Despite the Darkness Read online

  Cameron’s overwhelming feeling was relief. His fright had made him realize just how much he dreaded the police raid that was bound to come some time. He’d been lucky this time. When he played bridge his cards were terrible most of the time, but on the rare occasions when his luck was in he usually had several good hands in succession. He should ride his luck before it ran out – do what Mirambo was asking him to do and drive him up to the Lesotho border. Take a chance on its being a set-up – it wasn’t a strong chance.

  Why would they wait to catch him halfway to Lesotho harbouring someone they were after? Why not just arrest him immediately? They could shoot him and claim he had been trying to escape just as easily in a suburban garden as they could on the side of the road in the Natal Midlands. The niggling thought that had been obliterated by the knock on the door edged back. Why would Mirambo have tried John first rather than him? After all he, Cameron, was Mirambo’s supervisor and John didn’t even recognize the need for an armed struggle.

  ‘Alright,’ Cameron said, ‘your plan sounds feasible – but I don’t want Jules implicated in any way – neither she nor anyone else must know. That means you’ll have to stay in the outside room all day. You’ll be OK for the bathroom but you’ll need something to eat.’

  Cameron opened the pantry door and ran his eye over sparsely populated shelves that had not been stocked for a siege. He extracted a plastic bag from the tangle in the corner and selected an unopened jar of peanut butter, half a packet of lemon creams that looked as if they had outlived their shelf life, an apple, three bananas and a packet of Provita biscuits. ‘For life’ biscuits – the name seemed appropriate in the circumstances.

  ‘Not exactly haute cuisine I’m afraid,’ Cameron said, ‘but that should get you through the day. Let’s go.’

  Kitchen light switched off before the door was opened, Cameron led Mirambo back across the dining room in the dark, down the steps onto the verandah, out of the verandah door and across to the outside room. He reached up to feel for the key they kept on the ledge above the door, opened the door and checked that the curtains were drawn before switching on the bedside light. The room looked a bit shabby and the bed was not made up, but it would have to do. The door into the shower room was open and the frosted glass window wasn’t curtained, so he moved quickly to shut the door and contain what light there was.

  ‘Are you going to be OK here?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘Of course, this is a lot better than the digs I have been living in,’ Mirambo replied. ‘I can’t see a single cockroach. It’ll be fine. I’ll lock the door and wait here until you come tomorrow evening. Tap four times and the door will be opened unto you.’

  Mirambo seemed relaxed enough.

  ‘Cut the biblical crap,’ Cameron smiled. ‘The cockroaches are just on holiday. Probably best not to shower, the pipes bang sometimes and might be heard in the house.’

  Cameron left the caution about flushing the toilet unspoken. He left Mirambo in the darkness and heard the key turn in the lock as he slipped back across to the verandah door through a gust of dusty wind. He felt oddly guilty as he tiptoed across to the bed and pushed his loaded automatic in under the mattress, clicking the safety catch on as he did so, before slipping under the sheet.

  Jules rolled over towards him.

  ‘I thought I heard voices, a woman’s voice, were you talking to someone?’ she murmured.

  Whatever she thought she had heard didn’t appear to have made her anxious enough to wake up properly.

  ‘Just Mrs Scheepers,’ Cameron said. ‘I found her standing on the doorstep in the middle of the night with her winter dressing gown billowing in the wind. She was looking for her cat.’

  ‘What time is it anyway?

  ‘It’s well after midnight and I’m exhausted. Sleep well.’

  ‘You too,’ said Jules rolling back onto her sleeping side.

  Not much hope of that, Cameron thought – too much adrenalin, too many questions. And, as the questions floated to the surface one by one, the knot of dread inside him grew. He was lying listening for the heavy tread of boots up the path and the banging on the door that would signal the police raid that would inevitably find Mirambo. Dread was the right word – it wasn’t simply fear. It was the thought of the children’s terror and Jules’s fear for him and the children that filled him with a sick and oddly empty sense of dread. There was no way he was going to be able to get to sleep.

