‘When you came to see me in my office,’ van Zyl said after a few moments, ‘I did you the courtesy of offering you a cup of coffee, you could repay the courtesy by coming round in front of me so that I can see you.’
Cameron waited a few more seconds before walking slowly round to the front of the wheelchair and standing looking down at van Zyl. All that could be seen of him was his head, bent forward so that his chin was almost on his chest – the rest of him, including both arms, was covered by a predominantly red tartan rug tucked in behind his shoulders. The skin on his forehead and his prominent cheek-bones was a pallid greyish colour that matched his thinning hair, cut short in an incongruous crew-cut. The pale sheen of his skin made van Zyl’s face look like a waxwork. The angle his head was bowed at compelled him to look up at Cameron over the top of steel-rimmed glasses, but it was Cameron who again felt like the supplicant as he stood with his own head bowed to look down at van Zyl.
‘You didn’t need to have Mutoni killed,’ Cameron said. ‘She was a brave and gentle person who was helping to put the Hutu leaders responsible for the genocide in Rwanda behind bars.’
‘She had a name, did she?’ van Zyl replied slowly, his voice rasping. ‘She was going to be killed anyway, I merely made use of her death, I didn’t have her killed. But why would I be interested in the Rwandan genocide anyway? I spent the best years of my life working to ensure the safety of the one state in Africa where separate development was going to make sure that the kind of inter-tribal slaughter that took place in Rwanda was eliminated. And what happened? Liberals and communists like you were taken in by the ANC and undid all our good work. You just have to look at the mess the country is in now to see that we were right all along.’
‘The difference between then and now, Colonel van Zyl, or perhaps just Mr van Zyl,’ Cameron said, ‘was well summed up by Desmond Tutu when he said that apartheid was bound to bite the dust eventually “because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil”. I am sceptical about the word “evil” myself, but Tutu was dead right about apartheid being evil.’
‘You are only sceptical about evil, Dr Beaumont, because, like all communists, you are entirely godless,’ van Zyl said. ‘If apartheid was so evil, and Mandela’s arrival was the Second Coming, how do you explain the undeniable fact that the majority of black people in South Africa are no better off now than they were when we were in control?’
‘I suppose all the selective assassinations, the torturing and the disappearances you people were responsible for were God-full rather than godless,’ Cameron said. ‘But I didn’t come here for a political or theological debate with you. I came to tell you the game is up. It is over – and you have lost. Your loyal henchmen are busy implicating you in Mutoni’s murder as we speak. The police know where you are and I just came to make sure you are still here when they come to arrest you.’
‘Come, come, Dr Beaumont,’ van Zyl replied, ‘who uses words like “henchmen” these days? That little French Couve de Murville bangbroek – your English ‘scaredy-cat’ doesn’t cover it – may be talking, but I know Hannes won’t be. You didn’t come just to make sure I don’t head off down the M1 in my formula one wheelchair, you came to gloat. You say the game is up. Perhaps it is, but then again perhaps it isn’t. But even if the game is over you certainly didn’t win just because you have somehow managed to avoid spending the rest of your life in jail.’
Cameron could feel that the rigid control he’d carried over from his silent rearrangement of the chess pieces into this wildly improbable conversation was beginning to wear thin.
‘It isn’t a bloody game,’ Cameron said. ‘Mutoni has been murdered and, thanks to you, I’ve just spent weeks and weeks locked in a police cell with a stainless steel toilet for company.’
‘It was you who used the term, Dr Beaumont,’ van Zyl said. ‘You said “the game is up – its over” and told me I had lost. But you have lost a lot more than I have.’
‘I was speaking metaphorically. What makes you think I’ve lost anything? What have I lost?’ Cameron asked, then wished he hadn’t allowed van Zyl, once again, to dictate the path of the conversation.
‘Your sanity, for a start,’ van Zyl said. ‘You’ve been undergoing counselling for post-traumatic stress disorder for years, and you would be very hard put to deny that my phonecalls to remind you of our attentions in Pietermaritzburg have had you worried. You’ve also lost your job again. To adapt the Oscar Wilde quotation, “To lose one job may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.”’
