Game of Stones Page 2

  The memories were claustrophobic. Just being out in the open, listening to the birdsong and able to look miles out over the wooded valley, was more therapeutic than talking to Neil. It also cost the National Health Service a lot less.

  It was a Sunday morning so there was no need to go in to the university. He had woken just before dawn and remembering the dream had driven him out of bed and into his allotment clothes – a pale blue shirt with a frayed collar, and a pair of old jeans indelibly stained a dirty brown at the knees by the damp ground he had kneeled on over the years. Jules wouldn’t have allowed him to be seen dead in them; nobody since Jules would have cared. Lynn, his History Department colleague, might have cared, but Cameron did his best to avoid ever thinking about her.

  It was a bright morning in late April and the potatoes should already have been planted. Folk wisdom had it that they should have gone into the ground on Good Friday. But Easter Sunday had been on March 23rd – the earliest it had been since 1913 according to the Sheffield Telegraph, which could always be looked to as a treasure-chest of trivia. The further information it imparted, to the effect that the next time Easter fell on the 23rd March wouldn’t be until 2160, had been a gold-standard nugget of trivia that would be of even less interest to Cameron then than it was now. Frost had never, as far as Cameron knew, taken much cognisance of Easter.

  The ground had been prepared, but trenches had to be dug and lined with newspaper, and the manure had to be carted from the muck-heap, so there was enough heavy work to ensure that the vivid image of the eyes would blur and gradually fade altogether – at least until the next time.

  Cameron was so absorbed in what he was doing that he only noticed he had a visitor once a uniform had already come through what passed for his gate.

  ‘Christ, all we need to make our day is a visit from Mr Plod,’ he muttered.

  Cameron lent on the handle of his spade and watched as a large man in an ill-fitting uniform picked his way along the allotment path towards him, sidling ponderously between the straggling arms of the gooseberry bushes. Those should have been pruned several months ago when they were dormant, but it was too late now. Uninvited policemen would just have to take their chances with the thorns.

  ‘Good morning, sir. Are you Cameron Beaumont?’

  ‘Yes I am. Who are you and what do you want?’

  The policeman hesitated momentarily, appearing taken aback by the lack of warmth in Cameron’s welcome.

  ‘I’m sorry to intrude on your Sunday morning,’ he said. ‘I’m Constable Hudson of the South Yorkshire police. I am trying to find the African woman who rents the allotment next to yours. Over the hedge there,’ he said pointing down the slope. ‘I thought it might be a good idea to come down here to see if by any chance she was working on her allotment today. Have you seen her?’

  ‘Why are you looking for her?’ Cameron asked. ‘What makes you think I might have seen her? And why would I tell you if I had?’

  ‘Why I am looking for her is police business, so I can’t tell you,’ Hudson said. ‘There’s no need sound so aggressive. I’ve said I’m sorry to have had to disturb you.’

  There bloody well was a need to sound aggressive towards policemen, Cameron thought. As for being ‘aggressive’, Constable Hudson didn’t know the half of it. Being aggressive involved shoving the business end of an automatic into someone’s mouth and pulling the trigger. The man in question could have alerted Hudson to just how aggressive Cameron could be if three bullets hadn’t intruded.

  ‘How did you know my name?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘We have a copy of the allotment map which gives the names of the tenants of all the plots,’ Hudson replied, after a few moments’ hesitation. ‘I recognized your name and have seen your photograph in the newspapers.’

  Cameron didn’t reply, waiting for Hudson to interrupt the awkward silence. It didn’t take long.

  ‘If you are going to spend most of your life criticizing the police, you can expect the officers at the local police station to know who you are,’ Hudson said.

  ‘Not most of my life, and not the police in general – just the South Yorkshire and West Midlands police forces,’ Cameron replied. He had taken time out from writing another article about Hillsborough the previous Tuesday to make the trip down to Anfield to attend the annual memorial service. The more than five thousand voices singing ‘You’ll never walk alone’ at the end of the service, many breaking with emotion, had left him in tears. The tears didn’t come often these days but he hadn’t tried to stop them, they had plenty of company.

