The Doomed Oasis (10 page)

How could I tell her the boy was dead? “Have you heard from his father at all?”

She shook her head. “No, I've never heard from the Major—not once in all these years.” There was a catch in her voice, and she moved quickly away towards the door. “I'll make you some tea.”

“Please don't bother,” I said. “I have to go now.”

But she was between me and the door, her hands fumbling at her dress, her eyes searching my face. She had finally screwed herself up to the pitch of facing the implication of my visit. “What's happened, Mr. Grant?” she asked. “What's happened between them? As soon as I saw you standing there on the doorstep …”

“Nothing has happened between them. According to my information—”

But she didn't let me finish, wasn't even listening. “I knew they should never have met,” she cried. “They're alike, you see. They've the same nature—obstinate, very obstinate.” She was almost sobbing for breath. “I knew what it would mean. It's in their stars. They're both Sagittarius, you see. And he was such a fine man when I knew him. Such a fine man—and lusty, so full of fire and vitality.” She was wringing her hands, and a sound came from her lips like the sound of keening. “Known it I have, always. Oh, God!” she whispered. And then, staring straight at me: “How did it happen? Do you know how it happened?”

There was nothing for it then but to let her know the facts, such as they were. And because it was easier I handed her the copy of the cable her daughter had sent me. She read it through slowly, her eyes widening as the shock of it went home until they became fixed, almost vacant. “Dafydd!” She murmured his name.

“He's reported missing, that's all,” I said, trying to comfort her, to offer her some hope.

But she didn't seem to take that in. “Dead,” she whispered. And then she repeated his name. “Dafydd?” And her tone was one of shocked surprise. “I never thought it would be Dafydd. That's not right at all.” The fixed stare was almost trancelike. “It was never Dafydd that was going to die.” And a shiver ran through her.

“I'll write to your daughter. No doubt she'll let you have any further information direct.” She didn't say anything, and her eyes still had that fixed, trancelike look as I took the copy of the cable from her nerveless hand. Her behaviour was so odd I didn't like to leave it with her. “Don't worry too much. There's still a chance.…”

“No.” The word seemed to explode out of her mouth. “No, better it is like this, God rest his poor soul.”

Appalled, I hurried past her, out into the fresh evening air. The stars—what a thing to be believing in at a time like this. Poor woman!

But as I drove away, it was the father I was thinking about, a sense of uneasiness growing in my mind, fostered by the violence of her strange reaction. Going back to that house, to that poor woman driven half out of her senses by an old love she couldn't discard; it was all suddenly fresh in my memory—her fears and the way he'd sworn to kill his father. What had happened between those two in the intervening years? Or was this just an accident—one of those things that can happen to any young man prospecting out there in the remote deserts of Arabia?

Back at the office I got out the Whitaker file and read that postscript to David's letter again. But there was nothing in it to give me a clue as to how his father had reacted. The words might have been written by any youngster plunged into new and strange surroundings, except that he had described his father as though he were looking at him with the eyes of a complete stranger. But then that was what he was. Right at the bottom of the file was the dossier Andrews had produced from press-cuttings in the library of the Welsh edition of a popular daily, and I read it through again:

Charles Stanley Whitaker, born Llanfihangel Hall near Usk, 1899. Joined the cavalry as a trooper in 1915, served with Allenby in the offensive against the Turks, and rose to the rank of major. After the war, he stayed on in the Middle East. Policeman, trader, dhow-owner; he adopted the Moslem religion, made the pilgrimage to Mecca, has lived with the Bedouin. His book on his crossing of the Rub al Khali desert was published in 1936. By then he had already become something of a legend. Following publication of his book, he went back to the Middle East, and after three years with Gulfoman Oilfields Development, he joined Wavell's staff on the outbreak of war with the rank of colonel. Awarded the V.C. for gallantry, wounded twice, served with Wingate and later with Wilson. Was still a colonel at the end of the war. He then rejoined Gulfoman Oilfields Development as political representative.

There was a picture pinned to the dossier which showed him in Arab dress standing beside a Land Rover on a desert airstrip. The black patch over the right eye was plainly visible; so, too, was the prominent, beaklike nose. He was slightly stooped, as though conscious of his height; he was a head taller than the other two men in the picture. This and the beard and the black patch over the eye gave him a very formidable appearance, and, though the picture wasn't a very clear one, looking at it again, I couldn't help feeling that he was a man capable of anything, and I could appreciate the impression he had made on a Welsh servant girl all those years ago. He would have been thirty-six then, a good deal younger, and I suppose he had taken her the way he would have taken a slave girl in a Bedouin encampment; but for her it had been something different, an experience so out of the ordinary that she had thought of nothing else for the last twenty-five years.

I wondered whether she still possessed that album full of press-cuttings. I would have liked to look through it and also through the letters from her son, but I couldn't face the thought of going back to the house. I returned the file to its place and wrote to Susan advising her to make the journey to Bahrain and see Erkhard.
Nothing can be done, it appears, at this end
, I told her.
Erkhard seems to be the only man who has the authority to order the search to be resumed
.

Two days later the news of David's death was in
The Times
—a rather guarded account, it seemed to me. It was clearly based on a Company handout, but it did include a brief description by one of the RAF pilots who had flown the search.

Flight-Lieutenant Hill described the truck as similar to those used by oil companies for seismological work, though no company markings showed on either bonnet or sides. It was halfway up the side of a big sand dune, as though it had stalled or bogged down in an effort to surmount this obstacle. It was hardly surprising, he said, that he had flown several times over the area without seeing it; high winds—the local
shamal
—had piled the sand up on one side of it. He had only sighted the truck because the sun was low and it was casting a shadow.

