‘All over,’ I said. ‘It was loudest aft, of course, but the sound of it was not just confined to our end of the barge.’
He had been one of those on the rummage party when the tug had been stopped the first time, and looking down at my statement, he said, ‘You say here it sounded like wood on wood, as though they were tamping something in between the tree logs.’ He looked up at me. ‘I’m considering, you see, that packages of drugs could have been forced between the logs and then at a later stage — while you people were asleep perhaps — either dumped overboard or loaded into a fishing boat or an inflatable, some inshore craft to be run in to the coast.’
‘We would have heard it,’ I said, and Brian nodded, adding that though he had slept quite heavily at times during the run from the Cascades to the Spider, he had been awake most of the time after that.
‘Wolchak,’ the customs officer said, looking down again at the statement spread out on the oilcloth-covered table still littered with the remains of breakfast. ‘We’ve checked with Bella Bella and the pilot of that Cessna confirms that he flew Wolchak and two other men, one of them answering to your description of the man responsible for Mr Halliday’s death, out to Bella Coola where there was a hire car waiting for them. Bella Coola is the coastal end of the road west out of Williams Lake and police are making enquiries now to see whether they drove on from there to board another plane. There’s an airport at Williams Lake, another at Quesnel, also at Prince George a further eighty miles or so north. In that case he could be in the States now. Alternatively, if he’d doubled back to Namu in a small hire plane he could have organized a boat …’
But I was no longer listening, for the mention of Wolchak had taken my mind back to the scene in the mess room of the Kelsey with the rummage party sitting there talking over their coffee and that American Drug Enforcement officer describing how a man, who was also named Josef Wolchak, had risen to the head of those two mafioso families in Chicago. I was remembering the story of how he had made his first drug run from Columbia to New York. ‘Walking stick,’ I said.
‘What’s that?’
I shook my head. It was impossible, of course, and yet standing there on that hairpin bend, high above the logging camp, it had seemed so extraordinary to have a mobile drilling rig parked on the edge of that cliff. ‘You’ve checked the butt ends of those logs, have you?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I don’t know.’ I shrugged, feeling I was on the verge of making a fool of myself. ‘It’s just an idea.’ And then I asked the American whether they had had time to check if the Josef Wolchak involved in the High Stand selling was the same man his colleague had been talking about on the Kelsey a few days ago.
They were already doing that. ‘I guess he’s the same man all right. That’s why we’re so sure it’s drugs.’ He was looking at Brian then. ‘I know you think those trees are valuable, but they’re peanuts compared with what’s involved if they were a cover for a regular drug run.’ He turned back to me. ‘Walking stick. You said something about walking sticks.’
I hesitated. A tree trunk was in some ways rather like a giant version of a walking stick and with the trunk hollowed out … ‘Can we go down to the pulp mill and have a look at those logs?’
I thought they were going to press me to say what was in my mind, but instead, after a momentary hesitation, everyone staring at me, they got to their feet. ‘Okay. Let’s go have another look at that timber.’ And I could see that all of them, the two customs officers, the American drugs man and the RCMP officer — Brian and Miriam, too — were mulling over in their minds the idea I had given them, unwilling to put it into words for fear it would prove as nonsensical as it seemed.
We drove down in three vehicles, turned right by the Indian Reserve on the level flats of the Gold River estuary just short of the quay and entered the pulp mill. The logs were stacked in a pile close by a great tree trunk of a boom crane. Across the water the local passenger and cargo ship, the Uchuck HI, was just pulling out from the pier past the Coastguard cutter which was still lying there. The trunks were very uniform, and in that setting, with the booming ground just below us, the great pile of the mill at our backs plumed with white smoke and the rock walls of Muchalat Inlet to the right and die even narrower gut of Matchloe Bay to our left, clouds hanging black against a shaft of sunlight, they looked so much smaller.
It was the butts I wanted to examine, for I was sure the ones I had seen up-ended against that cliff above the logging camp had been butt-end up. Unfortunately the stacking had been done regardless of the order in which they had been loaded on the barge and they were wet from having been off-loaded into the booming ground first, so that the sawdust clinging to the butts was sticky and very tenacious. In the end, we had to get the mill people to bring in a pump and hose them down under pressure.
The first two dozen or so we examined had clearly not been tampered with in any way, and after that we had to use the back of a truck to give us extra height. All the time large clutches of logs were being brought in from the forests and tipped into the pen, an unnerving bustle of big vehicle activity. And then, when I was beginning to feel I had made a fool of myself, the logging boss who had been clambering over the logs without bothering to use the truck, called for the hose. ‘Something here.’ He was on his knees, leaning over the round raw wood end of a log, feeling it with his hands. ‘Sort of irregular.’ The truck was shifted slightly and the hose jet washed the sawdust clear. We could see it then, a slight protuberance and the growth rings not quite matching.
We saw the same thing then in several others. A plug had been inserted. Brian thought it might be just that, having drilled certain logs with the intention of making a boom and then being faced with the prospect that felling would be stopped, they had decided to ship the whole lot out. But it had been very cleverly done, in most cases the growth rings matching and only the slightest crack to indicate that a plug had been inserted in the drill hole. A lot of trouble had been taken to make those plugs fit exactly.
The foreman had scrambled down from the pile and was lumbering across to his office shack. Rain closed off the inlet, grey billows of cloud between the black rock walls. He came back with a big chainsaw. Also a piece of paper, which he handed to the RCMP officer. ‘Sign that.’ His heavy-jowled features cracked in a grin. ‘All right for you, but my people, they wouldn’t like it if they got a bill for a damaged cedar log.’ The policeman signed and the foreman stuffed it into his pocket. ‘Which shall we take first, the one I picked out?’
The officer looked at the rest of us, then nodded. The saw was passed up to us and the foreman began directing the winch winder in the boom crane’s cabin. One by one the logs were lifted down until the one that had quite obviously been plugged was fully exposed. The big Canadian was standing with his feet carefully balanced. ‘I’ll take it bit by bit, okay?’ he said as we handed the saw up to him. He pulled the starter cord and the engine roared.
That was when the rain reached us, but he took no notice, though all he was wearing was a heavy coloured shirt, and braces of course. Water spurted from the blade as he leaned forward, the grip claws positioned about two feet from the butt, the engine note deepening as the chain sliced down through the bark and into the wood, pale sawdust pouring out and all of us watching as the rain poured down and lightning flashed somewhere in the hills above us. Suddenly the saw checked and the foreman pulled the blade out, the motor idling, the chain still. He peered down, turning the saw and picking up a smear of dust and oil on the tip of his finger. ‘That’s not wood.’ He held his finger out to us, flecks of white amongst the sawdust, a pale slime, but mixed with the oil and the wood dust it was hard to see the difference. ‘Won’t do the saw much good if I try and go through it. Have to go round. There’s something there.’