Game of Stones

by David Maughan Brown

  Cameron stood up as they approached, feeling suddenly panicky about the most appropriate way to greet Lynn. She took the decision out of his hands, raising her eyes momentarily to meet his with a wan smile and holding a cool hand out for him to shake. It was like being a teenager again – no kissing on the first date.

  Not much talking either, as it turned out. If Harriet had hoped to witness an affectionate reunion she would have been disappointed. But she would know them both too well by now for that. Reflecting on the evening afterwards, Cameron realized that he hadn’t done much talking himself. Harriet and Brian had taken on the lion’s share of the burden of communication – and it must, at times, have felt like a burden. They had tried, without a great deal of success, to draw Lynn out about her work in the History Department at the University of Cape Town and life in post-apartheid South Africa, before falling back on a discussion of two of the films they had seen recently that were being tipped for Oscars – No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood. Eminently suitable titles for a discussion of apartheid South Africa, if not necessarily post-apartheid South Africa, Cameron thought.

  In honour of the meal’s distinction as a celebration of Cameron’s release, Harriet had ordered a bottle of champagne as soon as they sat down. Cameron had had no opportunity to drink anything stronger than Yorkshire tea in his cell, and had drunk very little alcohol since his whisky-fuelled confessional evening with Brian, but, not wanting to put a damper on Harriet’s and Brian’s celebratory mood, he agreed to half a glass. Lynn quietly consumed what would have amounted to Cameron’s share as well as her own, but withheld any impression that she was celebrating anything.

  After that one brief moment of eye-contact in greeting, Lynn didn’t, as far as Cameron could tell, look at him once – which made it much easier than it would otherwise have been for him to look at her. How much of the tenderness he felt towards her was the residue of his earlier love for her, and how much of it was the result of his feeling of guilt for the subdued state he found her in, he didn’t know. Lynn’s determinedly averted gaze suggested that it was going to take a considerable effort to generate any reciprocal feeling of tenderness on her part, and Cameron wasn’t at all sure that he had the energy to make that effort.

  When they had finished eating, Lynn excused herself and headed for the Ladies.

  ‘Don’t be in too much of a hurry,’ Harriet said to Cameron. ‘What is the plan for tomorrow?’

  ‘I’m not in any hurry at all,’ Cameron replied. ‘There isn’t a lot of point in hurrying to get nowhere. To answer your question, I’m going to set off quite early to van Zyl’s hotel and, once there, I’ll just hang around to make sure he doesn’t disappear.’

  ‘I’m sure it won’t be nowhere,’ Harriet said. ‘Just be very careful where van Zyl is concerned. Remember what Lynn said about his pathological hatred towards you – he went a very long way out of his way to frame you for the murder of one of your friends, he won’t be at all pleased to see you out of prison.’

  ‘I’ll be careful,’ Cameron promised as Lynn came back to the table.

  After Harriet had insisted on settling the bill, they made their way out to Harriet’s car together. Lynn said a quick goodbye, still without making eye contact, and climbed straight into the backseat. As if to offer a demonstration of what to do and how to do it, Harriet gave Cameron a warm and prolonged hug and kissed him on both cheeks.

  ‘I’m sure you will manage to break through, if you can bear to persevere,’ Harriet murmured in Cameron’s ear before breaking away. ‘She’s definitely a keeper.’

  Cameron headed home on his bicycle but soon, to his disgust, found himself having to get off and push it up a hill he would normally have expected to be able to ride up without breaking sweat. Several weeks locked up in a police station with no opportunity for exercise was apparently an even worse calamity fitness-wise than he had imagined.

  By the time Cameron reached his house he felt as drained physically as the dinner had left him feeling drained and flat emotionally. It wasn’t that he was disappointed. To be disappointed you have to have something by way of positive expectations. That was something someone needed to tell the BBC weather forecasters who kept telling listeners they were going to be disappointed by the weather. He just felt empty. All these years, in spite of Lynn’s injunction to him never to try to contact her, and his eventually largely successful determination not to think about her, the possibility that there might still be some kind of future with her had lingered somewhere under the surface.

