Despite the Darkness, page 30
Walking was difficult – but, like eating an elephant bite by bite, it could be done a bit at a time. Some railings outside a house here, that pillar-box there, and there were other lampposts he could rest against. There was still nobody around – but it must be getting on for midnight. Looking to see what the time was, he discovered that his watch was gone. It wasn’t broken, it just wasn’t there – they must have wanted to make it look like a common or garden mugging. How many people got mugged in their gardens? A reflex pat-down of his hip-pocket indicated that he still had his wallet.
It hurt a bit to breathe, but not too badly – ribs on the right side felt very bruised but they probably weren’t broken. Walking got a bit easier, to the point where the last fifty yards or so were manageable without support. Getting through the revolving front door of the hotel wasn’t so easy – the door was stiff and his leg had difficulty taking the weight he needed to put on it to get the door moving. If they asked him to complete a customer satisfaction survey he would tell them that their revolving door was too stiff.
Once in the warmth of the hotel, Cameron limped to the nearest seat in the foyer and collapsed onto it. The receptionist on duty was the one who had tried to warn him about Jules’s phone calls. He came quickly round from behind his desk, no doubt intent on ejecting the dishevelled hobo whose path from the front door was marked by dark patches across the carpet – the chair would be ruined. He stopped suddenly when he recognized who the culprit was. It was several seconds before he found his voice.
‘Good gracious … Dr Beaumont … what on earth has happened to you?’
‘I’ve been beaten up and had my wallet stolen,’ Cameron said. ‘I mean my watch – I’ve still got my wallet. I’m sorry about making a mess, but it is only rainwater – I badly needed to sit down.’
‘I’m sure you did, Sir. You don’t look very well at all. Take your time. Where did it happen? Can I phone the police?’
‘A couple of hundred yards up the street,’ Cameron replied. ‘I was on my way back from The Highwayman on the corner. I should have put two and two together.’
‘Would you like me to call the police?’ the receptionist repeated. ‘The police station isn’t far, it would only take them a minute or two to get here.’
‘No. Don’t worry, thank you,’ Cameron said. ‘It is only my watch that has been taken, and it was a cheap digital one. I was going to buy a new one soon anyway.’
‘But it isn’t just your watch, Sir,’ the receptionist said. ‘You have also been beaten up, and it would be seriously damaging for this hotel’s business if guests were to be mugged on the street outside on a regular basis.’
‘I am sure this won’t be a regular occurrence,’ Cameron said. ‘I know who did it. If you don’t want the hotel’s business to be damaged, don’t call the police. Getting the police around would guarantee that the story appeared in Saturday’s newspaper.’
‘You might be right,’ the receptionist said. ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, it isn’t just rainwater. There is a lot of blood on your collar. If you would turn your head to the light I could see where it is coming from.’
Blood on his collar again – but at least he wouldn’t have to lie to Jules about this one.
‘It isn’t a very big cut, although it looks badly bruised,’ the receptionist said as he examined the back of Cameron’s head. ‘If you come with me to the washroom I’ll get the First Aid kit and we can clean it up.’
‘No, it’s OK thanks,’ Cameron said. ‘What I really need is to go to bed and get some sleep, I’m sure I will be fine in the morning. But please try to cover the cut so that you don’t get blood on the hotel pillows.’
‘Who do you think it was?’ the receptionist asked as he cleaned the cut.
The blow that had knocked Cameron down in the first place hadn’t broken the skin, but it was throbbing just as persistently and painfully as the one the receptionist was attending to.
‘I don’t know his name,’ Cameron replied. ‘Someone working for the South African police Special Branch. He’s been following me around. He knows what he is doing – I didn’t hear a thing before I was hit on the head.’
‘It sounds like something from a John le Carré novel,’ the receptionist said. ‘I finished reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy just last week.’
When the receptionist had finished making sure that a plaster would stick, Cameron said good night and limped his way to the lift. What an embarrassing nightmare of a trip this had been – he had let his guard down completely. Jules was right – he was drinking too much. How could he not have been aware that two of them were coming up behind him?
His presentation had been a humiliation, as the THES had said, but there was nothing he could have done about that. Apart, perhaps, from telling Mirambo to go away when he knocked on the door. But that wouldn’t have helped – Venter’s plan to circulate the rumour that he was a police spy had nothing to do with Mirambo. Venter had just got lucky. When Mirambo disappeared, people were bound to put two and two together and get five – if Cameron was a police spy, and Mirambo had disappeared, Cameron must have betrayed him.
Allowing himself to be taken by surprise by Sideburns and his side-kick felt almost as humiliating. They hadn’t even given him a proper kicking – they could have killed him when he was lying defenceless on the ground. If they hadn’t wanted to kill him they could have put him in hospital for weeks – but they knew exactly what they were doing and held back, just giving him a few kicks to remember them by and, in the process, making sure that he ended up even wetter than Sideburns had been. This particular humiliation was one that Jules would think he deserved. She was always begging him not to provoke them unnecessarily – gratuitous provocation, she would say, couldn’t end well.
