Despite the Darkness, page 17
Better to broach the subject immediately rather than try to carry on as if nothing had happened – the unspoken accusation would not be a good sub-text to the tutorial. Third year students would have had the confidence to broach the subject without being prompted; first years would probably be too diffident. But his third year students should know him well enough not to need to ask the question.
‘I see you’ve got hold of a copy of the prize-winning entry in the SRC’s latest creative writing competition,’ Cameron said. ‘The short answer to your unspoken question is: “no – I’m not a police agent”.’
Two or three of the students shuffled uncomfortably in their chairs, but none of them said anything. It occurred to Cameron that the situation must be awkward for students, particularly for the well-disposed ones. How were they supposed to know how to respond to a rumour that their tutor was a police agent? It wasn’t exactly the kind of everyday occurrence that featured in the Frequently Asked Questions section of the Student Handbook. They needed to be confident about the integrity of the staff who were responsible for marking their essays.
‘OK,’ Cameron said after a short pause, ‘it looks as if the short answer was too short. Let’s try the long one.’
The long one included an account of the 3am phone calls, the SB stake-out of his house and the litter-lout conversation with Venter. It concluded with a brief account of the police raid and included a character sketch of Venter that would not have met Victoria’s complex-character requirements. It was Kali’s near miss that seemed to evoke the strongest reaction. Mirambo’s bitter generalization about white people caring more about their animals than about their black fellow-citizens came to mind. Mirambo kept coming to mind.
Cameron’s account of what had happened seemed to do the trick – at least to the extent that nobody got up and walked out – and the tutorial proceeded more or less normally. But perhaps it was just too early for them to know what the consequences of boycotting a suspect lecturer’s classes might be.
When the tutorial was eventually over – it was difficult to concentrate on the Zulu wars in the face of the more immediate struggle – Cameron went home for a sandwich. There was no sign of Margaret. Venter’s car was not in its usual position, but there was a white Cortina with a man behind the steering wheel in the shade of a Jacaranda further down the street. Cameron couldn’t see who it was. The SB appeared to be Henry Ford’s diametrical opposites when it came to variety in cars: its agents could choose any colour, as long as it was white.
Although it seemed like forever since he had left Mirambo to make his way to temporary safety in the darkness, it was unlikely that he would have had the time or opportunity to leave a message for Cameron at the library. But rationality didn’t stand a chance against the urge to be doing something to chip away at the uncertainty. Cameron was operating on auto-pilot as he slapped together and ate a sandwich, locked the house and went round to the garage to get the car out to drive into the city.
The roller-door of the garage wasn’t kept locked. As he lifted it Cameron started backwards at the sight of a very large and obviously very dead rat a couple of feet away. It was stretched out stiffly along the sill at the base of the hatchback window of the Renault, being kept from sliding off by the rear windscreen-wiper – or ‘winscreeper’ as Hilton, rather more economically, persisted in calling them.
It was a good thing Hilton couldn’t see this one. The rigidity Cameron had assumed at first glance to be rigor mortis turned out on closer inspection to be at least partly due to the rat having been kept in someone’s freezer for just such an occasion. So the rat hadn’t chosen Cameron’s car as the ideal spot from which to return peacefully to its maker after a well-lived rodent life. It had been carefully placed there, and to judge by the fact that it hadn’t thawed out completely it must have arrived within the last hour or so. It was obviously intended to convey a message of some sort – probably not just that he was considered to be a rat, but that, like even the biggest of rats, he too was mortal.
He needed to keep the garage locked in future – if he could find the key. It was a simple enough job to dispose of the rat. A couple of flies were buzzing around already so his arrival had been timely. Cameron selected a heavy-duty plastic bag from the collection they kept in the garage, eased the rat into the bag, tied the handles and dumped it in the rubbish bin.
The meeting with the SRC delegation had complicated matters when it came to ascribing authorship to such messages – students now had to feature on the list of potential suspects. But the morning’s leaflet had been circulated too late for it to have been a student on this occasion. It had to be another of Venter’s little surprises.
With the rat disposed of, Cameron reversed the car out of the garage and turned down the street towards the city. He felt drained and angry after the rush of adrenalin. How did they know it wouldn’t be Jules, with Hilton and Nicky in tow, who would have had to deal with the rat? Whoever put it there wouldn’t have cared.
The white Cortina followed him all the way into the city and parked two spaces away from the Renault in the library car park. Cameron recognized the driver as the baby-faced Venter sidekick who had been given the onerous responsibility of standing guard at the back door during the raid.
Once he had caught up with Cameron he took his new role as Cameron’s shadow so literally that his breathing was audible. Cameron normally climbed the stairs to the History stacks on the third floor instead of taking the lift, and saw no reason not to on this occasion. The laboured breathing behind Cameron rapidly graduated to panting, with clearly audible wheezing added into the mix. His shadow was clearly struggling to remain attached and had fallen a dozen steps behind by the time Cameron reached the second floor. One floor to go and the increasingly distant wheezing was beginning to sound like an asthma attack.
