Game of Stones

by David Maughan Brown

  ‘Sorry,’ Cameron said, anxious not to see the armour plating being tightened up again. ‘But something has been niggling away at the back of my mind. Why three Go stones rather than just one? I’m pretty sure I’ve just cracked it. Could you Google “Carter George”?’

  ‘But I thought we had concluded that he needed two for the eyes and one for the ferry passage across the Styx,’ Harriet said. ‘Two and one usually makes three.’

  ‘No need for sarcasm,’ Cameron said. ‘Three also happens to be the handicap I’ve been playing my Go games with on the internet. Please search “Carter George” for me. It’s always rung a faint bell but I’ve never bothered to follow it up.’

  Cameron edged closer to Harriet so that he could see her screen as she opened the computer, making a point of looking away as she typed in her password. She was wearing an understated but very distinctive perfume that somehow managed to hold its own against the pervasive smell of disinfectant. He was feeling apprehensive, but wasn’t quite sure why.

  ‘”Carter George” just switches to “George Carter”, as you can see,’ Harriet said, ‘and that then refers us to The Sweeney, and Dennis Waterman as one of the two lead actors.’

  ‘Shit!’ Cameron said. ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t swear.’

  ‘Don’t worry about swearing,’ Harriet said. ‘I’ve heard it all before. Most recently from an African Grey parrot I’ve acquired, ninety percent of whose vocabulary consists of swear words. It belonged to my born-again sister and her husband but their teenage son resented their po-faced piety and taught it an impressively wide range of swear words. My sister thought it was possessed by the devil and wanted it put down, so I took it over. I found the whole episode rather amusing. So what were you swearing about?’

  The last thing Cameron felt he needed right now was an African grey parrot anecdote, but it was good to see that the armour plating really did seem to be loosening.

  ‘I can’t believe I didn’t wake up to it years ago,’ Cameron said. ‘The clever bastard has been playing games with me all this time – both literally and figuratively. What a bloody idiot I’ve been! He must have been laughing himself silly, on top of beating me almost every time we played. I wondered why the message he sent to me accompanying the last move he played said ‘ATARI’ in capital letters. He had never done that before.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘Danger,’ Cameron answered. ‘It’s the Go equivalent of “Check!” in chess. It means that your opponent’s group of stones only has one liberty left and will be killed by your next move unless something is immediately done to save it. That last move Carter George made was threatening a very large group of my stones. Van Zyl was laughing at me – warning me of the danger I was in but confident that I wouldn’t understand the warning.’

  ‘So how do you make the connection?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘I once looked up the origins of the surnames of some of the Special Branch officers in our area for a satirical piece I was writing for our student newspaper,’ Cameron explained. ‘Van Zyl’s name is the Afrikaans equivalent of the Dutch surname Van Zijl. “Zijl” is an archaic Dutch term for a waterway. So van Zyl – Waterway – Water-man – George Carter – Carter George.’

  ‘I don’t think you should beat yourself up for not making that connection – it isn’t exactly blindingly obvious,’ Harriet said. ‘Calling him a clever bastard is an understatement.’

  The realisation that van Zyl had been present by proxy in his house all the time he had been playing Go with ‘Carter George’ made Cameron feel nauseous. It was the same sense of violation he had had when his house had been raided. Every white stone he had ever put on his board to represent one of Carter George’s online moves had been a proxy for van Zyl – a concentrated knot of malignity, a kind of deadly but invisible virus, invading the space of his home. As if it hadn’t been enough to invade his territory on the board.

  ‘How would van Zyl have known what name you were playing under?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘He must have worked out that I had arrived in South Africa on the portentously named SS Enlightenment,’ Cameron said. ‘He could have compared the list of names of the passengers and crew on the ship with the list of people who had hired cars in, or flown out of, Pietermaritzburg and Durban in the days after I killed his man. He would have seen that a certain Chris Barratt who had hired a car in Durban on the night of the murder had subsequently become a member of the ship’s company. When someone who called himself Chris Barratt turned up on the most commonly used Go site on the internet he must have rubbed his lily-white hands in glee. Bastard!’