  ‘You are old enough to have been at Hillsborough,’ Cameron said. ‘Were you there?’

  ‘That isn’t any of your business,’ Hudson said, turning to go.

  ‘It bloody well is my business,’ Cameron replied. ‘I live in South Yorkshire. The South Yorkshire police exist solely to keep people in places like Sheffield safe. Almost twenty years ago ninety-six football fans went to watch football on a Saturday afternoon in April and ended up dead. They were crushed to death, penned like farm animals into steel cages that they would never have been trapped in but for the utter incompetence and callousness of senior police officers. It most certainly is my business if policemen who were there to protect the crowd were prepared to lie about what happened and collude in altering their statements to say that the fans were drunk and rushed the gates. So it was all their own fault and they deserved to die.’

  ‘Nobody said anybody deserved to die,’ Hudson objected, turning back to face Cameron. An ugly-looking flush that had nothing to do with the temperature on a Spring morning in Sheffield was escaping from the top of the uniform and creeping up his neck and cheeks towards his forehead. Was it anger or embarrassment?

  ‘Like hell they didn’t,’ Cameron said. ‘The Sun would have been happy to see hundreds more Liverpool fans lying dead on the field. They claimed that the ones who didn’t die were seen picking the pockets of the dead and pissing all over the policemen who were trying to help the injured. Filth and lies are all one can ever expect from The Sun, but in this instance it was the police who fed them the filthy lies. I suppose you were one of the bleeding heart Bobbies trying to help the injured who was pissed on by a Liverpool fan?’

  ‘What’s got into you?’ Hudson asked. ‘I come out here off my own bat, nobody sent me, to try to warn a friend of yours that we think she may be in danger, and you set about abusing me for no reason at all.’

  ‘Not for no reason at all – for a bloody good reason,’ Cameron replied. ‘It’s ten years since Lord Justice Taylor wrote a report for the Home Office pointing to what he called a police-led campaign of vilification against Liverpool fans. In other words, the police invented a pack of lies. That was ten years ago, that was a Home Office report, and nothing whatever has happened in the ten years since – except that the police have carried on telling exactly the same lies. I expect they will go on doing that until Hell freezes over. How is anyone supposed to trust a single bloody word a policeman utters in this part of the world? Even if you weren’t there, I suggest you read Phil Scraton’s book, Hillsborough: The Truth – the real truth, not The Sun’s kind of truth – it would give you a valuable insight into the kind of people you work with and for.’

  ‘I was there, and I have read it,’ Hudson said very quietly. ‘I should also warn you that it is an offence to swear at the police.’

  ‘I wasn’t swearing at you,’ Cameron said, ‘I was swearing in your presence. There is a difference.’

  But there had been something in Hudson’s voice that suggested that it was time to change the subject.

  ‘When I asked what you wanted Mutoni for, you told me that was police business,’ Cameron said. ‘Now it suddenly isn’t exclusively police business any more. What makes you think she is a friend of mine?’

  Hudson allowed a few seconds to pass before replying – was he weighing his words or was
the pause for dramatic effect?

  ‘We know who all your friends are, Mr Beaumont,’ Hudson said, equally quietly. ‘There is very little we don’t know about you.’

  Cameron felt a sudden chill that had as little to do with the April sunshine as Hudson’s flush had earlier. Cameron noticed that the flush had retreated from Hudson’s face and neck, back into the shelter of his heavy woollen uniform.

  ‘What is that supposed to mean?’ Cameron asked. ‘ What makes you think you know all my friends?’

  ‘Anyone who spends as much time being critical of the police as you do obviously has an axe to grind,’ Hudson replied, only just loud enough for Cameron to hear him. ‘Axes are dangerous things. The South Yorkshire police are there to protect the citizens of Sheffield – you put it very well a few minutes ago – so we need to keep an eye on people who have axes to grind. That means knowing where they live, who their friends are, who they associate with, what they do with their time.’

  Hudson paused again. Cameron heard a cuckoo call somewhere down in the valley.

