Despite the Darkness, page 14
‘And…?’ Cameron interjected into the pause after Duncan stopped talking.
‘And Mirambo said some time ago that if he ever needed help from anyone at the university he would go to you or John Stanley.’
The speaker this time was Clifford Longman.
‘We’ve spoken to John this morning,’ Longman continued, ‘and he says he hasn’t seen Mirambo for weeks. Jackie says she saw you looking to see if anyone was watching and then running across the road and knocking on the car window to attract Venter’s attention before you spoke to him. She says you were talking very animatedly. We’ve also been told that Venter was seen talking to someone at the front door of your house earlier.’
Jackie nodded her head vigorously, but again said nothing, although it was her story that was being told. Why did she feel obliged to defer to Longman?
Clifford Longman was the leader of the relatively few conservative students who bothered to take part in student politics. He had been hanging around the university for several years longer than a three-year degree would normally allow. Part of this could probably be explained by his having spent more time eating than studying. He was not an obvious candidate for typecasting as a police spy in that he never made any effort to parrot left-wing rhetoric or to convey the impression of being prepared to die a heroic death on the barricades. Cameron nevertheless suspected that Longman was an SB plant – paying a high profile right-wing student as a police spy was the kind of double bluff they would think clever.
‘So,’ continued Duncan, reasserting his role as appointed spokesperson, ‘we want to know why you were talking to Venter, what you were saying to him, and what you know about Mirambo’s whereabouts.’
‘What precisely is it that you are implying?’ Cameron’s articulation was as precise and controlled as he could make it. ‘As it happens, I was fed up with Venter sitting outside my house in general, and fed up, in particular, with his constant littering. He’d just thrown a paper packet out of his car window and the wind had blown it into my swimming pool. I suggested that he should get out of his car and fish it out of my pool. I’m sure I looked animated – I certainly was. I had lost it completely, which was probably not the most sensible thing I could have done.’
Graham, who knew Cameron better than the others did, allowed himself a fleeting smile. The faces of the others conveyed varying levels of disbelief. The story clearly seemed improbable to them – as well it might.
‘How did Venter respond?’ asked Duncan, taking up his role as forensic interrogator again.
‘He threatened to shoot me with his service automatic,’ Cameron replied.
‘We didn’t see him pointing a gun at you,’ Jackie interjected, speaking for the first time.
‘He didn’t need to,’ Cameron replied. ‘It was on the seat beside him and he allowed his hand to hover suggestively over it. You didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce what that was about.’
‘It has been suggested that you might be working for the Special Branch,’ Graham said, resuming his rightful role as the leader of the group and coming to the point. ‘Speaking for myself, I find that extremely improbable, but we need to make sure that you aren’t.’
Cameron was stunned into silence and felt a sudden cold chill wash over him. So that was what this was all about. But he mustn’t allow a prolonged silence to be interpreted as evidence of guilt.
‘Suggested by who?’ he asked. ‘Do you think it likely that the SB would have the resources to post an officer day after day and night after night outside the house of someone who was actually working for them all the time? Why would they do that? ’
‘I notice you aren’t denying it,’ Duncan said, after the silence that greeted Cameron’s response had lasted several seconds. ‘You are focusing on resources. We are interested in the morality of betrayal.’
The ‘morality of betrayal’ indeed – the history of the Empire he felt so loyal towards had plenty to teach him about betrayal. But losing one’s temper with students was never a good idea.
‘I’m just trying to point to the advantages of exercising a bit of common sense,’ Cameron said, as mildly as he could. ‘Why would the SB have raided my house on Friday night, terrorizing my wife and children and threatening to shoot my dog? If I were working for them, why would they regularly wake me up at three in the morning threatening to blow my brains out? As a senior Management student you are unlikely to have come across many Management text books that recommend 3am death threats as an effective way of incentivising productive work from employees.’
‘We only have your word for the phone-calls,’ said Longman. ‘The raid could have been mounted as cover. Venter could have seen Jackie and the others passing by and have been worried that your cover had been blown – and you still haven’t denied that you are a police spy.’
How did they know it was Venter he was talking to? They had been walking down the pavement on the other side of the road – he would have been blocking Venter from their view. Besides which, Venter had only wound the window down far enough to be able to talk to Cameron through the gap – even if Venter had picked his 9mm up and pointed it at Cameron they couldn’t have seen it. They wouldn’t have been able to see Venter’s face properly, and, even if they had, how would they have known it was Venter? Come to that, how many passing students would have recognized that it was Venter talking to Margaret at the front door? And all of this information had mysteriously come together on a Monday morning when everything had happened the Friday before?
