Game of Stones

by David Maughan Brown

  As Cameron read through his notes and newspaper clippings, he was irritated all over again by the way the press kept referring to those responsible for the shooting as ‘police marksmen’. It didn’t take much of a marksman to hold a gun against somebody’s head and pull the trigger. The lies told by the police about what de Menezes had been wearing and how he had been behaving had a lot in common with the lies told at Hillsborough but, given that the killing happened in full view of horrified witnesses on the tube, in this instance the lies had to be rowed back from very quickly.

  Cameron found the process of writing wholly absorbing and was barely aware of the procession of alternating sunshine and showers, and the flailing gusts of wind ripping at the last of the blossom on the trees outside the window. It was only in the occasional breaks for coffee or something to eat that his anxiousness about Mutoni’s disappearance came to the surface. Before he sat down to his writing early on the Saturday morning, and again on Sunday, he phoned Ellen to ask whether there was any news of her. But no word had been heard from or about her, and by the end of each brief phone-call Ellen had been in tears. There was nothing Cameron could do, and pouring his concern into the writing served as a distraction from worrying about what might have happened.

  By Sunday evening Cameron had finished the first draft of the chapter. He would need to go back to it when it came to putting the book together as a whole, but he felt pleased with the weekend’s work. The balance seemed right. His analysis was sharp and hard-hitting enough, but he didn’t think he had gone overboard in his critique of what was admittedly a sitting-duck of a target. He hadn’t needed to be a marksman.

  After sitting at his desk almost constantly for two days, Cameron felt the stirrings of cabin fever and decided that a quick walk before bed was called for. The evenings were lengthening, the sky had cleared and the wind had dropped, but it was still anorak weather. As he set off down the road with no particular destination in mind Cameron heard the desolate sound of an owl hooting somewhere in the valley down below.

  Cameron reflected that the problem with being neither an ancient Roman nor an ancient Greek was that one had to choose between diametrically opposed interpretations of what the hooting of an owl meant. For the ancient Greeks, owls were symbols of good fortune; for the Romans, they were omens of impending disaster – to the point where hearing the hooting of an owl foretold an imminent death. Cameron shivered, but preferred to think that the owl was hooting to tell him that he would have the good fortune to find a publisher who would be interested in his book.

  A secondary reason for going out for his walk had been to check that there was nobody sitting in any of the cars that had a sight line to the house Brian’s flat was in. There had been no sign of anyone watching the house, so it seemed reasonable to hope that whoever had been keeping an eye on him had come to the conclusion that it was a waste of everyone’s time. The writing had left Cameron feeling drained and tired, as it always did once the relative high of getting the words down on paper had worn off, and he went to bed earlier than usual.

  Cameron’s head seemed barely to have had time to sink into his pillows when the phone beside his bed rang. Barely conscious, he rolled over to pick up the receiver and establish that, as usual, there appeared to be no one on the other end of the line. The usual silence greeted him and he was about to settle back and try to go back to sleep when he spotted the time on the luminous dial of the alarm clock beside his bed. Suddenly wide awake, he sat up abruptly, wondering what the hell was going on. All the other stalker phone-calls ever since he had been in Sheffield, every single one, had been at 3am, give or take a minute or two on either side. But now it was only midnight.

  It could just be a mistake. Considering that he was in Brian’s flat, he might not even be the target. But Brian had never mentioned phantom midnight phone-calls. If it was aimed at him, how did they know he was there and what the number was? It could just be a mechanical fault in whatever device had been programmed to phone him at 3am. But it didn’t feel that way – it felt as if something much more serious was wrong. The lonely hoot of the owl came to mind. Neil and Brian would accuse him of being paranoid, but Cameron felt an urgent need to get out and away from the house. If the phone-call wasn’t just a wrong number and they, whoever they were, knew that he was staying in Brian’s flat, why hadn’t they just continued with the 3am wake-up calls? The only reason Cameron could think of was that they wanted to check to make sure he was there. If he was right, the sensible thing was to make sure he wasn’t there.

  Cameron needed some light to help him find his clothes. The flat had been carved out of what had once been an attic, and the window in Brian’s bedroom was a velux set into the slope of the roof. Anyone watching the house would have needed to be in a helicopter to see his light being turned on, but Cameron felt the need to limit himself to light from the bedside light, and even that he shaded with a hand-towel. He pulled on a pair of heavy-duty jeans, a winter shirt, thick socks and a fisherman’s jumper, before going through to the hall and supplementing those with his winter anorak and boots. As he dressed he considered his options of where to go. There weren’t many.

  Cameron knew plenty of people in Sheffield, mainly people from work and people from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign – though he was not exactly flavour of the month there – but the only person he knew well enough to wake up in the middle of the night and ask for a bed was Brian, and it was Brian’s flat he was having to make his strategic exit from. Neil was away on holiday in Lanzarote or somewhere, and he didn’t know Harriet well enough to land on her in the middle of the night.

