Game of Stones

By David Maughan Brown

Cameron Beaumont’s phone still rings to wake him at 3am even in Sheffield 20 years after he had to escape from South Africa during the violent death throes of apartheid.  
Now it can’t be the Special Branch on the other end of the line; but the silence provides no clues. Who is following him this time, and who is trying to frame him? He has made too many enemies to know. Could it be the police again, hoping to stop him writing about Hillsborough?  
Does it have anything to do with what happened when he went back to South Africa to try to continue the struggle against apartheid? Can he decipher the trail of clues laid for him via references to the game of Go? 
This is a story of loss, betrayal and revenge that builds to a violent climax and an unlikely reconciliation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Nov 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781800468047

David Maughan Brown

Born in Cape Town, brought up in East Africa, David Maughan Brown spent twenty years in a university English Department, teaching African Literature and being harassed by the security police as an opponent of apartheid. He then took on senior roles in university management in South Africa and UK following the unbanning of the ANC in 1990. He now lives in York.

Book preview

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.

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ISBN 9781800468047

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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 the 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 fleeting 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.

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,