Despite the Darkness, page 22
Cameron picked up the paper, which didn’t take long to read. It was written in block capitals and ran: ‘You need to ask Mr Bowmont why their meid has stopped working. He has been fucking her in countervention of the imorality act.’ It wasn’t signed.
Remembering Patrick’s po-faced objection to swearing, Cameron managed to confine his audible response to a sigh. He needed to keep Patrick as far onside as possible. Was there no length to which they wouldn’t stoop? Four spelling mistakes in a couple of dozen words, particularly the misspelling of his name and the Afrikaans spelling of ‘maid’, had to be too good to be true. They wanted whoever read the letter to think it came from a concerned Afrikaans-speaking member of the public – but in the event of its being shown to Cameron, which they must have thought probable, they wanted him to know who it actually came from. Patrick should just have binned it. Anonymous letters didn’t deserve even to be discussed.
‘Did you keep the envelope?’ Cameron asked. ‘Does it give any clues as to who sent it?’
Patrick opened the top drawer of his desk and passed an equally anonymous envelope over. The writing was the same – the slightly smudged post-mark was from the city post-office. It was entirely unhelpful.
‘I won’t dignify an anonymous letter by asking whether your maid has, in fact, stopped working for you,’ Patrick said after a short pause. ‘If she has, and if it is, indeed, because you have been having a relationship with her, that is nobody’s business except yours, hers and your wife’s.’
‘Saying you won’t ask,’ responded Cameron, doing his best not to sound too confrontational, ‘is, of course, a way of asking indirectly. The short answer is no – I haven’t been having a relationship with Margaret. She has, indeed, stopped working for us, but that was because Venter threatened to do some extremely unpleasant things to her if she didn’t stop working for us. I thought our general practice was just to throw anonymous letters into the rubbish bin, where they belong.’
‘It is,’ Patrick agreed, ‘but I thought you needed to see this as it comes hot on the heels of the rumour that you are a police agent. If the same person is responsible for both, he certainly has it in for you. Copies of the letter might have been sent to other people, including the Principal. Having now spoken to you, I will be in a position to tell anyone who asks me that what is said in the letter isn’t true.’
‘I would have hoped,’ Cameron replied, ‘that you could have vouched for me without needing to talk to me first. If anyone else has seen a copy and talks to you about it, you might like to tell them that they should just have binned it.’
‘There is no need to be so defensive, Cameron,’ Patrick said. ‘Things are difficult for you right now – they are difficult for us all – but you aren’t helping yourself by assuming that the whole world is against you. I’m just trying to help – I thought you would want to see the letter, anonymous as it is, so that you could be aware of what it says. The next one I will just bin.’
Keeping Patrick onside obviously wasn’t going well.
‘Sorry, Patrick,’ Cameron said, ‘you are right – things are difficult. Apart from anything else I’m not getting much sleep. I probably am being more defensive than I need to be – I just don’t need another stupid rumour being circulated about me. There are people who will want to believe it.’
‘Well if the Principal mentions it I’ll tell him not to believe it,’ Patrick said. ‘Thanks for coming in to see me.’
Patrick was a pain in the backside, Cameron reflected as he walked to the staff room, but at least he was a consistent pain in the backside. Patrick really would consider it nobody else’s business who Cameron was sleeping with. Having a police agent in the camp would bring the department into disrepute, but having a member of staff who was contravening the Immorality Act by making love across the colour-line wouldn’t, because no civilized society would have a law that infringed individual liberties in such a crass way.
It was still early and Lynn was the only person in the staff room. She looked up from the newspaper she was reading.
‘Hi. Have you seen Patrick yet?’ she asked. ‘What did he want?’
‘He wanted to show me an anonymous letter he received yesterday telling him that I was, to quote, ‘countervening the Immorality Act by fucking our maid’ – not to put too fine a point on it.’
‘She should be so lucky,’ Lynn said with a smile. ‘So who do you think will have been responsible for the letter? Venter’s lot again? Did it really use the eff word? That would have embarrassed Patrick.’
