Game of Stones

by David Maughan Brown

  ‘Thanks very much,’ Cameron said. ‘I really appreciate your help.’

  Cameron spent the next few hours kicking himself for his carelessness in allowing Hudson to feel unappreciated, and fretting over whether someone who felt put-upon would bother to run the errand and come back to report on the outcome. One of the side effects of his fretting was a realization of just how much he would miss Hudson’s sporadic appearances and implicit support.

  Cameron need not have worried. Hudson came back just after lunch to report that he had gone to the forensic laboratory as promised and asked Dominic about the bag. Dominic had launched into a minutely detailed account of what he had found on the bag. The problem with Dominic, Hudson said, was that he never had any appreciation whatever of what his audience would be likely to find interesting. There was never any semblance of prioritization in his reports, which were always exhaustive – all information was treated as though it were of equal value. To cut a very long story short, Hudson said, Dominic had found fingerprints and DNA that were not Cameron’s, but that wasn’t all. What had particularly interested Dominic was the discovery that the DNA from the fingerprints yielded traces of something unpronounceable.

  ‘What do you mean “something unpronounceable”?’ Cameron asked.

  Hudson fished around in his breast pocket, produced a slip of paper and passed it to Cameron.

  ‘”Patho…gno…monic”,’ Cameron read out. ‘Bloody right it’s unpronounceable, but a pathogen is something that causes disease, so I suspect that it means that the DNA shows traces of a disease of some sort.’

  Cameron could feel, somewhere deep inside himself, the first stirrings of something resembling a hope that his situation might not be entirely hopeless.

  ‘I don’t know enough about DNA,’ Cameron said, ‘but, if a trace of some disease really is what Dominic has found, it could well connect to Sari’s dermatitis – perhaps it makes him leave microscopic bits of skin or something on whatever he touches. Why the hell didn’t we know about this before?’

  ‘It looks as if my supposed superiors have been selective in what they have disclosed by way of unused evidence,’ Hudson said. ‘Now there’s a surprise.’

  ‘I need to tell Harriet about this,’ Cameron said, ‘and I need to do it as soon as possible. She said she would have difficulty in coming in today. Could you take me to a phone so that I can phone her?’

  ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ Hudson replied. ‘But I can talk to the custody officer and tell him that you are demanding immediate access to your solicitor. I can’t see any reason why he would object.’

  There might have been no reason for him to object, but there was clearly no reason for the custody officer to be in any hurry to oblige either. Cameron had to spend almost two hours champing at the bit before he was escorted to the telephone to talk to Harriet, who said she would contact Sinclair, the DI in charge of the investigation, and would come in that evening to tell him what had transpired.

  The day limped past as a sequence of focused waits: waiting for Hudson to report back; waiting to phone Harriet; waiting for Harriet to come to see him. Time seemed to pass even more slowly when the waits were focused than when there was nothing in particular to wait for. It was early evening before Cameron felt his pulse rate quickening as he heard the familiar sound of Harriet’s footsteps approaching along the corridor and his cell door being unlocked. As soon as she stepped in through the door Cameron could see that something had succeeded in ruffling Harriet’s usually unrufflable composure. It wasn’t that there was a hair out of place or a wrinkle in her perfectly tailored outfit, but her cheeks were flushed and the way she walked into the cell and stood still while the door was shut behind her gave the impression she was struggling to hold back a fierce energy Cameron hadn’t seen before.

  ‘Condescending bastard!’ she spat as soon as the door was closed. ‘There’s no way he would have spoken like that to me if I had been a man. What makes him think that being the proud possessor of a penis is qualification enough for any job? Most jobs require people to be the proud possessors of brains, and he’s going to discover pretty damn soon that his is one of them.’

  ‘So it didn’t go well then,’ Cameron commented. Harriet’s ‘bastard’ and ‘damn’ were the first two off-colour words Cameron had ever heard from Harriet, whose vocabulary would normally be comfortably accommodated by a country church. Even if they were so mild as to be hardly classifiable as swear words these days, they were eloquent testimony to just how thoroughly Sinclair had succeeded in ruffling her.