  Now, after 23 years, they had seen each other again, Cameron had spent the better part of a couple of hours a few feet away from Lynn, and she had made eye-contact with him precisely once. Perhaps he should have serenaded her with a rendering of ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes’ – not that his singing voice would have promoted the chances of success. Whatever success might mean. The words of the first line brought other words from Jonson’s ‘Song to Celia’ to mind: ‘The thirst that from the soul doth rise, doth ask a drink divine.’ Cameron wasn’t comfortable with notions either of souls or of the divine, but he had known what Jonson meant by the thirst.

  Earlier, when he was reacquainting himself with his house, Cameron had been pleased to see that his computer was back on his desk. They had probably loaded it with spyware, including whatever device was needed for reading his key-strokes, but what the hell. He went upstairs, searched the internet, and listened to Paul Robeson and Johnny Cash singing the song. Listening to their singing gave Cameron enough energy to put on his CD of Dionne Warwick’s Friends, which evoked vivid memories of what it had felt like to love and be loved by a rather different Lynn from the one he had just had dinner with.

  Cameron listened to the CD through to the end, concluding that the title of the song ‘Love at Second Sight’ might have been a much more optimistic title for the album as a whole than the unpromising ‘Friends’. He switched off the CD player and collapsed into bed, grateful to be able, at long last, to sleep in a bed with a proper mattress that he wasn’t in danger of rolling off. He wouldn’t miss the smell of antiseptic and he didn’t need to worry about the telephone ringing at 3am. So there was some cause for celebration after all.

  It occurred to Cameron as he drifted off to sleep that for the first time in very many years his own bed was no longer equipped with an automatic under the mattress. He might miss that when he went to find van Zyl in the morning.

  Chapter 22

  When Cameron woke early the next morning, it took him a few moments to register where he was. He hadn’t slept well – partly because it had been a very muggy night, partly because his bed had been far too comfortable in comparison with the blue-cushioned bunk. But he relished the inconvenience of having to go into a different room for his early-morning pee.

  Hudson had established that van Zyl was staying in an up-market hotel set in extensive grounds a few miles from the centre of the city. Cameron decided that he would have to take his car as he was much too unfit to be able to get there on his bike and still be in a fit state for an encounter with van Zyl when he got there. He had decided during one of the night’s wakeful intervals that he wasn’t going there just to watch to make sure van Zyl didn’t escape; he was going there to confront van Zyl and let him know that the game was up and that he, van Zyl, had lost it. The player with the white stones didn’t always win – particularly when, with the exception of the white chocolate buttons, he seemed to prefer to make his moves with black stones.

  Cameron got up, had a quick bowl of porridge, being pleased to find that the oats hadn’t got stale in his absence, and phoned Hudson to check that Jacques and Poggenpoel had both been arrested. The last thing he needed was to get to the hotel to confront van Zyl and find himself up against all three of them. A very pleased-sounding Hudson told him that Jacques and Poggenpoel hadn’t offered any resistance and were, according to DC Scott, very busy ratting on each oth
er. Although Sinclair’s nose was apparently still very much out of joint, Scott was much more appreciative of Hudson’s role in tracking down the two men responsible for Mutoni’s murder, and was keeping him up to date with respect to the interrogations. Poggenpoel was apparently refusing to say anything about who he was being paid by and seemed unlikely to budge, as Cameron had predicted. Jacques, they were sure, was only withholding that information temporarily in the hope of using it as a counter in some kind of plea bargain.

  As Cameron got out of his car in the hotel carpark, he was struck by the expectant stillness of the already close atmosphere. If he were back in South Africa he would look for somewhere to park his car to avoid having it pulverised by hail stones. Here, what passed for hail couldn’t even damage baby lettuces. He remembered the Berg wind that had been blowing, and how tormented he’d been, the first time he went to meet van Zyl to plead with him to restrain his attack-dog Venter. Van Zyl, like his apartheid masters, had been in total control then. He wasn’t in control now.

