It was the answer to my request for background information on Welsh national servicemen in the engine-room of HMS Formidable in 1952. There had been two of them. Forthright’s had then checked four sinkings in suspicious circumstances in 1959, also two in late ‘58. There followed details of the sinking in October 1958 of the French cargo vessel Lavandou, an ex-liberty ship, off the Caribbean island of Martinique. She had been abandoned in deep water, but the edge of a hurricane had drifted her into the shallows north-east of the island so that divers had been able to get down to her. They had found extensive damage to the sea water inlets to the condensers. Second engineer David Price, accused of sabotage by both captain and chief engineer, had by then disappeared, having taken passage on a vessel sailing for Dutch Guiana, which is now Surinam. The enquiry into the loss of the Lavandou found Price to blame. Final clincher for us, the telex concluded, is that he was signed on to the Lavandou as engineer at the port of Cayenne in French Guiana in place of Henri Alexandre Choffel who fell into harbour and drowned after a night on the town. Company owning Lavandou registered in Cayenne. A David Morgan Price served HMS Formidable 1952. Thank you. Pritchard.
That settled it. No good his daughter, or anybody else, trying to tell me he was innocent. Not now. Price, Choffel, Speridion — I wondered what he was calling himself now. None of the names, not even Price, was on the hotel guest list. I asked Gault about the dhow that had met up with the Corsaire in the Straits of Hormuz, but he knew nothing about it and wasn’t really interested. ‘Dhows gravitate to Dubai like wasps to a honey-pot. If you think he was brought in here, then you’d better try the carpet dealers, they know all the gossip. As far as I’m concerned, the Petros Jupiter is a UK problem. Choffel’s no concern of mine…’ He sat staring down at his coffee. ‘Who do you think would employ a man like Baldwick to recruit ships’ officers?’ Another pause. ‘And why?’ he added, looking straight at me.
‘I hoped you could tell me that,’ I said.
‘Well, I can’t.’ He hesitated, then leaned towards me and said, ‘What are you going to do when you meet up with this man Price, or Choffel, or whatever he’s calling himself now?’
I shook my head. ‘I’ve got to find him first,’ I muttered.
‘So you’re letting Baldwick recruit you.’
‘Yes.’
‘A ship you know nothing about. God, man! You don’t know where she is, who owns her, what the purpose of the voyage is. You’re going into it absolutely blind. But you could be right.’ He nodded to himself. ‘About Choffel, I mean. A man like that — it makes sense. There has to be something wrong about the set-up or they wouldn’t be offering double rates and a bonus, and Baldwick wouldn’t be mixed up in it. When’s he get in to Dubai, do you know?’
‘Mustafa said tomorrow.’
‘Have you got his address here?’
I remembered then. ‘A telephone number, that’s all.’
He went to his desk and made a note of it. ‘I’ll have somebody keep an eye on him then. And on this Libyan travel agent. Also, I’ll make enquiries about the tanker you’re joining. But that may not be easy, particularly if she’s over the other side of the Gulf in an Iranian port. Well, that’s it.’ He held out his hand. ‘Nothing much else I can do, except tell you to be careful. There’s a lot of money washing around this port, a lot of peculiar people. It’s much worse than it was when you were last here. So watch it.’ He walked with me to the stairs. ‘That boy who brought the tea. His name is Khalid. If my people pick up anything useful I’ll send him to you.’
‘You don’t want me to come here?’
‘No. From what you told me it could be dangerous. And if it’s politics, not money, you’ve got yourself mixed up in, then my advice is take the next flight home. Your background makes you very vulnerable.’ He smiled and patted my shoulder. ‘Salaam alykoum.’
