Despite the Darkness, page 12
A trip to the Botanic Gardens for a Sunday afternoon tea and an icecream would compensate Hilton and Nicky in a small way for Friday evening. It also enabled Cameron and Jules to get out of the house and leave behind the sense of violation, even if only for a couple of hours. But there was no chance that they could also leave behind the oppressive sense of being under constant surveillance. The SB never made any attempt to disguise the fact that they were watching – a white Corolla was in Venter’s favourite spot on the pavement. Cameron glanced across at Jules and saw that she was watching in the passenger-side wing-mirror as it pulled off the pavement and followed them.
‘It isn’t as if we are just being watched,’ Jules commented. ‘We are effectively under guard. We are free to go where we want – at least for now – but the watchers are always there watching us. When they can’t see us they are listening to us. They think of themselves as protectors, as guards who are guarding white South African society from people like us. It is stressful and tiring – and it is boring. You might think that boredom would be the one thing that couldn’t coexist with stress. But that isn’t the case. Isn’t it odd that stressful things can also be boring?’
Getting out of the house had been a good idea – that was as many words in one speech as Jules had spoken to him in total since breakfast the previous day. But, as far as Cameron could tell, Jules didn’t take her gaze off the wing-mirror once as they drove across the city to the Botanic Gardens. Once they had parked, Jules stood beside the car with her door open watching the Corolla pull into a parking place on the other side of the car park. Unusually, she left Cameron to unbuckle both the children and get them out of the car. He had to come round to the passenger side to release Nicky from her car seat, giving Jules a kiss on the cheek and a quick hug in the process. She didn’t respond.
As he strapped Nicky into her pushchair Cameron saw the driver of the Corolla climb out ready to follow them. Did he really think they were likely to have arranged an en famille assignation with Mirambo among the strelitzias? He must have much better things to do with his life on a Sunday afternoon than watching a family having afternoon tea. The man followed them along the avenue of plane trees and round the lake at a discreet distance, but made no effort to disguise the fact that he was following them. When Hilton’s queries about when he was going to get his promised ice-cream couldn’t be withstood any longer and they found a table at the café, their watcher sat himself down a few tables away.
‘What a waste of his afternoon this is,’ Jules commented, echoing Cameron’s thoughts. ‘He must have better things to do than following us around. He doesn’t look sinister – in fact he looks as if he could be quite nice. But knowing that he is behind us all the time as we walk around the gardens makes my back crawl – it is very creepy, even in broad daylight with lots of other people around. Having an anonymous car, with a driver one can’t identify, permanently fixed in the rearview mirror as we drive through town is also pretty creepy.’
‘He’s being paid to wander round the gardens on a sunny afternoon and to sit in pleasant surroundings drinking coffee,’ Cameron replied, ‘so I wouldn’t feel too sorry for him – and I wouldn’t rely too much on his being nice. He’s got an automatic stuck into the waistband of his trousers under his jacket – I saw it as he got out of the car.’
Having finished his ice-cream, Hilton decided he needed Cameron to take him to the toilet. The direct route took them past their watcher’s table. The SB agent sat watching them approaching. The temptation to say something to him was irresistible.
‘Hi,’ Cameron said. ‘I hope you have been enjoying your stroll in the gardens this nice Sunday afternoon and that the cost of your coffee can be reclaimed on your expense account. Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Cameron Beaumont.’
‘I know who you are,’ came the reply.
The introduction was pointedly not reciprocated. The watcher then addressed himself equally pointedly to Hilton.
‘Your Daddy’s a funny man isn’t he? I expect you would be lost without him.’
‘I won’t get lost,’ replied Hilton. ‘I’m just going to the toilet and my Daddy is with me.’
‘I know he’s with you now,’ came the reply. ‘Just try to make sure he stays with you.’
‘I’m not going to leave him,’ Hilton said. ‘I’m just going to the toilet.’
Hilton was clearly puzzled by the conversation and looked to Cameron for reassurance. Cameron took his hand and led him away.
‘Why did that man say you are a funny man, Daddy?’ Hilton asked.
‘I don’t know, Hilton. I thought he was a pretty funny man himself.’
‘Yes,’ Hilton agreed, ‘I wouldn’t have got lost on the way to the toilet, even if you hadn’t come with me.’
‘What was that all about?’ Jules wanted to know as soon as they sat down again.
‘B-A-S-T-A-R-D,’ Cameron spelt out, ‘complete and utter, upper case and underlined – I’ll give you the detail later.’
‘It looked as if you started the conversation,’ Jules said, staring stony-faced at Cameron. ‘You weren’t by any chance being gratuitously provocative again were you? You didn’t need to say anything to him.’
It was a perfectly valid accusation. It didn’t make a lot of sense to go around deliberately irritating men with guns.
They were followed all the way home. Jules again kept her eyes on the wing mirror every yard of the way, as though mesmerized by the movement of the white car just behind them. Cameron was used to being followed and generally found it just an irritation. Jules had also been followed often enough when they were together, and had generally given the impression that she didn’t give a damn – but today she seemed to be fixated on the mirror. She had clearly been deeply disturbed by the raid – and she had yet to be alerted, even in the most general terms, to what Venter had threatened to do to her. Cameron hadn’t yet worked out how to broach the subject.
