Game of Stones Page 7

  ‘Just because you are paranoid, it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you,’ Cameron muttered, more to himself than Brian.

  ‘It could gave been a university or college Film and TV student – a mature-age one,’ Brian added hurriedly before Cameron could interrupt. ‘A student putting a documentary together for an assignment.’

  ‘But why would he not have wanted to lay a charge then?’ Cameron objected.

  ‘Point taken,’ Brian said. ‘OK, that seems to exhaust the possibilities in the one direction, so let’s work on the assumption that it was someone you have pissed off, someone who didn’t want his cover blown. That is a very wide field. Apart from Mossad, it could include MI5, who won’t have been pleased with your analyses of security overreactions of one sort or another. It would certainly include the local police – he could have been a cop under deep cover having infiltrated one or another fringe group on whose behalf he was filming. That might even include an extreme right-wing group – they don’t like Arabs, in this instance Palestinians, any more than they like Jews. It could even have been an undercover reporter from one of the tabloids, whose editors you will certainly have succeeded in pissing off.’

  ‘But, surely, he would have been much more covert about his filming if he was working under cover?’ Cameron said, more by way of a statement than a question.

  ‘You may well be right,’ Brian conceded. ‘It could, of course, just have been an isolated individual, not connected to any organization, whom you have somehow annoyed who was deliberately setting out to provoke you in the hope that you might do something stupid and get yourself into trouble. If so, I guess he got more than he bargained for, even if his plan worked to perfection otherwise.’

  They sat in silence for a few moments before Brian said he was sure that they hadn’t exhausted all the possibilities.

  ‘I’m still wholly unconvinced that it will have been anyone other than a Mossad agent,’ Cameron said.

  Looking round the room as though trying to identify a likely alternative, Cameron was in time to spot Mr Sari, the house-watcher, coming in through the door and standing surveying the room. Cameron stood up so abruptly that the chair he was sitting in fell over backwards, knocking the back of a chair at the table behind him. He covered the distance to the door in a few strides, leaving a trail of irritation in his wake, but the man he was intent on confronting saw him stand up and immediately disappeared back through the door. By the time Cameron got through the front door onto the top step the man was half-walking half-running down the pavement in the direction of the football stadium.

  ‘She isn’t here. Just bloody well leave us alone,’ Cameron shouted down the street after him, to the evident alarm of an elderly couple who had been about to go into the pub. Head pounding again, Cameron stood for a few seconds watching the man go before he went back into the pub. The elderly couple didn’t follow him.

  By the time he got back to their table, running the gauntlet of mutterings about the clumsiness of his exit, Brian had had time to pay another visit to the bar. A tray with a small cut-glass jug of water and two glasses of what looked like whisky, although the liquid was not the same colour in both glasses, was sitting in the middle of the table. Brian had obviously decided to mix his drinks. For some reason it was apparently necessary tonight for him to start in on each new drink by drinking two glasses.

  ‘Did you see that bastard?’ Cameron asked. ‘He’s the one watching my house.’

  ‘Yes,’ Brian replied. ‘I saw him clearly, but not clearly enough to detect that his ancestry was questionable.’

  ‘How are you getting home?’ Cameron asked, noticing the generous size of the tots in each glass.

  ‘On my bike, as usual,’ Brian replied, ‘but those aren’t both for me. Mine is Talisker, the darker one, yours is Macallan. You once told me that, in the days when you used to drink whisky, Macallan was your favourite.’

  ‘”Used to drink whisky” was the operative phrase there, Brian,’ Cameron said. ‘You know perfectly well that I don’t touch alcohol now.’

  ‘I know,’ Brian replied. ‘But you also told me that you had never been an alcoholic, that whisky used to relax you when you were under extreme stress, and, crucially, that when you needed to you were able to stop drinking. All of which means that, by any strict definition, you were never an alcoholic. So by encouraging you to have a whisky now I am not running the risk of pushing you off a wagon you can’t afford to fall off. I would never put an alcoholic drink in front of someone who really was a reformed alcoholic.’