‘What do you mean I’ve lost my job again?’ Cameron asked – van Zyl seemed to be enjoying this conversation a lot more than he was, which was not what was supposed to happen.
‘I wouldn’t have thought there could be too many different meanings to the statement that you have lost your job,’ van Zyl said. ‘Your head of department and the Vice Chancellor of the university you used to work at here have both received a series of letters and phone-calls suggesting that continuing to employ members of staff who are being charged with murder is not good for the university’s reputation. The callers and letter writers have been assured that you are no longer employed by the university. I am surprised you haven’t received notification to that effect.’
‘So much for being innocent until proved guilty,’ Cameron muttered, as much to himself as to van Zyl.
‘Don’t be naïve, Dr Beaumont,’ van Zyl said. ‘What university is ever going to want to employ anyone who has made front-page headlines in The Sun? But you can get another job, and if you live long enough you might regain your sanity – in so far as anyone who holds the political views you hold could ever be described as sane. In my view, your greatest loss has to be that mistress of yours. She had such a beautiful body – it was such a pity we had to blemish it. That loss is irreversible.’
It took a moment for Cameron to register that the ‘mistress’ van Zyl had referred to was Lynn. He had never thought of her in those terms, even if they had once been technically accurate. That same moment was all it took for Cameron feel a white-hot fury. He knew that if van Zyl had been standing up he could not have restrained himself from smashing his forehead into van Zyl’s death-mask of a face, which looked as if it would have shattered rather than squelched. But van Zyl was in a wheel-chair and a head-butt would have required Cameron to go down on his knees to him. Enraged as he was, Cameron realised that van Zyl would probably have regarded the symbolism as worth the pain.
‘You need to find somewhere to sit down, Dr Beaumont,’ van Zyl said. ‘You are shaking. Has anyone ever told you that you get angry too easily? It could get you into trouble. It could, for example, lead to your arrest for head-butting a Mossad agent.’
Cameron felt a sudden chill tempering his fury – could the bastard read his mind?
‘Didn’t you think, with hindsight of course, that the white chocolate buttons constituted an exceptionally elegant move?’ van Zyl asked. ‘I was particularly pleased by that. I didn’t of course tell David Joel why he should offer you one of the buttons, nor did I tell him that your response was likely to be violent – but I paid him well enough, and his nose had been broken before. I’m sorry to have to tell you, but you were always too predictable to be a particularly interesting opponent, Dr Beaumont. Carter George was getting very bored of beating you on line, so it made a nice change to come over to this soggy island to beat you in person, even if, regrettably, that could still only be virtually rather than literally. There was nothing virtual about the beating we gave your mistress, of course. She’s a very stubborn woman, so you are much better off without her. She held out remarkably well – but then women do, of course, generally have a higher pain threshold than men. As I said earlier, Dr Cameron, you aren’t the brightest button in the box, but I expect you managed to work out that the blood on the one stone was your mistress’s blood. I want to assure you that I took it from blood on her bac
k – it would have been indelicate for me to touch her bottom.’
Cameron’s white-hot fury had been tempered to a wary, steel-cold anger. Van Zyl was clearly barking mad. He was obviously incapable of anything resembling empathy, and there was something completely unhinged about his callousness. Which of the two of them had lost his sanity? Somewhere a part of him was weeping for Lynn and what she had been subjected to at the hands of this man, but right now he had to put that aside and concentrate on van Zyl. The cold-blooded bastard was trying to provoke him. But to what end? If van Zyl hated him as much as Lynn said he did, he was managing to disguise his hatred very well. His voice, while weak and raspy, hadn’t varied at all, at no stage showing signs of any strong emotion, least of all a passionate hatred. It seemed like time to test that.
