High Stand

2

Never having been dependent on money I didn’t earn I always find it difficult to appreciate how frightened people can become when the source of their income shows signs of drying up. It was the following Tuesday before I began to realize that this was what had probably happened to Tom Halliday and by then his son Martin had been on the phone to me twice. He employed almost a dozen people at the works and their pay was five weeks in arrears, his own salary too; the rent was due, electricity, gas, rates, water, telephone, and in addition he owed several thousand for materials. He had one car ready for delivery, but that was all. He wanted money to tide him over, but I had to tell him that there wasn’t any at the moment and it would take time to sort things out. ‘But I have to have some money.’ That anguished cry from a man who all his life had lived off his father … I had told him, quite bluntly I’m afraid, that he’d better think in terms of selling up and standing on his own feet. I was more concerned with Miriam.

She had phoned me on the Monday asking me to deal with the financial problems arising from her husband’s disappearance. They had a joint account at the Lewes branch of his bank, but this was only for convenience, the account being fed from the head office branch in the City. It was the Lewes branch that had refused to cash the two cheques referred to in the newspaper report. Tom Halliday had apparently drawn out the entire balance of the account the very day he had come to see me. It seemed likely, therefore, that his disappearance was a deliberate act and not due to any accident.

This became more apparent after I had talked to his London bank. Apparently they received the profits of the mine half yearly. Sometimes his account was in balance from one half year to the next, at others it was overdrawn. The overdraft arrangements had been generous because of the regularity of the half-yearly payments. However, these had recently become less regular and Halliday had been making use of the overdraft facility. In other words, the bank had been advancing money in anticipation of the income from the mine. The latest half-yearly payment had been due almost two months ago and the manager had let the overdraft run for that length of time because his client, before leaving for Canada, had assured him he would be dealing with the matter while he was there. However, a fortnight ago he had begun to make his own inquiries. These had been complicated by the fact that the payments did not come direct from Canada. Instead, they were routed through a Swiss bank, payment being made half-yearly through their London office. He thought this was probably for tax reasons, the Zurich bank informing him that it was a numbered account and they were not in a position to divulge any information.

I tried contacting them myself. I was, after all, one of Tom Halliday’s executors, but it made no difference. They refused to discuss the matter until there was some definite news as to what had happened to Halliday, and if it did turn out that he had had an accident, or had killed himself, then it would be a matter not for his executors, but for whoever inherited — Miriam, in other words.

I had the distinct impression, however, that they were going through the motions rather than protecting an important account, and it was after talking to them that I telexed the Mines Department of the Yukon Government in Whitehorse. Two days later I received this reply: GOLD PRODUCTION ICE COLD CREEK MINE FOR PAST THREE YEARS RECORDED AS FOLLOWS: 60.136, 27.35 AND 43.574 ozs. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION REFER JON EPINARD, TAKHINI TRAILER CRT, WHITEHORSE.

It didn’t make sense. Yields of that sort couldn’t possibly have been covering even the cost of production, let alone producing the sort of half-yearly payments the English bank had referred to. It was the younger son, Brian Halliday, who first made me realize where the money might have been coming from. He phoned to ask whether an American named Wolchak had been in touch with me. And when I said he hadn’t, he asked if I had the deeds to his father’s BC property.

‘No,’ I said, ‘the bank has them. Why?’

‘Wolchak wants to buy. He’s acting as agent for an American company and says they’re willing to pay cash for an option to purchase.’ And then he asked me straight out whether the BC property had been left to him. ‘Miriam says I get the trees, that right?’

‘There’s no reason to suppose your father isn’t alive,’ I told him.

‘Of course. But what about the trees — do they come to me or don’t they?’ He had a rather deep, soft voice, his manner on the phone slightly abrupt so that I formed the impression of a man who needed to assert himself.

There seemed no point in not telling him that the BC property would be his should his father suddenly die. ‘Subject, of course,’ I added, ‘to settlement of any outstanding debts.’

‘Meaning your fees, I suppose,’ he said rudely. And when I told him there would naturally be solicitor’s fees, he said very sharply, ‘Well, I’m not selling. Just understand that, will you. The Cascades is not for sale — not now, or ever.’

‘You’ve had an offer, have you?’ I was wondering what sort of figure Wolchak had put on the property.

‘Not me. Miriam. She told him to see you. That’s why I phoned — to warn you, and to make my position clear. He saw her this morning and she says he was in touch with her last week, wanting to see Tom and then asking when he would be back.’

‘Did he see your father after his return from Canada?’ I asked.

‘Yes. On the Monday, here at Bullswood. The Monday morning.’

And the following day Tom Halliday had come to me to change his Will. I could accept that people did get scared when the source of their income dried up, or when they had lost their money in some financial disaster. I had seen it happen to elderly people — one of my clients had committed suicide for just that reason. But Tom Halliday was still a relatively young man and he had disappeared owning a slice of land in Canada that was apparently saleable. And what was even more extraordinary, he had altered his Will so that the land went to his son instead of his wife, and his younger son at that. Either Miriam had been wrong when she had said, Tom and I are very close’, or else this stepson of hers had put quite exceptional pressure on his father.

‘If I do hear from Mr Wolchak I’ll be in touch with you,’ I told him, and I put the phone down. My secretary was back from her holiday and about an hour later it must have been she came in to say Wolchak had been on the phone to her and she had arranged an appointment for Friday afternoon at four-fifteen. ‘Ten minutes, that’s all.’ She knew I wanted to try the boat out at the weekend. ‘He says, incidentally, he appreciates your difficulties and is prepared to offer a solution.’

