The girl came in then to tell me my ten o’clock appointment had arrived. Miriam didn’t move. ‘What am I going to do, Philip?’
I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t really my problem if the man hadn’t been home for a couple of days. I’d heard talk that he had been away a good deal these past few months, so she ought to be used to it by now. But when I said as much, she insisted he always rang her every evening when he was away. ‘Always,’ she insisted. ‘Even in the Yukon, when he’s visiting the mine, he still telephones me most days — they’ve got radio-telephone in the trucks up there. And if he can’t get hold of me he gets quite upset. Sometimes,’ she added, ‘he forgets the time difference and wakes me in the middle of the night.’ She smiled. ‘He did that twice on the last trip when he was down in BC.’
‘Could he be suffering from amnesia, then?’ I suggested. But she brushed that aside. ‘Not Tom. He can remember every old crock he’s ever seen.’ I was on my feet then and she muttered something about ringing round some more people who might have some idea where he was. ‘I’ll give it another day, then if I still don’t know — ‘ She left it at that and got slowly up from the chair. ‘At least I know now why he came to see you… But to change his Will and then go off- I don’t like it, Philip. Do you think something’s happened to him?’ And when I didn’t answer, she added, ‘You’re sure he didn’t say anything — about where he was going? Not even the vaguest hint5’ I shook my head and she said again, ‘I’ll give it another day.’
She turned then, very abruptly and without another word, and after she’d gone I went back to my desk and sat there for a moment thinking about Halliday, trying to imagine what must have been going on in his mind as he’d waited here in my office for the girl to type the codicil. He hadn’t talked. He’d just sat there, his grey eyes staring out to the high ridge of the downs, quite expressionless, so that I had had the feeling he was mentally far away.
It was about an hour later that a freelance journalist based in Brighton phoned me to enquire whether it was true Tom Halliday had left his wife. He wouldn’t say where he had picked up the information, only that it was another woman, and he then suggested that Halliday had ‘gone walkabout’ did I have any information on that? I said no, I had not; that in fact I had seen Mr Halliday as recently as last Tuesday and there had been nothing to suggest my client was going ‘walkabout’, as he put it. He then asked me a lot of questions, personal questions, mostly about money, which I refused to answer. Finally I put the phone down.
I found that call very disturbing. For one thing, it was a reminder of how little I knew about Tom Halliday; I knew more about his father. But my main concern was the fact that a journalist was taking an interest in his movements; it suggested that there really was something seriously wrong. I must have smoked most of a full pipe while thinking about it. In the end, I put the thought that he might really have disappeared out of my mind and got on with the day’s work. I had been in Ditchling now three and a half years and in that time I had built up a thriving practice based largely on the precept that when it comes to Wills people want a solicitor who is of the locality and readily available, but not living in the same town and thus a part of their own community. Ditchling was perfect, being little more than a village and removed from the seaside towns of Eastbourne, Brighton and Worthing that were my main catchment area by the downland barrier. And now that I’d taken on a junior partner, my weekends were beginning to be my own. I had just bought my first boat, a junk-rigged Jester-type craft, and with it the dream of going trans-Atlantic had come one step nearer.
Next day, Saturday, I was into Shoreham early, driving the long dock road out to the east harbour entrance where I had left my pram dinghy on a dirty patch of gravel among a litter of old rowing boats, rusting buoys and baulks of timber. The boat was over on the far side of the harbour on a borrowed mooring. There was still a lot to be done and I stayed the night on board so that I was there to give a hand when the moonlighting engineer arrived on the Sunday morning to install the single-pot diesel I’d finally bought in preference to an outboard motor. I worked with him for a couple of hours or so, then rowed over to the yacht club for a drink. There was some sort of race on that afternoon and the bar was fairly crowded. I found myself next to a man with one of the Sundays spread out in front of him; that was how I heard about it — not from Miriam or the police or any official communication, but haphazardly, peering at a headline over another man’s shoulder:
GOLD MINE OWNER DISAPPEARS
MILLIONAIRE’S CHEQUES BOUNCE
‘COULD BE SUICIDE’ SAYS SON.
Good God! I must have said it aloud, for the man looked up. ‘Do you know him?’ And when I nodded, he pushed the paper across to me. ‘Help yourself, I’ve finished with it. But a man with a gold mine in the Yukon — you’d think he’d have more sense than to let it run through his fingers, all of it, so that he’s dead broke.’ He turned the pages, laying the paper flat where a large headline screamed across two pages: GOLDEN PLAYBOY COMES TO GRIEF — His Three Loves- Beautiful Cars — Beautiful Women — and Speed. The full story of the ‘lush life’ of Thomas Francis Halliday and his ‘Klondike Gold’ was carried over from the front page to almost two full inside pages. The three investigative journalists involved had clearly been putting in a lot of overtime, for it was a very full, very colourful account of the life of a gold-rich playboy, and it made good reading, the sort of life-style that half the commuters in the country would give their souls for.
Poor Miriam! They had treated her kindly, but it was hard all the same: names, and sometimes the addresses, of several of the girls who had claimed his attentions, including one he had talked to in a club bar in Brighton on the Tuesday evening. A reference to drugs, too, and how he had gone into silver mining in Peru and failed. But the main story was his disappearance, speculation as to the reasons for it and whether he was alive or dead. Somebody answering his description had taken the late night Townsend-Thoresen ferry from Felixstowe to Rotterdam on the Wednesday. He was also thought to have been seen at the Aust service station by the Severn Bridge. That was on Friday. There was a quote from a garage owner at Polegate and a builder at Lewes, both of whom had presented cheques on a joint account signed by Miriam and had been told to refer to drawer. The Hallidays’ bank manager had, of course, refused to comment. The journalists had then gone on to discuss the possibility of suicide and the article finished up with a quote from his doctor — ‘Nothing organically wrong with him, nothing at all.’
‘Well, what do you make of it?’ the owner of the paper asked as I folded it up.
‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘can’t discuss it.’ I was thinking of Miriam alone in that big flint house below the downs surrounded by the relics of a long-dead gold rush. I couldn’t remember whether her family were still in Cambridge, even whether they were alive and she had someone to fall back on. I knew, in fact, less about her than I had known about her husband, only that I felt impelled to see her and make sure she was all right. Those newspapermen, they would have been on to her, and now there would be others, the phone constantly ringing.
I thanked the man, tucked the paper under my arm and pushed my way out of the crowded bar, running down to my pram dinghy and rowing fast across the harbour to where I had left my car. In Brighton I stopped at a callbox and rang the Halliday home. There was no answer. It crossed my mind then that perhaps somebody had found the body, in which case it would have to be identified. I drove out past the marina, taking the coast road through Rortingdean and Peace-haven and up by Westdean Forest above the Cuckmere.