Despite the Darkness, page 39
They asked to see his ID book, which included his driving licence, but, as he had anticipated, they checked his face against the photo in the ID book without paying much attention to his name. In case the assistant’s quick glance had registered his capitalized initials, he had decided that it would be a Mr Christopher Barratt who filled in and signed their form for them. He was rewarded for his consideration by soon finding himself behind the wheel of an almost new Jaguar XJ6. Anyone who wanted to drive to Cape Town in a hurry overnight could not have asked for more.
There were three routes he could take. The fastest and most straightforward route to Cape Town was to go back the way they had come – past the city where it was to be hoped that the body of the late Mr Venter had not yet been found in his car – and on towards Jo’burg before turning off and going via Bloemfontein and the Karroo. The one alternative was to head up the North Coast road, in the opposite direction from Cape Town, and then cut across to join the Jo’burg road at Mooi River. That would avoid any potential roadblocks around the city by doing a huge loop, but would be a lot slower. The other alternative was to head South and go via the Transkei, but that road was particularly dangerous in the dark as it was poorly surfaced and frequented by stray animals.
The road back past the scene of the crime would be much the quickest. It was the biggest gamble, give or take the livestock on the Transkei road, but Venter had only been dead for a couple of hours and it was unlikely that they had found him yet – so he might as well go for it. The fifty miles back up the highway towards any potential roadblocks would be the most stressful part of a high-stress journey, but the Renault should confuse and delay them, at least for a bit. They would assume he must either have gone to ground on foot somewhere nearby, or borrowed or stolen a different car. They would need to knock on doors and ask a lot of questions.
Cameron was careful to keep the Jaguar to the speed limit as he approached the city – to be caught by a roadblock set up to catch speeding motorists rather than murderers would be a prime stupidity. As he passed the feed-on to the highway nearest his house he couldn’t see anything untoward. There was a speed trap a mile or two further on, but the two traffic cops manning it were sitting smoking on folding chairs beside their car, looking so relaxed and bored that he doubted whether they would have stirred themselves to chase him even if he had been clocked doing twice the speed limit.
Cameron felt the tension easing a little as the car left Hilton behind at the top of the hill and headed out past Midmar Dam. It wouldn’t be the only time he left Hilton behind, he thought sadly – that was one of the problems of lumbering a child with the name of a nearby village. But he could feel himself tightening up with anxiousness every time he passed a car, and much more so on the two occasions as it got dark when he saw headlights approaching in his rearview mirror and a car passed him.
His own headlights were strong, but even so his speed was beyond any sensible safety threshold. He had hardly slept the night before and the day had had its share of stress and drama – it was only adrenalin that was keeping him going. There was no danger that he would nod off, but he needed to be careful – the danger was that he would unwittingly press his foot harder and harder on the accelerator as he tried to get away further and faster. He needed to keep reminding himself that his judgement would be impaired.
His judgement hadn’t been impaired when he shot Venter. There was a war going on – not that he would be treated as a prisoner of war if they caught him. There was no way he could have stood by and let him hurt Jules. Venter was a sick sadistic bastard, even more so than was required by the standard SB job description. Pace Victoria, the world was a lot better off without him.
Cameron was sorry he had had to leave Lynn without saying goodbye. Until such time as Venter’s murder became the main item on the SABC news, she would probably assume that he had been detained. Nothing had yet been reported on any of the news bulletins. He watched the fuel gauge, trying to work out when he would need to stop for petrol. It would be good to get well past Bloemfontein, a city that had always seemed to him to be overpopulated with policemen looking for something to do.
It was too much to ask that his good luck should last the night. A row of lights across the road on a straight stretch ten miles before Bloemfontein, some of them moving, told him that the Bloemfontein police had found something to do. The road was straight, so they would have seen his lights from miles away and would come after him if he turned his car around – they never put their roadblocks where there were obvious side roads to turn into. The only option was to try to bluff it out. His photograph would have been faxed to them, but it might be an old one or the fax machine might be running out of ink. He felt sick with fear and realized he badly needed to pee.