  It was far too late to arrive at a hotel or B&B and ask for a room. The only option he could think of was to follow Mutoni’s example and look for temporary shelter in the shed on her allotment. The weather forecast had threatened rain sometime before dawn and his own shed was anything but waterproof. Mutoni’s wouldn’t be perfect, but it had to be better than his. He knew that she kept the gate locked, but it was a low gate and he could step over it without too much difficulty.

  Cameron grabbed a blanket and one of the pillows from the bed before making his way through to the kitchen to find something to take with him for the morning. He felt his way to the bowl on the counter near the stove, and eased an apple into each of his trouser pockets before moving to the fridge to take a bottle of water. He started back as the light glared out when he opened the fridge door, snatched a bottle from the top shelf, and quickly shut the light off again. Even if the phone-call did mean that someone was on the way, the chances of anyone being able to see the light were infinitesimally small. But one couldn’t be too careful.

  There was a time when Cameron would force himself to walk towards what threatened him. He remembered the mix of emotions as he walked back into his house to confront the apartheid Special Branch in full raid mode. Now his only instinct was to run away, to avoid whatever looming unpleasantness was in the offing. In those days it might have been his protective instincts towards Jules and the children that drove him forward. Now there was no family to protect, so no reason not to just get the hell out.

  Creeping down the stairs and out of the front door in the dark was relatively easy, extracting his bike from the carbuncle on the side of the house less so. Cameron hadn’t had enough confidence in the security set-up to rely on just one lock. Unlocking the one that needed a key was easy enough, but getting the other’s combination lock open in the dark took several minutes. It didn’t help that his hands were trembling. It eventually opened, much more by good luck than anything resembling judgement. Cameron strapped the blanket and pillow onto the carrier and set off down the hill without switching his lights on. It was only once he was well out of sight of the house that he felt it was safe to use the lights, and he only turned them on then because he heard a police siren in the distance. In the face of his sense of impending disaster there would be a certain irony in being stopped by the police for somet
hing as trivial as cycling without lights, but it was not an irony he felt any inclination to invite.

  There was very little chance of anyone hanging around the allotments at half past midnight, but Cameron still felt the need to approach extremely cautiously. With his lights turned off again, he freewheeled slowly down the hill until he was fifty yards from the gate. There he dismounted, carried his bike as quietly as he could up into the trees and scrub on the side of the road away from the allotments, and hid it in a thicket as far up the steep hillside as he could scramble. There was no moon, but once he was out of reach of the streetlights Cameron’s eyes had quickly adjusted to the darkness, and he could see enough to make his way between the trees. He was pretty sure the bike couldn’t be seen from the road but, in any case, the plan was to retrieve it soon after it got light. That was as far as planning for the next day went. He had no idea what he would do, or where he would go. He just knew that he needed to get away from Brian’s flat.

  At first sight, limited as sight was, it looked as if he had been unduly critical of his own shed in assuming that Mutoni’s would be a much better bet as a refuge. The door, such as it was, was open but the doorway was almost entirely blocked. The further investigation the blockage was clearly designed to discourage revealed that it consisted of a pile of half-empty bags of compost, a couple of watering cans, a large tub of chicken pellets and an old chair, all covered with weed membrane. Apart from discouraging, rather than preventing, entry – it was possible to squeeze past – piling everything in a heap just inside the doorway had cleared enough space at the back of the shed for an adult to lie full-length. There was even a covering of some sort on the wooden floor to limit the discomfort.

  The covering turned out to be an old sleeping bag, but the comfort it offered was minimal. Cameron stretched himself out and covered himself with his blanket. He was glad he had thought to bring a pillow: he didn’t fancy using the almost empty bag of compost Mutoni must have used. She had obviously been back since that Sunday morning, probably to sleep. The doorway hadn’t been blocked then.

  As Cameron lay listening to the night, the chances of getting any sleep seemed minimal. The musty-sweet organic smell of compost mingling with the ammoniac smell of the chicken pellets made him wonder whether it would be safe to fall sleep even if he could. But the door was open, so any toxic gases could escape, and Mutoni had survived spending more than one night here. The occasional rustle and scratching he could hear outside was probably a rat, which wasn’t a problem as long as it stayed outside. But the first drops of the threatened rain could be heard pattering on the corrugated iron of the roof. If it rained hard enough, the rat and its friends might all decide that the shed was the best place to be.

  The build-up of clouds in the west that Cameron had noticed as he rode down to the allotments had suggested that the rain meant business. The wind was getting up. Somewhere on an allotment further down the valley someone had hung a wind-chime from the branch of a fruit tree. In balmier weather, on a sunny summer evening, the wind-chime would produce a peaceful Zen-compatible tinkling sound; now it was sounding a frenetic alarm. Its urgency heightened Cameron’s anxiousness.

  When the rain began in earnest it soon drowned out the sound of the wind-chime and the rustlings of rodents. The rats chose not to seek shelter in Mutoni’s shed, either scenting an intruder or preferring the chaos of Cameron’s one instead. African rain drumming on corrugated-iron roofs had been one of the motifs of Cameron’s childhood, bringing with it a comforting sense of being snugly cocooned out of reach of the weather. The old sleeping bag he was lying on offered very little by way of comfort on the uneven floor, but Cameron was always lulled by the sound of rain on the roof.

