When we reached the hotel, the Libyan, whose name was Mustafa, gave us his card, which was gold-embossed with an address in one of the back alleys near the suk, also the name of a nearby store where we would be provided with lightweight trousers and sleeveless shirts. We would be at the hotel for at least two days, he said — until LB arrived. No, he didn’t know the name of the tanker, or where it was berthed.
He was a travel agent. He knew nothing about ships. Anything we spent in the hotel would be paid for, food, drinks, everything, but if there was something special required we could contact him. The dark eyes stared at us coldly and I wondered what a Libyan was doing running a travel agency in Dubai. He left us with the information that two of our ship’s officers were already billeted in the hotel and another would arrive tomorrow. Choffel was not among the names he mentioned.
After checking in, I went straight to the store. It was a cheap place, if anything could be called cheap in Dubai, the trousers and shirts poor quality cotton and not very well cut. But at least they were cool, for by the time I had had a shower the sun, beating on to the balcony of my room, was very hot. I went down to the desk again and had them check through the names of all the guests in their hotel. The place was a microcosm of modern Dubai, business men from Japan, Germany, France, Holland, Britain, anywhere that produced the machines and infrastructure the Gulf exchanged for its oil. There were even two Chinese and a little group from Byelorussia, all of them with briefcases brimful of specifications and optimism. There were oilmen, too, and air crews staying the night, as well as men like ourselves, officers from coasters in the Creek and ships in Port Rashid, all vocal testimony to the fact that Dubai remained the mercantile centre of the Gulf, the entrepot for the United Arab Emirates.
But there was no Choffel, no Speridion, not even anyone with a name that looked as though it might be Welsh. Something I did discover, however — there had been half a dozen guests booked in by Mustafa’s agency the previous week and they had left three days ago, not in taxis, but in Land Rovers. Again, Choffel had not been one of them. Before that there was no record of any of Mustafa’s clients having stayed at the hotel, though back in October he had booked accommodation and then cancelled it. The receptionist remembered that because the hotel had been fully booked and the last minute cancellation of four rooms had upset the management.
I walked down to the Creek then, turning left towards the bridge and found a place where I could sit in the sun with a coffee and a glass of water and watch the world go by. There was a coaster coming in from the Gulf flying the Iranian flag, lighters and launches and small boats bobbing in its wake, the whole waterborne concourse a pageant of movement with a big ocean-going dhow, a boom by the look of it, though it was hard to tell as it lay like a barge right in front of the coaster’s bows, its engine presumably broken down. Noise and movement and colour, every type of dress, every coloured suit, the smell of dust and spices, and the bloated carcase of a goat floating slowly past with its legs stiff in the air like the legs of a chair. I finished my coffee and closed my eyes, dozing in the warmth of the sun. The unhurried tempo of the desert was all about me, men walking hand-in-hand or squatting motionless, the leisurely, endless haggling over price at every shop and stall in sight. Time stood still, the Muslim world of Arabia flowing round me, familiar and relaxing. It is an atmosphere in which fatalism thrives so that, dozing in the sun, I was able to forget my worries about the future. I was tired of course. But it was more than that. It was in my blood, the feeling that I was just a straw in the stream of life and everything the will of God. Insh’Allah! And so I didn’t concern myself very much about the reaction of Baldwick and his friends if they were to discover I was visiting the Lloyd’s agent and GODCO. My only problem, it seemed to me at the time, was which of them I should visit first, or whether to go at all. It was so much easier to sit there in the sun, but I did need to check those crew details with the oil company’s marine superintendent.
In the end, after cashing a traveller’s cheque at one of the banks, I went to the GODCO building first, largely because it was there in front of me, a towering new block dominating the downstream bend of the Creek. After the noisy, saffron-scented heat of the waterfront, the cloistered air-conditioning of the interior hit me like a refrigerator. The marine superintendent’s offices were on the fifth floor with a view seaward to a litter of cranes, masts and funnels that was the Port Rashid skyline. Captain Roger Perrin, the name Saltley had given me, was the man in charge of the whole of the Company’s fleet, and when I was finally shown into his office, he said curtly, ‘Why didn’t you phone? I’d have had everything ready for you then.’ He was bearded, with pale cold eyes and a presence that I suspected had been carefully cultivated in the years he had been moving up the Company’s marine ladder. He waved me to the chair opposite him where the hard light pouring through the plastic louvres of the Venetian blinds shone straight on my face. ‘Well, why are you here? What do the solicitor people want to know that I haven’t already told them?’ And he added, ‘I’m responsible for Casualty Coordination, but I tell you now, in this Company we don’t expect casualties. And in the case of these two tankers there’s nothing to co-ordinate. They’ve just disappeared and your people know as much about it as I do. So why are you here?’
The only reason I could give him was the crew pictures, but when I asked to see them, he said, ‘I sent a full set of the pictures to our London office. That was three days ago. You could have seen them there.’
‘I had to go to France.’
‘France?’ The fact that I hadn’t come straight out from London seemed to make a difference. He gave a little shrug. ‘Well, I’ve no doubt you have your own lines of enquiry to follow.’ He reached behind him to a bookcase where a potted plant stood like a rubbery green sentinel, picked up two files and passed them across the desk to me. I opened the one labelled Aurora B. There were copies of design drawings for the ship’s hull and engines, detailed specifications, and, in an envelope marked personnel, a crew list, together with a full-face close-up of each individual. This was the only item of real interest and while he was telling me how the Indian airforce had mounted a search in the sea area west of Sri Lanka and the oil company’s representatives had appealed through the local press and media for anybody who might have picked up a radio signal or voice message, I went slowly through the pictures. I had met so many odd characters in cargo runs around the Gulf that there was always a chance.
‘Also we have checked the background of every officer — wives, girlfriends, sexual eccentricities, everything.’ He had a flat, rather monotonous voice and my mind kept drifting away, wondering vaguely whether the Lloyd’s agent would have heard from Prit-chard yet. My contact was Adrian Gault. I had met him once, a little shrivelled man who was said to have his ear to the ground and spies in every merchant house on the waterfront. An old Gulf hand like that, surely to God he would know by now what dhow had picked Choffel up, where it had taken him. It was four or five days since the man had left the Corsaire, time enough for news to filter through, for rumour to get its tongue round the story and spread it through the cafes and among the Gulf Arabs cooking over fires on the decks of dhows.