‘Why would I waste my time telling you I’m not a police agent?’ Cameron asked. ‘Don’t you think that if I were a police agent the chances are that I would immediately deny it? Either way, it would be a waste of time. If you distrusted me enough to think that I might be a police agent, you would distrust me enough not to believe me when I said I wasn’t.’
None of the students said anything for a few seconds while they digested this, then Graham spoke up again.
‘That may well be true, Cameron. But, if you were a police agent, that is precisely what you would say to deflect suspicion – isn’t it? It doesn’t get us any further. One of our SRC colleagues is missing. We are worried about him and think you may know more about what has happened than you are letting on. If you do know more, there could be one of two reasons for not telling us what you know. You could either be trying to protect him, or you could have handed him over to the Special Branch. We don’t know either way and, as the SRC, we need to know. If there is any suggestion that you might be a police agent, students will come to us to ask us – we need to know what to tell them. And we need to find out what has happened to Mirambo.’
‘It all comes down to trust, doesn’t it?’ replied Cameron. ‘If you don’t trust me, there is nothing I can say to you now that is going to be relevant to your search for Mirambo. But you do have my track-record to go on – fifteen years of lectures to thousands of students, speeches on university and other platforms, letters to newspapers, radio interviews, contributions to university and other external committees, and everything I’ve said less formally in tutorials. And those are just the public utterances. I’ve spoken off the record to hundreds of students. If you choose to think that all that has been a front all these years, and that the harassment I have been subjected to from the SB and others is just an elaborate charade, there is nothing I can say to persuade you otherwise.’
‘Trust works both ways,’ Cameron continued after a brief pause. ‘Even if I did know anything about what has happened to Mirambo, why would I tell you just because you ask me to? How do I know that everything I am saying isn’t going to be conveyed straight back to the SB headquarters in Longmarket Street as soon as you leave this room? For that matter it could be being conveyed back even as we speak.’
Cameron avoided looking at Longman as he said this. Of course any one of them could be an SB plant, it didn’t need to be the obvious candidate. There might be more than one on the SRC. But he wasn’t surprised that it was Longman who was the first to speak.
‘That’s an outrageous implication,’ he spluttered. ‘Anyway how would you know the SB headquarters is in Longmarket Street? They don’t have a sign over the door do they?’
‘Clifford,’ Graham interjected, ‘everybody knows the SB headquarters is in Longmarket Street, you don’t have to be an SB agent to know that.’
The students were silent. They appeared to realize the meeting had arrived at an impasse. It was time to wind up and send them on their way.
‘I’m sorry I can’t be more help,’ Cameron said. ‘I would love to know where Mirambo is myself. I’ve been worried about him, just as you have. I’m also sorry that you aren’t sure whether or not to believe that I might be an SB agent. I don’t know who it was that suggested to you that I might be, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to learn that Venter himself was the source. I hope that at least some of you know me well enough not to believe it, and I hope that the rest of you will base your judgment on my track record rather than on a rumour.’
‘I can’t prove that I am not a police spy,’ Cameron continued. ‘But that, of course, is why any reputable legal system, including our own, is – at least in theory – based on the principle that you are innocent until you have been proved guilty. It is often much more difficult to prove innocence than it is to prove guilt. So whoever is suggesting that I am a police spy needs to provide you with evidence before you start believing it. The fact that I was seen speaking to Venter, and the fact that Venter, if it was Venter, was seen speaking to someone who wasn’t me at our front door don’t provide evidence of anything beyond the fact that the SB apparently finds it necessary to keep an eye on me – which, it probably bears repetition, would be decidedly odd if I were working for them.’
‘You still haven’t denied that you are a police spy,’ said Duncan.
Hadn’t he understood any part of the conversation? Cameron’s patience had worn very thin and he could feel his temper rising. Possibly suspecting that they had already tested his tolerance too far, Graham quickly intervened.
