Game of Stones

by David Maughan Brown

  ‘What message, precisely?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘Apart from rubbing it in that I am a weaker Go player than he is – and a three stone handicap means I am a good bit weaker – he is gloating about overseeing what the bastards did to Lynn. He must have been there to see it. All of that in addition to the references to death and the signpost to Hell. The stone with the bloodstain must have been one of the two on Mutoni’s eyelids – if they had put it in her mouth the blood might have come off.’

  ‘I need to go,’ Harriet said, standing up. ‘I’m feeling sick. I haven’t had to deal with this kind of thing before. I’m going to need to talk to Lynn again to try to persuade her to come over to testify. Can you think of anything I could say to her that might make her less reluctant to come?’

  Cameron sat silently, allowing himself to remember.

  ‘Just ask her if she still listens to her Dionne Warwick album Friends,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that about?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘Lynn will understand,’ Cameron said.

  ‘No business of mine, then?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘It’s not that,’ Cameron said, though it wasn’t actually any business of Harriet’s. ‘Lynn played that record for me one evening when I went round to have dinner with her. It was a good evening. Reminding her of it might make her less reluctant to come over. It might, on the other hand, be wholly counter-productive. I just don’t know.’

  ‘I’ll try it then,’ Harriet said. ‘I don’t think any message like that could make her more reluctant to come than she sounded when I spoke to her. I’ll come in tomorrow morning to let you know the answer.’

  Harriet turned round and looked at Cameron for a second or two as the cell door was being opened for her. He found her expression very difficult to read.

  Chapter 17

  It was three days before Harriet visited again. Days in which the cell seemed hour by hour to be getting smaller and darker. There was no news. Nothing had changed, but Cameron’s situation felt more and more hopeless. The only time he could remember feeling anything similar was after his one meeting with van Zyl when it had become all too clear that nothing was going to be done about Venter’s threats against Jules. She had left him and there was nothing left to live for. He had decided then that the only way out was to get very drunk and drown himself in a trout dam in the Drakensberg. Lynn had saved him from that. As the days passed now, he realized how dependent he had become on Harriet’s visits.

  Why had she stopped coming? Cameron wondered whether he had offended her in some way, but couldn’t think how. The only explanation he could think of was that Lynn had told her something about him that had put her off seeing him.

  When she did eventually appear after her three-day absence, she gave the impression of having spent the three days tightening the bolts on her armour.

  ‘I’ve been talking to the people in charge of this set-up,’ she said. ‘They are apparently holding you here in terms of the Imprisonment (Temporary Provisions) Act of 1980, introduced to allow remand prisoners to be kept in cells in police stations and under magistrate’s courts when the prisons are too overcrowded. This police station doesn’t have the recreational or exercise facilities you are entitled to. You aren’t even being allowed visits. I could make formal application for you to be moved to one of the prisons with those facilities if you would like me to, but it might not be in South Yorkshire. If the prisons are as overcrowded as they say they are, that probably just means you will change places with some other remand prisoner. But I don’t see why it should be you who is deprived of your entitlements – this has gone on too long.’

  Cameron’s heart, which had lifted when he saw Harriet coming through the door, sank precipitously. Was she just looking for an excuse not to visit him as frequently as she had before her recent absence? He decided he might as well take the bull by the horns.

  ‘If you are fed up with visiting me so frequently and are looking for an excuse not to feel you have to,’ Cameron said, ‘you must just confine your visits to times when there is a need for a formal consultation about the trial. I don’t need to be moved thirty miles away to Doncaster or wherever. I’m not in desperate need of exercise, have no desire to play table tennis, and have even less desire to mix with other prisoners before I absolutely have to. Visits would be good – not that I have a host of friends who would be queuing up to visit – but, on the whole, I would very much prefer to stay where I am.’

  ‘No…. It’s not that I don’t want to come in,’ Harriet said, uncharacteristically hesitant.

