The Doomed Oasis

by Innes, Hammond;

  I switched off my torch and eased the door open a fraction, every nerve in my body tensed and expectant. I heard the scrape of the window latch, the scrabble of boots on the sill, the rustle of the curtains as they were pushed aside. A burglar? But nobody but a fool would expect to find cash lying around loose in a solicitor’s office. Perhaps he was after some particular document? But I could think of nothing I was handling at the moment sufficiently important to warrant breaking and entering. I heard him stumble against my chair and then I could hear his heavy breathing coming nearer as he crossed the room to the door. I guessed he’d be making for the light switch, and I flung the door wide and at the same time switched on my torch again.

  David Thomas stood there, checked in the white beam of it. His fair hair was plastered down by the rain. His face was streaked with blood from a gash on his forehead, the left cheek bruised and filthy with mud. There was mud on his clothes, too—black, wet patches of it that clung to the sodden cloth. His jacket was ripped at the shoulder and one trouser leg was torn so badly that the flesh of his leg showed through the rent. He was breathing heavily as though he’d been running.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I said and switched on the light. His face was ghastly white, his eyes unnaturally wide. He looked scared out of his wits. “Well, I don’t expect they’ll think of looking for you in my office.” I closed the door and walked past him and put the curtains straight. Then I took the guard from the fire and put some more coal on, poking it till a flame showed. And all the time I was conscious of him standing there, watching me in silence, too surprised, too scared probably, to move. I pushed the old armchair reserved for clients close to the hearth. “All right,” I said. “Take your jacket off and come and sit by the fire and dry yourself out.” He did as I told him, too startled to have any initiative of his own left. “Now,” I said, “just tell me what in God’s name made you do such a damn-fool thing.”

  For a moment I thought he was going to close up on me the way that sort of kid does when things go wrong and people start asking questions. The sullen tough-boy look had come back into his face. “Take your time,” I said. “There’s no hurry. You’ve got all evening if you want it.” I thought I’d try flattery then. “Not many chaps manage to get away from the police so soon after being taken in charge. How did you do it?”

  The tight lips relaxed slightly, a ghost of a smile. “Luck,” he said. He was shivering and I poked the fire again, coaxing it into a blaze. “They’d got a car to take me to one of their bloody jails. Said I’d feel more at home in the nick.” His tone was a sneer.

  “And you made a break for it.”

  “Yeah. That’s right. There was only one of them in the back with me, and I made a dive for it when they were driving down the Cowbridge Road. I hit the pavement and just about knocked myself out. They nearly had me then. But there was a pub I knew, and I dived in there and got away out the back.” And he added: “I said I’d see you in your office.” There was a touch of bravado in the way he said it.

  “Your sister was here a little while back,” I told him.

  “Sue? What did she want?” He was on the defensive immediately.

  “Wanted me to help you.”

  “Help me?” He gave a derisive laugh. “The only way you can help me is by giving me that address. That’s what I came for.”

  “Your mother’s worried sick,” I told him.

  “So what?”

  I lost patience with him then. “Can’t you get it into your thick head that your actions affect other people? Stop being so damned irresponsible. The police phoned your mother that you’d escaped, and now she’s half out of her mind.…”

  But he wasn’t interested in the heartbreak he was causing other people. “She should have thought of that before she wrote me that letter,” he said. “She was half out of her mind then. Did Sue tell you I’d two more months to do in a Borstal Institute?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I had. Two more months and I’d have been out and in the clear. And then I got this letter threatening she’s going to commit suicide. Your Da’s driving me to it, she said, and I can’t stand it any more. And then to come home and find she’s been holding out on me all the time, kidding me I was that drunken old fool’s son. Christ! And you talk about being irresponsible.”

  “It isn’t an easy thing for a woman to tell her son.”

  “She’d nineteen years. In nineteen years she ought to have been able to screw up her courage. Instead, she drives the old man to fling it in my face.” He stared at the fire, his shoulders hunched, his face bitter. “Does Sue know?” he asked at length. “Does she know she’s illegitimate?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what does she feel about it?”

  “She said she’d known for a long time—deep down.”

  “Then why the hell didn’t she tell me?”

  “I said, deep down. Her mother didn’t tell her. She just knew.”

  He looked sulky then. “We never kept anything from each other before.”

  “It’s not the sort of thing you want to share with anybody else,” I said.

  “Too right, it isn’t.” He suddenly beat his fist against the arm of the chair. “Christ! If I’d only known before.”

  “It wouldn’t have helped you,” I told him.

  He thought about that for a moment and then he nodded. “No, I guess you’re right.” And he added: “I always wondered why the old man hated my guts.” He leaned suddenly forward, picked up the poker, and jabbed at the fire. “Guess I hated his guts, too,” he said viciously.

  “Well, he’s dead now,” I said. “Did you know that?”

  He nodded and let go of the poker so that it clattered into the grate. “Yep. They told me that. Croaked on the way to hospital, blast him.”

  His attitude to the man’s death shocked me. “For God’s sake!” I said. “Haven’t you any compassion for the man who was a father to you?”

  “He wasn’t my father,” he cried. “I told you that before.”

