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  Cameron squeezed his way out of Mutoni’s shed and made it to the gate without attracting attention. Stepping over the gate had been easier going in than it was getting out as the ground outside the allotment was a bit higher, but he managed that too without making any noise. His own gate was a write-off. Crunched and splintered, it had been kicked aside and was attached to one gatepost only by the hasp and staple. Now that he could see the three men properly it didn’t lower his blood-pressure to see that, while two of them were in plain clothes, the third was in the uniform of the South Yorkshire Police. So they had now smashed their way into his space entirely unnecessarily twice in a couple of weeks.

  ‘What the fuck do you think you are doing?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘And who the hell are you? And where have you appeared from?’ one of the men in plain clothes responded.

  ‘Carry on swearing at us and we’ll have you for obstruction,’ the one in uniform added.

  In spite of his rapidly increasing acquaintance with the local constabulary Cameron didn’t recognize any of the three.

  ‘I’m Cameron Beaumont, this is my allotment, and I’ve just been for a walk – not that it is any of your business. What the hell do you think you are doing here? And why did you smash my gate to pieces? It wasn’t even locked. There was no need to pulverize it.’

  ‘Well, well,’ the other plain-clothes man said. ‘You’ve just saved us the trouble of having to go looking for you. Thank you for that. We’ve already been to look for you at your temporary accommodation and drawn a blank. I’m Detective Sergeant Evans, this is DC Scott and the uniform here is PC Graves.’

  Evans’s distinguishing feature was a very prominent wart on one side of his nose; Scott was short and slight but otherwise wholly nondescript; while Graves had an appropriately melancholy, hang-dog look, like a particularly depressed blood-hound.

  ‘None of which tells me what you think you are doing here,’ Cameron replied.

  ‘An anonymous call of interest to us came through to Crimestoppers yesterday evening,’ Evans said. ‘The caller suggested that it would be a good idea for us to do some digging on this allotment. He said we would find a handgun that you lost recently.’

  Cameron felt paralysed with shock, momentarily unable to say anything at all. He knew any even half-competent policeman would draw his own conclusions.

  ‘Have you lost a handgun recently?’ Evans asked.

  There was no time to think through the implications of admitting to having possessed an illegal firearm, and panic was getting in the way of any semblance of coherent thought.

  ‘No,’ Cameron said. ‘I don’t know why anyone might think I had.’

  It wasn’t a lie – it was literally true. He hadn’t lost it – he had known perfectly well where it was. It had been stolen, not lost. There was a significant difference. But who on earth would go to the trouble of stealing it only to bury it on his allotment and inform the police? If that was, indeed, what had happened.

  ‘OK. It will be easy enough to find out if you are telling the truth,’ Evans said. ‘We need you to stay here while we investigate.’

  ‘Are you arresting me?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘Why would we do that if what you say is true?’ DC Scott answered. ‘You heard what the Sergeant said – we just need you to stay here.’

  ‘The caller mentioned potatoes,’ Evans said. ‘Have you planted any potatoes and, if so, where?’

  ‘Over there,’ Cameron said, pointing.

  Cameron could see the green shoots that had just broken through the surface. With luck there shouldn’t be a late frost now. It was one thing to have one’s newly planted potatoes burnt off by late frosts, it was another thing entirely to have them vandalized by police digging-parties. What was the point of going to all the effort of planting potatoes if the police were just going to dig them up?

  There was no need to dig any potatoes up. As soon as Cameron went over to have a look, he could see that somebody had already done some digging at the end of one of the rows. It took all of thirty seconds for PC Graves, wielding a police-issue spade he had brought with him, to uncover a very muddied plastic bag with what looked like a blue supermarket logo Cameron didn’t recognise. Once the bag had been lifted out, it was carefully opened by Evans, who, with due ceremony, donned a pair of white gloves for the purpose. It came as a shock, but not a surprise, to Cameron to be shown that what it contained was his Sig Sauer. He could feel himself coming out in a cold sweat.

