Game of Stones

by David Maughan Brown

  ‘A message for me,’ Cameron said. ‘To tell me who is responsible for my being in this cell facing a life sentence for a murder I didn’t commit. To make it absolutely clear to me who is responsible for framing me. He will have been involved in one way or another in Mutoni’s murder, but won’t have killed her himself. He always used to get someone else to do the dirty work.’

  ‘Who are we talking about?’ Hudson asked.

  ‘A man called van Zyl,’ Cameron answered. ‘He was the commanding officer of the Security Branch man I told you about.’

  ‘So the Go stones tell you he plays Go,’ Hudson said, ‘and putting them on Mutoni’s eyes and between her lips tells you that he knows about Greek fairy tales. And that is enough to identify him?’

  ‘Yes,’ Cameron said. ‘He has sent me a similar message before. He left a vase of Go stones on my wife and children’s grave. That was also a message about death. The reference to Greek mythology this time is probably his way of telling me to go to Hell. Van Zyl must be behind all this. Thanks very much for finding that out for me.’

  ‘I can’t see how it can help to get you out of this,’ Hudson said, gesturing towards the walls of the cell and, by implication, the police station as a whole. ‘Let me know if you need me to do anything else.’

  It can only be van Zyl, Cameron thought as the sound of Hudson’s heavy boots faded away down the corridor. And that, at last, explained the 3am phone calls. Van Zyl wouldn’t have needed to be in the country, or even to be awake himself, to have had the calls put through. He would know people who could set him up with the international cold-calling technology that was driving people to distraction with offers of everything from solar-heating to help with no-win-no-fee insurance claims. How often had he picked up the receiver when the telephone rang during the day, only to hear nothing at the other end?

  Van Zyl knew how badly he and Jules had been affected by the 3am death threats and would know that 3am phone-calls now, even twenty years later and without the death threats, would freak him out. Van Zyl might even know that Cameron was suffering from PTSD, which would amplify the anxiety he would feel when his phone rang at the dead of night. Van Zyl had had access to an extensive network of Special Branch agents and informants in the UK under apartheid – who knew how much information he might still be able to gather? He had bided his time, just making sure Cameron’s nerves were kept jangling, until an opportunity came for him to get his revenge. He might even see himself as God’s avenging instrument – he was mad enough for that.

  Another long night passed without much sleep. It wasn’t Cameron’s shoulder that kept him awake, just the racing of his brain as more pieces of the puzzle were pushed into place. He was very pleased to see Harriet arrive earlier than usual – he felt that it couldn’t be long before his batteries ran out and his brain seized up altogether.

  ‘It wasn’t Mossad, after all,’ Cameron said after they had exchanged the relative formality of the kiss-on-each-cheek greeting.

  ‘What wasn’t Mossad?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘The man whose nose I head-butted after the PSC march,’ Cameron said. ‘He offered me a chocolate button from a packet he was holding after he had taken my photograph – they ended up all over the floor when I knocked him down. Van Zyl must have put him up to it. Don’t you see?’

  ‘Slow down, slow down,’ Harriet said. ‘Take a deep breath, or count to a hundred, or do whatever you have to do when you need to calm yourself down. No I don’t see – you are going much too fast for me. What on earth do chocolate buttons have to do with anything?’

  ‘They were made of white chocolate, not brown,’ Cameron said. ‘Were you to count all the white chocolate buttons in the world, and then count all the brown ones, I’m sure you would find that the white ones are very much a minority compared to the brown ones. In pretty much the same proportions, I would guess, as white people in South Africa now are to people who aren’t white.’

  ‘Are you feeling alright?’ Harriet asked, looking closely at Cameron.

  ‘Yes, of course I’m feeling alright,’ Cameron answered. ‘What makes you think I might not be? So a white chocolate button can be seen to represent the white South African responsible for what has been going on.’

