He was not quite so forthcoming, however, when I asked him whether they were negotiating a new sales agreement. ‘We would like to, but as you will know, Mr Redfern, there are certain difficulties at the moment.’ He was referring, of course, to Halliday’s disappearance, and when I asked him how long it was since he had seen Mr Halliday he said, ‘I have never seen him. All our business has been through Ringstrop, his forestry man, and McLarens, the solicitors. If you know where he is please tell me.’ And when I said I didn’t know and that was the reason I was in Canada, he sighed gently and said that was a pity. ‘If you find him please contact us immediately.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Meantime, have I your assurance that no more than two hectares of High Stand has so far been felled?’
The loggers cut only the area Mr Ringstrop marks out. That I promise. It is all being done through Mr Ringstrop, you understand.’
‘And you’ve no plans to fell any additional area?’
‘We would like to. That is why we need Mr Halliday - or perhaps you or his wife. If he is dead we are informed from London that you are the executors, not that son of his. Maybe soon we have to deal with you. Let me know, Mr Redfern. Let me know as soon as we can negotiate a purchase. Okay?’
‘One final question,’ I said. ‘Mrs Halliday was in Vancouver some three weeks ago. You didn’t see her?’
‘No. No, I didn’t see her.’
‘And she didn’t phone you?’
‘No, Mr Redfern. No, she don’t phone. So - I wait to hear from you, or from Mr McLaren, yes?’
That was that, and the rest of the afternoon I spent in Stanley Park, part of it watching the antics of the dolphins and the large black and white Orca and all-white beluga whales in their very restricted public display pool. While at the hotel I had, of course, phoned Ringstrop, but he was not in the office that day and the girl who answered the phone said he would be at the Crown Forest logging camp at Beaver Cove. I could ring him there. I had explained who I was and had asked her to tell him I would be visiting the Cascades in a few days’ time and if there was anything he wanted to tell me to ring me that evening at my hotel, otherwise I would contact him on my return to Vancouver.
Back at my hotel, I went through the press cuttings again. One piece of information was new to me — the weight and size of the logs. From my pocket calculator I worked it out that each tree contained something like a cubic metre of timber, the logs measuring upwards of 36 metres with a butt diameter of about 15 centimetres. Maybe they had got it wrong. The Sun reporter had presumably been looking at the top layer of logs, measuring them by eye and probably exaggerating, but even allowing for that it suggested High Stand as a whole was worth more than Brian Halliday had indicated, or that his father had been paid less than the true value. I couldn’t be sure of that since I was merely multiplying by the market value per cube for cedar that the girl at Campbell River had given me, and that was a figure she admitted was the going rate at waterside for Vancouver Island timber. As Brian had said, it was a long way from the Cascades to Seattle and the value depended very much on the price of the tow.
I walked down to the Canadian National Railway pier, watched a big rust-coloured bulk carrier come into Burrard Inlet from the Narrows, pick up its tugs and berth at the pier. Then I walked along Main to Hastings and strolled through the bright lights of Chinatown where I had an excellent meal in a little restaurant patronized by Chinese rather than tourists, mostly shopkeepers and local businessmen, I guessed by their appearance. I was reading a paperback history of the Yukon gold rush I had picked up at a nearby bookshop.
Next day I checked out of my hotel and caught the bus that runs across False Creek and south down Granville to the international airport stuck out on Sea Island, which is little more than a silt bank on the North Arm of the Fraser River delta. I had to wait there for the Whitehorse flight to come in from Victoria, and when we finally took off the sky was clouding over so that I only had a momentary view of Vancouver and the Fraser, with the treed humps of the Gulf Islands merging into the bulk of Vancouver Island as we banked, the Strait of Georgia running north-west between the islands and the mainland, the pewter calm of its waters criss-crossed with the wakes of ferries, coasters, fishing vessels and motor cruisers -also one or two yachts under power, their sails hanging limp. Then we were into cloud as we climbed across the Rockies to meet up with an Edmonton plane at Fort St John, and we stayed in cloud until we were dropping down into the province of Alberta, where in an instant the air cleared to reveal a brown and arid world with splashes of poplar green relieving the dark monotony of spruce, and the Peace River a snaking ribbon of water between clay-coloured banks.
