Despite the Darkness

Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Afterword

1985 Historical Context

Notes

Acknowledgements

Although the story told in Despite the Darkness is a fiction, and none of the characters is based on any real person, living or dead, the historical context of apartheid in South Africa in which the action is set was all too real. Reference is made in the novel to actual historical events and people, many of whom were murdered by agents of the South African State. For readers not familiar with the history, I have included a note at the end which provides a short account of the dark years of apartheid leading up to the State of Emergency in 1985 when the action takes place, as well as some very brief notes on the historical characters mentioned.

Although readers may identify the Pietermaritzburg campus of what was then the University of Natal as the setting for part of the action of this novel, it is important to stress that the novel is in no way intended to reflect negatively on that university’s very active opposition to apartheid during the 1980s.

My first acknowledgement must, then, be to the friends and colleagues in Pietermaritzburg and elsewhere in South Africa whose friendship, courage and shared commitment to a non-racial South Africa made those years endurable. Particular appreciation is due here to my wife, Susan, for her support, her stoicism in the face of surveillance and security police harassment similar to that experienced by Cameron and Jules in the novel, and her own courage and commitment to the struggle against apartheid, best exemplified by her involvement with the Black Sash.

Where the novel itself is concerned, acknowledgement and grateful thanks are due to Susan, Brenda Gourley, Rajani Naidoo, Brendan and Becky, and Jacqui Ackurst for their encouragement and for reading and commenting on early drafts. Thanks also to Christopher Merrett for his comments on the historical note. More general thanks for their support in the writing endeavour are due to Anthony, Kate, Sarah and Andreas.

Finally, damaging as it may be for his ‘street cred’, I need to record my warm appreciation to Professor Andy Smith for his encouragement and support in his capacity as the novel’s first reader. There can surely be no more rigorous a first reader for a novel than an empirical scientist inclined to skepticism towards the humanities in general and fiction in particular.

Chapter 1

The tap, tap, tapping rhythm on the glass was too regular. Surfacing reluctantly, Cameron realized it couldn’t, after all, be a bougainvillea branch blowing against the verandah window. It was too persistent, too urgent. The hot Berg wind was still blowing down from the Drakensberg, he could hear it buffeting the camphor tree, but there had to be someone at the back door.

No lights. Never turn a light on until you have made sure the curtains are tightly closed. The enclosed verandah at the back of the house had no curtains.

When was the last death threat? Three, maybe four, nights ago. No over-elaboration that time, just a pregnant pause during which Cameron could hear a snatch of Afrikaans dance music in the background, followed by: ‘You are going to die.’ He recognized the heavy accent and tobacco rasp from previous occasions. Almost always around 3am. The phone had been put down before he had time to finish reminding the caller that we are all going to die.

But not, if possible, just yet. The alarm clock showed that it wasn’t 3am now, only just after midnight, which relieved the tension slightly. The 3am phone calls had convinced Cameron that when he died he would do it at three in the morning. He slid out of bed, felt between the mattresses for his Sig Sauer, cocked it under his pillows to muffle the noise, slipped on his dressing-gown and held the automatic in his pocket. Safety catch off. The dirty tricks brigade would be much better with guns than he was, and he doubted that he would get much chance to use it, but just holding it made him feel less helpless. Jules appeared still to be asleep under the sheet on the other side of the bed.

The tapping was getting more urgent. Cameron, peeping through a chink in the bedroom curtains, could see the dark figure of a man through the verandah window, half obscured by one of the Ali Baba-pot bougainvilleas. The street light at the end of the drive extended just enough light for Cameron to make out that part of the reason for the figure being dark was that its owner was black.

Where the hell was the bloody dog, and what did it think it was doing? Hadn’t it worked out its contract? It got fed on the understanding that it would bark when strangers tapped on the back door in the middle of the night.

If the death threats were anything to go by it was white men with guns you had to worry about, but it wasn’t impossible that they could have sent a black man. An askari, perhaps – an ANC footsoldier captured and given graphic details about what could happen to his family while his finger nails were being pulled out or his teeth snapped off with a pair of pliers.

