It took me only a moment to toss the things into the boat, slide it down the slope into the water and jump in. White cloud vapour clung to the trees, dripped from the branches, the edge of the lake disappearing into nothingness. I rowed quietly, slipping the boat through the water, the rock fading. Suddenly it was gone and I stopped rowing. I could hear the crash of branches, loud above the murmur of water falling away to my right. Then voices. They were talking in Spanish, searching along the lake edge. There was a splash and a curse.
I wondered what they would do, what I was going to do, alone on the lake in thick cloud mist. I was thinking of the hut then, wondering vaguely what would happen when I reached it, my brain grappling wearily with the problem of how to check that Miriam really was being held there. An exclamation, a stream of half-audible words, the voice harsh and flowing. Lopez. And he had found the canoe.
I began to row again.
PART V
1
Following the shore, it was the dark grit of the little beach that I saw first, a scuffed drag-line leading across it to the pale tin gleam of the boat hauled up close to the bushes and tree roots of the bank. I turned my head and there was the hut, a dark shadow in the cloud mist that looked surprisingly large, like a small castle on its rocky mound. The dogs were quiet, the door shut. I back-paddled, dipping the oars with care. The log-built shape faded and was suddenly gone, swallowed so completely by the mist it might never have been there.
I rowed gently to some rocks, found a place where the boat would be partially concealed, leaving it there, half-in, half-out of the water, and making my way cautiously through the trees until I could see the hut again. The trees hung heavy with moisture, no breath of air, everything very still except for the all-pervading sound of water falling.
I don’t know how long I crouched there, my legs cramped, my trousers clinging wetly, eyes straining and the minutes passing. I thought I heard the rattle of a chain, and once I imagined the sound of voices, but nothing moved, the world in limbo, and the boat so near I could have reached out and touched its outboard engine. It was an aluminium boat with a flat ribbed bottom and a bow like a punt. A bald-headed eagle swooped on a fish and I began to shiver.
I couldn’t stay there indefinitely. If Camargo and Lopez had been coming up to the hut they’d have launched the canoe by now, and with branches as paddles, or with just their hands, it wouldn’t be long before they were here. I rose, trembling, and started cautiously forward. The hut had windows either side of the door that gave it the appearance of a wood-brown Indian face peering out over the lake, the glass of the eyes glinting with the water’s pale reflection. There was a side window too, but that seemed boarded up. If I could look in through the windows facing the lake without disturbing the dogs …
As though they had sensed my thoughts, the sound of chains dragging was suddenly quite distinct. I froze as one of them gave a little bark that was half-enquiring. At the same instant the door of the hut opened and a man came out, tall’ and gangling with big ears either side of a long, battered face. I suppose I was within fifty feet of him as he turned and said in English, ‘No sign of them yet. They must have missed their way.’ He was speaking to the man I had last seen in the early hours of the morning following Tarasconi up the wet curve of the wooden highway in Ocean Falls.
The dogs barked as Rodrigo moved towards the path that led to the portage. ‘Ah got two guys expecting me. Canadian whites.’ He hawked and spat in the direction of the dogs. ‘Remember. You tell that boss o’ yours Ah need double, an’ Ah need it reg’lar. The market down there’s growing fast. Okay?’ He looked at the dogs and spat again. ‘You got all the protection you need, eh?’
‘I guess so,’ the other replied, and then I couldn’t hear them any more, the two of them moving off into the trees, the mist swallowing them.
My head turned to the hut and the open door, the dark rectangle of it holding my gaze, seeming to beckon. I moved on the instant, almost running. It wasn’t a conscious action, my feet moving of their own accord, a reflex action. The dogs began barking as I reached the door. Inside there was a table, chairs, a sort of dresser with crockery, a kerosene stove and a two-tier bunk against the far wall, a walkie-talkie, aerial extended, hanging on a nail on the wall and below it a rifle propped against a small cupboard that had a pressure lamp on it, keys and a powerful torch. There were two doors leading off the central room, both of them held securely shut with heavy double bars of fresh-sawn timber slotted into clumsy wooden brackets.
‘Miriam!’
There was no answer, everything very still, except those damn dogs, barking madly now, leaping at the full stretch of their chains.
‘Miriam!’ I called again and a man’s voice answered. He was behind the door to my left. I started towards it with the intention of lifting the bars, but there was a shout from the direction of the lake and I stopped, turning to the open door and the figure of a man running towards it.
I slammed it shut. There was a big key in a lock and I turned it. Seconds later fists pounded on the door’s wooden boards, a voice shouting at me to open up and not play bloody stupid games. He thought I was Camargo or Lopez. ‘Don’t fool around, the High Stand owner is there and he’s high as a kite. Don’t let him out.’
The dogs had stopped barking, but they were leaping and growling at the full stretch of their chains as the man’s face appeared at one of the windows, the two of us staring at each other. Then I had turned and was wrestling with the timber bars to the door, a voice calling from the inside something that sounded like ‘shoot the bastard’ followed by a string of obscenities. The bars were swollen with damp. I reached for a chair, knocking them up as a rock smashed the glass of the nearest window.
The room door crashed open, Tom standing there, his eyes wild, his face flushed, that muscle twitching at the line of his mouth. ‘Where’s that fucking Mexican? Where’s Rodrigo?’ His eyes, searching madly, fastened on the rifle propped against the cupboard. He lunged for it as a dead branch began to demolish the rest of the window, the man wielding it yelling for the door to be opened.
The room from which Tom had emerged was small, no more than eight feet deep, and there was the figure of a man sprawled on a bed at the end. There was a bucket against the opposite wall, the place smelling of stale humanity and excrement. There was blood on the blankets, the man’s face swollen and bruised. He looked as though he’d been badly beaten up.
Behind me I heard the click of a bolt. I turned and in the same instant there was the crash of a shot. Tom was at the smashed window, the rifle at his shoulder, smoke curling lazily from the barrel, and from outside the hut the shot man began to scream.
It was a crazy thing to do. If he’d killed the man he would be on a murder charge, and God knows what that would do to him, and Miriam, all the publicity, his name blazoned across Canada and Britain, and myself a witness to it. I could see the expression on the QC’s face after he’d read the brief. I can’t remember what I said, but when I seized hold of him, trying to restrain him, trying to tell him the consequences, he rounded on me, his face creased with anger, his teeth bared below the beginnings of a new moustache. ‘Murder, you say. Are you bloody crazy? That bastard out there, he’s the murderer.’ And when I stared at him unbelievingly, he said, ‘Go and look. On the bed, in there.’
‘Who is it?’ I asked.
‘Olsen. Thor Olsen, my forest manager. And he’s dead — dead. You understand?’ He was leaning his face close to mine and screaming the words at me. ‘Dead!’ he screamed again. ‘Beaten to death to force Miriam to tell A-Aleksis there — ’ he nodded to the man squirming on the ground outside, his hand grasping his left leg, moans of pain issuing from his wide-open mouth — ‘to tell him something she didn’t know. I should have killed him.’ He thrust his face right into mine, the bulging eyes lit by a curious light, violence and excitement vibrating in his voice as he repeated, ‘I should have killed him — shot him dead. Instead, I’ve shot his knee to pieces, nothing more. So don’t talk to me of murder.’