‘About four,’ I said.
‘Okay, you got just over an hour. He’ll wait, will he?’ And when I nodded, he said, ‘Good. But you’d better get down there in time. I don’t want him walking in looking for you. I don’t want to see the bastard.’
‘Because he brought Miriam in?’
‘That and other things. Bringing you.’
‘He knows you’re here, does he?’
‘I don’t think he knows. But Kevin says he suspects. He’s a scheming little shit, that man. You know he’s descended from Lucky Carlos Despera on his mother’s side.’
‘Yes.’
‘A chip off the old block.’ He laughed, but without humour. ‘He can’t forget that his grandfather had a fortune in his pocket and threw it away. He wants to get his hands on the Gully, and if he did Kevin says he’s got friends, South American he thinks, who’d give him the backing.’
‘They’d finance him?’ There was no doubt about it, they all believed there was gold there, but looking back at the sheer weight of rock that had been sliced off the mountain by that slide I thought financing it would be taking a hell of a chance. ‘It would cost a great deal,’ I murmured.
‘Sure. But in this sort of situation, the Gully being like the neck of a bottle, the rocks of the slide the cork…’ He paused, his voice almost choked. ‘It could be another B-Bonanza.’
‘It could equally be nothing at all,’ I said sharply, trying to bring him back to reality.
‘Oh, yes.’ He nodded. ‘Life’s like that, isn’t it? Everything a gamble. One man smokes and drinks all his life and lives to a hundred; another doesn’t smoke and gets cancer at fifty; or a fellow doesn’t drink and dies of a liver complaint. I was at school with a boy who died at sixteen. Just a gamble.’ He stopped then. Tike this thing was when Josh arrived and dam’ near killed himself trying to prove what everyone told him was impossible. When they told him that, he’d point to the benches that terrace so many of the mountain slopes here and get on with shovelling dirt. And he did it with pick and shovel and his own sweat, not like me, having it easy with a machine.’ We had reached the watershed then and were looking down towards Ice Cold and the skeletal shape of the screening plant.
I didn’t say anything and he added, pointing away to the right, towards the headwaters of the Ice Cold Creek, ‘All those benches you see up there above the camp on the shoulder of that mountain… There’s bigger benches on the mountain slopes that ring the basin inside the Gully and a hell of a lot of them came down in that slide. Christ! I’d like to wring that bloody little consultant’s neck. But I hadn’t read up on the geological background of placer gold deposits then. Hadn’t any need to.’ He laughed, that same mirthless, neighing laugh, and after that we walked on in silence until we came to the camp. ‘What’ll it be — tea? Or would you like something stronger? I’ve a bottle of malt I keep for special visitors.’ He smiled thinly.
‘Tea,’ I said. There was a cold wind blowing up here and it was such a comforting thought I could almost feel the warmth of it in my mouth.
He took a bunch of keys from the pocket of his old corduroy trousers and opened the door of the cookhouse. It was well stocked, shelves full of canned food, a sink and draining board, a fridge, a stove with an oven below, and at the other end of it a bare spruce table and two benches. ‘Pretty basic,’ he said, ‘but once you get used to it…’ He filled the kettle from a tank clamped to the wall. ‘You’ve heard from Miriam, you say. When?’
‘About a month ago,’ I said. ‘A letter from the Sheffield House Hotel in Whitehorse, then a postcard from Lakeside Lodge.’
‘But nothing since.’
‘No.’
He sighed, striking a match. ‘For a moment — just for a moment I hoped …’ The stove, like the fridge, was run from a large butane gas cylinder, and when he’d lit it and put the kettle on, he nodded to the table. ‘Sit down. Since you’re here there’s some questions…’
I sat down, watching him as he got the tea things ready. It was extraordinary how changed he looked without the moustache, and the hair long and grey. I made some comment about it and he said, ‘You must have known I dyed my hair. If you’re married to a woman much younger than yourself, then you try to keep up appearances, don’t you?’ He said it sadly, fumbling in his pocket. ‘You got a cigarette?’
I reached for my haversack, found a packet and passed it to him. I also found my pipe and began to fill it. ‘You wouldn’t know about keeping up appearances — yet,’ he went on. ‘You’re young and you just move in, like a young stag when the rutting season’s on. I had a feeling — ’
‘It was only once,’ I said quickly.
He laughed, showing his teeth in what was almost a grimace. ‘But you’d made your mark, eh? She wrote to you.’ He was silent then, standing there staring at the flame under the kettle, his thoughts seeming to drift. ‘Why didn’t you stop her?’ he asked suddenly.
‘Stop her?’ I repeated, wondering what he meant.
‘Yes,’ he said, quite angrily. ‘Stop her from coming out here. I’m in enough trouble — ’
‘Why should I?’
He cocked his head on one side, listening. ‘Did you hear anything?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘I thought I heard something.’ He moved to the open door, leaning against the jamb of it, his body very still.
I couldn’t hear anything, only the gentle murmur of the stream below. ‘For God’s sake shut it,’ I said. The place was getting like an ice-house. ‘How did you leave England?’ I asked. ‘By boat?’
‘By boat, yes. The ferry from Felixstowe across to Rotterdam, then a flight to ‘For onto out of Schiphol.’ He held up his hand. ‘There! Did you hear it?’
‘What?’
‘The clink of a stone.’
‘It’s the stream,’ I said.
He listened a moment longer, then nodded. ‘Yes, the stream — you’re right. Living virtually alone in a place like this, it gets on your nerves in the end.’ He started to shut the door, but then he said, ‘I’m going to get myself a woolly.’ He was shivering with cold. ‘I build up quite a sweat operating that shovel. Do you want to borrow one?’
‘No, I’m all right.’
He went out, shutting the door behind him, and I sat there, wondering about him and about what advice I was going to give him now that I’d stumbled on his hideout. I had been cold standing in the Gully, but I had my anorak on and the walk up to the camp had warmed me. With the door shut the cookhouse was already beginning to get the chill off it as the gas flared under the kettle.
He was gone longer than I had expected and the kettle was just beginning to whistle when the door burst open and he came in, a paper in his hand, his face quite white, his eyes staring. ‘Did you leave this? I found it under the door. Did you slip it there?’
I stared at him, wondering what the hell he was talking about, why he was so upset. ‘Of course I didn’t.’
‘Who then? Tony? Where would he have got it?’
‘What’s the trouble?’ I asked.
‘Miriam.’ He slammed the door shut, coming across to the table, leaning over me. ‘You sure you didn’t s-slip it under the door?’ He held an envelope out to me. That’s her writing, isn’t it?’