I walked back to the hotel, changed into a pair of swimming trunks and had a light meal at a table by the pool. The courtyard, airless in the shadow of piled-up balconies, echoed to the murmur of voices, the occasional splash of a body diving. Afterwards I lay in a chair sipping an ice-cold sherbet and thinking about the Aurora B, what it would have been like on the bridge, on watch, when spontaneous combustion, or whatever it was, sent her to the bottom. The people I had contacted in the insurance world — underwriters, Lloyd’s agents, marine solicitors, everyone — they had all emphasized that marine fraud was on the increase. Like ordinary crime, it was tax free, and as the stakes got bigger… I was thinking of Sadeq then, suddenly remembering the name the Shah’s police had given him, a name he had confirmed to us as he lay in the Dragonera’s sick bay. It had been Qasim. So what was Qasim, a man they had claimed was a terrorist, doing on board the Aurora B under another name? Terrorists were trained in the handling of explosives, and instantly I was seeing the fireball holocaust that was so indelibly printed on my mind, knowing that if a bomb had been cleverly placed there was no way the radio operator would be able to put out a call for help.
Was the tanker we were joining intended to go the same way, delayed-action explosives attached to the hull? And us promised a bonus at the end of the voyage! But at least Baldwick was predictable. There was nothing political about him, or about Choffel, and fraud was almost certainly less dangerous. At least, that’s what I tried to tell myself, but Adrian Gault’s warning stayed in my mind. Here in Dubai anything seemed possible.
In the cool of the evening I took a stroll through the suk, looking in on several stall-holders I had known. Two of them were Pakistani. One, an Afridi, dealt in old silver jewellery — bangles, Bedu blanket pins, headpieces, anklets. The other, Azad Hussain, was a carpet merchant. It was he who told me about the dhow. It wasn’t just a rumour, either. He had heard it from a naukhada who had recently brought him a consignment of Persian carpets. They had been smuggled across the border into the little Baluchistan port of Jiwani. There had been two other dhows there, one waiting to embark cattle fodder from an oasis inland, the other under charter to Baldwick and waiting to pick up a group of Pakistani seamen being flown from Karachi.
He couldn’t tell me their destination. It’s a question naukhadas are wary of asking each other in the Gulf and he had only mentioned the matter to Azad because he was wondering why an Englishman like Baldwick should be shipping Pakistanis out of a little border port like Jiwani. If it had been hashish now, trucked down from the tribal areas close under the Hindu Kush or the Karakoram ranges of the Himalayas… He didn’t know the naukhada’s name or the name of the dhow, only that the seamen embarked numbered a dozen or so and the dhow had left immediately, heading west along the coast towards the Straits of Hormuz.
That night I went to bed early and for the first time, it seemed, since Karen’s death I slept like a log, waking to bright sunlight and the call of the muezzin. Varsac was waiting for me when I went down, his eyes shifty, the pupils dilated and his long face wrestling with an ingratiating smile. He wanted a loan. ‘Ees tres cher, Dubai,’ he murmured, his breath stale, his hand clutching at me. God knows what he wanted it for, but I had seen the ragged-turbaned little boy hovering in the entrance and I brushed Varsac off, telling him to stay in the hotel where everything was provided. The boy came running as he saw me. ‘What is it, Khalid?’
‘The sahib send you this.’ He held a folded sheet of paper out to me. ‘You read it inside please, then nobody see.’
It was very brief: Dhow chartered by B came in last night. Loading ship’s stores. Khalid will take you to see it. Take care. You were followed yesterday. A.G. I stuffed the note into my pocket and went out into the street again, Khalid clutching hold of my arm and telling me to go down the alley opposite the hotel and at the Creek I would find his uncle waiting for me with a small boat. I should hire it, but behave as though it were a sudden thought and argue about the money. He would cross by one of the ferry launches and meet me somewhere by the wharfs. Having given me my instructions he ran off in the direction of the mosque. I stood there for a moment as though savouring the warmth of the sunlight that slanted a narrow beam between two of the older dwellings. A casual glance at the Arabs hanging around the hotel narrowed it to two, and there was another inside the entrance who seemed to be watching me, a small man in spotless robes with a little pointed beard and a khanjar knife at his belt. I went back into the hotel, bought an English paper, and then sauntered across to the alley that led to the Creek.