When they got home Jules set about organizing the children’s supper and baths while Cameron took Kali for a walk. As they set off up the road he heard a car door slam behind him and, looking around, saw that he was going to have the same company on this evening’s walk as they had in the Botanic Gardens. The watcher was following fifty yards behind. That had never happened before – more often than not, if the neighbourhood watch was outside the house when he took the dog out, they would take a break and head off back to base, presumably on the assumption that he couldn’t do anything he shouldn’t with a border collie in tow.
The watcher kept his distance, not bothering to close the gap when Cameron turned a corner and was out of sight for a while. He had obviously been briefed on the precise route they took every evening. It had been refined over the years to avoid the gardens where other dogs hurled themselves, barking frenetically, at fences and gates as Kali sidled past, torn between being suitably intimidated and wanting to join the fun.
Cameron found himself unexpectedly grateful for his watcher’s distant company. It could only mean that they had not caught Mirambo and had no idea where he was. They must be wanting to check out the possibility that Cameron had made some prior arrangement to meet Mirambo, or might have some other way of contacting him. But if they were going to make sure that he wasn’t doing a letter drop, which was the most likely way, his watcher would have needed to follow him much more closely.
The evening passed slowly and largely in silence once the children had gone to sleep. Jules went to bed early again. When, after a couple of whiskies, Cameron eventually joined her still-turned back in bed, he thought he had a better chance of sleeping than he had had the previous two nights. It was unlikely that they could have arrested Mirambo in the time since he took Kali for his walk, and even if they had caught him they wouldn’t have had time to interrogate him.
But Jules was a worry. Her distance from him was easily explained – she knew that something had happened that he wasn’t telling her about. Worse than that, it wasn’t just a case of not telling her about it – he was very obviously not telling the truth about it. But he hadn’t expected the distance to be maintained all weekend. Less easy to get a handle on was her reaction to the raid. The fixation on the Corolla in the wing mirror had been odd – not like her at all.
Chapter 9
Department meetings on Monday mornings always started promptly at 9.00. Patrick, being Patrick, was rigid in his chairing. Cameron was anxious to avoid being interrogated about the police raid and to be spared Derek’s predictable speculations about the comfort levels to be enjoyed in Pretoria’s Central Prison or on Robben Island. With that in mind, Cameron delayed his usual departure for the university by an hour – he would go straight to the meeting without bothering to collect his post and go to his office first. The change of routine might not pass unnoticed – but members of the Department didn’t have their homes raided every day and there was no point in trying to pretend that nothing had happened.
The Department was bound to be agog with speculation. Both morning newspapers had filled several column inches with follow-up on their Friday reports of the bomb blast. Cameron had walked down to the nearest café before breakfast to buy the papers, overcoming his distaste for the Mercury in the interests of knowing precisely what his colleagues and students might have read.
In the absence of any concrete developments, the reports consisted largely of opinion rather than news. Both carried identical paragraphs, obviously quoting a formal police statement, to the effect that police investigating the explosion had conducted searches of several domestic premises, including those of a member of staff in the History Department at the University. Both were notably thin on ‘human interest’ stories about the life of the victim. That was another of the penalties, or perhaps advantages, of having been born poor and black in South Africa.
Cameron paused over his indirect mention in dispatches. It was unusual for police announcements to specify the occupation of anybody whose house had been raided. Venter would almost certainly have had a hand in that. They were getting more inventive in their subtler modes of harassment, but that didn’t lessen the feeling of being harassed.
Jules had left to drop the children off and get to work at the usual time, pausing fleetingly on her way out of the door for him to peck her on a proffered cheek. Twenty minutes or so before he needed to leave for the meeting, Cameron heard the improbable noise of what sounded like a large lorry reversing up his drive. Going to the back door to investigate, he was in time to see a short, very thickset, white man whom he didn’t recognize letting himself into the garden through the gate near the garage. He was wide enough to feel it necessary, although it probably wasn’t, to sidle crab-wise through the gate. Once through the gate he stood gazing up at the camphor tree as though entranced, slowly shaking his head.
To break the spell and find out what his visitor thought he was doing, Cameron opened the back door. The man swung round, obviously startled, and walked over. He was the first to speak, clearly not feeling the need for the niceties of introductions.
‘I’m very pleased to see you are still here after all, Mr Beaumont,’ he said in a distinctively Eastern Cape accent. ‘This is going to be much more difficult than you led us to believe. It is much taller than I expected, and if everything is going to have to be carried through the gate first it is going to take much longer to load the lorry than we had bargained for. You didn’t mention the fence and the hedge.’
After a moment’s reflection, Cameron concluded that patience was called for.
‘Maybe we should start at the beginning,’ he said. ‘You clearly know who I am but I have no idea who you are or what you are doing here. Why would you be surprised to find me in my own home?’
If the man had been startled by the sound of the back door, he gave every impression of being struck dumb now – his crew-cut seemed to stand up a little straighter and his mouth opened wordlessly. After a few moments of silence he evidently decided to go along with Cameron’s idea of where to begin.