But if anyone had come to carry out the death threats he wouldn’t, surely, have risked being seen standing out there tapping on the door for what must be the better part of a couple of minutes by now.

Cameron, heart pounding, knew he would be visible as a target as soon as he stepped through the door onto the verandah. The sweat on his palm was making the automatic feel oily.

What if the tapper was just a student needing help of some kind? It was unlikely that any student, even a drunk one, would come looking for help with an essay on the Zulu kingdom at this time of night. As Cameron watched, stomach churning, the figure turned abruptly from the door, allowing Cameron to glimpse his profile against the streetlight. It was Mirambo.

Apart from his height, Mirambo’s features – high domed forehead and aquiline nose, in particular – made him instantly recognizable among the relatively few black students the university had been allowed to admit.

What on earth could Mirambo want at this time of night? Whatever it was meant trouble. Mirambo was too intelligent and articulate not to have drawn attention to himself as soon as he arrived on campus to start his research the year before. It wouldn’t have helped that he had recently been appointed Welfare Officer for the Students Representative Council.

Cameron crossed the verandah, unbolted the back door – in the process letting in a blast of oven-hot Berg wind – and called ‘Mirambo’ at the retreating back just loud enough, he hoped, to be heard. He wasn’t, so he had to call again – too loudly for comfort. Mirambo turned and Cameron beckoned him in through the backdoor and into the dining room, closing the door and navigating the familiar few feet across the room in the dark before switching on the light in the kitchen.

‘Shit man, Cameron, I thought you weren’t going to let me in. Your car is in the garage so I knew you were here.’

How did he know the car was in the garage? It couldn’t be seen from outside, unless he had pulled himself up to peer through the fanlight, which seemed unlikely. Had he been watching the house and seen them come in earlier? Had he been told they were back by whoever had been listening to Jules’s phone-call to her mother when they got in? Jules had heard the usual click and complained about never being able to have a private conversation. The Special Branch’s white Corolla hadn’t been parked round the corner in its usual spot when they came back, so that couldn’t be the source of the information.

‘How about some coffee?’ Cameron asked. As usual he felt guilty for allowing even the slightest doubt to creep in. One got that way – more so when one had children.

‘Yeah, that would be good if you don’t have anything stronger.’

Cameron ignored the hint and, taking his time, checked and filled the kettle before switching it on.

‘How can I help?’ he asked.

‘I got information this morning that the Special Branch are looking for me, I’ve been holed-up in the library all day and now I need a safe house.’

Cameron’s stomach seemed to be taking on a life of its own. This could end up being a lot worse than a midnight discussion about the Zulu kingdom.

‘But this isn’t a safe house. They are watching me all the time.’

‘Precisely,’ Mirambo replied. ‘They would never imagine that anyone, not even a black man, could be stupid enough to hole-up in a house he knew was being watched.’

‘How do you know it isn’t being watched now and that you weren’t seen coming here?’

‘If I had been seen they would have broken down the door and been in here by now, wouldn’t they?’ Mirambo answered. ‘And anyway I checked very carefully. Venter’s car wasn’t around the corner. There’s no need to sound so edgy.’

‘I’m not edgy,’ Cameron said. ‘But if I were edgy it might be because I’ve just been woken up in the middle of the night by somebody who is on the run from the Special Branch. I don’t know what they think you have done, but whatever it is they will call it terrorism and if they find you here I will be arrested for harbouring a terrorist. That carries a minimum five-year jail term, and it did so even before they declared their State of Emergency last month. It would be hardly surprising if I sounded a bit edgy. Why now, anyway – what are they after you for now?’

Cameron felt bad enough when a sobbing Nicky sometimes had to be peeled off him when he tried to drop her off at kindergarten in the morning, arms in a strangulation lock round his neck, legs clenched round his waist. She’d be able to stick on a horse well enough when she got a bit bigger – he wanted to be around to watch her get bigger. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like if they took him away from her in the middle of the night, and Hilton wouldn’t be much better.

‘If they catch a black man like me,’ Mirambo said, ‘they will lock me up and throw away the key – that is if they don’t decide to avoid legal irritation by just shooting me. That will be after they have stubbed their Texans out on me, saved me the trouble of cutting my fingernails by pulling them out, rearranged my dentistry and broken my toes. And that’s if I’m lucky. And you are worried about five years in prison. How committed to the struggle are you anyway?’