‘He didn’t seem embarrassed,’ Cameron said, ‘he was actually quite decent about it. Who was responsible? Probably Venter himself, to judge by the clever-clever spelling mistakes. He would know that I would know that he would know that in English ‘maid’ is spelt with an ‘a’ not an ‘e’. He enjoys that kind of mind-game – among other things.’
The memory of Venter sjambokking the jacaranda tree came vividly to mind again.
Just before lunch, a phone-call came through from Graham in the SRC offices. They hadn’t spoken since the meeting with the SRC delegation. Cameron was sure that Graham, at least, didn’t believe the police-agent rumour, and he assumed that the silence from that quarter must be the result of an SRC decision to treat him as a police agent until such time as ‘evidence’ could be produced to the contrary.
‘Hi, Cameron,’ Graham said, sounding as friendly as he used to. ‘I’m not supposed to be talking to you, but I thought you needed to know that I received an anonymous letter this morning addressed to me as President of the SRC claiming that you are breaking the Immorality Act. I’ve binned it, but thought I should tell you.’
‘Claiming that I’m sleeping with our maid, to be more precise,’ replied Cameron. ‘Thanks, Graham. A copy was sent to Patrick who showed it to me this morning. I appreciate the phone call. Incidentally, although you will have been mandated not to believe me, I still haven’t heard anything from Mirambo and still have no idea where he is. I don’t suppose you have heard anything, or would be able to tell me if you had?’
‘No,’ Graham answered, ‘we haven’t heard anything. Duncan and Clifford and a number of the others have managed to convince themselves that you have turned him in to the SB.’
‘Allowed themselves to be convinced, more likely,’ said Cameron. ‘But there is nothing I can do about that. Thanks for alerting me.’
Cameron put the phone down and pondered the implications of Graham’s call. They were obviously prepared to do anything to discredit him. Only, in this instance, the only person it could really discredit him with would be Jules, who wouldn’t believe it.
Jules didn’t believe it. As soon as he got home Cameron went to find her in the kitchen to tell her what Patrick had wanted to see him about.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ she said. ‘Of course it is not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility. Margaret is very pretty. Aren’t white men supposed to find beautiful black women irresistibly alluring? But I know you would be anxious to avoid seeming to take advantage of the master/servant relationship. If I were going to worry about anything like that, it is Lynn I would be more worried about than Margaret.’
‘Why Lynn?’ Cameron felt his face flush and turned to busy himself at the kitchen counter. ‘It was her car I borrowed yesterday, not her virtue – not that one could ever give someone’s virtue back to them.’
‘Oh come on, Cameron, don’t be naïve,’ Jules said, ‘and don’t think I’m naïve. It has been obvious for ages that Lynn would like nothing better than to get into your pants.’
‘Well, if that is true,’ Cameron said, ‘and that has been the case for ages, and she is still in a state of unsatisfied desire, why would you worry?’
‘As it happens, I’m not worried,’ replied Jules. ‘I just said I would be more worried about Lynn than about Margaret – I never got the impression that Margaret was after you.’
‘Well I’m sure Lynn isn’t “after me”, as you so delicately put it, either,’ Cameron said, ‘she’s just congenitally flirtatious. It is nice to have someone to talk to at work who is on the same wavelength.’
‘I’m sure it is.’ Jules’s tone was inscrutable – being enigmatic was one of her fortés.
It was a relief to leave the matter there as Cameron went off to find the children to give them their baths. The conversation with Jules would have been a lot less uncomfortable if Lynn hadn’t kissed him like that.
Cameron was awake when the phone rang. Expectation of the imminent arrival of the SB had diminished little by little, night by largely uneventful night, but his anxiousness about Mirambo had increased the longer the lack of contact had lasted. He had slept a little, but had woken with a premonition that the phone was about to ring just before the clock struck three. When it did ring he was able to pick it up after the first trill.
