The Black Tide

I walked down to the Creek then, turning left towards the bridge and found a place where I could sit in the sun with a coffee and a glass of water and watch the world go by. There was a coaster coming in from the Gulf flying the Iranian flag, lighters and launches and small boats bobbing in its wake, the whole waterborne concourse a pageant of movement with a big ocean-going dhow, a boom by the look of it, though it was hard to tell as it lay like a barge right in front of the coaster’s bows, its engine presumably broken down. Noise and movement and colour, every type of dress, every coloured suit, the smell of dust and spices, and the bloated carcase of a goat floating slowly past with its legs stiff in the air like the legs of a chair. I finished my coffee and closed my eyes, dozing in the warmth of the sun. The unhurried tempo of the desert was all about me, men walking hand-in-hand or squatting motionless, the leisurely, endless haggling over price at every shop and stall in sight. Time stood

still, the Muslim world of Arabia flowing round me, familiar and relaxing. It is an atmosphere in which fatalism thrives so that, dozing in the sun, I was able to forget my worries about the future. I was tired of course. But it was more than that. It was in my blood, the feeling that I was just a straw in the stream of life and everything the will of God. Insh’Allah! And so I didn’t concern myself very much about the reaction of Baldwick and his friends if they were to discover I was visiting the Lloyd’s agent and GODCO. My only problem, it seemed to me at the time, was which of them I should visit first, or whether to go at all. It was so much easier to sit there in the sun, but I did need to check those crew details with the oil company’s marine superintendent.

In the end, after cashing a traveller’s cheque at one of the banks, I went to the GODCO building first, largely because it was there in front of me, a towering new block dominating the downstream bend of the Creek. After the noisy, saffron-scented heat of the waterfront, the cloistered air-conditioning of the interior hit me like a refrigerator. The marine superintendent’s offices were on the fifth floor with a view seaward to a litter of cranes, masts and funnels that was the Port Rashid skyline. Captain Roger Perrin, the name Saltley had given me, was the man in charge of the whole of the Company’s fleet, and when I was finally shown into his office, he said curtly, ‘Why didn’t you phone? I’d have had everything ready for you then.’ He was bearded, with pale cold eyes and a presence that I suspected had been carefully cultivated

in the years he had been moving up the Company’s marine ladder. He waved me to the chair opposite him where the hard light pouring through the plastic louvres of the Venetian blinds shone straight on my face. ‘Well, why are you here? What do the solicitor people want to know that I haven’t already told them?’ And he added, ‘I’m responsible for Casualty Coordination, but I tell you now, in this Company we don’t expect casualties. And in the case of these two tankers there’s nothing to co-ordinate. They’ve just disappeared and your people know as much about it as I do. So why are you here?’

The only reason I could give him was the crew pictures, but when I asked to see them, he said, ‘I sent a full set of the pictures to our London office. That was three days ago. You could have seen them there.’

‘I had to go to France.’

‘France?’ The fact that I hadn’t come straight out from London seemed to make a difference. He gave a little shrug. ‘Well, I’ve no doubt you have your own lines of enquiry to follow.’ He reached behind him to a bookcase where a potted plant stood like a rubbery green sentinel, picked up two files and passed them across the desk to me. I opened the one labelled Aurora B. There were copies of design drawings for the ship’s hull and engines, detailed specifications, and, in an envelope marked personnel, a crew list, together with a full-face close-up of each individual. This was the only item of real interest and while he was telling me how the Indian airforce had mounted a search in the sea area west of Sri Lanka and the oil company’s

representatives had appealed through the local press and media for anybody who might have picked up a radio signal or voice message, I went slowly through the pictures. I had met so many odd characters in cargo runs around the Gulf that there was always a chance.