The moving lights were torches and lanterns flagging down vehicles from both directions. As he got closer his headlights showed men in army camouflage cradling RN assault rifles. They were all in camouflage fatigues. This wasn’t a rerun of the roadblock on the Richmond Road – it was the army he now had to contend with, not the police. Did that make any difference?
They looked to be searching for weapons. A minibus that had come from the other direction was standing with its doors open, a line of boxes and suitcases lying higgledy-piggledy along the side of the road. Its black passengers were standing in a huddle watching as men in uniform went along the line ransacking their luggage and emptying their possessions out onto the road. It looked as if they had taken lessons in aggressive search techniques from the SB.
As Cameron slowed to a stop at the barrier and wound his window down, a very youthful looking soldier carrying a clipboard in lieu of a rifle ambled over. A white man driving a Jaguar was obviously no kind of threat. Whatever was clipped to the clipboard was obviously not a photograph of the white murderer of a security policeman. A torch was shone cursorily into the car, and the soldier waved him on.
Whether it was the tiredness, or the adrenalin, or just the congenital foolhardiness Jules had spoken about, instead of just driving on, Cameron heard himself asking the soldier if he could do anything to help. Even as he asked, he could hear Jules’s urgent voice in his ear telling him not to engage with them, just get the hell out.
‘Probably not,’ came the tired reply, ‘but we are looking for terrorists as well as weapons and bombs. You might have seen this man.’
The soldier unclipped a lived-in looking piece of paper from the clipboard, tucked the board under his arm-pit so that he could hold the piece of paper up for Cameron to see, and shone his torch on it. It was a grainy enlargement of the photograph of Mirambo that had appeared on the student leaflet.
It was all Cameron could do to stop his sharp intake of breath from being audible. For a fleeting moment he thought he might be so tired he was hallucinating – but it was definitely a photograph, and there couldn’t be any doubt it was Mirambo. It must mean he was still alive and they were still looking for him.
‘No, I haven’t seen him,’ he said, swallowing hard and clearing his throat. ‘Have you been looking for him long? It looks like an old photograph.’
‘I don’t know,’ came the reply, ‘I’ve only been here a few days. Thanks anyway.’
Sent on his way with a half-hearted salute, Cameron managed to hold on until he was out of sight of the roadblock before pulling the car into the side of the road and making sure there was nothing left in his bladder to wet himself with in the event of another scare like that.
So they were still looking for Mirambo – or, at least, the soldiers from this army camp were. Communication between the police and the army was notoriously bad. Even if Venter had been found, and an alert had been sent out to all police stations, this lot, a couple of miles from their army base, wouldn’t have known about it. So it was entirely possible that Mirambo could have been murdered weeks ago and they hadn’t been told to stop looking for him – but that didn’t stop the photograph from being cause for some hope, however minimal. Thank God it hadn’t been the other photograph on that leaflet.
There wasn’t another scare. Cameron stopped for petrol and bought a pie and a coke just outside Richmond. He had run so many varied risks during the day that he felt positively insouciant about risking a Richmond petrol station pie, which tasted surprisingly good – probably because he hadn’t eaten anything for what seemed like a very long time.
With powerful headlights and frequent stretches of road running rifle-barrel straight ahead of him through the Karroo, he felt reasonably safe to travel at close to 100 mph. He was making very good time. By dawn he was through the Karroo and moving down through the mountains into the much more fertile landscape of the Western Cape. The six o’clock news carried a brief report that a man had been found shot dead in his car near the university in Pietermaritzburg. Police enquiries were proceeding.
The sun was well up as he approached the city. He could see light wisps of cloud on top of Table Mountain giving preliminary warning of a South Easter. The first part of his getaway had gone to plan – he had got to Cape Town. But that was pretty much where the plan ended. He had had plenty of time to think during the night, but the thinking hadn’t identified any foolproof way of joining the good ship Enlightenment. Apart from anything else, he had been too distracted by wondering what the photograph of Mirambo meant. The only clear conclusion he had come to was that he had no choice but to gamble that Mark would not be too bothered about the morality of murdering a thug like Venter.