  ‘I hope you haven’t been ill the past few days,’ Cameron said – although that would be much the least hurtful reason for Harriet’s having absented herself.

  ‘No…. Well not as such,’ Harriet answered.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Not ill – just kind of shattered. I don’t know quite how to put it,’ Harriet said.

  ‘No harm in trying,’ Cameron suggested, after a few moments of silence.

  There was a long pause during which Harriet’s face was half turned away from Cameron as she sat on the bench a few feet from him. Looking at her closely, Cameron could see her eye moistening.

  ‘I phoned Lynn again, immediately after I left the other day,’ Harriet said.

  ‘Did you ask her about the Dionne Warwick record?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Harriet said, turning round to look directly at Cameron, her eyes still moist. ‘Yes, I asked her. She said she had thrown the record out years ago – she couldn’t bear to keep anything associated with you in her house. She said she gave your Go stones to your friend John for safekeeping in the unlikely event of your ever being able to go back to South Africa to claim them.’

  ‘That was a criminal waste of a very good record – I wonder what it would be worth now,’ Cameron said, trying not to allow himself to think about the full implications of what Harriet was saying. ‘I listened to a lot of Lynn’s records in the few weeks I lived with her, I hope they didn’t all suffer the contamination of being associated with me.’

  ‘You sound as if you are feeling sorry for yourself,’ Harriet said. ‘It’s Lynn I feel sorry for. It was a difficult conversation to begin with, as the first one had been. But in the end we talked for quite a time – in fact it was a very long phone-call, the better part of three hours. I don’t think…

  ‘Sorry,’ Cameron interrupted, ‘you must add the cost of the phone-call to my bill.’

  ‘I wasn’t worried about the cost of the phone-call,’ Harriet said. ‘I was much more worried about Lynn. When she eventually started talking I got the impression that she hadn’t ever opened up and told the full story to anyone before.’

  ‘That’s surprising,’ Cameron said. ‘Even then, twenty odd years ago, South African universities were decades ahead of the UK where psychological support was concerned. The Student Counselling Centre at the university employed three excellent clinical psychologists who spent a lot of their time helping staff members, as well as students. Two of them were female, and there wasn’t the same stigma attached to making use of psychotherapists there as there is here, so Lynn could easily have gone to them. I had assumed she would have.’

  ‘I did ask her whether she had had support,’ Harriet said. ‘She said she couldn’t trust anyone at the university. When she was in detention she discovered that there were members of staff who were being blackmailed to work for the security police – but she didn’t know exactly who or how many.’

  ‘Shit!’ Cameron exclaimed. ‘I was always worried about that. I knew they did that with students – catching them with drugs, or planting drugs on them, and getting them to spy on staff or act as agents provocateurs as the alternative to arrest and prosecution – and there was no reason for them not to be blackmailing staff in similar ways. I could always be sure that what I said in lectures was being reported back to the Special Br
anch.’

  ‘Even all these years later I think it was only the five thousand odd miles of distance between us that enabled Lynn to talk so freely,’ Harriet said.

  ‘And what happened to Lynn was all my fault,’ Cameron said. ‘That is presumably why I haven’t seen you for a few days, and why you no longer want to see me any more frequently than you have to.’

  ‘No…. It’s not that,’ Harriet said, but didn’t elaborate,

  ‘What is it then?’ Cameron asked after a few moments of silence.

  ‘It was just so awful – what they put her through,’ Harriet said. ‘It made me feel sick and shaky to listen to it. I couldn’t sleep properly for a couple of nights and had nightmares when I did manage to get to sleep. I needed to take a couple of days off work and then had to catch up. Among other things, she told me that van Zyl had encouraged one of the brutes to strip her and beat her while he watched. So he could easily have smeared some of her blood on that Go stone, as you suspected.’

  ‘Sweet Jesus!’ Cameron groaned. ‘He was getting them to act out on Lynn what Venter had threatened to do to Jules. The sick bastard was revenging himself on Lynn for what I had done. And it was all my fault.’

