Despite the Darkness, page 19
Mrs Scheepers just shook her head mutely. Tears were welling in her eyes, but she was holding herself together. A bullet from Venter’s 9mm automatic would have passed right through a cat, and a dum-dum bullet would have blown a hole as big as a fist in its other side on the way out. If the bullet hadn’t come out the other side it must have come from a much smaller calibre gun, probably a .22 – most likely a target pistol, which could have been fitted with a silencer. That meant one of two things, either the cat-killer wasn’t Venter, or he had brought his own handgun along with him.
What would he have done that for? And why the cat? One advantage of a .22, unlike his service automatic, would be that any shot he fired could not be forensically traced back to him. But if Venter regarded Cameron’s 7.2mm Sig Sauer with contempt as a popgun that could not be relied on to kill anybody, he couldn’t surely have been intending the target to be a person? Would he have gone to the trouble of bringing his own gun to shoot a cat, just to sour relations between Cameron and one of his neighbours? It seemed unlikely. If it was an animal he was after, it was much more likely to have been revenge against Kali he had in mind. Whiskers must just have been an opportunistic after-thought.
Burying Whiskers at the foot of a Flamboyant tree in Mrs Scheepers’ back yard did not take long. The recent rain had softened ground on which Cameron’s spade would just have sparked and bounced a week before. To Cameron’s relief he wasn’t invited to stay for a funeral tea. Mrs Scheepers just thanked him for his help and sent him on his way. As an antidote to any attempt to cast him in the role of neighbourhood cat-killer, helping to bury her cat had been worth the relatively minimal effort.
Chapter 15
After his introduction to grave-digging, and his late morning tutorial, Cameron felt it was time to brave the staff club for the first time since the raid and the spreading of the rumour. No classes were scheduled for the afternoon, which would have to be spent marking the ever-growing pile of essays, and a beer or two always provided insulation against the idiocies encountered in student essays.
It was too early for many people to be in the bar, and none of the group he usually sat with was there, so Cameron took his beer to a table in the corner and sat wishing he could do something to distract himself from the unrelenting suspense. When people did start drifting into the club, the ones he normally had lunch with joined him at his table as usual. He was sure several members of staff at the other tables were talking about him – why else look over at his table so often? But, if he didn’t ever have much to do with them at the best of times, why would that matter?
Going back to the club wasn’t the ordeal he had expected, and a couple of beers certainly took the edge off the essay marking – perhaps a bit too much so, as he felt himself drowsing over the essays from time to time. Drowning the suspense with regular infusions of alcohol might, he reflected, be the way forward – but it wouldn’t be one that would win many Brownie points with Jules.
A couple of beers at lunchtime might make one drowsy in the afternoon, but they weren’t likely to prove much help when it came to sleeping through the night. Besides which it could have been the essays that had made him sleepy. So two or three generous helpings – they couldn’t accurately be described as ‘tots’ – of twelve year old Macallan after supper seemed a good way to supplement the day’s alcohol intake. Jules declined the offer to join him and retired to bed early. She had been very withdrawn again all evening, but it was, after all, still less than a week since the raid. The whisky did help to lessen the suspense a bit.
Cameron slept a bit better, undisturbed by phone calls, but not well enough, he thought, to compensate for the headache he could feel building. Even with the assistance of the Macallan he hadn’t been able to escape the weight of suspense entirely during the night. As he surfaced, he reached out automatically to switch the bedside radio on. His slow return to consciousness was galvanised by the first item of the early morning news bulletin.
‘The Minister of Police has announced that a second ANC terrorist has been arrested in Mpophomeni in connection with the recent bomb blasts in Durban. Neither man is thought to have been involved in the murderous attack on the Supreme Court in Pietermaritzburg that resulted in the death of a night watchman on Wednesday night last week. The hunt for the terrorists responsible for that murder is ongoing.’
Cameron had sat bolt upright without realizing it – it hadn’t helped his headache. His temples throbbing painfully, he sank back on his pillows to consider the implications as Jules groaned and stirred beside him.