Jules was right again – as usual.
Chapter 23
Cameron slept badly in spite of, or perhaps because of, the quantity of alcohol he had consumed. It was impossible to settle on a comfortable position for sleep. His left shoulder, on the side he usually slept on, was badly bruised; his right ribs were still very painful, although breathing was easier; and he couldn’t sleep on his back without pressure being put on the swelling behind his ear. Finally giving up the attempt to sleep when he heard eight o’clock striking on a church clock somewhere nearby, Cameron took double the recommended safe dose of paracetamol to try to quieten the throbbing drumbeat in his head.
Gathering the different parts of himself together to get them all down to breakfast was out of the question, so breakfast had to be ordered from room-service’s limited choice between eggs benedict and an omelette. The prospect of leaving his room at all during the day held no appeal whatever – but Sideburns would be out there somewhere waiting to see if he would put in an appearance. The only way he could claw back a fragment of dignity from the humiliation of the night before would be by going out as though nothing had happened, if only for the afternoon.
Once his head had subsided to a dull ache, Cameron tried to phone Jules. Her mother answered the phone with a curtness that came as close to being rude as propriety would allow. Any distress the children or Jules felt from the impending separation was clearly going to be laid at Cameron’s door. Jules’s mother was a thin, angular woman who, if anyone had told her she was ‘angular’, would have assumed that all the angles being referred to were right angles. Nobody could ever tell her anything because she already knew everything. Jules had taken the children to a playgroup in Kenilworth – he might like to phone back in the evening.
A morning in bed, a long hot shower, and a token lunch in the hotel bar consisting of a sandwich and some sparkling water, combined to allow Cameron to feel vaguely human again. He found he could even walk without much limp to speak of. The morning hadn’t been entirely wasted – he had got beyond page three of the THES and scanned the job advertisements, which were what he had bought it for in the first place. Suva University in Fiji was looking for an African History specialist, improbably enough, and appeared to be needing one quite urgently if a closing date a mere ten days away was anything to go by. The advertisement specified a teaching-only contract, so it wouldn’t matter that nobody was ever going to publish his research again. If it was a teaching contract he wouldn’t have time to do any research anyway. He would send in an application as soon as he got to Cape Town.
The sun was shining again. It would have been a perfect day for another walk along the front to the pier to look for presents for Hilton and Nicky, but Cameron’s leg didn’t feel up to it, so he would have to take the bus.
Sideburns was lurking immediately outside the revolving door, leaning against the hotel wall. As Cameron passed him, Sideburns detached himself from the wall ready to resume his tailing function in a more orthodox manner, this time with a barely disguised smirk.
The Palace Pier was just as it had been when Cameron was last there. As he ambled into the tearoom, Cameron was surprised to hear his name being called out. Looking round he saw a man with strikingly ginger hair getting up from one of the tables and coming over to greet him. Cameron remembered him as a very bright student who had dodged being drafted into the South African Defence Force by skipping the country immediately after writing his Honours exams some years before.
‘Dr Beaumont, it’s good to see you after all these years,’ the man said. ‘You won’t remember me. I’m Mark Fern. I took History Honours ten years ago, before I had to leave South Africa in a bit of a hurry. What are you doing here?’
‘Of course I remember you, Mark,’ Cameron said, pleased that he didn’t have to ransack his memory to try to recall Mark’s name. ‘One always remembers the very good students and the truly terrible ones – it’s the ones in between that one forgets. Let me get a cup of coffee and I’ll join you.’
As he turned back to the serving-counter, Cameron saw that, in the few moments they had been talking, Sideburns had taken the gap and got in ahead of him in the queue. When he had his coffee, he went over to a table near where Mark was sitting, sat down, took a camera out of his pocket and started fiddling with it. Most of the tables were taken but there was a vacant one in the far corner – Sideburns would try to move closer to them, but all the nearby ones were taken. He could take as many photographs as he liked, at least they would be able to talk without being overheard. Cameron took his coffee over to it, hung his jacket over the back of the chair facing into the room and went across to Mark’s table.
‘Don’t look now,’ he said, ‘but there is an SB agent a couple of tables behind you who is tailing me and will try to get a photograph of you. I’ve taken a table in the corner where you can sit with your back to him. Let’s go over there instead.’
There had been a half-smile on Sideburns’ face as he sat down. He had hit the jackpot – Cameron must have set this meeting up with someone significant, choosing an unlikely rendezvous. Cameron glanced across as he led Mark to his table – Sideburns had stopped smiling.
Mark, it turned out, was on a day trip to Brighton from Southampton where his ship was docked. After leaving South Africa he had managed to get a job as a pianist on a cruise liner. His entirely self-taught skills on the keyboard had proved far more use in getting a job than his four years as a student of African and World History. He enjoyed the itinerant life and, while still spending much of his time playing the piano, had been given the added responsibility of managing a lecture programme that allowed passengers to convince themselves that the real purpose of their cruise was intellectual enrichment.
