Game of Stones

by David Maughan Brown

  As luck would have it – Cameron wasn’t sure whether it was good or bad – a police surgeon happened to be on the premises. He had been called down, made a cursory examination and declared Cameron to be FTI, which the custody officer had translated as ‘fit to be interviewed’.

  ‘Who is Harries?’ Cameron asked. He was still feeling headachy and a bit dizzy, almost hung-over. He should be feeling grief at the news of Mutoni’s murder rather than feeling knotted with apprehension about its implications for himself.

  ‘The custody officer,’ Harriet answered. ‘Are you feeling OK? You don’t look it.’

  ‘I’m probably feeling as OK as most people feel when they are charged with a murder they didn’t commit,’ Cameron said. ‘The walls closed in on me and cut off the light. But I think I’m more or less OK now.’

  ‘So what on earth is going on?’ Harriet asked. ‘You didn’t murder her did you?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Cameron replied, after a pause during which he looked carefully round the cell to see if he could spot where they had placed the microphone. You had to assume that police cells were bugged, although in this instance it wouldn’t matter. He had nothing to hide.

  ‘In which case,’ Harriet said, ‘someone is obviously trying to frame you for Mrs Sehene’s murder. But who, and why?’

  ‘They’ll think I fainted because I murdered her,’ Cameron said. ‘I can’t believe that after all she had been through in Rwanda – including having her children slaughtered and having to spend weeks and weeks up to her neck in a festering swamp to avoid being murdered herself – she could end up with a bullet in the back of her head, not in Kigali, but in Sheffield of all places.’

  ‘Who would want to murder her?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘I don’t know precisely,’ Cameron replied. ‘She was due to testify at a genocide tribunal in Tanzania and was very worried that people connected with the Hutu leaders on trial were going to try to stop her from testifying.’

  ‘But what has that got to do with you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Cameron, ‘absolutely nothing. I hardly even knew her really. She had the allotment next to mine. She only came to my house on two occasions, but it seems that they must have abducted her just after she left the last time. She had been looking for a safe house and had spent the night with me.’

  ‘Perhaps it was someone who was jealous?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘Jealous?’

  ‘Someone who assumed, because she had slept the night in your house, that she must have slept with you,’ Harriet said.

  ‘If that is an indirect way of asking if I slept with her,’ Cameron said, ‘the answer is no. I might well have made a move in that direction once I had got to know her better – she was extremely attractive, in a distant kind of way – but long before that could happen I discovered that she is, or rather was, gay. Since Mutoni disappeared I have been in regular contact with her partner, Ellen, who lives in Leeds. I wonder whether the police know about Ellen. Someone is going to need to break the news to her.’

  ‘I’m sure they will,’ Harriet said. ‘The police usually do that kind of thing very well. But none of that helps with answering the question about what any of that has to do with you.’

  ‘Nothing,’ Cameron repeated, ‘absolutely nothing. The Rwandan business has nothing whatever to do with me, and the people who were stalking Mutoni would have known that perfectly well.’

  ‘So who might want to frame you?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘If you were to ask my friend Brian that question,’ Cameron answered, ‘he would give you a long list of people who might want to frame me. He thinks I piss off too many people, much too often.’

  ‘He may well be right that you annoy too many people,’ Harriet said, ‘but you have to annoy people pretty badly for them to go to the trouble of framing you for murder. Who would he put at the top of his list?’

  ‘Mossad probably, and where Mossad is concerned we have an immediate suspect in the man I head-butted the other day,’ Cameron answered.

  ‘But why would Mossad be particularly interested in you, and go to such elaborate lengths to frame you? Have you done anything they might want to get you for that you haven’t told me about?’

  ‘No,’ Cameron said. ‘I’ve been asking myself the same question.’