  As Cameron walked up to the reception desk, he realised that he hadn’t worked out a detailed plan of action and didn’t even know whether van Zyl had registered under his own name.

  ‘Good morning. How can I help you?’ the immaculately uniformed receptionist asked with just a trace of what sounded like an Eastern European accent.

  ‘Do you have a Mr van Zyl staying here?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘No, I’m sorry, but we haven’t anyone of that name – I would certainly have remembered it,’ the receptionist answered.

  ‘It’s possible he is using the English translation of his name,’ Cameron said. ‘I used to know a Mr van Niekerk who called himself Fenchurch when he was in the UK. Perhaps he registered as Mr Waterman?’

  ‘No, we don’t have a Fenchurch or a Mr Waterman either,’ the receptionist said.

  This wasn’t going well. Cameron could see that the receptionist was looking at him dubiously, no doubt wondering whether his hotel wanted to have anything to do with the friends of people who used different names depending on which country they happened to be in. If he ventured another possible alias he risked being thrown out.

  ‘A man in a wheel-chair,’ Cameron said with sudden inspiration. ‘He has a tall friend with a beard.’

  ‘Ah, Mr George,’ the receptionist said. ‘Mr Carter George – yes, Mr George is one of our residents. He isn’t in his room at present, would you like to leave a message for him?’

  ‘He doesn’t actually have a passport in that name does he?’ Cameron said, as much to himself as the receptionist. Could van Zyl really have assumed the legal identity of his Go-playing alter-ego? You would have to assume that a rather important screw had come loose.

  “I am not at liberty to disclose personal information about our residents without their explicit permission,’ the receptionist answered. ‘Would you like to leave a message for him?’

  ‘No,’ Cameron said, ‘I need to see him in person. Do you know where he is?’

  ‘He usually spends time in the conservatory after breakfast,’ the receptionist said hesitantly – clearly torn between a desire to be of service and a growing uncertainty as to whether Cameron was the kind of person it was appropriate to be of service to. ‘It’s through that door on the right and along to the end of the corridor.’

  As he went through the door and along the corridor, Cameron felt unaccountably nervous. He had the upper hand, van Zyl’s game was effectively over. Why would he feel apprehensive about confronting a sick man in a wheel-chair? Nobody would spend his days sitting in a wheel chair if he didn’t have to. The chances of the wheel chair being part of some elaborate ploy that would end with van Zyl jumping to his feet with murderous intent were vanishingly small.

  The door from the corridor into the conservatory was open, so Cameron wouldn’t alert van Zyl to his arrival by the sound of its opening. As he reached the door, he could see the wheelchair at the far end of the conservatory. It was placed where van Zyl could see the garden and, beyond the hedge at the bottom of the garden, the long view down the wooded valley.

  The conservatory was huge, at least as big as a tennis court, in keeping with the lavish expenditure that had evidently gone into the rest of the building. It was furnished with strategically placed glass-topped tables surrounded by cane chairs equipped with tastefully bright cushions, and interspersed with wrought-iron stands holding the pot-plants – mainly improbably coloured orchids – it was its business as a conservatory to conserve. The centre-piece, around which everything else had been carefully arranged, was a large garden chess set – relocated indoors, Cameron assumed, out of deference to the Pennine weather. The black and white squares of the board must have been two-foot square and the pawns were around three-foot high, with royalty and the bishops a foot or so taller.

  Cameron had come with the intention of confronting van Zyl, but without anything resembling a plan. Precisely how he was going to go about it would have to depend on circumstances. The chessboard provided the answer – even if a Go board would have been better. Cameron crouched down to untie his shoelaces, slipped his shoes off and moved quietly to the middle of the room. By the time he reached the chessboard he could hear from van Zyl’s deep, asthmatic sounding breathing that he had dozed off.

