The Seven Trials of Cameron-Strange

by James Calum Campbell

  Too damn right! I could sleep for a week. Or at least a weekend.

  I said, ‘Did they get Fox?’

  ‘No. We think he took the Sikorsky back to Auckland with Elena, Saskia, and Tamsin. The girls are assisting the police with their enquiries, but Fox? He’s missing.’

  I crawled up to my bedroom, cast off my clothes, went to bed, and promptly fell asleep.

  Ten minutes later the telephone rang.

  ‘That you, Alastair? It’s Morley.’

  ‘Prof Girdwood.’

  ‘Rather living it up aren’t you, staying in the Esplanade?’

  I gazed vacantly into thin air.

  ‘Hello? Alastair? You there?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here.’

  ‘Look, we need you to start. Five o’clock tonight.’

  ‘I thought I was persona non grata. What with Ms Hodgson …’

  ‘Oh, that. Old hat. Besides, we need you.’ He said ungraciously, ‘Beggars can’t be choosers. Staff shortages.’

  ‘Morley, I’m really tired.’

  ‘What are you talking about? You’ve been swanning around for two weeks! Besides, you’ve got eight hours if you need a sleep. I’ll pop down to ED. See you this evening.’

  ‘Morley–’

  The line was disconnected and I was left listening to the dialling tone.

  I was out like a light. But I didn’t sleep well. I had bad dreams. I was back in that hellish sauna. The click, the movement at the door, the unbelievably delicious draught of cold air. I had half-fallen through onto the pool’s edge.

  Two dark-suited men with cruel faces. One of them had grabbed me by the hair and jerked my head backwards.

  ‘It’s not him.’

  ‘The fox has deserted his lair.’

  He had said ‘lhair’ – with the long back L of an Eastern European language, perhaps even from east of the Urals.

  ‘And now?’

  ‘If we cannot kill the fox, we will destroy his lhair.’

  Then I had been left. I’d slid gratefully into the pool and stayed there for an age.

  * * *

  New Zealand Herald, Monday, January 25.

  PRESIDENTIAL HOPEFUL DIES IN CAR BLAZE

  The mining and property tycoon Phineas Fox was admitted to Middlemore Hospital on Sunday night, having been involved in a head-on collision on Highway 1 at the Mount Wellington off-ramp. Rescue workers were unable to free him from a burning vehicle until he had sustained life-threatening injuries. He died shortly after admission to the hospital Emergency Department. This follows on from the recent destruction by fire of Mr Fox’s palatial summer retreat, Xanadu, his property on Great Barrier Island. Several employees were killed and injured in mysterious circumstances. Parallels are being drawn with suicide pacts of the sort that have been witnessed at the retreats of obscure Texan religious cults.

  Full story, page 4.

  Monday, April 18.

  On Monday morning I was woken at 7am by the clang of the automated release of my cell door. The policeman looked cheerful.

  ‘Morning, doc. It’s your lucky day. You’re out of here.’

  I looked up from my cot.

  ‘Good morning to you. Has somebody posted bail? Fat lot of use. I’m due in court in three hours.’

  ‘Counsel will explain.’ He ducked away and there, behind him, stood the fragrant Letitia O’Dwyer. She stepped into my cell, glancing around it as if it were a room in an apartment she was thinking of renting. She didn’t look impressed.

  ‘Better than that. The case has collapsed. You’re free to go. Well, almost.’

  I leaned forward on my elbows. ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘I don’t make jokes about these things.’ Indeed she didn’t. She had not lost her tone of severity. She disapproved of me.

  ‘How on earth?’

  ‘I think the pictures of the injury in court on Friday did it. I gather the jury made an application to the Honourable Judge Lowell just after Friday’s adjournment. In view of the severity of the patient’s injury, they were of one mind that you did him a favour. That is to say, they accepted your explanation that your motive was to provide palliation.’

  ‘Are they in a position to do that? I mean, can a jury stop a court case prematurely?’

  ‘No. But a judge can be persuaded, and can decide, that there is no case to answer.’

  ‘Why wasn’t I informed on Friday evening?’