The heat, when they opened the door, was tinder-dry, and in place of the pale-suited businessmen who had flown up to Fort St John, the passengers joining us from the Edmonton plane were from a different world - men in faded bush shirts, broad-brimmed cowboy hats and braces, girls with glistening black hair and dark, high-cheeked, slightly flattened faces, and full-blooded Indians moving as though nobody had told them about the force of gravity, the whole plane suddenly full of a frontier atmosphere.
We flew north-west now, cutting obliquely across a series of high, jagged ranges, clouds piling up to the west. The man in the seat next to me, who was dressed in a greenish uniform, proved to be one of the Kluane Park wardens. His name was Jim Edmundson, and without any prodding from me he began talking about the wildlife and describing the way the Indians had lived in the days when Mackenzie and the North-Westers had first opened up the country trapping beaver. ‘Now we keep the Indians on a welfare state basis, the Eskimo, too, and the beaver are protected.’ He had a slow, very Canadian voice, almost a drawl. ‘But we dam’ near killed them off one rime, the beaver I mean.’ The resulting decline in beaver dams had meant there was nothing to stop the run-off of rainwater from the mountains. ‘Soon there was drought and Alberta became a dust-bowl.’
He was so easy and friendly I didn’t resent it when he asked me straight out the purpose of my trip to Whitehorse. My briefcase, and the sort of questions I was asking, must have made it clear I wasn’t just a tourist. He had never met Tom Halliday but he knew the history of the mine and was able to tell me a lot about the area. He talked about the gold rush, too. But it was the mountains, the whole environment, and the balance of nature that he talked about most, and also the forests. He had trained as a forester. He had even written a book about forestry developments on Vancouver Island and the Charlottes. A large man with battered features like a boxer who was wholly absorbed in his work.
The clouds had thickened below us, and soon after starting the approach run to Whitehorse, we were into them and flying blind in a grey, ghostly world.
‘You headed straight for the Kluane?’ he asked me, his pronunciation confirming Miriam’s impression of it as Klewarny. ‘I never bin to the mine, but the Noisy Range I know, and if it’s near the Noisy…’ He shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t advise going in behind the Front Ranges in this weather.’
‘I’ll probably stay the night in Whitehorse and leave in the morning,’ I said.
‘Who’s meeting you?’
‘Nobody,’ I told him. ‘But I’ve got the mine manager’s address. Takhini Trailer Court. That’s near Whitehorse, isn’t it?’
He nodded. ‘Bout a mile down the highway from the airport.’
‘Any difficulty about hiring a car?’ I asked him.
‘Not this time of year. Tourist season’s just about over.
But if you’re planning a trip out to that mine, you’ll need a four-by-four, that’s for sure.’ He nodded to the grey swirl of cloud skimming past the wings. ‘Be raining on the ground. Might even be sleeting in the mountains over towards Haines Junction. Looks like winter’s starting early this year.’
We broke out of the cloud into driving rain, Whitehorse a rectangular grid of wide, blackly shining streets laid out flat in the elbow of a river. ‘The Yukon,’ he said. ‘One of the few rivers tha
t runs north then south.’ I traced the course of it on the map spread out on my briefcase. It started in BC, almost reached the sea at White Pass above Skagway, ran north to Dawson City, then west almost to the Bering Strait before turning south and ending up after two thousand miles in Norton Sound.
I turned to the window again, the river below me, a broad brown ribbon of water running fast all along one side of the town, paralleling the railway line, and on the other side the airport spread out along the top of a brown escarpment. . ‘Depends how long it’s been raining whether you get through to your mine, but in any case it’ll be rough going …’ He looked at me, frowning. ‘Guess you wouldn’t have much experience of four-wheel-drive trucks in the old country.’
‘I’ll manage,’ I told him.
‘Sure. But this is bad country to get bogged down in. Half my time is spent helping men get out of trouble they could have avoided if they’d had the sense to realize what they were up against. Tell you what, Philip’ - right from the start he had been using my Christian name - ‘I’ve got my truck parked at the airport. Why don’t I run you out to Takhini? It won’t take me five minutes and I’ve got to see the Parks man at the Government Building, also the Met. people. I’ll be about an hour in town, then I’ll pick you up and we’ll drive to Haines Junction. That’s where our HQ is, and it puts you almost a hundred miles on your way, right against the Front Ranges of the Kluane.’
