Game of Stones Read online

  praise for Despite the Darkness

  Set in Pietermaritzburg in the dark days of the 1980s…. Despite the Darkness skilfully captures the pervasive sense of fear and hopelessness that characterised those years and that we are inclined to forget in the dramas of the present.

  Margaret von Klemperer: The Natal Witness

  This is a book full of suspense, insight, and a bleak beauty. It captures both the terror and incisive and chilling reach of the apartheid government in South Africa and the small and big costs to human beings and their families…. An evocative and searing portrayal of what it was like to live in South Africa in that time period…. Very highly recommended.

  Rajani Naidoo

  This is an exceptional book. It is an engaging and suspenseful read with an unexpected outcome.

  Carole Goldberg

  It is not often I am so captivated by a story that I consumed a 400 page book in one sitting. Having been there at that time I know of the accuracy of the depictions of the characters and the political atmosphere of the time. I have become so gripped by Beaumont’s story that I need some resolution in a sequel!

  Adrian Furnham

  This is a humane account, neither romantic nor didactic, and it provides a fine account of the niceties and not-so-niceties of campus life too.

  Julian Stern

  The novel is both an important lesson and a chilling reminder of the apartheid regime. It illustrates with forensic skill how such regimes exercise their power on the individual, family and institution and destroy the fabric of relationships in a climate of mutual mistrust and terror….It is both a psychological thriller and important political commentary.

  Mike Calvert

  Copyright © 2020 David Maughan Brown

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  With the exception of the appendix, this is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  CREDIT: “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond”.

  Copyright 1931, (c) 1959, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust.

  Copyright (c) 1979 by George James Firmage, from COMPLETE POEMS:

  1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage.

  Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

  Matador

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  Tel: 0116 279 2299

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

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  ISBN 9781800468047

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  To Susan

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Appendix

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  My love and grateful thanks go to my wife, Susan, for her loving support and toleration of my indulgence in my writing habit. Thanks also to Brendan and Becky, for their comments on an early draft and, with Anthony and Kate and Sarah and Andreas, for their love and encouragement. Warm thanks to the readers from whose reviews of Despite the Darkness short extracts have been quoted. Thanks to Brenda and James Gourley for comments and encouragement. And, finally, thanks to the team at Matador – Joe Shillito, Andrea Johnson, Sophie Morgan and their excellent cover designers, in particular – for their friendliness, efficiency and support in the publication both of this novel and of Despite the Darkness.

  Author’s Note

  Game of Stones is, as it says on the tin, a sequel to Despite the Darkness. Prospective readers who have not read Despite the Darkness might like to consider doing so before they read Game of Stones. But it is not essential to do so, as the gist of what happened before Cameron left South Africa becomes apparent as this novel runs its course.

  Cameron Beaumont’s sardonic critique of the brutal and extravagantly dramatic police raid on 46 & 48 Lansdown Road in Forest Gate, east London, on 2nd June 2006, which plays a significant part in this story, will be found from p.339. Titled ‘Security: Forest Gate’, Cameron’s critique was originally intended as one chapter in a substantive analysis of post-9/11 reaction in Great Britain to the seminal events of that day in 2001. The analysis as a whole, putatively titled The Age of Overreaction, has yet to be published.

  Chapter 1

  Déjà vu. Would the time ever come when a telephone screaming into his ear at three in the morning would no longer shock Cameron awake with his heart pounding and his gut churning?

  Or not so déjà vu – Cameron didn’t need to worry about the telephone waking his wife and children any more. He no longer had a wife and children. Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children are gone. A two-up two-down rented terrace house on a main thoroughfare in Sheffield was hardly home. Home was Africa, more specifically South Africa, where you could smell the rain on the dry grass after a thunderstorm and hear the panicked cries of the hadidas.

  Hilton would have been twenty-eight now, and Nicky twenty-six, so they wouldn’t still have been at home to be woken by the telephone even if they had been able to join him in England. That didn’t stop Cameron’s first instinct, every time it happened, still being to snatch at the receiver to shut off the noise. The feeling of emptiness when he remembered that his children weren’t around to be woken didn’t fade with the passing of time.

  The main difference between then and now, though, was that now, twenty-three years later, there was no life at all on the other end of the line – no Afrikaans dance music, no death threats, no heavy breathing, nothing. Silence. Cameron never even heard the phone being put down.

