High Stand
Hammond Innes
* * *
Why should mine-owner Halliday have changed his will? And why should he disappear? Redfern, his solicitor, realizes he must find the answers. His investigations lead him to a gold mine in Yukon and to the high stand of red cedars in the forests of British Columbia where deadly secrets lie.
Why should Tom Halliday have changed his will after so many years? And why, shortly afterwards, should he disappear?
Philip Redfern, his solicitor, knows he must find the answers. Redfern tracks these down ‘ to a gold mine in the Yukon and to the High Stand of cedars where the secrets are deadly and the stakes terrifying …
Hammond Innes
High Stand
(1985)
PART I
The Golden Playboy
1
My mind didn’t register for a moment. It was nine-forty, a Friday in mid-August. Everything was always a rush on a Friday and I was trying to complete the draft of an affidavit before my first appointment at ten. ‘There’s a Mrs Halliday to see you.’ My secretary was on holiday and the girl standing in for her got the name wrong.
‘I told you, I don’t see people without an appointment.’
‘She said she was an old friend.’
It took a moment even then… My God! I thought -Miriam. I looked out of the window, at the long sweeping back of the downs running towards Ditchling Beacon, a smooth flowing line against a cloudless sky, streaks of cirrus forming in the west. More than a year ago, April or May, driving back late at night from a dinner party… May. It must have been May, the hedges long lines of white in the car’s headlights. Tom Hall’day’s wife,’ I said. ‘You typed that codicil for him to sign. Remember?’
‘It’s spelt Halliday,’ she said firmly, putting a slip of paper in front of me. ‘And she says it’s urgent.’
‘They pronounce it Hall’day,’ I told her, wondering what the hell Miriam wanted. Did she know he had changed his Will? I pushed the draft affidavit aside, my mind searching for an answer. Miriam I had liked more than most, but it was the cognac and the May moon, that was all, the only occasion, in fact, we had ever been alone together. The last time I had seen her had been about six months ago, at a dinner party at their house just after Tom Halliday got back from another of his Yukon trips. I told the girl I would ring when I was ready and leaned back into the shaft of sunlight streaming in through the open window, bracing myself for an awkward ii
interview. She hadn’t told her husband, I was certain of that. If she had he would have behaved quite differently. So it was either the Will, or else her sex life had suddenly become so complicated she needed advice. That was a development of the practice I hadn’t expected, women whose husbands had found them out, or who had got themselves pregnant, or, even worse in a way, men whose involvement with somebody else’s wife had come out into the open.
I picked up my pipe, but I didn’t fill it. I just sat there sucking at it and thinking of Halliday, remembering how he had looked, sitting in the chair opposite me — a compact, nervously tense man with a shock of black hair and a small moustache, the eyes bright, intensely alive, and the hands restless. Miriam was a lot younger and I had wondered then if his hair wasn’t dyed, it was so uniformly black.
Why had he done it, adding a codicil that switched the forestry property in BC from Miriam to the younger of the two sons by his first marriage? And that nervous tension. He wasn’t normally tense — a rather extrovert man with a fondness for good wine and showy cars. Bit of a show -off really, with an unpredictable streak that seemed to go with the fact that he was rich and had not had to earn a penny of it. I sucked at my pipe, staring out towards the downs, brown in the sun. I could almost smell the scent of the grass, but the picture in my mind was of Tom Halliday sitting over the port at the end of that dinner talking compulsively about his father, about Dawson City and the dreadful haul up from Skagway, talking so fast that the words seemed to spill out of him. I had heard most of it before, the incredible story of the phoney gold mine, but never in such detail and never told with such a sense of excitement. He had seemed lit up by the memory of it, and then he had taken us through into his study where the walls were hung with pictures and relics of the gold rush, a great moose head over the fireplace. But it was the faded photograph of his father that remained most vividly in my mind, a photograph of his father as a young man, with a drooping moustache, braces and a battered hat, standing against a rickety wooden sluice box that was half-covered in snow and ice, holding in his hand a panning dish, his mouth wide open and his teeth showing in a grin as he danced a jig over the contents. Strange to think that all his life Tom Halliday had been living off that pan. Well, at least Miriam had still got the mine, so what was she worrying about? Or hadn’t she realized it was only the trees he had come to see me about?
