Feldman! The C-in-C, too, had sold me down the river! They had turned over everything I had said and collected to this sharp-tongued barrister who was in the process of making a Roman holiday out of me!
'I wasn't after treasure, nor was my brother,' I flared. 'I wanted to find out what sank the Waratah so that I could make sure it didn't happen again.'
'A very commendable sentiment,' murmured Musgrave. 'Yet, despite the fact that this was the very purpose for which the authorities sent your ship to sea, you saw fit not merely not to consult them about your. . ah. . proposed enterprise, but you acted in flat defiance of their order.'
I could not reply.
Musgrave went on. 'It seems, on looking at the case as an outsider, that there must have been some compelling reason why at least three members of the Fairlie family have chosen to risk death-endure death, even-for the sake of the Waratah' The bland tone vanished. Tell the court, Captain Fairlie,' he ordered.
‘I've already told you — the safety of the oil rigs.'
'Then,' said Musgrave, 'you can undoubtedly describe, on the basis of your near-miss with death, and your brother's death, what those conditions are?'
1 said unhappily, 'There are still certain imponderables which require elucidation.'
Musgrave let the lightning rest on every syllable as he repeated my words. There-are-still-certain-imponderables-which-require-elucidation.'
The newsmen were grinning and scribbling. This was what they wanted.
Musgrave went on. ‘I put it to you, Captain Fairlie, that you used your brother and an aircraft, irreplaceable because of the arms embargo against this country, as a spotter for some nefarious enterprise which you will not disclose to the court, and in doing so caused his death. You also used a ship belonging to the state for the same purpose and caused tens of thousands of rands' worth of damage both to the vessel and her equipment. You have also destroyed the value of the weather watch in the Southern Ocean by breaking its continuity, so that the observations carried out during the past year will have to be scrapped, and the whole project begun again.'
I looked desperately across at Tafline. Her eyes did not meet mine. She was taut, white-faced. Had the Waratah cost me her, too?
I did not know the answer to that when, raw and damaged, I returned to her flat after the inquiry. There was no doubt that in the court's eyes the whole broadside of blame would be mine. She opened the door and went straight across to the window, not speaking. The dusk had come and the beam of light from the lighthouse flicked across her face and gave it a brightness which is with me still.
She still did not face me when she asked.
That night when the big wave hit Walvis Bay-what did you see, Ian?'
'Dead ahead I saw a ship, an old-fashioned ship. She was heading into the wind.'
She did not turn, and the light beam cut across her face. It came and went as she stood looking out.
I do not think either of us heard the telephone ring the first two or three times. Then she went slowly across to the instrument and spoke quietly. She said 'thank you' mechanically and went back to the window.
She waited, then said, 'That was Mr Hoskins. The late papers are full of it. The Navy has found part of your father's airliner. It has got a message on it — for you.
'It is addressed from the Waratah.'
CHAPTER TEN
The ragged rectangle of aluminium, about the size of a bathmat, looked strangely dull against the polish of the colonel's wooden desk. The edges were scolloped as if they had been hacked off with some inadequate instrument. The metal, section of an aircraft fuselage, did not lie flat and streamlined but was buckled and uneven. Painted orange letters, discoloured and faint but still readable, spelled 'b-o-k'. The upright stroke of the ‘b' was half obliterated by the torn edge. Fastened through the aluminium by its corroded strap was a gold wristwatch.
Tafline was with me at Railways and Harbours Police Headquarters the next morning. The day was bright and mild; we had lingered a little in the street before the building to admire the glorious proteas, the over-early yellow ixias and Tyrian purple babianas of the Malay women flower-sellers. She was quiet and serious and refused flowers after we came out again.
She had been that way ever since I had told her about my sighting of the old-fashioned sailing ship in the path of Walvis Bay. She had not, as I feared, derided it; she simply did not refer to it again, but she had been abstracted from time to time during the evening.
Both our consternation and perplexity at Mr Hoskins' news-I had gone out and bought newspapers with their screaming headlines — had been heightened by a second telephone call hard on the heels of his. The caller had been Colonel Joubert, head of the Railways and Harbours Police. He had first made sure it was Tafline he was speaking to, and then had requested-in a way which made it clear it was more a command than a request-that both of us should meet him next day. Why Tafline? What had she to do with the finding of a section of fuselage purporting to have come from my father's airliner? How, I asked myself uneasily, did Colonel Joubert know in the first place to find me at her flat? It presupposed that the authorities had a close eye on me. The papers stated that the Navy had found the panel floating at sea when the last warship (unnamed) was returning to Simonstown after a stay on the coast more than a week after the search had finally been abandoned. At first, the floating panel was thought to have been part of the Buccaneer; when it was realized that it was not, it was turned over to the Railways Police as falling within their sphere of investigation.
By some tacit understanding, Tafline and I did not discuss the Waratah or the panel or the hundred questions which thronged our minds that evening after the two telephone calls. After supper, we had sat on the floor of her flat, in one another's arms, and, as the lighthouse flash came and went, she had told me of her night's vigil and the dawn of her love; she took the pain, from my wounds; we lost ourselves in each other. I would wait with a kind of unbelieving impatience for the light flash to come and tell me that the lovely face was real, close to my face; when it was gone, the warmth of her lips against mine would underwrite the moment's vision with a searching tenderness.
Now, Colonel Joubert said tersely, 'Usually the sort of thing we have to cope with is an old bottle with a tear-jerker message in it, supposed to have been set adrift in an emergency which existed only in the joker's imagination. This has an original slant to it.'
He lit another cigarette off the one he was smoking and placed it, ash towards himself, on the desk's pock-burned inner camber.
A police major, sitting to one side of the colonel, said sarcastically, 'At least your father doesn't claim to have met your grandfather aboard the Waratah.'
The policemen looked as if they had listened to too many woes to accept anything at face value; several civilian aircraft experts, whose exact function I did not know, seemed strained.
'Not so fast,' I started to say. 'The only information I have is from the newspapers, but first I want to know why …'
'Why the juffrou has been brought into it?' The colonel swung back on his chair and blew a cloud of smoke towards the ceiling.
'She sent a very strange telegram to you.'
'Strange? There was nothing strange about it!'
He picked out a photocopy from a file in front of him.
' "Until we see each other, please keep away from the Waratah. Tafline."'
There was certainly nothing wrong with the Navy's staff-work. First, the record of my interview with the C-in-C which had been turned over to Musgrave, and now a private telegram to mel