Game of Stones

by David Maughan Brown

  ‘And loved,’ Harriet added.

  ‘Yes, and loved,’ Cameron said. ‘You have spent several hours on the phone to her recently. I haven’t spoken to her for twenty-three years. There’s no question that you know the 2008 Lynn better than I do.’

  ‘You’re right, of course,’ Harriet said, ‘she will have changed. How could she not have been changed to some extent by what she experienced? You will also have changed. But I have a very strong sense that, if you could allow yourselves to get close enough, you would find that neither of you has changed beyond recognition.’

  Harriet stopped talking and they sat in silence for a few seconds, side by side on the blue cushion. Cameron suddenly became sharply conscious of the embarrassing disinfectant smell coming from the stainless steel toilet. Harriet would be much more at home in the cocktail bar of a country club. Spending time sitting with him a few feet from a gaping toilet was a significant sacrifice. Before he could think of an appropriate way of acknowledging her generosity, Harriet broke the silence.

  ‘The short answer to your question is no, I can’t immediately think of anything you could say that would help to break down the barriers. If Lynn were to ask me the same question about you I would have to give her the same answer.’

  ‘But Lynn won’t,’ Cameron said, ‘because she won’t want the barriers to be broken down.’

  ‘That remains to be seen,’ Harriet said, standing up to leave. ‘In the meantime, as I’ve said before, try not to be too despondent. There has to be a happy medium between looking and sounding like Eeyore on a particularly miserable day in the Hundred Acre Wood, at one extreme, and dancing on your own grave, as you put it so vividly, at the other.’

  ‘The happy medium is probably only happy because you have fed her some of your happy pills,’ Cameron remarked. ‘She’s probably as miserable as sin underneath her Gypsy Rose Lee costume.’

  It couldn’t surely just be coincidence that Brian and Harriet had both likened him to Eeyore recently. Cameron felt a sudden twinge of loss at the thought that Harriet had been spending time talking to Brian.

  ‘Why would sin have to be miserable?’ Harriet asked, as the cell door was opened for her. ‘I would have thought that it could be rather fun.’

  As Cameron listened to the clicking of her heels receding down the corridor, he wondered whether it really was a case of Harriet having loosened up in the brief time he had known her. It was entirely possible that he had been misjudging her all along.

  Chapter 20

  As soon as he stepped inside the by now much too familiar interview room, it was obvious to Cameron that it had been Brian rather than Gypsy Rose Lee who had been the grateful recipient of the happy pills. There was an extra spring to his bounciness as he jumped up from his chair on the other side of the table and strode over to envelop Cameron in a bear hug. Anyone rash enough to try to enforce a rigorous ‘no contact’ regulation by getting between them would have been crushed.

  As it happened, there wasn’t anyone with them to enforce anything. Brian had been patted down when he arrived to ensure he hadn’t secreted any drugs, phones, handguns, files, or spades about his person that could be used by aspirant escapers, and once Cameron had been escorted to the interview room the door had been locked and they had been left alone. Brian had been told to ring reception on the internal phone when his visit was over so that he could be let out. They appeared to be short staffed.

  Sixty hours had passed since Cameron had seen Harriet, which had given him plenty of time to reflect on the unexpected twinge of loss he’d felt at the idea of her spending time talking to Brian. He had had no long-term relationship in all the years since Jules and Lynn, and he had only been with Lynn for a few weeks – for all that his love for her had held promise of being long-term. The more he’d seen of Harriet, the more he’d liked her. She had spent much more time visiting him than was strictly necessary from a professional point of view, so it seemed reasonable to assume that she liked him too.

  Cameron had concluded that he was much too dependent on Harriet to be able to gauge his feelings for her properly, either actual or potential. There was a baby-like helplessness about his confinement. If he had been able to sleep, he could have spent his days doing nothing but eating and sleeping. Locked in his cell, he could no more move around and interact with the world than a baby in its cradle could. His movements around his cell were like the random twitchings of a baby’s muscles. Harriet was the mother figure, the one who cared – what was not to love about a mother? But it was only in Freudian textbooks or Greek tragedies that people loved their mothers in the way he could be interested in loving Harriet. For that to happen he would need not to be locked away in a prison cell, and that wasn’t going to happen for a very long time. And all the while Brian was free.

