Game of Stones Read online

  The march was due to start at Bramall Lane and end as usual at the City Hall. The drizzle made cycling a wholly unattractive prospect, so Cameron decided to go early and take his car instead. Sheffield United were playing away so there wasn’t a match at Bramall Lane, and finding parking shouldn’t be an entirely impossible dream. Cameron had bought a third-, fourth- or fifth-hand Renault 16 when he got to Sheffield, just for old-times’ sake. Feeling nostalgic for any aspect of the old times was foolishly sentimental, and in this instance also somewhat impractical, given the venerable age of the car, but one never knew who one might need to ferry around in the boot of one’s car.

  The car was parked a hundred yards or so from Cameron’s house, which gave him plenty of opportunity to spot the white Volvo should it be there. He couldn’t see it, but that didn’t mean his house wasn’t being watched. The Volvo had been visible on Thursday and Friday but had been nowhere to be seen on Wednesday. If by Thursday they still hadn’t known where Mutoni was, they wouldn’t on Wednesday have taken the chance that she might come back when they weren’t watching. That must mean that Mr Sari swapped watches from time to time with whoever was responsible for keeping an eye on Mutoni’s digs. Cameron couldn’t see a car with anyone in it anywhere along the street. But, again, that didn’t mean nobody was there. The mere process of looking for a car with somebody in it was making Cameron’s pulse race again.

  The march was relatively small. Cameron’s rough count came to 210 marchers, excluding the ones in pushchairs, which wasn’t too bad considering the weather. What it lacked in numbers it made up for in noise. Shepherded by stewards in high-visibility vests, which Cameron had been let off because he was one of three designated speakers, the marchers made their way to the City Hall largely ignored by the Saturday morning shoppers in spite of, or perhaps because of, the chanting. Four policemen, also in in high-visibility jackets, two at the front and two at the rear, escorted the march. The high body-mass-indexed Constable Hudson had been assigned one of the leading roles. The exercise would do him good.

  If anyone had asked Cameron why he wasn’t joining in the chanting he would have said that he was making sure he still had a voice when the time came for him to speak. But it had been one thing to sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ and ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ while the South African Police got ready to tear-gas and baton-charge anti-government protests; it was another thing entirely to march down the streets of Sheffield on a Saturday morning chanting ‘Israel out of Gaza! – Out! – Out! – Out!’ The chanting of simplistic slogans on protest marches always seemed to undermine the seriousness of the issues. In this instance, apart from anything else, Israel couldn’t hear them.

  As they marched through the drizzle, Cameron was pleased to spot two press photographers he knew, one from each of the two local newspapers, busily snapping away. A few photographs as the march passed by; job done; find the nearest café to get out of the drizzle; have a coffee. That was just the photographers; their reporter equivalents would have the even worse job of standing in the rain listening to the speeches. But the march should get some good publicity in the Monday papers.

  There was just one, very obvious, exception to the quick-photograph-followed- by-leisurely-coffee rule. A well-built man about Cameron’s height with dark, tightly cropped hair and a flattened-looking face was taking the job of capturing the march on film a whole lot more seriously. Cameron, who was walking near the back of the march to keep an eye on things, first spotted the man aiming a video-camera at the marchers when roughly half the column had already passed him. The man was standing on the pavement half-obscured by a bus stop, and carried on filming until all the marchers, including a couple of stragglers with push-chairs, and a veteran of countless protest marches on a mobility scooter, had passed him. He then overtook the march on a bicycle and repeating the filming from the other side of the street.

  Why would the South Yorkshire police – or any of the UK security agencies for that matter – bother? Filming the entire column of marchers from both sides of the road could only mean that somebody wanted to make sure that everyone taking part was caught on film. But the entire route was covered by CCTV. UK security agencies could all examine the footage any time they wanted. So who else could be that interested in a march protesting the recent invasion of Gaza? The obvious answer was Mossad, although Cameron wouldn’t have expected them to be quite so blatant about it.

