I asked to see the Consul himself, but he, too, was distancing himself from the whole affair. He wasn’t available and I had to be content with a grey-haired, harassed-looking Pakistani, who issued me with temporary papers and then, by raiding some emergency stores, produced a pair of patched grey flannel trousers and a blue seaman’s jersey, socks and a pair of boots.
It was in this peculiar rig that thirteen hours later I arrived at Heathrow. Ahmad Khan had stayed with me until I was actually on the plane. In fact, he saw me to my seat, accompanied by the senior steward. It was a PIA aircraft full of emigrants going to join relatives in Britain, a bedlam of a journey with the toilets awash and one or two children who had never seen a flush lavatory before in their lives. I don’t know what chief steward was told about me, but he and the i ardess kept a very careful watch over me with the result that I had excellent service, my every want attended to immediately.
Brown had not seen fit to see me off and I had been refused permission to telephone. However, I was told he had been informed of my time of departure and flight number, and I presumed he would have passed this on to Saltley so that he would know my ETA at Heathrow. But there was nobody there to meet me and no message. I was delayed only a few moments at Immigration and then I was through and just one of the great flood of humanity that washes through Heathrow Airport. There is nothing more depressing than to be on your own in one of the terminals, all of London before you and nobody expecting you, no plans. The time was 08.27 and it was Sunday. Also it was blowing hard from the north-west and raining, the temperature only a little above freezing — a typical late January day. I changed my salt-stiffened franc notes and Emirate currency, got myself a coffee and sat over it, smoking a duty-free cigarette and thinking over all that had happened since I had left for Nantes ten days ago. No good ringing Forthright’s, the office would be closed and I hadn’t Saltley’s home number.
In the end I took the tube to Stepney Green and just over an hour later I was back in the same basement room, lying on the bed, smoking a cigarette with the legs of passers-by parading across the top of the grime-streaked window. I was looking at the typescript of my book again. ‘You left it her,’ Mrs Steinway had said to me when she brought it down from her room at the back of the ground floor. ‘The girl found it lying on the floor underneath the bed after you’d gone.’ From flipping idly through the pages I began to read, then I became engrossed, all our life together and Balkaer, Cornwall, the birds — it all flooded back, the bare little basement room filled with the surge of the Atlantic breaking against the cliffs, the cry of sea-birds and Karen’s.-voice. There was a strange peacefulness in the words I had written, a sense of being close to the basics of life. In this moment, in retrospect, it seemed like a dream existence and I was near to tears as the simplicity and richness of our lives was unfolded, so vividly that I could hardly believe the words were my own. And at times I found myself thinking of Choffel, those bare hills and the simplicity of his boyhood, Cornish cliffs and Welsh hills, the same thread and at the end the two of us coming together on that dhow.
Next day I phoned Forthright’s, but Saltley’s secretary said he would be at the Law Courts all morning. He was expecting me, however, and she said I could see him in the late afternoon, around four if that was convenient. I was back in the world of marine solicitors, insurance and missing tankers.
CHAPTER THREE
Yes, but what’s the motive?’ I was sitting facing Saltley across his desk and when I told him I didn’t know, he said it was a pity I hadn’t stayed on board instead of jumping on to the dhow just because I was determined to destroy Choffel. ‘If you’d stayed, then you’d have discovered their destination, and sooner or later you would have had an opportunity to get a message out by radio.’
‘Unlikely,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘There are always opportunities.’ And when I pointed out that at least he now knew the tanker was still afloat, which was more than he could have expected when he employed me, he said, ‘I appreciate that, Rodin, but I’ve only got your word for it.’
‘You don’t believe me?’ My voice trembled on the verge of anger.
‘Oh, I believe you. You couldn’t have made it up, not all the people and the astonishing sight of a tanker against cliffs at the head of that inlet. But the ship isn’t there any longer. To get a claim for millions of dollars set aside we’ve got to be able to prove the Aurora B is still afloat.’
‘And my word isn’t good enough?’
‘Not in law. Now if Choffel were still alive…’ He was leaning on his desk, his hands locked together on top of the thick file his secretary had left with him. ‘Is there anything else he told you that’s relevant? Anything at all? You were two days on that dhow together.’
‘He was wounded and a lot of the time he was unconscious, or nearly so.’
‘Yes, of course.’ But then he began to take me through every exchange of words I had had with the man. I found it very difficult to recall his exact words, particularly when he had been rambling on about his boyhood and his life up there in the bare Welsh hills, and all the time those dark eyes staring at me unblinking. Finally Saltley asked me why I thought he had seized the dhow. ‘Surely it wasn’t just to get away from you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Were you really going to kill him?’
‘Possibly. I can’t be sure, can I?’
‘You said his daughter had told him, in that letter of hers, that you were going to kill him. Is that right?’
‘Yes, that’s what he said.’
He was silent for a long time, thinking. ‘If I put you in court, as a witness, they’d dig that out of you right away. They’d say you were mentally unhinged at the time, that you weren’t responsible for your actions, and that you now don’t know what is true and what is the product of your imagination.’
‘They’ll know soon enough,’ I told him angrily. ‘In a few weeks from now the Aurora B will appear in some port or other and Sadeq will carry out his mission. They’ll know then all right.’
He nodded. ‘And Choffel gave no hint to you at any time what that mission might be?’
‘No.’
‘Or the destination?’
‘I tell you, no.’
‘Did you ask him?’
‘About the destination?’
‘Yes. Did you specifically ask him what it was?’
‘I think so,’ I murmured, staring at him and trying to remember, feeling as though I were already in the witness box and he was cross-examining me. ‘I think it was during that first night at sea. We were through the Straits then and into the Oman Gulf and he’d somehow dragged himself up to the poop to tell me the engine needed oil. He started talking then, about the ships he’d been in, the Stella Rosa and the engineer whose name he’d taken. I asked him about the Aurora B and the other ship, and what they were going to do with the oil, where they were going to spill it. It had to be something like that and I thought it was probably a European port, so I asked him where. I remember I kept on asking him where and shaking him, trying to get it out of him.’
‘And did you?’
‘No, I was too rough with him. He was screaming with pain, his mind confused. He said something about salvage, at least that’s what I thought he said. It didn’t make sense unless he was harking back to the first ship he destroyed, the Lavandou, which was supposed to have sunk in deep water but drifted on to a reef instead.’