‘We’ve been through all that, Duncan. Cameron, you’ve been very supportive of the SRC in my time here. We appreciate that. We don’t believe you are a police agent, but you will appreciate that we had to come to see you about this. Mirambo has disappeared and we needed – we still need – to follow up every line of inquiry. It is very difficult to trace a missing person when you know that the last people you can report his disappearance to are the police, who are more than likely to have been responsible. We will carry on trying to find out what has happened to Mirambo. In the meantime, thank you for your time.’
‘Thank you,’ Cameron replied as graciously as he could manage. ‘I will also keep trying to find out what has happened to Mirambo. Please let me know if there is anything further I can do to help.’
Graham pushed his chair back, stood up and, as the other members of the delegation followed suit and started to file out of the office, made his way round to shake Cameron’s hand before he followed them.
Chapter 11
Alone in his office, Cameron sat gazing at the closed door feeling a hollow emptiness in the pit of his stomach. It wasn’t clear what the implications of the meeting would be – it had been amicable enough for the most part, but it left a sense of deep foreboding. The utter, utter bastards. Not the students, or not most of them anyway. The majority of them were probably genuinely worried about Mirambo and were just trying to follow any lead they could get hold of – their lead in this case being down the garden path. The idea of circulating a rumour that he was a police spy must have come from the Special Branch. The implementation would have been left to whoever they had planted in the SRC this time around – probably the larger than life Clifford Longman.
Cameron had countered the allegation as well as he could, and had managed to control his temper. But managing to convince a few members of the SRC that he wasn’t working for the SB wouldn’t be the end of it – even assuming he had succeeded in convincing them. They hadn’t all looked particularly convinced. It had to be Venter who was responsible. What must it feel like to be held in such contempt that you could destroy someone’s reputation simply by circulating a rumour that he was working for you?
Would the rumour destroy his reputation? Probably not for those who had worked with him for any length of time, or had read what he had written. But there weren’t too many members of staff outside the Arts Faculty who fell into that category, and it wouldn’t include all the Arts students. It wouldn’t even include all his own students.
And outside the university? Anyone prepared to resist the bastards and their insane apartheid social engineering had to work on the assumption that the SB had spies everywhere. People didn’t have to buy into the rumour entirely for it to make them ultra-cautious – they would want to keep their distance.
You can’t prove a negative. The only evidence he could have presented that he wasn’t working for the SB in present circumstances would have been a hale and hearty Mirambo safely arrived in Maseru – but even that wouldn’t have been conclusive proof. Mirambo could be an SB agent himself, and the story of his escape and Cameron’s role in helping him could just be part of an elaborate plan to plant him in the ANC in exile. Any mention of Cameron’s part in the story would present the SB with all the evidence they needed to lock him up for a very long time and possibly even to have him hanged – if, that is, Mirambo had had anything to do with the bomb. And, if Mirambo were to go public with the story of his escape, Jules would inevitably be implicated. Who would ever believe that she didn’t know anything about it?
The more Cameron teased out the possible implications of his meeting with the students the deeper the sense of foreboding became. But there was no point in sitting agonizing about it. He felt the need to move – just being on the move would relieve the sense of being able to do nothing to stop whatever wave was about to break over him. It wasn’t quite time to go home yet – a walk would be good, provided it was unaccompanied. Going home to collect Kali would merely serve to invite company from whoever was spending his afternoon watching the house. Kali’s enjoyment of their evening walks always far exceeded his own, so going for a walk without him always made Cameron feel vaguely guilty.
The oppressive stillness of the morning seemed to have gathered purpose. He could now hear the distant rumble of thunder. But it didn’t sound close enough for him to need to worry about getting wet – at least for half an hour. A stirring of the hot air would alert him in good time when it was getting close.
Cameron arrived home after his walk to a subdued greeting from a slightly resentful looking Kali and a stressed Jules. Interpreting Kali’s hang-dog look as resentment was probably just guilt at not having come home to collect him before going for his walk. Jules’s stress this time around was not immediately of his own making.
‘Margaret hasn’t been here today,’ Jules said. ‘She has only missed work once since we took her on, and then she phoned to say she was sick and wouldn’t be coming in. I hope she is OK – she must have been traumatized by her encounter with Venter on Friday. Now, as well as making supper and giving the children their baths and putting them to bed, there is all the washing-up we left yesterday and a lot of ironing to do.’
‘I’ll do the washing up,’ Cameron said, wishing he had come straight home instead of going for his walk. ‘The ironing can wait for tomorrow – I expect she’ll come in tomorrow. The chances are that the phones in Edendale are on the blink.’