  ‘Now I must go,’ Hudson said, volume back to normal. ‘There is no reason whatever why I should stand here and listen to you lecturing me about Hillsborough, or, for that matter, any of your many other hobby-horses – Israeli settlements on the West Bank, the Prevent programme, police being nasty to the IRA, or anything else. If you see Mantodi, or whatever you called her, tell her to contact us at the police station at Attercliffe Common. It could be important.’

  Hudson turned abruptly and made his ponderous way back between the gooseberries, out of the gate and up the path towards the road. The sound of the cuckoo had been replaced by the cackling of crows in the plane trees that edged the allotments. Were they harbingers of doom, or messengers of the divine? Mythology couldn’t make up its mind. Cameron, whose relationship with the divine was very distant, would rather have heard the cuckoo’s call or, even better, the faraway call of a fish eagle.

  Chapter 2

  Cameron took several deep breaths to slow his pulse rate before turning back to get on with planting the potatoes. If he was able to use the throbbing in his temples as a heart monitor it was probably time to get someone to check his blood pressure. It was still impossible to stop his hackles rising at the sight of a police uniform intruding into his space, and he still couldn’t see an army helicopter flying overhead without having an urge to shoot at it. Nearly twenty years after Mandela had been released, the legacy of struggle lived on.

  As he shovelled manure into his wheelbarrow at the shed end of his allotment, Cameron was startled by a sudden clatter from Mutoni’s shed. Turning to look, he was just in time to see Mutoni falling out of the shed and landing on her hands and knees with a muffled ‘Eeina!’ It was an unexpectedly ungainly entry stage right for someone who was usually such a model of dignified composure.

  ‘Are you alright?’ Cameron asked, stepping quickly over to the hedge.

  Mutoni looked anxiously around, then bent to rub both her knees before answering.

  ‘I think so,’ Mutoni said. ‘What did the policeman want? I couldn’t hear what you were saying properly, but you sounded angry. It wasn’t about my asylum was it? I’ve got my letter.’

  ‘No. It was nothing to do with your asylum,’ Cameron answered. ‘He said he had come to look for you so that he could warn you that the police thought you might be in danger.’

  ‘That was kind of him,’ Mutoni said. ‘Did he say what kind of danger, or what made them think that?’

  ‘No,’ Cameron replied. ‘To begin with he wouldn’t even tell me why he was looking for you. I was surprised to hear a noise from your shed. I didn’t see you arriving.’

  ‘I slept there,’ Mutoni said. ‘There isn’t much room, which is why I tripped over my bean canes as I came out. But I have slept in much worse places. I don’t need a policeman to tell me when I am in danger. Someone has been watching our house and trying to follow me. I think he might also have been watching these allotments, so I don’t want to stand here in the open talking for too long.’

  As Mutoni turned her head to scan their surroundings again, the low sun fleetingly shadowed a deep scar, almost a cleft, on one side of her forehead. It seemed to have healed very well, but the blow had clearly been so savage that she must have been lucky not to be killed. Cameron had often exchanged greetings with her across the hedge in the year since she had taken over her allotment, but he didn’t know her well enough to ask about it.

  ‘Have you had breakfast?’ Cameron asked. ‘Wouldn’t you like to come back to my house for something to eat?’

  ‘No, I haven’t eaten,’ Mutoni replied. ‘That would be nice – but can we go quickly please? I’m feeling afraid about being seen.’

  ‘Sure,’ Cameron said, ‘I’ll just hide my spade in what passes for my shed. I certainly wouldn’t want to try sleeping there.’

  ‘I can’t provide anything like croissants, I’m afraid,’ Cameron said as he pulled his gate closed behind him and joined Mutoni on the path. ‘But I can do coffee – though probably from Kenya rather than Rwanda. And I’m sure I can find you something to eat.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Mutoni said, ‘that is kind of you. Why were you so angry with the policeman if he was coming to warn I might be in danger?’