  ‘That’s possible,’ Harriet said, ‘but wouldn’t the same rough proportions apply equally well to Israelis and Arabs in the Near East? And, even if your cameraman was put up to it by your van Zyl man, that doesn’t preclude him from being a Mossad agent. You told me yourself that the armed forces and security police of Israel and South Africa worked hand in glove under apartheid. Your van Zyl man would have had contacts in Mossad during the 1980s, it would be very surprising if he hasn’t maintained them.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t keep calling him “my” van Zyl man,’ Cameron said. ‘He is one of the nastiest bits of work I’ve ever come across – second only to Venter, but nasty in a very different way. I have no desire whatever to lay claim to him. But that is a side issue. During the night I worked out what the chocolate buttons were all about. The white ones are pretty much the same size and colour as white Go stones. Van Zyl was sending me a message, if I was smart enough to read it – which I wasn’t. He was telling me not only that he is the superior player but also that he has sente….’

  ‘He has what?’ Harriet interrupted.

  ‘Sente,’ Cameron said. ‘I was going to explain – give me a chance. Sente is a Go term which means making a move that you opponent is obliged to respond to. He can’t just ignore your move and make a move somewhere else on the board without damaging his position. The player who is in sente is controlling the game. I think the white chocolate button wasn’t just telling me that van Zyl sees himself as the stronger player; he was also gloating about the fact that he could get his man to piss me off so badly that I would overreact and get myself into trouble. He was forcing a bad move on my part. A player who knew what he was doing would respond to a sente move by shoring up his weak position. Van Zyl is basically saying that my position is so weak it is undefendable.’

  ‘Who would have guessed that a chocolate button could be so pregnant with meaning,’ Harriet said.

  ‘You think I’m going off the rails myself, don’t you?’ Cameron responded. ‘You’ve got to believe me. I know it sounds a bit far-fetched, and I don’t know what the connection is between van Zyl and the cameraman, but I am absolutely certain that was what the chocolate button was about. But you are right, the fact that van Zyl was the puppet-master doesn’t mean that the puppet wasn’t a Mossad agent. In fact, come to think of it, he must have been. If he had come along with the sole intention of infuriating me, he wouldn’t have needed to get himself wet making sure he had good photographs of everyone on the march. He could just have provoked me into assaulting him during the placard stand at the end.’

  ‘All of that is actually beside the immediate point, anyway,’ said Harriet. ‘You aren’t in here because you assaulted the cameraman, that’s water under the bridge. I’ve got the photograph of the Go stones you asked for. It’s a clear photograph of the five black stones but I can’t see how it is going to help us.’

  Harriet opened the black leather briefcase she had put down on the cushion beside her when she sat down, unzipped the front pocket, and took out a photograph in a transparent plastic folder that she passed to Cameron.

  ‘Look,’ said Cameron immediately, ‘you can see that they come from different sets of Go stones. The stones are all more or less the same size diameter-wise, but three of them are thicker than the other two – see how they stand up from the surface they are resting on?’

  ‘Yes, I hadn’t noticed that,’ Harriet said, taking the folder from Cameron and looking closely at it. ‘But why is that significant?’

  ‘It may not be,’ Cameron said, ‘but the three stones come from a set that isn’t my set. While the two stones I gave Mutoni are made of glass, I’m pretty sure
that the other three come from a much more expensive set. The white stones from the traditional Japanese sets are carved from shell, and the black ones from slate. I bought one of those sets not long before I had to leave South Africa but, like so much else, it got left behind and I don’t know what happened to it.’

  ‘So, if you are right,’ Harriet said, ‘van Zyl doesn’t murder Mutoni himself, but gives his hit-man your gun to kill her with, and at the same time gives him three expensive slate Go stones to plant on her body.’ She paused before going on, ‘I have to say that sounds wildly improbable – and if it sounds improbable to me, it is going to sound equally improbable to a jury. After all, I know you well enough to be confident you didn’t murder Mutoni, whereas the jury won’t know you at all and will almost certainly know, however careful the jury selection may be, that there has been at least one murder in your chequered past. The editors of The Sun were obviously trying to ensure exactly that. Leaving that aside, where would van Zyl have got the slate stones from?’