‘I need my work clothes ironed for work tomorrow, even if you don’t,’ Jules said. ‘I work for a reputable firm of stockbrokers, not a university – I can’t just turn up for work in worn jeans.’
Jules called out to the children and went to run their bath, leaving Cameron reflecting that her day at work had clearly not helped to reduce the residual stress from the trauma of the raid on Friday. Jules hadn’t returned to the question of what he had been doing that had required a change of shirt. If she was avoiding the question because she thought he was not going to tell her the truth it was hardly surprising that she was being a bit distant. But he couldn’t tell her without putting a legal obligation on her to go and tell the police – which, of course, she wouldn’t do. If he was going to try to reduce the distance between them he needed to make sure that he told her everything – provided always that it wouldn’t implicate her in any way.
The rumbles of thunder had become more frequent and more insistent as Cameron walked home, and as he started to run the water into the sink he heard the rain starting to patter on the corrugated iron roof. He was conscious of the lightning strikes getting very close, so he turned the taps on to fill the sink as quickly as possible. Jules would make sure the children didn’t linger in the bath.
While they ate supper after the children had been put to bed, Jules listened in silence as Cameron described his meeting with the students.
‘So now I’m the wife of a police agent,’ she said softly when he had finished, her voice barely audible above the pounding of the rain on the roof. ‘That will go down well at the Black Sash protest stand on Saturday. If Venter is in charge of surveillance he will probably give me a kiss as he takes my name, just to confirm everyone’s worst suspicions. My mother could never get away from being “the Minister’s wife”. I’ll become “the police-agent’s wife”. Funny that. I’m not identified now as “the lecturer’s wife”. It must be the moral extremes – at one end you are an angel’s wife, at the other you are the devil’s wife, in the middle, if you are lucky, you are just yourself. Not that angels have wives – or devil’s for that matter. Confronting Venter like that was just such a bloody stupid thing to do.’
Jules stopped talking and looked at Cameron sombrely for a second or two. Then, entirely unexpectedly, she smiled. The lightness of her smile contrasted with the dark shadows under her eyes. Cameron felt a rush of tenderness towards her and found himself wondering, again, whether her stillness in bed was masking sleeplessness, though she had never been a restless sleeper.
‘And Mirambo said some time ago that if he ever needed help from anyone at the university he would go to you or John Stanley.’
The speaker this time was Clifford Longman.
‘We’ve spoken to John this morning,’ Longman continued, ‘and he says he hasn’t seen Mirambo for weeks. Jackie says she saw you looking to see if anyone was watching and then running across the road and knocking on the car window to attract Venter’s attention before you spoke to him. She says you were talking very animatedly. We’ve also been told that Venter was seen talking to someone at the front door of your house earlier.’
Jackie nodded her head vigorously, but again said nothing, although it was her story that was being told. Why did she feel obliged to defer to Longman?
Clifford Longman was the leader of the relatively few conservative students who bothered to take part in student politics. He had been hanging around the university for several years longer than a three-year degree would normally allow. Part of this could probably be explained by his having spent more time eating than studying. He was not an obvious candidate for typecasting as a police spy in that he never made any effort to parrot left-wing rhetoric or to convey the impression of being prepared to die a heroic death on the barricades. Cameron nevertheless suspected that Longman was an SB plant – paying a high profile right-wing student as a police spy was the kind of double bluff they would think clever.
‘So,’ continued Duncan, reasserting his role as appointed spokesperson, ‘we want to know why you were talking to Venter, what you were saying to him, and what you know about Mirambo’s whereabouts.’
‘What precisely is it that you are implying?’ Cameron’s articulation was as precise and controlled as he could make it. ‘As it happens, I was fed up with Venter sitting outside my house in general, and fed up, in particular, with his constant littering. He’d just thrown a paper packet out of his car window and the wind had blown it into my swimming pool. I suggested that he should get out of his car and fish it out of my pool. I’m sure I looked animated – I certainly was. I had lost it completely, which was probably not the most sensible thing I could have done.’
Graham, who knew Cameron better than the others did, allowed himself a fleeting smile. The faces of the others conveyed varying levels of disbelief. The story clearly seemed improbable to them – as well it might.
‘How did Venter respond?’ asked Duncan, taking up his role as forensic interrogator again.
‘He threatened to shoot me with his service automatic,’ Cameron replied.