  ‘No,’ Harried replied. ‘I must apologise for using foul language, but no, it didn’t go well, as you put it.’

  ‘On a foul language scale of one to ten, that barely makes it to one,’ Cameron said. ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I asked him whether the inside of the bag your gun had been found in had been forensically analysed,’ Harriet said. ‘He started off by asking me why I wanted to know, and why I thought it might have been a good idea to analyse it. I told him that it seemed an obvious and routine thing to do, and pointed out that, if they had undertaken an analysis and intended to ignore the results, it had been dishonest not to include the findings in the package of unused evidence.’

  ‘You have obviously just been rereading your copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People,’ Cameron commented.

  ‘I certainly don’t want to win Sinclair as a friend,’ Harriet said. ‘You should have heard the way he was speaking to me. Macho policeman goes to local nursery school in his smart uniform to bask in the adulation of the four-year olds – and one of the little girls has the impertinence to ask him a question.’

  ‘So, never mind the tone, what was the content?’ Cameron asked, anxious to get to the point.

  ‘I damn well do mind the tone,’ Harriet snapped. ‘Are you suggesting I should just have ignored the bastard’s tone and got on with it?’

  He was doing well today, Cameron thought: alienate Hudson, alienate Harriet, now all that was left to do was to alienate Brian.

  ‘Sorry, no, I didn’t mean that,’ Cameron said. ‘I didn’t mean the tone wasn’t important, of course it was important, and of course you should mind it. I just meant let’s park it for the time being and get back to it later.’

  Harriet looked steadily at Cameron for a long five seconds while Cameron held her gaze, feeling very much like the nursery child who had had the temerity to ask the question.

  ‘Sinclair must have deduced that I had found out that there was something they hadn’t disclosed,’ Harriet said. ‘He said they had, of course, analysed the bag and there were some results, but he then went on to say that the results couldn’t be classified as evidence.’

  ‘Because?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘He led me through a whole series of unbelievably patronizing questions and answers by way of “because”,’ Harriet said. ‘He asked me if I knew where the bag came from? I told him I knew it came from a Lidl supermarket. Did I know how many people worked at a Lidl supermarket? Did I know how many people at a Lidl supermarket had to handle plastic bags? Did I know how many Lidl supermarkets there were in England? The fingerprints, he said, were exactly where you would expect them to be if a teller in a supermarket were to open a bag for a customer’s groceries. Did I expect the police to go around every supermarket in England taking the fingerprints of every teller who might have handled the bag in the effort to find a match?’

  ‘But the point about unused evidence,’ Cameron said, ‘is surely not whose the fingerprints were, but whose they weren’t – and they weren’t mine. Wasn’t that why they had given us the information about the Go stones?’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Harriet. ‘I made exactly that point. But Sinclair said that, as far as he was concerned, they didn’t constitute evidence of any sort, used or unused, because in this instance the fingerprints obviously didn’t relate to the
case, so there was no need to disclose them to us – which was transparent tosh. So, basically, run away and play and stop bothering him.’

  ‘Could we get a court order, if that is the right term, to require them to give us the results?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘Sinclair even went as far as challenging me to do exactly that,’ Harriet said. ‘I got the impression that he thought I would be so overwhelmed by the force of his masterful personality that I would subside in a girly heap. The really galling thing about it was that Sinclair was talking complete nonsense, and must have realized that I would know it was complete nonsense, but he nevertheless assumed that because I was a woman I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, do anything about it.’

  ‘Maybe he just thought that because you are a woman you wouldn’t be intelligent enough to recognize that he was talking nonsense,’ Cameron said. ‘But why, if they were prepared to give us the information about the Go stones, would they have wanted to withhold the results of their analysis of the bag. What’s the difference?’