Mirambo had had no involvement with the Durban blasts. He was certain of that. The original announcement of the Mpophomeni arrest had talked about blasts ‘in Durban and elsewhere in Natal’ – it was the ‘elsewhere’ bit that had been worrying. He remembered very clearly that the two most recent explosions in Durban had been on consecutive days a few weeks back at a time when he knew Mirambo was in Johannesburg using the Wits University library for his research.
Cameron was still pretty sure that if Mirambo had been caught Venter would have found some way of letting him know. The latest announcement seemed to confirm that Mirambo couldn’t be one of the two men who had been arrested. The best hope – the only realistic hope – of re-establishing contact lay with another visit to the City Library. Cameron had to restrain himself from getting dressed and driving into town immediately. The library wouldn’t be open yet and it would be far better to wait until the afternoon. It was possible that that morning might be the only time Mirambo could get a message to him.
Cameron found it impossible to keep his mind fully focused on the two tutorials he had to take on Friday mornings. The students gave every impression of being more interested in their plans for the weekend, so he was in good company.
The visit to the library followed the same pattern as it had first time around, with minor variations. The traffic was worse, as it was bound to be on a Friday afternoon; parking was more difficult; and the SB man following him was much more experienced. Hitler would have loved him: blond, blue-eyed, jutting jaw, and a gym-addict into the bargain by the look of him – ideal Waffen-SS master-race material, or at least ideal casting material for that second-rate 1950s black and white war movie Victoria had been so dismissive of. He just needed jackboots and a silver death’s-head on his lapel. There was no chance of outdistancing this one up the stairs, so a much more cautious approach was the order of the day. This time he took care to choose books that could be seen to relate in one way or another to his research.
As he sat down at one of the small tables with the pile of books and his notebook, Cameron felt even more nervous than he had on the previous occasion. The SS man parked himself two tables away and stared, unblinkingly lizard-like, at him the entire time. Cameron looked up at him several times and found himself wondering whether he had been born without eyelids. Afraid that he might not be able to follow through with the whole charade if he opened the Brookes book first and found no message, Cameron put it at the bottom of the pile to leave until last. If there were to be a message, the SS man’s concentration might be waning a bit by then.
As he made his way through the other three books, Cameron found himself wondering how he would feel if he did find a message. Any message could only mean Mirambo still needed help to make it to the border. That would involve another nerve-shredding drive with Mirambo in the boot of the Renault, and having to tell more lies to Jules. There wouldn’t be as many roadblocks as there had been immediately after the bomb went off, but they would have to be improbably lucky not to encounter one somewhere. But at least he would know that Mirambo was still alive and relatively safe. His absence was ever-present. He had spent less than twenty-four hours hidden in the outside room, but Cameron now felt haunted by that room’s emptiness whenever he was at home.
When he started working his way down the pile of books, Cameron’s heart was pounding the way it had been when he had raced up the stairs to reach the stacks the last time he was there. But by the time Cameron opened the Edgar Brookes book, being careful to start at the front and work towards anything that might have been left inside the back cover, his mouth was dry and he still felt nervous, but his heart was no longer racing. Somehow he knew, well before he could bring himself to look, that there was nothing for him to see. Nobody had left him a message.
There was nothing for it but to replace the books on the shelves and go home. Explicit requests to library users not to re-shelve books were printed and pasted at the end of each stack under the heading ‘A mis-shelved book is a lost book’, but there was no way he was going to leave the Edgar Brookes book in a pile on one of the tables where it could be identified.
So Mirambo must either have been caught, and possibly murdered, or have managed to get out over the border to Lesotho without Cameron’s help. The recognition brought the same pang he had felt when Mirambo had told him he had gone for help to John’s house first. The pang was perverse – it wasn’t as if he really wanted a repeat of the fear he had felt the last time Mirambo had been hidden in the boot of his car. It was a kind of jealousy – he wanted to be the one who had helped Mirambo escape. He was, after all, his supervisor and that would have been a bigger single contribution to the struggle than he could make by a lecture, an article or a letter to the newspaper, however eloquent.