I told him I wouldn’t wish to put him to so much trouble, but I was into a country now where helping others was a part of living. A friend of his might even lend me his four-by-four if it was only for a couple of days, and there was a reasonably comfortable lodge just outside Haines Junction. ‘Food’s okay, too,’ he said. ‘And maybe in the morning the rain will have stopped.’
We landed in a downpour, spray flung up higher than the wings, the wheels skimming the surface water, and since he wouldn’t take no for an answer, even saying if there was no room at the lodge his wife would make up a bed for me in what they called the nursery, I accepted his offer of a lift. The prospect of company on the drive to Haines Junction was too good to refuse.
We hurried across the wet concrete, flung our cases into the big Parks vehicle and piled in. The interior of the truck was damp and cold, the surrounding country lost in the driving rain and the flat rectangle of Whitehorse only just visible like a toy town below us. The Alaska Highway,’ he said, as we swung north out of the airport, the asphalt road gleaming, the black of spruce closing in. Almost immediately we were into the settlement of Takhini and he turned right, down a dirt road that forced him into four-wheel drive. The surface was some sort of boulder clay. ‘Slippery as hell soon as there’s any rain.’ Ahead of us the river expanded into a small lake. Spruce everywhere. White spruce, he said, though the forest it made was funeral black.
The trailer court was wet and sticky with mud, nobody about, so I had a miserable time finding someone to direct me. The man I had come to see lived at the far end, a large home on wheels with the name Jonny Epinard painted on the door. A red Dodge pick-up stood beside it almost completely coated with a glistening layer of mud. Maybe it was the rain, or the fact that his wife was in hospital, but he was there, the door opening almost as soon as I banged on it. He was a wiry little man, rather Irish-looking, with a dark, screwed-up face. He hadn’t shaved that morning, the stubble showing grey, though his hair was black, jet black and very straight. In his faded bush shirt, open at the neck, and mud-stained jeans held up by braces as well as a thick leather belt, he had a wild, outlandish look.
His dark eyes switched from me to the Park warden, then back to me again. ‘Who are you?’ His grip on the door had tightened, his voice a little high. ‘What d’you want?’
‘Answers,’ I said. ‘To a few questions.’ I could hear the suck of his breath as I told him who I was and got my briefcase from the truck. I think he would have liked to close the door on me then, but Jim Edmundson called, ‘Back in about an hour, okay?’ and without waiting for an answer drove off. The man had no alternative then: ‘You’d better come in,’ he said, his voice reluctant.
The rear of the trailer was fitted out as a sitting-room, chintz curtains, imitation-leather chairs, pale wood cupboards and shelves. He waved me to a seat, but then remained standing, staring at the floor as though he didn’t know what to do about me. I let the silence run on until finally he said, ‘Well?’ The question hung in the air. He was nervous and I wondered why. ‘You like a beer?’
I shook my head.
His eyes darted about the room as though seeking some way of escape. Then abruptly he sat down. ‘You’re Tom Halliday’s lawyer, you say.’ His eyes fastened on the briefcase. I opened it and showed him copies of several letters that gave my firm’s address, but I could see he had already accepted my identity. ‘What do you want to know?’ His tongue flicked across his lips. ‘Sure you won’t have a beer?’
‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I had a drink on the plane.’
He nodded, then got suddenly to his feet again. ‘Well, I think I will. Don’t mind, do you?’ He opened a cupboard, busying himself searching among the bottles and cans. ‘You come all the way from England?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
To see me? Or to see the mine? You going there?’ He looked round at me. There’s nothing to see. The mine’s finished.’ He had a can in his hand and he snapped the ring. ‘It ran out years back. But you know that, don’t you?’
‘How many years back?’
He stared at me, his eyes probing as though he was trying to decide whether the question was some sort of a trap. ‘Didn’t he tell you?’ I waited, and at last he sat down again, taking a swig direct from the can. ‘It didn’t happen all at once. The pay dirt just thinned out, yielding less and less each year.’
