected on the coincidence of its being eyes that haunted both their dreams.

  ‘Why would they have been full of reproach?’ Cameron asked, mainly to break the silence. He needed time to try to frame an adequate apology for having rounded on Hudson about Hillsborough, lumping him in with the rest of the South Yorkshire police. Leaping to conclusions was precisely what historians were supposed not to do.

  ‘They were full of reproach because I hadn’t managed to get the gate open and my CPR wasn’t good enough to revive him,’ Hudson said. ‘I got tired too quickly and I hadn’t been on a CPR refresher course. I could have gone on one but I didn’t. If I had gone on the course I might have been able to save him.’

  ‘Lots of people who are drowned or get crushed are past saving and can’t be revived – no matter how proficient people are at CPR,’ Cameron said. ‘I’m sorry I spoke to you the way I did the other day. If you are still having nightmares about it you are probably suffering from PTSD. Were you offered any counselling afterwards?’

  ‘I had one meeting with a Welfare Officer – I think that was what he was called – but I wasn’t convinced, so I didn’t go back. Anyway by then I was public enemy number one and he probably wouldn’t have given a damn what I was suffering from.’

  ‘Public enemy number one?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Hudson said. ‘I refused to write my incident report on a loose sheet of paper like we were told, and insisted on writing it in my notebook as usual. I knew that the only reason the fuckers would want us to do that was so that our reports could be doctored. Later I broke ranks again and gave evidence to the Taylor inquiry. I told them that the stories about Liverpool fans stealing from the corpses and pissing on policemen were a pack of lies – but I think they had worked that out already. The fans were doing a bloody sight more to try to save the people who had been crushed than most of my colleagues. I saw the sergeant who stopped me from opening the gate swearing at two of the Liverpool fans and trying to stop them from tearing down one of the advertising boards to use as a stretcher. Can you believe that with people lying dead and dying all around he was threatening to arrest the two of them for vandalizing the stadium? I was very pleased when they just told him to fuck off and tore it down anyway.’

  ‘What a bloody nightmare!’ Cameron said. ‘Breaking rank won’t have done your promotion chances much good. Is that why you are still a constable? Why didn’t you just leave the police force? I understand that a number of your colleagues did just that in the years immediately after the disaster.’

  ‘You talk about “just” leaving,’ Hudson said, ‘but it isn’t as easy as that. Being a policeman is all I know. It’s what I was trained to do. I always wanted to be a policeman when I was a kid. I wanted to help people, and I knew early doors that I couldn’t do well enough at school to become a doctor. Now that my mother has died I live by myself in her house, so I don’t need to be paid any more than I am. I like doing what I do, and I wouldn’t want a desk job, which is what the officers who get promoted all end up doing. Anyway I was buggered if I was going to stop being a policeman just because they wanted me to.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ Cameron said. ‘It was the same with me in a way. I was damned if I was going to leave South Africa under apartheid just because the security police were trying to make me.’

  ‘Is that why you don’t like policemen?’ Hudson asked.

  ‘What makes you think I don’t like policemen?’ Cameron asked. ‘Being serious, though, that is only part of it. I didn’t like being followed everywhere, having my phone tapped all the time, my house and office bugged and my mail opened. I particu
larly didn’t like their death threats, and after they assassinated one of my colleagues we had to take the death threats seriously. They devised other forms of harassment, but that’s another story. Anyway, it wasn’t so much what they did to me as what they did to other people, particularly black people. They tortured and murdered as they pleased, and always got away with it. There were endless lies and cover-ups – people falling down stairs, and slipping on bars of soap in the showers, and supposedly committing suicide. And then I come here and discover that things aren’t that different, what with the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four and Hillsborough and Orgreave, and so on, and on, and on. The police here may not go in for as much torture and murder as they did in South Africa, but the shining model of justice we looked to in those days turns out to have been distinctly tarnished.’

  After a few moments of silence Hudson looked at his watch, drained what was left in his glass, and stood up.

  ‘I need to go,’ he said, as Cameron stood up to say goodbye. ‘I’m glad we have cleared the air a bit.’

  ‘Thanks very much for coming over to talk to me,’ Cameron said, ‘and thanks also for not having seen what I did to that bloody cameraman after the Palestine march the other day.’

  ‘I’d been watching him,’ Hudson said. ‘He was obviously trying to provoke you and deserved to have his nose spread all over the rest of his face. But you need to be careful. You have succeeded in annoying some of my colleagues big time with your letters and articles, and they are out to get you. You would be best not to give them a chance.’

  Chapter 12

  With the students on study-leave, no lectures to prepare and, for once, no essays needing urgent marking, Cameron was able to spend the weekend writing up the chapter of his book devoted to the mistaken-identity killing of Jean Charles de Menezes he had gone on about to Harriet. The firing of seven dum-dum bullets by specialist firearms-officers at point-blank range into the head of a wholly unterroristic Brazilian plumber in a London tube-station in July 2005 could reasonably be described as an overreaction. As with Forest Gate, the overreaction could probably be attributed as much to racial prejudice as to sheer incompetence, and it came as no surprise that the people pulling the trigger were never held accountable.