  ‘The years I spent in South Africa under apartheid gave me very good cause to be angry with policemen,’ Cameron replied. ‘I don’t trust them. I was angry because I have been reading and writing about what happened at Hillsborough. Do you know about Hillsborough?’

  ‘Not properly,’ Mutoni replied. ‘I have heard people talking about Hillsborough and I know where the football ground is, but I don’t really know what happened.’

  ‘To cut a long story short,’ Cameron said, ‘96 people who went to watch a football match in that stadium on an April afternoon in 1989 died because the police allowed too many people into the cage they had to stand in to watch the game. They were crushed to death.’

  Cameron’s allotment wasn’t far below the road, and it didn’t take them long to reach his car, parked half on the grass verge. While Cameron unlocked the car and moved a tray of bean seedlings from the front seat onto the floor at the back, brushing the residual soil off the seat, Mutoni stood on the path in the gap between the bramble hedges, checking that nobody could be seen in the three other cars on the verge.

  ‘All those people dying was bad,’ Mutoni said as she climbed into the car.

  ‘Very bad indeed,’ Cameron said, starting the car and doing a U-turn to go back up the hill, ‘and, what is worse, the police then lied and claimed it was the fans’ fault because they were all drunk.’

  ‘That is indeed very bad,’ Mutoni agreed, ‘but 1989 is many years ago. Why does it make you angry still? You were not even here then. There is a Kinyarwanda proverb that says “the other’s stitch in the side doesn’t prevent you from sleeping.” The pain of those deaths belongs to the people who were here, not to you. Holding onto anger is not good.’

  ‘You are probably right,’ Cameron acknowledged. ‘But what about apartheid? It was the black people who suffered the stitch in the side there and many white people didn’t lose any sleep over it. But that was absolutely not the right thing to do. Injustices have to be exposed and fought against and remedied – and they don’t carry an expiry date. What about the genocide in Rwanda? Shouldn’t the people responsible be hunted down, hunted all the way to their graves if necessary, and put on trial like the Nazi war criminals?’

  Out of the corner of his eye Cameron saw the slightest stiffening of Mutoni’s always very upright posture, and sensed, rather than saw, a stillness come over her. Nothing was said as he parked outside his house, led Mutoni through to the kitchen, cleared a space on the small kitchen table, moved a pile of books off the spare chair, and gestured for her to sit down.

  The stiffening and stillness couldn’t, surely, be because she
had been responsible in any way for the genocide? It seemed extremely unlikely that she could have been involved in the actual killing of Tutsi men, women and children. Her dignity and self-possession, her calmness, and, perhaps above all, her rationality, seemed totally at odds with any idea of her as a blood-thirsty wielder of a machete. But Cameron knew that those responsible for some of the more genocidal Hutu-supporting news media had been indicted at an international tribunal and, however unlikely, it wasn’t impossible that she could have been involved and was now being hunted to be brought to trial. Was that why she was so anxious to avoid being seen that she had resorted to sleeping in her shed?

  Mutoni chose porridge from the limited range of options Cameron listed – porridge or toast, or porridge and toast – and Cameron got on with microwaving some oats. The simplest way of finding out would be to ask Mutoni outright whether she was Hutu or Tutsi, but, coming from a white South African man, the ethnic question might have been open to misinterpretation.

  Cameron put a large bowl of porridge on the table for Mutoni with the sugar basin and the milk bottle from the fridge – Jules would not have approved, but he no longer possessed a milk jug – and got on with making the coffee and tidying the kitchen counter. Mutoni ate her breakfast hungrily and Cameron saw no need to distract her from the process by engaging her in conversation. When she had finished, Cameron suggested that they should go through to the lounge to sit more comfortably while they had their coffee.

  The Hutu or Tutsi question was best asked indirectly.

  ‘Were any of your friends or family killed in the genocide?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘When you talk about the genocide I’m sure you want to ask whether I am Tutsi or Hutu, but you don’t know quite how to do that,’ Mutoni replied. ‘I’m Tutsi and, yes, many of my friends and family were killed in the genocide. But, if you don’t mind, I would rather not talk about that now.’