Despite the Darkness, page 27
‘Dr Beaumont,’ Jordan said in tones clearly intended for the audience as much as for the two of them, ‘I thought I had made it clear that you are unwelcome at our conference and had asked you to leave.’
‘I have left the conference, Professor Jordan,’ Cameron replied, quietly. ‘I am now having a drink at the university bar. As far as I am aware the university bar is not licensed to the organizing committee of this particular conference. That means there is nothing you can do to stop me from having a drink here this evening. I will leave here when I am ready, not before.’
‘As for you, Dr Taylor,’ Jordan said turning to William and lowering his voice, ‘I don’t think you are doing your career a lot of good by associating with a South African academic who has been exposed as a Security Branch agent.’
‘Special Branch, not Security Branch,’ William replied. ‘I don’t think you are doing your own credibility much good either, Professor Jordan. Cameron is not a police agent. Now bugger off and leave us to mind our own business.’
‘Be it on your own head,’ Jordan said, beating a dignified retreat.
‘So they’ve chucked you out of the conference,’ William said once the buzz of conversation had started up again. ‘What did the Council of Elders have to say for themselves?’
Cameron started to give William the gory details at length, interrupting himself when he saw the man with side-burns getting up from his table and going to the bar to get himself another drink.
‘Don’t make it too obvious, William, but there’s a man at the bar who would have to list his side-burns as a distinguishing characteristic on a passport application. When you get a chance, I’d like you to take a look at him and tell me if you’ve seen him before.’
‘Never seen him before,’ William declared after a quick glance round. ‘Why did you want to know?’
‘You wouldn’t have seen him then,’ Cameron said, ‘but he came into the back of the hall just before I started to speak this afternoon and then left after a minute or so. I’m sure I have seen him before. I think he may have been following me around Brighton – but I wasn’t paying proper attention. I’ve let my guard slip since being here.’
‘You are getting paranoid, Cameron,’ William said. ‘Why would they bother to send someone over here to follow you around?’
‘They wouldn’t need to send someone over here,’ Cameron answered. ‘They will have plenty of people working for them over here. Perhaps they don’t know what has happened to Mirambo after all, and think that if he has somehow made it over here I will meet up with him. More likely they just want to see what dealings, if any, I have with the ANC over here.’
‘I was thinking about all this last night,’ William said thoughtfully. ‘Isn’t it possible that Mirambo is working for them himself, that he had nothing to do with that bomb? Couldn’t they have used the explosion as a smokescreen under cover of which they could spirit him out of South Africa to infiltrate the ANC over here with greater credibility? That would have the added advantage of destroying your credibility at the same time. They could kill the two proverbial birds with one stone – which would be less messy for them than killing one of the birds with a bullet.’
‘Being messy doesn’t bother them,’ Cameron replied. ‘I’ve thought of that possibility, but I spent a lot of time with Mirambo and I’m a hundred percent certain that he wouldn’t work for them. You’ll just have to trust me on that.’
It would have been a lot more convincing if he could have told William that, more than anything else, it was the time he had spent with Mirambo curled up in the boot of his Renault that had been the clincher. It felt mean-spirited to hold anything back from William, given William’s generosity in supporting him in the face of everything that had happened at the conference, but Cameron couldn’t risk Jules being indirectly implicated in any way. The only way to overcome the vague feeling of guilt, and to dull the memory of his abortive plenary, seemed to be to get on with some serious drinking.
The bar emptied when the conference delegates left en masse for dinner, leaving Sideburns and a scattering of students behind. Sideburns, possibly feeling a bit exposed at a table on his own, had buried himself in a book. Looking across at him from time to time, Cameron suddenly remembered where he had seen him before. A man had followed him into a bookshop in the Lanes and stood watching him with his face largely obscured behind a book. This was definitely the same man – so he was being followed after all. He should probably have expected that. Even six thousand miles away in Brighton, he couldn’t get away from the bastards.
William said he didn’t feel like going to the conference dinner – he didn’t have the little bell he needed to warn the other delegates he was coming. In fact he felt like abandoning the conference too, but he was prepared eventually to agree that there was little point in two careers being blighted by one conference. Cameron said he would decide what to do in the morning, in the meantime several more whiskies and a couple of pies along the way to mop up some of the alcohol seemed the best idea. They ascertained from the barman that the last bus across to Hove left just before closing time.
Cameron noticed Sideburns getting up to leave about half an hour before he needed to leave himself. They were apparently still at the stage of trying to disguise the fact that they were following him. When it was time for him to catch the bus, William escorted Cameron to the bus stop, showing signs of being worried about the state he was in. William had managed to book a room within walking distance of the campus, but offered to accompany Cameron back to his hotel.
‘Thanks, William, but it really isn’t necessary,’ Cameron replied. ‘I’ll be fine. Thanks very much for your support in all this – we must keep in touch.’
