Hammond Innes - High Stand

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.