‘We didn’t see him pointing a gun at you,’ Jackie interjected, speaking for the first time.
‘He didn’t need to,’ Cameron replied. ‘It was on the seat beside him and he allowed his hand to hover suggestively over it. You didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce what that was about.’
‘It has been suggested that you might be working for the Special Branch,’ Graham said, resuming his rightful role as the leader of the group and coming to the point. ‘Speaking for myself, I find that extremely improbable, but we need to make sure that you aren’t.’
Cameron was stunned into silence and felt a sudden cold chill wash over him. So that was what this was all about. But he mustn’t allow a prolonged silence to be interpreted as evidence of guilt.
‘Suggested by who?’ he asked. ‘Do you think it likely that the SB would have the resources to post an officer day after day and night after night outside the house of someone who was actually working for them all the time? Why would they do that? ’
‘I notice you aren’t denying it,’ Duncan said, after the silence that greeted Cameron’s response had lasted several seconds. ‘You are focusing on resources. We are interested in the morality of betrayal.’
The ‘morality of betrayal’ indeed – the history of the Empire he felt so loyal towards had plenty to teach him about betrayal. But losing one’s temper with students was never a good idea.
‘I’m just trying to point to the advantages of exercising a bit of common sense,’ Cameron said, as mildly as he could. ‘Why would the SB have raided my house on Friday night, terrorizing my wife and children and threatening to shoot my dog? If I were working for them, why would they regularly wake me up at three in the morning threatening to blow my brains out? As a senior Management student you are unlikely to have come across many Management text books that recommend 3am death threats as an effective way of incentivising productive work from employees.’
‘We only have your word for the phone-calls,’ said Longman. ‘The raid could have been mounted as cover. Venter could have seen Jackie and the others passing by and have been worried that your cover had been blown – and you still haven’t denied that you are a police spy.’
How did they know it was Venter he was talking to? They had been walking down the pavement on the other side of the road – he would have been blocking Venter from their view. Besides which, Venter had only wound the window down far enough to be able to talk to Cameron through the gap – even if Venter had picked his 9mm up and pointed it at Cameron they couldn’t have seen it. They wouldn’t have been able to see Venter’s face properly, and, even if they had, how would they have known it was Venter? Come to that, how many passing students would have recognized that it was Venter talking to Margaret at the front door? And all of this information had mysteriously come together on a Monday morning when everything had happened the Friday before?
‘Why would I waste my time telling you I’m not a police agent?’ Cameron asked. ‘Don’t you think that if I were a police agent the chances are that I would immediately deny it? Either way, it would be a waste of time. If you distrusted me enough to think that I might be a police agent, you would distrust me enough not to believe me when I said I wasn’t.’
None of the students said anything for a few seconds while they digested this, then Graham spoke up again.
‘That may well be true, Cameron. But, if you were a police agent, that is precisely what you would say to deflect suspicion – isn’t it? It doesn’t get us any further. One of our SRC colleagues is missing. We are worried about him and think you may know more about what has happened than you are letting on. If you do know more, there could be one of two reasons for not telling us what you know. You could either be trying to protect him, or you could have handed him over to the Special Branch. We don’t know either way and, as the SRC, we need to know. If there is any suggestion that you might be a police agent, students will come to us to ask us – we need to know what to tell them. And we need to find out what has happened to Mirambo.’
‘It all comes down to trust, doesn’t it?’ replied Cameron. ‘If you don’t trust me, there is nothing I can say to you now that is going to be relevant to your search for Mirambo. But you do have my track-record to go on – fifteen years of lectures to thousands of students, speeches on university and other platforms, letters to newspapers, radio interviews, contributions to university and other external committees, and everything I’ve said less formally in tutorials. And those are just the public utterances. I’ve spoken off the record to hundreds of students. If you choose to think that all that has been a front all these years, and that the harassment I have been subjected to from the SB and others is just an elaborate charade, there is nothing I can say to persuade you otherwise.’
‘Trust works both ways,’ Cameron continued after a brief pause. ‘Even if I did know anything about what has happened to Mirambo, why would I tell you just because you ask me to? How do I know that everything I am saying isn’t going to be conveyed straight back to the SB headquarters in Longmarket Street as soon as you leave this room? For that matter it could be being conveyed back even as we speak.’