None of this was an answer to Cameron’s question.

‘I don’t see how it would help the struggle for me to spend five years gazing at the walls of a cell in Pretoria,’ he said.

‘No. But there’s no reason to think they would catch us. It’s Thursday today,’ Mirambo said, glancing at the kitchen clock. ‘Friday in fact. If I could stay here for the rest of the night, lie up tomorrow when you go to varsity, and sleep here another night, then you could take me up to Bushman’s Neck in the boot of your car when you go fishing on Saturday. I need to get out to Lesotho.’

‘You’ve got this all planned out haven’t you?’ Cameron said.

With a sharp eye for detail too – the Renault 16’s boot would be just about big enough for someone tall and thin, even someone as tall as Mirambo, to curl up in. How did Mirambo know that there wasn’t anyone living in the room at the back, originally intended for the white South African family’s regulation ‘maid’ but converted by Jules into a room to be let to a student?

‘No,’ Mirambo replied. ‘I haven’t had time to plan anything. It only occurred to me that the fishing might provide a good smokescreen as I was walking round from John’s house. I wanted…’

A sudden knocking startled them. This time it was from the front door.

‘Sssh,’ hissed Cameron, pointing to the pantry door.

Opening the door released a soup of smells – curry spices, banana and cabbage prominent among them. Cameron signalled to Mirambo to go in and, when he had done so, closed the door to a slit through which Mirambo should, with luck, be able to hear something of what was going on.

Sweet Jesus, Cameron thought, if that is the Special Branch they haven’t wasted any time. The knocking didn’t sound like the overture to a police raid. It wasn’t loud enough and it wasn’t incessant – in fact it was oddly tentative. Whoever was out there certainly wasn’t trying to break the door down – at least not yet. Cameron’s mouth was dry and he felt sick. He froze for an instant, having difficulty believing that this was happening, then moved quickly through the dining room to the lounge, keeping the lights off, relying on the slivers of light from the street lamps that came through the curtains. One spent a lot of one’s life in the dark.

‘Who is it? What do you want?’

He spoke loudly enough, he hoped, to be heard but not to wake Jules or the children.

‘Whiskers,’ came a parched-sounding voice, ‘have you seen Whiskers? He didn’t come in for his supper tonight and I don’t know where he is.’

Cameron unlocked and opened the front door. The pink dressing-gowned and slippered figure, grey hair imprecisely trapped in random multi-coloured rollers, was an unlikely advance party of the Special Branch.

‘Whiskers,’ she repeated, ‘have you seen my Whiskers?’

Relief washed over Cameron. He had to suppress an untimely giggle – even without the verandah light on it was not at all difficult to see Mrs Scheepers’ whiskers.

‘Have you any idea what the time is, Mrs Scheepers?’

‘Of course I have, just because I’m old doesn’t mean I’m stupid. It’s just after midnight. But I was in the garden looking for Whiskers, I saw him on your wall this afternoon, I saw your kitchen light was on, so I came to ask you if you had seen him. I can’t go to sleep for worry. Have you seen Whiskers? I hope that dog of yours hasn’t done anything to him.’

This midnight doorstep conversation was beyond bizarre.

‘Border collies don’t eat cats, Mrs Scheepers. As it happens, I don’t know where he is, but I assure you that he is not out somewhere chasing Whiskers.’

Cameron refrained from adding that border collies have better things to do with their lives than chasing cats – like guarding the house and barking at midnight intruders.

‘Agh, true as God that dog of yours will be up to mischief – and my Whiskers is lost.’

Mrs Scheepers appeared to notice for the first time that Cameron was in his dressing gown and pyjamas.

‘Go back inside, young man. You should be in bed.’

Cameron thought she had something there. She turned away and shuffled her slippers down the path towards the gate. Cameron closed the door, locked it, and this time slid the bolts home, top and bottom. He slipped through to the kitchen and found Mirambo had already broken pantry cover.

‘What the hell was that about?’ Mirambo asked. ‘I couldn’t hear properly but it sounded like a woman.’

