‘How did you manage that? Didn’t he recognise you?’ Cameron asked.
‘I don’t think so,’ Brian said. ‘When I got to the pub they were both there but I got the impression that a heated argument was on the go, and soon after I got there Frogs Pool looked at his watch, got a bit unsteadily to his feet, and left. I think he was quite drunk. I got the impression that the argument had something to do with Jack’s hands, which he kept trying to get Frogs Pool to look at. Even from where I was sitting they looked very red and sore. On the way to the bar for a refill I stopped by his table, introduced myself as a doctor and said I couldn’t avoid noticing his hands. I said I hoped that he had had them looked at.’
‘That was a bit cheeky,’ Cameron said. ‘You don’t look remotely like a doctor and couldn’t have answered any questions he might have put to you on the subject. I would have expected him to smell a rat and disappear out into the night.’
‘I had no idea how he might react and half expected that too,’ Brian said. ‘But he didn’t seem irritated by my approach, in fact he seemed pleased that someone was taking an interest in his problem. He’s probably a bit of a hypochondriac. He told me his name and said the problem with his hands had been diagnosed as contact dermatitis, which meant that he couldn’t ever wear any kind of glove, and nothing could be done about it. He then put on his brave face and told me that it didn’t bother him much.’
‘So what did you do?’ Cameron asked.
‘I just said I was glad it was under control and went on my way,’ Brian replied.
‘In the league table of irrelevant information, Sari’s contact dermatitis is, at the very least, on a par with the Lidl bag,’ Cameron said. ‘What the hell has that got to do with anything?’
‘Ah, but wait – historians aren’t supposed to rush to conclusions, remember,’ Brian said. ‘Last night I finally got Frogs Pool alone, as I had hoped. I was sitting at the bar when he came in. He gave me the impression of already being a bit the worse for wear, but that didn’t stop him from ordering a double tequila and a pint of beer. He scrabbled around in his pocket for the cash to pay for it and found he hadn’t enough – he was 50p short – so I intervened and offered the 50p, which gave me the perfect excuse to join him at a table in the corner.’
‘That was lucky,’ Cameron said.
‘Very,’ Brian agreed. ‘Anyway, to cut a very long story as short as possible, I was right in thinking that he was already pissed by the time he got to the pub. It wasn’t difficult to get him to open up and give me an edited version of his life story – although he wasn’t pissed enough to say anything about Mutoni. He told me there had been no effing way he was going to stay in the South African police once a bunch of terrorists had been allowed to join – he called them “fokking black commie bastards”, along with a whole lot of what I assume were rather less polite Afrikaans words.’
‘As far as that lot were concerned “communist” was about as impolite as it could get,’ Cameron said.
‘Anyway,’ Brian went on, ‘he told me that he had been in the army before he joined the police, so he was very well qualified for a security job when he left the police. He apparently joined a small South African security company – I forget the name – which had been taken over by Securicor which then became G4S. He obviously wanted to put his macho credentials on display and told me he had worked in a number of different “hot spots”, as he called them – the Congo, Afghanistan and Iraq included. I got the impression that it hadn’t all been for G4S and that he had spent some time as a mercenary….’
‘There’s not a lot of difference,’ Cameron said.
‘Possibly not,’ Brian said. ‘I don’t know much about G4S. Anyway, he seemed drunk enough for me to risk saying that I thought I had seen him in the pub a few evenings before with a friend who sounded French. He asked what made me think Jack was a friend, but he was obviously feeling expansive and volunteered that he had met Jack when he was working in the Congo – he pronounced his name “jakes” – as in shithouse. He was clearly very pissed off with our friend Jack, but he had such a heavy Afrikander accent I had some difficulty, particularly to begin with, in understanding what he was on about.’
‘Afrikanders are a breed of cattle,’ Cameron remarked. ‘They tend not to be particularly talkative. You mean Afrikaans.’