  ‘There are hundreds of people in cities all around the UK who sit on PSC committees and publish letters and articles critical of the government of Israel,’ Harriet said. ‘Yours might be more hard-hitting than most, but there is no way Mossad would run the public relations risk of murdering someone in England just to discredit one among the hundreds of critics of the Israeli government – particularly when that one individual isn’t particularly prominent or influential.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Cameron said. ‘That’s a bit deflating – but I’m not under any illusion that anything I write makes much difference.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Harriet said, ‘it is possible that your cameraman could have gone rogue and acted on his own purely out of revenge for what you did to him, without thinking about the potential damage to Mossad’s reputation.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s likely,’ Cameron said. ‘Going to elaborate lengths might have made sense if Mossad were responsible and I was living on the West Bank. Targeted assassination may be a viable option in the occupied territories, but it would be much too risky in UK. Here they rely on propaganda and lobbying. If Mutoni’s murderer was a rogue agent out for revenge, surely he would have been much more direct and just put a bullet in my head rather than Mutoni’s? Anyway, if he was acting alone, how could he have got hold of my gun?’

  ‘A Mossad agent who had infiltrated the South Yorkshire police and got himself onto the team searching your house?’ Harriet suggested.

  ‘It is certainly possible that they might have agents under cover in UK police forces,’ Cameron agreed, ‘in fact they probably do have. But why risk blowing elaborately built-up cover just to frame me? I can’t possibly be an irritating enough thorn in their side for that – regrettably.’

  ‘So if it isn’t Mossad, who would be next on Brian’s list?’ Harriet asked.

  The paracetamol Cameron had been given was kicking in and the pain in his head was becoming less of an obstacle to thinking.

  ‘Even if he wasn’t a Mossad agent,’ Cameron said, ‘my gun could only have been taken by one of the policemen who searched my house. The reason it wasn’t mentioned when they were questioning me must have been because whoever found it wanted to use it to frame me.’

  ‘It seems wildly improbable,’ Harriet said, ‘that any South Yorkshire policeman would risk his career by holding onto a prohibited weapon he had found during a raid, and then go on to risk a life sentence by using it to murder someone – all just to frame you? What could you possibly have done to make any policeman think that was a risk worth taking? Surely it would have been enough for anyone you had irritated, no matter how much, just to hand the gun in and make sure you spent some time in prison?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cameron said, feeling overcome with weariness, ‘I just don’t know. But they say everyone has a price. It had to be a policeman – but someone else could have been paying him.’

  ‘You are 100% certain are you that the gun was under your mattress when they raided?’ Harriet asked. ‘When did you last see it?’

  ‘I’m 99% certain,’ Cameron said after a moment’s pause. ‘I hadn’t actually checked for a few days – I can’t remember precisely when I last saw it, probably the last time I changed the sheets – but nobody else had been in the house since then so it must have been there.’

  ‘Mutoni had been in the house, hadn’t she?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘That’s true,’ Cameron said, ‘but she didn’t go into my bedroom, and why, anyway, would she have wanted to take my gun?’

  ‘To protect herself?’ Harriet suggested.
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  ‘So she steals my gun,’ Cameron said, ‘and then shoots herself in the back of the head with it by way of protecting herself, does she?’

  ‘No need for sarcasm,’ Harriet replied. ‘But you are right, that doesn’t make any sense. Even if the people who abducted her had found the gun on her and decided to use it to murder her, they wouldn’t have known it was your gun. Who else would have been on Brian’s list? It sounds as if it must have been someone who could pull the strings of a puppet in the police force.’

  ‘The editors and journalists of the tabloids,’ Cameron replied. ‘But I doubt whether even The Sun or the Daily Mail would go to the lengths of murdering a black woman just to frame someone who was irritating them – however much Mutoni’s status as a black migrant might have tempted them to do that.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Harriet agreed. ‘But you can be quite sure that they are going to get a great story out of this. You need to prepare yourself for that. Anyone else?’