  ‘Have you heard from Harriet?’ Brian asked as soon as they sat down.

  ‘Just a note she left at the reception desk yesterday morning saying she had to rush off to Liverpool unexpectedly for a day or two and would come to see me as soon as she got back,’ Cameron said. His heart had lifted momentarily when he saw that Harriet had signed-off her note to her client ‘with love’ and had written it on private notepaper, not her firm’s letterhead.

  ‘Yes,’ Brian said. ‘She received a phone-call telling her that she was urgently needed in Liverpool. One of her clients, a single mother who had been trafficked from Romania and been granted asylum, had recently moved to a job there. Harriet had helped her with her asylum application. She had apparently taken her twin three-year-olds to nursery looking distraught and then rushed off in tears, leaving the twins beside themselves. One of the nursery assistants who was trying to quieten and distract the children sensed that something was badly wrong, checked through the children’s school-bags and found an envelope addressed to Harriet. She took it upon herself to open the envelope and read the letter, which amounted to a suicide note. It was a plea to Harriet to make sure the twins were taken care of and found a good home – like a pair of stray kittens. Harriet got down there in time to collect the children from the nursery but their mother had already thrown herself in front of a train.’

  ‘God, what a terrible story, poor woman!’ Cameron said. ‘You seem to know a lot about it. How did you get to hear the details?’

  ‘Harriet was with me when the call came through,’ Brian said, before going on more hesitantly, ‘she had spent the night at my place.’

  Cameron looked across at Brian and saw that he was blushing. Harriet had spent the night with Brian, and hadn’t been in any rush to get to work the next day by the sound of it. Things had obviously gone pretty well when Harriet and the ‘overgrown bear’, as she had called him, had got together – and it was clearly not just their heads they had put together. Cameron felt the sharpest pang yet. Not so much resentment at the closeness of Brian’s contact with Harriet – how could he resent Brian for getting close to Harriet when it was, and probably always would be, impossible for him to do so himself? It was the loss, once again, of what might have been. He might not resent Brian, but that was no reason not to give him a hard time.

  ‘So the South Yorkshire police raided her house and rendered it uninhabitable, like mine?’ Cameron asked. ‘It’s amazing, even to a historian, how often history repeats itself.’

  ‘No … actually …’ Brian started to say.

  ‘Her house burnt down then?’ Cameron interrupted. ‘World War two bomb discovered in her garden so she had to be evacuated? Plague of ladybirds? Don’t tell me her parrot went berserk, broke out of its cage, and is rampaging through the house savaging anyone who dares to enter.’

  ‘You are just jealous,’ Brian said. ‘In fact it was my irresistible attractiveness that drew her to me.’

  ‘Probably only by comparison with Hudson,’ Cameron said, smiling, ‘assuming the three of you got together. So what is going to happen now? Is the even tenor of your sedentary
bachelor existence about to be shattered by the sudden addition of a high-powered lawyer and a pair of traumatised three-year-old orphan twins? I’m sorry to have to tell you, but, based on my extensive experience, your pad is not going to be big enough.’

  ‘I have no idea what happens next,’ Brian said. ‘Harriet is currently dealing with the fall-out, which includes talking to Social Services. The twins’ mother appears to have been entirely alone, no relatives have been traced, nobody knows who the father is – she might well not have known herself. Matters are further complicated by the fact that the twins know hardly any English – she always spoke to them in Romanian. I think Harriet will probably try to foster them, at least temporarily. What a bloody mess!’

  Brian was obviously genuinely affected by the situation the twins had been left in – this wasn’t the time to carry on giving him a hard time about Harriet.

  ‘Well, at least you got on well with Harriet,’ Cameron said.

  ‘There’s a hell of a lot more going on behind that professional façade than you could ever imagine,’ Brian said. ‘Harriet is amazing.’