  ‘Perhaps there isn’t any difference,’ Harriet said. ‘It is entirely possible that they are just being bloody-minded – being obstructive just for the sake of demonstrating that there’s nothing we can do about it. The most charitable interpretation would be that any worthwhile results were only retrieved from the bag after they had already given us the information about the stones. But after talking to Sinclair my money would be on bloody-minded.’

  ‘That would actually make some sense,’ Cameron said. ‘Hudson told me that their forensics man is both wholly obsessive and at times painfully slow. But Sinclair’s refusal to give you the results of the analysis now can only be bloody-mindedness. So there’s nothing we can do about it?’

  ‘We could go down the court-order route,’ Harriet said, ‘but I’m not sure there is much point at this juncture. It would be tedious and costly and there’s nothing we could do with the information right now anyway. If Sinclair is going to go on being obstructive we can always fall back on that. Incidentally…’

  ‘We might not need to get a court order anyway,’ Cameron said. ‘Hudson sounds to have a good relationship with the forensics man, Dominic. If the results of that analysis ever seem likely to be useful to us I expect Hudson can circumvent Sinclair and get the information we need directly from forensics. Sorry to interrupt – you were about to say?’

  ‘I just wanted to let you know that Lynn landed at Heathrow yesterday,’ Harriet said. ‘She is staying with friends in London tonight and will be coming up to Sheffield tomorrow. I meant to tell you earlier, but my encounter with Sinclair put it out of my mind.’

  ‘Shit! So soon?’ Cameron suddenly felt short of breath and panicky. ‘But the trial isn’t for a couple of weeks yet is it? Why has she come over already?’

  ‘It turns out that she is on sabbatical from the university, so she doesn’t have a lecture schedule to worry about,’ Harriet answered. ‘I’ve been on the phone to her quite a bit and asked her to come over as soon as possible. I want to start sowing seeds of doubt in the corporate mind of the CPS. Confirmation that the DNA on that Go stone is Lynn’s – always assuming it is Lynn’s – should constitute one such seed. Lynn’s account of her experience at van Zyl’s hands – if she can be persuaded to talk about it in public – and van Zyl’s determination to exact his revenge on you should be another.’

  ‘So what exactly is she coming to Sheffield for?’ Cameron asked. The idea that he could very soon find himself in the dock being tried for murder seemed completely unreal. Its very unreality was cause enough for panic. How do you speak reason to a nightmare? But, when he stopped to try to analyse precisely what was triggering the incipient panic, he couldn’t be sure whether it was primarily caused by the imminence of the trial or by the prospect of seeing Lynn again.

  ‘Lynn doesn’t want to see you,’ Harriet said. ‘Or, rather, putting it less bluntly, she says she can’t bear to see you again.’

  Had Harriet got to know him so well already that she could read what was left of his mind? There was no point in denying that he had been thinking about seeing Lynn. Why would he deny it anyway? It wasn’t as if acknowledging his complex feelings about Lynn was going to get in the way of a prospective relationship with Harriet. The prospect of his ever having an intimate relationship with Harriet was vanishingly small.

  ‘So who is paying for her airfare?’ Cameron asked, stalling for time. ‘Does that get added to my legal costs?’

  ‘Come off it, Cameron,’ Harriet said. ‘Anyone can see that you aren’t really interested in what it is costing for Lynn to come over. Asking about costs is just a smoke-screen to avoid acknowledging what you feel about her.’

  Cameron didn’t reply. He sat on the bench, leaning forward with his arms on his thighs, staring at his hands, noticing absent-mindedly that his fingernails needed cutting. The muffled sound of a motorcycle without a silencer came through the glass bricks. Harriet waited Cameron out.

  ‘OK, you are probably right,’ Cameron said eventually. ‘The bottom line is that I’m not sure if I could bear to see her again either. It isn’t that I don’t want to see her. I certainly don’t want her to feel constrained to see me if she doesn’t want to. I don’t know – I just don’t know. So she hasn’t come over just to supply a DNA sample?’

