Despite the Darkness, page 10
‘Nee man – moenie skiet nie.’
Cameron looked over his shoulder. The order not to shoot had come from a man with ginger hair and an unusually pallid pock-marked face. Cameron recognized him as one of Venter’s occasional partners in the house-watching business – he thought he had heard him addressed as Poggenpoel. Surprisingly, although he was clearly lower in rank than Venter, the latter slowly lowered his arm to point the automatic at the floor before nestling it back in its holster with a sigh.
‘Our dog isn’t a “brak” – he’ isn’t a mongrel, he’s a pedigree border collie,’ Cameron said, his voice shaking slightly as he shouted to make himself heard above Kali’s barking and the children’s crying. ‘And he has a perfect right to defend his territory when it is invaded.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Cameron, don’t provoke them any further,’ Jules intervened. ‘What the hell does it matter what names they call our dog? He doesn’t care.’
Jules was also having to shout to make herself heard. As she hardly ever raised her voice, the volume of the children’s crying went up a further notch. Cameron backed away as far as the ladder as Venter, flushed with fury, came out of the kitchen and slammed the door behind him. Kali’s barking subsided.
‘Yes, Doctor Beaumont,’ Venter said, his hand making its now familiar twitch in the direction of his holster, ‘it would really not be a good idea to provoke me. You’ve tried that once already today. Your pretty little wife and your screaming kids would really not like it if you were to succeed.’
Venter looked inquiringly at the faces of his minions assembled in the doorway. Heads were shaken in unison – they hadn’t found anything of interest.
‘OK, get on with it,’ he snarled. ‘If those screaming children don’t shut up we’ll have to give them something to scream about.’
Jules quickly put Nicky down on the bed and moved to stand in the doorway, trying to expand her slight five foot six figure to block the entrance to her children’s bedroom. Her voice was tightly controlled.
‘No. Leave my children alone. They have done nothing whatever to you. You can hear how upset they are already.’
The occupants of every house in the neighbourhood would be able to hear how upset they were.
‘Lady, just shut those children up won’t you?’ Poggenpoel ordered. ‘We have to search everywhere. People like you often think it’s clever to hide stuff in babies’ cots – you think we are so stupid we won’t look – but we are not that stupid. So move.’
He turned the volume up on the ‘move’. Something in the timbre of his voice reminded Cameron of the earliest death threats, but it didn’t have the tobacco rasp of the more recent ones.
Jules stayed exactly where she was. Before Cameron had time to intervene, Poggenpoel and a side-kick Cameron hadn’t seen before forced their way past her, sending Jules staggering backwards against the door of the built-in cupboard. Jules recovered her balance and she and Cameron both rushed to Hilton’s bed to pick up the children, whose screaming was reaching a crescendo. Poggenpoel upended Nicky’s bed, sending her soft toys flying in all directions, while his counterpart started emptying the drawers of the dressing table onto the floor.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Jules said. ‘I can’t stand any more of this.’
Cameron could see tears in her eyes as Jules spoke through tightly clenched teeth. She headed towards the back door with Nicky sticking to her like a limpet, still crying loudly. Cameron followed, carrying a sobbing Hilton. They had to walk past Venter who was extracting another Texan from an almost empty packet. It was the teenager at the back door who blocked their exit, but it was Venter who did the talking.
‘You can’t leave the house until I give you permission. If you leave the house tonight it is with me and then maybe, Doctor Beaumont, you won’t come back for a very long time – if ever. That depends on what we find – or maybe it doesn’t depend on what we find. You see what you have done Doctor – you’ve made your pretty little wife cry. Shame. Why don’t you save yourself a lot of trouble and tell me where that Mr Sithole of yours is – we think you must know where he is.’
‘Who the hell is this Mr Sithole you are on about? Why should we know where he is?’ asked Jules, her voice still low and controlled but now with an undertone of desperation.
‘Mirambo. Sithole is his real name, but he doesn’t like it,’ Cameron explained.
