‘Where’s the ship?’ I demanded, grabbing hold of him.
He hesitated. ‘Ask LB. He knows. Not me.’
I turned to Baldwick then, but he had heard my question and was staring at me, his eyes red-rimmed and angry. ‘Just get your things.’
I hesitated. But the man was tired after the flight. He’d been drinking and I’d know soon enough. ‘No, wait,’ he said as I was moving away. And he asked me what the hell I’d been up to at the GODCO offices. *And you went to see Gault. Why?’
‘How do you know?’ I asked.
‘Think I wouldn’t have somebody keep an eye on you.’ He came lumbering towards me. ‘You been talking?’ His tone was menacing.
‘I like to know what ship I’m sailing on, where it’s berthed.’
‘You been asking questions?’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘Adrian Gault I’ve known on and off for years. Perrin, too. With time to kill I looked them up. Why not? And of course I asked them.’
‘I told you to keep yer mouth shut.’ He was glaring at me, and suddenly I couldn’t help it, I had to know.
‘Choffel,’ I said. ‘Will he be on the same ship as me?’
‘Choffel?’ He seemed surprised, repeating the name slowly, his voice reluctant, his eyes sharp. ‘No.’ He was frowning angrily, groping for the right reply. ‘The only engineer on board at the moment is the Chief.’ And to settle the matter he added quickly, ‘His name’s Price if you want to know.’
So I was right. That picture with Baldwick on the edge of it, at Sennen, when the crew came ashore. He had recruited him then, made all the arrangements for getting him to the Gulf. And now he was on board. He was there, waiting for me. I suppose I must have been staring open-mouthed. ‘You don’t concern yourself with Price. Understand?’ He was glaring at me, conscious that the name had meant something to me, but not certain what. ‘You’re not an engineer. You’ve never met him before.’ He was still glaring at me doubtfully and it was Varsac who came to my rescue. He had been talking very fast in French to the new arrival. Now they were both of them looking at Baldwick — the same question.
‘Le tankair. Ou ca?’
Baldwick turned his head slowly, like a bull wearily finding himself baited from another direction. ‘We’re keeping it as a surprise for you,’ he growled. ‘Where the hell d’you think it is? In the bloody water, of course.’ His small eyes shifted to me, a quick glance, then he went off to get a shower.
We all had breakfast together, coffee and boiled eggs, with Baldwick’s beady little eyes watching me as though I was some dangerous beast he had to keep an eye on. Afterwards, when I had packed and was coming away from reception after handing in my room key, Khalid suddenly appeared at my side. ‘For you, Said.’ He slipped me a blue envelope. ‘Sahib say it arrive last night.’ He was gone in a flash, scuttling out into the street, and I was left with an English air mail letter card in my hand. The writing was unfamiliar, a round, flowing hand, and the sender’s name and address on the back came as a surprise. It was from Pamela Stewart.
I was thinking back to that lunch at Lloyd’s, the Nelson Exhibition room. It was all so remote. And to have reached me now she must have sent the letter off the instant Gault had reported my arrival in Dubai. The Land Rovers had started up, Baldwick shouting to me, and I slipped it into my pocket, wondering why she should have written, why the urgency.
It was just after ten as we pulled away from the hotel, Baldwick with the engineer officers in the first Land Rover, Mustafa with myself and the other deck officers in the second. There was no sign of Pieter Hals. I slit open the air mail letter and began reading it as we threaded our way through Dubai’s crowded streets. It appeared to have been written in a hurry, the writing very difficult to read in places. Dear Trevor Rodin, it began. Daddy doesn’t know I’m writing, but I thought somebody should tell you how much we appreciate what you are doing and that our thoughts are with you. It went on like that for almost half a page, then suddenly she abandoned the rather formal language, her mood changing. I was a fool, leaving you like that. We should have gone on to a club and got drunk, or gone for a walk together, done whatever people do when the heart’s too full for sensible words. Instead, I made a silly excuse and left you standing there under the Nelson picture. Please forgive me. I was upset. And my mind’s been in a turmoil ever since. I stopped there, staring down at the round, orderly writing on the blue paper, aware suddenly that this wasn’t an ordinary letter. ‘God Almighty!’ I breathed. The Canadian was saying something. His hand gripped my arm. ‘It’s not Mina Zayed. Abu Dhabi is west of Dubai. We’ve turned east.’
I slipped the letter back into my pocket and looked out at the chaos of construction work through which we were driving. This was the outskirts of Dubai and he was right. We were on the coast road headed east towards Sharjah, and the shamal was starting to blow little streamers of sand across the tarmac road.
‘Is it Mina Khalid, you reck’n?’ I shook my head. I didn’t think it was deep enough. ‘Mebbe an SMB.’ He turned to Mustafa. ‘They got one of the big single mooring buoys for tanker loading along the coast here?’ he asked.
The Libyan stared at him blankly. ‘Well, where the hell are we going?’ But all Mustafa said was, ‘You see. Very good accommodation. Sea view very fine.’
I was staring out of the sand-blown side window, memories of childhood flooding back. Nothing had changed, only the road and a few modern buildings. The country either side was just the same — a vast vista of sky and sand. We passed the remains of the little tin-roofed hospital where my mother had been a nurse. 1 could remember playing in the dunes there, pretending to be Sayid bin Maktun, the old sheikh of Dubai who had surprised a big raiding force from Abu Dhabi and slaughtered sixty of them at their camp in the desert. We played at pirates, too, using an old dugout canoe we had found washed up on a sand spit in the silted Sharjah estuary, and the little Baluch boy was our slave.
I sat there, staring out as the low dunescape dropped away to the gleaming mud flats of the subqat that stretched out to a distant glint of the sea. The wind was stronger here, blowing out of the north-west, and I could have cried for the memory of that little Baluch boy, so thin, so scared, so dead these many years. We skirted Sharjah, the subqat giving way to low coastal dunes, sand blowing again in long streamers from the wheels of the leading Land Rover. Occasionally we caught glimpses of the sea, a dark blue-green shot through with the white of breaking wavetops, and the cloudless sky pearl-coloured with the glare of the sun. A glimpse of the fort that had been a radio communications centre in the early days and we were driving fast along the coast towards Ras al Khaimah, the interior of the Land Rover hot and full of sand, the dunes shimmering.
We stopped only once, just beyond Umm al Qaiwain, for sandwiches and coffee served on the tailboard of the leading Land Rover. We didn’t stay long, for though we were under the lee of a small dune sparsely covered with brittle dried-up furze, the wind blowing straight off the sea filled the air with a gritty dusting of fine sand. Less than an hour later we pulled into Ras al Khaimah, where the Jebel cliffs begin to form a red background. Here we were given quarters in a little fly-screened motel with cracked walls and temperamental plumbing. The skeletal ribs of a half-constructed dhow thrust pale wooden frame-ends against the blue sky.
What the hell were we doing at Ras al Khaimah? Mustafa and the Land Rovers had left as soon as our luggage had been off-loaded. And since Baldwick wouldn’t talk about it, speculation was rife, particularly among the deck officers. Accustomed to think in terms of navigation, our guess was that the ship was across the other side of the Gulf in Iranian waters, or perhaps loading at one of the island tanker terminals, Abu Masa or Tumbs. The engineers didn’t care so much. Fraser had got hold of a bottle of Scotch and the man from Marseilles, Jean Lebois, had brought some cognac with him. Baldwick and Varsac joined them and the four settled down to drink and play poker. I went for a walk.