‘OK, Afrikaans,’ Brian said. ‘Anyway, Frogs Pool then proceeded to give me Jack’s life history as well. He was apparently born in Mauritius but was taken to France as a teenager, got involved in drugs, did a spell in prison, and spent some time in the Foreign Legion and as a mercenary before joining G4S.’
‘Ideal credentials for a job with G4S,’ Cameron remarked. ‘Did you gather why Poggenpoel was so pissed off with Sari?’
‘Yes, he was talking so freely that I thought there couldn’t be much harm in asking him,’ Brian replied. ‘He said Jack – I wish you wouldn’t keep calling him Sari – was a “fokking lazy bastard” who always used his hands as an excuse when he didn’t want to do anything. Frogs Pool was clearly….’
‘Did you ask him what was the matter with Jack’s hands? – if you are going to insist on calling him Jack,’ Cameron interrupted.
‘It is his bloody name,’ Brian said. ‘Or, at least, it’s a damn sight nearer to his name than “Sari” is. I was just about to tell you, if you’d give me half a chance. Jack had apparently been an ace burglar when he was in Paris, which was apparently why he ended up in prison.’
‘If he was that ace he wouldn’t have landed in prison,’ Cameron commented, ‘contradiction in terms.’
‘No – apparently he was really good,’ Brian said. ‘Frogs Pool said that he’s never seen Jack take more than a few seconds to open a locked door. But he apparently developed such a violent latex allergy from the rubber gloves he’d been wearing during his burglaries that it became impossible for him to wear any gloves at all. All of which confirms what Jack had told me the night before. What Jack hadn’t told me was that he had tried to pursue a profession as a burglar without wearing gloves, but hadn’t been able to avoid leaving fingerprints behind and eventually got caught. So what do you make of all that then?’
Brian’s excitement had been becoming more and more evident as he spoke – he’d been talking faster as he went along, his voice had become louder and he’d asked his final question with a kind of vocal flourish – the magician whisking the cloth away and revealing a rabbit peering with some puzzlement over the rim of the top-hat. Cameron shared the puzzlement.
‘Nothing much,’ he said. ‘You already knew Jack had a problem with his hands. What am I supposed to make of it?’
‘Don’t you see?’ Brian asked. ‘A man you know to have been watching your house turns out to be an expert lock-picker. That has to be the last piece of the jigsaw.’
‘No, I’m afraid I still don’t see,’ Cameron said, ‘I’m still not with you. Being locked in a cell all day, every day, isn’t ever likely to help anyone see anything.’
‘What if it wasn’t the police who took your gun, after all?’ Brian said. ‘You don’t know for certain that it was under your mattress on the day of the raid. You are fixated on the police after what happened in South Africa – understandably enough. You’ve relocated your fixation to the UK, focusing on the South Yorkshire police and Hillsborough in particular. So when, after the police have raided your house, you discover that the gun is missing, you immediately assume that it must have been taken by the police.’
‘A pretty obvious conclusion, I would have thought,’ Cameron said, ‘given that apart from me and Mutoni, who wouldn’t have touched it, they are the only people who have been in the house.’
‘An entirely logical conclusion, for sure,’ Brian said. ‘But I’ve always been skeptical about that, as you know. I know that there are some rotten eggs in the police force, and I wouldn’t for a moment defend what happened at Hillsborough, but the pol
ice still wouldn’t be my first choice of likely villain every time anything bad happens that they could conceivably be involved with. Even at Hillsborough there were a few exceptions, like Hudson. And even if we didn’t know that, I’d still be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt until I had good reason not to. One always has to drill down into what would be in it for them.’
‘Well, where the Guildford four and the Birmingham six were concerned, to take just two examples,’ Cameron said, ‘what was in it for the police was the kudos of quick convictions and the convenience of being able to avoid the hassle of looking for the real culprits – not to mention the enjoyment of beating up a few “Paddies”, as they would no doubt have called them.’
