The Sons of Adam (53 page)

‘Screw it!’ he yelled, kicking the core hard in apparent frustration. ‘Screw this goddamn stinking stupid flea-bitten lousy pisshole of a well.’

‘There a problem?’ The stupidest cowpoke spoke mildly.

‘Goddamn lubricant’s leaked. Gotta do it again. Stupid goddamn son-of-a-bitch.’ He kicked the core barrel again.

‘We gotta take another core?’

‘Yeah.’

The cowpokes looked at the tired apparatus. ‘We gonna start right now?’ They would honestly have been willing to empty the core barrel, re-arm it for another trip down the well, and start hauling pipes all over again until the fall of night.

‘No. Screw it. Tomorrow. If I spend another hour on this rig I’m going to puke.’

One of the cowpokes bent down. He dug his thumb into the sand, exposing oil deep down inside. ‘You sure this ain’t oil?’

‘I’m damn sure it
is
oil,’ said Tom. ‘Premium grade Texan oil. It’s been all the way through a Gulf Oil refinery and come out the other side in a shiny red can marked “For Lubricant Use Only”.’

‘It spilled, huh?’

‘No, it just got homesick for underground. Go on, beat it. Scram. I’ll close down.’

The cowpokes melted away. One of them went over to the huge pie still standing like a millstone on the ground. He nudged it with his toe and looked at it sadly, before heading home like the others.

Harrelson came over to Tom.

‘Lubricant spilled, huh?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Bad?’

‘Uh-huh.’

Harrelson sighed deeply and sat down in the shade of the rig. He wiped his face with a white handkerchief.

‘Shame that.’

‘Yeah.’

‘’Cept that a core barrel don’t use no lubricant.’

‘Nope.’

‘Nothing ’cept mud.’

‘Nope.’

Tom brought the core down for Harrelson to see. Both men hefted it in their hands. They probed it with their fingernails. They smelled it. They crumbled it between their palms. What was there to say? It was oil.

When the car turned up, Rebecca was working in the little cottage garden behind the house, while Mitchell was scooping water from the butt, in an effort to teach worms to drink. The car – a battered old Tin Lizzie, filthy with dust – shot up to the front of the house and stopped with an angry bark from the engine. Whoever had been driving it, raced up the garden path and in through the front door.

‘Mitch, you wait here a moment –’

‘I’m going to make them swim!’ said Mitch with delight as a new idea struck him.

‘No darling, worms don’t like swimming. What about making Mommy some nice mud castles?’

She supervised Mitch long enough to make sure that the worms would escape their swimming lessons, then hurried inside.

It was Tom.

Tom crazy, Tom possessed.

He was snatching everything that had any saleable value at all. He had clothes, crockery, a blue vase that Mrs Elwick had given them, a clock all rolled up in their bedroom quilt. When Rebecca found him, he was hesitating over her thirty-dollar wedding ring on the windowsill, where she’d left it while she was out gardening. Pipsqueak, who had tried to welcome him home with her usual explosion of licks, barks and tail-wags, was cowering frightened in a corner of the room.

‘Tom, what the –’

He stood up, leaving the wedding ring where it was. ‘Your necklace, hon,’ he interrupted. ‘I’ve got to have cash now, as much as I can as fast as I can.’

‘Tom! We need our money for the house!’

‘Screw the house. Have a mansion.’

Rebecca saw one of their bank books lying on the side. She knew instantly that Tom had already drained their account of its last dollar and cent.

‘You can’t do this,’ she said. ‘The money’s half mine. I earned it.’

‘I’ll pay it back.’

‘
Tom
! Don’t do this. It’s not –’

‘No, no, no. It’s not like before. This is not what it seems. We’re this far from oil, this far.’ Tom held his finger and thumb two inches apart. With his other hand he groped in his pocket and pulled out some compacted sand, which he threw onto the bare table. The sand mostly looked like sand. There were some dark oily blotches in it, which could have come from anywhere.

A person’s world can change utterly in a matter of seconds. Rebecca’s world changed now. She knew there was no point in fighting her husband’s addictive drive. She saw her dream of a new home vanish. She saw that Tom would never be able to escape the trap he’d built for himself. Her world turned to ash.

‘If you go now, we’re finished. You know that.’

He stopped and took her by the shoulders.

‘We’re only a few yards from striking oil. Feet, even. Doesn’t that make a difference to you?’

‘You always were only a few yards away. Only a few more yards.’

Tom snorted out through his nose. ‘Not like now. See that?’ He pulled away from her and poked the sand on their kitchen table. ‘Smell it.’

‘Don’t go, Tomek.’

‘I’ve got to. Right away.’ He looked again at her necklace, wanting to ask her for it again and only barely restraining himself. Rebecca could see his fingers itching to take her wedding ring. ‘I’ll be back,’ he added.

‘Don’t count on it.’

He pretended he hadn’t heard her. ‘I’ll write you from Overton. Soon as I can.’

‘I’ve let you back three times, Tomek. I swore I never would again.’

By this time, Mitchell had come in from the garden. His first impulse had been to run to Daddy, but something in the atmosphere scared him and he hung back, pressing himself into Rebecca’s skirts, holding Pipsqueak into his little chest. Tom picked up the quilt by its four corners so it formed a grab-bag of all their household possessions.

‘Bye, Mitch. See you soon. Be a good boy for your mommy.’

‘Don’t go, Tomek.’

‘I’ll write.’