  ‘Now you are, indeed, under arrest,’ Evans said, and rattled through the increasingly familiar ‘anything you say’ warning, while Graves unclipped the pair of handcuffs on his belt and snapped them onto the wrists that Cameron, remembering the agonizing pain in his shoulder the last time he had been handcuffed, obligingly held out in front of him.

  Chapter 13

  In the harsh light of the interview room, the large wart on the side of Detective Sergeant Evans’s nose looked even more prominent, partly because his high domed forehead and receding chin gave the appearance of holding themselves back out of deference to it. It was going to be very difficult to avoid focusing on it when answering his questions. The brighter light didn’t make Scott look any less mousily nondescript.

  It was the same interview room, just two different policemen sitting across the table from Cameron and Harriet. She must by now be thinking that it would be a good idea to keep the first hour of every day clear in her diary in case he needed her down at the police station. The couple of minutes they had had together before Cameron was escorted to the interview room had been just about enough for him to tell her what had happened. Once the formulaic preliminaries had been completed, the questioning began.

  ‘Do you recognize the automatic in this bag?’ Evans asked, holding up the bag. ‘For the purposes of the tape I am holding up a plastic supermarket bag removed this morning from Mr Beaumont’s allotment.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cameron replied. ‘I have already told you that the automatic is mine.’

  They would have found his DNA all over it, so there hadn’t been any point in denying that it was his. What was a lot less clear was why anyone would have planted it on his allotment, and who else’s DNA they would find on it. Cameron was feeling cold and clammy with apprehension. Why on earth would anyone have gone to the trouble of burying the gun on his allotment instead of just handing it in? Nothing in his limited experience of Detective Sergeant Evans to date had given Cameron any confidence that Evans was the man to find the answers to those questions.

  ‘So what were you doing in possession of a prohibited weapon?’ Evans asked.

  ‘Why would you assume that my client, who is a relatively recent immigrant, would know that a handgun he was licensed to possess in South Africa is illegal here?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘He came here twenty years ago,’ Evans responded. ‘I don’t call that “relatively recent”. In any case, Miss Johnson, ignorance of the law is no defence – as you know perfectly well. Please allow Mr Beaumont to answer my question.’

  ‘Doctor, not Mister,’ Cameron said. It had been a long, hard slog and he was damned if he was going to let them get away with refusing to acknowledge it – his doctorate was one of the few real achievements he could claim. His peripheral vision picked up Harriet flashing a ‘for God’s sake don’t provoke them unnecessarily’ glance at him.

  ‘Just answer the bloody question,’ Scott interjected, sounding surprisingly belligerent. So the mouse could roar after all.

  Cameron supposed he had better back off trying to insist on the ‘Doctor’. Harriet had more experience of this kind of situation than he had and was clearly anxious for him not to piss them off unnecessarily.

  ‘I needed a gun to protect myself in South Africa,’ Cameron said. ‘It came over with me and there was a good chance that I would still need it here, so I kept it –just in case.’

  ‘I
t “came over with you” did it?’ Evans responded. ‘Climbed into your suitcase of its own accord when you weren’t looking, no doubt. You might have needed protection from black criminals in South Africa but you don’t need such protection here.’

  ‘It wasn’t black criminals I was worried about, it was white policemen,’ Cameron said, managing for Harriet’s benefit to restrain himself from adding ‘like you’. ‘They murdered one of my university colleagues and they were threatening to do the same to me. I needed a gun to protect myself and my family.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have had a hope in hell of protecting yourself with this,’ Evans responded, pointing to the bag lying on the table between them. ‘If anyone who knew what he was doing had really wanted to kill you, I’m sure it would have been dead easy. Anyway we are not in South Africa. Even if you thought you needed it there, you didn’t need it here – and it is a criminal offence to possess it.’

  ‘The apartheid government had agents all over the UK,’ Cameron replied. ‘Many of the exiled ANC leaders…’

  ‘ANC?’ Scott interrupted.