  ‘No,’ Harriet said. ‘I am going to ask her to sign a sworn affidavit giving an account of what van Zyl did to her. That is going to be really difficult for her, but it will make it easier when she comes to testify in your defence later on.’

  ‘What defence?’ Cameron asked. ‘They’ve got a dead woman with a bullet in her brain fired from an unlicensed gun which I own, which has my fingerprints and DNA on it, and which was found buried on my allotment. I not only knew the woman – she had spent the night at my house shortly before she died, and I have no alibi for the time of her death. What do we have by way of a “defence” to put against that? Let’s go through it, dazzlingly persuasive line by line. First, we have an elaborate story that features, and hangs on, stones from a Japanese board game that the judge and jury will probably never even have heard of. And, second, we are relying on results, which we haven’t even been given yet, from a forensic analysis of some DNA and/or fingerprints – we don’t as yet even know which – found on a plastic supermarket bag. Where the Go stones are concerned, even if we find that the DNA from the blood sample on the one stone is Lynn’s, all that proves is that that particular Go stone was originally mine. “That comes as no surprise,” the prosecution will be entitled to say, “it is you, after all, whom we have put on trial for the murder.” Some defence that is.’

  ‘But we know what has happened,’ Harriet said. ‘We know who has framed you and why.’

  ‘So bloody what?’ Cameron asked. ‘What bloody difference does that make?’

  ‘Don’t you think two bloodies in two sentences is a bit too bloody much?’ Harriet asked.

  Cameron looked sharply up at her and saw that Harriet was smiling. She was teasing him, not reprimanding him. It was a good thing he’d looked up as he had been about to round on her in a way that would not have reduced the chances of her being alienated.

  ‘It makes a huge difference,’ Harriet said. ‘You are always saying “you can’t prove a negative.” Most people who are wrongfully accused know they didn’t commit the crime, but haven’t a clue who did. We know exactly who was responsible for murdering Mutoni – the man you call Sari stole the gun and Poggenpoel pulled the trigger – and we know why. So we don’t have to prove a negative. We just have to prove a positive, which, while not easy, can certainly be done.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Cameron acknowledged, ‘but not on the basis of the exceedingly slim pickings of evidence we have been able to cobble together so far.’

  ‘In the meantime,’ Harriet said, ‘try not to feel too despondent. They will be monitoring and reporting back on your demeanor all the time. The more
despondent you seem, the more convinced they will be that you are guilty. It will be particularly important at the trial that your body language can’t be interpreted as an indication of guilt.’

  ‘So give me a handful of your happy pills then,’ Cameron said. ‘It will take quite a lot of happy pills to make me feel like dancing on my own grave. How cheerful am I supposed to feel, locked into this box all day and all night for weeks on end, just waiting for the relief of being condemned to spend the rest of my life in an even worse kind of confinement?’

  ‘We’ll get you out,’ Harriet said. ‘I’m convinced about that.’

  ‘Is it a hare’s foot you are holding or a four-leaf clover?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well your certainty can’t be based on anything tangible,’ Cameron answered. ‘It would be sexist to suggest it was based on female intuition, so I have to conclude that it is based on either faith or superstition, which amount to the same thing. So what happens now? Apart, that is, from Lynn doing her thing without wanting to see me.’

  ‘I think it is time your overgrown bear of a friend, Brian, and I put our heads together,’ Harriet said.

  ‘It might be a good idea if you invited Hudson to join the party,’ Cameron said. ‘If whatever has shown up on that bag is ever going to be useful to us, it will only be via Hudson’s direct line into the forensic laboratory.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Harriet said. ‘I’ll do that. Anything you would like me to say to Lynn when I see her?’

  ‘Do you think there is anything I could say to her that would make any difference?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘You know her much better than I do,’ Harriet said.

  ‘I don’t actually think that’s true,’ Cameron said. ‘I’m not sure that I know her at all any more. What she went through at the hands of those bastards twenty years ago can only have changed her, and having to live with the memory of that for those twenty years will have changed her some more. She will be a different person now from the one I knew.’