As Cameron walked past the hotel reception desk, he said good night to the man behind the counter who told him there was a message for him. Jules had phoned just after 9.00pm, which would have been 10.00pm in Cape Town. The message just said ‘Please phone as soon as possible.’ Cameron looked at his watch, it would be well past midnight there now and she wouldn’t want him to wake the children in the middle of the night. Besides which, she would immediately hear that he had been drinking and would be bound to give him a lecture about that on top of whatever else she wanted to tell him. That was the last thing he needed. He would phone her in the morning. She wasn’t working, so she would be bound be at her mother’s house.
‘If you dial the desk when you get to your room,’ the receptionist said, ‘I’ll be able to put you straight through.’
‘I’ll phone in the morning – it’s too late now,’ Cameron said. ‘I don’t want to wake the children. Good night.’
‘Excuse me for saying so, Sir,’ the receptionist persisted, ‘but your wife phoned twice earlier in the evening and left the same message – there didn’t seem to be any point in giving you the same message three times over. It isn’t my business to say so, Sir, but your wife did sound very upset.’
If anything had happened to one of the children, Jules would have said so. She wouldn’t just have said ‘Please phone.’ Whatever Jules’s problem was, he wasn’t sober enough to solve it. And if he phoned just to comfort her – and what kind of comfort could one offer from six thousand miles away? – he knew she would not find it comforting to hear an undeniably drunk husband on the line. He would phone in the morning – right now he needed several thousand milligrams of vitamin C and some paracetamol to stop him from having the mother of all hangovers when he spoke to her.
‘It is too late to phone her now,’ Cameron said with finality. ‘I will phone her in the morning. Good night.’
‘She did sound very upset,’ the man said quietly.
‘I do appreciate your concern,’ Cameron said, ‘but it really will be better for a lot of reasons for me to phone in the morning. Good night again.’
‘I’m sure you are right,’ came the wholly unconvinced reply, ‘good night, Sir.’
Chapter 21
The phone was ringing – the damn thing was always waking him up in the middle of the night. Cameron reached over to the bedside table to pick it up before it woke the children – it would have woken Jules already. It wasn’t in its usual place. For a second or two Cameron found himself completely disoriented. He wasn’t at home – the phone was on the other side of the room on a desk by the window. There was an illuminated digital clock on the bedside table that told him it was just after nine o’clock, not three o’clock – but the clock had to be wrong as it was still dark.
The vitamin C had done a pretty good job, but his head was feeling fuzzy. The humiliation of what should have been his big conference moment came sweeping back as Cameron got out of bed to silence the shrill ringing. As he picked up the receiver he pulled the edge of the black-out curtain aside and saw that the seafront was being lashed by rain.
‘Why didn’t you phone me yesterday? Didn’t you get my message?’
Cameron couldn’t remember ever having heard anything remotely like the strain and anger in Jules’s voice.
‘I didn’t get the message until very late,’ Cameron answered. ‘I didn’t want to wake the whole household. I thought you would be upset.’
‘And you think I’m not upset now?’ Jules asked. ‘You promised to phone after you had given your paper to tell me how it went. I left message after message after message asking you to phone. You should know me well enough by now to know I wouldn’t ever do that unless it was important – but not a bloody word from you. I waited by the phone until well after midnight so that I could pick it up as soon as it rang so that it wouldn’t wake anybody.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Cameron said. ‘I thought that if anything had happened to Nicky or Hilton you would have mentioned that in your message. I thought that it was better to wait to phone you as soon as possible this morning.’
‘What about me?’
The sudden turning up of the volume, the desperation of the emphasis that went into that ‘me’, sent a shock through Cameron. No more fuzziness – in spite of a vague headache somewhere in the background, he was now fully awake.
‘What?’ Cameron asked. ‘Has something happened to you?’
‘Too bloody right it has,’ came Jules’s vehement reply. ‘And something has happened to Hilton as well. But I wasn’t about to dictate an account of what had happened over the phone to a receptionist in a Brighton hotel. I was misguided enough to think that a message asking you to phone me urgently would be enough. Yesterday was a bloody nightmare and I needed to talk to you.’
‘I’m sorry, Jules,’ Cameron repeated. ‘What can I say? It was very late, I had had a day from hell, and I thought it would be better to wait until the morning to phone you.’
‘But you didn’t,’ Jules said. ‘I had to phone you – after waiting a couple of hours for your phone-call. On top of everything else, I was starting to get worried that something worse than a bad hangover might have happened to you.’
‘Something did,’ Cameron said, ‘but not the kind of thing you might have been worried about. You first – what happened?’
‘Hilton first,’ said Jules. ‘We were coming in for supper and baths when my mother’s phone rang. Hilton had gone in ahead of us and was closest to it, so he ran to pick it up. He never gets to answer the phone at home. It hadn’t occurred to me to tell him not to answer the phone.’
‘What happened?’ Cameron asked.
‘By the time I got to him he had put the phone down and was standing looking bewildered,’ Jules said. ‘Then he started to cry, and it was some time before I could get anything coherent out of him. Piecing the fragments together, I gathered that somebody had told him that his Daddy was going to die very soon, his Mummy would be taken away, and he and Nicky would be left by themselves. What kind of bastard says something like that to a five year old?’
