I hesitated. Then I followed her, realizing suddenly that her words were for the benefit of the two fellers, that what she wanted to tell us couldn’t be said while they were within earshot. Brian stood there for a moment longer. He was genetically incapable of accepting instructions from a woman, but in the end he followed. There had been something in Miriam’s tone, and in her manner — a decisiveness, almost a cold-bloodedness in the way she had torn herself away from her husband’s body — that was very compelling.
We reached the track, and when we had gone up it a little way, she left it and headed into the dark of the forest. Not until we reached the edge of it, almost at the spot where Brian and I had stood earlier in the day looking out towards the camp, did she turn and face us. She was so choked up, so near to tears that she could hardly speak: ‘What I have to tell you — you, Brian, in particular — is that what is going on here has nothing to do with the forest your grandfather planted. Nothing at all.’ It had begun to rain, all the end of the inlet blotted out.
‘Balls!’ Brian’s voice exploded in sudden anger. ‘Why do you think Tom changed his Will? Why did he leave these trees to me? Because I know the value of them and understand why my grandfather — ‘
‘It’s not that.’ Her chin was suddenly lifted, a sharp determined line. ‘What I’m trying to tell you is that these people — ‘
‘SVL Timber and Milling? They’re sawmillers handling high quality cedar for a specialized market. There’s a million dollars locked up in this plantation if they can get it out before I stop them.’
‘They aren’t sawmillers. They’re dope smugglers.’ Her face was flushed with anger. ‘The trees here are a cover for a drug-importing racket into the States.’
He stared at her unbelievingly, the forest darkening behind him as the clouds thickened. ‘Where the hell did you get that idea?’
Tom — up at Ice Cold.’ Thunder crashed, a blinding fork of lightning. ‘Why do you think he disappeared? Why do you think he was desperately trying to find gold? These people had their claws into him and he didn’t know how to get clear of them. That’s why he was back on drugs. He was scared — scared out of his wits.’
‘But — ‘ Brian stared at her, frowning, and then he voiced the question I had been on the point of asking her: ‘The SVL Company in Seattle. I went and saw them, a man named Barony. It’s an old-established timber company, founded back in the First World War when demand was high.’
‘But who’s behind it now?’ she asked. ‘I spoke to Barony, too, I asked him for the name of the major shareholder and he told me to mind my own business. Also, he said his company merely bought timber standing. The people felling and loading it were self-employed, nothing to do with him.’
It was what I had been told, what Brian had been told, too. We stood there talking it over for a moment longer, but so much of what had happened fell into place that I think even Brian would have been convinced if I hadn’t told them about the customs operation and how a barge loaded with logs from the Cascades had been searched, the tug, too, without anything being discovered. If they were smuggling drugs, then the method was not apparent, and Tom hadn’t told her how it was being done. Nor had he confided in me, not even on the ferry when he had lain there in his cabin mulling over those Chicago press cuttings.
Finally Brian said, ‘Well, there’s only one way to find out.’ He was gazing out to the quay, where the squat shape of the barge showed drab against the approaching cloudburst.
Wolchak had just come out of his office. He paused for an instant, looking up the valley, the sound of the rain audible as lightning flashed. He wrenched the door of the pick-up open and jumped in, thunder crashing and the office disappearing. The sound of the rain was like surf on a sand shore. The pick-up stayed just ahead of it, so that we could see him quite clearly as he drove past, and the next instant the rainstorm was on us, breaking against the forest tops with a roar that almost drowned the next clap of thunder.
Sheltering behind separate tree boles, the rain such a flood of water and the noise so overwhelming that each of us cowered there in isolation, the horror of what had happened and the motives that had driven Tom to such a point of desperation had time to sink in. I saw Brian glance uncertainly at Miriam, could see what was going on in his mind. His appalled realization that he was to some degree responsible for what had happened to his father was there in his face.
He said something, but either she didn’t hear or she didn’t want to hear, her face set and stony, no forgiveness in it at all. He looked down at the walkie-talkie, then at the one still slung over my shoulder, and the sight of that means of communication with the outside world seemed to turn his mind to practical matters. The full force of the rain was passing now, but it was still a downpour blotting out all sign of the camp and the jetty as he stepped out from behind his tree. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.
I stared at him blankly, seeing the rain streaming down his face, his black hair plastered to his head. ‘Where?’ Just opening my mouth to say that one word filled it with water, the fresh sweet taste of rainwater on my tongue.
‘The barge. It’s our chance now — to get aboard — unseen.’ He passed me the handset and turned to Miriam. I thought she would refuse, that he would have to waste time arguing with her. But she nodded and went with him without question, out into the rain, as though, like me, she had realized the logic of his suggestion. If we were ever to get away from the Cascades and the Halliday Arm of the Cascade Inlet our only hope was the barge, and to get on board without being seen we had to do it now while the whole place was awash with rain.
We ran. We ran blindly through the storm, our clothing soaked, water streaming down our bodies. I could feel it cold on my skin, my trousers clinging and my anorak getting heavier by the minute. But somehow we made it, reaching the drowned quay only yards away from the shadowy bulk of the barge. It looked huge close-to; I had never seen such a giant of a barge in my life, not even on the Dutch waterways.
Then our feet were squelching on its wet steel deck plates as we stepped aboard, over mooring lines and the hose of a pump, hurrying aft along the narrow sidedeck to the wheel-house. It was a small place, the paint flaking and very dirty, sliding wooden doors at each side. There was a wheel and below the windows a shelf with some mugs, a tobacco tin half full of cigarette stubs, an oily rag, some matches, and in the corner a VHP radio, the sort of set used by small boats. It was wired to a battery clamped to the wooden flooring below the shelf, and I presumed it was there to enable tug and barge to keep in contact.
‘You reckon it works?’ Brian reached forward and switched it on. A little dot glowed red in the gloom and it began to crackle at us. His hand strayed to the mike on its rest at the side of the set, but I stopped him.
‘You won’t contact anybody,’ I said. ‘Not in the middle of the mountains here.’
He nodded and switched off. ‘At least it’s alive and it works.’ He ducked his head, disappearing down the near-vertical ladder that led through a trap door to the shelter and comparative warmth of a sort of cuddy. Miriam and I followed him.
The time was 16.39. Another twenty-four hours and with luck we would be out into the Inside Passage headed towards Vancouver. The rain stopped abruptly, footsteps sounded on the deck plates overhead and a voice shouted instructions. They had begun to load another log.
2
That first night we spent on the barge I couldn’t stop shivering. It wasn’t so much the cold — the temperature was nowhere near freezing — but the damp ate into one’s bones. Fear had something to do with it, too. At times the whole thing seemed so utterly crazy that, remembering Wolchak seated in the client’s chair back in my office in Ditchling, I felt I had only to clamber up to the quay and walk across to his office and the whole thing could be resolved over a cup of coffee. But then the memory of Tom’s body cradled in Miriam’s arms, her blood-stained hands, and Olsen lying dead in the bunk up at the hut on the lake, and Miriam herself, shut in that room … it seemed so impossible, so utterly divorced from real life. My life, at any rate. I’d only read about such things. And now …