‘Why the hell should I know where he is?’ he asked, turning to Venter. ‘He isn’t “my” Mr Sithole – he’s just my student, not my son. He doesn’t live here – as you know perfectly well. I have no idea where he is.’
Which, as it happened, was literally true.
‘Why are you looking for him?’ Cameron asked.
‘That’s police business,’ Venter replied. ‘It’s none of your business – or, on the other hand, it may be your business.’
Venter was clearly cultivating a line in being enigmatic.
‘We think he may have come here,’ he went on, ‘and if he has been here you can have no doubt that we will find evidence of that.’
The image of a half-empty bottle of peanut butter broke the surface of Cameron’s consciousness. Once they had finished tearing the house apart they would inevitably move on to the outside room, the car and the garage. Cameron could feel the vague trembling in his legs again.
Jules looked at Cameron and jerked her head in the direction of their bedroom. She carried Nicky in and stood looking around while Cameron joined her. The dressing table drawers were lying higgledy-piggledy upside-down on the floor like oversize building blocks. Their contents – from ties, to tights, to panties, to a box of Tampax – was strewn everywhere. A framed photograph of the children was lying in a corner with its glass broken, which would account for the tinkle of glass they had heard. The room smelt incongruously of lavender from a spill of some sort. The clothes from the hanging section of the wardrobe were in a pile on the carpet. The mattress and bed-clothes had been pulled off the bed.
They had been vandalized and violated.
White with anger, Jules signalled to Cameron to put Hilton down on the mattress. She peeled Nicky off and handed her to Cameron and strode out of the room without saying anything – she was saving it for Venter who was still in the dining room. Her voice was steely quiet and ultra-controlled.
‘You think you are one of God’s chosen people don’t you?’ she said. ‘You think that because you are God’s elect you can invade people’s homes and turn them upside down and break their things and terrorize their children. What kind of man is it that makes himself feel bigger and stronger by terrifying little children and threatening to shoot their dog? You lot don’t just frighten children, you shoot them and kill them and maim them as you did in Soweto. You starve them in the homelands and let them die of disease. You behave like barbarians – and then you go to church and thank God for giving you this land, which you weren’t given but exterminated whole peoples to grab hold of. You thank God for making you white and for your culture of guns and rugby and beer and burnt meat and banality – and you scorn black people who are in most cases infinitely more humane and intelligent than you are and have a far longer history and far richer culture than you will ever have.’
Jules wasn’t normally one for making speeches but she clearly had the bit between her teeth now.
‘What on God’s earth do you imagine gives you the right to patronize me with your inane “pretty little wife” spiel? You can’t be entirely unintelligent or you wouldn’t have got where you are – why don’t you try to act intelligent? If anything is totally stupid it is imagining that you can go on invading people’s homes, locking people up, shooting them and torturing them, on and on and on forever. It is idiotic to imagine that you can carry on oppressing a whole people in perpetuity and that your bullying will do any of you any good in the long run. Much as it grieves me to have to tell you – God has not chosen you and is not on your side.’
Jules stopped talking and stalked back into the bedroom. Cameron smiled a ‘well said’ at her. She had certainly been able to summon up a more comprehensive charge sheet for Venter than his own littering indictment earlier. Cameron couldn’t see Venter’s face from where he sat on the mattress holding Nicky and very early in her reading out of the charge sheet he expected Venter to interrupt, and possibly even hit her. There was complete silence for several seconds after Jules stopped speaking – even the children were quiet. The SB cohorts had all stopped dismantling the house to listen – though Jules’s articulateness would have been largely lost on most of them.
Venter broke the silence with another string of furious oaths, but this time in a rumbling mutter from which Cameron could only untangle the word ‘bitch’. It was probably not the best idea Jules had ever had to take him on – he was a vicious sadist who was unlikely ever to have been spoken to like that by a woman in his entire life.
‘Get on with it,’ he shouted to his men, ‘what are you all standing about for? Let’s get out of here.’