  “He was your father in the eyes of the law.”

  “Then the law ought to be changed, oughtn’t it? You can’t make chalk cheese by a legal declaration.”

  “He supported you all the time you were growing up,” I reminded him.

  “All right, he supported me. But he hated me all the same. I always knew that. When he took a strap to me, he enjoyed it. He hasn’t been able to do that for a long time now. But he’d other ways of getting at me, jeering at me because I read a lot, and at my Arab friends. Do you know what he’d done whilst I’d been in Borstal? I went up to my old room after you’d left. All my books on Arabia, every damn one of them, he’d pulled out and torn to pieces. The only books he hadn’t destroyed were the technical ones. I’d a lot of them on oil—geology, seismology, geophysics. He left me those because he didn’t think I cared about them.” He stared at me. “Now he’s dead, and I’m glad. Glad, do you hear?” His voice had risen, and suddenly the tears were welling up into his eyes and he began to cry. “I didn’t mean to kill him,” he sobbed. “Honest. I didn’t mean to.” He broke down completely then, sobbing like a child, and I went over to him and gripped his shoulder.

  “It was an accident,” I said, trying to steady him.

  “They don’t believe it.”

  “Did they prefer a charge?”

  “No, but they think I killed him. I know they do.” And he burst out: “I haven’t a chance with them.”

  “You certainly haven’t made it any better by making a break for it like that.” I was wondering whether I could persuade him to come with me to the police station and give himself up. I hesitated and then walked over to the phone, but he was on his feet immediately.

  “What you going to do? Ring the police?” There was panic in his voice.

  “No,” I said. “I’m going to ring your home—get your mother down here, your sister, too.”

  “What for? What good’ll that do?”

  �
�If your mother makes a statement, explaining exactly how it happened …”

  “It’s no good,” he said. “She wouldn’t do it. She’d rather have me hanged.…”

  “Oh, don’t be childish,” I said.

  “It’s true,” he cried. “She told me so herself—after you’d gone.” He had followed me to the desk and his voice was intense, very serious. “She thinks I’m going to kill Whitaker if I ever lay my hands on him. And she loves him. After all these years, she still loves the man. I don’t understand it, but that’s how it is. You’d think after the swine had treated her like that, after he’d left her flat …” He pulled a blood-stained handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. “When I got back this afternoon the old man was giving her hell. I could hear it out in the street. He was calling her all sorts of names. I suppose he was drunker than usual. He had that book of press-cuttings in his hand, and when I told him to shut his mouth, he taunted me with being a bastard, said he’d had all he could stand of another man’s whelps. And then he turned on my mother and added: ‘And all I can stand of another man’s whore. After all I’ve done to cover up for you,’ he said, ‘you creep off as soon as I’m out of the house to mope over your lover’s pictures.’ And he flung the book at her. That’s when I went for him.” He paused, staring at me, his eyes overbright. “That book was full of press-cuttings of him—pictures, some of them. I’ve grown up with that book, grown up with the man himself. I know him, know his way of life, everything about him. It’s like I told you—he was a sort of god to me. I wanted to be like him, tough, independent, an adventurer in far places. I tried to get a job as a seaman on ships going out that way from Cardiff docks, but at first I was too young, and then there was the union. I even tried to stow away once. And now I find he’s no more than a rotten, dirty little sham who’d leave a woman to bear her twins alone. I told Ma I’d kill him if I ever laid hands on him. Remember? You were there when I said it.”

  I nodded.

  “Well, she believed me. She’s convinced I really will kill him if I ever catch up with him.”

  “And you didn’t mean what you said—is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  He walked back to the fire and stood staring at it for a moment. Then he slumped down in the chair again, his body limp. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “Honest, I don’t know. All I do know is that I have to find him.”

  “And that’s why you came here, to search my office for his address?”

  He nodded. “I knew you’d have it somewhere in your files.”

  “Well, I haven’t.” I hesitated. But, after all, the boy had a right to know where his father was. “Will you promise me something? Will you promise me that if you find him, you’ll remember that he’s your father and that blood is something you just can’t rub out with violence?”

  He looked at me and was silent a long time. At length he said: “I can’t promise anything. I don’t know how I’d act.” He was being honest at least. “But I’ll try to remember what you’ve just said.” And then on a sudden, urgent note: “I’ve got to find him. I’ve just got to find him. Please, please try to understand.”

  The need of that kid … It was the thing that had been lacking for him all his life. It was his mother’s need reflected and enlarged. The sins of the fathers … Why in God’s name should a sense of insecurity lead to violence, in people and in races? “All right,” I said. “I accept that.” And I passed on to him what Griffiths had told me. “But then you know the sort of man your father is. Anyway, there it is, he’s still out there. And if you want to contact him, I imagine a letter to the Gulfoman Oilfields Development Company—”

  “A letter’s no good. I wrote him already—twice. He never answered.” He looked up at me. “This Captain Griffiths, is his ship the Emerald Isle? She sails regularly to the Persian Gulf.” And when I nodded, he said: “That was the ship I tried to stow away on. I was fourteen then, and a year later I tried to sign on. She’s in port now, is she?”