  ‘You underestimate my imagination,’ Cameron said. ‘There’s a word “ordentlik” in Afrikaans that has no direct equivalent in English. It covers all, and more, of ‘proper’, ‘decent’, ‘respectable’, ‘orderly’, ‘organized’, even ‘pernickety’. It is what your perfect University Registrar would aspire to be. When you first encounter Harriet it seems to sum her up perfectly, but I had a strong sense that there was a lot more to her than that. I would have liked to get to know her much better myself.’

  ‘Too late, I’m afraid,’ Brian said. ‘It’s probably a good thing they’ve locked you up.’

  ‘So what conclusions, if any, did your three person summit arrive at before you headed off to bed with Harriet?’ Cameron asked. It was time to move on. There would be all too much time later to dwell on his nagging sense of loss where Harriet was concerned.

  ‘Not a lot, it must be said,’ Brian replied. ‘Hudson is quite sure the detectives responsible for the investigation are not going to lift a finger to pursue it any further. We may be raising doubts about it, but that’s what we would do, wouldn’t we? We can’t prove you didn’t commit the murder without first proving that someone else did. So Hudson reckons it is up to us to provide the evidence.’

  ‘He’s up for that?’ asked Cameron.

  ‘He certainly seems to be – in fact I’m sure he is,’ Brian said. ‘The more I see of Hudson the more impressed I am by him. It was gross of you to crap on him like that when you first encountered him on your allotment. He’s a stubborn bastard – but stubborn in the right way and for the right reasons. In fact, when he told me that he was buggered if he was going to leave the police force after Hillsborough just because his so-called superiors wanted him to, it reminded me very much of you telling me that you were damned if you were going to leave South Africa just because the Special Branch wanted to see the back of you. He’s solid as a rock.’

  ‘He’s certainly solid,’ Cameron said. ‘It may have been unfair of me to assume he was part of the problem at Hillsborough – OK, it was unfair – but if I hadn’t done so you wouldn’t be best buddies now. So how is it going to work?’

  ‘That has to be the world’s best ever rationalization for rudeness,’ Brian answered. ‘We haven’t worked the detail out yet. Hudson says that if we can get DNA samples from Frogs Pool and Jack he can get them to his mate Dominic in forensics. If Dominic finds a match, the evidence will then be passed on to Harriet.’

  ‘What would Harriet do with it?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘Hudson reckons there would be two alternatives. She could either take it to Sinclair and insist that he follows it up, threatening court orders and all kinds of shit if he doesn’t, or she could just take it to the CPS over Sinclair’s head. The CPS would have to take it seriously. That wouldn’t look good for Sinclair and his lot.’

  ‘Supposing you can get the evidence,’ Cameron said, ‘regardless of what Harriet does with it, Dominic and Hudson are not going to be flavour of the month where the South Yorkshire police are concerned. It may be Hudson’s lifetime’s work to piss them off, but what about Dominic? Is he up for it?’

  ‘Dominic sounds to be so far onto the autistic spectrum that, even if he noticed that people were ostracizing him, he probably wouldn’t care,’ Brian said. ‘Hudson says he is so good at his job that they couldn’t possibly afford to lose him.’

  ‘But you haven’t got a plan for getting the DNA yet,’ Cameron said.

  ‘Not yet,’ Brian said. ‘But I’m meeting Hudson for a drink this evening. We’ll do our plotting then. It’s a pity you are still locked in here. If you weren’t, you could rearrange both their faces with your forehead and we could take samples from the pools of blood on the pavement.’

  ‘Very funny,’ Cameron said.

  ‘Not for them,’ Brian said. ‘But it’s not as if they wouldn’t have deserved it.’

  After ten more minutes of desultory conversation, Brian said he needed to get to a lecture, used the internal phone as instructed, and was duly released to go on his way, while Cameron was escorted back to his cell. Once there, he reflected on Brian’s success with Harriet. Much as he regretted that he hadn’t had the opportunity to get to know Harriet a lot better himself, Brian was so obviously buoyed up and energized – not that Brian ever gave the impression of needing his batteries charged – that it was difficult to begrudge him that success. It was difficult, but not impossible – at least just a little.