  ‘This all lends more weight to what I started to say earlier,’ Harriet said. ‘If there is any chance whatever that the blood on that stone is Lynn’s, we need to get her to come over and testify at your trial.’

  ‘She won’t want to do that,’ Cameron said. ‘I know she won’t.’

  ‘How can you be so certain?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘After I escaped van Zyl’s trap and got back here,’ Cameron said, ‘she wrote to me saying that she never wanted to see or hear from me ever again.’

  ‘That’s a bit drastic,’ Harriet said, ‘what had you done to make her so angry with you?’

  ‘I’d implicated her and put her at serious risk of being tried as an accessory to the murder,’ Cameron answered. ‘I suspect that they used that threat, along with many others, as a way of wearing her down. Being associated with me led to her being imprisoned and tortured. She had every reason to be angry with me, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t anger that led her to want to have nothing more to do with me. She said in the letter that it was shame at having eventually agreed to cooperate with them. She warned me that van Zyl had a pathological hatred for me and was obsessed with avenging his enforcer’s death. I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone about any of this. Now I’ve told you about it, as well as telling Brian.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Harriet said, ‘how awful for her. So you are still emotionally involved with her.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘If you weren’t, you wouldn’t bother about having told us,’ Harriet answered. ‘But you needed to tell me about it if I was going to contact her – and I don’t need to tell Lynn what you have told me.’

  ‘No, you must tell her,’ Cameron said. ‘If any one thing led to Jules’s decision to leave me it was my not being upfront with her. In trying to protect her I had to lie to her, and she found that patronising as well as dishonest. And we know where that ended up – in a grave in Pinelands.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Harriet said, putting a warm hand over Cameron’s on the cushion beside her and squeezing it. ‘Sitting here in England now, it is difficult to believe what people had to go through under apartheid in South Africa.’

  ‘That depends on where you are sitting,’ Cameron said, looking around the cell. ‘My experience of apartheid was nothing compared to what black South Africans had to go through. At least, even under apartheid, I never found myself in a cell accused of a murder I didn’t commit.’

  ‘We’ll find a way to get you out,’ Harriet said. ‘Getting Lynn over here is going to be the key to that.’

  ‘Can’t you just get Lynn to put a bit of her hair, or some nail clippings, or something, in an envelope and send them to us for the DNA verification?’ Cameron asked. ‘Then she wouldn’t have to come over to testify in person.’

  ‘I really think we are going to need her to testify in person,’ Harriet said. ‘Assuming it is her DNA on that stone, she could win a jury’s sympathy by giving an account of what happened to her and explain how van Zyl had access to the Go stones. The fact that he had a pathological hatred for you, which she could testify to, would be a particularly telling point.’

  ‘But it won’t be van Zyl who is on trial,’ Cameron pointed out, ‘it will be me. The fact that van Zyl had access to
the stones doesn’t prove that he took them. I could easily have taken them myself and carried them around ever since, possibly for sentimental reasons because Lynn’s blood was on one. There doesn’t have to have been a rational reason. Nobody who could execute a woman in cold blood and then decorate her corpse with Go stones is going to stand out from a crowd by the rationality of his behaviour. Getting Lynn to testify isn’t going to prove I didn’t murder Mutoni. You can’t prove a negative.’

  ‘We’ve got to try, Cameron,’ Harriet said. ‘We’ve got to use every possible means at our disposal. Otherwise I’m afraid you are going to spend the rest of your life in a prison cell. I’m sorry to be blunt, but I really need you to shake off your fatalism and find the energy to defend yourself. If you approach the trial in your present state of mind, any jury is bound to read your fatalism as an indication that you are guilty.’

  ‘Well, I am guilty,’ Cameron said. ‘I’m guilty as hell of messing Lynn’s life up very badly, killing a policeman and being ultimately responsible for the deaths of my wife and children,’ Cameron said.