It sounded as if Venter knew they were just going through the motions of a raid – though why he had suddenly started ordering his men around in English rather than Afrikaans was anyone’s guess. Mirambo clearly wasn’t in the house and there was no evidence that he had been. If Cameron had had anything to hide he would have been smart enough to hide it elsewhere. Jules was right – Venter couldn’t be entirely stupid. But there was still the outside room.
They had only been sitting for a couple of minutes holding the children when Venter appeared in the doorway. He was holding Cameron’s ankle holster in his left hand and twirling the Sig Sauer around his right forefinger by its trigger-guard. Jules, who hated guns, instinctively shrank away. Venter noticed and took a few steps towards her so that he could twirl the gun in her face.
‘Maybe I was wrong,’ Jules said with a slight catch in her voice, looking straight ahead, ‘maybe you are entirely stupid.’
‘The safety catch is on,’ Venter said. ‘Your loving Doctor husband wouldn’t like anything to happen to you would he?’
The menace in his voice was chilling.
‘I suppose, Doctor,’ he continued, injecting his usual contempt into the ‘Doctor’, ‘that you got a licence for this, what do you call it, popgun? Who do you think you could shoot with this toy? They’d better not be wearing too many clothes or it won’t even get through to the meat.’
‘Of course I have a licence,’ Cameron replied. ‘You’ll find it in my ID book under the clock on the mantelpiece in the dining room.’
When the inevitable police raid eventually came it was obvious that even the most rudimentary search would uncover his perfectly legal handgun, so Cameron always made sure the licence was ready to hand.
Behind Venter, Cameron could see Poggenpoel and two of the other searchers lumbering out of the dining room down the verandah steps to the back door. They were finished in the house and off to search the garage and outside room. Crunch time. Cameron suddenly remembered that he hadn’t put the key back in its usual place on the sill above the door when he had left with Mirambo – it was still in his pocket. At least having it in his possession meant he would be the one who got to open the door – not that that would make any difference. He wouldn’t have time to hide the peanut-butter jar – and there wasn’t anywhere to hide it anyway.
It didn’t take long for Poggenpoel to arrive back to announce to Venter in Afrikaans that the maid’s room, as he called it, was locked and there wasn’t a key in the door. Cameron was about to get up and offer the key – no point in letting them break the door down – when he remembered that he was supposed not to be able to understand or speak Afrikaans.
Surprisingly, Venter refrained from telling them to break the door down. Instead, he asked Cameron where the key was and demanded his car keys so that they could search his car. Cameron handed Nicky back to Jules, stood up and handed his car keys over. The room key he held clenched in his pocket.
‘I’ll show you.’
‘So now we have become all co-operative, all of a sudden, have we?’ asked Venter.
The worry was that Jules might intervene and announce that the key was on the sill above the door. But she was too angry to want to offer them any help at all – even if doing so might ensure that they went away sooner. Cameron crossed the verandah, passed the guard on the back door, and reached up with his right hand, pretending to feel along the sill until he found the key before fitting it into the lock, trying to stop his hand from shaking. He opened the door, turned the light on and looked round. There was nothing – no banana skin, apple core or empty biscuit packet to be seen, not even in the wire waste-paper basket. No sign of the bottle of peanut butter, or the plate and mug either – not even an indentation on the bed. There wouldn’t be anything to find in the toilet either. Poggenpoel, who appeared to take the lead when it came to action rather than oversight, went to look and came out immediately, shaking his head.
Mirambo was clearly highly professional when it came to covering his tracks. Could that be the result of military training? You just had to hope that he could be as successful all the way to the border. It was still possible that he might contact Cameron for a lift, but he would probably prefer to avoid further acquaintance with the Renault’s boot and try to find some other way of getting out.
What now? If Venter really thought Cameron knew anything about Mirambo’s whereabouts, or anything about the bomb blast, normal practice would see him carted off for intensive interrogation. That could involve anything from sleep deprivation to electric shocks and the pliers Mirambo had kept mentioning. There was no telling when he might get back to Jules and the children – even if they didn’t catch Mirambo and couldn’t find anything to charge him with. Under the State of Emergency regulations they could hold him indefinitely.