  “Yes.”

  “When is she sailing?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Tonight?” He looked up at me, suddenly eager, like a dog being offered a walk. “Tonight. When? What time?” He had jumped to his feet, all the tiredness falling from him. “For Christsake, what time?”

  I hesitated. It was no part of a lawyer’s job to get involved in a criminal case. My duty was plain. “The sensible thing would be for you to give yourself up to the police.”

  He didn’t hear me. His eyes had fastened on the envelope I had left propped up on the mantelpiece. “Were you taking this down to the ship tonight?”

  I nodded, and his hand reached out for the envelope, clutched at it. “I’ll deliver it for you.” He held it as though it were a talisman, his eyes bright with the chance it represented. “That’s all I need. The excuse to go on board. And they wouldn’t catch me this time, not till we were at sea.” He glanced at the window, balanced on the balls of his feet, as though about to take off the way he had come. But then I suppose he realized I should only phone the police. “Will you let me take it?” His voice was urgent, his eyes pleading. “Once on board the Emerald Isle … Please, sir.”

  That “sir” was a measure of his desperation.

  “Please,” he said again. “It’s the only hope I got.”

  He was probably right at that. And if I didn’t let him take it, what other chance would he ever get in life? He’d escaped from Borstal. He’d escaped from the police. With that sort of record he’d be lucky to get away with three years for manslaughter. After that he’d be case-hardened, a criminal for life. And there was the sister, too. A nice girl, that. I sighed. “I’m supposed to be a lawyer,” I reminded him … or maybe I was reminding myself. “Not a travel agency for boys who’ve escaped from the police.”

  “But you’ll let me deliver it, won’t you?”

  What the hell can you do when faced with youth in all its shining innocence and eagerness. “All right,” I said. “You can try it, if you like. But God knows what Griffiths will do.”

  “All I want is the chance to meet up with my father.”

  I realized then that his mind had leap-frogged all the obstacles; he was already mentally sailing the coast of Arabia in search of his father. “All I’m giving you,” I warned him, “is the excuse to get on board that ship. She sails at nine thirty. And those documents have got to be delivered into Captain Griffiths’s hands, understand?”

  “I’ll give them to him. I promise.”

  “You know your way about the ship?”

  “I knew every corner of her once. It’ll come back to me as soon as I get on board.”

  “Well, kindly remember that I’m a solicitor. When you’re caught, as you will be eventually, don’t implicate me. Shall we say you walked into my office to get legal advice, saw the envelope I had forgotten, and took it on the spur of the moment? Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll take you down to Bute East Dock now,” I said. “After that you’re on your own.” I hesitated. It wasn’t much of a chance I was giving him. He’d no clothes other than what he stood up in, no money probably, nothing, not even a passport. But at least I’d have done what I could for him—what I’d have hoped somebody would do for a son of mine if he’d got himself into a mess like this. But then I hadn’t a son; I hadn’t anybody. “Better clean the blood off your face,” I said and showed him where the wash-place was. “And you’ll need something to hide your torn clothes.”

  I left him in the lavatory and went through the office to the cupboard under the stairs. There was an old overcoat that had been there ever since I’d taken over the place, a black hat, too. He tried them on when he’d finished cleaning himself up. The coat wasn’t too bad a fit, and with the sweatband padded with strips from an old conveyance the hat was passable. I wondered what my uncle would have said if he knew to what use these sartorial relics of his were being put. And because I wanted him to realize how slender his cha
nces were, I said: “If you’re caught before the ship sails, don’t try and bluff it out with Captain Griffiths. Tell him the truth and say you want to give yourself up to the police.”

  He nodded, his face bloodless, his pale eyes almost fever-bright with the nervous tension that was building up in him. The dark coat and the black hat accentuated his pallor, accentuated, too, his beaky nose and the strong jaw. In the old lawyer’s cast-off clothes he looked much older than his nineteen years.

  There was a back way out of the office, and I took him out by that. It was still sleeting, and there was nobody in the street where I parked my car. We drove in silence down Park Place and across Castle Street, and then we crossed the railway and were in the maze of little streets that edge the docks. I slowed in a dark gap between streetlights and told him to climb into the back and lie on the floor with the rug I kept for my dog pulled over him.

  It was fortunate that I took this precaution, for the police at the dock entrance had been alerted and there was a constable there who recognized me; a fortnight before, he had given evidence in a case I’d defended. I told him my business and he let me through. I hadn’t expected the police to be watching the docks already and my hands were sweating as I drove on across the slippery steel of the railway tracks.

  The Emerald Isle was at the far end of the Bute East Dock, close to the lock. She had completed loading and she had steam up, smoke trailing from her single stack. The cranes along the quay were still, their gaunt steel fingers pointed at the night. I stopped in the shadow of one of the sheds. The sleet had turned to snow and it was beginning to lie, so that the dock looked ghostly white in the ship’s lights. “Well, there you are,” I said. “That’s the ship.”

  He scrambled out from under the rug. “Couldn’t you come with me?” he asked, suddenly scared now that the moment had arrived. “If you were to have a word with Captain Griffiths …”