‘I’m Philip Pistorius, of course. You phoned on Saturday morning and asked us to come round this morning to cut a camphor tree down and remove the logs – that must be the tree over there. You said there wouldn’t be anyone here if we came at 8.30 but to go ahead and clear it all away anyway. That’s why I was surprised to see you.’
‘It sounds a bit dodgy, to say the least,’ Cameron said, ‘to arrive in someone’s garden and start cutting down their trees on the basis of a single phone-call from someone you have never seen or spoken to before.’
‘I’ve never done it before, but if someone phones and asks us to do a job, and says he won’t be home but the job needs doing, what am I supposed to do?’
‘How were you going to get paid?’ Cameron asked. ‘You can’t even have taken a deposit – and if you hadn’t seen the tree how could you give a quotation for what the job was going to cost?’
‘You didn’t ask for a quotation,’ the man said. ‘You said the job needed to be done, that it was urgent, and that money was no object. I remember that very clearly. Nobody has ever said that to me before – it’s not something one would forget.’
‘I’m sure it isn’t,’ Cameron said. ‘I expect that also accounts for the high priority you have given it on the first working day since the phone-call. How were you going to get paid if there wasn’t going to be anyone here to pay you?’
‘It’s not like I was selling you a car which you could jump into and drive away and I would never see you again. I know where you live. There’s going to be a very big tree-stump in the garden to prove that the tree was cut down. You live in a house big enough for you to be able to pay a few hundred rands to have a tree removed. Why would I worry about not being paid? You told me to put an invoice in the post-box and come round to the house on Wednesday evening next week at 6.00pm to collect a cheque. You were very precise about the time.’
‘So why is the tree taller than you expected?’ Cameron asked.
‘Because you told me when I asked that it was about twenty foot tall. It isn’t – it is much closer to forty foot. Almost twice what you told me.’
It was past time for matters to be clarified.
‘Did you speak to me yourself, or did someone else take my order?’ Cameron asked.
‘No,’ the man replied, obviously still puzzled. ‘I took your order. That’s why I was surprised you had forgotten my name.’
‘Am I me?’ Cameron asked.
Mr Pistorius’s astonished silence suggested that this was a philosophical bridge too far for him. Cameron felt the need to elaborate.
‘Are you sure I am the person you spoke to and took the order from?’ he asked. ‘I am Dr Beaumont but I can assure you I did not ask anyone to cut my camphor tree down. It helps keep the house cool in summer; I’ve built a tree house for my children in it; and cutting it down it would be a seriously stupid thing to do. Did the person you spoke to on the phone sound like me? Didn’t he have an Afrikaans accent by any chance? And did he give you any reason why it might be a good idea to cut it down?’
‘Yes,’ the man replied. ‘He sounded just like you – he certainly wasn’t Afrikaans. And he did give a reason, although I was a bit puzzled by it – he said he wanted to make it easier for people to see his house. People usually grow trees to stop other people from seeing their houses. I was also surprised that he told me to feel free to kick his dog if it got too close.’
Cameron could see why Mr Pistorius might have been puzzled by this. For Cameron, on the other hand, things were now all too clear – it was obviously Venter again. Still on a high from the raid, if not from anything else, he must have decided to spice his weekend with a bit of harassment and arranged for someone to make the phone call. Venter would have realized that his own accent was unlikely to convince a tree-cutter that he was a Doctor Beaumont.
The tree routine was not original. Cameron knew that it had been used on a lecturer in Grahamstown, for one. At least having a tree chopped down was less terminal than having one’s head shattered like a pumpkin. The idea that the person being watched might pay someone to cut down a tree to make the job of the watchers easier also carried Venter’s signature. It was on a par with switching post addressed to him at home into the envelopes of post addressed to him at the university, and vice versa, just to make the point that he was under wall-to-wall surveillance.
What was much more worrying was the specificity of the Wednesday evening visit. Venter knew that Cameron had fortnightly evening lectures to deliver to his part-time class at 6.00pm on Wednesdays. Jules would be alone with the children. Venter was sending a message – he knew precisely when Jules would be at home without him. Cameron looked at his watch. The conversation had taken several minutes – he needed to rush.
‘I’m sorry, but I need to go now or I will be late for work,’ Cameron said. ‘I’m very sorry your time has been wasted but I had nothing to do with that. I am just pleased I happened to be at home when you arrived – I really don’t want my camphor tree cut down. Goodbye.’
Cameron walked quickly through to his study to pick up the pile of largely unmarked essays and headed out through the front door. A fast walk wasn’t quite enough to get him to the meeting on time, but it was too hot to run. The wind had dropped over the weekend leaving an oppressive and threatening stillness. Venter’s car was in its usual place. Cameron walked up the pavement on the other side of the street, willing himself not to look to see whether it was Venter who was sitting in the driver’s seat. From the corner of his eye he got the impression that there were two people sitting in the front seats. Venter would have been hoping for a grandstand view of the dismemberment of the camphor tree and might well have brought a guest along to watch the spectacle.