‘Venter’s kind of bastard, I guess,’ replied Cameron, suddenly feeling sick. ‘Poor little boy, he must have been devastated.’
‘Of course he was,’ said Jules, ‘so was I. You know what this means? It means that as long as they are intent on harassing you there isn’t going to be any refuge anywhere for the rest of us. It means that they know where we are and they have got hold of my mother’s phone number – for all I know one of them may be listening to this phone-call. A thousand miles doesn’t make any difference to them. It also means that in the interests of getting back at you they are quite happy to carry on traumatising a little boy who has no idea what is going on, but is now terrified of being left alone without us, having to try to look after his little sister.’
There was a pause at the other end of the line. Cameron heard Jules taking a deep breath, then she went on with a catch in her voice.
‘Later something else equally horrible happened.’
Jules paused again, and Cameron could hear that she was having to keep a tight hold to stop herself crying.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘I was sitting in the lounge by myself after supper,’ Jules said, ‘hoping that you would have received the first message I sent you and would phone. I wanted to tell you what had happened to Hilton. The children were asleep and my mother had gone to bed as she hasn’t been feeling very well. I heard something being pushed through the mail-slot in the front door and dropping quite loudly onto the floor of the hall. I found an oblong parcel wrapped in brown paper lying just inside the front door with my name and the address on it and VIDEO written in block capitals at the top. I was too nervous to open the door to try to see who had left it.’
‘Did you open the parcel?’ Cameron asked. ‘How did you know it wasn’t a parcel bomb?’
‘Come off it, Cameron, don’t be silly,’ Jules said. ‘I’m not Ruth First. I don’t pose any threat to them – it is you they have been threatening to kill, not me or Hilton or Nicky. Anyway, even if they did want to kill me, why would they wait until I was in Cape Town? Much easier to put a parcel bomb in our letter-box at home.’
‘So you opened it,’ Cameron said. ‘What was in it?’
Cameron could feel his stomach tensing with apprehension. Jules wasn’t easily shaken – it must have taken something really dire to upset her like this. He heard a catch in Jules’s breath again and heard her sniff in the pause before she spoke – she was clearly on the edge of crying but was keeping herself under very tight control. She managed to keep her voice steady as she answered.
‘A video – as it said on the outside of the packet.’
Jules didn’t say anything for what felt like a very long time. Cameron could hear quick intakes of breath.
‘So you put it into your mother’s video-player and played it,’ Cameron said by way of a prompt. ‘You wouldn’t be so upset if you hadn’t. What was on it?’
Jules’s control broke and he could hear her sobbing quietly.
‘Tell me what was on it, Jules,’ Cameron repeated. ‘Perhaps talking about it will make you feel a bit better.’
‘It won’t, I know it won’t,’ Jules voice rose, ‘I’m not a bloody child. Don’t treat me like one. It was horrible … horrible … horrible.’
Jules didn’t say anything more for all of twenty seconds while she gathered herself. This was clearly a game-changer of some sort. The suspense was making Cameron more and more apprehensive, but he knew better than to try another prompt.
‘I could only watch about thirty seconds of it,’ Jules went on eventually, her voice back under a modicum of control. ‘So I don’t know how long it went on. It was obviously a home video, the camera was shaky and there was no sound – thank God. It started with about five seconds in which the camera just focused on a sjambok lying at one end of what was obviously a long table. Then the video showed a white hand and a hairy arm as somebody picked the sjambok up and the camera panned to the other end of the table.’
Jules paused again and Cameron could hear her taking a couple of deep breaths before going on. But he no longer wanted to prompt her – he knew what was to be seen at the other end of the table. He was afraid he was going to be sick.
‘There was a woman stretched over the table,’ Jules said rapidly, clearly wanting to get the telling over as quickly as possible. ‘Her arms were being stretched out in front of her, you could see handcuffs on her wrists, but somebody was also holding her wrists so she couldn’t move. She had no clothes on at all. The camera focused on her bare bottom and then you saw the sjambok hitting her… again and again. I couldn’t watch. I turned it off. It was horrible… pornographic… It made me sick. And when I had finished being sick I phoned the hotel again and left another message asking you to phone me, which you also ignored.’
‘What did you do with the video?’ Cameron asked.
‘I tore the envelope into tiny pieces so that the address couldn’t be read,’ Jules said matter-of-factly. ‘I then smashed the video with a stone in the back yard while my mother was reading the children a story in bed this morning. I put the pieces of the packaging with what was left of the video into a Checkers bag and deposited them in a litter bin at the far end of the street first thing this morning.’
‘That was a bit drastic,’ Cameron said. ‘It could have come in useful as evidence of police brutality.’
‘What was I supposed to do?’ Jules asked. ‘Take it down to the nearest police station and ask them to investigate which of their colleagues had been sending pornography to me? There was no way I was going to allow it to pollute my mother’s house for one second longer than was necessary. It made me feel filthy just to have to touch it. I badly wanted to talk to you – I thought you might have some idea what it was about. It followed too soon after the phone-call Hilton answered to be coincidental. But why that particular video, and why send it to me?’
