It didn’t make sense. Yields of that sort couldn’t possibly have been covering even the cost of production, let alone producing the sort of half-yearly payments the English bank had referred to. It was the younger son, Brian Halliday, who first made me realize where the money might have been coming from. He phoned to ask whether an American named Wolchak had been in touch with me. And when I said he hadn’t, he asked if I had the deeds to his father’s BC property.
‘No,’ I said, ‘the bank has them. Why?’
‘Wolchak wants to buy. He’s acting as agent for an American company and says they’re willing to pay cash for an option to purchase.’ And then he asked me straight out whether the BC property had been left to him. ‘Miriam says I get the trees, that right?’
‘There’s no reason to suppose your father isn’t alive,’ I told him.
‘Of course. But what about the trees — do they come to me or don’t they?’ He had a rather deep, soft voice, his manner on the phone slightly abrupt so that I formed the impression of a man who needed to assert himself.
There seemed no point in not telling him that the BC property would be his should his father suddenly die. ‘Subject, of course,’ I added, ‘to settlement of any outstanding debts.’
‘Meaning your fees, I suppose,’ he said rudely. And when I told him there would naturally be solicitor’s fees, he said very sharply, ‘Well, I’m not selling. Just understand that, will you. The Cascades is not for sale — not now, or ever.’
‘You’ve had an offer, have you?’ I was wondering what sort of figure Wolchak had put on the property.
‘Not me. Miriam. She told him to see you. That’s why I phoned — to warn you, and to make my position clear. He saw her this morning and she says he was in touch with her last week, wanting to see Tom and then asking when he would be back.’
‘Did he see your father after his return from Canada?’ I asked.
‘Yes. On the Monday, here at Bullswood. The Monday morning.’
And the following day Tom Halliday had come to me to change his Will. I could accept that people did get scared when the source of their income dried up, or when they had lost their money in some financial disaster. I had seen it happen to elderly people — one of my clients had committed suicide for just that reason. But Tom Halliday was still a relatively young man and he had disappeared owning a slice of land in Canada that was apparently saleable. And what was even more extraordinary, he had altered his Will so that the land went to his son instead of his wife, and his younger son at that. Either Miriam had been wrong when she had said, Tom and I are very close’, or else this stepson of hers had put quite exceptional pressure on his father.
‘If I do hear from Mr Wolchak I’ll be in touch with you,’ I told him, and I put the phone down. My secretary was back from her holiday and about an hour later it must have been she came in to say Wolchak had been on the phone to her and she had arranged an appointment for Friday afternoon at four-fifteen. ‘Ten minutes, that’s all.’ She knew I wanted to try the boat out at the weekend. ‘He says, incidentally, he appreciates your difficulties and is prepared to offer a solution.’
I had already arranged with the bank for them to take Bullswood House as security for the overdraft. Fortunately Tom hadn’t mortgaged it. He couldn’t very well without it becoming apparent he was in financial difficulties for the freehold was in his wife’s name as well as his own. But the house and its contents, that was about all there was left. They had had a 99-year lease on a big flat in Belgravia and a villa in the Algarve, but he had sold those over the past two years, and very recently he had parted with the all-cream Rolls tourer that had been the pride of his collection of old cars — ‘built for a maharajah just before Partition,’ Miriam told me, ‘door handles, headlights, all the trimmings gold-plated.’ And she had laughed. ‘Trouble is it needed mink or leopard skin, something like that, and nothing would induce me to have some poor wretched animal wrapped around me.’
With my partner on holiday the amount of work crossing my desk pushed the Halliday problem to the back of my mind, so that when I received from the bank the photocopies I had asked for of the deeds they held I had no time to do more than check that they included the deeds of the BC forest land and that it hadn’t been mortgaged or otherwise encumbered to raise a loan.
Wolchak was late that Friday afternoon and I had to keep him waiting. ‘What’s he like?’ I asked my secretary as she came back from showing my four-thirty appointment out. She hesitated, then smiled, the corners of her mouth turned down. ‘You’ll see,’ she said, and she showed him in.
He came bustling across to my desk, hand outstretched, a short, thick body, a large, square head, and a smile that flashed like a beacon, eyes lighting up, a switched-on incandescence, and the teeth very white against a tanned skin. Josef Wolchak,’ he said as he shook my hand. He had a slight accent that was difficult to place.
I sat him down and he said, ‘You’re busy, so’m I. I’ll be brief. It’s about this Halliday property in British Columbia. I’m acting for an American company. They want to buy it. You got the deeds here?’
‘They’re at the bank.’
‘But you’ve seen them.’
‘I have photocopies.’
‘And there’s nothing in them to preclude a sale — a mortgage, anything like that?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘Good, good. It’s the trees, Mr Redfern, not the land. My clients don’t necessarily want the land. It’s the trees they’re interested in.’ He took a wallet from the pocket of his jacket, produced a card and passed it across the desk to me. That’s the company. You’ll find they’re an old-established timber and saw-milling outfit. Been in existence more than half a century. Anybody in Seattle will tell you.’ The card simply gave the name of the company — SVL Timber and Milling Inc. — and the address in Seattle. ‘It’s north along the waterfront, out on the Everett road,’ he said. ‘They’ve already been in touch with lawyers in Vancouver who’ve had dealings with Mr Halliday. But now that he’s reported missing…’ He gave an expansive shrug. ‘I was advised I should contact you.’
‘Who by?’ I don’t know why but I was sure from the way he had made such a point of informing me about the company that there had to be an individual involved. ‘Who are you really acting for?’
There was a fractional hesitation, then he said, ‘Bert Mandola. He has interests in a number of companies, Chicago and out west.’
I wrote it down on the back of the company card, just in case, at the same time pointing out to him that I was in no position to dispose of any part of my client’s property. And I added, ‘You will appreciate that Mr Halliday may turn up any moment.’
‘Yes, of course. But suppose he doesn’t, eh?’ He had already talked to ‘young Halliday’. And he added, ‘There’s a problem there, but if the man’s dead and the estate’s in debt, and it will be, your English tax boys will see to that…’
‘I’m sure Mr Halliday’s alive and in good health,’ I said, not liking the way he was trying to rush me.
‘Yes, yes, but as I was saying, if he’s dead and the estate is in debt, or there are financial difficulties …’ He wasn’t smiling now, his small mouth a thin, hard line. ‘You’ve been out there to see the Cascades, Mr Redfern?’
I shook my head.
‘Well, I have,’ he said. ‘Mr Mandola and I took a look at it a while back. Quite a nice looking place, but very remote — about eighteen and a half square miles, that’s counting the mountain tops and the waterfalls that give it its name. There are some timber extraction roads in poor condition, the remains of an old logging camp at the head of the Halliday Arm, an A-frame drilling truck that looks like it dates back to the Red River oilfield days, and a lot of mosquitoes. There’s nothing much there of any value except the timber in the bottom.’