I had already arranged with the bank for them to take Bullswood House as security for the overdraft. Fortunately Tom hadn’t mortgaged it. He couldn’t very well without it becoming apparent he was in financial difficulties for the freehold was in his wife’s name as well as his own. But the house and its contents, that was about all there was left. They had had a 99-year lease on a big flat in Belgravia and a villa in the Algarve, but he had sold those over the past two years, and very recently he had parted with the all-cream Rolls tourer that had been the pride of his collection of old cars — ‘built for a maharajah just before Partition,’ Miriam told me, ‘door handles, headlights, all the trimmings gold-plated.’ And she had laughed. ‘Trouble is it needed mink or leopard skin, something like that, and nothing would induce me to have some poor wretched animal wrapped around me.’

With my partner on holiday the amount of work crossing my desk pushed the Halliday problem to the back of my mind, so that when I received from the bank the photocopies I had asked for of the deeds they held I had no time to do more than check that they included the deeds of the BC forest land and that it hadn’t been mortgaged or otherwise encumbered to raise a loan.

Wolchak was late that Friday afternoon and I had to keep him waiting. ‘What’s he like?’ I asked my secretary as she came back from showing my four-thirty appointment out. She hesitated, then smiled, the corners of her mouth turned down. ‘You’ll see,’ she said, and she showed him in.

He came bustling across to my desk, hand outstretched, a short, thick body, a large, square head, and a smile that flashed like a beacon, eyes lighting up, a switched-on incandescence, and the teeth very white against a tanned skin. Josef Wolchak,’ he said as he shook my hand. He had a slight accent that was difficult to place.

I sat him down and he said, ‘You’re busy, so’m I. I’ll be brief. It’s about this Halliday property in British Columbia. I’m acting for an American company. They want to buy it. You got the deeds here?’

‘They’re at the bank.’

‘But you’ve seen them.’

‘I have photocopies.’

‘And there’s nothing in them to preclude a sale — a mortgage, anything like that?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Good, good. It’s the trees, Mr Redfern, not the land. My clients don’t necessarily want the land. It’s the trees they’re interested in.’ He took a wallet from the pocket of his jacket, produced a card and passed it across the desk to me. That’s the company. You’ll find they’re an old-established timber and saw-milling outfit. Been in existence more than half a century. Anybody in Seattle will tell you.’ The card simply gave the name of the company — SVL Timber and Milling Inc. — and the address in Seattle. ‘It’s north along the waterfront, out on the Everett road,’ he said. ‘They’ve already been in touch with lawyers in Vancouver who’ve had dealings with Mr Halliday. But now that he’s reported missing…’ He gave an expansive shrug. ‘I was advised I should contact you.’

‘Who by?’ I don’t know why but I was sure from the way he had made such a point of informing me about the company that there had to be an individual involved. ‘Who are you really acting for?’

There was a fractional hesitation, then he said, ‘Bert Mandola. He has interests in a number of companies, Chicago and out west.’

I wrote it down on the back of the company card, just in case, at the same time pointing out to him that I was in no position to dispose of any part of my client’s property. And I added, ‘You will appreciate that Mr Halliday may turn up any moment.’

‘Yes, of course. But suppose he doesn’t, eh?’ He had already talked to ‘young Halliday’. And he added, ‘There’s a problem there, but if the man’s dead and the estate’s in debt, and it will be, your English tax boys will see to that…’

‘I’m sure Mr Halliday’s alive and in good health,’ I said, not liking the way he was trying to rush me.

‘Yes, yes, but as I was saying, if he’s dead and the estate is in debt, or there are financial difficulties …’ He wasn’t smiling now, his small mouth a thin, hard line. ‘You’ve been out there to see the Cascades, Mr Redfern?’

I shook my head.

‘Well, I have,’ he said. ‘Mr Mandola and I took a look at it a while back. Quite a nice looking place, but very remote — about eighteen and a half square miles, that’s counting the mountain tops and the waterfalls that give it its name. There are some timber extraction roads in poor condition, the remains of an old logging camp at the head of the Halliday Arm, an A-frame drilling truck that looks like it dates back to the Red River oilfield days, and a lot of mosquitoes. There’s nothing much there of any value except the timber in the bottom.’

‘So why’s your client interested in it?’ I was still trying to make up my mind what all this was about. Wolchak himself, I thought, probably belonged to one of those ethnic groups that stem from America’s flood of refugees. There was an accent but, as Brian Halliday had said on the phone, it was more an undercurrent, difficult to place. He could be Irish, I thought, or equally from one of the Mediterranean countries; there was a quickness about him, and the tanned face, the nose, the dark eyes. But definitely a man who had lived quite a bit of his time in America, fortyish and well fleshed, the face a little leathery from the sun. California perhaps. But that was only a guess. I’d never been to California — or anywhere very much for that matter.

‘It’s the timber in the bottom. All the rest of the property has been cut over, nothing good left, but down by the river and round the lake expansions there’s a stand of real good timber, and all of it western red cedar. SVL Timber specializes in western red cedar, either putting the logs through their sawmill or trucking them to other outfits in the States. It’s just that bottom stuff, otherwise the property’s ripped out and not worth a damn. So we’re talking about a square mile or so of top-grade timber.’ He glanced at his watch and got to his feet. ‘I’ve kept you long enough.’ That smile beaconed out. ‘Think it over. Have a talk with Brian Halliday — that’s if he comes into it, as I understand he does.’

‘Did he tell you that?’ I asked.

‘He didn’t deny it.’ He produced his own card and flipped it onto my desk. ‘I’m staying with friends in Brighton over the weekend, back at my London hotel Monday. Get in touch with me when you’ve made up your mind.’ He held out his hand. ‘I take it you’ll be contacting the lawyers in Vancouver and arranging for a firm of forestry consultants to make an independent valuation. If so, kindly put it in hand right away, then as soon as you have it we can start talking figures. Option money ten per cent of agreed total, management in the SVL Company’s hands from date of signature.’ The smile flashed out again. ‘When you get the valuation you’ll be pleasantly surprised, I think. That bottom stand should see you out of any difficulties with a good margin.’