  Could it be a set up? Were they really after Mirambo? If so, why now? What had Mirambo done to trigger the sudden interest? And if they weren’t really after him? If Mirambo was, in fact, a police plant – unlikely as it seemed from Cameron’s experience of him? Surely incriminating Cameron would be far too insignificant a prize to justify blowing Mirambo’s elaborately built-up cover?

  These were, in the end, just questions of detail – looming behind them, as always, was the meta-question. Why the hell put everything at risk by taking the bastards on in the first place? He didn’t have to. He could have let Mirambo walk away into the night looking for somewhere else to hide. Mirambo would be the only person who knew he had tried Cameron’s house, and not even Mirambo would know that his tapping on the door had succeeded in waking Cameron.

  But how would he feel if Mirambo had walked away and never been seen or heard of again? Even that was still just a question of detail. The answer to the meta-question was easy – what apartheid was doing to everyone in the country who wasn’t fortunate enough to have been born with a light complexion was, quite simply, intolerable. In the face of the Nationalist government’s brutality, inhumanity and, ultimately, stupidity – how could they possibly imagine that they could suppress the vast majority of the country’s people indefinitely? – there were only two moral alternatives. You could either pack up and leave the country, or you could stay and try to play a part in the struggle. And, if you decided to stay, that meant offering a safe house to students on the run from the Special Branch – particularly if they were your own research students, and, even more particularly, if they were the kind of research student who was happy to spend time kicking a football around with your son.

  Cameron was on his third or fourth circuit of the detail when the telephone beside his bed shrilled. He snatched at it before it could wake the children – he was always too slow to save Jules from waking.

  ‘You weren’t asleep, were you?’ mocked the heavy Afrikaans accent. ‘Sorry I didn’t wake you.’

  Cameron felt shivery, he could think of nothing to say.

  ‘You got nothing to say for yourself, for once, Dr Beaumont. Well perhaps you can answer a question for me. Did you ever see what happens to a man’s head when it gets hit by a dum-dum bullet?’

  Click.

  Silence.

  Chapter 2

  By the time Hilton climbed sleepily into their bed at six or so in the morning Cameron thought that he might have dozed off for about ten minutes. Having someone threaten to blow your head apart with a dum-dum bullet was not conducive to sleep. That was, he assumed, the whole point.

  Ever since they had murdered Rick Turner the death threats had to be taken seriously. Nobody knew who had shot Rick through the window after he had opened the curtain to see who was tapping on the glass, but all his friends at the university assumed that it was someone from the Special Branch.

  It was a good thing Jules had wanted part of the verandah adjacent to their bedroom converted into an ensuite bathroom. Cameron would not have made it to the main bathroom in time for the gut-wrenching vomiting that was brought on by the image of his head bursting like the pumpkin he’d once used for target practice – and that had been with hard-nosed bullets. At least the phone-call had lessened the dread of an immediate police raid. They wouldn’t have bothered to phone if they’d been about to smash the front door down.

  Agreeing to give Mirambo a bed for the night was not the cleverest thing he h
ad ever done. Was there a subtext to the death threat? Had they been letting him know that they knew that Mirambo was with him? Or had it just been a routine death threat from a bored SB officer whose peculiarly sinister timing had been purely coincidental?

  As always, the phone had woken Jules up. He’d had to tell her what the bastard had said, and felt very uncomfortable about not letting her know at the same time that she would be hosting Mirambo for two nights. He couldn’t tell her – if she then didn’t tell the police that they were hiding someone whom the SB would call a terrorist, regardless of what he had done, she would be as guilty as he was in terms of the Terrorism Act. If it turned out to be a trap they would both end up in prison, leaving no one to look after the children.