  As silently as he could, Cameron set about moving the chess pieces off their starting positions and onto the floor beside the board. Although they seemed to be made of plastic, all the pieces – even the pawns – were surprisingly weighty. Perhaps not so surprising if they needed to spend half the year subjected to the Pennine winds outside. By the time he had moved them all off the board, Cameron’s heart was racing – partly from the effort, partly from the suspense. He didn’t want van Zyl to know he was there. Once he had moved all the pieces off the board, he picked up three of the white pawns one by one and placed them on three of the squares at the corners of the board.

  When he had set the board up the way he wanted it, Cameron walked silently up behind van Zyl’s wheelchair in his stockinged feet, his heart pounding the way it used to when he played stalking games at school – Statues, or Grand-mother’s Footsteps, or “What’s the time, Mr Wolf?” The last of these was much the best name – even if a sick and sleeping Mr Wolf was a lot less threatening than he used to be. As he stepped up behind the wheelchair, Cameron could smell the faded urine smell of retirement home lounges. It crossed his mind that he should perhaps have been more appreciative of the smell of disinfectant in his cell.

  Cameron looked to see whether van Zyl would be able to identify him from their reflection in the glass panes of the conservatory in front of him, but there was no reflection. It must have been a function of the sunlight streaming down on the other side of the glass – or perhaps they were both ghosts. Van Zyl woke up as soon as Cameron grasped the handles of the wheelchair and flicked the brake off with his foot. Cameron had expected him to turn his head to see who was behind him, but van Zyl’s head seemed to be locked rigidly in a bowed position – one manifestation, presumably, of whatever it was that had condemned him to end his days in a wheel-chair.

  ‘Is that you, Hannes?’ van Zyl asked, his voice not much more than a whisper.

  Cameron didn’t reply. He just turned the wheel-chair around and pushed it very slowly towards the chess board.

  ‘Jaques?’ van Zyl asked, then went on immediately, ‘no, it’s not either of you. I can smell fear. I know what fear smells like.’

  Cameron carried on pushing the wheelchair towards the board. He wasn’t going to say anything until he had positioned it precisely in the middle of the board, at which point he was going to declare “Atari” – the Go equivalent of “Check”. With the pawns placed as stone-substitutes on three corners of the board, van Zyl would understand that it would just take the placing of one stone on the other corner – his one remaining ‘liberty’ – for him, in Go-terms, to be dead and able to be removed from t
he board. It would be van Zyl’s turn to make a move, his opportunity to make the most of having that one liberty left. But he didn’t have anything to move with, and he was in a wheelchair – so he couldn’t move anyway.

  ‘Atari,’ van Zyl said, just as Cameron pushed the wheelchair onto the board.

  Cameron felt utterly deflated. It was like telling a joke that required an elaborate build-up to the punchline, and then having someone else jump in with the punchline at the last moment.

  ‘Dr Beaumont, I presume,’ van Zyl said. ‘It has taken you a long time to join the dots. But then you never were the brightest button in the box – as the English saying goes. The pawns you placed to put me in Atari really should have been black ones rather than white ones. I am, and always will be, the stronger player.’

  Cameron didn’t answer. Let the bastard sweat a bit. The longer he stood silently out of sight behind him, the more vulnerable van Zyl would feel.

  ‘You are wasting your time, Dr Beaumont,’ van Zyl said. ‘I know it is you behind me, and you aren’t going to make me feel vulnerable just by standing there. You forget how well I know you. You wouldn’t ever assault a dying man in a wheelchair. That might tactically be much the most sensible thing to do, but your over-developed sense of fair play – which has got you into so much difficulty in the past – wouldn’t allow you to do that.’

  Van Zyl didn’t sound to be sweating, he wasn’t the sweaty type, but it couldn’t do any harm to maintain the suspense for a while longer.