  Cameron didn’t like being filmed at the best of times. When he realized that the march was going past the man with the camera a third time, and that the man was still filming, Cameron felt himself starting to sweat again. Instead of just allowing himself to recognize that he was feeling threatened and get on with his life, as Neil would have recommended, he felt strongly inclined to step out of the column of marchers to confront the man and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing. But now wasn’t the time – he was going to have to make a speech when they arrived at the City Hall, which was very close now, and he couldn’t afford to be delayed by an argument.

  A couple of loud-speakers and a microphone, all covered in transparent plastic, beaded with raindrops, stood forlornly on the steps of the City Hall to greet the protesters’ arrival. As they reached the foot of the steps, the 150 or so marchers who hadn’t peeled off to find shelter spread out to listen to the speeches. Cameron was pleased to see that those responsible for the pushchairs had thought better of staying – this was nobody’s idea of baby and toddler weather. The veteran on the mobility scooter, by contrast, was not about to be deterred by a few drops of rain.

  Cameron kept his speech very short, as promised. It was very seldom necessary to do much more than find an appropriate quotation from the two moral giants of the South African transition, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Where archbishops were concerned, it was never easy to find an appropriate quotation that did not make any reference to God. Cameron didn’t think God had shown him- or herself in a particularly good light at any point over the past hundred years where Palestine was concerned, but even the most thoroughgoing atheist could hardly find fault with Tutu’s statement: ‘We in South Africa had a relatively peaceful transition. If our madness could end as it did, it must be possible to do the same everywhere else in the world. If peace could come to South Africa, surely it can come to the Holy Land?’

  Nelson Mandela needed even less introduction to a Sheffield audience than Tutu did. Cameron knew of a Nelson Mandela Walk, a Nelson Mandela room in the nearby Sheffield Town Hall, and a Nelson Mandela Auditorium in the University of Sheffield’s Student Union, just for a start. In fact he knew that the entire Sheffield Hallam Student Union had been renamed the Nelson Mandela building in 1982 – but, to Cameron’s considerable regret, that had recently been put up for sale and was to be demolished. The 1997 Mandela quotation Cameron chose was pithier than the Tutu one, and very much to the point where the implicit comparison with South Africa was concerned: ‘We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.’ Very little more needed to be said.

  Cameron, who was on after Jean McGregor, the local PSC Chair, spoke for less than five minutes before handing over the microphone to the last speaker. He had been conscious throughout his speech of the man with the video-camera standing just to one side filming him – presumably with a view to recording what he said, rather than what he looked like as he said it. The man also filmed the entire speech given by Ahmed Hadid, who spoke last.

  Always alert to the presence of the police, Cameron had noted that when the march reached the City Hall the police-woman who had been paired with Hudson at the front of the march had walked off towards the Town Hall, leaving Hudson standing on his own on one side of the group, while the two policemen who had brought up the rear stood chatting on the other side.

  It had been agreed that, once the speeches were over, the majority of the marchers would go their separate ways while the ten members of the committee would rema
in behind for half an hour’s silent protest stand. They had each chosen a placard and stood in a line across the bottom step in front of the City Hall. Cameron stood at one end of the line holding a placard with the Mandela quotation, while Jean stood at the other end. The drizzle had stopped and the sun was trying, somewhat ineffectually, to struggle out through the clouds. So the stand was not going to be quite as unpleasant as Cameron had anticipated.

  They had only been standing for a few minutes when the cameraman approached Jean and started taking photographs of her. He had changed his video-camera for an expensive Nikon SLR camera. Cameron reflected later that it had probably been the camera that had suddenly triggered a flashback of quite startling clarity and immediacy.

  Jules had been standing by herself holding a placard protesting about one of apartheid’s many viciousnesses at one of the regular Saturday morning Black Sash protest stands on the pavement of the main street in Pietermaritzburg. One of the Special Branch agents had leant in towards her with his camera lens not more than three feet from her face.