  ‘But none of that is what you are on trial for, Cameron,’ Harriet said, with the painstakingly patient tone of a nursery assistant talking to a not very bright four-year-old. ‘You happen to be on trial for the murder of your friend Mutoni – a murder you didn’t commit.’

  ‘But can’t prove, and won’t ever be able to prove, that I didn’t commit,’ Cameron said. ‘At the risk of repeating myself yet again: you can’t prove a negative. That phrase seems to have become the leitmotif of my life. OK, I can try not to come across as fatalistic, but it is impossible not to recognise the extent to which the odds are stacked against me. Contrary to what I believed for much of my life, this country is not a shining example of justice…’

  ‘Please don’t go on about Hillsborough again,’ Harriet interrupted. ‘I’ve heard it all before and have no argument with any of it.’

  ‘Hillsborough is only one of many examples,’ Cameron said. ‘You talked about spending my life in a prison cell – just like all the poor bastards they are currently locking up in terms of their bloody “Imprisonment for Public Protection” sentences. They have to prove they aren’t a danger to the public before they can be released – but you can’t prove a negative. You watch – some of them will rot in prison for the rest of their lives. In an age of overreaction where anything to do with Health and Safety is concerned, it will be impossible for them to prove they aren’t a danger to the public. Just having spent time in prison will be seen as making them, by definition, a danger to the public. The possibility of being given an IPP sentence is a nightmare.’

  ‘Which is why we need to do everything possible to make sure they don’t get to give you any sentence at all,’ Harriet said. ‘That means trying to get Lynn over here. So I’m going to go off right now and try to contact her. I’ll be very gentle, I promise. I can be gentle you know.’

  ‘I know you can,’ said Cameron. ‘You are much gentler with me than I deserve. Thank you for that.’

  ‘Just doing my job,’ Harriet said, standing up briskly and picking up her briefcase. ‘I’ll let you know tomorrow how I get on – assuming, of course, that I can get Lynn’s contact details.’

  ‘Try the University of Cape Town first,’ Cameron said. ‘I’ve been told she moved down there.’

  In the silence that fell after the clicking of Harriet’s heels had faded down the corridor and the gate at the end had clanged shut behind her, Cameron found himself feeling apprehensive again. Earlier, he’d been on edge about what they would find when they Googled Carter George, but by then he had already worked out that van Zyl must have been the mastermind behind his arrest. Uncovering the chain of clues van Zyl had laid linking Carter George to his own name had merely provided confirmation, and wasn’t of itself any cause for apprehension. He was anxious, he realised, because the further they went with their unmasking of van Zyl as the puppet-master, the more important it was going to become for him to allow Lynn back into his thoughts.

  For several years after seeing Lynn for the last time, as she was bundled out of the Special Branch car by van Zyl, Cameron had been at pains to try to exile her from his mind. He’d ultimately been reasonably successful in that. She had still come to mind from time to time, but in recent years it had largely been in the shape of a kind of historical flashback, unaccompanied by too much of the earlier welter of pain and regret. He had managed to avoid thinking about her in any kind of sustained way for several years before he had unburdened himself to Brian. Now the wall he’d built, brick by painful brick, to keep her as far away from his thoughts and feelings as possible was in danger of being dismantled. He’d been emotionally dependent on Lynn in the weeks after Jules had left him. Now he was wholly dependent: staying out of prison might depend entirely on what she was prepared to say in court, and how she said it. That was reason enough to feel apprehensive.

  Nothing came to mind to make him feel any less apprehensive during the periods of wakefulness through the night. In the hour or two before Harriet came to see him he felt so wrought up that he didn’t know what to do with himself, beyond robotically pacing the five steps backwards and forwards across his cell.

  ‘I managed to get hold of Lynn,’ Harriet said as soon as the cell door had been closed behind her. ‘You were right, she doesn’t want to see you, and is very reluctant to come over.’

  ‘Break it to me gently, won’t you,’ Cameron said. ‘Did she give you any reason why?’