‘I’m sorry my final encounter with your attack dog rather undermined your carefully worked out strategy,’ Cameron said. ‘Your senior officers couldn’t have been too impressed with your plan to discredit, rather than murder or lock up, your academic critics if the outcome of the test case was the demise of one of the Special Branch’s most feared operatives.’
‘No, they weren’t very pleased,’ van Zyl said evenly. ‘They demoted me and I was no longer allowed to furnish my much smaller office with my own furniture and paintings. You will have seen and admired those when you visited it. But I did not lose my job, Dr Beaumont. Even if I was no longer a Colonel, I was still in command when you returned to South Africa, as you saw from your vantage point at the Rhodes Memorial car park. Our dogs identified the spot behind the bushes where you had been watching us. The Rhodes Memorial was an appropriate place for your meeting. As Kipling’s poem says:
“His immense and brooding spirit
Still shall quicken and control,
Living he was the land
And dead his soul shall be her soul.” Mine too, I hope.’
Cameron was startled by the way van Zyl’s voice had suddenly shaken off all signs of illness and age as he declaimed Kipling’s bizarre encomium to Cecil Rhodes, carved into the granite of the memorial. Whatever it was that informed post-apartheid South Africa it sure as hell wasn’t Cecil Rhodes’s soul. Underneath his undemonstrative exterior van Zyl was obviously as mad as a hatter.
‘Unlike you, Dr Beaumont,’ van Zyl went on, his voice reverting all the way back to its original wheezy weakness, ‘I did not lose everything. I only lost rank and then only one rank. You lost your job, your home, your wife, your mistress, your children and your country. Look at your life – I’ve been looking at it for some time. You live in a drab terrace house, in a grey post-industrial city, under generally leaden skies. You spend half your life teaching history to second-rate students who couldn’t get into the top universities and who won’t have any use for history when they eventually get jobs as bartenders – if they are lucky. The other half of your life you spend writing letters and articles to newspapers and magazines and academic journals that hardly any people read, and that make no difference whatever to the lives of the few who do. For recreation you grub around on a vegetable patch. I’m right so far, aren’t I?’
Cameron, trying to work out what van Zyl thought he was doing, didn’t reply.
‘So that was what you gained in exchange for what you lost,’ van Zyl went on. ‘But some of what you lost you didn’t actually lose, you discarded, you threw away, you might as well have left on the rubbish dump. You know what I’m talking about. And, as far as you were concerned, allowing your children to live with your skoonma – your mother-in-law – wasn’t much better than leaving them on a rubbish dump, was it? But you didn’t leave them there long did you? They died pretty soon afterwards – your little children, your Hilton and your Nicky – not to mention your wife, Juliet. Crushed to death by a ten-ton truck wasn’t it?’
Cameron finally lost control, realizing as he did so that that was precisely what van Zyl was after – taunting him in his cold-blooded and calculating way until Cameron’s self-control finally cracked, as he had known it would. Shaking with anger, Cameron lunged forward to grab the arms of the wheelchair. He didn’t know what he intended to do to the shrivelled gnome taunting him – beyond lifting the wheelchair into the air and smashing it down as hard as he could upside down on the tiled floor.
Cameron didn’t have time to do anything. As he leaned over, grasping the arms of the wheelchair, he saw in slow motion what looked like a massive erection rising improbably from van Zyl’s groin under the tartan blanket. He was so startled that it took him a fraction of a second too long before he realised what it was and threw himself to the floor to his right. Even as he did so he knew he was too late. He heard the metallic crack as the automatic van Zyl had been nursing under the blanket went off, and felt a thumping blow on the shoulder that twisted him round in the air and made him land on his back among the black chess pieces lining the side of the chess-board. As he lost consciousness he heard another shot. His last thought was one of surprise that the second one seemed to have missed.
Chapter 23
The North-West wind, the wind that brought the rain, had dropped and the skeins of cloud over the Cape Flats were lifting and dissolving. The granite step Cameron was sitting on below the bust of Cecil Rhodes at the Rhodes Memorial was damp. He could feel the dampness seeping thinly through the fibres of his jeans, but that was a small price to pay for the view and the scent of pine needles carried by the moisture in the air. A dove was murmuring its appreciation of the morning somewhere in the trees nearby.
