Landslide
Landslide
Desmond Bagley
Action thriller by the classic adventure writer set in British Columbia.Bob Boyd is a geologist, as resilient as the British Columbia timber country where he works for the powerful Matterson Corporation. But his real name and his past are mysteries – wiped out by the accident that nearly killed him. Then Boyd reads a name that opens a door in his memory: Trinavant – and discovers that Bull Matterson and his son will do almost anything to keep the Trinavant family forgotten forever…
DESMOND BAGLEY
Landslide
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_772210ee-b175-588d-a1d1-df7087cd01f2)
HARPER
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Collins 1967
Copyright © Brockhurst Publications 1967
Desmond Bagley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008211165
Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN 9780008211448
Version: 2016-11-23
CONTENTS
Cover (#uab09ce4e-21ff-5c80-b340-6f1948e10b75)
Title Page (#u84abb8d5-b6df-5557-be85-289d2abd6fbf)
Copyright (#u4cd0578a-8183-578e-8f8f-f44ffd55db23)
Landslide (#ufe50269b-ed0d-5d79-b91b-951b36250367)
Dedication (#u76d1b682-0b76-502a-b847-18dcf806b890)
One (#u58e9f9f0-c6fb-5549-9456-67ce796af7d1)
Two (#u785590a0-4a6c-5064-9851-8d69e822c754)
Three (#u9917273f-16a4-572c-a5c5-d458ab2b74d1)
Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
LANDSLIDE (#ulink_ea627b7b-9ec6-585c-96a3-cd440e5ebdd9)
DEDICATION (#ulink_60c4cbfd-35d1-5121-9e85-76f9746e2fdd)
For Philip Joseph and all good booksellers
ONE (#ulink_4be85a4e-cb32-566c-b646-26371784d489)
I was tired when I got off the bus at Fort Farrell. No matter how soft the suspension of the bus and how comfortable the seat you still feel as though you’ve been sitting on a sack of rocks for a few hours, so I was tired and not very impressed by my first view of Fort Farrell – The Biggest Little City in the North-Eastern Interior – or so the sign said at the city limits. Someone must have forgotten Dawson Creek.
This was the end of the line for the bus and it didn’t stay long. I got off, nobody got on, and it turned and wheeled away back towards the Peace River and Fort St John, back towards civilization. The population of Fort Farrell had been increased by one – temporarily.
It was mid-afternoon and I had time to do the one bit of business that would decide if I stayed in this backwoods metropolis, so instead of looking for a hotel I checked my bag at the depot and asked where I could find the Matterson Building. The little fat guy who appeared to be the factotum around the depot looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and tittered. ‘You must be a stranger round here.’
‘Seeing I just got off the bus it may be possible,’ I conceded. I wanted to get information, not to give it.
He grunted and the twinkle disappeared. ‘It’s on King Street; you can’t miss it unless you’re blind,’ he said curtly. He was another of those cracker-barrel characters who think they’ve got the franchise on wisecracks – small towns are full of them. To hell with him! I was in no mood for making friends, although I would have to try to influence people pretty soon.
High Street was the main drag, running as straight as though it had been drawn by a rule. Not only was it the main street but it was practically the only street of Fort Farrell – pop. 1,806 plus one. There was the usual line of false-fronted buildings trying to look bigger than they were and holding the commercial enterprises by which the locals tried to make an honest dollar – the gas stations and auto dealers, a grocery that called itself a supermarket, a barber’s shop, ‘Paris Modes’ selling women’s fripperies, a store selling fishing tackle and hunting gear. I noticed that the name of Matterson came up with monotonous regularity and concluded that Matterson was a big pumpkin in Fort Farrell.
Ahead was surely the only real, honest-to-God building in the town: an eight-storeyed giant which, I was sure, must be the Matterson Building. Feeling hopeful for the first time, I quickened my pace, but slowed again as High Street widened into a small square, green with cropped lawns and shady with trees. In the middle of the square was a bronze statue of a man in uniform, which at first I thought was the war memorial; but it turned out to be the founding father of the city – one William J. Farrell, a lieutenant of the Royal Corps of Engineers. Pioneers, O Pioneers – the guy was long since dead and the sightless eyes of his effigy stared blindly down false-fronted High Street while the irreverent birds made messes in his uniform cap.
Then I stared unbelievingly at the name of the square while an icy shudder crawled down my spine. Trinavant Park stood on the intersection of High Street and Farrell Street and the name, dredged out from a forgotten past, hit me like a blow in the belly. I was still shaken when I reached the Matterson Building.
Howard Matterson was a hard man to see. I smoked three cigarettes in his outer office while I studied the pneumatic charms of his secretary and thought about the name of Trinavant. It was not so common a name that it cropped up in my life with any regularity; in fact, I had come across it only once before and in circumstances I preferred not to remember. You might say that a Trinavant had changed my life, but whether he had changed it for better or worse there was no means of knowing. Once again I debated the advisability of staying in Fort Farrell, but a thin wallet and an empty belly can put up a powerful argument so I decided to stick around and see what Matterson had to offer.
Suddenly and without warning Matterson’s secretary said, ‘Mr Matterson will see you now.’ There had been no telephone call or ring of bell and I smiled sourly. So he was one of those, was he? One of the guys who exercised his power by saying, ‘Keep Boyd waiting for half an hour, Miss So-and-so, then send him in,’ with the private thought – ’That’ll show the guy who is boss around here.’ But maybe I was misjudging him – maybe he really was busy.
He was a big, fleshy man with a florid face and, to my surprise, not any older than me – say, about thirty-three. Going by the extensive use of his name in Fort Farrell, I had expected an older man; a young man doesn’t usually have time to build an empire, even a small one. He was broad and beefy but tending to run to fat, judging by the heaviness of his jowls and the folds about his neck, yet big as he was I topped him by a couple of inches. I’m not exactly a midget.
He stood up behind his desk and extended his hand. ‘Glad to meet you, Mr Boyd. Don Halsbach has said a lot of nice things about you.’
So he ought, I thought; considering I found him a fortune. Then I was busy coping with Matterson’s knuckle-cracking grip. I mashed his fingers together hard to prove I was as big a he-man as he was and he grinned at me. ‘Okay, take a seat,’ he said, releasing my hand. ‘I’ll fill you in on the deal. It’s pretty routine.’
I sat down and accepted a cigarette from the box he pushed across the desk. ‘There’s just one thing,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t want to fool you, Mr Matterson. This hasn’t got to be a long job. I want to get clear of it by the spring thaw.’
He nodded. ‘I know. Don told me about that – he said you want to get back to the North-West Territories for the summer. Do you think you’ll make any money at that kind of geology?’
‘Other people have,’ I said. ‘There have been lots of good strikes made. I think there’s more metal in the ground up there than we dream of and all we have to do is to find it.’
He grinned at me. ‘We meaning you.’ Then he shook his head. ‘You’re in advance of your time, Boyd. The North-West isn’t ready for development yet. What’s the use of making a big strike in the middle of a wilderness when it would cost millions in development?’
I shrugged. ‘If the strike is big enough the money will be there.’
‘Maybe,’ Matterson said noncommittally. ‘Anyway, from what Don told me, you want a short-term job so you can get a grubstake together in order to go back. Is that it?’
‘Just about.’
‘All right, we’re your boys. This is the situation. The Matterson Corporation has a lot of faith in the potentialities of this section of British Columbia and we’re in development up to our necks. We run a lot of interlinked operations – logging-centred mostly – like pulp for paper, plywood, manufactured lumber and so on. We’re going to build a newsprint plant and we’re making extensions to our plywood plants. But there’s one thing we’re short of and that’s power – specifically electrical power.’
He leaned back in his chair. ‘Now we could run a pipeline to the natural gas fields around Dawson Creek, pipe in the gas and use it to fuel a power station, but it would cost a lot of money and we’d be paying for the gas for evermore. If we did that the gas suppliers would have a hammerlock on us and would want to muscle in with their surplus money to buy a slice of what we’ve got – and they’d be able to do it, too, because they’d control our power.’ He stared at me. ‘We don’t want to give away slices – we want the whole goddam pie – and this is how we do it.’
He waved at a map on the wall. ‘British Columbia is rich in water power but for the most part it’s undeveloped – we get 1,500,000 kilowatts out of a possible 22,000,000. Up here in the North-East there are a possible 5,000,000 kilowatts without a single generating set to make the juice. That’s a hell of a lot of power going to waste.’
I said, ‘They’re building the Portage Mountain Dam on the Peace River.’
Matterson snorted. ‘That’ll take years and we can’t wait for the Government to build a billion-dollar dam – we need the power now. So that is what we do. We’re going to build our own dam – not a big one but big enough for us and for any likely expansion in the foreseeable future. We have a site staked out and we have Government blessing. What we want you to do is to see we don’t make one of those mistakes for which we’ll kick ourselves afterwards. We don’t want to flood twenty square miles of valley only to find we’ve buried the richest copper strike in Canada under a hundred feet of water. This area has never been really checked over by a geologist and we want you to give it a thorough going-over before we build the dam. Can you do it?’
‘Seems easy enough from where I’m sitting,’ I said. ‘I’d like to see it on a map.’
Matterson gave a satisfied nod and picked up the telephone. ‘Bring in the maps of the Kinoxi area, Fred.’ He turned to me. ‘We’re not in the mining business but we’d hate to pass up a chance.’ He rubbed his chin reflectively. ‘I’ve been thinking for some time we ought to do a geological survey of our holdings – it could pay off. If you do a good job here you might be in line for the contract.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said coolly. I never liked to be tied down.
A man came in carrying a roll of maps. He looked more like a banker than J. P. Morgan – correctly dressed and natty in a conservative business suit. His face was thin and expressionless and his eyes were a cold, pale blue. Matterson said, ‘Thanks, Fred,’ as he took the maps. ‘This is Mr Boyd, the geologist we’re thinking of hiring. Fred Donner, one of our executives.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said. Donner nodded curtly and turned to Matterson who was unrolling the maps. ‘National Concrete want to talk turkey about a contract.’
‘Stall them,’ said Matterson. ‘We don’t sign a thing until Boyd has done his job.’ He looked up at me. ‘Here it is. The Kinoxi is a tributary of the Kwadacha which flows into the Finlay and so into the Peace River. Here, there’s an escarpment and the Kinoxi goes over in a series of rapids and riffles, and just behind the escarpment is a valley.’ His hand chopped down on the map. ‘We put the dam here to flood the valley and get a good and permanent head of water and we put the powerhouse at the bottom of the escarpment – that gives us a good fall. The survey teams tells us that the water will back up the valley for about ten miles, with an average width of two miles. That’ll be a new lake – Lake Matterson.’
‘That’s a lot of water,’ I observed.
‘It won’t be very deep,’ said Matterson. ‘So we figure we can get away with a low cost dam.’ He stabbed his finger down. ‘It’s up to you to tell us if we’re losing out on anything in those twenty square miles.’
I examined the map for a while, then said, ‘I can do that. Where exactly is this valley?’
‘About forty miles from here. We’ll be driving a road in when we begin to build the dam, but that won’t help you. It’s pretty isolated.’
‘Not so much as the North-West Territories,’ I said. ‘I’ll make out.’
‘I guess you will at that,’ said Matterson with a grin. ‘But it won’t be as bad as all that. We’ll fly you in and out in the Corporation helicopter.’
I was pleased about that; it would save me a bit of shoe-leather. I said, ‘I might want to sink some trial boreholes – depending on what I find. You can hire a drilling rig and I might want two of your men to do the donkey work.’
Donner said, ‘That’s going to an extreme length, isn’t it? I doubt if it’s justified. And I think your contract should specify that you do any necessary work yourself.’
I said evenly, ‘Mr Donner, I don’t get paid for drilling holes in the ground. I’m paid for using my brains in interpreting the cores that come out of those holes. Now, if you want me to do the whole job single-handed that’s all right with me, but it will take six times as long and you’ll be charged my rate for the job – and I don’t come cheap. I’m just trying to save you money.’
Matterson waved his hand. ‘Cut it out, Fred; it may never happen. You’ll only want to drill if you come across anything definite – isn’t that right, Boyd?’
‘That’s it.’
Donner looked down at Matterson with his cold eyes. ‘Another thing,’ he said. ‘You’d better not have Boyd survey the northern end. It’s not …’
‘I know what it’s not, Fred,’ cut in Matterson irritably. ‘I’ll get Clare straightened out on that.’
‘You’d better,’ said Donner. ‘Or the whole scheme might collapse.’
That exchange meant nothing to me but it was enough to give me the definite idea that these two were having a private fight and I’d better not get in the way. That wanted clearing up, so I butted in and said, ‘I’d like to know who my boss is on this survey. Who do I take my orders from – you, Mr Matterson? Or Mr Donner here?’
Matterson stared at me. ‘You take them from me,’ he said flatly. ‘My name is Matterson and this is the Matterson Corporation.’ He flicked his gaze up at Donner as though defying him to make an issue of it, but Donner backed down after a long moment by giving a sharp nod.
‘Just as long as I know,’ I said easily.
Afterwards we got down to dickering about the terms of my contract. Donner was a penny-pincher and, as he had made me mad by trying to skinflint on the possible boring operations, I set my price higher than I would have done normally. Although it seemed to be a straightforward job and I did need the money, there were undercurrents that I didn’t like. There was also the name of Trinavant that had come up, although that seemed to have no particular relevance. But the terms I finally screwed out of Donner were so good that I knew I would have to take the job – the money would set me up in business for a year in the North-West.