Occasional light-headedness suggested that it wouldn’t be possible to keep going on adrenalin forever. He needed to find a safe place to rest – and think. It would help to have a bird’s eye view of the layout of the harbour and surrounds. The best option seemed to be to drive up Kloofnek Road and then along the flank of Lion’s Head to the parking place at the top of Signal Hill. But he would need to be careful in the early morning traffic as his judgement would be as badly impaired by sleeplessness as it would have been a week or two ago by whisky.
The view of Table Mountain in one direction and Table Bay in the other was spectacular in the spring sunshine. Robben Island, where so many of the political leaders he looked up to were incarcerated, looked paradoxically small and insignificant in the wide expanse of the bay. Mandela had been moved off the island to Pollsmoor Prison on the mainland three years ago. It was easy to see why they would want to use the island as a prison – the chances of escaping by swimming ashore looked to be somewhere between nil and zero.
Breakfast and coffee were calling very loudly, but it was going to take an effort of will to get going again. It seemed like much more than twenty years since he had driven Jules up here on moonlit nights when they were students, ostensibly to look at the lights of the city. Being threatened with a premature death on a regular basis tended to age one a bit.
Enlightenment was easily identified from this vantage point. It was the only cruise liner ignoring the economic boycott. Some enlightenment that was. He could also see Somerset Hospital, notorious for boasting a ‘W wing’ and a ‘N wing’ that had nothing to do with the points of the compass – ‘W’ stood for ‘Whites’ and ‘N’ stood for ‘Non-whites’.
It was almost eight o’clock, so waiting for the news provided an excuse to put off summoning up the energy to go in search of breakfast. The first item was pretty much what he had expected. The body of a plain-clothes policeman had been found in his car on the side of a street in Pietermaritzburg. He had been murdered in the course of his duties while keeping the house of a university lecturer suspected of subversive activities under surveillance. The suspect, a Doctor Beaumont, a History lecturer at the local university, was being sought in connection with the murder. The policeman’s name would be released once his next of kin had been informed. A post-mortem would be conducted to ascertain the cause of death.
Hardly ‘in the course of his duties’, given that he was off-duty and decked out like a beachcomber in the Bahamas, give or take the shoulder holster. The cause of death would be pretty obvious – three bullets in the brain, even bullets from a 7.2mm popgun, tend to be fatal. The toxicology report, which they would no doubt suppress if Cameron were ever to be put on trial, would be an eye-opener for forensics, if not for van Zyl. It would be interesting to know whether dope was Venter’s only indulgence – he would have had plenty of access to harder drugs.
Hunger pangs and caffeine withdrawal were demanding attention increasingly stridently, but he needed now to be very careful to avoid going anywhere that was frequented by university people who might recognize him. Some would pretend not to see him, now that murdering a Special Branch policeman called his standing as a police spy into serious question, but others wouldn’t hesitate to report his presence in Cape Town. He also needed to find a way of getting to the ship before too many photographs of him were put into circulation. They were unlikely to have managed to get hold of a photograph of him in time to broadcast it on the television news.
One of the anonymous cafés near the harbour seemed the best bet, so Cameron drove sedately back down the hill into the city. He found a likely looking café, chose the darkest corner, and changed his normal practice by facing into the corner with his back to the door. He made shorter work of a cup of dubious coffee and a plate of greasy eggs and bacon than he would have done if his back hadn’t felt so exposed.
The plan from here was rudimentary, but the news bulletin had reinforced the earlier feeling of calm lucidity, which was a relief as he had been afraid his tiredness might erode the clarity. He was going to have to wing it somehow at the harbour gates, where they were bound to check IDs. The sooner he got there the less likely it would be that the people on the gates had been alerted. They would be watching the airport in Durban very closely and would probably assume that he couldn’t as yet have reached Cape Town any other way.