I put down my pipe and reached for the intercom. Better get it over with, whatever it was. ‘Show Mrs Halliday in, will you.’
She wasn’t pregnant, that was my first thought, every detail of her revealed by the close-fitting jeans and her stomach flat as a boy’s. And though the sight of her made my blood run faster, I knew at once that the reason she was here didn’t concern me, for she’d taken no trouble with her clothes - just the jeans and a pair of sandals, a chequered cotton shirt, hardly any make-up and her hair straggling in wisps across her face. She smiled at me, briefly and without any special warmth, her eyes blank. She didn’t even say she was glad to see me again, her mind totally preoccupied as she took the chair I indicated.
Even then she didn’t look at me. She just sat there across the desk from me, staring blankly at the wall behind my head. She seemed at a loss for words. This isn’t a social call, I take it?’ I tried to keep my voice light.
She shook her head. ‘No. I need some advice. Your help, Philip.’
The large eyes focused suddenly and I felt something stir in me and was surprised that just a glance and the knowledge that she needed my help could do that to me. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘Tom,’ she said. ‘Have you seen him recently — since he got back?’ And when I didn’t say anything she nodded to herself. ‘Tuesday, wasn’t it?’ And she added, ‘About his Will?’ She was staring at me, teeth clamped on her lower lip.
‘You know I can’t give you the reason for his visit.’ He could have phoned me about it, but he’d been in a hurry, wanting the codicil typed out there and then while he waited, and then the temp and I had witnessed it. ‘You’re his wife, I know, but a solicitor -‘
‘Rubbish.’ She shook her head quickly, a gesture of impatience. ‘I knew you’d say that. He came to you about his Will. There’s no other reason he would have come here. Is there?’ It was said as an afterthought, almost under her breath, and she added, ‘I don’t care about the Will, but how did he seem?’ She leaned suddenly forward so that I could see the swell of her breasts in the V of her shirt, her hands clasped, very tightly. ‘You’ve met him a number of times over the last two or three years. Was he any different - worried, upset, tense? Was there tension?’
‘Why?’ There was an edge to my voice. If it wasn’t the Will, then why was she so upset ‘He seemed just the same.’ I said it quickly, angry with myself, and with her for the effect she had on me.
‘Then why change his Will? Just then — right after his return.’ Her voice faded, became uncertain. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘No need for you to worry,’ I answered her, thinking of the trees and that son of his. ‘You’re very well provided tor.’
She brushed that aside. ‘I can always look after myself.’ I thought I caught the glimmer of a smile. ‘But I happen to be very fond of Tom and there’s something wrong.’ Her eyes flickered round my office as it search
ing for some indication of what that something might be. ‘Did he give any reason?’ And when I didn’t answer, she said, ‘It’s Brian, I take it.’
I didn’t say anything, wondering how she had guessed. I had asked him about that — why the younger son? But when he said he had had the boy trained in forestry I could see the sense of it from his point of view. Miriam still got the mine, which was what really mattered. And the elder boy, Martin, inherited all the shares in Halliday Special Bodies, which was presumably what he wanted since he more or less ran the works for his father. ‘Martin’s an engineer,’ Halliday had said. ‘He doesn’t know one end of a tree from the other.’
‘Was it the mine or that land in British Columbia?’ She was watching me closely, her eyes searching. ‘Not the company, surely. That wouldn’t suit Brian, it’s been losing money for years. It must be the trees - that land Tom’s father planted fifty years or more ago.’ Her eyes, still fixed on me, caught the light, a sort of turquoise blue with flecks of green, very striking. I hadn’t seen them so clearly before, the sun straight on her. And that hair of hers, almost red. ‘Did he give any reason5 Brian has a feeling for trees, I know that. But there has to be a reason, something that impelled Tom to come and see you — right then, just after he had got back from Canada.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I can’t discuss it. I really can’t.’