  ‘You were right about that too,’ Harriet said. ‘She said she couldn’t bear to face you after what she had done.’

  ‘Did she ask whether you knew what she had done?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Harriet replied, ‘so, as we agreed, I told her what you had told me.’

  ‘So she knows that I broke my promise to her not to tell anyone,’ Cameron said. ‘Even if the real reason that she doesn’t want to see me is because she hates my guts, she wouldn’t say so.’

  ‘I’m sure she doesn’t hate your guts,’ Harriet said. ‘She was anything but forthcoming, but I got the impression that rather than hating you she still cares enough about you to be anxious about what you think of her.’

  ‘Did you ask her what she is doing?’

  ‘Yes,’ Harriet said, ‘but it was like getting blood out of a stone. She’s an Associate Professor at UCT.’

  ‘Did she tell you where she is living?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘Yes, a flat in a suburb called Rosebank, which I thought was in Johannesburg,’ Harriet replied. ‘She gave me her home phone number, but only because she doesn’t want me to phone the university number. I gather she is worried that the switchboard operator might listen in to conversations.’

  ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,’ Cameron commented. ‘I don’t suppose you asked her whether she was sharing the flat with anyone?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Harriet said. ‘That is none of my business – or yours either, for that matter. Surprisingly enough, I didn’t ask her about her sex life either.’

  ‘I just thought…,’ Cameron said, chastened. ‘I just thought she might have told you in case someone else answered the phone.’

  ‘Well she didn’t,’ Harriet said.

  ‘So, did she say anything that was helpful?’ Cameron asked. Whatever Harriet’s armour was bolted on with, she seemed to have suddenly tightened the bolts a few notches.

  ‘She confirmed that van Zyl had led the raid on her house, as you told me,’ Harriet said. ‘She said that a number of things had been taken from her house at the end of the raid, including her computer, her lecture notes, some of her books, and your Go stones. At the time, she didn’t know that they had been taken – she had been arrested and taken to the Special Branch offices. Most of what they had taken was returned to her when she was eventually released, including your stones. She said she had no idea whether
any of the stones were missing when the two bowls were returned.’

  ‘No – she couldn’t possibly have known,’ Cameron said. ‘There would have been no reason to count them. In any case I’ve no idea myself how many stones there should have been. Did you tell her there was blood on one of the stones?’

  ‘Yes, I mentioned that,’ Harriet said. ‘I thought she was bound to be rather vague about it, given how many years have passed, but she wasn’t. She was absolutely adamant that she hadn’t ever touched your special slate Go stones with a cut on her hand and would never have done so. She said she would have been worried that the stones might be absorbent. When I pointed out that it was a long time ago, she told me rather tartly that she has a very good memory for detail. I took her to be implying that there are a large number of details of that time that she would very much prefer not to remember.’

  ‘It’s certainly true that she used to have a remarkable memory for detail,’ Cameron said. ‘If she is certain she didn’t leave blood on that stone, we can be sure that she didn’t.’

  ‘Well, there goes our defence then,’ Harriet said. ‘If that blood wasn’t Lynn’s there is no way of linking the stones to van Zyl. From what you say about him, it certainly won’t be his own.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ Cameron replied. ‘There is no way van Zyl would not have noticed the blood. It won’t be his, and, if the object of the exercise was to send me a message, what would be the point of sending me a stone with anybody else’s blood on it? If it is Lynn’s blood, and if Lynn wasn’t responsible for getting it on the stone, van Zyl must have found a way of smearing Lynn’s blood on the stone himself. He could have done that when they were torturing her.’

  ‘God, how sick!’ Harriet exclaimed quietly. ‘Could anybody possibly be as sick as that?’

  ‘Venter certainly could, and I’ve no doubt that van Zyl could as well,’ Cameron said. ‘He knew any stones found on Mutoni’s body would be analysed for DNA and that we would be told the outcome. He would expect us to try to find a match for the DNA on the stone and Lynn would be an obvious candidate. Black stone – dark message.’