Game of Stones

Maughan Brown David

Description

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.

Sujets

• Psychological thriller
• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 4
• EAN13: 9781800468047
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

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

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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 nurse