‘Supposing the worst has happened and Mr Halliday is dead,’ I said. ‘I think the executors might well decide to put the property up for auction.’

He looked at me sharply. ‘Timber is an up-and-down business. It’s down at the moment, so there aren’t many buyers around over the other side and this Cascades place is up north so it’s a long haul down to the markets. Also, auctions aren’t sure money, and they don’t produce cash on the nail for an option. If Halliday is dead, then I guess you’ll be needing cash very badly, and that’s what I’m offering you.’ He nodded and was about to walk out when he looked back at me. ‘I’m in this for the commission, you understand.’ His eyes, sharp and grey, were fixed on mine. ‘I’m sure you and I can come to a sensible arrangement.’ He nodded, smiling confidently, as though bribing lawyers was all part of the day’s work. ‘Just so long as the deal goes through. And don’t be too long making up your mind, Mr Redfern.’ His eyes flicked wide in a stare, and then he was gone, a broad, neatly suited man of uncertain age with something near to a bounce in his walk.

Three hours later I was on board my boat and getting ready to make Littlehampton and back over the weekend. It being new and everything to be checked out by trial and error, my mind was so concentrated on the business of sailing that I thought of nothing else until I walked into my office on the Monday morning and found Brian Halliday sitting in the little waiting room that was really a part of the old entrance hall when the house had been a private residence. He had no appointment, but that I presumed was typical. I wasn’t at all pleased as I was due to appear in court in Brighton that morning for a client who was up on a drink-driving charge.

He was short and dark, a long face with a long beak of a nose and big ears, high cheekbones — not exactly ugly, but definitely an odd appearance, his hair black and somewhat lank. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with Greenpeace on it, canvas shoes on his feet. He seemed very agitated and I thought at first it was because Miriam had gone. He blurted this out almost as soon as we were into my office and I thought at first it was why he had come to see me. With feminine practicality she had apparently gathered up some of the more portable valuables in the house, silver chiefly, also the gold cigarette box I had seen on the dinner table and the silver-gilt chamber pot that had been the centrepiece. She had taken them off in her car on Saturday — ‘presumably to flog them to a dealer for some ready cash. Have you seen her?’ he asked me.

‘No.’

‘She hasn’t been here, then?’

I shook my head, and at that moment my secretary came in and handed me a typewritten slip. ‘It was on the phone tape. I thought you’d like to see it right away.’

It was a message from Miriam. She had phoned on the Sunday morning to say she was flying to Canada that day and would be away a week, maybe ten days. I’ll be staying part of the time at the Bayshore, Vancouver. Very extravagant of me. But what the hell! And she had added, I’ll be in touch with you if I have any news of Tom.

I showed it to Brian Halliday and he said, ‘Do you think she’s going out there to sell the Cascades? You saw Wolchak, did you?’ And when I nodded, he added, ‘I haven’t had a word from him since I phoned you. Do you think that’s what Miriam’s up to?’

‘She can’t sell it,’ I told him.

‘You’re sure?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then what’s she going to Vancouver for? It’s just across the Juan de Fuca Strait from Seattle with a daily ferry service and Wolchak said he was acting for a timber company in Seattle. If Miriam can bugger off with the silver like that…’

‘You shouldn’t jump to conclusions.’ I could see the makings of a vicious family row and, noting the almost wild light in the very dark brown eyes staring at me across the desk, I added quickly, ‘You seem to forget your father is reported missing, nothing more. And in any case, a slice of timber land in British Columbia is a very different matter to a few items of household silver.’

He nodded slowly, sitting back, but still tense. Finally he said, ‘I’d like to see the deeds. If it turns out that I now own the trees …’

‘I told you, the deeds are at the bank.’

‘Your secretary said you had photocopies.’

I hesitated, not sure I would be justified in refusing him. And then he said, ‘Tom said there’s a curse.’

‘A curse?’ I stared at him, wondering what he was talking about. ‘How do you mean, a curse?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know, not really. It’s quite a time back. Eight years almost. We were chewing coca together in an Indian hut, not the leaves, but the powdered sort they call patu — ’ He smiled, a sleepy, almost feline smile. ‘It was real potent stuff, like dust — took your breath away if you inhaled it before you’d got enough spittle worked in to make a masticating ball of it.…’

‘Where was this?’

‘In the Andes. Below the pass that leads to Cajamarca. Anyway, that’s what he said.’ And he added, ‘He hadn’t seen the deeds. Not then at any rate. He wasn’t much interested in trees. But he said his father had told him he’d put a curse on anybody who cut them.’

‘Why?’

‘He’d planted them, hadn’t he? Not all the trees, but the real good stuff in the valley bottom, the area Tom always refers to as High Stand. Planted them with his own hands.’

‘And this curse is in the deeds?’

‘I think so. I don’t know. I wasn’t that interested, you see, not at the time. I was still in my teens, and though I was engaged in forestry — we were doing a lot of planting for the Peruvian Government — BC seemed like a million miles away, and anyway the chances of my ever being involved with the curse seemed very remote, my father just divorced and full of energy again. Didn’t you feel that about him?’ Again that strange, almost secretive smile. ‘All that machismo, the adrenalin flowing — ’ The smile became a laugh as he added, ‘And then suddenly you’d see it was all a sham. He was just a kid, nothing for real, the world a toy.’ The face became solemn, a sadness in the eyes, so that I had the impression he was fond of his father.

I picked up the intercom and asked my secretary to get me the file. ‘It’s very unusual,’ I said, ‘something as personal as that incorporated into a land deed.’

He nodded, his eyes fastening on the papers as soon as she brought them in, his expression intent, almost avid. I don’t think it was greed, more the excitement of getting to grips with something he wanted to be involved in.