Matterson was no help to Donner. He just sat on the sidelines and grinned while I gouged him. It was certainly a hell of a way to run a corporation! After the business details had been settled Matterson said, ‘I’ll reserve a room for you at the Matterson House. It doesn’t compare with the Hilton, but I think you’ll be comfortable enough. When can you start on the job?’
‘As soon as I get my equipment from Edmonton.’
‘Fly it in,’ said Matterson. ‘We’ll pay the freight.’
Donner snorted and walked out of the room like a man who knows when he isn’t wanted.
II
The Matterson House Hotel proved to be incorporated into the Matterson Building so I hadn’t far to go when I left Matterson’s office. I also noticed a string of company offices all bearing the name of Matterson and there was the Matterson Bank on the corner of the block. It seemed that Fort Farrell was a real old-fashioned company town, and when Matterson built his dam there would be the Matterson Power Company to add to his list. He was getting a real stranglehold on this neck of the woods.
I arranged with the desk clerk to have my bag brought up from the bus depot, then said, ‘Do you have a newspaper here?’
‘Comes out Friday.’
‘Where’s the office?’
‘Trinavant Park – north side.’
I walked out into the fading afternoon light and back down High Street until I came to the square. Lieutenant Farrell was staring sightlessly into the low sun which illuminated his verdigris-green face blotched with white where the birds had made free with him. I wondered what he would have thought if he knew how his settlement had turned out. Judging by the expression on his face he did know – and he didn’t think much of it.
The office of the Fort Farrell Recorder seemed to be more concerned with jobbing printing than with the production of a newspaper, but my first question was answered satisfactorily by the young girl who was the whole of the staff – at least, all of it that was in sight.
‘Sure we keep back copies. How far do you want to go back?’
‘About ten years.’
She grimaced. ‘You’ll want the bound copies, then. You’ll have to come into the back office.’ I followed her into a dusty room. ‘What was the exact date?’
I had no trouble in remembering that – everyone knows his own birthday. ‘Tuesday, September 4th, 1956.’
She looked up at a shelf and said helplessly, ‘That’s the one up there. I don’t think I can reach it.’
‘Allow me,’ I said, and reached for it. It was a volume the size and weight of a dozen Bibles and it gave me a lot less trouble than it would have given her! I supposed it weighed pretty near as much as she did.
She said, ‘You’ll have to read it in here; and you mustn’t cut the pages – that’s our record copy.’
‘I won’t,’ I promised, and put it on a deal table. ‘Can I have a light, please?’
‘Sure.’ She switched on the light as she went out.
I pulled up a chair and opened the heavy cover of the book. It contained two years’ issues of the Fort Farrell Recorder – one hundred and four reports on the health and sickness of a community; a record of births and deaths, joys and sorrows, much crime and yet not a lot, all things considered, and a little goodness – there should have been more but goodness doesn’t make the headlines. A typical country newspaper.
I turned to the issue of September 7th – the week-end after the accident – half afraid of what I would find, half afraid I wouldn’t find anything. But it was there and it had made the front page headlines, too. It screamed at me in heavy black letters splashed across the yellowing sheet: JOHN TRINAVANT DIES IN AUTO SMASH.
Although I knew the story by heart, I read the newspaper account with care and it did tell me a couple of things I hadn’t known before. It was a simple story, regrettably not uncommon, but one which did not normally make headlines as it had done here. As I remembered, it rated a quarter-column at the bottom of the second page of the Vancouver Sun and a paragraph filler in Toronto.
The difference was that John Trinavant had been a power in Fort Farrell as being senior partner in the firm of Trinavant and Matterson. God the Father had suddenly died and Fort Farrell had mourned. Mourned publicly and profusely in black print on white paper.
John Trinavant (aged 56) had been travelling from Dawson Creek to Edmonton with his wife, Anne (no age given), and his son, Frank (aged 22). They had been travelling in Mr Trinavant’s new car, a Cadillac, but the shiny new toy had never reached Edmonton. Instead, it had been found at the bottom of a two-hundred-foot cliff not far off the road. Skid marks and slashes in the bark of trees had shown how the accident happened. ‘Perhaps,’ said the coroner, ‘it may be that the car was moving too fast for the driver to be in proper control. That, however, is something no one will know for certain.’
The Cadillac was a burnt-out hulk, smashed beyond repair. Smashed beyond repair were also the three Trinavants, all found dead. A curious aspect of the accident, however, was the presence of a fourth passenger, a young man now identified as Robert Grant, who had been found alive, but only just so, and who was now in the City Hospital suffering from third-degree burns, a badly fractured skull and several other assorted broken bones. Mr Grant, it was tentatively agreed, must have been a hitchhiker whom Mr Trinavant, in his benevolence, had picked up somewhere on the way between Dawson Creek and the scene of the accident. Mr Grant was not expected to live. Too bad for Mr Grant.
All Fort Farrell and, indeed, all Canada (said the leader writer) should mourn the era which had ended with the passing of John Trinavant. The Trinavants had been connected with the city since the heroic days of Lieutenant Farrell and it was a grief (to the leader writer personally) that the name of Trinavant was now extinguished in the male line. There was, however, a niece, Miss C. T. Trinavant, at present at school in Lausanne, Switzerland. It was to be hoped that this tragedy, the death of her beloved uncle, would not be permitted to interrupt the education he had so earnestly desired to give her.
I sat back and looked at the paper before me. So Trinavant had been a partner of Matterson – but not the Matterson I had met that day because he was too young. At the time of the smash he would have been in his early twenties – say about the age of young Frank Trinavant who was killed, or about my age at that time. So there must be another Matterson – Howard Matterson’s father, presumably – which made Howard the Crown Prince of the Matterson empire. Unless, of course, he had already succeeded.
I sighed as I wondered what devil of coincidence had brought me to Fort Farrell; then I turned to the next issue and found – nothing! There was no follow on to the story in that issue or the next. I searched further and found that for the next year the name of Trinavant was not mentioned once – no follow-up, no obituary, no reminiscences from readers – nothing at all. As far as the Fort Farrell Recorder was concerned, it was as though John Trinavant had never existed – he had been unpersonned.
I checked again. It was very odd that in Trinavant’s home town – the town where he was virtually king – the local newspaper had not coined a few extra cents out of his death. That was a hell of a way to run a newspaper!
I paused. That was the second time in one day that I had made the same observation – the first time in relation to Howard Matterson and the way he ran the Matterson Corporation. I wondered about that and that led me to something else – who owned the Fort Farrell Recorder?
The little office girl popped her head round the door. ‘You’ll have to go now; we’re closing up.’
I grinned at her. ‘I thought newspaper offices never closed.’
‘This isn’t the Vancouver Sun,’ she said. ‘Or the Montreal Star.’
It sure as hell isn’t, I thought.
‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ she asked.
I followed her into the front office. ‘I found some answers, yes; and a lot of questions.’ She looked at me uncomprehendingly. I said, ‘Is there anywhere a man can get a cup of coffee round here?’
‘There’s the Greek place right across the square.’
‘What about joining me?’ I thought that maybe I could get some answers out of her.
She smiled. ‘My mother told me not to go out with strange men. Besides, I’m meeting my boy.’
I looked at all the alive eighteen years of her and wished I were young again – as before the accident. ‘Some other time, perhaps,’ I said.
‘Perhaps.’
I left her inexpertly dabbing powder on her nose and headed across the square with the thought that I’d get picked up for kidnapping if I wasn’t careful. I don’t know why it is, but in any place that can support a cheap eatery – and a lot that can’t – you’ll find a Greek running the local coffee-and-doughnut joint. He expands with the community and brings in his cousins from the old country and pretty soon, in an average-size town, the Greeks are running the catering racket, splitting it with the Italians who tend to operate on a more sophisticated level. This wasn’t the first Greek place I’d eaten in and it certainly wouldn’t be the last – not while I was a poverty-stricken geologist chancing his luck.
I ordered coffee and pie and took it over to a vacant table intending to settle down to do some hard thinking, but I didn’t get much chance of that because someone came up to the table and said, ‘Mind if I join you?’
He was old, maybe as much as seventy, with a walnut-brown face and a scrawny neck where age had dried the juices out of him. His hair, though white, was plentiful and inquisitive blue eyes peered from beneath shaggy brows. I regarded him speculatively for a long time, and at last he said, ‘I’m McDougall – chief reporter for the local scandal sheet.’
I waved him to a chair. ‘Be my guest.’
He put down the cup of coffee he was holding and grunted softly as he sat down. ‘I’m also the chief compositor,’ he said. ‘And the only copy-boy. I’m the rewrite man, too. The whole works.’
‘Editor, too?’
He snorted derisively. ‘Do I look like a newspaper editor?’
‘Not much.’
He sipped his coffee and looked at me from beneath the tangle of his brows. ‘Did you find what you were looking for, Mr Boyd?’
‘You’re well-informed,’ I commented. ‘I’ve not been in town two hours and already I can see I’m going to be reported in the Recorder. How do you do it?’
He smiled. ‘This is a small town and I know every man, woman and child in it. I’ve just come from the Matterson Building and I know all about you, Mr Boyd.’
This McDougall looked like a sharp old devil. I said, ‘I’ll bet you know the terms of my contract, too.’
‘I might.’ He grinned at me and his face took on the look of a mischievous small boy. ‘Donner wasn’t too pleased.’ He put down his cup. ‘Did you find out what you wanted to know about John Trinavant?’
I stubbed out my cigarette. ‘You have a funny way of running a newspaper, Mr McDougall. I’ve never seen such a silence in print in my life.’
The smile left his face and he looked exactly what he was – a tired old man. He was silent for a moment, then he said unexpectedly, ‘Do you like good whisky, Mr Boyd?’
‘I’ve never been known to refuse.’
He jerked his head in the direction of the newspaper office. ‘I have an apartment over the shop and a bottle in the apartment. Will you join me? I suddenly feel like getting drunk.’
For an answer I rose from the table and paid the tab for both of us. While walking across the park McDougall said, ‘I get the apartment free. In return I’m on call twenty-four hours a day. I don’t know who gets the better of the bargain.’
‘Maybe you ought to negotiate a new deal with your editor.’
‘With Jimson? That’s a laugh – he’s just a rubber stamp used by the owner.’
‘And the owner is Matterson,’ I said, risking a shaft at random.
McDougall looked at me out of the corner of his eye. ‘So you’ve got that far, have you? You interest me, Mr Boyd; you really do.’
‘You are beginning to interest me,’ I said.
We climbed the stairs to his apartment, which was sparsely but comfortably furnished. McDougall opened a cupboard and produced a bottle. ‘There are two sorts of Scotch,’ he said. ‘There’s the kind which is produced by the million gallons: a straight-run neutral grain spirit blended with good malt whisky to give it flavour, burnt caramel added to give it colour, and kept for seven years to protect the sacred name of Scotch whisky.’ He held up the bottle. ‘And then there’s the real stuff – fifteen-year-old unblended malt lovingly made and lovingly drunk. This is from Islay – the best there is.’
He poured two hefty snorts of the light straw-coloured liquid and passed one to me. I said, ‘Here’s to you, Mr McDougall. What brand of McDougall are you, anyway?’
I would swear he blushed. ‘I’ve a good Scots name and you’d think that would be enough for any man, but my father had to compound it and call me Hamish. You’d better call me Mac like everyone else and that way we’ll avoid a fight.’ He chuckled. ‘Lord, the fights I got into when I was a kid.’
I said, ‘I’m Bob Boyd.’
He nodded. ‘And what interests you in the Trinavants?’
‘Am I interested in them?’
He sighed. ‘Bob, I’m an old-time newspaperman so give me credit for knowing how to do my job. I do a run-down on everyone who checks the back files; you’d be surprised how often it pays off in a story. I’ve been waiting for someone to consult that particular issue for ten years.’
‘Why should the Recorder be interested in the Trinavants now?’ I asked. ‘The Trinivants are dead and the Recorder killed them deader. You wouldn’t think it possible to assassinate a memory, would you?’
‘The Russians are good at it; they can kill a man and still leave him alive – the walking dead,’ said McDougall. ‘Look at what they did to Khrushchev. It’s just that Matterson hit on the idea, too.’
‘You haven’t answered my question,’ I said tartly. ‘Quit fencing around, Mac.’
‘The Recorder isn’t interested in the Trinavants,’ he said. ‘If I put in a story about any of them – if I even mentioned the name – I’d be out on my can. This is a personal interest, and if Bull Matterson knew I was even talking about the Trinavants I’d be in big trouble.’ He stabbed his finger at me. ‘So keep your mouth shut, you understand.’ He poured out another drink and I could see his hand shaking. ‘Now, what’s your story?’
I said, ‘Mac, until you tell me more about the Trinavants I’m not going to tell you anything. And don’t ask me why because you won’t get an answer.’
He looked at me thoughtfully for a long time, then said, ‘But you’ll tell me eventually?’
‘I might.’
That stuck in his gullet but he swallowed it. ‘All right; it looks as though I’ve no option. I’ll tell you about the Trinavants.’ He pushed the bottle across. ‘Fill up, son.’
The Trinavants were an old Canadian family founded by a Jacques Trinavant who came from Brittany to settle in Quebec back in the seventeen-hundreds. But the Trinavants were not natural settlers nor were they merchants – not in those days. Their feet were itchy and they headed west. John Trinavant’s great-great-grandfather was a voyageur of note; other Trinavants were trappers and there was an unsubstantiated story that a Trinavant crossed the continent and saw the Pacific before Alexander Mackenzie.
