Hammond Innes - High Stand

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 searching 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.’