Десмонд Бэгли - Landslide

I ordered coffee and pie and took it over to a vacant table intending to settle down to do some hard thinking, but I didn’t get much chance of that because someone came up to the table and said, ‘Mind if I join you?’

He was old, maybe as much as seventy, with a walnut-brown face and a scrawny neck where age had dried the juices out of him. His hair, though white, was plentiful and inquisitive blue eyes peered from beneath shaggy brows. I regarded him speculatively for a long time, and at last he said, ‘I’m McDougall — chief reporter for the local scandal sheet.’

I waved him to a chair. ‘Be my guest.’

He put down the cup of coffee he was holding and grunted softly as he sat down. ‘I’m also the chief compositor,’ he said. ‘And the only copy-boy. I’m the rewrite man, too. The whole works.’

‘Editor, too?’

He snorted derisively. ‘Do I look like a newspaper editor?’

‘Not much.’

He sipped his coffee and looked at me from beneath the tangle of his brows. ‘Did you find what you were looking for, Mr Boyd?’

‘You’re well-informed,’ I commented. ‘I’ve not been in town two hours and already I can see I’m going to be reported in the Recorder. How do you do it?’

He smiled. ‘This is a small town and I know every man, woman and child in it. I’ve just come from the Matterson Building and I know all about you, Mr Boyd.’

This McDougall looked like a sharp old devil. I said, ‘I’ll bet you know the terms of my contract, too.’

‘I might.’ He grinned at me and his face took on the look of a mischievous small boy. ‘Donner wasn’t too pleased.’ He put down his cup. ‘Did you find out what you wanted to know about John Trinavant?’

I stubbed out my cigarette. ‘You have a funny way of running a newspaper, Mr McDougall. I’ve never seen such a silence in print in my life.’

The smile left his face and he looked exactly what he was — a tired old man. He was silent for a moment, then he said unexpectedly, ‘Do you like good whisky, Mr Boyd?’

‘I’ve never been known to refuse.’

He jerked his head in the direction of the newspaper office. ‘I have an apartment over the shop and a bottle in the apartment. Will you join me? I suddenly feel like getting drunk.’

For an answer I rose from the table and paid the tab for both of us. While walking across the park McDougall said, ‘I get the apartment free. In return I’m on call twenty-four hours a day. I don’t know who gets the better of the bargain.’

‘Maybe you ought to negotiate a new deal with your editor.’

‘With Jimson? That’s a laugh — he’s just a rubber stamp used by the owner.’

‘And the owner is Matterson,’ I said, risking a shaft at random.

McDougall looked at me out of the corner of his eye. ‘So you’ve got that far, have you? You interest me, Mr Boyd; you really do.’

‘You are beginning to interest me,’ I said.

We climbed the stairs to his apartment, which was sparsely but comfortably furnished. McDougall opened a cupboard and produced a bottle. ‘There are two sorts of Scotch,’ he said. ‘There’s the kind which is produced by the million gallons: a straight-run neutral grain spirit blended with good malt whisky to give it flavour, burnt caramel added to give it colour, and kept for seven years to protect the sacred name of Scotch whisky.’ He held up the bottle. ‘And then there’s the real stuff — fifteen-year-old unblended malt lovingly made and lovingly drunk. This is from Islay — the best there is.’

He poured two hefty snorts of the light straw-coloured liquid and passed one to me. I said, ‘Here’s to you, Mr McDougall. What brand of McDougall are you, anyway?’

I would swear he blushed. ‘I’ve a good Scots name and you’d think that would be enough for any man, but my father had to compound it and call me Hamish. You’d better call me Mac like everyone else and that way we’ll avoid a fight.’ He chuckled. ‘Lord, the fights I got into when I was a kid.’

I said, ‘I’m Bob Boyd.’

He nodded. ‘And what interests you in the Trinavants?’

‘Am I interested in them?’

He sighed. ‘Bob, I’m an old-time newspaperman so give me credit for knowing how to do my job. I do a run-down on everyone who checks the back files; you’d be surprised how often it pays off in a story. I’ve been waiting for someone to consult that particular issue for ten years.’

‘Why should the Recorder be interested in the Trinavants now?’ I asked. ‘The Trinavants are dead and the Recorder killed them deader. You wouldn’t think it possible to assassinate a memory, would you?’

‘The Russians are good at it; they can kill a man and still leave him alive — the walking dead,’ said McDougall. ‘Look at what they did to Khrushchev. It’s just that Matterson hit on the idea, too.’

‘You haven’t answered my question,’ I said tartly. ‘Quit fencing around, Mac.’

‘The Recorder isn’t interested in the Trinavants,’ he said. ‘If I put in a story about any of them — if I even mentioned the name — I’d be out on my can. This is a personal interest, and if Bull Matterson knew I was even talking about the Trinavants I’d be in big trouble.’ He stabbed his finger at me. ‘So keep your mouth shut, you understand.’ He poured out another drink and I could see his hand shaking. ‘Now, what’s your story?’

I said, ‘Mac, until you tell me more about the Trinavants I’m not going to tell you anything. And don’t ask me why because you won’t get an answer.’

He looked at me thoughtfully for a long time, then said, ‘But you’ll tell me eventually?’

‘I might.’

That stuck in his gullet but he swallowed it. ‘All right; it looks as though I’ve no option. I’ll tell you about the Trinavants.’ He pushed the bottle across. ‘Fill up, son.’

The Trinavants were an old Canadian family founded by a Jacques Trinavant who came from Brittany to settle in Quebec back in the seventeen-hundreds. But the Trinavants were not natural settlers nor were they merchants — not in those days. Their feet were itchy and they headed west. John Trinavant’s great-great-grandfather was a voyageur of note; other Trinavants were trappers and there was an unsubstantiated story that a Trinavant crossed the continent and saw the Pacific before Alexander Mackenzie.

John Trinavant’s grandfather was a scout for Lieutenant Farrell, and when Farrell built the fort he decided to stay and put down roots in British Columbia. It was good country, he liked the look of it and saw the great possibilities. But just because the Trinavants ceased to be on the move did not mean they had lost their steam. Three generations of Trinavants in Fort Farrell built a logging and lumber empire, small but sound.

‘It was John Trinavant who really made it go,’ said McDougall. ‘He was a man of the twentieth century — born in 1900 — and he took over the business young. He was only twenty-three when his father died. British Columbia in those days was pretty undeveloped still, and it’s men like John Trinavant who have made it what it is today.’

He looked at his glass reflectively. ‘I suppose that, from a purely business point of view, one of the best things that Trinavant ever did was to join up with Bull Matterson.’

‘That’s the second time you’ve mentioned him,’ I said. ‘He can’t be the man I met at the Matterson Building.’

‘Hell, no; that’s Howard — he’s just a punk kid,’ said McDougall contemptuously. ‘I’m talking about the old man — Howard’s father. He was a few years older than Trinavant and they hooked on to each other in 1925. John Trinavant had the brains and directed the policy of the combination while Matterson supplied the energy and drive, and things really started to hum around here. One or the other of them had a finger in every goddam pie; they consolidated the logging industry and they were the first to see that raw logs are no damn’ use unless you can do something with them, preferably on the spot. They built pulping plants and plywood plants and they made a lot of money, especially during the war. By the end of the war the folks around here used to get a lot of fun out of sitting around of an evening just trying to figure out how much Trinavant and Matterson were worth.’