John Trinavant’s grandfather was a scout for Lieutenant Farrell, and when Farrell built the fort he decided to stay and put down roots in British Columbia. It was good country, he liked the look of it and saw the great possibilities. But just because the Trinavants ceased to be on the move did not mean they had lost their steam. Three generations of Trinavants in Fort Farrell built a logging and lumber empire, small but sound.
‘It was John Trinavant who really made it go,’ said McDougall. ‘He was a man of the twentieth century – born in 1900 – and he took over the business young. He was only twenty-three when his father died. British Columbia in those days was pretty undeveloped still, and it’s men like John Trinavant who have made it what it is today.’
He looked at his glass reflectively. ‘I suppose that, from a purely business point of view, one of the best things that Trinavant ever did was to join up with Bull Matterson.’
‘That’s the second time you’ve mentioned him,’ I said. ‘He can’t be the man I met at the Matterson Building.’
‘Hell, no; that’s Howard – he’s just a punk kid,’ said McDougall contemptuously. ‘I’m talking about the old man – Howard’s father. He was a few years older than Trinavant and they hooked on to each other in 1925. John Trinavant had the brains and directed the policy of the combination while Matterson supplied the energy and drive, and things really started to hum around here. One or the other of them had a finger in every goddam pie; they consolidated the logging industry and they were the first to see that raw logs are no damn’ use unless you can do something with them, preferably on the spot. They built pulping plants and plywood plants and they made a lot of money, especially during the war. By the end of the war the folks around here used to get a lot of fun out of sitting around of an evening just trying to figure out how much Trinavant and Matterson were worth.’
He leaned over and took the bottle. ‘Of course, it wasn’t all logging – they diversified early. They owned gas stations, ran a bus service until they sold out to Greyhound, owned grocery stores and dry goods stores – everyone in this area paid them tribute in one way or another.’ He paused, then said broodingly, ‘I don’t know if that’s a good thing for a community. I don’t like paternalism, even with the best intentions. But that’s the way it worked out.’
I said, ‘They also owned a newspaper.’
McDougall’s face took on a wry look. ‘It’s the only one of Matterson’s operations that doesn’t give him a cash return. It doesn’t pay. This town isn’t really big enough to support a newspaper, but John Trinavant started it as a public service, as a sideline to the print shop. He said the townsfolk had a right to know what was going on, and he never interfered with editorial policy. Matterson runs it for a different reason.’
‘What’s that?’
‘To control public opinion. He daren’t close it down because Fort Farrell is growing and someone else might start an honest newspaper which he doesn’t control. As long as he holds on to the Recorder he’s safe because as sure as hell there’s not room for two newspapers.’
I nodded. ‘So Trinavant and Matterson each made a fortune. What then?’
‘Then nothing,’ said McDougall. ‘Trinavant was killed and Matterson took over the whole shooting-match – lock, stock and barrel. You see, there weren’t any Trinavants left.’
I thought about that. ‘Wasn’t there one left? The editorial in the Recorder mentioned a Miss Trinavant, a niece of John.’
‘You mean Clare,’ said McDougall. ‘She wasn’t really a niece, just a vague connection from the East. The Trinavants were a strong stock a couple of hundred years ago but the Eastern branch withered on the vine. As far as I know Clare Trinavant is the last Trinavant in Canada. John came across her by accident when he was on a trip to Montreal. She was an orphan. He reckoned she must be related to the family somehow, so he took her in and treated her like his own daughter.’
‘Then she wasn’t his heir?’
McDougall shook his head. ‘Not his natural heir. He didn’t adopt her legally and it seems there’s never been any way to prove the family connection, so she lost out as far as that goes.’
‘Then who did get Trinavant’s money? And how did Matterson grab Trinavant’s share of the business?’
McDougall gave me a twisted grin. ‘The answers to those two questions are interlocked. John’s will established a trust fund for his wife and son, the whole of the capital to revert to young Frank at the age of thirty. All the proper safeguards were built in and it was a good will. Of course, provision had to be made in case John outlived everybody concerned and in that case the proceeds of the trust were to be devoted to the establishment of a department of lumber technology at a Canadian university.’
‘Was that done?’
‘It was. The trust is doing good work – but not as well as it might, and for the answer to that one you have to go back to 1929. It was then that Trinavant and Matterson realized they were in the empire-building business. Neither of them wanted the death of the other to put a stop to it, so they drew up an agreement that on the death of either of them the survivor would have the option of buying the other’s share at book value. And that’s what Matterson did.’
‘So the trust was left with Trinavant’s holdings but the trustees were legally obliged to sell to Matterson if he chose to exercise his option. I don’t see much wrong with that.’
McDougall clicked his tongue in annoyance. ‘Don’t be naïve, Boyd.’ He ticked off points on his fingers. ‘The option was to be exercised at book value and by the time Donner had finished juggling the books my guess is that the book value had slumped in some weird way. That’s one angle. Secondly, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees is William Justus Sloane, and W.J. practically lives in Bull Matterson’s pocket these days. The Board of Trustees promptly reinvested what little they got from Matterson right back into the newly organized Matterson Corporation, and if anyone controls that dough now it’s old Bull. Thirdly, it took the Board of Trustees an awful long time to get off its collective fanny to do anything about ratifying the terms of the trust. It took no less than four years to get that Department of Lumber Technology going, and it was a pretty half-hearted effort at that. From what I hear the department is awfully short of funds. Fourthly, the terms of the sale of Trinavant’s holdings to Bull were never made public. I reckon he should have cut up for something between seven and ten million dollars but the Board of Trustees only invested two million in the Matterson Corporation and in non-voting stock, by God, which was just ducky for Bull Matterson. Fifthly … aaah … what am I wasting my time for?’
‘So you reckon Bull Matterson practically stole the Trinavant money.’
‘There’s no practically about it,’ McDougall snapped.
‘Bad luck for Miss Clare,’ I said.
‘Oh, she did all right. There was a special codicil in the will that took care of her. John left her half a million dollars and a big slice of land. That’s something Bull hasn’t been able to get his hooks on – not that he hasn’t tried.’
I thought of the tone of the leader in which the recommendation had been made that Miss Trinavant’s education should not be interrupted. ‘How old was she when Trinavant was killed?’
‘She was a kid of seventeen. Old John had sent her to Switzerland to complete her education.’
‘And who wrote the leader on September 7th, 1956?’
McDougall smiled tightly. ‘So you caught that? You’re a smart boy, after all. The leader was written by Jimson but I bet Matterson dictated it. It’s a debatable point whether or not that option agreement could have been broken, especially since Clare wasn’t legally of John’s family, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He flew out to Switzerland himself and persuaded her to stay, and he put that leader under her nose as an indication that the people of Fort Farrell thought likewise. She knew the Recorder was an honest newspaper; what she didn’t know was that Matterson corrupted it the week Trinavant died. She was a girl of seventeen who knew nothing about business.’
‘So who looked after her half million bucks until she came of age?’
‘The Public Trustee,’ said McDougall. ‘It’s pretty automatic in cases like hers. Bull tried to horn in on it, of course, but he never got anywhere.’
I went over the whole unsavoury story in my mind, then shook my head. ‘What I don’t understand is why Matterson clamped down on the name of Trinavant. What did he have to hide?’
‘I don’t know,’ confessed McDougall. ‘I was hoping that the man who consulted that issue of the Recorder after ten years would be able to tell me. But from that day to this the name of Trinavant has been blotted out in this town. The Trinavant Bank was renamed the Matterson Bank, and every company that held the name was rebaptized. He even tried to change the name of Trinavant Square but he couldn’t get it past Mrs Davenant – she’s the old battle-axe who runs the Fort Farrell Historical Society.’
I said, ‘Yes, if it hadn’t been for that I wouldn’t have known this was Trinavant’s town.’
‘Would it have made any difference?’ When I made no answer McDougall said, ‘He couldn’t rename Clare Trinavant either. It’s my guess he’s been praying to God she gets married. She lives in the district, you know – and she hates his guts.’
‘So the old man’s still alive.’
‘He sure is. Must be seventy-five now, and he wears his age well – he’s still full of piss and vinegar, but he always was a rumbustious old stallion. John Trinavant was the brake on him, but when John went then old Bull really broke loose. He organized the Matterson Corporation as a holding company and really went to town on money-making, and he wasn’t particular how he made it – he still isn’t, for that matter. And the amount of forest land he owns …’
I broke in. ‘I thought all forest land was Crown land.’
‘In British Columbia ninety-five per cent is Crown land, but five per cent – say, seven million acres – is under private ownership. Bull owns no less than one million acres, and he has felling franchises on another two million acres of Crown land. He cuts sixty million cubic feet of lumber a year. He’s always on the edge of getting into trouble because of over-cutting – the Government doesn’t like that – but he’s always weaselled his way out. Now he’s starting his own hydroelectric plant, and when he has that he’ll really have this part of the country by the throat.’
I said, ‘Young Matterson told me the hydro plant was to supply power to the Matterson Corporation’s own operations.’
McDougall’s lip quirked satirically. ‘And what do you think Fort Farrell is but a Matterson operation? We have a two-bit generating plant here that’s never up to voltage and always breaking down, so now the Matterson Electricity Company moves in. And Matterson operations have a way of spreading wider. I believe old Bull has a vision of the Matterson Corporation controlling a slice of British Columbia from Fort St John to Kispiox, from Prince George clear to the Yukon – a private kingdom to run as he likes.’
‘Where does Donner come into all this?’ I asked curiously.
‘He’s a money man – an accountant. He thinks in nothing but dollars and cents and he’ll squeeze a dollar until it cries uncle. Now there’s a really ruthless, conniving bastard for you. He figures out the schemes and Bull Matterson makes them work. But Bull has put himself upstairs as Chairman of the Board – he leaves the day-to-day running of things to young Howard – and Donner is now riding herd on Howard to prevent him running hogwild.’
‘He’s not doing too good a job,’ I said, and told him of the episode in Howard’s office.
McDougall snorted. ‘Donner can handle that young punk with one hand tied behind his back. He’ll give way on things that don’t matter much, but on anything important Howard definitely comes last. Young Howard puts up a good front and may look like a man, but he’s soft inside. He’s not a tenth of the man his father is.’
I sat and digested all that for a long time, and finally said, ‘All right, Mac; you said you had a personal interest in all this. What is it?’
He stared me straight in the eye and said, ‘It may come as a surprise to you to find that even newspapermen have a sense of honour. John Trinavant was my friend; he used to come up here quite often and drink my whisky and have a yarn. I was sick to my stomach at what the Recorder did to him and his family when they died, but I stood by and let it happen. Jimson is an incompetent fool and I could have put such a story on the front page of this newspaper that John Trinavant would never have been forgotten in Fort Farrell. But I didn’t, and you know why? Because I was a coward; because I was scared of Bull Matterson; because I was frightened of losing my job.’
His voice broke a little. ‘Son, when John Trinavant was killed I was rising sixty, already an elderly man. I’ve always been a free-spender and I had no money, and it’s always been in my mind that I come from a long-lived family. I reckoned I had many years ahead of me, but what can an old man of sixty do when he loses his job?’ His voice strengthened. ‘Now I’m seventy-one and still working for Matterson. I do a good job for him – that’s why he keeps me on here. It’s not charity because Matterson doesn’t even know the meaning of the word. But in the last ten years I’ve saved a bit and now that I don’t have so many years ahead of me I’d like to do something for my friend, John Trinavant. I’m not running scared any more.’
I said, ‘What would you propose to do?’
He took a deep breath. ‘You can tell me. A man doesn’t walk in off the street and read a ten-year-old issue of a newspaper without a reason. I want to know that reason.’
‘No, Mac,’ I said. ‘Not yet. I don’t know if I have a reason or not. I don’t know if I have a right to interfere. I came to Fort Farrell purely by chance and I don’t know if this is any of my business.’
He puffed out his cheeks and blew out his breath explosively. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘I just don’t get it.’ He wore a baffled look. ‘Are you telling me that you read that ten-year-old issue just for kicks – or just because you like browsing through crummy country newspapers? Maybe you wanted to check which good housewife won the pumpkin pie baking competition that week. Is that it?’
‘No dice, Mac,’ I said. ‘You won’t get it out of me until I’m ready, and I’m a long way off yet.’
‘All right,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ve told you a lot – enough to get my head chopped off if Matterson hears about it. I’ve put my neck right on the block.’
‘You’re safe with me, Mac.’
He grunted. ‘I sure as hell hope so. I’d hate to be fired now with no good coming of it.’ He got up and took a file from a shelf. ‘I might as well give you a bit more. It struck me that if Matterson wanted to erase the name of Trinavant the reason might be connected with the way Trinavant died.’ He took a photograph from the file and passed it to me. ‘Know who that is?’
I looked at the fresh young face and nodded. I had seen a copy of the same photograph before but I didn’t tell McDougall. ‘Yes, it’s Robert Grant.’ I laid it on the table.
‘The fourth passenger in the car,’ said McDougall, tapping the photograph with his fingernail. ‘That young man lived. Nobody expected him to live, but he did. Six months after Trinavant died I had a vacation coming, so I used it to do some quiet checking out of reach of old Bull. I went over to Edmonton and visited the hospital. Robert Grant had been transferred to Quebec; he was in a private clinic and he was incommunicado. From then on I lost track of him – and it’s a hard task to hide from an old newspaperman with a bee in his bonnet. I sent copies of this photograph to a few of my friends – newspapermen scattered all over Canada – and not a thing has come up in ten years. Robert Grant has disappeared off the face of the earth.’