  Jules had always been a nervous wreck for a day or two before the stands, but she invariably managed to suppress her fear enough to go out and face the largely hostile white Saturday morning shopping crowd in the city centre, and the unavoidable attentions of the even more hostile Special Branch. Cameron used to be delegated from time to time to be the man responsible for keeping an eye, from an appropriate distance, on what was going on. If anyone were to be arrested, somebody needed to report back to the Sash headquarters immediately; and if any of the frequently abusive shoppers ever became physically aggressive it might be necessary to intervene – the police certainly wouldn’t.

  The Special Branch agents always accosted the Black Sash members one by one, noting down names and addresses in their notebooks and taking photographs. It was all game-playing – the Special Branch already knew everything that was worth knowing about each of them. But it was a sinister and intimidating game, and they always made a point of invading the women’s space far more intrusively than was necessary. That was exactly what this man was doing. As the women had had to stand a minimum of ten yards apart to avoid being arrested as an ‘illegal gathering’ under the Riotous Assemblies Act, the intrusiveness had always made them feel all the more isolated and vulnerable.

  It must have been the way the cameraman leant in take Jean’s photograph that had triggered the flashback. Cameron felt a surge of anger and a strong urge to launch himself along the line and smash the man over the head with his placard. All that restrained him was the thought that doing so would put a serious dent in the public image of the PSC.

  The closer the man came to Cameron as he made his way along the line, the angrier Cameron became. The man was crowding the women in the line much more assertively than the men. Cameron’s hands felt clammy and he could feel his pulse pounding in his temple. Whatever the man thought he was doing, and whoever he was doing it for, his intelligence gathering could not have been less covert.

  The smell of garlic as the man closed in on Cameron wasn’t covert either. Cameron was pleased the several deep breaths he’d taken to try to calm himself had been taken when the man was still several yards away. Close to, it was clear that the reason the man’s face conveyed an oddly flattened impression from a distance was because his nose had been very badly broken, almost certainly on more than one occasion. He wore his ears so flat against the sides of his head that they looked as if they had been ironed on.

  It was the man’s careless arrogance that was particularly infuriating. Cameron sensed that it stemmed from the same casual ruthlessness that had characterized the apartheid Special Branch. After he had taken Cameron’s photograph, the man stood in front of Cameron making an elaborate show of packing his camera away in his camera bag. It took Cameron a few seconds to realize that the man wasn’t just putting the camera away, he was feeling for something else in the bag. For one chillingly irrational moment Cameron expected him to produce a gun. But it wasn’t a gun, just a small brown paper packet. The man put his hand into the packet and offered Cameron what looked like a white chocolate button. Cameron didn’t feel relieved enough to accept the bizarre offering. Was the man entirely deranged, or what?

  As he was turning away, the man looked again at Cameron’s placard and muttered something that sounded very like ‘fuckwit terrorist.’ Cameron could feel his carefully cultivated self-control, already wound too tight by the events of the past week, reaching breaking point.

  ‘What did you say?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘I said Nelson Mandela was a fuckwit,’ the man said, turning back to face Cameron, his minimal lips twisted into an equally minimal smile. ‘A half-baked terrorist who was stupid enough to get himself caught, and should have been hanged, in 1964. “The Black Pimpernel” – my arse.’

  The man shouldn’t have insisted on taking the close-ups so close up. Cameron lost it. He threw his poster down to one side, where the clatter of its wooden support on the stone paving was loud enough to make the man turn his head. Cameron took one step forward and smashed his forehead into the man’s face. The face looked as if it knew its way around a street-fight well enough, it wouldn’t have been flattened in Sunday School. But if Zinadine Zidane could knock a man over with a head-butt to the chest, Cameron was confident he could inflict enough initial damage with a head-butt not to need to worry about any immediate retaliation.

