I closed the diary, tucked it under my arm and got to my feet. I took the photograph too. I told Mrs Steading, of course, but not about the diary and the watch, and when I got back to the office, I put them away in the Halliday deed box, and that was that, my mind switching to other things, the oil man dying of cancer and all his affairs to cope with in a rush.
The last days of August had slipped away in a blaze of summer heat and now we were well into September and it was raining, my first real holiday less than a week away. I took the boat down to Bembridge. No word from Miriam, and her husband still missing. The following day I set off for Brittany with a girl I had met only once, at a party given by a client, and it didn’t work out. It was a beat all the way, quite rough at times, and she was seasick. She left me at Paimpol, and it was after that, when I was on my own, starting to rock-hop westward along the coast, that I began thinking of Miriam again and how it would have been if I had had her on board, wondering what she was up to, who she was with — why, after that postcard and her visit to the mine, she hadn’t bothered to write.
I was becalmed for a whole day by Les Sept lies with nothing to do but listen to the radio. That was when I started to worry about her. It was two weeks now, a little more. After Whitehorse she would probably have gone down to Vancouver, or Victoria, where Tom at any rate would have had friends but, however hectic the social life, it seemed strange she had not written to me again, if only to make certain that I was keeping an eye on the house.
It was there, in the solitary confinement of my little boat, with the moon coming up and the sails slatting, not a breath of wind, that I made up my mind. It wouldn’t take more than a week at the outside, and even if she had forgotten all about me, and her promise to write after she’d been up to the mine, it would at least settle the nagging thought that something had happened to her. And at the same time I could check for myself whether the mine was really exhausted, possibly see the BC property and that stand of timber in the Cascades valley.
In the early hours of the morning, just as dawn was breaking, the wind came in from the west again and it began to cloud over. I turned the boat about and headed for home. And when I got there my partner told me over the phone that we had received a reply to the letter I had sent to the solicitors in Vancouver before I had started on my holiday. It stated unequivocally that the previous year’s September timber sale agreement was the last they had drawn up for Mr Halliday. But he had been into their office on Thursday the fifteenth of last month to enquire about the possibility of selling the whole Cascades property through a nominee, or perhaps forming a special trust to handle the sale. They had not seen him since, only Mrs Halliday who had been in to see them on 9 September, which was the day I had received her postcard. His manner at that meeting in August was described as ‘quite normal, but not relaxed’. And the letter concluded with the words — ‘we have no reason to suppose our client was ill, nor did he show any indication of being on the verge of a nervous breakdown or any other disturbance that would account for his disappearance’. It was signed McLaren amp; Partners.
Two days later I was on a Wardair flight out of Gatwick bound for Vancouver across the top of the world.
PART II
1
It’s an odd feeling sitting with earphones on and a drink in one’s hand listening to a symphony concert and looking down through drifting cloud to a scattering of growlers so far below that the sea appears dusted with salt, the pack-ice beyond and an occasional berg. Tim Severin would have been glad of this aerial view when his leather hide boat was caught in the ice, for it showed St Brendan was right. Even now, almost fifteen hundred years after that Irish saint recorded the details of his voyage to North America, there was still the ice-clear gap between the pack and the coast of Greenland. It showed quite clearly from where I sat, 37,000 feet above sea level, a dark lane of water, and beyond it great rivers of snow and ice sweeping down between the black mouths of overlapping craters, and then the white blank-out of age-old, depthless snow as we whispered our way across the Greenland icecap. Baffin Island for lunch, the sun standing still as we flew almost as fast as the earth was spinning with bergs like ships between dark-coloured outbreaks of land. Black, black mountains, sheer cliffs, everything brittle-bright, the clarity of the air unbelievable.
The man next to me leaned across. ‘Don’t want to drop into that lot, eh?’ It was the first time he had said a word. ‘Guess we must be just about over the spot where Franklin and all those others wintered and died.’ He looked at me hard, steel-grey eyes and a baldish head. ‘First time you bin on this run?’
I nodded.
‘Thought so. I do it three, four times a year. Always Wardair.’ He nodded emphatically. ‘I got contracts to supply you people with fruit, apples mainly.’ He smiled a hard, tight-lipped smile. ‘You wouldn’t believe it, but we grow them right in the middle of the Rockies. Grapes, too. You should take a trip up and see for yourself. And this is the right time, Indian summer weather, real warm.’ He reached into his jacket pocket, produced a business card and placed it on my meal tray. ‘Be happy to show you around.’ He nodded, pushed his earphones back in place and was lost to the world again.
We crossed Slave Lake, the Rockies looming ahead, the murmur of the engines barely audible as we began to slide down the sky towards a world of jagged peaks and the dirty yellow of snow that had lain exposed all summer. On and off I had been thinking of Miriam. Almost a month ago she had come this way, maybe in this very seat since she, too, had flown Wardair. Had the sky been as clear as it was now? Had she sat there looking down on the barren, ice-scarred land below, thinking of her destination, knowing the Yukon border was only a few hundred miles away to starb’d? And not a word since that postcard.
It had seemed strange enough back in England, but now that the wild bleakness of northern Canada was spread out below me, the vastness of it and the loneliness, it seemed stranger still. To have reached out to somebody as she had — never mind the reason — and then to cut the contact as though it didn’t matter any more. All that space, a wilderness of mountain, lake and scrub just beginning to take on an autumn blaze on the heights below the snow line, and in the Yukon, on the ground, it would still be a vastness of space full of rock and trees, the humans few and strange. Surely in the remoteness of that glacial national park, having penetrated to Ice Cold Creek, she would have come back urgent to tell me about it, about the mine, about what she had found. It didn’t seem natural that she should suddenly have gone silent on me, not now that I, too, was conscious of the vastness, experiencing that sense of smallness and loneliness that she must have felt.
There was a marvellous view of Vancouver sitting like a miniature Manhattan surrounded by vast expanses of sun-bright water as we came in to land. Ships, and tugs with long trams of barges, some with log rafts, the Strait of Juan de Fuca reaching out to the American mainland and the distant shapes of snow-clad mountains. It was for this, and the sight of the Arctic Ocean, that I had flown the northern route instead of the more prosaic and slightly cheaper route via Edmonton. As soon as I had settled into my hotel, which was in the rather congested eastern part of Vancouver known as Gas Town, I took a taxi across town to the Bayshore Hotel. It was right on the water, close against the old wharfs and boatyards of Coal Harbour.