‘So?’
‘Son, have you seen this man?’
I looked down at the photograph again. Grant looked to be only a boy, barely in his twenties and with a fine full life ahead of him. I said slowly, ‘To my best knowledge I’ve never seen that face.’
‘Well, it was a try,’ said McDougall. ‘I had thought you might be a friend of his come to see how the land lies.’
‘I’m sorry, Mac,’ I said. ‘I’ve never met this man. But why would he want to come here, anyway? Isn’t Grant an irrelevancy?’
‘Maybe,’ said McDougall thoughtfully. ‘And maybe not. I just wanted to talk to him, that’s all.’ He shrugged. ‘Let’s have another drink, for God’s sake!’
That night I had the Dream. It was at least five years since I had had it last and, as usual, it frightened hell out of me. There was a mountain covered with snow and with jagged black rocks sticking out of the snow like snaggle teeth. I wasn’t climbing the mountain or descending – I was merely standing there as though rooted. When I tried to move my feet it was as though the snow was sticky like an adhesive and I felt like a fly trapped on flypaper.
The snow was falling all the time; drifts were building up and presently the snow was knee-high and then at midthigh. I knew that if I didn’t move I would be buried so I struggled again and bent down and pushed at the snow with my bare hands.
It was then that I found that the snow was not cold, but red hot in temperature, even though it was perfectly white in my dreams. I cried in agony and jerked my hands away and waited helplessly as the snow imperceptibly built up around my body. It touched my hands and then my face and I screamed as the hot, hot snow closed about me burning, burning, burning …
I woke up covered in sweat in that anonymous hotel room and wished I could have a jolt of Mac’s fine Islay whisky.
TWO (#ulink_b518ba02-9a76-58a9-9ea3-30d6ef026f12)
The first thing I can ever remember in my life is pain. It is not given to many men to experience their birth-pangs and I don’t recommend it. Not that any commendation of mine, for or against, can have any effect – none of us chooses to be born and the manner of our birth is beyond our control.
I felt the pain as a deep-seated agony all over my body. It became worse as time passed by, a red-hot fire consuming me. I fought against it with all my heart and seemed to prevail, though they tell me that the damping of the pain was due to the use of drugs. The pain went away and I became unconscious.
At the time of my birth I was twenty-three years old, or so I am reliably informed.
I am also told that I spent the next few weeks in a coma, hovering on that thin marginal line between life and death. I am inclined to think of this as a mercy because if I had been conscious enough to undergo the pain I doubt if I would have lived and my life would indeed have been short.
When I recovered consciousness again the pain, though still crouched in my body, had eased considerably and I found it bearable. Less bearable was the predicament in which I found myself. I was spreadeagled – tied by ankles and wrists – lying on my back and apparently immersed in liquid. I had very little to go on because when I tried to open my eyes I found that I couldn’t. There was a tightness about my face and I became very much afraid and began to struggle.
A voice said urgently, ‘You must be quiet. You must not move. You must not move.’
It was a good voice, soft and kind, so I relaxed and descended into that merciful coma again.
A number of weeks passed during which time I was conscious more frequently. I don’t remember much of this period except that the pain became less obtrusive and I became stronger. They began to feed me through a tube pushed between my lips, and I sucked in the soups and the fruit juices and became even stronger. Three times I was aware that I had been taken to an operating theatre; I learned this not from my own knowledge but by listening to the chatter of nurses. But for the most part I was in a happy state of thoughtlessness. It never occurred to me to wonder what I was doing there or how I had got there, any more than a newborn baby in a cot thinks of those things. As a baby, I was content to let things go their own way so long as I was comfortable and comforted.
The time came when they cut the bandage from my face and eyes. A voice, a man’s voice I had heard before, said, ‘Now, take it easy. Keep your eyes closed until I tell you to open them.’
Obediently I closed my eyes tightly and heard the snip of the scissors as they clipped through the gauze. Fingers touched my eyelids and there was a whispered, ‘Seems to be all right.’ Someone was breathing into my face. The voice said, ‘All right; you can open them now.’
I opened my eyes to a darkened room. In front of me was the dim outline of a man. He said, ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’
A white object swam into vision. I said, ‘Two.’
‘And how many now?’
‘Four.’
He gave a long, gusty sigh. ‘It looks as though you are going to have unimpaired vision after all. You’re a very lucky young man, Mr Grant.’
‘Grant?’
The man paused. ‘Your name is Grant, isn’t it?’
I thought about it for a long time and the man assumed I wasn’t going to answer him. He said, ‘Come now; if you are not Grant, then who are you?’
It is then they tell me that I screamed and they had to administer more drugs. I don’t remember screaming. All I remember is the awful blank feeling when I realized that I didn’t know who I was.
I have given the story of my rebirth in some detail. It is really astonishing that I lived those many weeks, conscious for a large part of the time, without ever worrying about my personal identity. But all that was explained afterwards by Susskind.
Dr Matthews, the skin specialist, was one of the team which was cobbling me together, and he was the first to realize that there was something more wrong with me than mere physical disability, so Susskind was added to the team. I never called him anything other than Susskind – that’s how he introduced himself – and he was never anything else than a good friend. I guess that’s what makes a good psychiatrist. When I was on my feet and moving around outside hospitals we used to go out and drink beer together. I don’t know if that’s a normal form of psychiatric treatment – I thought head-shrinkers stuck pretty firmly to the little padded seat at the head of the couch – but Susskind had his own ways and he turned out to be a good friend.
He came into the darkened room and looked at me. ‘I’m Susskind,’ he said abruptly. He looked about the room. ‘Dr Matthews says you can have more light. I think it’s a good idea.’ He walked to the window and drew the curtains. ‘Darkness is bad for the soul.’
He came back to the bed and stood looking down at me. He had a strong face with a firm jaw and a beak of a nose, but his eyes were incongruously soft and brown, like those of an intelligent ape. He made a curiously disarming gesture, and said, ‘Mind if I sit down?’
I shook my head so he hooked his foot on a chair and drew it closer. He sat down in a casual manner, his left ankle resting on his right knee, showing a large expanse of sock patterned jazzily and two inches of hairy leg. ‘How are you feeling?’
I shook my head.
‘What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?’ When I made no answer he said, ‘Look, boy, you seem to be in trouble. Now, I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me.’
I’d had a bad night, the worst in my life. For hours I had struggled with the problem – who am I? – and I was no nearer to finding out than when I started. I was worn out and frightened and in no mood to talk to anyone.
Susskind began to talk in a soft voice. I don’t remember everything he said that first time but he returned to the theme many times afterwards. It went something like this:
‘Everyone comes up against this problem some time in his life; he asks himself the fundamentally awkward question: ‘Who am I?’ There are many related questions, too, such as, ‘Why am I?’ and ‘Why am I here?’ To the uncaring the questioning comes late, perhaps only on the death-bed. To the thinking man this self-questioning comes sooner and has to be resolved in the agony of personal mental sweat.
‘Out of such self-questioning have come a lot of good things – and some not so good. Some of the people who have asked these questions of themselves have gone mad, others have become saints, but most of us come to a compromise. Out of these questions have arisen great religions. Philosophers have written too many books about them, books containing a lot of undiluted crap and a few grains of sense. Scientists have looked for the answers in the movement of atoms and the working of drugs. This is the problem which exercises all of us, every member of the human race, and if it doesn’t happen to an individual then that individual cannot be considered to be human.
‘Now, you’ve bumped up against this problem of personal identity head-on and in an acute form. You think that just because you can’t remember your name you’re a nothing. You’re wrong. The self does not exist in a name. A name is just a word, a form of description which we give ourselves – a mere matter of convenience. The self – that awareness in the midst of your being which you call I – is still there. If it weren’t, you’d be dead.
‘You also think that just because you can’t remember incidents in your past life your personal world has come to an end. Why should it? You’re still breathing; you’re still alive. Pretty soon you’ll be out of this hospital – a thinking, questioning man, eager to get on with what he has to do. Maybe we can do some reconstructions; the odds are that you’ll have all your memories back within days or weeks. Maybe it will take a bit longer. But I’m here to help you do it. Will you let me?’
I looked up at that stern face with the absurdly gentle eyes and whispered, ‘Thanks.’ Then, because I was very tired, I fell asleep and when I woke up again Susskind had gone.
But he came back next day. ‘Feeling better?’
‘Some.’
He sat down. ‘Mind if I smoke?’ He lit a cigarette, then looked at it distastefully. ‘I smoke too many of these damn’ things.’ He extended the pack. ‘Have one?’
‘I don’t use them.’
‘How do you know?’
I thought about that for fully five minutes while Susskind waited patiently without saying a word. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I don’t smoke. I know it.’
‘Well, that’s a good start,’ he said with fierce satisfaction. ‘You know something about yourself. Now, what’s the first thing you remember?’
I said immediately, ‘Pain. Pain and floating. I was tied up, too.’
Susskind went into that in detail and when he had finished I thought I caught a hint of doubt in his expression, but I could have been wrong. He said, ‘Have you any idea how you got into this hospital?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I was born here.’
He smiled. ‘At your age?’
‘I don’t know how old I am.’
‘To the best of our knowledge you’re twenty-three. You were involved in an auto accident. Have you any ideas about that?’
‘No.’
‘You know what an automobile is, though.’
‘Of course.’ I paused. ‘Where was the accident?’
‘On the road between Dawson Creek and Edmonton. You know where those places are?’
‘I know.’
Susskind stubbed out his cigarette. ‘These ash-trays are too damn’ small,’ he grumbled. He lit another cigarette. ‘Would you like to know a little more about yourself? It will be hearsay, not of your own personal knowledge, but it might help. Your name, for instance.’
I said, ‘Dr Matthews called me by the name of Grant.’
Susskind said carefully, ‘To the best of our knowledge that is your name. More fully, it is Robert Boyd Grant. Want to know anything else?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What was I doing? What was my job?’
‘You were a college student studying at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Remember anything about that?’
I shook my head.
He said suddenly, ‘What’s a mofette?’
‘It’s an opening in the ground from which carbon dioxide is emitted – volcanic in origin.’ I stared at him. ‘How did I know that?’
‘You were majoring in geology,’ he said drily. ‘What was your father’s given name?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said blankly. ‘You said “was”. Is he dead?’
‘Yes,’ said Susskind quickly. ‘Supposing you went to Irving House, New Westminster – what would you expect to find?’
‘A museum.’
‘Have you any brothers or sisters?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Which – if any – political party do you favour?’
I thought about it, then shrugged. ‘I don’t know – but I don’t know if I took any interest in politics at all.’
There were dozens of questions and Susskind shot them at me fast, expecting fast answers. At last he stopped and lit another cigarette. ‘I’ll give it to you straight, Bob, because I don’t believe in hiding unpleasant facts from my customers and because I think you can take it. Your loss of memory is entirely personal, relating solely to yourself. Any knowledge which does not directly impinge on the ego, things like the facts of geology, geographical locations, car driving know-how – all that knowledge has been retained whole and entire.’
He flicked ash carelessly in the direction of the ash-tray. ‘The more personal things concerning yourself and your relationships with others are gone. Not only has your family been blotted out but you can’t remember another single person – not your geology tutor or even your best buddy at college. It’s as though something inside you decided to wipe the slate clean.’
I felt hopelessly lost. What was there left for a man of my age with no personal contacts – no family, no friends? My God, I didn’t even have any enemies, and it’s a poor man who can say that.
Susskind poked me gently with a thick forefinger. ‘Don’t give up now, bud; we haven’t even started. Look at it this way – there’s many a man who would give his soul to be able to start again with a clean slate. Let me explain a few things to you. The unconscious mind is a funny animal with its own operating logic. This logic may appear to be very odd to the conscious mind but it’s still a valid logic working strictly in accordance within certain rules, and what we have to do is to figure out the rules. I’m going to give you some psychological tests and then maybe I’ll know better what makes you tick. I’m also going to do some digging into your background and maybe we can come up with something there.’
I said, ‘Susskind, what chance is there?’
‘I won’t fool you,’ he said. ‘Due to various circumstances which I won’t go into right now, yours is not entirely a straightforward case of loss of memory. Your case is one for the books – and I’ll probably write the book. Look, Bob; a guy gets a knock on the head and he loses his memory – but not for long; within a couple of days, a couple of weeks at the most, he’s normal again. That’s the common course of events. Sometimes it’s worse than that. I’ve just had a case of an old man of eighty who was knocked down in the street. He came round in hospital the next day and found he’d lost a year of his life – he couldn’t remember a damn’ thing of the year previous to the accident and, in my opinion, he never will.’
He waved his cigarette under my nose. ‘That’s general loss of memory. A selective loss of memory like yours isn’t common at all. Sure, it’s happened before and it’ll happen again, but not often. And, like the general loss, recovery is variable. The trouble is that selective loss happens so infrequently that we don’t have much on it. I could give you a line that you’ll have your memory back next week, but I won’t because I don’t know. The only thing we can do is to work on it. Now, my advice to you is to quit worrying about it and to concentrate on other things. As soon as you can use your eyes for reading I’ll bring in some textbooks and you can get back to work. By then the bandages will be off your hands and you can do some writing, too. You have an examination to pass, bud, in twelve months’ time.’
II
Susskind drove me to work and ripped into me when I lagged. His tongue could get a vicious edge to it when he thought it would do me good, and as soon as the bandages were off he pushed my nose down to the textbooks. He gave me a lot of tests – intelligence, personality, vocational – and seemed pleased at the results.