  Cameron didn’t need to worry – at least not where the cameraman was concerned. He staggered backwards and crumpled onto his backside on the flagstones where he sat with his head in his hands, the packet of white chocolate buttons scattered on the pavement. Cameron couldn’t see his face, just the blood dripping down onto the paving between his legs.

  ‘That will bloody well teach you not to call Mandela a fuckwit,’ Cameron said, standing over the cameraman. He felt as if his own blood was raging through his body under such pressure that something had to give. He had a fleeting, but intensely vivid, image of his nose starting to bleed of its own accord, his blood streaming down to mingle with the cameraman’s blood on the flagstones.

  He wouldn’t get even a silver star from Neil for this, Cameron thought as he heard a clattering and thudding as the remaining protesters dropped their placards and hurried over to intervene. They were beaten to it by the two policemen who came running over, no longer chatty but galvanized by the violence. The leading one was unfastening the handcuffs on his belt as he came. Although Cameron was standing passively over the cameraman with his arms at his sides by the time the two officers reached him, the first one grabbed both his arms and twisted his right one violently up behind his back, forcing him over forwards. Cameron’s right shoulder had been suspect ever since it had frozen five or six years before. He cried out as he heard something making a tearing sound and felt an intense pain in his upper arm, shoulder and neck.

  The policeman gripping his arm pulled him backwards away from the cameraman, wrenching the shoulder even more, and snapped the handcuffs onto his wrists. Once he had made sure that Cameron was no longer a danger to anyone, ignoring the fact that it had been his head rather than his hands that had inflicted the damage, the policeman told him he was under arrest and embarked on the ritual of informing him that he did not need to say anything, but it might harm his defence if he didn’t mention when questioned etc. etc.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Cameron had seen Hudson come over to where the action was, looking mildly shocked. He was now standing a few feet away, using his radio to request an ambulance for the victim and a police vehicle for the transport of the assailant. The third policeman was crouched down beside the cameraman talking to him. The cameraman was still sitting in the same place, shaking his head vigorously in response to the policeman’s questions and trying to use a handful of tissues from a pack proffered by one of the gathering crowd of onlookers to staunch the blood still flowing from what was left of his nose. The shaking was not c
ontributing to staunching the blood, some of which was evading the tissues and decorating both his trouser legs with dark lines of spattered droplets.

  If Constable Hudson was looking shocked, that was nothing to what Cameron was feeling. It wasn’t a case of feeling sorry for the bastard. If he was working for Mossad he had it coming. And who else could he possibly be working for on this particular assignment? The man had been deliberately provocative and obviously thought he could intimidate the protesters with impunity. That had turned out to be a slight miscalculation. He had been acting in a wholly untenable cause. If the length constraints on Cameron’s book on post 9/11 over-reaction hadn’t compelled him to focus exclusively on the UK, Israel would have been very near the top of the list.

  It was the amount of blood that was shocking. In spite of all the time Cameron had put into coming to terms with the flashbacks, and into keeping the surges of anger under control, he had allowed himself to be provoked into pulping someone’s face. The fact that said face appeared to have been pulped on more than one previous occasion was unlikely to count for much as a plea in mitigation.

  As Cameron stood waiting to be taken to the police station, one of the policemen stood beside him grasping him roughly by his excruciatingly painful shoulder. He felt distanced, as though this were all happening to someone else. It was only his shoulder that was trying to tell him otherwise. The policeman had no need to hold onto him, he felt no inclination whatever to try to sprint off over the horizon with his wrists hand-cuffed together behind him.

  The waiting lasted only a few minutes, but that was time enough for Cameron to take a detached inventory of the likely consequences of head-butting an ostensibly innocent member of the public. He would have to resign from the PSC committee, preferably before they had a chance to fire him. The university’s name would be splashed all over the local newspapers. So a second university was almost certain to dismiss him for bringing its reputation into disrepute – this time with reasonable cause. Once again he was going to find himself out of a job.