Cameron couldn’t just leave it at that – he couldn’t forget all about Mirambo just because he hadn’t been asked for any further help. As he drove home, Cameron knew he would have to go out to Edendale to try to find out what had happened to him – but where to start, and how to avoid having Venter’s company on his quest? And, somewhere along the line, there was a pile of essays to mark that needed to be handed in on Monday morning.
Cameron felt himself in a kind of limbo all through a weekend that offered very little by way of good news or bad news, but had a no-news dimension to it that was in danger of becoming an all-absorbing distraction. Jules was amiable enough but remained distant. She was like a flower that had closed in on itself when the sun went down – tidily pursed and intact, but with all its vibrant colour shrouded. The children seemed better, wanting more attention than he could give them, particularly when it drizzled all day on Saturday and they had to stay indoors. Hilton only wet his bed one night of the three. The nights brought a bit more sleep but little rest, despite the best efforts of the rapidly disappearing Macallan. Dread of the arrival of Venter and his cohorts at the front door was never far away.
Going out in the drizzle on Saturday morning to collect the post, Cameron had immediately noticed that there was no white car on the verge across the road. That would be the first time in at least a week. Was that good news? The empty space brought a contradictory surge of anxiety. It wasn’t as if he missed their company, but might it not mean that they no longer needed to watch to see if Mirambo would put in an appearance because they knew that he couldn’t? Could this be Venter’s way of letting him know that they had arrested Mirambo? If so, it was a lot more subtle than Cameron would have expected.
The Sunday morning weather was warm and sunny and the children were desperate for a swim after lunch, although he had warned them that the water wouldn’t be as warm as it was in summer. The water was clean and he had cleared all the floating leaves off the surface and taken a quick dip himself before stretching out on his towel to drowse in the sun. He needed to avoid spending too much time looking at Jules in her bikini. She was sitting with her back to the road dangling her feet in the water at the deep end while keeping an eye on the children playing at the other end.
Cameron was vaguely aware of a car door opening and clumping shut followed by an oddly regular cracking noise, but was too sleepy to take much notice until he felt Hilton poking his back.
‘Daddy, what is that man doing?’ Hilton asked.
Sitting up reluctantly and looking across the road, Cameron saw that a car identical to the SB one Venter normally drove, apart from having shaded windows, had arrived in the usual neighbourhood-watch position. Venter was standing beside a jacaranda tree a few paces from the car where he could see over their low garden wall. He looked to be wearing his regulation safari-suit shorts and uniform khaki stockings and brown shoes, but a brightly coloured beach shirt with a garish floral pattern provided a startling contrast. He was wearing a baseball cap and standing, arms akimbo, looking across the road at them through trendy sunglasses. When he had succeeded in gaining Cameron’s attention, he turned, picked something up off the grass and hit the tree trunk with it. Cameron’s stomach contracted and he felt the all too familiar nausea welling up, as he realized what the cracking noise had been. What Venter had picked up from the grass was a sjambok, and he was methodically whipping the tree trunk with it.
‘Daddy, what is that man doing?’ Hilton asked again. ‘Isn’t he one of the nasty men who came to our house when my bed was turned upside-down?’
‘Yes, he was one of the men, Hilton,’ Cameron replied after a second or two. ‘But I have no idea what the thinks he is doing. He must be out of his mind.’
Jules had turned to look across the road and, seeing Venter, had immediately slipped into the water where, if he could see her at all, he could only see the top of her head. She was looking questioningly across at Cameron.
‘What does “out of his mind” mean Daddy?’ Hilton asked. ‘What makes him be out of his mind?’