‘You’re no dope,’ he announced, waving a sheaf of papers. ‘You scored a hundred and thirty-three on the Wechsler-Bellevue – you have intelligence, so use it.’
My body was dreadfully scarred, especially on the chest. My hands were unnaturally pink with new skin and when I touched my face I could feel crinkled scar tissue. And that led to something else. One day Matthews came to see me with Susskind in attendance. ‘We’ve got something to talk about, Bob,’ he said.
Susskind chuckled and jerked his head at Matthews. ‘A serious guy, this – very portentous.’
‘It is serious,’ said Matthews. ‘Bob, there’s a decision you have to make. I’ve done all I can do for you in this hospital. Your eyes are as good as new but the rest of you is a bit battered and that’s something I can’t improve on. I’m no genius – I’m just an ordinary hospital surgeon specializing in skin.’ He paused and I could see he was selecting his words. ‘Have you ever wondered why you’ve never seen a mirror?’
I shook my head, and Susskind chipped in, ‘Our Robert Boyd Grant is a very undemanding guy. Would you like to see yourself, Bob?’
I put my fingers to my cheeks and felt the roughness. ‘I don’t know that I would,’ I said, and found myself shaking.
‘You’d better,’ Susskind advised. ‘It’ll be brutal, but it’ll help you make up your mind in the next big decision.’
‘Okay,’ I said.
Susskind snapped his fingers and the nurse left the room to return almost immediately with a large mirror which she laid face down on the table. Then she went out again and closed the door behind her. I looked at the mirror but made no attempt to pick it up. ‘Go ahead,’ said Susskind, so I picked it up reluctantly and turned it over.
‘My God!’ I said, and quickly closed my eyes, feeling the sour taste of vomit in my throat. After a while I looked again. It was a monstrously ugly face, pink and seamed with white lines in arbitrary places. It looked like a child’s first clumsy attempt to depict the human face in wax. There was no character there, no imprint of dawning maturity as there should have been in someone of my age – there was just a blankness.
Matthews said quietly, ‘That’s why you have a private room here.’
I began to laugh. ‘It’s funny; it’s really damn’ funny. Not only have I lost myself, but I’ve lost my face.’
Susskind put his hand on my arm. ‘A face is just a face. No man can choose his own face – it’s something that’s given to him. Just listen to Dr Matthews for a minute.’
Matthews said, ‘I’m no plastic surgeon.’ He gestured at the mirror which I still held. ‘You can see that. You weren’t in any shape for the extensive surgery you needed when you came in here – you’d have died if we had tried to pull any tricks like that. But now you’re in good enough shape for the next step – if you want to take it.’
‘And that is?’
‘More surgery – by a good man in Montreal. The top man in the field in Canada, and maybe in the Western Hemisphere. You can have a face again, and new hands, too.’
‘More surgery!’ I didn’t like that; I’d had enough of it.
‘You have a few days to make up your mind,’ said Matthews.
‘Do you mind, Matt?’ said Susskind. ‘I’ll take over from here.’
‘Of course,’ said Matthews. ‘I’ll leave you to it. I’ll be seeing you, Bob.’
He left the room, closing the door gently. Susskind lit a cigarette and threw the pack on the table. He said quietly, ‘You’d better do it, bud. You can’t walk round with a face like that – not unless you intend taking up a career in the horror movies.’
‘Right!’ I said tightly. I knew it was something that had to be done. I swung on Susskind. ‘Now tell me something – who is paying for all this? Who is paying for this private room? Who is paying for the best plastic surgeon in Canada?’
Susskind clicked his tongue. ‘That’s a mystery. Someone loves you for sure. Every month an envelope comes addressed to Dr Matthews. It contains a thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills and one of these.’ He fished in his pocket and threw a scrap of paper across the table.
I smoothed it out. There was but one line of typescript on it: FOR THE CARE OF ROBERT BOYD GRANT.
I looked at him suspiciously. ‘You’re not doing this, are you?’
‘Good Christ!’ he said. ‘Show me a hospital headshrinker who can afford to give away twelve thousand bucks a year. I couldn’t afford to give you twelve thousand cents.’ He grinned. ‘But thanks for the compliment.’
I pushed the paper with my finger. ‘Perhaps this is a clue to who I am.’
‘No, it’s not,’ said Susskind flatly. He looked unhappy. ‘Maybe you’ve noticed I’ve not told you much about yourself. I did promise to dig into your background.’
‘I was going to ask you about that.’
‘I did some digging,’ he said. ‘And what I’ve been debating is not what I should tell you, but if I should tell you at all. You know, Bob, people get my profession all wrong. In a case like yours they think I should help you to get back your memory come hell or high water. I take a different view. I’m like the psychiatrist who said that his job was to help men of genius keep their neuroses. I’m not interested in keeping a man normal – I want to keep him happy. It’s a symptom of the sick world we live in that the two terms are not synonymous.’
‘And where do I come in on this?’
He said solemnly, ‘My advice to you is to let it go. Don’t dig into your past. Make a new life for yourself and forget everything that happened before you came here. I’m not going to help you recover your memory.’
I stared at him. ‘Susskind, you can’t say that and expect me just to leave it there.’
‘Won’t you take my word for it?’ he asked gently.
‘No!’ I said. ‘Would you if you were in my place?’
‘I guess not,’ he said, and sighed. ‘I suppose I’ll be bending a few professional ethics, but here goes. I’m going to make it short and sharp. Now, take a hold of yourself, listen to me and shut up until I’ve finished.’
He took a deep breath. ‘Your father deserted your mother soon after you were born, and no one knows if he’s alive or dead. Your mother died when you were ten and, from what I can gather, she was no great loss. She was, to put it frankly, nothing but a cheap chippy and, incidentally, she wasn’t married to your father. That left you an orphan and you went into an institution. It seems you were a young hellion and quite uncontrollable so you soon achieved the official status of delinquent. Had enough?’
‘Go on,’ I whispered.
‘You started your police record by the theft of a car, so you wound up in reform school for that episode. It seems it wasn’t a good reform school; all you learned there was how to make crime pay. You ran away and for six months you existed by petty crime until you were caught. Fortunately you weren’t sent back to the same reform school and you found a warden who knew how to handle you and you began to straighten out. On leaving reform school you were put in a hostel under the care of a probation officer and you did pretty well at high school. Your good intelligence earned you good marks so you went to college. Right then it looked as though you were all right.’
Susskind’s voice took on a savage edge. ‘But you slipped. You couldn’t seem to do anything the straight way. The cops pulled you in for smoking marijuana – another bad mark on the police blotter. Then there was an episode when a girl died in the hands of a quack abortionist – a name was named but nothing could be proved, so maybe we ought to leave that one off the tab. Want any more?’
‘There’s more?’
Susskind nodded sadly. ‘There’s more.’
‘Let me have it,’ I said flatly.
‘Okay. Again you were pulled in for drug addiction; this time you were mainlining on heroin. You just about hit the bottom there. There was some evidence that you were pushing drugs to get the dough to feed the habit, but not enough to nail you. However, now the cops were laying for you. Then came the clincher. You knew the Dean of Men was considering throwing you out of college and, God knows, he had enough reason. Your only hope was to promise to reform but you had to back it up with something – such as brilliant work. But drugs and brilliant work don’t go hand in hand so you were stupid enough to break into an office and try to doctor your examination marks.’
‘And I was caught at it,’ I said dully.
‘It would have been better if you were,’ said Susskind. ‘No, you weren’t caught red-handed but it was done in such a ham-fisted way that the Principal sent a senior student to find you. He found you all right. He found you hopped up on dope. You beat this guy half to death and lit out for places unknown. God knows where you thought you were going to take refuge – the North Pole, maybe. Anyway, a nice guy called Trinavant gave you a lift and the next thing was – Bingo! – Trinavant was dead, his wife was dead, his son was dead, and you were seven-eighths dead.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘That just about wraps it up,’ he said tiredly.
I was cold all over. ‘You think I killed this man, Trinavant, and his family?’
‘I think it was an accident, nothing more,’ said Susskind. ‘Now listen carefully, Bob; I told you the unconscious mind has its own brand of peculiar logic. I found something very peculiar going on. When you were pulled in on the heroin charge you were given a psychiatric examination, and I’ve seen the documents. One of the tests was a Bernreuter Personality Inventory and you may remember that I also gave you that test.’
‘I remember.’
Susskind leaned back in his chair. ‘I compared the two profiles and they didn’t check out at all; they could have been two different guys. And I’ll tell you something, Bob: the guy that was tested by the police psychiatrist I wouldn’t trust with a bent nickel, but I’d trust you with my life.’
‘Someone’s made a mistake,’ I said.
He shook his head vigorously. ‘No mistake. Do you remember the man I brought in here who sat in on some of your tests? He’s an authority on an uncommon condition of the human psyche – multiple personality. Did you ever read a book called The Three Faces of Eve?’
‘I saw the movie – Joanne Woodward was in it.’
‘That’s it. Then perhaps you can see what I’m getting at. Not that you have anything like she had. Tell me, what do you think of the past life of this guy called Robert Boyd Grant?’
‘It made me sick to my stomach,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe I did that.’
‘You didn’t,’ said Susskind sharply. ‘This is what happened, to the best of my professional belief. This man, Robert Boyd Grant, was a pretty crummy character, and he knew it himself. My guess is that he was tired of living with himself and he wanted to escape from himself – hence the drugs. But marijuana and heroin are only temporary forms of escape, and like everyone else he was locked in the prison of his own body. Perhaps he sickened himself but there was nothing he could do about it – a conscious and voluntary change of basic personality is practically an impossibility.
‘But as I said, the unconscious has its own logic and we, in this hospital, accidentally gave it the data it needed. You had third-degree burns over sixty per cent of your body when you were brought in here. We couldn’t put you in a bed in that condition, so you were suspended in a bath of saline solution which, to your unconscious, was a pretty good substitute for amniotic fluid. Do you know what that is?’
‘A return to the womb?’
Susskind snapped his fingers. ‘You’re with it. Now I’m speaking in impossibly untechnical terms, so don’t go quoting me, especially to other psychiatrists. I think this condition was tailor-made for your unconscious mind. Here was a chance for rebirth which was grabbed at. Whether the second personality was lying there, ready to be used, or whether it was constructed during the time you were in that bath, we shall never know – and it doesn’t matter. That there is a second personality – a better personality – is a fact, and it’s something I’d swear to in a court of law, which I might have to do yet. You’re one of the few people who can really call yourself a new man.’
It was a lot to take in at once – too much. I said, ‘God! You’ve handed me something to think about.’
‘I had to do it,’ said Susskind. ‘I had to explain why you mustn’t probe into the past. When I told you what a man called Robert Grant had done it was like listening to an account of the actions of someone else, wasn’t it? Let me give you an analogy: when you go to the movies and see a lion jumping at you, well – that’s just the movies and there’s no harm done; but if you go to Africa and a lion jumps at you, that’s hard reality and you’re dead. If you insist on digging into the past and succeed in remembering as personal memories the experiences of this other guy, then you’ll split yourself down the middle. So leave it alone. You’re someone with no past and a great future.’
I said, ‘What chance is there that this other – bad – personality might take over again spontaneously?’
‘I’d say there’s very little chance of that,’ said Susskind slowly. ‘You rate as a strong-willed individual; the other guy had a weak will – strong-willed people generally don’t go for drugs, you know. We all of us have a devil lurking inside us; we all have to suppress the old Adam. You’re no different from anyone else.’
I picked up the mirror and studied the reflected caricature. ‘What did I … what did he look like?’
Susskind took out his wallet and extracted a photograph. ‘I don’t see the point in showing you this, but if you want to see it, here it is.’
Robert Boyd Grant was a fresh-faced youngster with a smooth, unlined face. There was no trace of dissipation such as one might have expected – he could have been any college student attending any college on the North American continent. He wasn’t bad-looking, either, in an immature way, and I doubted if he’d had any trouble finding a girl-friend to put in the family way.
‘I’d forget about that face,’ advised Susskind. ‘Don’t go back into the past. Roberts, the plastic surgeon, is a sculptor in flesh; he’ll fix you up with a face good enough to play romantic lead with Elizabeth Taylor.’
I said, ‘I’ll miss you, Susskind.’
He chuckled fatly. ‘Miss me? You’re not going to miss me, bud; I’m not going to let you get away – I’m going to write the book on you, remember.’ He blew out a plume of smoke. ‘I’m getting out of hospital work and going into private practice. I’ve been offered a partnership – guess where? Right – Montreal!’
Suddenly I felt much better now I knew Susskind was still going to be around. I looked at the photograph again and said, ‘Perhaps I’d better go the whole way. New man … new face … why not new name?’
‘A sound idea,’ agreed Susskind. ‘Any ideas on that?’
I gave him the photograph. ‘That’s Robert Grant,’ I said. ‘I’m Bob Boyd. It’s not too bad a name.’
III
I had three operations in Montreal covering the space of a year. I spent many weeks with my left arm strapped up against my right cheek in a skin grafting operation and, no sooner was that done, than my right arm was up against my left cheek.
Roberts was a genius. He measured my head meticulously and then made a plaster model which he brought to my room. ‘What kind of a face would you like, Bob?’ he asked.
It took a lot of figuring out because this was playing for keeps – I’d be stuck with this face for the rest of my life. We took a long time working on it with Roberts shaping modelling clay on to the plaster base. There were limitations, of course; some of my suggestions were impossible. ‘We have only a limited amount of flesh to work with,’ said Roberts. ‘Most plastic surgery deals mainly with the removal of flesh; nose-bobbing, for instance. This is a more ticklish job and all we can do is a limited amount of redistribution.’