Cameron avoided looking at Longman as he said this. Of course any one of them could be an SB plant, it didn’t need to be the obvious candidate. There might be more than one on the SRC. But he wasn’t surprised that it was Longman who was the first to speak.
‘That’s an outrageous implication,’ he spluttered. ‘Anyway how would you know the SB headquarters is in Longmarket Street? They don’t have a sign over the door do they?’
‘Clifford,’ Graham interjected, ‘everybody knows the SB headquarters is in Longmarket Street, you don’t have to be an SB agent to know that.’
The students were silent. They appeared to realize the meeting had arrived at an impasse. It was time to wind up and send them on their way.
‘I’m sorry I can’t be more help,’ Cameron said. ‘I would love to know where Mirambo is myself. I’ve been worried about him, just as you have. I’m also sorry that you aren’t sure whether or not to believe that I might be an SB agent. I don’t know who it was that suggested to you that I might be, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to learn that Venter himself was the source. I hope that at least some of you know me well enough not to believe it, and I hope that the rest of you will base your judgment on my track record rather than on a rumour.’
‘I can’t prove that I am not a police spy,’ Cameron continued. ‘But that, of course, is why any reputable legal system, including our own, is – at least in theory – based on the principle that you are innocent until you have been proved guilty. It is often much more difficult to prove innocence than it is to prove guilt. So whoever is suggesting that I am a police spy needs to provide you with evidence before you start believing it. The fact that I was seen speaking to Venter, and the fact that Venter, if it was Venter, was seen speaking to someone who wasn’t me at our front door don’t provide evidence of anything beyond the fact that the SB apparently finds it necessary to keep an eye on me – which, it probably bears repetition, would be decidedly odd if I were working for them.’
‘You still haven’t denied that you are a police spy,’ said Duncan.
Hadn’t he understood any part of the conversation? Cameron’s patience had worn very thin and he could feel his temper rising. Possibly suspecting that they had already tested his tolerance too far, Graham quickly intervened.
‘We’ve been through all that, Duncan. Cameron, you’ve been very supportive of the SRC in my time here. We appreciate that. We don’t believe you are a police agent, but you will appreciate that we had to come to see you about this. Mirambo has disappeared and we needed – we still need – to follow up every line of inquiry. It is very difficult to trace a missing person when you know that the last people you can report his disappearance to are the police, who are more than likely to have been responsible. We will carry on trying to find out what has happened to Mirambo. In the meantime, thank you for your time.’
‘Thank you,’ Cameron replied as graciously as he could manage. ‘I will also keep trying to find out what has happened to Mirambo. Please let me know if there is anything further I can do to help.’
Graham pushed his chair back, stood up and, as the other members of the delegation followed suit and started to file out of the office, made his way round to shake Cameron’s hand before he followed them.
Chapter 11
Alone in his office, Cameron sat gazing at the closed door feeling a hollow emptiness in the pit of his stomach. It wasn’t clear what the implications of the meeting would be – it had been amicable enough for the most part, but it left a sense of deep foreboding. The utter, utter bastards. Not the students, or not most of them anyway. The majority of them were probably genuinely worried about Mirambo and were just trying to follow any lead they could get hold of – their lead in this case being down the garden path. The idea of circulating a rumour that he was a police spy must have come from the Special Branch. The implementation would have been left to whoever they had planted in the SRC this time around – probably the larger than life Clifford Longman.
Cameron had countered the allegation as well as he could, and had managed to control his temper. But managing to convince a few members of the SRC that he wasn’t working for the SB wouldn’t be the end of it – even assuming he had succeeded in convincing them. They hadn’t all looked particularly convinced. It had to be Venter who was responsible. What must it feel like to be held in such contempt that you could destroy someone’s reputation simply by circulating a rumour that he was working for you?
Would the rumour destroy his reputation? Probably not for those who had worked with him for any length of time, or had read what he had written. But there weren’t too many members of staff outside the Arts Faculty who fell into that category, and it wouldn’t include all the Arts students. It wouldn’t even include all his own students.
And outside the university? Anyone prepared to resist the bastards and their insane apartheid social engineering had to work on the assumption that the SB had spies everywhere. People didn’t have to buy into the rumour entirely for it to make them ultra-cautious – they would want to keep their distance.