  ‘Anyone from the wide range of lunatic fringe right-wing political groups the loss of Empire has spawned,’ Cameron replied. ‘There are plenty of racists, fascists and neo-Nazis out there who will have been intensely irritated by some of what I have written – assuming that they can read. That would include the England First Party, the Nationalist Alliance, the British People’s Party, and the New Nationalist Party, just for a start. After living through apartheid all I need in my life is a New Nationalist Party. That list would probably have to include a few eccentrics sitting on the Tory back benches.’

  ‘You’ve never had the kind of direct contact with any members of those extremist organisations that would give you reason to think any of them might be responsible?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘No,’ Cameron answered, pausing for a moment before continuing. ‘When I discussed the disappearance of my Sig Sauer with Brian, he thought that the gun had probably been taken so that it could be sold on the black market – but at that stage we didn’t know that it had been used to murder Mutoni.’

  ‘That is still possible,’ Harriet said. ‘Your gun might have been taken and sold, and whoever bought it might then have used it to kill Mutoni. There might not have been any intention to put you in the frame, it could just have been coincidence. The killer might well have had no idea who you are or where the gun came from.’

  ‘In which case choosing my allotment to bury it on would have been a singular coincidence,’ Cameron responded. ‘And why phone Crimestoppers to let the police know where it had been buried? Do we know where and how Mutoni’s body was found? I’ll bet it was another anonymous phonecall rather than a dog-walker.’

  ‘It should be easy enough to establish that,’ said Harriet.

  Footsteps sounded in the corridor and the metallic clinking of keys could be heard as someone tried to identify the right one.

  ‘They will almost certainly try to provoke you into saying something it would be better not to say,’ Harriet said. ‘Try not to let them succeed.’

  Harries, the custody officer, opened the door and came in.

  ‘Is Dr Beaumont feeling well enough for the questioning to continue?’ he asked, addressing Harriet as though Cameron wasn’t there.

  ‘Yes – I think so,’ Harriet said looking at Cameron, who inclined his head slightly by way of assent. Might as well get on with it and get it over.

  The personnel the other side of the table had been upgraded now that the inquiry had become a murder inquiry rather than just a prohibited weapons one. Gorbachev look-alike Detective Inspector Sinclair had replaced Scott, but apparently only as a spectator. It was still the out-ranked Evans who was asking the questions.

  ‘I would like a detailed outline of your movements over this past weekend – from 6am on Saturday morning until Sunday midnight,’ Evans demanded.

  ‘I was in my flat all…, ’

  ‘Not true,’ Evans interrupted. ‘The flat you are living in at the moment is not your flat, it is your friend’s. You would do well to tell the truth.’

  Cameron took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, focusing intently on the wart on Evans’s nose. It had a hair growing out of it that Evans kept trimmed, but couldn’t trim quite enough to conceal. Harriet was right – it wouldn’t be a good idea to allow himself to be provoked.

  ‘Answer the question,’ Evans instructed, before adding a belated and insincere sounding ‘please’.

  ‘Because my own house had been gratuitously and wantonly damaged by a gang of South Yorkshire policemen who arrived mob-handed before dawn on a wild-goose chase that any half-intelligent member of the public would have realized was a wild-goose chase before wasting public money pursuing the geese, I spent the weekend in the flat of a friend of mine who had kindly offered me shelter,’ Cameron said quietly. Avoiding being provoked meant not raising his voice.

  ‘The entire weekend?’ Evans asked, after a few moments of charged silence. ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Yes – the entire weekend,’ Cameron said. ‘I was turning the notes I had made on the Metropolitan Police’s grossly incompetent murder of Jean Charles de Menezes into the first draft of a chapter of a book I am writing on post-9/11 overreaction. You are very welcome to read it – if you haven’t hacked my PC and done so already. You might find it instructive.’

  Cameron glanced sideways at Harriet next to him. The slight wrinkling of the skin between her carefully tended eyebrows suggested that she didn’t have a lot of confidence in Cameron’s resistance to being provoked.

  ‘So you didn’t leave the flat all weekend. Did you have any visitors?’ Evans asked.