I guess it was fun in a macabre sort of way. It isn’t everyone who gets the chance to choose his own face even if the options are limited. The operations weren’t so funny but I sweated it out, and what gradually emerged was a somewhat tough and battered face, the face of a man much older than twenty-four. It was lined and seamed as though by much experience, and it was a face that looked much wiser than I really was.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Roberts. ‘It’s a face you’ll grow into. No matter how carefully one does this there are the inevitable scars, so I’ve hidden those in folds of flesh, folds which usually come only with age.’ He smiled. ‘With a face like this I don’t think you’ll have much competition from people your own age; they’ll walk stiff-legged around you without even knowing why. You’d better take some advice from Susskind on how to handle situations like that.’
Matthews had handed over to Susskind the administration of the thousand dollars a month from my unknown benefactor. Susskind interpreted FOR THE CARE OF ROBERT BOYD GRANT in a wide sense; he kept me hard at my studies and, since I could not go to college, he brought in private tutors. ‘You haven’t much time,’ he warned. ‘You were born not a year ago and if you flub your education now you’ll wind up washing dishes for the rest of your life.’
I worked hard – it kept my mind off my troubles. I found I liked geology and, since I had a skull apparently stuffed full of geological facts it wasn’t too difficult to carry on. Susskind made arrangements with a college and I wrote my examinations between the second and third operations with my head and arm still in bandages. I don’t know what I would have done without him.
After the examinations I took the opportunity of visiting a public library and, in spite of what Susskind had said, I dug out the newspaper reports of the auto smash. There wasn’t much to read apart from the fact that Trinavant was a big wheel in some jerkwater town in British Columbia. It was just another auto accident that didn’t make much of a splash. Just after that I started to have bad dreams and that scared me, so I didn’t do any more investigations.
Then suddenly it was over. The last operation had been done and the bandages were off. In the same week the examination results came out and I found myself a B.Sc. and a newly fledged geologist with no job. Susskind invited me to his apartment to celebrate. We settled down with some beer, and he asked, ‘What are you going to do now? Go for your doctorate – ’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so – not just yet. I want to get some field experience.’
He nodded approvingly. ‘Got any ideas about that?’
I said, ‘I don’t think I want to be a company man; I’d rather work for myself. I reckon the North-West Territories are bursting with opportunities for a freelance geologist.’
Susskind was doubtful. ‘I don’t know if that’s a good thing.’ He looked across at me and smiled. ‘A mite self-conscious about your face, are you? And you want to get away from people – go into the desert – is that it?’
‘There’s a little of that in it,’ I said unwillingly. ‘But I meant what I said. I think I’ll make out in the north.’
‘You’ve been in hospitals for a year and a half,’ said Susskind. ‘And you don’t know many people. What you should do is to go out, get drunk, make friends – maybe get yourself a wife.’
‘Good God!’ I said. ‘I couldn’t get married.’
He waved his tankard. ‘Why not? You find yourself a really good girl and tell her the whole story. It won’t make any difference to her if she loves you.’
‘So you’re turning into a marriage counsellor,’ I said. ‘Why have you never got married?’
‘Who’d marry a cantankerous bastard like me?’ He moved restlessly and spilled ash down his shirt-front. ‘I’ve been holding out on you, bud. You’ve been a pretty expensive proposition, you know. You don’t think a thousand bucks a month has paid for what you’ve had? Roberts doesn’t come cheap and there were the tutors, too – not to mention my own ludicrously expensive services.’
I said, ‘What are you getting at, Susskind?’
‘When the first envelope came with its cargo of a thousand dollars, this was in it.’
He handed me a slip of paper. There was the line of typing: FOR THE CARE OF ROBERT BOYD GRANT. Underneath was another sentence: IN THE EVENT OF THESE FUNDS BEING INSUFFICIENT, PLEASE INSERT THE FOLLOWING AD IN THE PERSONAL COLUMN OF THE VANCOUVER SUN – R.B.G. WANTS MORE.
Susskind said, ‘When you came up to Montreal I decided it was time for more money so I put the ad. in the paper. Whoever is printing this money doubled the ante. In the last year and a half you’ve had thirty-six thousand dollars; there are nearly four thousand bucks left in the kitty – what do you want to do with it?’
‘Give it to some charity,’ I said.
‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Susskind. ‘You’ll need a stake if you’re setting off into the wide blue yonder. Pocket your pride and take it.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.
‘I don’t see what else you can do but take it,’ he observed; ‘You haven’t a cent otherwise.’
I fingered the note. ‘Who do you think this is? And why is he doing it?’
‘It’s no one out of your past, that’s for sure,’ said Susskind. ‘The gang that Grant was running with could hardly scratch up ten dollars between them. All hospitals get these anonymous donations. They’re not usually as big as this nor so specific, but the money comes in. It’s probably some eccentric millionaire who read about you in the paper and decided to do something about it.’ He shrugged. ‘There are two thousand bucks a month still coming in. What do we do about that?’
I scribbled on the note and tossed it back to him. He read it and laughed. ‘“R.B.G. SAYS STOP.” I’ll put it in the personal column and see what happens.’ He poured us more beer. ‘When are you taking off for the icy wastes?’
I said, ‘I guess I will use the balance of the money. I’ll leave as soon as I can get some equipment together.’
Susskind said, ‘It’s been nice having you around, Bob. You’re quite a nice guy. Remember to keep it that way, do you hear? No poking and prying – keep your face to the future and forget the past and you’ll make out all right. If you don’t you’re liable to explode like a bomb. And I’d like to hear how you’re getting on from time to time.’
Two weeks later I left Montreal and headed north-west. I suppose if anyone was my father it was Susskind, the man with the tough, ruthless, kindly mind. He gave me a taste for tobacco in the form of cigarettes, although I never got around to smoking as many as he did. He also gave me my life and sanity.
His full name was Abraham Isaac Susskind.
I always called him Susskind.
THREE (#ulink_91259d60-2f45-5986-9818-c2b610f2bf97)
The helicopter hovered just above treetop height and I shouted to the pilot, ‘That’ll do it; just over there in the clearing by the lake.’
He nodded, and the machine moved sideways slowly and settled by the lakeside, the downdraught sending ripples bouncing over the quiet water. There was the usual soggy feeling on touchdown as the weight came on to the hydraulic suspension and then all was still save for the engine vibrations as the rotor slowly flapped around.
The pilot didn’t switch off. I slammed the door open and began to pitch out my gear – the unbreakable stuff that would survive the slight fall. Then I climbed down and began to take out the cases of instruments. The pilot didn’t help at all; he just sat in the driving seat and watched me work. I suppose it was against his union rules to lug baggage.
When I had got everything out I shouted to him, ‘You’ll be back a week tomorrow?’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘About eleven in the morning.’
I stood back and watched him take off and the helicopter disappeared over the trees like a big ungainly grasshopper. Then I set about making camp. I wasn’t going to do anything more that day except make camp and, maybe, do a little fishing. That might sound as though I was cheating the Matterson Corporation out of the best part of a day’s work, but I’ve always found that it pays not to run headlong into a job.
A lot of men – especially city men – live like pigs when they’re camping. They stop shaving, they don’t dig a proper latrine, and they live exclusively on a diet of beans. I like to make myself comfortable, and that takes time. Another thing is that you can do an awful lot of work when just loafing around camp. When you’re waiting for the fish to bite your eye is taking in the lie of the land and that can tell an experienced field geologist a hell of a lot. You don’t have to eat all of an egg to know it’s rotten and you don’t have to pound every foot of land to know what you’ll find in it and what you won’t find.
So I made camp. I dug the latrine and used it because I needed to. I got some dry driftwood from the shore and built a fire, then dug out the coffee-pot and set some water to boil. By the time I’d gathered enough spruce boughs to make a bed it was time to have coffee, so I sat with my back against a rock and looked over the lake speculatively.
From what I could see the lake lay slap-bang on a discontinuity. This side of the lake was almost certainly mesozoic, a mixture of sedimentary and volcanic rocks – good prospecting country. The other side, by the lie of the land and what I’d seen from the air, was probably palaeozoic, mostly sedimentary. I doubted if I’d find much over there, but I had to go and look.
I took a sip of the scalding coffee and scooped up a handful of pebbles to examine them. Idly I let them fall from my hand one at a time, then threw the last one into the lake where it made a small ‘plop’ and sent out a widening circle of ripples. The lake itself was a product of the last ice age. The ice had pushed its way all over the land, the tongues of glaciers carving valleys through solid rock. It lay on the land for a long time and then, as quickly as it had come, so it departed.
Speed is a relative term. To a watching man a glacier moves slowly but it’s the equivalent of a hundred yards’ sprint when compared to other geological processes. Anyway, the glaciers retreated, dropping the rock fragments they had fractured and splintered from the bedrock. When that happened a rock wall was formed called a moraine, a natural dam behind which a lake or pond can form. Canada is full of them, and a large part of Canadian geology is trying to think like a piece of ice, trying to figure which way the ice moved so many thousands of years ago so that you can account for the rocks which are otherwise unaccountably out of place.
This lake was more of a large pond. It wasn’t more than a mile long and was fed by a biggish stream which came in from the north. I’d seen the moraine from the air and traced the stream flowing south from the lake to where it tumbled over the escarpment and where the Matterson Corporation was going to build a dam.
I threw out the dregs of coffee and washed the pot and the enamel cup, then set to and built a windbreak. I don’t like tents – they’re no warmer inside than out and they tend to leak if you don’t coddle them. In good weather all a man needs is a windbreak, which is easily assembled from materials at hand which don’t have to be back-packed like a tent, and in bad weather you can make a waterproof roof if you have the know-how. But it took me quite a long time in the North-West Territories to get that know-how.
By mid-afternoon I had the camp ship-shape. Everything was where I wanted it and where I could get at it quickly if I needed it. It was a standard set-up I’d worked out over the years. The Polar Eskimos have carried that principle to a fine art; a stranger can drop into an unknown igloo, put out his hand in the dark and be certain of finding the oil-lamp or the bone fish-hooks. Armies use it, too; a man transferred to a strange camp still knows where to find the paymaster without half trying. I suppose it can be defined as good housekeeping.
The plop of a fish in the lake made me realize I was hungry, so I decided to find out how good the trout were. Fish is no good for a sustained diet in a cold climate – for that you need good fat meat – but I’d had all the meat I needed in Fort Farrell and the idea of lake trout sizzling in a skillet felt good. But next day I’d see if I could get me some venison, if I didn’t have to go too far out of my way for it.
That evening, lying on the springy spruce and looking up at a sky full of diamonds, I thought about the Trinavants. I’d deliberately put the thing out of my mind because I was a little scared of monkeying around with it in view of what Susskind had said, but I found I couldn’t leave it alone. It was like when you accidentally bite the inside of your cheek and you find you can’t stop tongueing the sore place.
It certainly was a strange story. Why in hell should Matterson want to erase the name and memory of John Trinavant? I drew on a cigarette thoughtfully and watched the dull red eye of the dying embers on the fire. I was more and more certain that whatever was going on was centred on that auto accident. But three of the participants were dead, and the fourth couldn’t remember anything about it, and what’s more, didn’t want to. So that seemed a dead end.
Who profited from the Trinavants’ death? Certainly Bull Matterson had profited. With that option agreement he had the whole commercial empire in his fist – and all to himself. A motive for murder? Certainly Bull Matterson ran his business hard on cruel lines if McDougall was to be believed. But not every tight-fisted businessman was a murderer.
Item: Where was Bull Matterson at the time of the accident?
Who else profited? Obviously Clare Trinavant. And where was she at the time of the accident? In Switzerland, you damn’ fool, and she was a chit of a schoolgirl at that. Delete Clare Trinavant.
Who else?
Apparently no one else profited – not in money, anyway. Could there be a way to profit other than in money? I didn’t know enough about the personalities involved even to speculate, so that was another dead end – for the time being.
I jerked myself from the doze. What the hell was I thinking of? I wasn’t going to get mixed up in this thing. It was too dangerous for me personally.
I was even more sure of that when I woke up at two o’clock in the morning drenched with sweat and quivering with nerves. I had had the Dream again.
II
Things seemed brighter in the light of the dawn, but then they always do. I cooked breakfast – beans, bacon and fried eggs – and wolfed it down hungrily, then picked up the pack I had assembled the night before. A backwoods geologist on the move resembles a perambulating Christmas tree more than anything else, but I’m a bigger man than most and it doesn’t show much on me. However, it still makes a sizeable load to tote, so you can see why I don’t like tents.
I made certain that the big yellow circle on the back of the pack was clearly visible. That’s something I consider really important. Anywhere you walk in the woods on the North American continent you’re likely to find fool hunters who’ll let loose a 30.30 at anything that moves. That big yellow circle was just to make them pause before they squeezed the trigger, just time enough for them to figure that there are no yellow-spotted animals haunting the woods. For the same reason I wore a yellow-and-red checkered mackinaw that a drunken Indian wouldn’t be seen dead in, and a woollen cap with a big red bobble on the top. I was a real colourful character.
I checked the breech of my rifle to make sure there wasn’t one up the spout, slipped on the safety-catch and set off, heading south along the lake shore. I had established my base and I was ready to do the southern end of the survey. In one week the helicopter would pick me up and take me north, ready to cover the northern end. This valley was going to get a thorough going-over.