Cameron had enough of a lead by the time he reached the History stacks to feel that it was safe to go straight to the shelf where Edgar Brookes’s South Africa in a Changing World should be. He made his way quickly down between two of the closely ranked and musty-smelling stacks of books, the racing of his heart only partly attributable to the stairs. The book was there, as he knew it would be. South Africa had undoubtedly been changing in 1953, but it had been changing so much faster in the three decades since then that Edgar Brookes, like Cameron’s shadow, had been left well behind.
A quick glance at the inside of the back cover was enough to confirm that Mirambo hadn’t left a message. There was nothing there apart from the page with the date-stamps. There hadn’t been a rush of eager readers. There were only two date stamps – the first from July 1967 and the second from November 1972. Cameron’s feeling of emptiness had nothing to do with the absence of date stamps.
Cameron quickly replaced the book on the shelf as he heard the wheezing advancing slowly along the passageway. His shadow had survived the last flight of stairs and was looking for him down the rows of stacks. He moved back to the beginning of the row, took a book at random from a shelf without looking at it and walked out from between the stacks a yard or two in front of his shadow.
‘I’m sure we have met before but I don’t think we were introduced,’ he said, ‘I’m Cameron Beaumont.’
The shadow was wheezing too hard to reply. Instead, having caught up with his quarry, he sank into the chair attached to a small table at the end of one of the shelves and put his head in his hands. He was sweating profusely and looked a dangerous shade of puce – the final flight of stairs might have been too much for him. What would he do if the man had a heart attack in front of him? He certainly couldn’t just leave him to die among the History stacks. Even for a historian that wouldn’t be a good end.
‘There’s a water-cooler by the lift. I’ll get you a glass of water,’ Cameron said.
The water was received with a small nod of appreciation between wheezes, but the man was clearly still having too much trouble with his breathing to be able to say anything. Cameron needed to be seen to have some serious academic purpose for being there. It was easy enough to prevent them from identifying exactly how or where a message might be passed, but if they suspected that the library was being used for a letter-drop they would put someone to watch it, and if Mirambo were then to try to leave a message that would be the end of it. So he needed to take some books off the shelves and be seen to be taking notes on the notepad he had brought for the purpose.
Cameron went back into the stacks, added three more books to the one he had picked at random, and sat down at a table close enough to his still wheezing shadow for the titles of all the books he was opening to be visible, should they be of any interest. Although clearly still very uncomfortable, the man was conscientious enough to shift in his seat so that he could try to see what Cameron was reading. The random choice, at the top of the pile, turned out to be Allan M. Brandt’s No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880. That would give them something to puzzle over.
No magic bullet indeed, and not a lot of point in spending much time pretending to a serious academic interest in VD. As Cameron moved on to the first of the African History books he had pulled from the shelves the wheezing seemed to be easing, and after five minutes or so the shadow cleared his throat and spoke for the first time.
‘Thanks for the water. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you my name – it is Piet, Piet Fourie. Please don’t tell Warrant Officer Venter about the asthma attack. I need to keep this job.’
‘I’m not in the habit of socializing with Venter,’ Cameron said. ‘The asthma sounded bad, don’t you have an asthma pump?’
‘Yes I do,’ came the still wheezy answer, ‘but I can’t carry it with me or Mr Venter would know I sometimes have a problem. He would use it as an excuse to try to get rid of me. He thinks I’m too young to put the fear of God into terrorists.’
‘He’s probably right,’ responded Cameron. ‘You do look a bit young to be in the Special Branch. I would have thought that the fear of God was the business of the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk rather than the Special Branch.’
‘I don’t think twenty-six is too young,’ said Fourie. ‘My father’s a Kolonel in the Special Branch in Pretoria, he is very keen on me following in his footsteps.’
This was not the time or place to explore the family relationships of SB operatives – if there ever was an appropriate time and place. Cameron turned back to his note-taking, but didn’t feel it necessary to continue the charade too much longer. Fourie hadn’t been in a state to pay much attention to detail, and there wouldn’t be anything to worry about in whatever report he made back to Venter.
No longer having any need to out-distance his shadow, and feeling vaguely guilty about the physical ordeal he had put Fourie through, Cameron took the lift back down to the ground floor, waiting for his shadow to join him in the lift. Nothing further was said, but Cameron felt that their conversation, however brief, had brought him closer to sympathy for a member of the Special Branch than he felt comfortable with. It was a good thing their conversation hadn’t been observed. An anxious look around the foyer as the lift door opened didn’t reveal anyone he knew who might find confirmation of the rumour that he was a police agent from the fact that he was sharing a lift with Fourie. Come to think of it, there probably weren’t too many people around who knew, or would have believed, that Fourie was Special Branch.
With no classes to take for the rest of the day, it seemed a good idea to go straight home to do the washing-up and make the beds before Jules got home with the children. There wasn’t anything he could do about Mirambo for the time being. He had suggested to Mirambo that he lie low for a week, so he needed to pay another visit to the library on Friday to see if a message had been left – but Friday felt a very long time to wait.