‘It was – it was Mrs Scheepers, our nextdoor neighbour. She was looking for her cat – she thinks Kali might have eaten it.’

‘Holy shit, Cameron, she gave me a fright. I have never understood the priority white people give to animals. Most of you feed your dogs better than your gardeners and worry more about cruelty to animals than about black kids starving to death in the townships. But your dog is a lay-about, so she need not worry.’

‘That is what I told her,’ Cameron said, ‘though not in those exact words.’

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 had 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 or 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.’

‘I’m not trying to defend anything,’ Lynn replied. ‘I’m just trying to understand what the thinking might have been behind planting a bomb in that particular place at that particular time. Isn’t that the kind of thing historians are supposed to do? Understanding isn’t endorsement.’

‘What I’d like to understand,’ said Derek, ‘is what kind of night watchman it is who is employed to watch, which presumably involves using his eyes, but not only doesn’t spot a package lying under a bench just outside the main door of the symbolic building he is supposed to be watching, but goes and sits right on top of the package.’

‘A sixty year-old watchman, to be precise, according to the paper,’ said Lynn. ‘He would have had a twelve-hour shift the night before, probably spent two hours getting home after his shift, not had much to eat, and then had to try to sleep during the day with the wind threatening to rip the roof off his hut. He would then have had to spend another two hours travelling back into town in an overcrowded bus. Probably a very tired watchman, I would guess.’

‘Well at least he doesn’t have to worry about any of that any more,’ said Derek.

‘The file-photo of the front of the building in the Mercury this morning, showed two benches just next to the stairs going up to the front door,’ Patrick said. ‘You can see the mouth of a run-off rainwater pipe running under the stairs. The bomb would have been pushed into the pipe, which would account for the fact that the watchman didn’t spot it and also presumably for the fact that it apparently didn’t actually do much damage to the building.’

Patrick could be relied on to have all the answers – particularly by himself.

‘And that presumably accounts for the fact that the unfortunate watchman was almost directly in the line of fire,’ added Cameron.

‘Anyone who didn’t know you better might find it surprising that such a prominent Liberal should know so much about planting bombs,’ Louis said, looking at Patrick, ‘but you are, of course, wholly opposed to violence.’

‘Of course,’ said Patrick, ‘unlike some among us.’

‘Come on, Patrick,’ Cameron said. ‘How many times have we had this discussion? You know as well as I do that the ANC only resorted to violence when it became absolutely clear that the Nationalist Government was incapable of understanding any other response to its own violence.’

Cameron paused – it was not impossible that the common room might be bugged. He needed to weigh his words, but it couldn’t be left at that.

‘What are people supposed to do?’ he went on. ‘Are they expected to allow themselves to be ground-down under the jackboots for ever, while their houses are bulldozed and their children denied decent education, and then tear-gassed, beaten and shot when they protest? What are people supposed to do when they, their parents, their families and friends are humiliated every day of their lives? I could go on. If they aren’t going to listen to reason voluntarily, somebody needs to make them listen.’

‘But the end, Cameron, can never justify the means,’ Patrick replied.

‘Tell that to the government, Patrick,’ Cameron said. ‘Tell that to the government.’

‘I do, you know I do,’ Patrick said, ‘that is what I joined the Liberal Party for in the 1950s.’

‘But the Liberal Party was banned over twenty years ago,’ Cameron said. ‘If they didn’t listen to Albert Luthuli and Mandela, and aren’t listening to Tutu and Helen Suzman and all the others who have been trying to persuade them to change their minds about their mad apartheid dream, why would they listen to you?’

‘Let me remind you again, Cameron,’ Patrick said, ‘of what Aldous Huxley wrote: The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced. Now I’ve got work to do, even if the rest of you haven’t.’

Patrick extracted his post from his pigeonhole and processed, with the gravitas appropriate to a Professor and Head of Department, out of the staff-room and along the corridor to his office.

Cameron, desperate to get away, decided that Patrick’s attempt to dismantle the group gave him a cue to leave that wouldn’t look too suspicious. As he reached his office door he could hear the phone ringing inside.

‘Cameron, I’m