It was less a news story than a short article, and most of it was about Colonel Whitaker—
that strange, half-Arab figure, so prominent in the search for Gulf oil during the past twenty years
. It was “From Our Own Correspondent,” and I had a vague sense as I read it that there was something behind the piece, something that he was not in a position to reveal but that was nevertheless there for those who could read between the lines. Such phrases as:
The fascination of this man who has maintained his theory about oil in the face of persistent failure;
and
Whether he is another Holmes or not, whether the oil company he served for so long will live to regret his departure, only time will tell
. Finally there was this:
It appears there is some foundation for the rumour that his son, though employed by GODCO, was on loan to him for some private purpose, presumably connected with prospecting for oil
.

The suggestion that David had been on loan to his father at the time of his disappearance did nothing to allay the uneasiness that had resulted from my visit to Mrs. Thomas. And then the following morning Captain Griffiths walked into my office and I knew for certain that there was something more to the boy's death than the Company had so far revealed.

Griffiths had docked at first light and was still in uniform, having come straight from his ship. “I promised to deliver this personally into your hands.” He put a fat envelope down on the desk in front of me. “Personally, you understand. He wouldn't risk it through the post.”

“Who's it from?” I asked. But the address was handwritten, the writing familiar. I knew it was from David before he answered my question. “Young Whitaker,” he said and sat himself down in the chair opposite my desk.

I was too startled to say anything for a moment, for the boy had been alive when he'd handed this to Griffiths. I picked it up, staring at the address as though that would give me some clue as to what was inside. “When did he give you this?”

“Well, now …” He frowned. “It was Sharjah, and we were anchored about a mile off—”

“Yes, but what was the date?”

“It's the date I'm trying to remember, man.” His little beard bristled. “Without my log I can't be sure. But we left Basra on January twenty-third and we called at Kuwait, Bahrain, Doha, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai before we anchored off Sharjah; it would be about the middle of the first week in February.”

And David had been reported missing on February 28. Griffiths must have been one of the last people he saw before he went out into the desert—perhaps one of the last of his own race to see him alive.

“Still the same offices, I see.” Griffiths had pulled his pipe out and was busy filling it. He didn't know the boy was dead.

“The trouble is the clients don't pay their bills,” I said and slit the packet open. The old rogue had never settled my account, though he'd admitted that Whitaker had made him a present of fifty quid for getting the boy out to Arabia. Inside was a hand-written letter folded around another envelope that had GODCO, B
AHRAIN
, printed on the flap. Across the front of it he had typed: DAVID WHITAKER—TO BE OPENED ONLY IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH.

Those words—they came as a shock. I stared at them, wondering how he could possibly have known he was going to die. Or was it just a coincidence?

“What's the matter?” Griffiths asked. “What's he been up to?”

I suppose he thought he was in some sort of legal trouble. “You haven't seen
The Times
then?”

“Of course not. I only got in this morning. Why?”

“David Whitaker is dead,” I said. And I told him about the truck they'd found abandoned and the description of it given in
The Times
. “You must have been one of the last people to see him alive.”

“I see.”

His acceptance of it might have surprised me, except that my mind was still on that envelope. “It's almost uncanny,” I murmured.

“What is?”

“Your coming here, with this.” I turned the envelope round so that he could see what was typed across it. “He must have had some sort of premonition.…”

Griffiths nodded his head slowly. “That explains it.” And he added: “May his soul rest in peace, the poor devil.” He said it quietly, with reverence, as though he were on the deck of his ship and consigning the boy's body to the deep.

“Explains what?” I asked him.

“The circumstances …” He hesitated. “Very strange they were.” And then he looked at me, his gaze very direct. “I don't think you quite understand, Mr. Grant. That boy risked his life on a filthy night with a
shamal
blowing to get that packet to me without anyone knowing.”

“Risked his life?” I was reading through the covering letter, only half listening to him.

“Yes, indeed, for he came off in one of those fisherman's dugouts and just an Arab boy with him. It was a damned foolhardy thing to do. There was a wicked sea running. He needed a lawyer, he said, somebody he could trust.”

“Why? Did he say why he needed a lawyer?”

“No.” Griffiths shook his head. “No, he didn't say why, and it's something I've been asking myself ever since I put that envelope away in the ship's safe. What would a young geophysicist want with a lawyer out there in the middle of Arabia?”

I finished reading the letter and then I put it down on the desk. Griffiths was lighting his pipe, his head cocked on one side. “Well, he's dead now, you say.” He was eying the unopened envelope the way a thrush eyes a worm.

“Perhaps you'd tell me just what happened?” I suggested.

“Well …” He hesitated, his eyes still on the envelope. “It was night, you see. We had finished unloading and the deck lights had been switched off about an hour when one of my Arab crew reports a dugout alongside and a white man in it called Thomas asking for me. Well, I couldn't recall his name—how should I? I have so many passengers; they come and go along the coast—oil men, Locust Control, Levy officers, Air Force personnel, Government officials. How should I remember his name, even if he was another Welshman? It was four years since he'd used it anyway. And then he came stumbling into my cabin and I recognized him at once, of course.”

I thought he was going to stop there, but after a moment's silence he went on: “Only the previous voyage I'd had him on board as a passenger, from Bahrain down to Dubai. He'd changed a great deal in those six months; all the vitality of youth seemed to have been whipped out of him, his skin burned almost black by the sun and the hard, angular bones of the face showing through. But it was the eyes, man. They weren't the eyes of a youngster any more; they were the eyes of a man who'd looked the world in the face and been badly frightened by it.”

“Who was he afraid of?” I was thinking of the father then.

“I didn't say he was afraid of anybody.”

“Did he talk to you at all—about himself?”

“Oh, yes, indeed. He was talking all the time. To be honest, Mr. Grant, I thought he might be going round the bend. Some of them do that, you know … the heat and the sand, and if it's lonely work—”