The Doomed Oasis by Hammond; Innes Page B

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?
    â€œWhat’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?”
    â€œOf course not. I only got in this morning. Why?”
    â€œDavid 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.”
    â€œI see.”
    His acceptance of it might have surprised me, except that my mind was still on that envelope. “It’s almost uncanny,” I murmured.
    â€œWhat is?”
    â€œYour 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.
    â€œExplains what?” I asked him.
    â€œThe 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.”
    â€œRisked his life?” I was reading through the covering letter, only half listening to him.
    â€œYes, 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.”
    â€œWhy? Did he say why he needed a lawyer?”
    â€œNo.” 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.
    â€œPerhaps you’d tell me just what happened?” I suggested.
    â€œWell …” 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.”
    â€œWho was he afraid of?” I was thinking of the father then.
    â€œI didn’t say he was afraid of