  Cameron had written his English long-essay on Conrad in his final year as a History and English major and had found The Secret Sharer strangely disturbing. The story had come to mind in the hours after the phone call. The unnamed Captain in the story had hidden a fugitive who had arrived unexpectedly on his ship in his cabin until he could sail close enough to land to allow the ‘secret sharer’ a good chance of slipping away in the darkness and swimming ashore. The crucial difference was that the secret sharer had arrived in the night after killing a member of the crew of the ship on which he had been an officer, whereas Mirambo hadn’t killed anybody.

  Breakfast was a strain. Cameron had to control his compulsion to keep glancing across to the window of the outside room to spot any telltale signs of the secret sharer. It was a relief when Jules drove off to drop the children at school on her way to the stockbroker’s office where she worked.

  Cameron collected his lecture notes, told Margaret, who helped them with the cleaning and ironing, that he had locked a birthday present for Nicky in the outside room so she needn’t bother to clean it, and headed up the road to the university.

  It was hair-drier hot again and there was so much dust in the air that he could barely make out the hills the other side of the city. Venter’s car wasn’t in its usual place and he had checked that he wasn’t being followed. He was only halfway to work when the dust coagulating in his nostrils set off a bout of sneezing.

  Cameron was blowing his nose, trying to head off a straggler sneeze, as he walked into the History Department staff room to collect his post on the way to his office. Derek and Louis were talking animatedly by the pigeonholes with their backs to the door. Cameron yielded to the inevitable and the sneeze erupted.

  ‘Christ,’ said Derek, swivelling round, ‘that gave me a fright. It must have been almost as loud as last night’s explosion.’

  ‘What explosion?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘Didn’t you listen to the news this morning? Haven’t you seen the Mercury? Where have you been?’

  Derek had never been an obvious candidate for assertiveness training.

  ‘What explosion?’ Cameron asked as he began to feel the first ripples of anxiety. He seldom listened to the news in the morning – the SABC news made him angry enough for one day every evening, and he hadn’t looked at the Witness. The Mercury was so biased that he never looked at it – trust Derek to subscribe. Whatever had happened must have been relatively early in the evening if there had been time for it to be reported on before the newspapers were put to bed.

  ‘Someone planted a bomb under a bench outside the Supreme Court where they are holding the Treason Trial,’ replied Derek. ‘It is said to have gone off just as the night watchman decided to take a rest from his rounds and sat down on the bench – though how any journalist could know that is anybody’s guess. More likely he used to spend most of his time sitting on the bench sleeping. One of his legs ended up in a fork of one of the jacaranda trees and lots of other bits of him decorated the rest of it – the blossoms have come early this year.’

  ‘What time did it go off?’ Cameron asked, starting to feel sick again.

  ‘Around nine o’clock,’ said Derek. ‘I was marking the second year essays in my study with the window open and heard it echoing round the hills. I thought it sounded like a bomb. I went out onto my verandah, but apart from a few sirens there wasn’t anything else.’

  Pietermaritzburg, still the capital of what had once been the British colony of Natal, was set in a hollow surrounded by hills. Derek’s house in Blackridge was on a ridge above the city so it made sense that the sound of an explosion could have been heard echoing around the hills. Cameron had also been marking but Jules had been watching TV – in fact she’d been watching Dallas, he remembered – and if the bomb had gone off around nine the chances were that the noise of an explosion in the city, even just a mile or so away, would have been drowned out by the Hollywood theme-tune.

  Cameron felt an urgent need to be alone to think. He walked quickly over, grabbed the post from his pigeon-hole, and walked out without saying anything else. Out of the corner of his eye he caught Derek and Louis glancing at each other in surprise as he left. There had been a number of limpet-mine and hand-grenade blasts over the past few months, several only fifty miles away in Durban, but they hadn’t killed anyone. It wasn’t as if deadly bomb blasts in any South African city, never mind one’s own, had become such an everyday occurrence as to merit only a couple of sentences.