You can’t prove a negative. The only evidence he could have presented that he wasn’t working for the SB in present circumstances would have been a hale and hearty Mirambo safely arrived in Maseru – but even that wouldn’t have been conclusive proof. Mirambo could be an SB agent himself, and the story of his escape and Cameron’s role in helping him could just be part of an elaborate plan to plant him in the ANC in exile. Any mention of Cameron’s part in the story would present the SB with all the evidence they needed to lock him up for a very long time and possibly even to have him hanged – if, that is, Mirambo had had anything to do with the bomb. And, if Mirambo were to go public with the story of his escape, Jules would inevitably be implicated. Who would ever believe that she didn’t know anything about it?
The more Cameron teased out the possible implications of his meeting with the students the deeper the sense of foreboding became. But there was no point in sitting agonizing about it. He felt the need to move – just being on the move would relieve the sense of being able to do nothing to stop whatever wave was about to break over him. It wasn’t quite time to go home yet – a walk would be good, provided it was unaccompanied. Going home to collect Kali would merely serve to invite company from whoever was spending his afternoon watching the house. Kali’s enjoyment of their evening walks always far exceeded his own, so going for a walk without him always made Cameron feel vaguely guilty.
The oppressive stillness of the morning seemed to have gathered purpose. He could now hear the distant rumble of thunder. But it didn’t sound close enough for him to need to worry about getting wet – at least for half an hour. A stirring of the hot air would alert him in good time when it was getting close.
Cameron arrived home after his walk to a subdued greeting from a slightly resentful looking Kali and a stressed Jules. Interpreting Kali’s hang-dog look as resentment was probably just guilt at not having come home to collect him before going for his walk. Jules’s stress this time around was not immediately of his own making.
‘Margaret hasn’t been here today,’ Jules said. ‘She has only missed work once since we took her on, and then she phoned to say she was sick and wouldn’t be coming in. I hope she is OK – she must have been traumatized by her encounter with Venter on Friday. Now, as well as making supper and giving the children their baths and putting them to bed, there is all the washing-up we left yesterday and a lot of ironing to do.’
‘I’ll do the washing up,’ Cameron said, wishing he had come straight home instead of going for his walk. ‘The ironing can wait for tomorrow – I expect she’ll come in tomorrow. The chances are that the phones in Edendale are on the blink.’
‘I need my work clothes ironed for work tomorrow, even if you don’t,’ Jules said. ‘I work for a reputable firm of stockbrokers, not a university – I can’t just turn up for work in worn jeans.’
Jules called out to the children and went to run their bath, leaving Cameron reflecting that her day at work had clearly not helped to reduce the residual stress from the trauma of the raid on Friday. Jules hadn’t returned to the question of what he had been doing that had required a change of shirt. If she was avoiding the question because she thought he was not going to tell her the truth it was hardly surprising that she was being a bit distant. But he couldn’t tell her without putting a legal obligation on her to go and tell the police – which, of course, she wouldn’t do. If he was going to try to reduce the distance between them he needed to make sure that he told her everything – provided always that it wouldn’t implicate her in any way.
The rumbles of thunder had become more frequent and more insistent as Cameron walked home, and as he started to run the water into the sink he heard the rain starting to patter on the corrugated iron roof. He was conscious of the lightning strikes getting very close, so he turned the taps on to fill the sink as quickly as possible. Jules would make sure the children didn’t linger in the bath.
While they ate supper after the children had been put to bed, Jules listened in silence as Cameron described his meeting with the students.
‘So now I’m the wife of a police agent,’ she said softly when he had finished, her voice barely audible above the pounding of the rain on the roof. ‘That will go down well at the Black Sash protest stand on Saturday. If Venter is in charge of surveillance he will probably give me a kiss as he takes my name, just to confirm everyone’s worst suspicions. My mother could never get away from being “the Minister’s wife”. I’ll become “the police-agent’s wife”. Funny that. I’m not identified now as “the lecturer’s wife”. It must be the moral extremes – at one end you are an angel’s wife, at the other you are the devil’s wife, in the middle, if you are lucky, you are just yourself. Not that angels have wives – or devil’s for that matter. Confronting Venter like that was just such a bloody stupid thing to do.’
Jules stopped talking and looked at Cameron sombrely for a second or two. Then, entirely unexpectedly, she smiled. The lightness of her smile contrasted with the dark shadows under her eyes. Cameron felt a rush of tenderness towards her and found himself wondering, again, whether her stillness in bed was masking sleeplessness, though she had never been a restless sleeper.