At the end of the first day I checked my findings against the Government geological map which was, to say the best of it, sketchy; in fact, in parts it was downright blank. People sometimes ask me: ‘Why doesn’t the Government do a real geological survey and get the job done once and for all?’ All I can say is that those people don’t understand anything about the problems. It would take an army of geologists a hundred years to check every square mile of Canada, and then they’d have to do it again because some joker would have invented a gadget to see metals five hundred feet underground; or, maybe, someone else would find a need for some esoteric metal hitherto useless. Alumina ores were pretty useless in 1900 and you couldn’t give away uranium in the 1930s. There’ll still be jobs for a guy like me for many years to come.
What little was on the Government map checked with what I had, but I had it in more detail. A few traces of molybdenum and a little zinc and lead, but nothing to get the Matterson Corporation in an uproar about. When a geologist speaks of a trace, he means just that.
I carried on the next day, and the day after that, and by the end of the week I’d made pretty certain that the Matterson Corporation wasn’t going to get rich mining the southern end of the Kinoxi Valley. I had everything packed back at the camp and was sitting twiddling my thumbs when the helicopter arrived, and I must say he was dead on time.
This time he dropped me in the northern area by a stream, and again I spent the day making camp. The next day I was off once more in the usual routine, just putting one foot in front of the other and keeping my eyes open.
On the third day I realized I was being watched. There wasn’t much to show that this was so, but there was enough; a scrap of wool caught on a twig near the camp which hadn’t been there twelve hours earlier, a fresh scrape on the bark of a tree which I hadn’t made and, once only, a wink of light from a distant hillside to show that someone had incautiously exposed binoculars to direct sunlight.
Now, in the north woods it’s downright discourteous to come within spitting distance of a man’s camp and not make yourself known, and anyone who hadn’t secrecy on his mind wouldn’t do it. I don’t particularly mind a man having his secrets – I’ve got some of my own – but if a man’s secrets involve me then I don’t like it and I’m apt to go off pop. Still, there wasn’t much I could do about it except carry on and hope to surprise this snoopy character somehow.
On the fifth day I had just the far northern part of the valley to inspect, so I decided to go right as far as I had to and make an overnight camp at the top of the valley. I was walking by the stream, trudging along, when a voice behind me said, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’
I froze, then turned round carefully. A tall man in a red mackinaw was standing just off the trail casually holding a hunting rifle. The rifle wasn’t pointing right at me; on the other hand, it wasn’t pointing very far away. In fact, it was a moot point whether I was being held up at gun-point or not. Since this guy had just stepped out from behind a tree he had deliberately ambushed me, so I didn’t care to make an issue of it right then – it wouldn’t have been the right time. I just said, ‘Hi! Where did you spring from?’
His jaw tightened and I saw he wasn’t very old, maybe in his early twenties. He said, ‘You haven’t answered my question.’
I didn’t like that tightening jaw and I hoped his trigger finger wasn’t tightening too. Young fellows his age can go off at half-cock awfully easily. I shifted the pack on my back. ‘Just going up to the head of the valley.’
‘Doing what?’
I said evenly, ‘I don’t know what business it is of yours, buster, but I’m doing a survey for the Matterson Corporation.’
‘No, you’re not,’ he said. ‘Not on this land.’ He jerked his head down the valley. ‘See that marker?’
I looked in the direction he indicated and saw a small cairn of stones, much overgrown, which is why I hadn’t spotted it before. It would have been pretty invisible from the other side. I looked at my young friend. ‘So?’
‘So that’s where Matterson land stops.’ He grinned, but there was no humour in him. ‘I was hoping you’d come this way – the marker makes explanations easier.’
I walked back and looked at the cairn, then glanced at him to find he had followed me with the rifle still held easily in his hands. We had the cairn between us, so I said, ‘It’s all right if I stand here?’
‘Sure,’ he said airily. ‘You can stand there. No law against it.’
‘And you don’t mind me taking off my pack?’
‘Not so long as you don’t put it this side of the marker.’ He grinned and I could see he was enjoying himself. I was prepared to let him – for the moment – so I said nothing, swung the pack to the ground and flexed my shoulders. He didn’t like that – he could see how big I was, and the rifle swung towards me, so there was no question now about being held up.
I pulled the maps out of a side pocket of the pack and consulted them. ‘There’s nothing here about this,’ I said mildly.
‘There wouldn’t be,’ he said. ‘Not on Matterson maps. But this is Trinavant land.’
‘Oh! Would that be Clare Trinavant?’
‘Yeah, that’s right.’ He shifted the rifle impatiently.
I said, ‘Is she available? I’d like to see her.’
‘She’s around, but you won’t see her – not unless she wants to see you.’ He laughed abruptly. ‘I wouldn’t stick around waiting for her; you might take root.’
I jerked my head down the valley. ‘I’ll be camped in that clearing. You push off, sonny, and tell Miss Trinavant that I know where the bodies are buried.’ I don’t know why I said it but it seemed a good thing to say at the time.
His head came up. ‘Huh?’
‘Run away and tell Miss Trinavant just that,’ I said. ‘You’re just an errand boy, you know.’ I stooped, picked up the pack, and turned away, leaving him standing there with his mouth open. By the time I reached the clearing and looked back he had gone.
The fire was going and the coffee was bubbling when I heard voices from up the valley. My friend, the young gunman, came into sight but he’d left his artillery home this time. Behind him came a woman, trimly dressed in jeans, an open-necked shirt and a mackinaw. Some women can wear jeans but not many; Ogden Nash once observed that before a woman wears pants she should see herself walking away. Miss Trinavant definitely had the kind of figure that would look well in anything, even an old burlap sack.
And she looked beautiful even when she was as mad as a hornet. She came striding over to me in a determined sort of way, and demanded, ‘What is all this? Who are you?’
‘My name’s Boyd,’ I said. ‘I’m a geologist working on contract for the Matterson Corporation. I’m …’
She held up her hand and looked at me with frosty eyes. I’d never seen green frost before. ‘That’s enough. This is as far up valley as you go, Mr Boyd. See to it, Jimmy.’
‘That’s what I told him, Miss Trinavant, but he didn’t want to believe me.’
I turned my head and looked at him. ‘Stay out of this, Jimmy boy: Miss Trinavant is on Matterson land by invitation – you’re not, so buzz off. And don’t point a gun at me again or I’ll wrap it round your neck.’
‘Miss Trinavant, that’s a lie,’ he yelled. ‘I never—’
I whirled and hit him. It’s a neat trick if you can get in the right position – you straighten your arm out stiff and pivot from the hips – your hand picks up a hell of a velocity by the time it makes contact. The back of my hand caught him under the jaw and damn’ near lifted him a foot off the ground. He landed flat on his back, flopped around a couple of times like a newly landed trout, and then lay still.
Miss Trinavant was looking at me open-mouthed – I could see her lovely tonsils quite plainly. I rubbed the back of my hand and said mildly, ‘I don’t like liars.’
‘He wasn’t lying,’ she said passionately. ‘He had no gun.’
‘I know when I’m being looked at by a 30.30,’ I said, and stabbed my finger at the prostrate figure in the pine needles. ‘That character has been snooping after me for the last three days: I don’t like that, either. He just got what was coming to him.’
By the way she bared her teeth she was getting set to bite me. ‘You didn’t give him a chance, you big barbarian.’
I let that one go. I’ve been in too many brawls to be witless enough to give the other guy a chance – I leave that to the sporting fighters who earn a living by having their brains beaten out.
She knelt down, and said, ‘Jimmy, Jimmy, are you all right?’ Then she looked up. ‘You must have broken his jaw.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t hit him hard enough. He’ll just be sore in body and spirit for the next few days.’ I took a pannikin and filled it with water from the stream and dumped it on Jimmy’s face. He stirred and groaned. ‘He’ll be fit to walk in a few minutes. You’d better get him back to wherever you have your camp. And you can tell him that if he comes after me with a gun again I’ll kill him.’
She breathed hard but said nothing, concentrating on arousing Jimmy. Presently he was conscious enough to stand up on groggy feet and he looked at me with undisguised hatred. I said, ‘When you’ve got him bedded down I’ll be glad to see you again, Miss Trinavant. I’ll still be camped here.’
She turned a startled face towards me. ‘What makes you think I ever want to see you again?’ she flared.
‘Because I know where the bodies are buried,’ I said pleasantly. ‘And don’t be afraid; I’ve never been known to hit a woman yet.’
I would have sworn she used some words I’d heard only in logging camps, but I couldn’t be certain because she muttered them under her breath. Then she turned to give Jimmy a hand and I watched them go past the marker and out of sight. The coffee was pretty nigh ruined by this time so I tossed it out and set about making more, and a glance at the sun decided me to think about bedding down for the night.
It was dusk when I saw her coming back, a glimmering figure among the trees. I had made myself comfortable and was sitting with my back to a tree tending the fat duck which was roasting on a spit before the fire. She came up and stood over me. ‘What do you really want?’ she asked abruptly.
I looked up. ‘You hungry?’ She stirred impatiently, so I said, ‘Roast duck, fresh bread, wild celery, hot coffee – how does that sound?’
She dropped down to my level. ‘I told Jimmy to watch out for you,’ she said. ‘I knew you were coming. But I didn’t tell him to go on Matterson land – and I didn’t say anything about a gun.’
‘Perhaps you should have,’ I observed. ‘Perhaps you should have said, “No gun”.’
‘I know Jimmy’s a bit wild,’ she said. ‘But that’s no excuse for what you did.’
I took a flat cake of bread out of the clay oven and slapped it on a platter. ‘Have you ever looked down the muzzle of a gun?’ I asked. ‘It’s a mighty unsettling sensation, and I tend to get violent when I’m nervous.’ I handed her the platter. ‘What about some duck?’
Her nostrils quivered as the fragrance rose from the spitted bird and she laughed. ‘You’ve sold me. It smells so good.’
I began to carve the duck. ‘Jimmy’s not much hurt except in what he considers to be his pride. If he goes around pointing guns at people, one of these days there’s going to be a bang and he’ll hang as high as Haman. Maybe I’ve saved his life. Who is he?’
‘One of my men.’
‘So you knew I was coming,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘News gets around these parts fast, considering it’s so underpopulated.’
She selected a slice of breast from her platter and popped it into her mouth. ‘Anything that concerns me I get to know about. Say, this is good!’
‘I’m not such a good cook,’ I said. ‘It’s the open air that does it. How do I concern you?’
‘You work for Matterson; you were on my land. That concerns me.’
I said, ‘When I contracted to do this job Howard Matterson had a bit of an argument with a man called Donner. Matterson said he’d straighten out the matter with someone called Clare – presumably you. Did he?’
‘I haven’t seen Howard Matterson in a month – and I don’t care if I never see him again.’
‘You can’t blame me for not knowing the score,’ I said. ‘I thought the job was above board. Matterson has a strange way of running his business.’
She picked up a drumstick and gnawed on it delicately. ‘Not strange – just crooked. Of course, it all depends on which Matterson you’re talking about. Bull Matterson is the crooked one; Howard is just plain sloppy.’
‘You mean he forgot to talk to you about it?’ I said unbelievingly.
‘Something like that.’ She pointed the drumstick at me. ‘What’s all this about bodies?’
I grinned. ‘Oh, I just wanted to talk to you. I knew that would bring you running.’
She stared at me. ‘Why should it?’
‘It did – didn’t it?’ I pointed out. ‘It’s a variation of the old story of the practical joker who sent a cable to a dozen of his friends: FLY – ALL IS DISCOVERED. Nine of them hastily left town. Everyone has a skeleton in some cupboard of their lives.’
‘You were just pining for company,’ she said sardonically.
‘Would I pass up the chance of dining with a beautiful woman in the backwoods?’
‘I don’t believe you,’ she said flatly. ‘You can cut out the flattery. For all you knew I might have been an old hag of ninety, unless, of course, you’d been asking questions around beforehand. Which you obviously have. What are you up to, Boyd?’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘How’s this for a starter? Did you ever get around to investigating that Trinavant-Matterson partnership agreement, together with the deal Matterson made with the trustees of the estate? It seems to me that particular business transaction could bear looking into. Why doesn’t someone do something about it?’
She stared at me wide-eyed. ‘Wow! If you’ve been asking questions like that around Fort Farrell you’re going to be in trouble as soon as old Bull finds out.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I understand he’d rather forget the Trinavants ever existed. But don’t worry; he won’t get to hear of it. My source of information is strictly private.’
‘I wasn’t worrying,’ she said coldly. ‘But perhaps you think you can handle the Mattersons the same way you handled Jimmy. I wouldn’t bank on it.’
‘I didn’t think you cared – and I was right,’ I said with a grin. ‘But why doesn’t someone investigate that smelly deal? You, for instance.’
‘Why should I?’ she said offhandedly. ‘It has nothing to do with me how much Bull Matterson gyps the trustees. Tangling with the Mattersons wouldn’t put money in my pocket.’
‘You mean you don’t care that John Trinavant’s intentions have been warped and twisted to put money in Matterson’s pocket?’ I asked softly.
I thought she was going to throw the platter at me. Her face whitened and pink spots appeared in her cheeks. ‘Damn you!’ she said hotly. Slowly she simmered down. ‘I did try once,’ she admitted. ‘And I got nowhere. Donner has the books of the Matterson Corporation in such a goddam tangle it would take a team of high-priced lawyers ten years to unsnarl everything. Even I couldn’t afford that and my attorney advised me not to try. Why are you so interested anyway?’