  ‘No. I told you I spent the weekend writing,’ Cameron answered. ‘If you have to entertain visitors you can’t be writing. Just in case you are feeling inclined to point out that I couldn’t have spent the entire weekend writing, and to accuse me of lying, I probably need to add that I did take time out to shower, go to the toilet, brush my teeth, eat and sleep a bit. But I didn’t shave.’

  ‘So you don’t have an alibi,’ Evans observed. ‘There is nobody who can verify your claim to have been in your friend’s flat all weekend. There is nobody who is in a position to prove that you didn’t murder Mrs Sehene, who, preliminary investigations suggest, must have died sometime over the weekend.’

  ‘No,’ Cameron said, ‘I don’t suppose there is. But it isn’t up to me to prove that I didn’t murder Mutoni is it? It is up to you to prove I did – which you obviously can’t do, for the simple reason that I didn’t murder her. Why would I do that anyway? What possible motive could I have had?’

  ‘It isn’t going to be at all difficult to prove you murdered her, Dr Beaumont,’ Evans said. ‘It didn’t take ten seconds to establish that, as I suspected, one bullet had been fired from the clip in your automatic, and forensics have now confirmed that the bullet which killed Mrs Sehene was fired from that very same automatic. We wouldn’t even have to mention that it just happened to be your allotment the gun was found on for a jury to be certain to convict you.’

  Cameron felt the energy needed to keep his mind focused on what was being said, and to give articulate answers to Evans’s questions, draining out of him. It left behind a confused mix of grief and shock over Mutoni’s death and an acute awareness of the hopelessness of his own situation. Evans was right – there was more than enough circumstantial evidence to convince a jury. Mutoni’s dignity and stoicism as she sat recounting the horror of her experience came vividly to mind. He wouldn’t be able to match that – not that a few years in prison would even begin to compare in awfulness with her month in that festering mud.

  You can’t prove a negative. He couldn’t prove that he hadn’t killed Mutoni – any more than he had been able to prove, all those years ago, that he hadn’t been a police spy. If he had been able to prove that he hadn’t been working for the Special Branch he would still be in South Africa, and all this would never have happened. He couldn’t
even prove it to Harriet, sitting here beside him – although he hoped that by now she had spent enough time with him for him not to need to. But he couldn’t just roll over and die.

  ‘So if I had killed Mutoni,’ Cameron said, ‘why would I be stupid enough to bury the murder weapon on my own allotment when the whole of Yorkshire was at my disposal? And, if I were going to bury it on my allotment, why would I not take care to make sure that it wasn’t blindingly obvious that the ground where I had buried it had been freshly dug? Why, for that matter, would I have buried it at the end of a row of potatoes that will need to be lifted in a few months time, bringing the gun up with them? If I wanted to hide something on my allotment I would bury it somewhere where the ground was never likely to be dug over.’

  ‘We ask the questions here, not you,’ said Sinclair, intervening for the first time.

  ‘How am I supposed to be able to read the mind of a murderer?’ Evans asked. ‘Murderers don’t think the way other people do. Perhaps you felt guilty about doing what you did and subconsciously wanted to be found out.’

  ‘Sure,’ Cameron said, ‘and perhaps I wanted to sleep with my mother and felt compelled to expunge my guilty feelings about that by executing someone else’s mother who had come to me for shelter. But, seriously, what motive could I possibly have had for murdering someone I liked and admired?’

  ‘We ask the questions here,’ Sinclair repeated.

  Evans turned his wart towards Sinclair and raised a questioning eyebrow, in response to which Sinclair shrugged his shoulders and nodded assent.

  ‘My guess is that you murdered her because you tried to make love to her and she spurned your advances,’ Evans said. ‘The full forensic report will tell us whether or not she was raped before she was murdered.’

  ‘I would never ever rape anyone,’ Cameron said. ‘Besides which she was lesbian.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Evans. ‘Enough said.’