Hilton’s and Nicky’s anguish came agonizingly back to him – that was a form of torture he could feel already. He couldn’t bear the thought of putting them through more – and he couldn’t even warn Jules that they might want to detain him. He knew that as soon as they had gone to the outside room Jules would have taken the children back to their bedroom, set their beds to rights, and put them back to bed. She would have coaxed Kali out from under the kitchen table and would now be sitting with all three of them, trying to comfort her dog and get the children to sleep. Having been ushered back through the door, Cameron moved to the far end of the closed-in verandah. He needed to be as far as possible from the children’s room, so that whatever Venter had to say to him when the raid was over couldn’t be heard by them.
Searching the car, garden and garage didn’t take long. Any of Mirambo’s blood that had dripped into the boot must already have been dry by the time it was searched at the roadblock. There probably wasn’t that much of it anyway, most of it would have soaked into his shirt collar. There was nothing else to be found.
Cameron heard Venter telling his cohorts that they could go. He could hear a mutter of Afrikaans outside, too low for him to be able to catch what was being said, and then saw Venter coming back into the house accompanied by Poggenpoel. It only needed two of them to detain him, if that was what they were going to do. Venter walked right up to Cameron until he was no more than three feet away.
‘Now listen to me very carefully, Doctor Beaumont. You need to watch it. If we don’t like what you do we can make you suffer so you wish you had never been born. We can also make your children suffer. I can, in particular, make that cheeky bitch wife of yours suffer. You may or may not know the provisions of the new laws for the State of Emergency. Let me spell them out for you – I have learnt them off by heart because they are excellent laws.’
‘First and most important,’ Venter continued, ‘is that the laws grant indemnity, in other words immunity, to security personnel. I am a security personnel. You need to think about what that means. In fact it means I can do what I want. Second, the laws say that security personnel can detain anybody on suspicion. Third, detainees can be held incommunicado – in other words nobody gets to speak to them, not even lawyers – and detainees may be punished by up to 30 days solitary confinement or whipping with a cane for violating the rules under which they are held. These rules include no singing or whistling.’
‘So, Doctor Beaumont, what that means is that any time I want I can detain you or your wife on suspicion. When the time is right I am going to detain that cheeky bitch wife of yours on suspicion. I will make it my business to take advantage of my indemnity to whip her bare bottom with a cane. I will make her sing and then I will whip her some more as a punishment for singing. I will whip her until she screams for me to stop – but I won’t stop. Nobody talks to me like she did and gets away with it – particularly not a woman, and particularly not in front of my men. She needs to be taught a lesson and I promise you I’ll make it my business to teach her one.’
Venter paused to let the full import of what he was saying sink in. Cameron could think of nothing to say. The menace in Venter’s voice transfixed him. He felt nauseous again and desperately didn’t want to give Venter the satisfaction of seeing him vomit. Venter was perfectly capable of carrying out his threats. Cameron didn’t know the detail, but he knew that the emergency legislation did give Venter indemnity, which effectively meant that he had carte blanche to do pretty well anything he liked. And all the time he’d been trying to make sure that Jules was kept out of the firing line.
But Venter wasn’t finished yet.
‘I will be back,’ he promised. ‘I can come and search your house any time I want. Next time, if that dog of yours comes near me, true as God I will shoot it dead. I could take you away right now and lock you up and throw away the key. But I’ve been watching you and I know what makes you tick. If I really want to get to you – and you may be sure I do – it will be through your children and that bitch wife of yours. If I put you in prison you can’t protect them and you will just have to sit and imagine them suffering without you. But if I don’t put you in prison you still can’t protect them – and you won’t have the excuse that you were in prison. If you aren’t locked-up I can keep you both waiting in suspense for the moment when I decide it is time for me to get that cheeky bitch wife of yours alone in a cell and beat the shit out of her. And that I am really looking forward to.’