  ‘No, Cameron, it wasn’t all your fault,’ Harriet said, raising her voice just enough for Cameron to register an element of exasperation. ‘Listen to yourself, you are doing it again.’

  ‘Doing what again?’ Cameron asked, bewildered.

  ‘Assuming all responsibility,’ Harriet said. ‘Lynn told me that you had alienated Jules by making her feel patronized – taking decisions on her behalf and lying to her to protect her. You are doing it again – patronizing Lynn when you say that everything that happened was your fault. Lynn was an adult, and she came across to me as a very intelligent adult. She was politically attuned, she knew the score when she lent you her car and took you into her bed. It is demeaning her political commitment to imagine that she only did what she did because you were somehow in control of what she did.’

  ‘Lynn seems to have told you a lot about me,’ Cameron said.

  ‘Yes, she did,’ Harriet said. ‘I told you we spoke for nearly three hours – she had plenty of time.’

  Harriet stopped talking for long enough to make Cameron lift his head and look at her. She was looking directly at him, the light falling on her face at an angle that highlighted flecks of gold in her sea-green iris that Cameron hadn’t noticed before.

  ‘I got the impression,’ Harriet went on, ‘that Lynn thought I might be interested in embarking on a relationship with you, and saw herself as handing on some kind of baton.’

  ‘A baton inscribed with all kinds of dire warnings about me, no doubt,’ Cameron said. ‘Fat chance of anyone with any intelligence contemplating embarking on a relationship with someone who is about to be sentenced to life imprisonment.’

  ‘The circumstances certainly aren’t auspicious,’ Harriet said. ‘The outcome of our conversation was that Lynn has agreed to come over to Sheffield some time before your trial – whenever they get around to setting a date. That shouldn’t be too long now as the Crown Prosecution Service seems to think it is a pretty straightforward case.’

  ‘That’s cheerful,’ Cameron said. His stomach had tensed and he could feel his heart starting to race, but it was difficult to tell whether it was the prospect of an imminent trial for murder or the prospect of seeing Lynn that was responsible.

  ‘Lynn is still very reluctant to see you,’ Harriet said. ‘She asked if that would be necessary in the run up to the trial. She was hoping that any preparation for the trial wouldn’t need to involve her seeing you. I broke the news gently to her that we would almost certainly need to have the two of you together on at least one occasion before the trial gets under way. She sounded alarmed by that, but I assured her that you are actually still quite human.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Cameron said.

  ‘I must go now,’ Harriet said. ‘Talking to Lynn upset me enough to keep me away from work for a couple of days, but it wasn’t because of anything she said about you. I think she still feels so bad about agreeing to go along with van Zyl because she looks up to you and has such good memories of your time together. On my way out I will let them know that I’m not going to push for you to be moved to one of the prisons but, as a quid pro quo, I will insist on them allowing people to visit you – I know Brian wants to. They must have a spare interview room that could be used – they can’t be using all their interview rooms all the time. I’ll push them on that. Bye.’

  Harriet reached out, put her hand over Cameron’s hand resting on the cushion and, once again, gave it a squeeze before she stood up to go. Her hand was much warmer than his. Its warmth, and the smile she gave him as she said goodbye, brought home to Cameron just how much his isolation in the cell made him miss everyday human contact.

  It soon became clear that anyone who had been pushed by Harriet knew they had been well and truly pushed. Shortly after Cameron’s lunch tray had been removed, a constable Cameron hadn’t seen before, who looked as if he should still be at school, opened the cell door and invited Cameron to accompany him out of the cell and down the corridor. The constable unlocked the clangy gate to allow them through, locking it again behind them, and ushered Cameron into an interview room where Brian was sitting at the table.