The first port of call was Somerset Hospital, where parking would be available relatively close to the harbor. Several empty spaces in the ‘Doctors Only’ car park beckoned. He was a Doctor – as Venter had always been at pains to emphasise – and the sign didn’t say anything about Doctors of Philosophy being excluded.
Cameron found a phone-box, as he had expected, in the front hallway of the hospital. Conveniently enough, there was a notice on the wall beside it giving the phone numbers of local taxi companies – Marine Taxis seemed to fit the bill. It only took a minute to ask for someone to collect him from the hospital and take him to the harbour – a taxi was nearby and would be with him in a minute or two.
A minute or two was all he needed to phone Lynn at work. There was a small risk that they might be able to work out that he was in Cape Town, but he couldn’t leave without saying goodbye. But the phone in Lynn’s office rang unanswered, each ring intensifying a sudden desperate desire to hold her and lose himself in her, leaving the last twenty-odd hours behind.
Michelle answered the phone in the department office instantly.
‘Tell them I’m OK,’ Cameron said, ‘please tell Lynn I’ll contact her when I can. Take care.’
Cameron put the phone down and went to find a toilet – the shorter the conversation, the less chance there was of tracing it. None of the people on the reception desk took the slightest notice of him, and he thought it better not to draw attention to himself by asking directions, so it took him longer than expected to find a toilet and get back to the entrance hall.
As he arrived back, one of the women behind the reception desk called out to tell him in Afrikaans that his taxi driver was waiting for him outside, which, she pointedly said, was where he should be. The taxi was immediately in front of the main entrance – its driver sitting behind the wheel looking anything but welcoming. It always felt more egalitarian to sit beside the driver in the front seat of a taxi, so Cameron opened the front door and climbed in. The driver muttered something that sounded remarkably like ‘fokkin boer’ under his breath and asked Cameron where he wanted to go.
‘Hi. Thanks for coming so quickly,’ Cameron said. ‘I’m Chris. What happened in there?’
‘Pieter,’ the driver responded. ‘The receptionist saw I am a Non-White, non-person, Coloured man and told me to wait outside because that entrance is for Whites Only.’
‘That would make me bloody angry,’ Cameron said.
‘Too bloody right I am angry,’ the driver said. ‘I have had it with these peoples’ bullshit and insults – I’m fed-up, really, really, really, fed-up. I have had enough of it.’
The driver’s anger might provide the solution. As a so-called Cape Coloured he would have to keep his ID with him at all times. In keeping with the maritime theme, Marine Taxi drivers wore uniform jackets and black nautical caps. The driver was more or less the same size as Cameron.
‘How would you like to be paid to get back at them, just a little bit?’ Cameron asked.
‘I wouldn’t need to be paid,’ the driver answered. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘How often do you go in and out of the harbour? Do the people on the gate know you well?’ Cameron asked.
‘Not often,’ came the reply. ‘I’ve only been working for this company a few months. I used to be the driver for a member of parliament but they didn’t pay me enough to feed my family properly.’
‘Why am I not surprised?’ Cameron commented. ‘Do you see that Jaguar over there at the far end of the Doctor’s car park? Please just drive over and park beside it and I’ll tell you what you can do.’
He didn’t need to be paid, but the taxi driver wasn’t about to say no when Cameron took R100 from his wallet and handed it to him. Cameron transferred his suitcase from the boot of the Jaguar to the taxi, opening it in the process and taking out one of his ties and the jacket he had packed at the top. There was no one around, but it seemed safest to take advantage of the ample interior space of the Jaguar for the driver to put on Cameron’s jacket, and Cameron to put the tie on, slip into the uniform jacket and don the cap. Once Pieter had given directions as to how to get into the harbour, Cameron set off while Pieter made a show of relaxing on the back seat, his ID book at the ready, clearly committing himself wholeheartedly to his role.