  In an odd way the silence was even more disturbing than the threats had been. Under apartheid you knew who the enemy was – you knew it was the Special Branch or their hangers-on who were threatening to blow your head off, or put a match to a petrol-soaked tyre round your neck. You knew that what came next would probably be a police raid and time in detention. You knew the rules of the game. One of the rules was that if you happened to be a white man t
he chances were that they probably wouldn’t carry out their threats to murder you.

  Now Cameron hadn’t a clue who it was, why they were making the calls, or what came next.

  There was an irony, Cameron thought, in his sense that history was repeating itself. One of the ways he was filling the empty spaces between the part-time History lectures he gave at Sheffield Hallam University was by writing a book about the UK’s post-9/11 right-wheel towards being a police state. The book he was writing, The Age of Overreaction, drew some not too distant parallels between the UK in 2008 and apartheid South Africa. There was no distance whatever between the parallels when it came to being startled awake by phone-calls at three in the morning.

  It must have been the phone-calls that had triggered another cycle of Cameron’s recurring nightmare. In it, the eyes didn’t just widen in surprise and roll backwards into the man’s skull as the bullets from Cameron’s Sig Sauer rearranged his brain. They jumped right out of their sockets at Cameron, bloodshot and baleful. Now that he knew that the eyes were going to pop out at him he didn’t get the same fright each time, at least not to the extent of being woken by his own screaming, but they always left him sweating and feeling sick.

  Once he had moved to Sheffield it hadn’t taken many repeats of the dream to persuade Cameron to have himself referred to a therapist. That was the easy bit. It had taken the better part of a year for him to get as far as seeing someone. Mental health was clearly not a First World priority. Neil Draper, the therapist he did eventually get to see, was an enthusiastic gardener who liked to talk about his role as ‘tending the gardens of people’s minds’. Although Cameron had considerable difficulty in taking him seriously, Neil had succeeded, bit by bit, in prising the story out of him. He had likened the process to digging weeds out from the cracks between paving-stones.

  Cameron told Neil about the death threats during the apartheid years, which he knew the police had been responsible for, and about the perpetual surveillance. He told the story of his research student’s arrival at their back door in the middle of the night looking for a safe house and how things had gone rapidly downhill from there. If reliving the story was supposed somehow to relieve the stress, it hadn’t worked.

  Neil, whose rimless spectacles and funereal taste in ties made him look more like a small-town solicitor than a nurseryman, prided himself on the variety of heritage apple trees he grew in his orchard. After much digging and appraisal he had selected a label from his bag and stuck it on Cameron. He wasn’t Arthur Turner or Charles Ross, and he certainly wasn’t the Duke of Devonshire or Lord Lambourne – he was PTSD.

  ‘Post-traumatic stress disorder,’ Neil kindly spelt out for Cameron’s benefit. You didn’t need to have spent however many years qualifying as a clinical psychologist, or growing apples for that matter, to arrive at that conclusion.

  ‘If phone-calls in the middle of the night are triggering PTSD reactions, why didn’t you, and why don’t you, simply unplug the telephone beside your bed?’ Neil had asked. ‘That would seem the obvious thing to do.’

  ‘We didn’t disconnect the phone,’ Cameron replied, ‘because Jules’s mother had a weak heart and if she wasn’t well we needed to know that immediately. Anyway, if there are people out there wanting to kill you, isn’t it a good idea to know that they want to kill you?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Neil said. ‘Not if you are going to insist on doing nothing about it. It seems to me that in South Africa you had two options – you could either have stayed and stopped irritating them, or you could have left on the next plane. I would have done the latter because even if you had unplugged your phone I expect they would have found other ways to convey their message.’

  ‘They did find other ways,’ Cameron said, ‘like hanging funeral wreaths on our front door. What makes you think that would have been less stressful?’

  ‘At least it wouldn’t have woken you up at night,’ Neil said. ‘Stress is always made worse by sleeplessness. Anyway, that is all beside the point. This is now, that was then. There is no reason to suppose that anyone wants to kill you now. You say nobody ever says anything when you pick the phone up. Isn’t it a bit of a stretch to react to silence by jumping to the conclusion that someone wants to kill you? We aren’t living in Africa.’

  ‘That was South Africa under apartheid – it wasn’t “Africa”,’ Cameron said. ‘So, if they don’t want to kill me, why the hell would they be phoning at three in the morning to wake me up and say nothing?’

  ‘It could be a student you’ve annoyed with a bad mark,’ Neil replied. ‘You could have irritated your landlord, who might think this is a good way to get you to find somewhere else to live. It could be a stalker of either gender who finds you irresistibly attractive. There could be any number of reasons that don’t involve people wanting to kill you.’