‘When did you first realize the gold was petering out?’
‘Hard to say exactly, but about seven years ago, I guess. Why? What do you want to know for? Because Tom’s broke, is that it?’
‘Did Mrs Halliday tell you that?’ I was thinking of her description of the man watching from across the road. ‘You spoke to her in the end, did you?’
But he was still thinking of Tom. ‘He’s been a good guy to work for.’ He was suddenly smiling. ‘Used to come out about once a year. Wasn’t much interested in mining, only the machinery - he liked that. What he really came for was the fishing. And camera stalking. Didn’t want to shoot anything. But if he could get a close-up with his camera, moose in part’c’lar - he’d stalk moose all day down in the swampland below Nine Mile Falls.’ He shook his head, still smiling - a slightly crooked, slightly uncertain smile.
‘You kept the mine running.’
That’s right.’
‘Why did you do that? It was losing money.’
‘He wanted it kept running, that’s why. Not flat out like it used to be, but ticking over.’
‘Why?’ I repeated.
He shrugged. ‘Why does any man do anything if he’s got the money? He liked it, liked the idea of being a mine owner, that’s what he told me. It was in the blood, I guess, his father finding gold there when everyone told him he’d been sold a dud. Reck’n Tom didn’t want anybody to know the gold had run out.’
‘It must have cost him quite a bit.’
‘Sure, but a rich man like him -‘ He laughed. ‘Wish I were rich enough to run a mine just for the hell of it, just to keep up appearances. That’s what he was doing. Keeping up appearances. And now what?’ His eyes darted at me, anxious now and worried about the future. This was a young man’s country and he was certainly the wrong side of fifty. He leaned forward, ‘You’re his lawyer. If it turns out he’s dead, then what happens about the mine? There’s only myself and a young half-breed Indian, Jack McDonald, now, but we need to know.’
I didn’t answer him for a moment, wondering what line to take. ‘You’ll have to ask Mrs Halliday about that,’ I said. ‘In the event you speak of, the mine will belong to her.’
‘Mrs
Halliday?’ He seemed suddenly confused.
‘You saw her here in Whitehorse, didn’t you? When she was staying at the Sheffield.’ Or had it been the half-breed Indian who had followed her? It had to be one of them. ‘She hired a car and drove down to a lake called Dezadeash.’
‘Dezdeesh.’ From the way he said it I knew his correction of my pronunciation was to give him time to think. ‘She stayed at Kevin McKie’s place — Lakeside.’
‘You spoke to her just as she was driving off, is that it?’
‘No.’
‘But you were watching her from across the road.’
He didn’t answer.
‘She said she was being followed when she was staying at the hotel. Was that you?’
He stared at me blankly, his face gone sullen, and in that moment he looked part Indian himself.
‘She wrote to me,’ I said. ‘Somebody was following her about, watching her. That was you, wasn’t it?’
He nodded, slowly ‘and reluctantly.
‘Why?’
He hesitated, shaking his head. And then suddenly he blurted out, ‘I was scared, you see. I couldn’t make up my mind.’ And he went on, the words coming in a rush, ‘Tom had talked of her like she was a princess. Not often, but sometimes - over the camp fire, when he was lonely. And the way he spoke of her …’ He paused, his mind remembering. ‘She never came out here with him, you see. I’d never met her, and when I saw her… well, I guess there was something about her —’ He leaned suddenly forward, both hands clasped rightly round the beer can. ‘What would you have done? She looked so beautiful, and at the same time so remote — like ice, or a sunset seen across a frozen lake. I knew she must be here to find out about the mine - the same questions you bin asking. Was I to go right up to her and say What about my job - my wife’s sick and I haven’t had any money for over six months? Could I go right up to her and say that? Would you, if you were me?’
He was staring at me, his gaze urgent, his eyes almost pleading. It was obvious what he wanted, what any man would want who’d held an apparently safe job for years and now didn’t know whether it would continue, or even if he’d get the money he was owed. And I couldn’t help. Also, there was something that puzzled me. ‘How did you know Mrs Halliday was staying at the Sheffield? You say she’d never been out here before, yet you were there waiting for her, following her about.’
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