Free A Dead Man in Barcelona by Michael Pearce Page B

Fisher’s idea, of course, but a good one.’
    He looked expectantly at Seymour. Seymour could see this was significant but for the life of him he couldn’t see why. Something to do with fuel, obviously. What made ships go. Until now he had not, actually, ever thought about this. If anything, he was still living mentally in the world of sail. Of course, he knew, vaguely, that sail was being superseded by steam. That must be the coal. And now, apparently, coal was being superseded in its turn by oil.
    ‘Hmm,’ he said, trying to sound impressed. ‘Important, I imagine.’
    ‘It is!’ said the Admiral enthusiastically. ‘You can see at once the implications it has for us!’
    ‘Oh, yes!’ said Seymour. ‘Oh, yes.’
    ‘Take refuelling times, for instance. With oil, all you’ve got to do is stick a pipe in and then pump. With coal, you’ve got to have dozens of people shovelling. Takes hours. The switch from coal to oil will cut refuelling times – and, therefore, turn-round times – by four-fifths!’
    ‘Amazing!’ said Seymour.
    ‘Oh, it’s going to be. And that’s not the end of it. It will revolutionize the way we do things. But we’ve got to get on with it. Otherwise, the Germans will do it first. In fact, they probably have done it first! But – and this is where I really do take my hat off to the Government – in one respect we’re ahead of them.’
    ‘We are? Oh, good!’
    The Admiral paused dramatically, then lowered his voice.
    ‘We’ve got the oil,’ he said.
    ‘Got the –?’
    ‘Yes. Stitched it up. Bought the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Guaranteed the Navy’s oil supplies for years.’
    ‘Well, that’s splendid!’
    ‘And I don’t need to tell you the difference that will make!’
    ‘No, indeed!’
    ‘And this is where Lockhart comes in.’
    ‘Lockhart?’ said Seymour with a start.
    ‘Yes. You see, until this Anglo-Persian deal, we hadn’t been sure where our oil was going to come from. We’d been thinking about it, of course. I’d been thinking about it. Thought about little else from the moment I knew the switch was in the offing. I’d been making forward contracts, building storage tanks, trying to find suppliers – and this, of course, is where Lockhart came in.’
    ‘Lockhart?’
    ‘Yes. With his contacts. All through the Middle East. Especially with the Arabs. Now, of course, he wasn’t dealing directly with the Persians. But he had plenty of ways of dealing with them indirectly, and I found him invaluable.
    ‘It had to be done quietly, you see. We were ahead of the game, and we didn’t want to let on to anyone else. And that was especially important to me, down in the Med, with the Turks at one end, and the Germans in cahoots with them, letting them have warships.
    ‘Of course, once the Anglo-Persian oil started coming through, we’d be all right. But until then we were scratching around for oil. And that was where Lockhart came in with his connections. As I said, he was invaluable.
    ‘So when I heard – and this was two years ago, remember, when things were still in the balance, and before the Anglo-Persian oil had really started flowing – that Lockhart had been murdered, I thought: hello, someone’s putting their finger in my pie! And I didn’t like it. By then I looked on Lockhart as one of my people. If someone was out to get him, I was out to get them.
    ‘So I went to the Foreign Office and said, “This is an Englishman. More than that, he’s one of my people, so you’ve got to do something.” Did they do anything? Did they hell! They just faffed around, pushing papers in all directions, referring it here, taking it up there. I think they hoped I would go away. But once I’ve get my teeth into something, I don’t let go and I’d got my teeth into this. And I still have. I want to know who killed Lockhart. And that, I hope, is what you’re eventually going to tell me.’
    Seymour, in fact, had come across the Admiral’s ‘new bloke’