Mark gave every evidence of being genuinely pleased to see Cameron, which provided licence to unload the whole trailer-load, or almost the whole trailer-load, of what had happened over the past few weeks. It was almost certainly pure coincidence that Mark happened to be on the pier when Cameron arrived, but it was not entirely beyond the realms of possibility that it wasn’t – his sudden departure could have been staged. Cameron hadn’t told anyone he was heading for the pier so it would have taken a clairvoyant to get Mark there for a chance encounter, but he nevertheless felt it advisable, as he had with William, to keep the detail of Mirambo’s departure to himself.
‘What a bunch of bastards!’ Mark said vehemently when Cameron had finished unloading. ‘Am I glad I got the hell out when I did. It was rough on my family, but there was no way in the world I was going to join their bloody army for two years.’
‘Yes, you are well out of that,’ Cameron agreed. ‘Can you imagine what it would be like to have to sit in the heat on the banks of the Limpopo waiting to shoot guys like Mirambo braving the crocodiles as they try to get across the river?’
‘I can’t say I would like to have to spend my nights waiting for people to phone in the middle of the night to tell me they are going to kill me either,’ Mark said.
‘But what they are doing to me,’ said Cameron, ‘is absolutely nothing compared to what they do to black people who stick their heads above the parapet. I’m sure the only reason I’m still alive is that I just happen not to have been born black – no thanks to any foresight or planning on my part.’
‘But how long can that last?’ Mark asked.
‘What?’ Cameron asked. ‘My staying alive, or the whole apartheid edifice?’
‘Both, I suppose,’ Mark replied. ‘You are in a much better position to judge than I am, but I can’t see the overall situation getting better any time soon, and it seems likely to get a whole lot worse before it gets better, if it ever does. As it gets worse, they could well calculate that the negative publicity that would come with murdering a few more white people like you would be more than outweighed by the advantage of getting rid of the nuisance value you represent.’
‘That is not impossible,’ Cameron said. ‘And, if people suspect that the only reason I am still alive is because I am a police agent, I won’t be able to carry on doing even the little I have been able to do up to now. But what else can I do?’
‘Jump ship, as I did,’ said Mark. ‘In fact, talking of ships, my role as the lecture programme coordinator on the good ship SS Enlightenment means I could slot some African and World History very easily into our programme of lectures. It would be a piece of cake for you. ’
‘It isn’t really called the SS Enlightenment is it?’ Cameron asked. ‘You must be joking.’
‘No, I’m not joking,’ said Mark. ‘It really does sail around the world making that ambitious claim. It is the brainchild of a fat-cat Brit entrepreneur who spotted a gap in the market. A number of universities around the world have started summer schools aimed largely at the wealthy retired who think it a good idea to keep their brains active so that they can go on enjoying their money for as long as possible – which is sensible enough. So why not combine luxury cruising with a summer school of sorts, especially if it enables the teaching of “traditional” subjects like Classical Antiquity, the subjects he learnt at his public school? He particularly targets what he ungallantly calls the “blue-rinse brigade”, by which he means wealthy widows. He’s got a network of agents in places like Florida and the south of Spain. You’ll find him on the list of major Tory donors and, not coincidentally, he is an enthusiastic sanctions buster. So we call in quite regularly at Cape Town and Durban where, for obvious reasons, I never go ashore.’
‘How do you square the sanctions busting with your political conscience?’ Cameron asked.
‘With some difficulty,’ Mark admitted with a wry smile. ‘When anyone asks, which is very rarely, I quote what you used to say about education being subversive, and I make sure that the lecturers we employ aren’t raving right-wingers. Some of the people who come on board have never been exposed to any views to the left of Enoch Powell on the political spectrum. The ones who don’t die of apoplexy really do find it enlightening.’
‘Thanks, Mark,’ Cameron said. ‘I’ll bear it in mind if I ever need to make a quick exit on my own. If I were to join you I obviously wouldn’t want the SB to know about it, so communicating with you would be very difficult. How would I know when Enlightenment was coming in my direction?’
‘You would see a golden glow on the horizon,’ Mark replied, poker-faced. ‘But, to save yourself getting a crick in your neck watching out for it, you could either phone one of the more up-market travel agents and ask for one of our brochures, or you could keep an eye on the schedules of shipping movements in the newspapers. The Cape Times publishes a schedule of arrivals every Friday under the title ‘Harbour Log’, and I expect the Durban papers do something similar. As it happens, we are due into Cape Town in about three weeks time, I can’t remember the precise date. The ship normally stays there for four or five days before going on to Durban.’
‘If I were to join you, which is tempting but seems very unlikely,’ Cameron said, ‘I would need to keep a very low profile until we were well away from South Africa.’
‘Of course,’ said Mark. ‘I can’t believe what a terrible time you have been having, and I would be very pleased to do anything I can to help. Your lectures changed my view of the world in lots of ways. It would be particularly satisfying to be able to help if doing so involved poking a stick in the SB’s eye.’