‘So you weren’t asleep again.’
It was the same voice but sounding a bit nasal. Perhaps he was getting a cold – Cameron hoped it would be a bad one.
‘Agh, what a shame,’ the voice continued. ‘I wonder why. I have some good news for you and some bad news. The good news is we have arrested the three men who swore at you yesterday; the bad news is that they are going to be very angry with you when we release them.’
‘What three men?’ Cameron asked.
‘What three men do you think? The three men you went to see at 142 Mayibuye Road in Edendale. They aren’t terrorists but we had to beat the shit out of them before we could be sure of that. When they can walk again they are going to come after you – we told them we followed your car there yesterday. Sleep well.’
Fat chance of that now, even if he’d been sleeping like a log before the phone rang. They hadn’t followed him, he was certain of that – he had taken a circuitous route and checked all the way. How the hell did the bastards know he had been to that house in Edendale?
There were two possibilities. There were almost as many informers in the townships as there were rats. It was possible that one of them had been in the vicinity, had somehow overheard the conversation, recognized him, and let the SB know he had been there. Of course an informer could also have taken down the car number and phoned it through to the SB – he hadn’t thought of that possibility and the potential that borrowing Lynn’s car had for implicating her. He wondered if she had considered that. But they wouldn’t have known who was driving the car and would certainly have wanted to get hold of Lynn before they spoke to him. And ‘get hold of’ might well have been the operative words. Apart from anything else, Lynn’s involvement in anything to do with Mirambo’s disappearance would have offered them plenty of scope for blackmail.
But that would have depended entirely on chance – and they were usually too systematic to have to rely on chance. The alternative possibility was more likely. They had got hold of the missing contents of Mirambo’s student file from the Student Records Office, gone to the address to arrest whoever was there to question them about Mirambo, and then applied whatever was necessary to get them to talk – very thoroughly if ‘when they can walk again’ wasn’t just bluster. Given that the three men thought Cameron was working for the SB, there would have been no reason whatever for them to hold back from saying that he had come calling.
What the phone call had told Cameron was that he now had a lot more to worry about from his comrades in the struggle than merely being frozen out of working groups, and not being invited to speak on public platforms. Being a police informer was a hazardous occupation with limited life expectancy in the townships. As long as it was just rumoured that he was working for the SB, and as long as he had stayed on campus, he didn’t think anybody would have bothered to come after him. But now three UDF supporters had been detained and tortured and told that it was his fault – and there was nothing he could do to persuade them otherwise.
Given that the majority of those who were being detained in terms of the emergency regulations were still being held, there had to be a strong possibility that they had been released precisely because whoever was interrogating them had known that they would come after him. Just because you are paranoid it doesn’t mean that they aren’t out to get you.
Fortunately the phone-call didn’t seem to have woken Jules this time. But after an hour or so of increasingly panicky worry about the build-up of threats from all sides – he was sure he wasn’t just being paranoid – he had slipped out of bed to see whether a further brief encounter with the Famous Grouse might calm his nerves and help him either to think more clearly or just get to sleep. Drinking whisky at four in the morning wasn’t a good idea in general, but it wasn’t as if he did it every day.
The whisky helped to clear his head a little, but the only illumination it brought was relief that in five days time he would be on an aeroplane. With Jules and the children safely down in Cape Town, getting out to the Brighton conference would give him a break from the constant surveillance and a chance to think things through.
The day didn’t go well. Cameron’s mood was not improved by a brief encounter with Derek in the staff room and the latter’s typically tactless comment that he looked like death. At least he hadn’t remarked that Cameron also stank of whisky, which was something to be grateful for. That must mean that he didn’t smell of whisky, as Derek wouldn’t have held back if he had. There seemed to be more empty seats in his lecture than usual. He didn’t feel inclined to indulge in the collegiality of the commonroom for tea and went home for a sandwich at lunch instead of going to the staff club.