  ‘Judging by the improbably expensive and tasteful furniture and paintings in his office,’ Cameron answered, ‘he will certainly own one of the shell and slate sets himself, though I somehow doubt that he would be willing to sacrifice three of his own stones.’

  ‘Alright,’ Harriet said, ‘let’s think this through. Van Zyl doesn’t know that Mutoni already has two Go stones with your DNA on them in her pocket. He makes sure that three stones are planted on her body and isn’t worried that they don’t have your DNA on them because he is confident that your gun will make the DNA case without needing the corroboration of DNA on the stones. Three stones because he needs two for her eyes and one for her mouth. So the stones are a message for you, not a message for the police. The police will just assume that you cleaned any DNA off the stones beforehand and wore gloves when you planted them. They won’t be particularly interested in why you might have done that because they will assume on the basis of your obsession with Hillsborough that you are mad as a box of frogs.’

  ‘Two problems with that,’ Cameron said, ‘one minor, the other major. The minor one is that he didn’t need three stones. The coins on the eyes, and the coin in the mouth relate to two different traditions. If the stones were intended as a memento mori or, even more sinister, as a death threat, he could have got away with one or the other, he didn’t need both. The major problem, though, is that the three stones weren’t all entirely free of DNA – one of them had someone’s DNA on it that wasn’t mine.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Harriet said, looking carefully at the photograph again, ‘you can see quite clearly that there is a smear of something on one of them.’

  ‘If van Zyl was responsible,’ Cameron said, ‘and I’m sure he was, you can be quite sure that he wouldn’t have been careless enough to choose a stone with his own DNA on it. It also seems unlikely to me that he would have been happy just to plant three stones with no DNA whatever on them. However convincing the case may be on the basis of the DNA on my Sig Sauer, I don’t think van Zyl would have been able to resist twisting the knife. My guess is that he probably assumed that any DNA left on the stones would be found to be mine.’

  ‘In which case the stones must be your stones or, at the very least, ones he knows you played with,’ Harriet said. ‘But I’m afraid I need to rush off now. We clearly need to find out more about the DNA on that stone. In terms of disclosure I can oblige them to tell me exactly what they found. I’ll make sure I get an answer on that piece of the jigsaw, if not an answer to the puzzle as a whole. It’s a good thing the need to discuss your defence provides a reason for them to allow me to see you whenever I need to – although technically, of course, it is you who are allowed access to your solicitor at any reasonable time.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Cameron said, ‘your visits are more important to me than that – even if you can only come in your capacity as my solicitor.’

  ‘It’s good to see you exhibiting more vital signs than you have of late,’ Harriet said. ‘But don’t get your hopes up too high. We are a very long way from being out of the woods yet.’

  ‘I know,’ Cameron replied, ‘and there are still some very nasty creatures lurking in the wood. But still – it’s nice to see you.’

  ‘You too,’ Harriet said, picking up her briefcase and moving towards the door. ‘See you tomorrow.’

  Chapter 16

  The one and only advantage of sleeping in a cell in a police station, as far as Cameron could see, was the guarantee that the phone wouldn’t wake him at three in the morning. It didn’t stop the nightmares. Lying on a concrete bench, thinly disguised as a bed by the inch or so of foam in the blue cushion, was adding severe backache to the pain in his shoulder and triggering an uncomfortable burning sensation in his feet. Not being able to sleep gave him plenty of time to think, but he had more than enough time for that during the interminable daylight hours, and his thinking seemed to be getting slower and fuzzier with every passing day.

  From time to time Cameron found himself wondering whether it wouldn’t be better to be in a prison rather than the police station after all. At least they would have to allow him time for exercise – time to get out of his increasingly oppressive cell. Cabin-fever couldn’t hold a candle to cell-fever. He had never appreciated just how difficult every new arrival in prison must find it to come to terms with being locked up. Apart from Harriet’s relatively fleeting visits, and the occasional brief conversation with Hudson, he was being held in what amounted to solitary confinement, and that, as everyone should know, was a form of torture.

