Hammond Innes - The Doomed Oasis

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, beak-like 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 like to have looked 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 have 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. BAHRAIN, 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 a 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 eyeing the unopened envelope the way a thrush eyes a worm.