There were three documents altogether, an original purchase of Indian land, a conveyance of that land to a logging company and a further conveyance from the company to Joshua Francis Halliday. The curse was appended to the last page of this final document. Below all the signatures and government seals, a slip of paper of a different shade and consistency had been gummed on. Even on the flat surface of the photocopy it showed as something added later. ‘I’ll read it out to you,’ I said, and he nodded, sitting hunched forward, his eyes fixed on the page I had opened out and laid flat on the desk before me. ‘It’s side-headed — To all who come after me and inherit or in any other way acquire this land: Know ye’ — his choice of words indicated his intention of making it as solemn a declaration as possible — ‘Know ye that when I bought this land, which I call Cascades, the logging company who sold it to me had ripped out all the big timber in the valley bottom alongside the Snakeskin River, above the gorge and beside the lake expansions in the flats, everything that could be got out easily. They said it was big stuff, western red cedar mainly and Douglas, like the Macmillan outfit keeps preserved close west of here on the Port Alberni road …’ I glanced across at Brian Halliday. ‘Where was he living when he wrote this?’

‘Vancouver Island probably. That’s where he died anyway. Near a place called Duncan just north of Victoria.’ His eyes gleamed brightly for a moment. ‘Nice country, good forest land. And he had a fishing boat.’ And he added almost dreamily, ‘I went there once, just to look at where he’d lived, and then I went on out to the west coast, a hell of a road, more of a trail really. Cathedral Grove.’ He nodded, as though confirming the name to himself. ‘That’s what the Macmillan Bloedel logging people call it. There’s trees there four, six hundred years old. Thuja plicata — that’s western red cedar — standing two hundred feet and more, one of the last remaining stands of primeval coastal forest, some of them with a bottom bole circumference of anything up to thirty feet or so. Cathedral Grove.’ He smiled, an almost dreamy expression. ‘I wonder what the Cascades trees run to now. Does it say when he planted them? Does it give a date? They’ll be getting quite a spectacle now, something worth seeing.’

I glanced back through the conveyance. But I could only find the date he had bought the land, and I twisted the deeds round so that he could see.

‘That’s over seventy years ago. They could be a hundred and fifty feet now. More maybe.’ He turned back to that last page, reading on, his lips moving. ‘You see, he says it here — he planted it all himself. Had Indians in, cleaned off the scrub, had seedlings brought up from Duncan and planted it up, the whole area that had been devastated by the loggers.’ He sat back, looking straight at me, eyes wide under the lank black hair. ‘One man marking out the future, ensuring a lasting monument to his life on earth.’ And he added, ‘My God! What a Herculean task — more than eight hundred acres, he reckons. That’s over three hundred hectares. A plantation like that, it must be unique. No wonder he put a curse on anyone daring to take a chainsaw to any of his trees.’ He suddenly laughed. ‘No, of course, it must have been back around the First World War. He wouldn’t have had an inkling then that thirty, forty years on chainsaws would make it possible for one man to fell a three-hundred-foot Redwood giant that had been growing five centuries and more in a matter of hours. But hours, days — it doesn’t matter. He saw the threat and did the only thing he thought might deter a future owner greedy for money …’ He was silent for a moment, his lips moving as he read. Then he sat back. ‘Have you read it? The curse, I mean.’ And when I shook my head, he passed the deed back to me. ‘I think,’ he murmured, ‘if I had read that and was thinking of felling High Stand, compartment by compartment, I think I’d have second thoughts. Either that or …’ He paused, shaking his head again and muttering something to himself.

I read the rest of it then: ‘However long I live there will come a time’ — this was the final paragraph — ‘when my physical presence will no longer be there to guarantee the safety of my trees. But you who read this Declaration be warned — I am the man who planted them, they are my family, and my spirit. As his ancestor is to the Indian, so will I be to my trees. They are my Totem. Let any man fell even one of them, other than in the interests of sound forestry, then with the first cut of the saw or swing of the axe my curse will be upon him? Finally, as if pointing an accusatory finger, he switched from the third to the first person: ‘Do that and I will never leave you, day or night, till your nerves are screaming and you are dead by your own hand, dead and damned for ever to rot in Hell? And it finished with these words: ‘This curse stands for all time, to be renewed with my last breath, and may the Good Lord help me to my purpose.’ No date was given.

‘He doesn’t rule out thinning, you see, or scrub clearance, or anything that will encourage the trees to achieve maximum growth. In the interests of sound forestry. That’s modern terminology, which shows how involved he was in the business of forestry.’

‘When did he die, do you know?’

He moved his head, a dismissive gesture, as though I had interrupted a train of thought. ‘Not certain. I think’ — He frowned. ‘It must have been 1947.I know he was seventy-four when he died and I seem to remember being told he was born in 1873, so I guess that’s when the curse begins to operate.’ He looked across at me, his eyes still blank, his brow furrowed. ‘I was just wondering — about Tom, what’s happened to him. You see, I found some sales agreements in his desk. They go back almost seven years. Clear fell agreements that provide for extraction and haulage down to a booming ground on the Halliday Arm. Also bills for towing. He was marketing the Cascades timber. Not High Stand, but the poorer, scrubbier stuff on the slopes above. That is, until the last of those agreements…’ He shook his head. ‘The amounts had been dwindling all the time, until this last one. It was for two hectares of western red cedar, and it gave the grid reference.’

He paused there, looking straight at me, waiting for it to sink in. ‘It may not sound all that important to you. Not very real, I mean, here in Sussex, in a solicitor’s office. But out there, so much of the west raped of its best timber — do you know anything about trees?’

I shook my head.

‘Let me just say one thing then: but for trees you and I wouldn’t be alive.’ He was leaning forward, a strange intensity in his manner and in his voice. ‘It was the trees, through their infinite numbers of leaves and needles, that converted our atmosphere from deadly carbon dioxide into the oxygen we breathe. Does that help you to understand? The curse, I mean — and Tom’s reaction to it when he realized what he’d done.’

‘You’re hinting at suicide, are you? You think your father might be dead.’