  ‘African National Congress – the main political resistance to apartheid,’ Cameron answered.

  ‘Actually a terrorist organization waging a guerilla war against the South African government,’ Evans said. ‘What Mr Beaumont refers to as “political resistance” included the planting of bombs that killed innocent civilians.’

  ‘Doctor, not Mister,’ Cameron repeated after a momentary pause – this wasn’t the time or place to enter into a debate about the morality of armed resistance. ‘As I was saying, many of the ANC leaders were based in the UK, and the apartheid government planted agents over here to keep an eye on them. When I came over to a conference in Brighton in 1985 I was followed everywhere I went by one of those agents.’

  ‘But none of the leaders were assassinated,’ Evans said. ‘What made you think that they would bother to target you if they were leaving the ANC leaders alone?’

  ‘It wasn’t just the government agents I was worried about,’ Cameron replied. ‘It was the ANC itself. I had been wrongly accused of turning some of their members over to the police and the ANC dealt pretty ruthlessly with people who did that kind of thing.’

  ‘Whatever justification you thought you had for retaining possession of this firearm is of no interest whatever to me,’ Evans said. ‘It won’t be of much interest to a magistrate either. You have admitted that it belongs to you – admitted, in other words, to the possession of a prohibited weapon – and you will be charged accordingly.’

  ‘With regard to police bail…’ Harriet started to say.

  She was interrupted by a loud rapping on the door of the interview room. The door opened and Cameron saw the desk sergeant who had signed him in poking his head round the door and beckoning to Evans, who got up from his seat and left the room, closing the door behind him. For some reason, the sound of the closing door and the click of the latch made Cameron feel sick with apprehension. Scott sat impassively in the chair opposite, watching him.

  Harriet caught Cameron’s eye and raised a questioning eyebrow; all he could manage by way of response was a minimal shrug of his shoulders. The way things were going at the moment, whatever it was that Evans had been called out for – and it must be important – could only be bad news. Scott demonstrated his unconcern by fishing a steel comb out of his back pocket and proceeding to use one end of it to clean the dirt out from under his fingernails. It called vividly to mind the inch or so of similar comb that could always be seen sticking out of the top of the khaki stockings Warrant Officer Venter used to wear with his safari suit. There wouldn’t have been a lot to choose between what Scott harboured under his fingernails and whatever tended to get stuck in the Brylcreem Venter slicked his hair with. Nobody said anything to break the silence.

  When Evans came back into the interview room after two or three minutes his expression was one of grim satisfaction. Cameron’s interpretation of Evans’s expression could just be paranoia, so he glanced across at Harriet for confirmation. It appeared from the clenching and unclenching of her jaw muscles that she was also interpreting Evans’s expression as bad news. Evans seemed to like the silence he found on his return and allowed it to continue for what seemed a long time after he sat down.

  ‘I think you had started to say something about police bail, Ms Thompson?’ Evans asked.

  ‘Johnson, not Thompson,’ Cameron said. Were they getting names and titles wrong deliberately, or were they just incompetent?

  ‘Johnson,’ Evans said, without apology. ‘If you were about to ask whether police bail can be granted pending a hearing, the answer is no. Any request for bail will need to be put before a magistrate.’

  The shadow of a smile at the corners of Evans’s mouth made Cameron feel even more apprehensive. Evans was playing a cat and mouse game of some sort, and evidently enjoying the process.

  ‘Why a magistrate?’ Harriet asked. ‘In the case of illegal possession of a firearm it is entirely within police powers to grant bail pending further investigation. The prohibited weapon in question is no longer in Doctor Beaumont’s possession so it cannot be argued that granting him bail would pose a risk to the public.’

  ‘You are, of course, assuming that the charge in question would relate solely to possession of a prohibited weapon,’ Evans said.

  ‘What else would it refer to?’ Harriet asked.