Cameron parked the Renault on campus for the afternoon so that he could drive directly into the city for his evening lecture, which was delivered in a non-descript office block in the city centre. He wasn’t surprised to see the familiar white car parked immediately outside the building. They knew his timetable and liked him to know that they knew where he would be and what he would be doing. The lecture was unremarkable – apart from the fact that all the students had turned up, in spite of having had to work a full day and often to travel some distance to get there.
Cameron arrived home just in time to kiss Hilton goodnight – Nicky was already fast asleep. Jules’s expression looked strained as she glanced up to greet him, but that wasn’t unusual these days.
‘Somebody has sent you some funny flowers, Daddy,’ Hilton announced. ‘I heard somebody outside and Kali ran to hide in the kitchen without even growling. I told Mummy, and we looked through the window, but we couldn’t see anybody. So we opened the door and they were on the door.’
‘It’s outside the back door,’ Jules said. ‘Just say goodnight to Hilton before you go to look.’
‘It’? Obviously no ordinary bunch of flowers, which Jules would already have put in a vase, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would want to send him flowers anyway. If she had put ‘it’ outside it must be because she was worried about poison or explosives – not that the back door would be much of a defence against a parcel bomb. Cameron kissed Hilton goodnight and headed for the back door.
‘It’ was a wreath. It looked to be a straightforward enough funeral wreath – blood red gerbera, roses and carnations entwined in assorted greenery. The warmth and brightness of the colour was very much at odds with the chill he felt as he saw what it was. The blood red was obviously not coincidental. Weren’t wreaths, and funereal flowers in general, usually white – arum lilies and the like? They must have gone to some trouble and expense to organize this one.
The greenery was dense enough to hide explosives. Heart racing, Cameron leant close enough to listen for any ticking. What other devices might tech-savvy terrorists of the police variety be using to detonate bombs these days? It was almost certainly intended as a message of impending death, rather than the instrument of that death, but that didn’t stop the heart from racing. Cameron was pleased that Jules had not come out with him.
There was a card on a ribbon attached to the wreath. Cameron went back inside to fetch the kitchen scissors and the broom. He carefully cut the card off before pushing the broom handle through the middle of the wreath, lifting it and carrying it to the rubbish bin – it was possible, but unlikely, that it could have been poisoned. Once the wreath had been safely stowed where it belonged, Cameron carried the bin down to the end of the drive and left it there.
The message was simple, written on two lines in large block capitals that at first glance looked very like the writing on the morning’s anonymous letter and envelope. The first line consisted simply of his initials – CB. The second line was the predictable R.I.P. The CB was written with a black felt-tipped pen, the R.I.P was multi-coloured – the ‘R’ was black, but the ‘I’ was green and the ‘P’ was yellow, presumably as close as they could get to gold.
‘The ANC colours,’ said Jules, coming into the diningroom after putting Hilton’s light out. ‘You really did irritate your Edendale friends yesterday. I said it was a bloody stupid thing to do.’
It was just as well Jules didn’t know the gist of last night’s telephone call – so didn’t know just how bloody stupid a thing it had been to do. But the ANC colours had to be another red herring. If the three men involved had been severely tortured before being released, as the voice said they had, they would not be in any condition to be wandering around the suburbs distributing wreaths.
‘No,’ Cameron replied, ‘I’m sure this is the SB again, the multi-coloured lettering is just a smoke screen.’
‘What makes you so sure, Sherlock Holmes?’
‘Well, for a start,’ Cameron said, ‘that must have been a very pricey wreath – roses and carnations and what not. We know incidental expenses are not an issue for the SB, our taxes fund them very generously to protect us against the onslaught of civil liberties. But who in Edendale is going to be able to afford to throw money away on a wreath that was bound to end up in a rubbish bin? Just to send a message. It fits the pattern of police harassment perfectly – it makes no sense as a one-off threat. Besides which, even if the Edendale three knew which our house was, they wouldn’t know that they weren’t going to be eaten alive by a Rottweiler.’