  ‘Jules used to worry that I was an alcoholic,’ Cameron said. ‘I have been known to smuggle bottles of whisky into our bedroom at her mother’s house – but that was to fortify myself against her mother. It didn’t mean I was alcoholic. But why suddenly imagine that I am going to want to exchange my J2O for a double whisky now?’

  ‘You are obviously under extreme stress,’ Brian replied. ‘You have PTSD, and that shrink you go to doesn’t seem to be making much difference. If alcohol helped you to relax in your previous life, about which you never say very much, it might help now.’

  ‘What makes you think I’m under extreme stress?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake Cameron, look at yourself,’ Brian said, picking up the jug and pouring just enough water into the glass with the Talisker to open the whisky.

  ‘Over the last forty-eight hours you have severely assaulted a man who had the temerity to take your photograph and say nasty things about your immediately past President; you have been arrested and spent an afternoon in a police cell for your pains; and you have just chased like a charging rhino after a man who was rash enough to open the door of a pub and look in. What would you have done to him if you had caught him? Head-butted him too? And you ask why I think you might be stressed.’

  ‘I don’t know what I would have done if I had caught him,’ Cameron said. ‘I really have no idea. I might have head-butted him. Yesterday was the first time I have ever tried it, and it really worked – beginner’s luck perhaps. If you get it right, you can inflict serious damage while barely feeling it yourself. If he had said “Sari. No understand” again, I might well have head-butted him.’

  ‘You don’t just need to look at yourself, Cameron,’ Brian responded, ‘you also need to listen to yourself. You sound scarily detached. You did something yesterday that could easily have cost you your job and landed you in prison. You rushed off just now without having any idea what you were going to do. That sounds to me like someone who is verging on being dangerously out of control.’

  ‘Cheers,’ Brian said, after a short pause, holding his whisky glass up to Cameron.

  ‘Cheers,’ Cameron responded, holding the other glass out to Brian by rote and clinking glasses. Brian took a sip from his; Cameron put his down without tasting it. The scent of the whisky as he held it up brought a rush of memories: warm summer evenings with the French windows open but the curtains drawn and the trellis-door firmly locked; the muffled shrilling of the cicadas and the distant sounds of dogs barking down the street; five-year old Hilton coming over to sniff his glass and managing to wrinkle his whole face in response; Jules sitting in the other armchair with the lamplight falling on the book she was reading.

  ‘How do you like it?’ Brian said gently.

  ‘One third whisky, two thirds water,’ Cameron said slowly, as though dredging a forgotten scientific formula up from the recesses of his memory.

  The taste of the Macallan, the burning sensation as he swallowed it and the warmth as it settled in his stomach hadn’t changed. If Brian was going to insist on plying him with anaesthetic, the Macallan was as good a choice as any. He was pleased that Brian just sat silently, glancing at him from time to time but not watching him, as he took a few more sips. He had a sense that a crack might appear in the dam that had been keeping his emotions held back. If it did, he knew Brian well enough to know he w
ouldn’t be too embarrassed – but a pub might not be the ideal venue.

  ‘I’ve told you about my Diana’s breast cancer and how she died,’ Brian said eventually. ‘Tell me about Jules. The only time you ever mentioned her to me you said you had “lost” her and that it was your fault. I have always assumed that you got divorced, but that is just an assumption. I have no idea who she is, what she is like, where she is now, or what she’s doing.’

  The silence lasted long enough for Cameron to take two more slow sips, his eyes on the table in front of him. He remembered sitting with Jules on the beach at Muizenberg on a warm, unusually windless, summer evening. They had bought a picnic supper and were both holding plastic cups containing generous shots of Macallan as they watched Hilton and Nicky, still a toddler, playing in the sand. The cries of the seagulls could be heard over the tumble and swish of the waves.

