He was staring at me, his gaze urgent, his eyes almost pleading. It was obvious what he wanted, what any man would want who’d held an apparently safe job for years and now didn’t know whether it would continue, or even if he’d get the money he was owed. And I couldn’t help. Also, there was something that puzzled me. ‘How did you know Mrs Halliday was staying at the Sheffield? You say she’d never been out here before, yet you were there waiting for her, following her about.’
He didn’t say anything, and his eyes dropped, one hand under his arm abstractedly scratching himself.
‘Did she write you she was coming?’
He shook his head, his eyes shifting to the window.
‘But you knew she was coming.’
‘Yes.’ He finished his drink and got slowly to his feet, putting the empty can down and reaching into a drawer stuffed with papers. She hadn’t written to him. She had cabled him. He handed me the flimsy. It was addressed to a box number in Whitehorse. It gave her date of arrival and flight number and asked him to meet her either at the airport or the Sheffield. PLEASE ARRANGE VISIT ICE COLD MINE. MIRIAM HALLIDAY. ‘That’s when I first saw her, at the airport.’
‘But you didn’t talk to her then.’
‘No.’
‘What about the visit to the mine — did you fix that?’
‘Yep. She went in with a guy who works a claim on a neighbouring creek. I fixed that for her at the airport. Bit of luck, he was there to pick up some radio spares.’
‘An Italian.’
He nodded. Tony Tarasconi. She was staying at Lakeside Lodge. He picked her up from there and took her in.’
‘You fixed that for her, at the airport. But you didn’t make yourself known to her, though you were there and she had asked you to meet her. What were you afraid of?’
‘Nothing.’ He said it quickly, his eyes darting. ‘I told you — I was worried about the future. I couldn’t face it, not then.’
‘So when did you finally talk with her?’
‘Later. I spoke to her later.’
‘After she’d been to the mine?’
‘Yep.’
I handed back the cable slip, wondering what had made him change his mind. ‘I’ll be going up to the mine myself,’ I said and an expression almost of hostility showed for an instant in his dark eyes.
‘What for?’ He stared at me. ‘There’s nobody there, nothing — only the equipment. Anything you want to know I can tell you right here. Any questions about production, how much it would cost to move the screening plant and have a try up the Stone Slide Gully.’ It was clear he didn’t want me there. But why? ‘I tried to persuade Tom to have a go at Stone Slide, but he wouldn’t. I guess he was finding things difficult by then. Financially, I mean. We’ve cut right back. Everything we can, so no point your going there.’ And he added, ‘It’s bad going at any time, but after all the rain we’ve had — ‘
‘It’s not the rain,’ I said. ‘It’s something else.’ He shook his head, his face taking on that sullen look, his hands clasped very tight as I told him I was determined to see the mine now that I was here. In the end he agreed to contact the Italian for me. He couldn’t drive me in himself because of his wife. Just why he had been willing to talk to Miriam after she had been to the mine, when he wouldn’t speak to her before, I couldn’t discover. And after she had been to the mine Miriam had only stayed one night at the Sheffield, then in the morning she had taken the train down to Skagway in Alaska.
‘And after that?’ I asked. ‘Where was she going after Skagway?’
He gave a little shrug and shook his head. ‘Vancouver, I guess.’ It wasn’t for him to ask her where she was going, and he added that people who went down to Skagway on the old Yukon and White Pass Route railway were usually headed back to Vancouver by the sea route, in which case she would have been taking one of the American ships as far as Prince Rupert, then changing to the BC Ferries service. I suggested she might not have gone straight back to Vancouver. ‘Did she give any indication she wanted to see the forest land her husband had inherited on the west coast of BC?’
He didn’t say anything, a slight shake of the head, that was all.
I asked him then about Brian, whether he had ever met him. ‘No,’ he said. And then, after a pause: ‘Tom wanted him to come out. He said so several times. But Brian never came. First he was in Peru, then India, I think.’ The eagerness of his reply made it obvious he was glad my questioning had switched away from Miriam. Tom thought he’d be interested in the spruce forests here, but I got the impression that what his son was really interested in was people — people in trouble, I mean. Like the Peruvian Indians, or those being exterminated by the destruction of the Amazon rain forest.’ He saw I was surprised and quick as a flash he said, ‘You see, Mr Redfern, we’re not ignorant of what goes on in the world even if we are just a handful of people on the edge of the North Polar Sea. There’s plenty of magazines and we’ve all the time in the world to read — a good library, too.’ He was smiling then and for a fleeting moment he seemed suddenly more relaxed as I asked him about Tom Halliday’s interest in the forestry land. ‘Did he talk about it?’
‘He may have done.’ And he added, ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember.’
‘Did he ever go down there? Before coming to see you at the mine, or after?’
‘He may have done.’ He gave a quick little laugh. ‘Not much interested myself, you see. Trees are all right for shoring and sluicing, building a log cabin. But if you’re a mining man like me you tend to think of them as something that’s got to be cleared out of the way before you start shovelling the dirt.’
‘You don’t think he was paying for the continued operation of the mine out of the sale of timber?’
‘I wouldn’t know — about his business affairs, I mean.’ He said it quickly, getting up and going to the cupboard for another beer. ‘Sure you won’t change your mind?’
I shook my head, watching him and wondering why he was suddenly nervous again.
He snapped the ring seal and took a pull at the can, standing in front of the window, his feet apart, one hand clasped on the bright red elastic of his braces, staring out at the rain. ‘He was a rich man, wasn’t he?’ He looked at me then, his eyes brown and worried under the dark puckers of his brow. I realized then that he wanted confirmation of that. ‘He was rich, wasn’t he? I mean, when he came up here, he’d hire planes, anything he wanted, throwing money about…’ His voice trailed away.
‘He was broke,’ I said, thinking it best to tell him the worst straight out. ‘When he disappeared — ‘ I stopped. ‘You do know that he’s disappeared, don’t you?’
He had sat down again, his hands clutching at the beer as though he desperately needed something to hold on to. ‘Yes,’ he muttered, his voice so muted I hardly heard his reply. But of course Miriam would have told him. And then he said, ‘I heard it on the radio. Late one night. It was on television, too. Just the announcement that he’d gone missing. Didn’t see it myself, but the radio said something about financial trouble. It was a hell of a shock, I can tell you, always thinking of him as being so rich — until these last few months, that is.’
‘And it was on the media.’ I hadn’t expected the man’s disappearance to be news up here in the far north.
‘The mine, you see. Anything to do with mining is news here and he was quite a guy. You talk to the fellers up at the airport who fly the Kluane, they thought the world of him, so did Kevin McKie and some of the others around Dezadeash and the Lakeside Lodge.’
‘Do you mean he impressed them, or was he a popular figure up here?’