The seat belt sign came on, the flaps slid out from the wings and I heard the rumble of the undercarriage going down. I felt suddenly sick, a void in my stomach and my skin breaking out in a sweat. It was nerves, the tension of waiting, wondering what was going to happen. And then we were down with the runway lights flashing by and I braced myself, breathing deeply, telling myself I had nothing to be afraid of, that the truth was the truth, something I couldn’t be shaken on, so that eventually they must believe me.
The plane came to a halt and a chill wind blew in as the fuselage door was thrown back. We filed out past the chief stewardess, who said her usual piece, hoping I’d had a good flight, and I saw her eyes widen in confusion as she realized who it was. And when I boarded the bus one of the airport staff got in with me and kept his eyes on me all the way to the arrivals area.
The time was just after 19.30 GMT when I joined the queue at the UK passport desk. It moved quickly so that in a moment I was handing my temporary papers to the immigration officer. He glanced at them and then at me, his glasses reflecting the glint of the lights, his eyes faintly curious. ‘What happened to your passport, sir?’
‘I lost it.’
‘Where?’
‘I left it on board a tanker in the Persian Gulf.’
He looked down at some papers on the desk beside him. ‘And this is your correct name — Trevor McAl-istair Rodin?’ He turned and nodded to a man over by the wall. ‘This gentleman will look after you now.’ The man came quickly forward, positioning himself at my elbow. He took my papers and said, ‘This way please.’
He led me through into the Customs hall, where he arranged for my baggage to be cleared and brought to me. ‘Am I under arrest?’ I asked, not sure whether he was airport police or CID.
‘Just a few questions, that’s all at this stage.’ We went upstairs and into one of the airport offices, and when he had sat me down at the desk facing him, I asked to see his credentials. He was a detective-inspector of the Surrey police force. I started to tell him about the tankers then, but he stopped me almost immediately. ‘I’m afraid that’s nothing to do with me. I’m told the information you gave the captain of your aircraft about tankers and terrorists has already been passed to the proper authority. My concern is a much earlier statement you made, about how you escaped in some native craft in the Persian Gulf with a French engineer named Choffel. I’d be glad if you’d now go through that again, so that I can prepare a statement for you to sign.’
I tried to argue with him, but he was insistent, and he gave me the usual caution about the possibility of evidence being used against me. And when I told him about the statement I had already made in London a month ago, he said, ‘That’s the Metropolitan area, Special Branch by the sound of it.’ He was an ordinary-looking man, quite human. ‘I have my orders, that’s all.’
‘Who from?’
‘The Chief Constable.’
‘But not because of what I said about those tankers. It’s because Choffel’s daughter has accused me of killing her father, isn’t it?’
‘She made a statement, yes.’ ‘But there’s no warrant for my arrest.’ He smiled then. ‘Nobody has told me to do anything more than get a statement from you, all right?’ ‘And it’ll go to the Chief Constable?’ He nodded. ‘He’ll then pass it on to the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions or not as he thinks fit. That’s why I had to caution you.’ He pulled his chair into the desk and got his pen out. ‘Now, shall we get started? I don’t imagine you want to be all night over it any more than I do.’
There was nothing for it then but to go over the whole story from the beginning, and it took time, for he was summarizing it as we went along and writing it all out in longhand. By 08.30 I had only got as far as my arrival on the tanker and the discovery that it was the Aurora B. He rang down to somebody for sandwiches and coffee to be sent up from the cafeteria, and it was while we were eating them, and I was describing how Sadeq had stood at the top of the gangway firing down on to the deck of the dhow, that the door opened and I turned to find myself looking up at the shut face and hard eyes of the man who had visited me in my Stepney basement.
He handed a piece of paper to the detective. ‘Orders from on high.’ ‘Whose?’
‘Dunno. I’m to deliver him to the Min of Def — Navy.’ He turned to me. ‘You slipped out of the country without informing us. Why?’ I started to explain, but then I thought what the hell — I had been talking for an hour and a half and I had had enough. ‘If you haven’t bothered to find out why I’m back here in England, then there’s no point in my wasting your time or mine.’
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