  ‘Funnily enough,’ Cameron replied, ‘my head of department in South Africa was always inclined to assume that if I was being harassed it must be because I had pissed a student off, though he was far too proper to use that terminology. You appear to think that my failure to disconnect my phone is compulsive or obsessive or disordered, probably all three. It may well be – but someone is using my phone to try to intimidate me and if they can’t use the phone they might try something worse. Besides which I always need to feel connected. Just in case.’

  ‘I wouldn’t ever use the word “failure”,’ Neil said. ‘Just in case of what, precisely?’

  ‘I don’t know precisely,’ Cameron answered. ‘If I did know, I would be in a much better position to judge whether I can afford to disconnect my phone. Not knowing makes me feel as though cutting my connection to the outside world would be tempting fate. In the same way it would seem unlucky to get rid of my Sig Sauer automatic, which I keep between my mattresses, just as I did in South Africa. I keep it just in case.’

  ‘You can’t possibly have a licence to possess an automatic here,’ Neil said, looking alarmed. ‘That could get you into all kinds of trouble with the police. How many people know you have it?’

  ‘As it happens, it has got me out of all kinds of trouble with the police in the past,’ Cameron said. ‘And who is going to find out about it? There is only one other person who knows I had it when I arrived in England. He probably assumes I have got rid of it, and even if he knew that I still have it he certainly wouldn’t tell anyone. There’s never anyone in my house who might find it. I do all my own cleaning – such as it is.’

  ‘It is still an unnecessary risk to keep it,’ Neil said. ‘It could get into the wrong hands. Anyway, our police aren’t like the apartheid security police – they don’t lock people up without good reason; they aren’t into killing and torturing people; and they understand that effective policing requires them to win the trust of the people they police.’

  ‘Sure, sure, sure … of course,’ Cameron replied. ‘Dixon of Dock Green and all that. The real life inspirations for Enid Blyton’s Mr Plod – all beaming goodwill and ever-reliable authority in the civilized world’s holy war against thieving gypsies and gollywogs. Enid Blyton obviously never had the opportunity to read Phil Scraton’s book, Hillsborough: The Truth. I don’t imagine you have read it either, have you?’

  ‘No,’ said Neil stiffly, ‘and we don’t have time to discuss it now – perhaps next time I see you. In the meantime I really think you should either hand that gun in to the police or find some very deep water to drop it into. I obviously won’t tell anybody about it – apart from anything else, client confidentiality wouldn’t allow me to – but I can’t see any possible benefit in keeping it, and things could go seriously wrong if the police did find out about it. But I’m repeating myself.’

  While ‘never’ wasn’t wholly accurate, it was true that there was very seldom anyone else in the house to stumble across the Sig Sauer, or, for that matter, to be bothered by the phone-calls. Only once had one of the phone-calls coincided with the flee
ting passage through his bed of one of the few women he had shared it with since his escape from South Africa. Cameron had managed to pass it off as a wrong number – which, of course, it might have been. So it wasn’t the phone-call that had been responsible for the brevity of that particular relationship. She had blamed his moodiness and the shortness of his temper.

  Cameron hadn’t told any of the women about the dream or its origin. Knowing what he had done with the automatic all those years ago might have made them somewhat less enthusiastic about sleeping with him. Their ardour might have been cooled even further had they been aware that it was still hidden somewhere under the mattress they were sleeping on. He no longer felt the need to have it instantly to hand, as he had in South Africa, but getting rid of it would have felt very unlucky.

  It was never possible to get back to anything resembling a restful sleep after one of the phone-calls, so when the alarm went off he would sit up blearily, remember the phone call, relive his first instinct to grab the receiver before it could wake anyone else, experience all over again the desolation of realizing that everyone else was long gone, and know that he was, at least partly, to blame.

  Experience told him that the best way to escape the desolation was to work his butt off on his allotment. Digging over ground that had been dug-over for the better part of a hundred years helped to hold back the memories. When there was no more digging to do, there was always the planting, and then the weeding, and later the harvesting, and then the digging-over again. The repetitiveness of the cycle was reassuring. When the harvest was over, and the ground was frozen like concrete, there were bushes and trees to prune, and yards of tangled bramble-hedge to cut back. Even when bitter winds were scouring the Pennines in winter, the allotment offered a kind of sanctuary. It also offered the only way he’d found to put roots down into the alien soil of England.