‘Entirely. Go on. When was it that Bill talked about the odd landscape?’

‘He didn’t talk about it at all. He just babbled one night when we were all a little drunk. Bill doesn’t drink, Mr Grant. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I mean: drink as a habit. A few of the boys in our lot do, I admit, but they don’t last long in OCAL. They don’t last long anyway. That’s why OCAL heaves them out. They don’t mind them killing themselves, but it gets expensive in crates. But now and then we have a night-out like other people. And it was on one of those nights out that Bill got going. We were all a little high so I don’t remember anything in detail. I know we were drinking toasts and we were running out of subjects by that time. And we were taking it in turn to think up unlikely things to toast. You know: like “The third daughter of the Lord Mayor of Bagdad”, or “June Kaye’s left little toe”. And Bill said: “To Paradise!” and then gabbled a piece about talking beasts and singing sands and what not.’

‘Didn’t anyone ask about this Paradise of his?’

‘No! The next fellow was just waiting to get his word in. No one was paying any attention to anything. They’d just think Bill’s toast pretty dull. I wouldn’t have remembered it myself if I hadn’t come across the words in the paper when my mind was full of Bill.’

‘And he never mentioned it again? Never talked about anything like that in his sober moments.’

‘No. He isn’t much of a talker at the best of times.’

‘You think, perhaps, if he was greatly interested in something he would keep it to himself?’

‘Oh, yes, he does that, he does that. He’s not close, you know; just a bit cagey. In most ways he’s the most open guy you could imagine. Generous with his roll, and careless with his things, and willing to do anything for anyone. But in the things that—in personal things, if you know what I mean, he sort of shuts the door on you.’

‘Did he have a girl?’

‘Not more than any of us can be said to have one. But that’s a very good sample of what I mean. When the rest of us are out for an evening we take what’s going. But Bill will go off by himself to some other quarter of the town where he has picked something more to his fancy.’

‘What town?’

‘Any town we happen to be in. Kuwait, Masquat, Quatif, Mukalla. Anything from Aden to Karachi, if it comes to that. Most of us fly scheduled routes, but some fly tramps. Take anything anywhere.’

‘What did—does Bill fly?’

‘He’s flown all sorts. But lately he’s been flying between the Gulf and the South Coast.’

‘Arabia, you mean.’

‘Yes. It’s a damned dreary route but Bill seemed to like it. Me, I think he was too long on it. If you’re too long on one route you get stale.’

‘Why do you think he was too long on it? Had he changed at all?’

Mr Cullen hesitated. ‘Not exactly. He was just the old Bill, easy-going and nice. But he got so that he couldn’t leave it behind him.’

‘Leave his work behind, you mean?’

‘Yes. Most of us—all of us, in fact—drop work when we turn the bus over to the ground staff. We don’t remember it until we say hullo to the mechanic in charge next morning. But Bill got so that he would pore over maps of the route as if he had never flown the hop before.’

‘Why this interest in the route, do you think?’

‘Well, I did think maybe he was figuring out a way to avoid the bad weather areas. It did begin—the interest in maps, I mean—one time when he came in very late after being blown out of his way by one of those terrific hurricanes that come out of nowhere in that country. We had nearly given him up that time.’

‘Don’t you fly above the weather?’

‘On a long hop, of course. But when you’re flying freight you have to come down at the oddest places. So you’re always more or less at the mercy of the weather.’

‘I see. And you think Bill changed after that experience?’

‘Well, I think it left a mark on him. I was there when he came in. In the plane, I mean. I was waiting for him, on the field. And he seemed to me a bit—concussed, if you get me.’

‘Suffering from shock.’

‘Yes. Still back there, if you know what I mean. Not really listening to what you said to him.’

‘And after that he began to study maps. To plan his route, you think.’

‘Yes. From then on it was in the forefront of his mind instead of being something that you drop with your working clothes. He even began to come in late as a habit. As if he went out of his way to look for an easier route.’ He paused a moment, and then added in a quick warning tone: ‘Please understand, Mr Grant, I’m not saying Bill has lost his nerve.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Lost nerves don’t take you that way at all, believe me. You get quite the opposite. You don’t want to think of flying at all. You get short in the temper, and you drink too much and too early in the day, and you try to wangle short hops, and you go sick when there’s nothing wrong with you. There’s no mystery about lost nerve, Mr Grant. It announces itself like a name on a marquee. There was nothing like that about Bill—and I don’t think there ever will be. It was just that he couldn’t leave the thing behind.’

‘It became an obsession with him.’

‘That’s about it, I suppose.’

‘Did he have other interests?’

‘He read books,’ Mr Cullen said, in an apologetic way; as one confessing a peculiarity in a friend. ‘Even in that, it showed.’

‘How: showed?’

‘I mean, instead of the books being the usual story affairs they’d as likely as not be about Arabia.’

‘Yes?’ Grant said, thoughtfully. Ever since this stranger had first mentioned Arabia, Grant had been altogether ‘with him’. Arabia to all the world meant one thing: sand. And what was more, he realised that when he had had the feeling, that morning in the Scoone hotel, that ‘singing sands’ did actually exist somewhere, it was with Arabia that he should have connected them. Somewhere in Arabia there were in fact sands that were alleged to sing.

‘So I was glad when he took his “leave” earlier than he meant to,’ Mr Cullen was saying. ‘We had planned to go together, and spend our leave in Paris. But he changed his mind and said he wanted a week or two in London first. He’s English, you know. So we arranged to meet at the Hotel St Jacques in Paris. He was to meet me there on the 4th of March.’

‘When?’ said Grant; and was suddenly still. Mind and body still, like a pointer with the bird in sight; like a man with the target in his sights.

‘The 4th of March. Why?’

Singing sands were anyone’s interest. Men who fly for OCAL were two a penny. But the wide, vague, indefinite affair of Bill Kenrick who was obsessed with Southern Arabia and did not turn up to his appointments in Paris narrowed suddenly to one small focused point. To a date.

On the 4th of March, when Bill Kenrick should have turned up in Paris, the London mail had come into Scoone bearing the dead body of a young man who was interested in singing sands. A young man with reckless eyebrows. A young man who, on looks, would have made a very likely flyer. Grant remembered that he had tried him, in imagination, on the bridge of a small ship; a fast small ship, hell in any kind of a sea. He had looked well there. But he would look just as well at the controls of a plane.

‘Why did Bill choose Paris?’

‘Why does anyone choose Paris!’

‘It wasn’t because he was French?’

‘Bill? No, Bill’s English. Very English.’

‘Did you ever see his passport?’

‘Not that I can remember. Why?’

‘You don’t think that he might have been French by birth?’

It wouldn’t work out, anyway. The Frenchman was called Martin. Unless his English upbringing had made him want to adopt an English name?

‘You don’t happen to have a photograph of your friend, do you?’

But Mr Cullen’s attention was on something else. Grant turned to look, and found that Zoë was approaching them along the river bank. He looked at his watch.