  ‘Because, remember, you have been remanded for contempt of court. This still hangs over you. However, I have received a message from Justice Lowell. I understand that the judge was offended – on behalf of the court – by your description of yourself – with respect to the court proceedings – as “contemptuous”. On reflection, he wondered if he might have misheard you. Either that, or you yourself misled the judge by a misuse and abuse of language. You described yourself as “contemptuous” when what you meant to say was that you were, are, “contemptible”. Justice Lowell makes the suggestion that if you were to go before him at 10am and clarify the situation to that effect, the case would indeed be over, and you would be free to go.’

  ‘Neat. But there’s always that pesky interferer in human affairs – the truth. I am perfectly well aware of the difference between the meanings of “contemptuous” and “contemptible”.’

  Then Letitia O’Dwyer did something I dare say quite rare, and quite magnificent. She lost her temper.

  ‘You pompous idiot! Can’t you see when you’re being offered a get-out-of-jail-free card? Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth! For once in your life, just play the game. Because if you don’t, don’t expect me to bend over backwards any more. I’ve had enough!’

  It was doubtless very unprofessional, but I have to say I much admired Letitia, when flushed.

  I think the proceedings in court took less than a minute. I focused on looking contrite. Letitia did most of the talking. I merely had to acquiesce. Then we shook hands in a formal way. I thought of asking her if she’d like a celebratory drink, but decided that would have been pushing my luck.

  She said, ‘Next time you’re in trouble, don’t call me.’

  * * *

  I took the Arrow up to Kaitaia and asked my mate Bam-Bam at the Aero Club to give me a lift down to the north of Awanui. He’s called Bam-Bam because he’s handy with his fists. Rub him up the wrong way and bam bam, you’re down on the deck. I’m always very polite to Bam-Bam. I got him to drop me off at the Ninety Mile Beach turnoff at Waipapakauri because I wanted to walk west past my old primary school at Pararore, by Sweetwater, Lake Gnatu, and the pink bloom of the ti-tree kahikatoa, and all the way down to the ocean where the sand is soft and white. Here there are black oystercatchers, fernbirds and bitterns, prions and petrels. At the far end I passed the Top Ten campervan site and finally got back to Nepenthe, and came home.

  Nearly twenty years ago MacKenzie and I lost our parents. My Dad was a top dresser, an Ag pilot. He was bringing Mum back from Kerikeri to Kaitaia and turning from base leg on to finals, and there was a freak gust. They flicked over. Just like that. MacKenzie and I were orphans. Joe and Hine took us in without a second thought. Like kinder transport. They didn’t owe us a thing in the world, and I’ve never forgotten it.

  I reached Nepenthe in the late afternoon, gave Hine a long hug, and then slipped unobtrusively into the back bedroom. The shutters were closed and the blind drawn, and the atmosphere was sweetly fetid. The man sitting up in the bed was fifty-nine years old but he looked twenty years older.

  ‘Hello, Dad.’

  ‘Hello, son.’

  I sat on the edge of the bed and took his hand. It was cool and a little damp.

  ‘How’ve you been, son? Hear you’ve been in the wars.’

  ‘I’m good. You?’

  ‘Not so good. Gout’s playing up.’

  ‘Have you been to see Dr Judkins?’

  ‘Nah. Don’t want to bother him. Make a fuss and that.’

  ‘Fuss? Don’t be daft. You’re helping
pay his mortgage.’

  ‘Well, if you put it that way …’

  ‘You checking your sugars?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘You had anything since lunch?’

  ‘Cuppa tea.’

  ‘Let’s check it now.’ I fished the glucometer out of the drawer. The battery was flat. I replaced it and switched on and attached a reagent stick. My Dad obligingly lent me his thumb and I made a pinprick with the zapper and touched the end of the stick with the tiny globule of blood. A blood glucose of, say, less than 10 mm/L would be not bad. Something to work with, anyway. There was a pause, and a beep, and the digital display illuminated.

  27.6 mm/L.

  ‘Oh, Dad.’

  ‘I’ll need to cut the sugar out of my cuppa.’

  MacKenzie was scheduled to call from Paris at 6pm, 8am her time. She’d been getting some work done on the Phoenix. The landline rang out bang on time and I picked it up.

  ‘Is that my darling sister, the fuckin’ bitch goddess?’

  There was a fractional pause.