He shrugged. ‘What do you think — now you know about that curse? Put yourself in his place. How would you feel, having negotiated the sale of two hectares, and knowing all the time that your own father had sworn a curse on anybody who felled even a single tree? And he did know. He didn’t have to get the deeds out of the bank. The old man had told him, and hearing it direct like that, when he was little more than a kid himself — why do you think he told me about it if it wasn’t there always at the back of his mind? And he’d just been over there. Only a few days back he’d been looking at those trees.’ The intensity was back in his voice as he added, Trees are alive, you know. They have an aura, a very powerful feel about them. And a curse like that — ‘

‘Yes, but I hardly think your father was the sort of man to take much note of a thing like that.’ I thought he was letting his imagination run away with him somewhat. ‘He was much too much of an extrovert, surely.’

‘Tom?’ He shook his head. ‘Nobody who needs a drug, even if it’s only drink or nicotine, can be totally extrovert. And just think of the effect on him as a youngster in his teens — he was the son of a late marriage so he must have been that sort of age at the time. And he wasn’t unimaginative. Quite the contrary in some ways. Then years later, with the mining income gone and all the timber on the slopes felled and cashed, nothing much left except High Stand… And then, after he had sold those two hectares, at some moment when he was real high, remembering that curse — well, he’d be capable of anything then, wouldn’t he? Or on the let-down maybe, in a fit of manic depression…’ He gave a little shrug, a gesture of finality. ‘Yes, I think he’s dead. I think he’s done what his father swore he’d cause any man to do who cut those trees.’

‘The cutting was done presumably by a logging company.’

‘But he signed the agreement. He caused it to be done.’ And then he switched my mind back to the Yukon. ‘I suppose the mine is finished?’ And when I gave him the figures for the last three years, he nodded as though that was what he had expected. ‘But you haven’t checked the mine itself. You haven’t had a mining consultant go over and have a look at it?’

I shook my head. ‘What are you suggesting — that somebody has been creaming off the best of the gold?’

‘Well, it’s happened before.’

‘You seem to forget your father had only just returned from the Yukon, a longer trip than usual, Miriam said.’

‘He’d been to Canada, yes. But he didn’t say anything about the Yukon or the mine. He could have been in BC organizing the sale of another two hectares of High Stand.’ He gave a rather helpless little shrug. ‘I’ve been down several gold mines, but all of them mines with ore bodies where you drill ahead and have a good idea what the reserves are. Ice Cold Creek is placer mining. You’re just shifting tons of river silt, screening, washing — yes, I guess it could peter out like that, no warning.’ The brown, remote eyes fixed on me again. ‘Is that where Miriam’s gone? Suddenly she wasn’t there any more, the house locked up.’

‘So how did you know about the silver?’ I asked.

‘I’m living there, aren’t I? And you, I suppose you have a key, too?’

I nodded.

‘And you’re one of the executors?’

‘Yes.’

He was back to the trees again. ‘Have you any idea of the value of that stand? For just those two hectares he was getting over three thousand dollars — that’s standing, no charges. Cash on the nail like Judas or any goddamned murderer. Anyway, that’s the figure given in the sale agreement, so they were paying something around five or six dollars a cube. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad, bearing in mind the market at the time and the problems of getting it to the water and then the long tow down to Seattle, but with near on a thousand acres it values High Stand at about six hundred thousand dollars. There’s men a lot less pressed than my father who’d do almost anything for a sum like that. I wonder …’ He put his hands over his eyes, his head bowed in thought. ‘I wonder,’ he murmured, ‘if that’s why he left those trees to me.’

‘Because you were pressing him for money?’

His head jerked up, his eyes suddenly blazing. ‘No. Because he knew I’d never cut them. Because the curse was on him and I belonged to the Men of the Trees. He knew that. He knew I wouldn’t sell them. Not now. Not ever.’ And then, his voice suddenly anxious, ‘He did leave them to me, you’re sure about that?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I drew up the codicil myself and he signed it that day he was here in this office, sitting where you’re sitting now.’

‘But the executors, they can still sell them to pay bills, if the estate’s in debt, I mean. That right?’ He didn’t wait for a reply. ‘You’re one of them, and Miriam, she’s an executor, too, I suppose. Who else?’

‘His accountant in London,’ I said. Trevor Richardson.’

‘Not Martin. Not me. Just the three of you.’ I nodded and he got suddenly to his feet. ‘Okay. Well, just remember this — that curse, it’s real. And it applies to you, to anyone — you let them put a chainsaw into a single tree without there’s a silvicultural reason’ — his voice had risen, his dark eyes staring straight into mine — ‘and it doesn’t have to be the man who operates the saw, it’s whoever’s responsible… You sell High Stand to a saw mill company — ‘ He leaned further forward, almost a crouch, the eyes strangely alight. ‘Do that and if it’s the only way to stop you I’ll kill you myself.’

He stared at me a moment, quite wildly and in absolute silence. Then abruptly he turned and left my office without another word.

I sat there thinking about him for some time, his Indian background, how dangerous he might be. Then, almost unconsciously, I picked up the deed and read again those words of Joshua Francis Halliday written all those years ago.

And then my secretary put the file back in the strong room and I went off to Brighton, only just making the court in time. Looking back on it, I suppose I should have made more of an effort. But there was an undercurrent of hostility between us, and though there are things he could have told me about his father if I had taken the time and the trouble to ask the right questions, it never occurred to me I would not have another opportunity until it was almost too late.

The week passed in a flash, a hectic rush of work, and still no news of Tom Halliday. The police had received negative reports from the RCMP in Canada. There was no indication that he had visited either the Yukon or British Columbia, and the emigration people had no record of his either leaving Britain or entering Canada. The only hope seemed to be that Miriam would pick up some information in Vancouver where presumably he had friends. My partner was still on holiday and when my secretary came in with the mail on Friday morning I was leaning back in my chair staring up at the clouds scudding low over the downs and thinking what it would be like that night in the Channel. I had planned to sail over to the French coast and it looked now as though I would have a fast passage. ‘I thought you’d like to see this straight away — it looks a little personal.’ She put the flimsy sheets on the desk in front of me, her face deadpan, not a flicker of a smile as she added that my first appointment was already waiting for me.