  ‘Don’t feel you have to talk to me about her if you don’t want to,’ Brian said. ‘There must be a good reason why you never talk about her. But I think you may need to talk, and, if you aren’t going to open up to your shrink, you may need someone else to talk to. If so, perhaps I am he.’

  Cameron looked up and smiled. As long as he had known him, Brian had always been able to get himself around surprising quantities of alcohol – either real ale or peaty-smelling whisky – without betraying any sign of its affecting him beyond an increasingly painstaking grammatical exactitude.

  ‘Jules hated everything about living under apartheid,’ Cameron said. ‘She found the surveillance – having our phone tapped, our house watched, and being followed everywhere – intimidating and claustrophobic. But what she hated most was the death threats, which really scared her. She always felt really torn. On the one hand she fully supported my involvement in the struggle against apartheid, such as it was, even if she thought the way I went about it was a bit reckless at times. At the same time she became increasingly worried that the children would lose their father, either to prison or to an assassin’s bullet. That sounds melodramatic but it was exactly what happened to one of my university colleagues, Rick Turner. I think I told you about him.’

  ‘Yes, you did,’ Brian said, ‘go on.’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ Cameron said. ‘To cut it short, I got myself implicated in helping one of my students in a way which would have had me put away for a very long time, if not permanently, if I had been caught. I had to lie to Jules to prevent her being implicated as well. She realized I was lying but couldn’t know the reason, and that upset her deeply. Her overriding concern was always to protect Nicky and Hilton. I then had to leave the country and the divorce was finalized when I was here. I couldn’t contest it – but I wouldn’t have wanted to even if I could have. Our children were safer without me, difficult as that was to accept. Jules deserved a fresh start and I hoped she could be happy.’

  Cameron fell silent, noticed that both whisky glasses were empty and got up to get another round. Neither man spoke until the ritual with the water jug had been completed.

  ‘I still miss Jules and Hilton and Nicky terribly,’ Cameron said by way of belated afterthought.

  ‘What are they doing now?’ Brian asked. ‘How often have you been able to see the children since you left?’

  ‘I haven’t been able to see them again – ever,’ Cameron said. He could feel his eyes moistening in a way they hadn’t done for a long time. He didn’t know whether, in general terms, that was a good or a bad thing. It seemed unlikely to be a particularly good thing in a Sheffield pub on a Sunday evening. Brian sat silently, waiting for Cameron to elaborate.

  ‘A few months after I left South Africa,’ Cameron continued after a long pause, ‘in the last week of April to be exact, it’s the anniversary next week, one of my friends at the university contacted me to say that Jules’ car had been involved in an accident. Cape Town is built on the side of a mountain so there are lots of very steep roads. A dumper-truck being filled with builder’s rubble lost its brakes and rolled down a steep road in Seapoint, careering through a set of red traffic lights on the main road just as Jules’ car with the two children in the back entered the intersection. It went right over the car. They were all killed instantly. There was very little left of Jules, but the story made the local newspaper, partly because one of the firemen who had to cut their bodies free reported that Hilton and Nicky had died holding hands.’

  ‘So that is how I lost Jules,’ Cameron went on after another long pause. ‘Except, of course, that I had already lost her. There was no chance whatever of my getting to their funeral – the police would have picked me up the moment I set foot on South African soil. In any case my friend only managed to contact me after the funeral had already taken place. I was told that Jules’ mother gave a speech at the funeral the gist of which was that it was entirely my fault that her daughter and both her grandchildren had been killed. She was right of course. If I had just minded my own business and got on with being a good white South African who didn’t question what his government was doing, Jules and the children wouldn’t have been in Cape Town that day and wouldn’t have been killed.’

  ‘But you couldn’t have lived like that, Cameron,’ Brian said, ‘and I’m sure Jules wouldn’t have wanted you to – even if her mother did. It wasn’t your fault that they just happened to be at that particular intersection on that particular day at the precise moment when the truck went through the lights. I am sure there are plenty of hills in Natal. If you hadn’t been targeted by the security police and your family had stayed with you in Pietermaritzburg, they could just as easily have been killed by a runaway truck going through a set of red traffic lights there.’