‘Precisely,’ Brian said. ‘In those cases there were some clear benefits to be had by the police. This situation is very different. However irritating they might have found your letters and articles, the police would have been confident that nothing you could say was going to make a blind bit of difference. If Phil Scraton hasn’t been able to dent the establishment’s indifference, why should you? Murdering someone just so that they could frame you for the murder would be far too risky – like chucking a hand-grenade at a particularly irritating mosquito.’
‘I may be paranoid, but I’m not completely deluded,’ Cameron said. ‘At least I hope not. I didn’t ever imagine that the South Yorkshire police high command had sat down at their monthly strategy meeting and signed off a plan to murder someone so that they could frame me for the murder. But that doesn’t rule out the possibility that a rogue policeman had stolen the gun to sell on the black market.’
‘Too much of a coincidence,’ Brian said. ‘I’m sure we’ll find that Jack was responsible and that the police weren’t involved at all. It all hangs together. Jack is French-speaking and spent time in the Congo, either as a mercenary or working for G4S. Where did the Hutus responsible for the genocide take off to when they needed to get out of Rwanda? Answer: the Congo. So Jack is contracted to murder Mutoni by henchmen of the Hutu leaders on trial at the war crimes tribunal; Frogs Pool is contracted by van Zyl to frame you; the two of them have worked together in the past so they get together to kill two birds with one stone, or in this case a single bullet – voilà, jigsaw complete.’
Getting his head round the idea that the South Yorkshire police had nothing to do with framing him, was going to be like trying to get his head around the idea that if you spin a coin ninety-nine times and it lands heads up every single time it still only has a fifty percent chance of landing tails-up the hundredth time. So Cameron decided he needed to push that to one side for the time being and think through the implications of the scenario Brian was suggesting.
‘OK, let’s take what you are suggesting at face value, ’ Cameron said. ‘Sari watches my house and breaks in when I’m not around. Van Zyl could well have guessed that I would have hung onto my automatic, and would know that that would be illegal, and Poggenpoel will have told Sari where I used to keep it. It was Poggenpoel who found it when they raided my house. So Sari goes up to my bedroom, finds the gun and pops it into a bag he has bought with him to that end. He can’t wear gloves, but he isn’t too worried about leaving finger-prints because he knows I won’t have a licence for the gun and won’t report it when I discover that it is missing. So he doesn’t have to worry about anybody going around the house taking fingerprints.’
‘Except,’ Brian said, ‘that he would have been told to make absolutely certain that there weren’t any fingerprints on your gun. So how does he get the gun into the bag without leaving any fingerprints on it if he can’t wear gloves?’
‘Dog-shit,’ Cameron said.
‘What?’
‘Dog-shit,’ repeated Cameron. ‘The same way that you get dog-shit into a bag before throwing it away. You turn the bag inside out, put your hand in, get hold of the dog-shit and then reverse the bag – easy enough, and even easier with a gun that isn’t squidgy. He would know that burying the gun, which would have been the plan all along, would get rid of any finger-prints and DNA that might have been left on the bag.’
‘The outside of the bag,’ Brian said, ‘but what about the inside of the bag? What you are suggesting sounds plausible but, thinking through that process, it strikes me that it would be very difficult to avoid touching the inside of the bag at any stage. How do you turn the bag back outside-out without touching any part of the inside?’
‘It would be difficult, particularly if you are in a hurry,’ Cameron conceded, ‘but why would the killer worry? Who is going to think of checking for DNA or fingerprints on the inside of a plastic bag? As far as the police are concerned all that matters is that my fingerprints and DNA are on the murder weapon – the bag is irrelevant. We assumed that whoever pulled the trigger would have been wearing gloves and that was why there were no fingerprints or DNA, apart from mine, on the gun. But gloves only came into the reckoning because we knew I was being framed – the police aren’t prepared even to consider that.’
‘But they will be keeping the bag as evidence,’ Brian said. ‘If Jack did break into your house and steal the gun, there is a chance that he will have left traces of his DNA or his fingerprints on the inside of the bag. We must get Harriet to find out if the inside of the bag has been tested and, if not, to demand that they test it.’