Cameron checked his watch as he drove out of the car park and turned on the radio to catch the news headlines. The first item was a bald two-sentence announcement: ‘The Minister of Police announced in the House of Assembly this afternoon that a man has been been arrested in Mpophomeni, near Pietermaritzburg, in connection with bomb blasts in Durban and elsewhere in Natal, one of which killed a man in the city last Thursday night. No further information is available at this time.’
Cameron observed himself, as if from a distance, breaking out in a cold sweat. He’d read about people doing that but had assumed that it was just a fiction-writer’s cliché. He was aware of a trembling in his hands and arms and he felt shaky. He looked for somewhere to pull into the side of the road, but a glance in the rear-view mirror showed that the white Cortina was immediately behind him. Fourie’s English was good enough for him to be listening to the English programme himself. If Cameron were suddenly to pull into the side of the road for no obvious reason immediately after that news flash they might put two and two together. He needed to keep driving and think it through.
If Mirambo really had been in Mpophomeni that day and had come back into the City on an evening when a bomb had gone off, in spite of knowing he was being hunted by the SB, that must mean either that he knew nothing about the bomb, or that he had been involved in planting it. If he hadn’t known about the bomb and had come back to the city because nobody in Mpophomeni could drive him to the border, it seemed unlikely that he would have gone back there afterwards. If he had been involved in making or planting the bomb with comrades from Mpophomeni he would surely want to steer as clear of the place as possible. Mpophomeni was on the main road up to the border, but there were much more direct ways of getting there from Edendale, and Mirambo had said that he had used those back roads before.
It didn’t seem likely that it was Mirambo they had arrested, but that might just be wishful thinking. He would know soon enough. If it was Mirambo, and they had started to extract information from him, he would hear the boots sometime that night. If it was Mirambo, and he wasn’t talking, Venter would be unable to resist finding some way of gloating that would make it clear they had caught him. In the meantime they would try not to let Cameron out of their sight just in case he decided to head for the border himself – but he wasn’t about to let them win that easily.
Cameron heard Jules arriving home with the children as he switched the kettle on in the kitchen after he had finished making the beds.
‘Hi, I hope your day has been better than mine,’ he greeted her. ‘I found a very deceased rodent decorating the back window of the Renault when I opened the garage this afternoon. I expect it will be the standard truck load of poultry excrement we are gifted with next.’
Jules frowned a warning, but Hilton and Nicky just looked appropriately puzzled.
‘You can tell me about your rodent later,’ Jules said. She was clearly not about to discuss dead rats or loads of chicken manure when the children were around. She walked into the kitchen but came out a moment later.
‘Did Margaret come today?’ she asked. ‘I phoned from work a couple of times and got no answer, but the washing-up has all been done.’
‘No – she didn’t come,’ Cameron said. ‘I didn’t have any classes this afternoon so I came back early and tidied up a bit. I didn’t want you to have to come back to it after a long day at work. We must try to find out what is going on – I hope she is alright.’
‘Thank you,’ Jules smiled at him, ‘that was thoughtful of you.’
Chapter 14
The next day seemed interminable. The night had once again been one long restless wait for the sound of boots on the verandah and banging on the front door. Fragmentary dozing might have overridden the hollow dread for a total of perhaps three hours of what could hardly be called sleep. The phone didn’t ring, but he was again awake to hear the clock on the mantelpiece striking three. If Mirambo had been caught he wasn’t talking – yet. Hilton had wet his bed again and arrived in their bed sometime before dawn. There was nothing on the morning news about the Mpophomeni arrest. The newspapers had been able to report nothing of substance beyond the Minister of Police’s bald announcement.
The number of students turning up to his classes might have been marginally down but there was no sign of an organized boycott, nor were any of the leaflets to be seen. There was no word from Margaret, and a lunchtime walk back home to listen to the one o’clock news bulletin confirmed that she wasn’t there. They would need to give it a couple of days in case she was ill, but if they didn’t hear from her soon he would need to go up to her house to make sure she was OK. There was nothing on the news.
The phone rang while they were having supper. They were all at the table so there wasn’t the usual need to rush to answer a daytime phone-call before Hilton could pick it up. Jules inclined her head towards the phone by way of asking Cameron to answer it. It was Margaret asking to speak to Jules, she sounded as if she had been crying.
‘It’s Margaret – for you,’ Cameron said, holding his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘I think maybe take it in the bedroom?’
Jules got up from the table, her lips pursed, and went through into their bedroom, closing the door. Cameron put the receiver down when he heard the one from the phone on the bedside table being lifted. The conversation was over quickly. Jules’s voice was audible through the door but it wasn’t possible to hear what she was saying. She came back, sat down and carried on with her supper without saying anything – managing to look simultaneously worried, sad and angry.
‘Well?’ asked Cameron after a minute or two, unable to bear the suspense.
Jules didn’t reply. She just carried on eating mechanically, staring at her plate.
‘Well?’ asked Cameron again.
‘She won’t be back,’ Jules said flatly. Then, turning more animatedly towards Cameron, her eyes angry, she added, ‘it would be much better to discuss this later.’
