The Black Tide

He didn’t like that. But there wasn’t much he could do about it, his orders being simply to escort me, and the local inspector waiting to get his statement completed. It took another half hour of concentrated work to get it into a form acceptable to me so that it was almost ten before I had signed it. By then two journalists had tracked me down, and though the Special Branch man tried to hustle me out of the terminal, I had time to give them the gist of the story. We reached the police car, the reporters still asking questions as I was bundled in and the door slammed. Shut-face got in beside me, and as we drove out of the airport, he said, ‘Christ! You got a fertile imagination. Last time it was a tanker hiding up in the Gulf and an Iranian revolutionary firing a machine pistol, now it’s two tankers and a whole bunch of terrorists, and they’re steaming into the Channel to commit mayhem somewhere in Europe.’

‘You don’t believe me?’

He looked at me, his face deadpan, not a flicker of reaction in his eyes. ‘I don’t know enough about you, do I?’ He was staring at me for a moment, then suddenly he smiled and I caught a glimpse of the face his wife and children knew. ‘Cheer up. Presumably somebody does or our branch wouldn’t have been asked to pick you up.’ The smile vanished, his face closed up again, and I thought perhaps he didn’t have

a family. ‘Lucky the local CID were taking an interest in you or you might have gone to ground in another East End basement.’ And he added, his voice harder, more official, ‘You can rest assured we’ll keep tabs on you from now on until we know whether those tankers are real or you’re just a bloody little liar with an outsized capacity for invention.’

There wasn’t much to be said after that and I closed my eyes, my mind wandering sleepily in the warmth of the car. Somebody at the Admiralty wanted a firsthand account of our meeting with those tankers. The Second Sea Lord — a friend of yours, the admiral at Funchal had said to Saltley — and Saltley wasn’t here. Was it the Second Sea Lord who wanted to see me? Whoever it was, I’d have to go over it all again, and tomorrow that statement I had signed would be on the Chief Constable’s desk, and he’d pass it on. Any official would. It was such a very strange story. He’d leave it to the Director of Public Prosecutions. And if those tankers blew themselves up… There’d be nobody then to prove I hadn’t killed Choffel. They’d all be dead and no eye-witness to what Sadeq had done.

That feeling of emptiness returned, sweat on my skin and the certainty that this shut-faced man’s reaction would then be the reaction of all officialdom — myself branded a liar and a killer. How many years would that mean? ‘Why the hell!’ I whispered to myself. Why the hell had I ever agreed to return to England? In Tangier it would have been so easy to disappear — new papers, another name. Even from

Funchal. I needn’t have caught that charter flight. I could have waited and caught the next flight to Lisbon. No. The controllers were on strike there. I was thinking of Saltley again, wondering where he was now, and would he back me, could I rely on him as a witness for the defence if those tankers were totally destroyed?

It was past eleven when we reached Whitehall, turning right opposite Downing Street. ‘The main doors are closed after eight-thirty in the evening,’ my escort said as we stopped at the Richmond Terrace entrance of the Ministry of Defence building. Inside he motioned me to wait while he went to the desk to find out who wanted me. The Custody Guard picked up the phone immediately and after a brief conversation nodded to me and said, ‘Won’t keep you a moment, sir. 2LS’s Naval Assistant is coming right down.’

My escort insisted on waiting, but the knowledge that two such senior men had returned to their offices in order to see me gave me a sudden surge of confidence. That it was the Second Sea Lord himself who was waiting for me was confirmed when a very slim, slightly stooped man with sharp, quite penetrating grey eyes arrived, and after introducing himself as Lt Cdr Wright, said, ‘This way, sir. Admiral Fitzowen’s waiting to see you.’ The sir helped a lot and I seemed to be walking on air as I followed him quickly down the echoing corridors.

The Admiral was a big, round-faced man in a grey suit which seemed to match the walls of his office. He

jumped up from behind his desk to greet me. ‘Saltley told me you could give me all the details. I was talking to him on the phone to Lisbon this morning.’

‘He’s still there, is he?’ I asked.

But he didn’t think so. ‘Told me he’d get a train or something into Spain and fly on from there. Should be here some time tomorrow. Now about those tankers.’ He waved me to a seat.

‘Are they in the Channel?’