‘Balls! Really, Philip.. ‘She was suddenly more like herself — vital, very alive, with that sharp intelligence that had so attracted me. ‘He came here last Tuesday, and Brian came back about a month ago, straight from some Godforsaken village in the Himalayas where he’d been sitting at the feet of a Muslim fakir — a guru, a wizard, I don’t know what you’d call him.’ And she added, quite softly, ‘He’s wild, that boy, always has been. Tom said once he ought to have some trees of his own. The only trees he could give him are on the Halliday Arm. One of the finest stands of western red cedar in BC. That was how he described it to me once, and the only business he had with you was his Will.’ She stopped there, almost breathless, for it had come out in a rush, her eyes still fixed on mine. She seemed on the point of saying something more, but then she turned her head away, locking whatever it was up inside herself, the silence dragging.
‘Suppose you tell me what the problem is?’
She gave a slight movement of the head, a negation. ‘I thought you might be able to help, that he might have told you something.’ Another long silence, and then suddenly she had turned to me again. ‘He was in Canada, a longer trip than usual, and when he got back… That was the weekend — Sunday morning. He saw you on the Tuesday and left for London that same evening. I haven’t seen him since.’
‘So he’s been gone two and a half days, that’s all.’ I didn’t understand why she was so concerned. London, his club, the company, which was at a place called Haverhill near Cambridge, old car rallies and motor shows. Miriam was the daughter of a professor of archaeology at Cambridge. She was interested in ancient buildings, timbered buildings in particular. She knew a lot about hammerbeam roofs and old oak carvings. Nothing about cars, except as a means of getting somewhere. As a result she was often on her own, which was how it had happened, the two of us paired at a dinner party, and then the starter motor of my car packing up just as we were leaving. ‘Did he say why he was going to London?’
She shook her head. ‘No, he wouldn’t tell me anything.’
I reminded her then that she had told me herself he would quite often leave at a moment’s nonce to meet some fellow car enthusiast at his club, see an old crock that could be rebuilt in the company’s works or go off to a show he’d only just heard about, but again she shook her head. ‘He’s sold his fleet of old cars, you know. There’s only that lovely Rolls tourer left.’ And she added that she had tried the RAC in Pall Mall, all his usual haunts, the works at Haverhill, even Beaulieu where she knew he was trying to get the Rolls put on display.
Another woman, then? There was always that possibility, particularly at his age. But when I hinted at some personal attachment, she brushed it aside. ‘No!’ She said it explosively, adding with a little smile, ‘Whatever you may think, Tom and I are very close ‘
I hesitated then, not sure how serious this was. ‘Can we go • back a bit?’ I said. ‘He returned from Canada at the weekend, you say?’ She nodded. And he had seen me on the Tuesday. ‘Did he have any meeting, anything he didn’t tell you about — did anybody come to see him?’
‘No, nobody. I picked him up at Gatwick early Sunday morning and the rest of that day we spent at home. He slept a lot of the time. Monday we were at a drinks party in the morning - the Griesons, do you know them’ Lovely place near Firle. That afternoon he dealt with a pile of post that had accumulated, dictated a lot of letters, then in the evening we dined out at a nearby restaurant.’
‘And he saw nobody between his arrival back in England and last Tuesday when he left for London. By car?’
‘Yes, by car.’
‘And nobody had contacted him?’
‘Not as far as I know — nobody who was a stranger to me, if that’s what you mean.’
Telephone calls?’
‘Yes, several.’ She hesitated, then said, ‘There was his accountant, I know. Otherwise they were social calls.’ And she added, ‘He never talked to me about money. Never needed to, I suppose. He was a Canadian citizen, as you probably know, and we’d always had what we needed. But I had the feeling — I’ve had it for some time now — that things were getting a little difficult. And there was one call, just before he returned - a man named Josef Wolchak, an American I think. He wanted to know when my husband was expected back. He had to see him - urgently, he said. I remember the call because I’d never heard of the man before and when I mentioned it to Tom he seemed quite shaken for a moment.’
‘Perhaps that was why he went to London,’ I suggested.
But she didn’t seem to think so. ‘I’m sure he would have mentioned it. And why hasn’t he phoned me?’