  ‘Hello. This is Margaret Rowallan speaking. May I speak with Dr Cameron-Strange?’

  I had to think quickly. ‘Hang on and I’ll see if he’s available.’

  I put the phone down, gave it thirty seconds, picked it up again and said in my politest voice, ‘Hello?’ I don’t think for a moment she was fooled. But she still offered me the job. The N-MASS thing. She was phoning from London. Clearly she was an early riser. Seven am – they’d be on British Summer Time now. I said something non-committal. She said think it over. Take your time. We’d be happy to have you on board.

  When MacKenzie eventually called we had a mirror image of our conversation about the ‘taster’ job. I told her about the N-MASS proposal, and she did it again. ‘Take it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’ll be a pain in the neck and a thorn in their flesh, and a maverick, and a smartarse, and all the things you’re good at.’

  ‘Thanks very much. How’s the Phoenix?’

  ‘I’m beginning to tame the beast.’

  ‘That was a crazy thing you did, putting it in the pawn shop.’

  ‘I never did. Told you I had a plan B. I told Mr Fox I owned a Strad and I told him I’d wager my viola. My other viola. Copy of the Archinto Stradivari, Duncan Sanderson, Glasgow, 1965. Nice instrument. Might fetch $5000.’

  At dusk my darling mum Hine and I went for a long walk north up Ninety Mile Beach and I asked her what I should do. I thought she was going to say, ‘I don’t care. So long as you’re happy.’ But she didn’t. She said, ‘Take the job.’ Just like MacKenzie said. I asked her why, and she said much the same as MacKenzie had said. Pain in the neck, thorn in the flesh, etc. I’d get stuff done. I said I was worried about how things were around here. I was preoccupied with my dad’s brittle diabetes. I’d tweaked his medication and phoned Dr Judkins the GP to arrange an urgent appointment. But Hine shook her head and said a very characteristic thing: ‘She’ll be right.’

  I went back down to Auckland, and I still didn’t have a clue where I was going, what I was going to do next, where I was going to end up. I met Major Forster for coffee in a favourite watering hole of mine, a coffee shop on the edge of a mall at the corner of Queen Street and Quay Street.

  Forster said, ‘Thanks.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For a job well done. An accurate diagnosis, I understand, and a propitious outcome.’

  ‘You call 95 per cent full thickness burns propitious?’

  ‘Well, I wondered about that. When I heard your testimony, or rather lack of testimony, I thought to myself, ‘This guy is on our side. He’s protecting us. We were after Fox, but this man’s not giving us away.’

  ‘That’s not right. It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘I know. I know, because we didn’t kill Fox. I wonder who did? Who had motive? An employee? A wife? A daughter?’

  ‘Plenty of motive, certainly. Nobody liked him much.’

  ‘You know, don’t you?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You know. You know because he told you. That’s what he told you in the last minutes of his life. He told you who doused him in gasoline and set fire to him.’

  I never said a word. I just drank my hazelnut latte.

  ‘I hazard another guess. The person who killed Fox is the person who released you from his sauna. Isn’t that right?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘You know, twenty-four hours after Fox died, two men boarded a Qantas flight out of Christchurch to Melbourne. There they got a connection to Ho Chi Minh City. Then they boarded a Vietnam Airlines flight to Moscow. I have an idea you might just have prevented World War Three.’

  ‘That sounds a little fanciful.’

  ‘I suppose you must have decided that, whoever it was, nothing would be served by bringing it all to light. It’s fine by me. I trust your judgement. I suppose I’d just like the nod so as to know I’m on the right track.’

  I said, ‘Major Forster, have you ever heard of a man named Donald Kutyna?’

  ‘I can’t say I have.’

  ‘He was a General in the US Air Force. He sat on the Challenger Inquiry. You reminded me of him that time you warned me to ‘check six’. That’s a US Air Force expression. Watch your back. Kutyna told the physicist Richard Feynman to ‘check six’ when he was making a nuisance of himself and exposing NASA shortcomings. He had Feynman round to his house for dinner one night, and took him out to the garage and showed him a vintage car he was working on. He picked up a carburettor and told him these damn things leak in the cold. That’s essentially what caused the Challenger disaster. Kutyna knew it all along. He just needed some maverick who operated outside the system to articulate it.’