  When Harriet was let into his cell the next morning she seemed to Cameron somehow to have become a little softer round the edges. Immaculately dressed as always, with every hair still appropriately ordered in its proper place in her helmet-like hairstyle, she nevertheless conveyed the impression that the armour plating had been loosened just a bit. But that might, of course, just be wishful thinking.

  ‘The stain on that Go stone is definitely dried blood,’ Harriet said, without any preliminaries. ‘They have confirmed that it is blood and I did a bit of research before I came in this morning. Those could be stones from your set – provided van Zyl had some way of getting hold of them.’

  ‘But I haven’t touched those stones for the better part of twenty-three years,’ Cameron said.

  ‘It they are yours, that is why any DNA on them is only on the one stone,’ Harriet said. ‘DNA from skin or sweat wouldn’t have lasted this long, but DNA can apparently be extracted from dried blood for years. But it is puzzling that the DNA isn’t yours.’

  ‘If the stones are mine, the DNA must be Lynn’s,’ Cameron said, trying to push aside the curtain of fuzziness. ‘The stones I had ordered arrived so shortly before I left that I never played with the black stones myself, but I did start teaching Lynn to play. I can’t remember Lynn ever playing with a cut on her hand, but if the stones are mine it can only be Lynn’s blood. It seems very unlike her, but I think we can be confident that nobody will have played with them after I left.’

  ‘How would van Zyl have got hold of them?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘All too easily,’ Cameron replied. ‘The Special Branch raided Lynn’s house within hours of the body being found, and I was told that van Zyl had led that particular raid himself. There wouldn’t have been anything to stop him taking the stones. He must have noticed that one of them had blood on it and assumed that it was my blood.’

  ‘But if van Zyl was responsible for getting one of the policemen who searched your house to steal your gun, why wouldn’t he have asked him to take the stones at the same time?’ Harriet asked. ‘The ones you’ve been playing with recently would be much more likely to have your DNA.’

  ‘How would van Zyl know that I still play Go and that my stones would be accessible?’ Cameron asked. ‘Anyway, the more I think about it the more sure I am that he would be confident that the DNA side of things had been taken care of v
ia my automatic. I’m sure it was me, not the police, that that message was intended for. As far as he was concerned, if my DNA happened to be found on the stones that would just be a bonus.’

  ‘But if it didn’t turn out to be yours, it could be a mistake,’ Harriet said. ‘We could build your defence on that one stone. This looks like a perfect vindication of the disclosure rules. They were obliged to tell us about the three stones they weren’t going to cite as evidence because they might assist our defence. It is beginning to look as if they could do just that.’

  ‘A single stone is often the key to a successful Go defence,’ Cameron observed. ‘But van Zyl makes very few mistakes and will have been planning this for so long that I can’t kindle much optimism.’

  ‘Van Zyl might well have had a long term plan to use the stones against you in one way or another,’ Harriet said, ‘but framing you for murdering Mutoni obviously couldn’t have been part of the plan – you only met her recently. He must have acted opportunistically, which is when people tend to make mistakes. If the blood is Lynn’s, we need to…’

  ‘Wait a second,’ Cameron said, standing up abruptly before taking three steps across the cell to stand, feet astride, with his back to Harriet.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Harriet asked.

  Cameron didn’t say anything, he just folded his arms and leant forward to rest his forehead against the wall. After twenty seconds of silence, which Harriet clearly didn’t think there was any point in breaking to ask if he was alright, Cameron abruptly swung round to face her.

  ‘Of course! Of bloody course! How could I have been so cretinously brain-dead all this time?’ Cameron said. ‘Do you have your laptop in your briefcase?’

  ‘Yes, I always carry it with me,’ Harriet said. ‘What on earth is going on?’