I didn’t tell her he had mentioned Wolchak at our meeting on Tuesday, asking whether anyone of that name had contacted me. And when I had said no, he had seemed relieved. Even so, it wouldn’t account for his sudden silence. I could still see him sitting there in the chair where his wife was now seated, his features so strained, and his manner, that sense of tension. ‘This son of his,’ I said, thinking of the codicil. ‘I’ve met the other one, Martin, but not Brian.’
‘He’s wild, like I said. Suddenly turns up at the beginning of the month looking like death. It was dysentery, but he still insisted on seeing his father. Money, of course. He wanted money tor this guru he’d been with in the Himalayas. It’s always the same, always money. Whenever he turns up. Though I’ll say this for him, it’s not for himself, always some cause.’ And she added, ‘It was trees this time. Before that it was seals. He wanted Tom to produce something in the works that would jam the Canadian sealers’ instruments. He’s crazy,’ she added softly. ‘Quite crazy.’
‘But you like him?’
‘Oddly enough, yes.’ She nodded. ‘Yes, I do. He’s a very strange, very exciting person to be with.’
That was something, I thought. At least she wouldn’t go to law when the time came and she discovered the land and the trees in British Columbia really were going to another woman’s son. I was trying to recall Tom Halliday’s words, everything he had said. But it wasn’t much. He had virtually written the codicil himself. All he’d wanted was for it to be drawn up properly. There’d been no discussions, no explanation. I’d simply done what he’d wanted and that was that. True, his features had looked drawn and rather tense, and he seemed to have a cold. But people often pick up a germ at the end of a long hard trip. ‘His health all right5’ I asked.
She looked at me quickly. ‘Why? Did you dunk he looked ill?’
‘No. A bit strained, that’s all, but one always wonders when a man starts fiddling about with his Will.’
‘Physically he’s all right. I
had him go for a check-up before he went to Canada this last time. We were in London, one of those receptions to launch a new car.’ She hesitated, then went on, ‘Dr Wessler’s report arrived just after he had left: all systems functioning normally, only the cholesterol slightly high. More exercise and lav off the fat. That was all, bar a reference to nervous tension and the suggestion that I should get him away for a holiday somewhere in the sun, preferably an island with no roads and no cars.’ She gave a snort of derision. ‘Seychelles. That was what he advised. Boat to hotel by bullock cart, can you imagine?’ She looked down at her hands, that warm Titian hair of hers falling across her face. ‘We’ve never had a holiday together since our honeymoon, and that was at Brighton. We drove there in a 1913 de Dion Bouton.’ She gave a suppressed giggle. ‘It’s almost as ridiculous as the colonel, married to his regiment, who took his bride round the battlefields of the Second World War.’
The girl came in then to tell me my ten o’clock appointment had arrived. Miriam didn’t move. ‘What am I going to do, Philip?’
I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t really my problem if the man hadn’t been home for a couple of days. I’d heard talk that he had been away a good deal these past few months, so she ought to be used to it by now. But when I said as much, she insisted he always rang her every evening when he was away. ‘Always,’ she insisted. ‘Even in the Yukon, when he’s visiting the mine, he still telephones me most days -they’ve got radio-telephone in the trucks up there. And if he can’t get hold of me he gets quite upset. Sometimes,’ she added, ‘he forgets the time difference and wakes me in the middle of the night.’ She smiled. ‘He did that twice on the last trip when he was down in BC.’
‘Could he be suffering from amnesia, then?’ I suggested. But she brushed that aside. ‘Not Tom. He can remember every old crock he’s ever seen.’ I was on my feet then and she muttered something about ringing round some more people who might have some idea where he was. ‘I’ll give it another day, then if I still don’t know -‘ She left it at that and got slowly up from the chair. ‘At least I know now why he came to see you… But to change his Will and then go off— I don’t like it, Philip. Do you think something’s happened to him?’ And when I didn’t answer, she added, ‘You’re sure he didn’t say anything - about where he was going? Not even the vaguest hint5’ I shook my head and she said again, ‘I’ll give it another day.’
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