  Whatever Harriet needed to do in Liverpool was more complicated than Brian had expected. It was another four days before Cameron heard the unmistakable clicking of her shoes approaching along the corridor, days in which it was increasingly borne home to him where the term ‘stir crazy’ came from, and what it meant. The only puzzling thing about the term was how ‘stir’ had ever become slang for prison – ‘stir’ implied motion, whereas prison was the epitome of motionlessness. The whole point of prisons was to stop people moving, stop them getting out into the open air, stop them from hearing the birds sing, stop them from feeling the wind on their faces. As the four days and nights wore on, Cameron became more and more convinced that if he were to be sentenced to a prison term he would go crazy, stark staring mad – and it wouldn’t even need to be a long sentence.

  ‘Hello,’ Harriet said. ‘I’m very sorry I haven’t been able to get in to see you – I’ve been tied up unexpectedly in Liverpool.’

  ‘Yes, I know about it,’ Cameron said. ‘Brian told me. It must have been very stressful for you. Did you manage to get the twins sorted?’

  ‘Yes,’ Harriet said, looking mildly surprised at Cameron’s question – presumably uncertain about how much Brian might have told him. ‘Yes – they will be staying with me, for the time being at least. I had to stay down there while they went through an emergency placement process before I could be allowed to look after them in my capacity as a “connected person”, however vaguely connected: police check, approval of the Head of Service, a Care Plan, a Foster Carer Agreement, and so on. We had to spend a day coming up to Sheffield for the social worker to vet my house for suitability and for me to organize a nursery. It helped that I am a lawyer. It was good to see the pains they go to in trying to ensure placements are suitable.’

  ‘Bit of a change of lifestyle,’ observed Cameron.

  ‘You can say that again,’ Harriet said. ‘I haven’t got my head around the full implications yet – but I couldn’t bear to let the poor mites take their chances on the foster-carer circuit, and I feel an obligation to their mother. She must have been at her wits end, quite literally, to leave them like that.’

  ‘So there won’t have been any developments where my case is concerned in the interim,’ Cameron said, trying not to sound as despondent as he felt. Harriet was central to any developments there might have been, and she had obvi
ously been wholly occupied with the fostering process.

  ‘Not true – there have been,’ Harriet said. ‘Brian is waiting in the interview-room, he wanted to be the one to update you. There’s a constable waiting outside the door to escort us.’

  Brian got up from the table looking extremely pleased with himself as Cameron was ushered in. As Harriet sat down beside Brian, Cameron tilted his head towards the constable who had taken up position in the corner and raised a quizzical eyebrow. Harriet made a small dismissive gesture with one hand indicating, Cameron assumed, that it didn’t matter that what they said was going to be overheard.

  ‘I love it when a plan comes together,’ Brian said, visibly loving it.

  ‘Which of your two plans would that be?’ asked Cameron.

  Harriet looked puzzled for a moment, then looked round at Brian and blushed. Brian looked even more pleased with himself.

  ‘You didn’t tell him, did you?’ Harriet asked Brian. But Cameron could see it was a rhetorical question, Harriet had already worked out the answer.

  ‘Of course I did,’ Brian said smiling at her. ‘I’ve always believed in being transparent with my friends – particularly when two of us might independently have hit on the same plan.’

  It was Cameron’s turn to feel himself reddening.

  ‘Moving on,’ Cameron said, ‘would either of you two love-birds like to tell me precisely what the other plan was and how it came together?’

  ‘Over to you,’ Harriet said, looking at Brian.

  ‘I got together with Hudson after I saw you last,’ Brian said, ‘and we worked out how to get DNA samples from Frogs Pool and Jaques. Please note that I’ve taken lessons in the proper French pronunciation.’ He looked at Harriet and smiled before going on. ‘Devising the plan wasn’t exactly rocket science – just purloin the beer glasses they were drinking from and get them to the lab. The trick was obviously to find them at the right pub, and that took us two nights. I didn’t want the landlord of the one we found them in to make a scene about the glasses – Yorkshire publicans tend to resent having their beer glasses stolen – so told him what we proposed to do, without telling him precisely why. The tight-arsed old bugger made me pay for two glasses.’