‘We can certainly do that,’ Cameron said. ‘But, equally certainly, it won’t make any difference. They might not have been responsible for framing me – though I’ve yet to be entirely convinced about that – but now that they’ve got me where they want me there is no way they are going to lift a finger to do anything that might muddy the waters. In fact very much the opposite – they’ll try to suppress any evidence that doesn’t support their case. It won’t matter to them who is framing me, if it is done properly it won’t just shut me up, it will save them the bother of having to hunt for who was really responsible – the Birmingham six all over again. They will have it all sown up. Trying to unstitch it is a waste of energy.’
‘You are a bright-eyed and bushy tailed little ray of sunshine aren’t you, Eeyore,’ Brian said.
‘Well this isn’t exactly Hundred Acre Wood, is it?’ Cameron replied, surveying the drably institutional walls of the interview room. ‘Nor was it ever intended as a soft-play area for overgrown Tiggers. It won’t do any good, but I suppose it can’t do any harm for you to outline your theory to Harriet and try to persuade her to get them to analyse the bag. Just try not to mix too many metaphors.’
‘Harriet won’t need much persuading,’ Brian said. ‘Last time I spoke to her she sounded worried about you. She is very anxious to get you out of here.’
‘It’s going to take more than Harriet being anxious about me to get me out of here,’ Cameron said, as Brian stood up to go.
Chapter 19
‘There’s no question that the bag will already have been checked for finger-prints and DNA,’ Hudson said. ‘Not to mention MRSA, rat-droppings and everything else under the bloody sun – inside and outside.’
Hudson had arrived without the usual mug of tea early the next morning, ‘just to check up on you’, as he put it. Cameron had assured him that he hadn’t spent the night trying to dig a Great Escape tunnel out of his cell, and had asked him about the chances of having the bag checked for fingerprints or DNA.
‘But why would anyone have thought of checking the inside of the bag, if all you lot needed was proof that the murder weapon belonged to me?’ Cameron asked.
‘”You lot”,’ Hudson repeated. ‘I would have hoped that by now you might have stopped thinking that we all came as a job lot.’
‘Of course I do,’ Cameron said. ‘Sorry – that was just shorthand, I know you aren’t all the same. What is left of my brain hasn’t kicked into gear yet this morning.’
‘We sure as hell aren’t all the same,’ Hudson said, only sounding partly mollified, ‘and that’s why that bag
will have been checked so thoroughly. Dominic, the guy in forensics who will have been responsible for analysing the evidence, is totally obsessive. There’s nobody better in terms of his results, but he is considered a complete pain in the arse by most of the people here. He’ll give initial results very quickly on anything he is asked to analyse, but then he won’t let go – he’ll go on working at whatever he’s asked to look at until he’s exhausted every conceivable possibility. He’s in the forensic laboratory pretty much all night sometimes. I’ve heard it said that he’s ‘on the spectrum’ – whatever the hell that means. He’s completely anti-social – always on his own – and, apart from when he has to report on his findings, I think I’m probably the only person here he ever talks to. I make a point of going to sit with him from time to time, but I don’t think he gives a stuff whether I do or not and, when I do, whether I talk to him or not.’
‘”On the spectrum” sounds about right,’ Cameron said. ‘Will you be seeing him? Would you mind asking him if he can remember whether he got any results from that bag, if he tested it?’
‘I told you he will have tested it,’ Hudson replied. ‘I can certainly ask him whether he found anything. It could be days before I see him in the ref, so I’ll go and find him when I get a chance. On the way I’ll call in at HR and get them to change my job description to include running errands for remand prisoners awaiting trial for murder.’
Cameron had been looking at Hudson as he spoke. Anxious at the tetchy tone of Hudson’s insistence that the bag would have been tested, he tried to assess whether the ‘running errands’ bit was a ponderous attempt at humour, just a further indication of a general tetchiness, or a signal that he really did feel put upon. Hudson’s face gave nothing away.
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