  Cameron didn’t try to contest Brian’s logic. It might not have been logical to feel responsible for the deaths of the children he had wanted so badly to protect, but that didn’t stop him feeling responsible. They sat in silence for a few minutes.

  ‘Did you ever go back?’ Brian asked eventually.

  ‘Yes, but that’s another long story,’ Cameron replied, ‘and I’m not sure this is the best time to tell it – or even whether I want to tell it.’

  ‘If not now, when?’ Brian asked. ‘What would it take to make it the best time? How about another whisky?’

  ‘OK, why the hell not?’ Cameron replied. ‘But only a single, please. I haven’t drunk whisky for over twenty years and I don’t need to try to make up for all those years in one night. I’m feeling so light-headed already that my head feels as if it is in serious danger of floating right off and wafting away into the night.’

  ‘Just pray that it doesn’t head-butt anyone on its way out,’ Brian said as he stood up to get the drinks.

  Chapter 6

  ‘What’s your take on selective assassination?’ Cameron asked, as Brian, with measured care, put their two glasses down on the table and sat down again.

  ‘I didn’t know I had a take on selective assassination,’ Brian replied. ‘Should I have one? If so, where do you suggest I find one?’

  ‘The Israeli government has one, and the apartheid government certainly had one,’ Cameron said, ignoring the facetiousness. ‘After I had left South Africa I decided that they might be onto a good thing. Being realistic, it seemed to me that taking out one of the key apartheid functionaries might be the only way to make a significant contribution to the armed conflict if one had to operate entirely on one’s own.’

  ‘But you didn’t have to operate on your own surely?’ Brian asked. ‘Given the reason you had to leave, I would have expected the ANC to welcome you with open arms.’

  ‘The ANC in exile had to be totally paranoid the entire time,’ Cameron said. ‘The South African intelligence services were always trying to infiltrate them, and to some extent succeeded. There was no way, as a white man arriving on their doorstep in a flurry of rumours, I was going to be able to convince them of my bona fides. Nobody in London could have known the full truth about wha
t had happened.’

  Cameron looked across at Brian and found the sceptical look on his face irritating. Why would Brian go to such lengths to get him to tell his story if he wasn’t going to believe what he was told?

  ‘What, if not paranoia, do you think made a highly intelligent man like Mbeki fall hook, line and sinker for the AIDS deniers’ conspiracy theories?’ he asked. ‘The major pharmaceutical companies do use people in Africa as guinea-pigs in drugs trials – le Carré’s The Constant Gardner wasn’t just the product of a fevered imagination – and the apartheid government did deliberately try to limit the birth-rate of black South Africans. If you had to spend half your life being paranoid just to stay alive, it wasn’t unreasonable to think the whole HIV/AIDS thing was a conspiracy.’

  ‘OK. So the ANC couldn’t trust you,’ Brian said, ‘and you had to act alone. But what about all the human rights, civil liberties and so on you always supported?’

  ‘There must be some circumstances in which the end justifies the means,’ Cameron replied. ‘If significant progress can be made towards restoring the human rights of millions of people by infringing the right to life of one person, surely the balance has to come down in favour of the millions?’

  ‘We could debate that,’ Brian said, ‘but let’s leave it for another occasion. Leaving the ethics aside, what makes you think that selective assassination makes any sense strategically? Kill the queen bee and another will very rapidly take her place.’

  ‘Who was going to take Hitler’s place if Elser’s, or von Stauffenberg’s, or any of the other bombs prepared for him, had managed to kill him?’ Cameron asked. ‘None of the others – Himmler, Goering, Goebbels – even began to compare with Hitler. There is no question that the world would have been a better place had Hitler been assassinated. The same goes for Jonas Savimbi in Angloa, who was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of his own people. You could make the same case now where Zimbabwe’s inimitable President Mugabe is concerned, even if one wouldn’t have done so twenty years ago.’