  Neil had told Cameron that he didn’t need to be deeply asleep for nightmares and flashbacks to creep up on him, and warned him that the more stressed he allowed himself to become the more likely he was to experience them. Cameron was entirely unconvinced that when he felt stressed it was his fault for giving the stress permission to possess him. At least this one didn’t feature the staring bloodshot eyes.

  He was suddenly back in South Africa, sitting on the bank of a trout dam in the foothills of the Drakensberg. He had put his rod to one side and was drinking a premium Macallan single malt, intent on finishing the bottle as he watched the sun going down and the moon rising. As he sat there, all the Special Branch officers he had ever encountered arrived one by one on the side of the dam, sat themselves down on upright chairs they had brought with them, and watched him through their binoculars. When he had emptied the bottle, he put it aside, stood up and walked slowly into the water as the watchers put down their binoculars and started to clap.

  There was something comforting about the feel of the water pressing in hard and cold on his waders, rising higher and higher up his legs as he edged inch by inch towards the deep water. There must be a small leak in one the waders, he could feel cold water trickling in. The water would be much colder when it came in over the top of his waders, but that wouldn’t last long. Once the waders were full of water there would be no turning back. But he had already reached the point of no return; if he tried to turn around, unsticking his boots from the clinging mud, he would overbalance and that would be it. That was it, anyway. The slope was steeper than he had realized, the water was filling his waders, just as cold as he had imagined, and now was washing over him. He couldn’t see the moon any more.

  Cameron came to with a start. It was still more dark than light and the rain was still falling, now with quiet persistence rather than violently, and the wind had dropped. There was more weight on his legs than he would have expected, and the right leg of his trousers felt uncomfortably soggy. Sitting up to assess what was going on, Cameron realized that rain water had seeped in where the side of the shed met the floor, soaked up into his blanket and saturated the leg of his trousers nearest to the wall. That would account for the water leaking into his waders.

  With the Special Branch on his back the whole time, and no prospect of any headway being made in the struggle against apartheid, he really had, for a time, contemplated walking into a dam in his waders and drowning himself. It would have been easy enough to do and, with enough whisky inside him, it should have been relatively painless. It was Lynn who had distracted him and stopped him from doing that. The same Lynn who had then allowed herself to become the bait in a trap designed to capture him so that he could be put on trial. That would have been a trial from which there could only ever have been one outcome: they would have sentenced him to be hanged by the neck until he was dead.

  There wasn’t much that could be done about the water-saturated end of the blanket or his wet trousers – both would dry, given time – and it wasn’t quite as cold as Cameron might have expected. After rearranging the sleeping bag and blanket as best he could, he sat with his back against the end wall at the dry end of the shed and thought about where to go and what to do.

  Neil and Brian would have been right to tell him he was paranoid. It was ridiculous to spend an uncomfortable night in an allotment shed just because he had heard an owl hooting and the telephone had woken him at midnight instead of 3am. What had he thought was about to happen? But just because you are paranoid it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. At least under apartheid you usually knew who ‘they’ were. Not knowing who they were when your house was being watched and your telephone kept waking you at dead of night – and this time it hadn’t even been his own telephone – was enough to make anyone paranoid.

  The rational thing to do would be to wait until it got properly light, retrieve his bike, go back to Brian’s flat and get on with his book. At some point he would need to look in on his own house to check on progress with its recovery from the attentions of the police. An assertively cheerful blackbird had started singing very close by – no doubt very pleased not to have been one of the four and twenty baked in the pie. Was there any good reason why a happy blackbird
shouldn’t be a more accurate omen than a depressive owl?

  Perhaps there was good reason. It wasn’t properly light yet but Cameron could hear the slamming of car doors up on the road and the sound of men’s voices. The voices came closer and Cameron expected to hear them passing on down the hill to one of the other allotments. It seemed very early for people to be going to tend their vegetables, and it would be far too wet for them to be able to do anything useful when they got there. But, as they say, it takes all sorts. In Cameron’s experience people with allotments tended to veer towards the more eccentric end of the spectrum.

  The voices didn’t pass on down the hill. They sounded to have stopped outside the gate of Cameron’s allotment. He could feel his heart starting to race. A loud crunch of splintering wood converted incipient anxiety instantly into anger. The noise could only have been the sound of someone kicking his gate in. There was no bloody need to kick the gate open – if they had taken the trouble to look they would have found that the padlock on the inside wasn’t locked. It was never locked, for the simple reason that it was too rusty to lock.

  Cameron stood up quietly and peered around the door of the shed to see if he could see what was going on. He didn’t want to give away the fact that he had been sleeping there – he might need to do so again sometime. It was surprisingly misty, but he could make out three men standing with their backs to him just beyond the shed on his allotment. One appeared to be holding a piece of paper they were poring over. If he could get out of the doorway and round the corner of the shed he would be out of sight and could leave Mutoni’s allotment without being seen.