  Before he got upstairs to his office Cameron realized that it had been a mistake to walk out like that – time to think had to come later. Derek and Louis mustn’t be allowed to think that he had been rattled by mention of the explosion. They knew he was actively involved in the anti-apartheid struggle, and the United Democratic Front in particular, and he didn’t want them to put two and two together and arrive at five. He didn’t want them to suspect that he had had anything to do with an explosion that would clearly get those responsible hanged if they were ever caught – regardless of whether or not they had intended anyone to be killed.

  Cameron diverted to a staff toilet near his office. He was feeling nauseous and his heart was racing but he willed himself not to be sick again. He put the lid of the toilet down and sat on it for ninety seconds, taking slow deep breaths. Then he went through the ritual of methodically pulling sheets of toilet paper off the roll as loudly as possible. He flushed the toilet and washed and dried his hands. He thought the performance necessary because it was just possible that Louis might have followed him, ostensibly, or perhaps even genuinely, to check that he was OK.

  He knew Derek wouldn’t bother, but Louis was still an entirely unknown quantity, in spite of having been in the Department for nearly two years now. Always up for a political discussion, very good at avoiding being pinned down, he came originally from Mauritius and had fluent Portuguese on top of his French and English. He had taught in Maputo and had spent time in Angola – Cameron had checked all this out – and he might well have been very useful to South African Government agencies of one sort or another in the process.

  Louis wasn’t anywhere to be seen, so Cameron hurried back to the staff room and found that Derek and Louis had been joined by Patrick, the Head of Department, and Lynn.

  Lynn was a kindred spirit – a highly competent historian, politically very astute and prepared to speak out when it was important to do so. Of all his colleagues Lynn was the one Cameron felt closest to. He often sat with her at tea, and they had lunch together at the staff club from time to time, but there wasn’t much occasion to socialize off campus. Lynn kept her private life to herself, and as far as he knew didn’t have a long-term partner. Cameron found that surprising as he found her very attractive with her shoulder-length light brown hair, flecked blonde by the end of summer, and direct brown eyes. She could almost certainly be confided in should he choose to do so, but, as with Jules, while that might make him feel better it would put her directly in the line of fire.

  Patrick Hambleton, on the other hand, was neither a particularly competent historian nor a kindred spirit. A proper historian, as far as he was concerned, knew enough about the whole of history to be able to lecture o
r supervise research on any topic. He regarded colleagues who focussed their teaching and research on particular historical periods or areas – particularly African history – as lower forms of pond life. Patrick clearly resented having been obliged, as a result of Mirambo’s specific request, to approve Cameron’s appointment as his supervisor. As far as Patrick was concerned, it was obviously the Head of Department who should be supervising the Department’s first black Ph.D student – he would have ensured that said student was persuaded to undertake his research on something less peripheral than the East African slave trade.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Cameron said as he joined the group, ‘dodgy curry last night.’

  Patrick and Lynn looked surprised; Derek and Louis exchanged another glance. Damn, Cameron thought, another mistake. Now they would be concluding that he had come down specifically to be seen to be happy to carry on the conversation.

  ‘Alimentary, my dear Watson, alimentary,’ remarked Derek.

  Cameron’s heart sank further – was that just another example of Derek being unable to resist a polysyllabic pun, particularly if it was in any way lavatorial, or was Derek making it abundantly clear that Cameron’s excuse for having left the staff room so abruptly was bullshit?

  ‘As I was saying,’ said Lynn, ‘whoever planted the bomb couldn’t possibly have wanted anyone to be killed. The Supreme Court is a purely symbolic target. The court doesn’t sit in the evenings, nobody would be going in or out at night, and the building is set back from the road so passers-by would be highly unlikely to be killed or injured. The Treason Trial is going on there, and people get sentenced to death there, so someone must just have been trying to point out that the State isn’t the only entity that has the capacity to kill people. The night watchman was just unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. How could anyone have known…’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that outside this room,’ interrupted Louis. ‘That could sound suspiciously like a defence of a terrorist bombing.’