I stared down at it, too surprised to say anything. It was on the notepaper of a hotel named the Sheffield, the address Whitehorse, Yukon: My dear Philip — I feel suddenly very lonely here and turn to you for reasons I’m not quite sure about, only that I know writing to you will somehow help. Silly, isn’t it — I don’t know your home address, or if you told me I’ve forgotten it, so I’ll send it to your office. But please don’t charge for the time it takes to read it! There’s no money. That was a shock — first Tom disappearing, then the bank phoning to say I couldn’t cash any cheques. It was a joint account, as you know. Tom was good that way. He always trusted me. God! ‘What a mess!.. There were five pages of it, on thin airmail paper, the ink tending to run and her scrawl not easy to read. I folded it carefully and slipped it back into its envelope. If she had discovered anything new it would surely have been referred to in that first paragraph. I stuffed it in my pocket to read later and told my secretary to show the man in.

That evening I slipped my moorings and headed out through the harbour entrance as the sun set and the downs darkened to merge with a line of cloud coming in from the north-west. It was a downhill sail, no engine and everything very quiet as I slipped south at about 5 knots, the little boat rolling gently to the long swell coming in from the west. By dawn, if the wind held, I would be in France.

It was past midnight before I was across the westbound shipping lane and content to leave it to the windvane steering and go below. It was then, in the lamplit warmth of the saloon, with my pipe and a malt whisky, that I read the rest of Miriam’s letter. It was an unusual letter because it was full of description, and what she was describing was a very strange part of the world. And I’m being followed. That was on page 2, the words leaping out at me. You’ll think I’m crazy, but it’s true. Every time I leave the hotel, he’s there, dogging my footsteps. And it’s not my imagination. I’ve checked, by doubling back through the hotel. It has two entrances, the front on Wood Street, and the back down a long corridor, past a shop full of lovely Arctic prints and out onto Steele Street, which is where the travel agents all seem to hang out. He’s a very small man with a lined, craggy face, high cheek- bones and puffed eyelids, very black, straight hair-not unlike some of the Indians that hang about the streets here. Perhaps it’s just that a woman walking around this northern frontier ‘own on her own is a bit of an oddity. Talking of Steele Street, wasn’t Steele the Mountie Tom used to talk about, the man who ran the North virtually singlehanded back in ‘98? And then she was describing Whitehorse, the frontier atmosphere of it, the grid pattern of dirt-impacted streets, the fine government building down by the Yukon River within tight of the old white wooden steamboat that lies like a stranded whale on the far side of the bridge, the mixture of gold rush and modern buildings, the bellow of the train coming in from Skagway in Alaska. It’s all so strange, so exciting. I’m sleepy now. It’s the dry air. Tomorrow I have a hire car and will be driving the Alaska Highway to Haines Junction, then down the Haines Highway to Lakeside Lodge, which is beside a lake called Dezadeash. After that I’m told I’ll need a four-by-four, which is what they call a four-wheel-drive truck. Looks like I’ll have to see if I can charm one of the locals. Bumming a ride from Dalton’s Post up to Ice Cold will be quite something. It’s right on the edge of the Kluane, which according to my lodge brochure is an tee wonderland of 8500 sq. miles that includes the highest mountain range in North America, icefields that are the largest anywhere in the world outside of polar regions, masses of glaciers and one that ‘gallops’. Half the men around here seem to be Indians and the whites wear braces and coloured shirts and wide-brimmed sweat-stained hats. Getting one of them to drive me into the Noisy Range area should exercise my talents’ Anyway, you can imagine how excited I am about tomorrow. I’ll be right under the ‘Front Ranges’ of the Kluane (they pronounce it Klewarny).. Then she had scribbled: I’ve got the car, I’m on my way. I’ll leave this at the desk. If you don’t hear from me you’ll know I’m lost in the Kluane. I can see my ‘follower’ watching from across the road. Do you think he’ll jump into a pick-up and follow me when I drive off down the Alaska Highway in my little Ford? Love. M. I didn’t give much thought to her claim that she was being followed. Her description of Whitehorse, stuck out there in a dark wilderness of spruce with the Yukon flowing deep and fast alongside the railroad track, would presumably make any visitor an object of curiosity, particularly a lone woman. In any case, Miriam was not above a little sex play, even in present circumstances. What interested me far more was the fact that she had written to me — and the effect it had on me, which my secretary had noticed. I had seen her recognition of it reflected in her eyes, and now, still in my oilskins, slumped on my bunk, the sound of water moving along the skin of the hull and the lift and fall of the westerly swell making me sleepy, I could see her face so clearly, the casual way she tied the scarf at her throat, the hair glinting with that Titian warmth in the sunlight of my office, the large, almost greenish-blue eyes…

I stuffed the letter back into the old briefcase I had propped at the rear of the fold-down shelf that was both eating surface and chart table and poked my head up into the plastic observation dome. A cluster of lights on the port bow, probably fishing vessels trawling one of the banks, the lighthouse on Dungeness blinking clear and bright to the east, and my mind still on Miriam driving the Alaska Highway, enticing some wild stranger to take her up the track from Dalton’s Post to the mine on the upper reaches of Ice Cold Creek.