  ‘What exactly has this got to do with the price of fish?’ (Forster was going native.)

  ‘Just that your committee sine nominee have been working me, running me blind, on a “need to know” basis. You mustn’t be surprised if I reciprocate.’

  ‘Who killed Phineas Fox?’

  I drained my hazelnut latte. ‘I couldn’t possibly say.’

  ‘In the final analysis, was it you?’

  ‘I still think there is a difference between palliating somebody’s agony, and putting somebody out of their misery. But sometimes it can be hard to discern. But enough already. It’s me who should be thanking you. Thanks for not giving up on me when I could so easily have been thrown to the wolves.’

  ‘You’re very welcome. We look after our own.’

  ‘I’m not in the firm.’

  ‘Yes you are. Well, if you want it. Civil will kick up a bit of a stink, but you’ve got allies. And Margaret Rowallan will have the last word.’

  ‘I don’t know, Major. I’ve said it before, I like it here. I have a life here – could have a life here. You want me to go back to that miserable, rain-soaked, snob-ridden, festering …?’

  ‘That’s the deal. Don’t say you’re not tempted.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Fair enough. That just about ties up all the loose ends. With one exception. They never found Kramer. They dredged the mud bath at the end of the Big Push. But they never found a body.’

  We left it at that. Forster paid the bill. We parted on the pavement. He was going back up Queen Street to collect his car, while I decided on a whim to take the ferry across to Devonport and do some house hunting – just in case.

  We shook hands. As he turned to go, I said, ‘By the way … I don’t even know your first name.’

  ‘It’s Martin.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Martin.’

  He laughed. We went our separate ways. He turned one last time, grinned at me, and called out.

  ‘Check six!’

  II

  Classified. MOD property.

  Cabinet Office Briefing Room A.

  Class B Security Clearance and above only.

  Content subject to Official Secrets Act 1989.

/>   Not to be removed. In event of unauthorised removal, holder should return to MOD, Whitehall, Westminster, London, SW1A2HB.

  Extract from Extraordinary General Meeting, Committee Sine Nomine, minutes of April 25th.

  Witan: Baroness Margaret Rowallan, Rear-Admiral Miles Mattick, Air Vice-Marshall John Herring, Sir Christopher Hotchkiss, Mr Jonathan Braithwaite, Dr Ralph Parkinson, Chief Superintendent Harry Golightly, Chief Inspector Ronald Slack, Lord Justice Forteviot Dunning, Archbishop Percy Mogadishu.

  Attending via video link: Major General Iain Civil, Major Martin Forster.

  Item 7A: Appointment to the position of National Medical Adviser to the Security Services …

  ‘Frankly,’ snapped Major General Civil, speaking from Government House in Remuera, ‘I’m not happy with this appointment. Dr Cameron-Strange is unreliable, unpredictable, whimsical, capricious, and a maverick. He is certainly not a team player.’

  ‘With the greatest respect, sir,’ said Major Forster, speaking from the same location, ‘May I point out that Dr Cameron-Strange has undergone half a dozen ordeals over the past three months, largely on our behalf. In the first place, he has had to endure the appalling strain of appearing in court on a charge of manslaughter. Whatever his motivation, his reticence in the dock certainly worked to the advantage of this committee. Secondly, he saved the life of a trainee pilot who, unknown to him, happened to be one of ours. But for his chivalrous intervention, his skill and his nerve, Captain Hodgson would likely not be with us. He put his own reputation on the line. Had he failed, it would have been trashed.

  ‘Thirdly, he went up to Vanuatu on a retrieval mission made very hazardous by extreme weather conditions. Cut off for a day, he improvised a successful treatment. Fourthly, on his return, he undertook an investigation on our behalf, and established a vital piece of information. Fifthly, he took part in an extreme sport event and won it, an outcome for which I think the majority of New Zealand people are extremely grateful. Sixth and last, he made a return to a place he detested and underwent an ordeal I would suggest was at the limit of human endurance. It’s an extraordinary achievement. Maybe he’s not a team player. Call him unpredictable. Call him a maverick if you like. It’s precisely what we needed. I think we should take him on. I propose he succeed as the next N-MASS. Codename: Speedbird’.