Tom looked around the shabby little cottage one last time. There was nothing left to take. The room was almost empty, except for the wedding ring on the windowsill and the oil sand on the table. He tousled Mitch’s hair and kissed him. He would have kissed Rebecca but she shrank from his touch. Ten seconds later, the Ford’s engine clattered into a roar and tore off.

Away from Rebecca, out of her life.

Coppers are coppers are coppers are coppers.

Probably, if it were possible to go back to ancient Rome, or further back still to the first dawning of civilisation in Assyria and Sumeria, you’d find that their policemen looked exactly the same. Big-footed, heavy-shouldered, plain-faced, bent-nosed, put-upon, dogged.

Alan’s first act on receiving the news from Hartwell had been to identify and then retain the leading firm of private detectives in London. The three men standing in front of Alan now didn’t just look the part, they were the part. Between them, they had sixty-eight years with Scotland Yard. Sixty-eight years of hunting men and finding them.

The senior detective, Alfie Proctor, cleared his throat.

‘On the fifteenth of April nineteen thirty, you supplied us with a list of some eighty-three persons believed to have been held in the Hetterscheidt –’ he pronounced it Hetter-shit, with only the smallest glimmer of embarrassment – ‘Hetter-shit prison camp in Germany during the last war at the time when your friend, Lieutenant Thomas-known-as-Tom Creeley, was also believed to be present.’

Proctor paused briefly, to let Alan acknowledge the facts. He did so with a nod and Proctor continued.

‘As of today’s date, the twenty-seventh of August, we have now been in touch with sixty-one of the eighty-three persons. Of the twenty-two individuals we have not been able to find, six have died, four have emigrated to America (in three cases) or Australia, in the fourth case. We have so far been unsuccessful in determining the whereabouts of the remaining dozen, but will – if so instructed by yourself – continue to make enquiries.’

Alan nodded. ‘Please do.’

‘Of the sixty-one men we have been able to find, five were not available for questioning or were found not to be of sound mind, and were accordingly removed from our list of possible informants.’

Alan nodded again, more briskly. Why the hell couldn’t the man just get on with it? Alan sighed. The man was a policeman, that was why. And because he was a policeman, he’d been able to find as many men as he had. Proctor turned a page in his notebook, as though he himself had no idea what the outcome of the investigation had been.

‘Of the fifty-six men we have spoken to, nineteen had no recollection of Thomas Creeley or were positive that he was not present in the camp. The remaining thirty-seven had some recollection of him and thirty-two were able to pick out a photograph of him correctly from a set of five.’

‘
Yes!
So he was there.’

‘Yes, sir, he was there.’

‘And … ? Did you … ?’

Proctor, at last having mercy, or perhaps just finding the pull of humanity stronger than his years in the police force, put down his notebook. ‘Well, sir, it’s funny. We know he was there for definite. There was eleven people who remembered him escaping and the stir that caused, and remembered in enough detail that we can be pretty sure they’re not making it up – people do invent things, sir, not that they mean to, but just to be helpful, like.’

‘Yes.’

‘Now no one – at least, no one what I would call reliable – remembers him being executed for the offence. It seems like the prison wasn’t too harsh, not by comparison with some. But what’s peculiar, see, is that no one really remembers him much after the escape. We’ve got six people swearing he was moved to a different camp, nine people saying he survived till the end of the war and was liberated like everyone else, five people saying he was sent to work on a farm and wasn’t locked up with the rest of them or not near so much. Then again, we’ve got –’ Proctor checked his notebook again – ‘one person says he died in an accident down one of the coal mines, two people saying he was involved in a brawl over a bowl of soup and ended up dying of injuries, and one chap swearing that Creeley woke up with a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the hosts of Heaven, then died that night with a blissful smile on his face.’

Proctor closed his notebook.

Alan was blank with amazement. You could send three long-serving detectives to find and interview more than eighty men – and end up as uncertain as you began. At least the oil business wasn’t like that. When you drilled for oil, you either hit it or you didn’t. Alanto had expanded its operations to Iraq now, and so far had drilled unsuccessfully – but at least the answer was clear cut and unmistakable.

‘Proctor, listen, what d’you make of it? As a man, I mean. I’ve heard your statistics, but what d’you make of them? In your opinion, is Tom alive or dead?’

‘Obviously, sir, anything I ventured would only be an opinion, like.’

‘Yes, yes, of course.’

‘But in my opinion, sir, Tom Creeley did not die in Hetter-shit during the war.’

‘He survived?’

‘That is my opinion, sir. Yes.’

It was the toughest drilling Tom had ever done.

He spent his days working as hard as he could – and doing his damnedest not to drill down another inch. With excruciating care, he picked his most rotten drill pipes, spent his evenings filing them down in their weakest spots, then hoisting them carefully into place the next day. When the rotten pipe was deep enough, Tom would send a surge of power through the turntable, while at the same time letting the drill down as hard as he could. Twice he tried it. Twice he failed.

Then he waited for the wood-man to haul a new load of prime firewood. He got up a strong head of steam. He tried the same manoeuvre one more time, and bingo! The drill pipe buckled and snapped. Tom swore (but was delighted) and promptly began the horrendous task of fishing for the busted tube. Days passed. Tom was normally skilled at deploying a fishing tool, but this time the job took ages. The cowpoke riggers did what they were told to do, until Saturday evening when Harrelson forgot to come and pay them. The next Monday only half of them turned up. When Harrelson still failed to show, the riggers melted away. The rig was there and Tom was there, but there was no action at all.