She was with me all that night, which was a very broken one, the alarm waking me every twenty minutes. There is too much traffic in the Channel for a lone sailor to risk much in the way of sleep and the thought of Miriam, going up into the arctic north of Canada on her own to find out what the hell had happened to that mine… to go off like that, pinching the silver to pay for the trip, and here was I, bumbling across to Fecamp, never having been further afield than Europe in my life. Quite a girl, I thought, knowing that I was half in love with her and that if I let it take hold I’d be in trouble. Miriam was too hot a property for me to handle. I was smiling to myself, a sort of fixed grin — I could feel the muscles of my mouth creased up as I savoured the word ‘property’, thinking of that night on the downs, the urgency of her. It was just past three, the eastern sky paling to the first breath of dawn, and I was tired.

When the sun rose I could see the coast of France, and by midday my little boat was lying snug in Fecamp and I was sitting alone at a cafe eating a croissant and drinking a cognac with my coffee, the first single-handed sail in my own boat completed. I should have felt excited, filled with a sense of achievement, but in fact I felt nothing. If I had had somebody to share it with …

I went back on board and lay on my bunk, too tired, and my nerves still too tense, for sleep, my mind groping with a feeling of emptiness — a house, an office, clients, and now a boat. It was quite an achievement, starting from nothing, and yet it seemed so hollow, lying there alone on my bunk, the sound of French voices all around me, families arguing and the laughter of youngsters. Was that what life was about, the shared happiness of the smallest and most basic of tribal units? And I dealt in death and family disaster, sordid squabbles over money.

I had a night in Fecamp, with a lonely meal in a restaurant and then a round of portside bistros getting gradually a little tight on Armagnac, and early on the Sunday morning I sailed out with the wind south-west force 6 and a rising sea that was soon breaking quite viciously. I wasn’t thinking of Miriam then. It was raining and visibility poor, but at least I had a fast passage and the next morning I was in court arguing a paternity case.

My young partner was back and life was suddenly easier, my own holiday only two weeks away. The following morning I heard from Miriam again, just a postcard showing timbered cabins dark against a brilliant sunrise reflected in the pewter surface of a lake, and across the middle of it, in bold black type:

LAKESIDE LODGE

DEZADEASH

Mile 123 Haines Highway

On the back she had scribbled:

I’m in luck. An Italian from Medicine Hat — what a name for a birthplace! — a real nice guy with a 4 x 4 who spends the summer working a claim on the Squaw. Our creek runs into it, he knows the way and we leave in the morning. It really is very exciting, everybody so kind, but the word is that l.C. is cleaned out. Will write you again when I get back to Whitehorse. How’s the boat — happy sailing! M. That was the last I heard from her. She never wrote from Whitehorse, or from anywhere else. I couldn’t blame her. It was nice of her to think of me, but I was under no illusions. She had been alone in Whitehorse and I suppose I was uppermost in her mind at the time, so closely connected with what had happened, but once she had got used to the country and begun to make new friends her need of any contact at home would have receded. Indeed, England would probably seem as remote as the Yukon did to me and she had already indicated that the mine was finished. She probably felt there was nothing more to say, but it irked me all the same, and though I was very busy running in my new partner and getting to grips with the boat, I still found it difficult to get her out of my mind. Once I drove over to Bullswood House to see that everything was all right. The staff were provided for — I had checked that already. Miriam had sent them a quarter’s wages in advance before leaving for Canada. Mrs Steading, the housekeeper, opened the door to me. ‘Mr Brian still here?’ I asked her.

She shook her head.

‘Did he leave an address?’

Again the negative shake of the head. She was a small, very quiet woman, born locally and still living in the village. ‘Never said a word. One day he was here, the next he was gone.’ I already knew that she didn’t approve of him.

‘Anything missing?’ I asked. I had had to find out about the silver myself, but now she didn’t hesitate. ‘Two pictures,’ she said, and she took me into Tom Halliday’s study, pointing to where they had hung, one on either side of the sad-looking moose that dominated the fireplace. I remembered them vaguely, two small ship pictures, very Dutch. ‘Mr Halliday thought a lot of them.’ I wondered who they were by, how much his son had got for them, whether he had flogged them to a picture dealer in the Lanes in Brighton or taken them up to London, to the Portobello Road, something like that, where they’d never be traced. ‘Have you mentioned it to anybody else?’ I asked her.

She shook her head. ‘None of my business, but since you asked I’ve told you.’

‘Very proper of you, Mrs Steading,’ I said, wondering what the hell to do about it now she’d told me. I couldn’t really blame either of them, Miriam using the money to take a look at the mine, and Brian — where had he gone, back to India and his Himalayan guru? Or had he gone to stand guard over those Cascades trees? I sat down for a moment at Tom Halliday’s desk, my eyes going involuntarily to that extraordinary photograph of his father dancing and shouting for joy there by the wooden sluice box, his teeth gleaming and his hand with the pan in it held out, the snow on the mountain behind him yellowish-white and speckled with damp marks.

The housekeeper had left me. I could hear her moving about upstairs. I went through the drawers quickly, none of them locked and all of them full of the usual backlog of papers, bank statements, old cheque stubs, and in the top right-hand drawer the timber sale agreements. As his son had said, the sale agreements and related correspondence, including felling and towing contracts and forestry reports from a consultant in Campbell River, Vancouver Island, went back seven years with new agreements every six months and the payments steadily declining. All the agreements were with Canadian companies, except the last, which was with SVL Timber and Milling Coy. Inc. of Seattle, and with this contract there were no felling and towing contracts, only a letter from the forestry consultant advising that the American company was more cost-effective in its felling and towing arrangements and was therefore offering a better price, having also outlets in the mid-west of America, particularly Chicago.