The observation hadn’t been intended for Hilton, he’d been talking to himself. Cameron hadn’t managed to summon up the courage to warn Jules about what Venter had threatened to do to her – a threat he had obviously come to reinforce. He was now glad that he hadn’t mentioned it. The man had to be either insane or as high as a kite – probably both. It looked as if he was trying to use the sjambok to ring-bark the tree – Pauline wouldn’t be pleased. Venter obviously assumed that Cameron had told Jules about his threat and was trying to terrify her. Revenge is a dish best served cold, but the odd spoonful or two as it cooled couldn’t hurt.
‘It means mad, Hilton,’ Cameron answered. ‘It means he can’t think properly and doesn’t really know what he is doing. Maybe he crashed into that tree with his car and has come to hit the tree because he thinks it was naughty to make a dent in his car.’
‘But we don’t hit people, even if they are nasty to us,’ Hilton responded. ‘He shouldn’t be hitting the tree.’
‘You are absolutely right, Hilton – he shouldn’t be hitting the tree,’ Cameron said. ‘I think we should all go inside now as we have had enough sun for one afternoon.’
Jules climbed out of the pool and rapidly wrapped a towel around her before going inside with Hilton. But Nicky had been oblivious to what was happening, seemed impervious to cold, and was enjoying splashing in the pool. She was not yet ready to go inside and had to be lifted bodily from the pool and carried inside, making her displeasure felt as loudly as she could. Once Nicky had been distracted, and the children were playing safely out of earshot, Jules asked Cameron what he thought Venter had been up to.
Cameron was too shaken to answer. The cameo of Jules’s slight body in her bikini sitting quietly on the edge of the pool couldn’t belong in the same visual universe as the sight of Venter in his bizarre beach shirt methodically whipping a tree on the other side of the road behind her. It was the vivid memory of the sound-track linking the two images – the vicious crack of the sjambok hitting the tree-trunk – that convinced him that it really had happened. It wasn’t he who was going mad. But panic wasn’t an altogether preferable alternative to madness – and panic felt like the appropriate response.
Cameron couldn’t give Jules the detail of Venter’s threat after what had happened. He’d already warned her that Venter was dangerous and was bearing a grudge against her. ‘Dangerous’ was an understatement. Venter must have lost it completely – too high to worry about being seen. Even with his baseball cap, sunglasses and Disneyland shirt he would have been easily recognizable to anyone who knew him. There wasn’t a lot of traffic on the road on a Sunday afternoon, but two or three passing cars had slowed down as their drivers looked to see what he was doing before speeding up again.
‘Does everyone who asks you a question this afternoon have to ask it twice before you answer them?’ Jules asked, her voice brittle.
‘How the hell would I know what Venter thinks he is doing?’ Cameron answered. ‘I guess he was just trying to intimidate us and was so high that he didn’t mind who saw him doing it. The man really must be unhinged – but that just makes him more dangerous. I don’t want to leave you here to look after the children by yourself when I fly out to the conference next weekend. You would be much safer with your mother in Cape Town. Can you phone her now and ask if it is OK for you to come down with the children on Saturday?’
‘I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself,’ Jules retorted, ‘and I’ve got a job to do. It would be very difficult to get leave at this short notice. We’ll be fine – you are only going to be away for ten days. What can Venter do in that time?’
‘I know you can look after yourself, I’m not suggesting otherwise, but I’m afraid Venter could do quite a lot,’ Cameron said. ‘He could come back any time, and you know how traumatized Nicky and Hilton were last time he was here. I would really much prefer to know that they were a thousand miles away from him – preferably a lot more. If you can’t get leave, and can’t go away, I think I would be better to cancel my attendance at the conference – they can always get someone else to read my paper.’
‘No,’ Jules said. ‘I know how important this conference is to you. It is the first plenary you have been asked to deliver at an international conference. Having the platform to yourself for a whole session with everyone at the conference invited to listen to you, rather than having to choose between parallel sessions, is a great step forward. You need to go. It isn’t as if there was a lot you could do to stop the children being traumatised last time the SB paid us a visit, and they are much more likely to come if you are here than if you aren’t – it is you they are after, not me – but I will go and phone my mother now. It shouldn’t be difficult to get a flight.’