  As the constable turned to close the door behind them, Brian stood up, walked quickly around the table and gave Cameron a brief but enveloping hug. Cameron wouldn’t have expected the feeling of being hugged by a well-tailored bear to bring such a lump to his throat. He really had been missing contact. The constable let out a muffled squawk of remonstrance, presumably having visions of files, drugs or guns being passed between them, and pointedly pulled out the chair for Cameron to sit down as they separated. Once Cameron and Brian had sat down with the safe distance of the table between them, he withdrew discreetly into a corner, pretending not to be there.

  ‘Hi, long time no see,’ Cameron said. ‘Thanks for coming. How was your holiday?’

  ‘Good, thanks,’ Brian said. ‘A lot better than yours by the look of it. How are you keeping?’

  ‘OK, I suppose, but you are right, it hasn’t been a holiday,’ Cameron answered. ‘I’ve been better, but would probably be a lot worse if Harriet hadn’t been coming in quite regularly to consult me. She thinks our present state of limbo isn’t going to last too long. Lynn is going to be coming over to testify.’

  ‘Yes, Harriet has been keeping me up to speed,’ Brian said. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been able to come to see you before now. I was surprised when I suddenly got a phone-call at lunchtime telling me that I could come this afternoon if I wanted. Somebody has been doing some moving and shaking.’

  ‘That will have been Harriet,’ Cameron said. ‘When Harriet does some moving and shaking, things clearly get properly moved and thoroughly shaken.’

  ‘Are you reasonably comfortable in here?’ Brian asked. ‘Sleeping alright? Is there anything I can bring you?’

  ‘Questions, questions, questions,’ Cameron said. ‘They haven’t bothered to question me for weeks – presumably thinking they have all the answers – so now it is your turn. A decent mattress would be good – but it wouldn’t fit on the bench. Sleeping tablets would be good – but I wouldn’t be allowed those. Thanks, incidentally, for the books – at least those were permitted. There aren’t too many ways you can use a book to commit suicide.’

  ‘You aren’t on suicide watch, are you?’ Brian said, looking anxious.

  ‘No,’ Cameron replied. ‘I’m just being melodramatic. Which isn’t to say that the futility of trying to prove the negative – trying to prove one didn’t do something one is accused of having done – isn’t material for despair. There are times I feel just as hopeless now as I did towards the end of my time in South Africa.’

  ‘But it isn’t the same,’ Brian said. ‘Proving you didn’t
do something you are accused of doing has to be a lot easier than proving you aren’t something you are accused of being. All you have to do to prove you didn’t do something is demonstrate that somebody else did it. Being able to prove that someone else is a liar, for example, in no way helps to prove that you aren’t one yourself.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Cameron said, unconvinced but lacking the energy to argue.

  ‘I was really sorry to hear about Mutoni,’ Brian said. ‘ What a dreadful thing to happen.’

  ‘Bastards!’ Cameron said. ‘I just hope her death isn’t going to result in the leader of the genocide being let off the hook at the war crimes tribunal. That would be an outcome she would probably regret even more than her own death. Finding out who really killed her might help to ensure that doesn’t happen, but as long as this lot are happy to think that I did it they aren’t going to bother to look any farther.’

  ‘In which case,’ Brian said, ‘it is going to be up to us to do the looking.’

  As he spoke, Brian shifted his weight on the chair so that he could extract a thick and very worn leather wallet from the back pocket of his jeans. He took out a photograph and passed it across to Cameron.

  ‘It’s not a good photograph,’ Brian said, ‘as I had to take it with my mobile phone without being seen. They were in the pub a couple of nights ago. I thought I recognized the smaller man, the one with the dark hair. I only caught a glimpse of him, but I’m pretty sure he is the man who came to the pub that night when you told me about Lynn – the man you rushed out after. Was I right, and do you recognize the one with the beard?’

  The light hadn’t really been good enough so the photograph wasn’t particularly clear, but the two faces could be made out. The shorter, darker man was certainly Sari, the other one looked vaguely familiar but Cameron couldn’t place him.