  Evans sat silently, staring at Cameron, the shadow still playing around the corners of his mouth. If this was a pause for dramatic effect, Cameron thought, it was certainly effective. He could feel his pulse pounding in his temples, and he was sweating profusely. He must look guilty as sin – but what the hell was he supposed to be guilty of?

  ‘Murder,’ Evans said, as if in answer to the question. He waited a full ten seconds before going on.

  ‘I was called out a few minutes ago because the custody officer wanted to tell me that the body of Mrs Sehene, Mr Beaumont’s supposed friend, who we have been looking for for some days, has been found. She had been murdered execution-style by a single bullet fired at point-blank range into the back of her head. I strongly suspect that the magazine in the gun in that bag will be found to be one bullet short. Mr Beaumont you are now under arrest for the murder of Mrs Mutoni Sehene…’

  Cameron was feeling dizzy. He leant forward to put his head on his arms on the table. As he did so he was conscious of darkness welling inwards from the periphery of his vision. He heard, rather than felt, a crash as his forehead hit the table-top – he hadn’t succeeded in getting his arms there in time.

  It was hands under his armpits hauling him upright, and pulling the chair he was on backwards in the process, that Cameron next became aware of. He shrugged the hands off and sat up. He was conscious of something having gone desperately wrong but it took a second or two for him to realize where he was. There seemed to be a lot of people in uniform standing around him in the room and he could see a stretcher lying on the floor beside the table. It was a huge relief to realize that Harriet was standing beside him and to feel her hand on his shoulder. It would be even better to feel her arms around him. He didn’t know how long he had been unconscious, but it had obviously been long enough for them to get someone to bring the stretcher.

  ‘Please lie down on the stretcher, Mr Beaumont,’ a man Cameron recognized as the custody officer said. ‘An ambulance is on its way and we need to get you to hospital for a check up.’

  ‘Dr Beaumont,’ Cameron muttered, shaking his head and lifting both handcuffed hands for a fingertip exploration of the damage to his forehead. It felt tender and his head was aching, but he didn’t need the public humiliation of a police escort to hospital.

  ‘No,’ Cameron said. ‘I don’t need to go to hospital for a check-up. I’m fine.’

  ‘If you were fine, Dr Beaumont,’ the custody officer said, ‘you wouldn’t have passed out and a brui
se wouldn’t be forming on your forehead. You may not need to lie on the stretcher but we will need you to go to the hospital.’

  ‘What part of “I don’t need to go to hospital” do you not understand?’ Cameron said. It came out more loudly than he intended. He needed to avoid getting angry – he could feel his headache getting worse.

  ‘I’ve read your article on the so-called Birmingham Six,’ Evans said. ‘If we don’t have you checked over, and get a doctor to certify that the bruise on your forehead was not our responsibility, I have no doubt that you will go to the press and accuse us of police brutality.’

  ‘Don’t be bloody ridiculous,’ Cameron said. Not getting angry was not going to plan. ‘The Birmingham Six were freed after they had spent nearly seventeen years in prison when it became clear to the court that they should never have been imprisoned in the first place. They had been convicted entirely on the basis of police lies and false confessions extracted from them by systematic beatings. If that wasn’t police brutality I don’t know what is. In any case my solicitor is a witness to what happened here and it isn’t either of us who is in the habit of lying.’

  ‘It seems pretty clear that Dr Beaumont is well enough to be able to talk rationally,’ Harriet intervened. ‘If your Health and Safety policy requires him to be examined, can I suggest that he be allowed back to the cell and that someone who is suitably qualified be called here to examine him? Even if you were not directly responsible, he has taken a blow to the forehead and may need to rest.’

  ‘You call that rational?’ Evans asked.

  ‘That sounds reasonable,’ the custody officer said, ignoring Evans and taking charge. ‘I do need to have Dr Beaumont checked over. We will take him back to the cell and resume questioning later.’

  ‘Harries is a decent sort, I’ve come across him before,’ Harriet said, looking closely at Cameron, once they had been left alone in the cell.