I made a note of the dates of those agreements, also the address of the Vancouver solicitors who had drawn them up. Then I was sitting back, looking up again at the wall above the desk, thinking of Tom — and of Miriam, the life they had shared together in this house. By now she would have been where the sluice box in that photograph had stood, where young Josh Halliday with the ridiculous drooping moustache and the battered hat had proved a dud mine so full of gold that it had given him and his son a steady flow of wealth for the better part of a century. Was there anything here she would want to keep if he didn’t turn up, anything personal — of Tom or the mine? Idly I began opening the drawers of the desk, not looking for anything specific, just thinking how odd it was to be sitting there in Tom’s study, everything just as it was when I had last been to dinner, and soon perhaps it would belong to somebody else who would probably change it all round, throw out that photograph and the moose head and the bits and pieces of mine equipment that hung on the walls and lay scattered about the hearth. I was surprised Brian hadn’t taken the photograph, a reminder of the man who had planted High Stand all those years ago.

The desk was an old one, Queen Anne by the look of it, a lovely silky walnut, the top slightly stained with ink, a letdown flap and little drawers and pigeonholes full of note-paper, envelopes and postcards. I had seen one rather like it in the home of a retired oil man and I moved my hands gently across the flat wood below the pigeonholes, feeling for movement. That’s how I found it, a secret well with a sliding top, the space beneath broad and shallow, and in it a gold Hunter with a flip-up top and a tinkling chime, a gold chain with a nugget of rough gold about the size of a lump of sugar, and beside it a slim book, rather like a ledger, the ink faded to a dull brown.

It was Joshua Halliday’s diary. It began on 20 July 1898:

My birthday, and everything I own now aboard this ship. A great number of people too, many, like me, with stores, also horses, some bullocks, several big cast-iron stoves, and the SF waterfront crowded, the hubbub of excitement swelling all the time, thrilling me through and through. So much hope, every man I speak with sure he will strike gold and come back a millionaire. I turned the pages. Shipboard life. Seattle. Vancouver, 5 September: This day we reached Skagway. Great excitement, but also chaos. So many people ashore, tents and makeshift huts, the squalor and the stench — and rising above this wretched encampment the mountains we have to cross.

After that entry the writing became less copperplate, in places quite shaky, the ink often giving way to pencil scribblings that were so faint the words were difficult to decipher. But it was all there — how he’d cut across the frozen expanse of a lake called Bennett and made it to Dawson in the depth of winter and then to the Dalton Trail and the Squaw. / was about done when I started up the Ice Cold, my breath freezing on my beard, the range all white, and next day the wind came westerly, thick mist and the snow melting to slush on the surface, like ice underneath. That was the first day of April and next morning he had reached the claim.

I sat back, staring up at that photograph. Was this how Tom had first read the diary, sitting at his desk with that faded photograph hanging on the wall in front of him, or had he gone out to Vancouver Island on his father’s death and read it there? Whichever way it was, he had certainly had it here at this desk. I picked up the watch with its chain and nugget and slipped it into my pocket, certain Miriam would prefer to have it kept safe in a strong room, particularly now she had been out to the mine.

I glanced at the other relics, the battered metal pan on the wall behind me, the bits and pieces of iron and wood by the hearth. I wasn’t sure whether the pan was the one with which he had made the first find. There was a bit of a shovel, all rusted into holes and carefully blackleaded, a cartridge bandolier, a military-type water bottle, two rusted tins of corned beef and, slung above the mantelpiece below the moose head, a long-barrelled rifle with the wood of the butt half rotted away, barrel and stock pitted with rust. They were the sort of things you would expect to find discarded round an old camp site, rotting in the damp air.

I closed the diary, tucked it under my arm and got to my feet. I took the photograph too. I told Mrs Steading, of course, but not about the diary and the watch, and when I got back to the office, I put them away in the Halliday deed box, and that was that, my mind switching to other things, the oil man dying of cancer and all his affairs to cope with in a rush.

The last days of August had slipped away in a blaze of summer heat and now we were well into September and it was raining, my first real holiday less than a week away. I took the boat down to Bembridge. No word from Miriam, and her husband still missing. The following day I set off for Brittany with a girl I had met only once, at a party given by a client, and it didn’t work out. It was a beat all the way, quite rough at times, and she was seasick. She left me at Paimpol, and it was after that, when I was on my own, starting to rock-hop westward along the coast, that I began thinking of Miriam again and how it would have been if I had had her on board, wondering what she was up to, who she was with — why, after that postcard and her visit to the mine, she hadn’t bothered to write.

I was becalmed for a whole day by Les Sept lies with nothing to do but listen to the radio. That was when I started to worry about her. It was two weeks now, a little more. After Whitehorse she would probably have gone down to Vancouver, or Victoria, where Tom at any rate would have had friends but, however hectic the social life, it seemed strange she had not written to me again, if only to make certain that I was keeping an eye on the house.

It was there, in the solitary confinement of my little boat, with the moon coming up and the sails slatting, not a breath of wind, that I made up my mind. It wouldn’t take more than a week at the outside, and even if she had forgotten all about me, and her promise to write after she’d been up to the mine, it would at least settle the nagging thought that something had happened to her. And at the same time I could check for myself whether the mine was really exhausted, possibly see the BC property and that stand of timber in the Cascades valley.

In the early hours of the morning, just as dawn was breaking, the wind came in from the west again and it began to cloud over. I turned the boat about and headed for home. And when I got there my partner told me over the phone that we had received a reply to the letter I had sent to the solicitors in Vancouver before I had started on my holiday. It stated unequivocally that the previous year’s September timber sale agreement was the last they had drawn up for Mr Halliday. But he had been into their office on Thursday the fifteenth of last month to enquire about the possibility of selling the whole Cascades property through a nominee, or perhaps forming a special trust to handle the sale. They had not seen him since, only Mrs Halliday who had been in to see them on 9 September, which was the day I had received her postcard. His manner at that meeting in August was described as ‘quite normal, but not relaxed’. And the letter concluded with the words — ‘we have no reason to suppose our client was ill, nor did he show any indication of being on the verge of a nervous breakdown or any other disturbance that would account for his disappearance’. It was signed McLaren amp; Partners.

Two days later I was on a Wardair flight out of Gatwick bound for Vancouver across the top of the world.