Cameron was conscious of the words of the Kipling poem van Zyl had quoted so bizarrely during their terminal conversation, words carved into the plaque behind him. ‘His immense and brooding spirit still shall quicken and control….’ The immense and brooding spirit belonged to mountain, not to man, he thought. Table Mountain – that immense mass of photogenic rock, broodingly treacherous in its relationship with rock-climbers who had the impertinence to challenge it – was the constant witness to the troubled history Cameron had devoted his academic life to studying.
As he watched the clouds lifting, a shaft of sunlight broke through, shining down on the Athlone cooling towers and the townscape around them. Cameron couldn’t work out quite where the Pinelands cemetery was in relation to the towers, but the sunlight was almost certainly shining down on the grave with the simple headstone that bore the names of Jules, Hilton and Nicky. Lynn had taken him to the cemetery the evening before and had come with him to put a bowl of flowers on the grave. It was a relief to see that the vase with the Go stones had been removed. Cameron had noted in passing that Jules’ mother’s name had been added to her father’s headstone a couple of years after he had last been there.
Cameron had wanted to pay an early visit the Rhodes Memorial as a statement of his return. He had no desire whatever to pay his respects to the memory of Cecil Rhodes, whose life and legacy was far more accurately encapsulated in Rhodes’ own five word sentence to the Cape Parliament, ‘I prefer land to niggers’, than it was by Kipling’s poem. The massive neo-classical granite pile Cameron was sitting in was a monument to imperial greed and acquisitiveness, and there would inevitably come a time when the bust of Rhodes suffered the same fate as the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. But that wasn’t Cameron’s problem – at least not immediately – and the memorial held so many personal associations.
Cameron looked down at the bronze lion he had sat on with Jules as they watched the sun rising after an all-night party when they were students. His family had enjoyed an appropriately colonial cream tea at the café after his graduation, and there had been multiple family birthday teas there since. Somewhere up on the hillside behind him was the clump of bush he’d hidden behind as he watched the Special Branch setting their trap. Making a point of returning was never going to exorcise the memory, but it would go some way towards reclaiming the space.
Lynn hadn’t wanted to come with him this morning – the associ
ations were still too raw. She had driven to work early to miss the traffic and Cameron had walked up to the memorial from her designated parking space on the upper campus of the university. The walk had been more difficult than Cameron had expected – the full effect of the anaesthetic from his operation couldn’t have worn off yet, and having his left arm in a sling didn’t help his balance on the uneven path.
Recovery had been a long slow process and there was still a long way to go.
Cameron’s first inkling that he wasn’t dead had come with a growing awareness of, and irritation at, a regular and very penetrating electronic beeping noise. It took him a while to discover that the sound, which would plague his days and nights for the next few weeks, was an alarm telling the overworked nurses that someone’s bag of saline, or antibiotic, or something, needed to be replaced. A nurse, who had been waiting for him to come round, told him he was in the recovery room at the Northern General Hospital and that he had just had a long operation to patch up his shattered shoulder. It was nighttime, his head was very muzzy and he could feel that it was bandaged. He couldn’t feel his shoulder at all.
The next time Cameron woke it was daytime, he was in a much smaller room and Lynn was sitting reading in an armchair near the head of his bed. Cameron couldn’t quite read the title of the book she was reading, which meant that someone must have realized he had been wearing contact lenses and taken them out. He felt very tired but his head no longer felt muzzy. Lynn was absorbed in her book and hadn’t realized that he had woken up, so he was able to look at her without embarrassment.
As she sat reading in her chair, unconscious of his examination, Lynn looked somehow closed in on herself. Cameron thought he would be hard-pressed to say precisely what it was about her that gave that impression, perhaps the way she held her book so close. She was thinner than he remembered and the shadows under her eyes suggested that she hadn’t been sleeping well.
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