I watched her sop up gravy with a piece of bread; I like a girl with a healthy appetite. ‘I don’t know that I am interested. It’s just another point to wonder about. Like why does Matterson want to bury the Trinavants – permanently?’
‘You stick your neck out, you’ll get it chopped off,’ she warned. ‘Matterson doesn’t like questions like that.’ She put down her platter, stood up and went down to the stream to wash her hands. When she came back she was wiping them on a man-sized handkerchief.
I poured her a cup of coffee. ‘I’m not asking Matterson – I’m asking a Trinavant. Isn’t it something a Trinavant wonders about from time to time?’
‘Sure! And like everyone else we get no answers.’ She looked at me closely. ‘What are you after, Boyd? And who the hell are you?’
‘Just a beat-up freelance geologist. Doesn’t Matterson ever worry you?’
She sipped the hot coffee. ‘Not much. I spend very little time here. I come back for a few months every year to annoy him, that’s all.’
‘And you still don’t know what he has against the Trinavants?’
‘No.’
I looked into the fire and said pensively, ‘Someone was saying that he wished you’d get married. The implication was that there’d be no one around with the name of Trinavant any more.’
She flared hotly. ‘Has Howard been – ?’ Then she stopped and bit her lip.
‘Has Howard been … what?’
She rose to her feet and dusted herself down. ‘I don’t think I like you, Mr Boyd. You ask too many questions, and I get no answers. I don’t know who you are or what you want. If you want to tangle with Matterson that’s your affair; my disinterested advice would be “Don’t!” because he’ll chop you up into little pieces. Still, why should I care? But let me tell you one thing – don’t interfere with me.’
‘What would you do to me that Matterson wouldn’t?’
‘The name of Trinavant isn’t quite forgotten,’ she said. ‘I have some good friends.’
‘They’d better be better than Jimmy,’ I said caustically. Then I wondered why I was fighting with her; it didn’t make sense. I scrambled to my feet. ‘Look, I have no fight with you and I’ve no cause to interfere in your life, either. I’m a pretty harmless guy except when someone pokes a gun in my direction. I’ll just go back and report to Howard Matterson that you wouldn’t let me on your land. There’s no grief in it for me.’
‘You do that,’ she said. There was puzzlement in her voice as she added, ‘You’re a funny one, Boyd. You come here as a stranger and you dig up a ten-year-old mystery everyone has forgotten. Where did you get it from?’
‘I don’t think my informant would care to be named.’
‘I bet he wouldn’t,’ she said with contempt. ‘I thought everyone in Fort Farrell had developed a conveniently bad memory as well as a yellow streak.’
‘Maybe you have friends in Fort Farrell, too,’ I said softly.
She zipped up her mackinaw against the chill of the night air. ‘I’m not going to stick around here bandying mysteries with you, Boyd,’ she said. ‘Just remember one thing. Don’t come on my land – ever.’
She turned to go away, and I said, ‘Wait! There are ghosties and ghoulies and beasties, and things that go bump in the night; I wouldn’t want you to walk into a bear. I’ll escort you back to your camp.’
‘My God, a backwoods cavalier!’ she said in disgust, but she stayed around to watch me kick earth over the embers of the fire. While I checked my rifle she looked around at my gear, dimly illuminated in the moonlight. ‘You make a neat camp.’
‘Comes of experience,’ I said. ‘Shall we go?’ She fell into step beside me and, as we passed the marker, I said, ‘Thanks for letting me on your land, Miss Trinavant.’
‘I’m a sucker for sweet talk,’ she said, and pointed. ‘We go that way.’
III
Her ‘camp’ was quite a surprise. After we had walked for over half an hour up a slope that tested the calf muscles there came the unexpected dark loom of a building. The hunting beam of the flashlamp she produced disclosed walls of fieldstone and logs and the gleam of large windows. She pushed open an unlocked door, then said a little irritably, ‘Well, aren’t you coming in?’
The interior was even more of a surprise. It was warm with central heating and it was big. She flicked a switch and a small pool of light appeared, and the room was so large that it retreated away into shadows. One entire wall was windowed and there was a magnificent view down the valley. Away in the distance I could see the moonglow on the lake I had prospected around.
She flicked more switches and more lights came on, revealing the polished wooden floor carpeted with skins, the modern furniture, the wall brightly lined with books and a scattering of phonograph records on the floor grouped around a built-in hi-fi outfit as though someone had been interrupted.
This was a millionaire’s version of a log cabin. I looked about, probably with my mouth hanging open, then said, ‘If this were in the States, a guy could get to be President just by being born here.’
‘I don’t need any wisecracks,’ she said. ‘If you want a drink, help yourself; it’s over there. And you might do something about the fire; it isn’t really necessary but I like to see flames.’
She disappeared, closing a door behind her, and I laid down my rifle. There was a massive fieldstone chimney with a fireplace big enough to roast a moose in which a few red embers glowed faintly, so I replenished it from the pile of logs stacked handily and waited until the flames came and I was sure the fire had caught hold. Then I did a tour of the room, hoping she wouldn’t be back too soon. You can find out a lot about a person just by looking at a room as it’s lived in.
The books were an eclectic lot; many modern novels but very little of the avant-garde, way-out stuff; a solid wedge of English and French classics, a shelf of biographies and a sprinkling of histories, mostly of Canada and, what was surprising, a scad of books on archaeology, mostly Middle-Eastern. It looked as though Clare Trinavant had a mind of her own.
I left the books and drifted around the room, noting the odd pieces of pottery and statuary, most of which looked older than Methuselah; the animal photographs on the walls, mainly of Canadian animals, and the rack of rifles and shotguns in a glassed-in case. I peered at these curiously through the glass and saw that, although the guns appeared to be well kept, there was a film of dust on them. Then I looked at a photograph of a big brute of a brown bear and decided that, even with a telephoto lens, whoever had taken that shot had been too damn’ close.
She said from close behind me, ‘Looks a bit like you, don’t you think?’
I turned. ‘I’m not that big. He’d make six of me.’
She had changed her shirt and was wearing a well-cut pair of slacks that certainly hadn’t been bought off any shelf. She said, ‘I’ve just been in to see Jimmy. I think he’ll be all right.’
‘I didn’t hit him harder than necessary,’ I said. ‘Just enough to teach him manners.’ I waved my arm about the room. ‘Some shack!’
‘Boyd, you make me sick,’ she said coldly. ‘And you can get the hell out of here. You have a dirty mind if you think I’m shacked up with Jimmy Waystrand.’
‘Hey!’ I said. ‘You jump to an awful fast conclusion, Trinavant. All I meant was that this is a hell of a place you have here. I didn’t expect to find this in the woods, that’s all.’
Slowly the pink spots in her cheeks died away, and she said, ‘I’m sorry if I took you the wrong way. Maybe I’m a little jumpy right now, and if I am, you’re responsible, Boyd.’
‘No apology necessary, Trinavant.’
She began to giggle and it developed into a full-throated laugh. I joined in and we had an hysterical thirty seconds. At last she controlled herself. ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘That won’t do. You can’t call me Trinavant – you’d better make it Clare.’
‘I’m Bob,’ I said. ‘Hello, Clare.’
‘Hello, Bob.’
‘You know, I didn’t really mean to imply that Jimmy was anything to you,’ I said. ‘He isn’t man enough for you.’
She stopped smiling and, folding her arms, she regarded me for a long time. ‘Bob Boyd, I’ve never known another man who makes my hackles rise the way you do. If you think I judge a man by the way he behaves in a fight you’re dead wrong. The trouble with you is that you’ve got logopaedia – every time you open your mouth you put your foot in it. Now, for God’s sake, keep your mouth shut and get me a drink.’
I moved towards what looked like the drinks cabinet. ‘You shouldn’t steal your wisecracks from the Duke of Edinburgh,’ I said. ‘That’s verging on lèse majesté. What will you have?’
‘Scotch and water – fifty-fifty. You’ll find a good Scotch in there.’
Indeed it was a good Scotch! I lifted out the bottle of Islay Mist reverently and wondered how long ago it was since Hamish McDougall had seen Clare Trinavant. But I said nothing about that. Instead, I kept my big mouth shut as she had advised and poured the drinks.
As I handed her the glass she said, ‘How long have you been in the woods this trip?’
‘Nearly two weeks.’
‘How would you like a hot bath?’
‘Clare, for that you can have my soul,’ I said fervently. Lake water is damned cold and a man doesn’t bathe as often as he should when in the field.
She pointed. ‘Through that door – second door on the left. I’ve put towels out for you.’
I picked up my glass. ‘Mind if I take my drink?’
‘Not at all.’
The bathroom was a wonder to behold. Tiled in white and dark blue, you could have held a convention in there – if that was the kind of convention you had in mind. The bath was sunk into the floor and seemed as big as a swimming-pool, and the water poured steaming out of the faucet. And there was a plenitude of bath towels, each about an acre in extent.
As I lay soaking I thought about a number of things. I thought of the possible reason why Clare Trinavant should bring up the name of Howard Matterson when I brought up the subject of her marriage. I thought of the design of the labels of Scotch, especially on those from the island of Islay. I thought of the curve of Clare Trinavant’s neck as it rose from the collar of her shirt. I thought of a man I had never seen – Bull Matterson – and wondered what he was like in appearance. I thought of the tendril of hair behind Clare Trinavant’s ear.
None of these thoughts got me anywhere in particular, so I got out of the bath and finished the Scotch while I dried myself. As I dressed I became aware of music drifting through the cabin – some cabin! – which drowned out the distant throbbing of a diesel generator, and when I got back to Clare I found her sitting on the floor listening to the last movement of Sibelius’s First Symphony.
She waved me to the drinks cabinet and held up an empty glass, so I gave us both a refill and we sat quietly until the music came to an end. She shivered slightly and pointed to the moonlit view down the valley. ‘I always think the music is describing this.’
‘Finland has pretty much the same scenery as Canada,’ I said. ‘Woods and lakes.’
One eyebrow lifted. ‘Not only a backwoods cavalier, but an educated one.’
I grinned at her. ‘I’ve had a college education, too.’
She coloured a little and said quietly, ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It was bitchy, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s all right.’ I waved my hand. ‘What made you build here?’
‘As your mysterious informant has probably told you, I was brought up around here. Uncle John left me this land. I love it, so I built here.’ She paused. ‘And, since you’re so well informed, you probably know that he wasn’t really my uncle.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I have only one criticism. Your rifles and shotguns need cleaning more often.’
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Desmond Bagley
Action thriller by the classic adventure writer set in British Columbia.Bob Boyd is a geologist, as resilient as the British Columbia timber country where he works for the powerful Matterson Corporation. But his real name and his past are mysteries – wiped out by the accident that nearly killed him. Then Boyd reads a name that opens a door in his memory: Trinavant – and discovers that Bull Matterson and his son will do almost anything to keep the Trinavant family forgotten forever…
DESMOND BAGLEY
Landslide
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_772210ee-b175-588d-a1d1-df7087cd01f2)
HARPER
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Collins 1967
Copyright © Brockhurst Publications 1967
Desmond Bagley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008211165
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CONTENTS
Cover (#uab09ce4e-21ff-5c80-b340-6f1948e10b75)
Title Page (#u84abb8d5-b6df-5557-be85-289d2abd6fbf)
Copyright (#u4cd0578a-8183-578e-8f8f-f44ffd55db23)
Landslide (#ufe50269b-ed0d-5d79-b91b-951b36250367)
Dedication (#u76d1b682-0b76-502a-b847-18dcf806b890)
One (#u58e9f9f0-c6fb-5549-9456-67ce796af7d1)
Two (#u785590a0-4a6c-5064-9851-8d69e822c754)
Three (#u9917273f-16a4-572c-a5c5-d458ab2b74d1)
Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
LANDSLIDE (#ulink_ea627b7b-9ec6-585c-96a3-cd440e5ebdd9)
DEDICATION (#ulink_60c4cbfd-35d1-5121-9e85-76f9746e2fdd)
For Philip Joseph and all good booksellers
ONE (#ulink_4be85a4e-cb32-566c-b646-26371784d489)
I was tired when I got off the bus at Fort Farrell. No matter how soft the suspension of the bus and how comfortable the seat you still feel as though you’ve been sitting on a sack of rocks for a few hours, so I was tired and not very impressed by my first view of Fort Farrell – The Biggest Little City in the North-Eastern Interior – or so the sign said at the city limits. Someone must have forgotten Dawson Creek.
This was the end of the line for the bus and it didn’t stay long. I got off, nobody got on, and it turned and wheeled away back towards the Peace River and Fort St John, back towards civilization. The population of Fort Farrell had been increased by one – temporarily.
It was mid-afternoon and I had time to do the one bit of business that would decide if I stayed in this backwoods metropolis, so instead of looking for a hotel I checked my bag at the depot and asked where I could find the Matterson Building. The little fat guy who appeared to be the factotum around the depot looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and tittered. ‘You must be a stranger round here.’
‘Seeing I just got off the bus it may be possible,’ I conceded. I wanted to get information, not to give it.
He grunted and the twinkle disappeared. ‘It’s on King Street; you can’t miss it unless you’re blind,’ he said curtly. He was another of those cracker-barrel characters who think they’ve got the franchise on wisecracks – small towns are full of them. To hell with him! I was in no mood for making friends, although I would have to try to influence people pretty soon.
High Street was the main drag, running as straight as though it had been drawn by a rule. Not only was it the main street but it was practically the only street of Fort Farrell – pop. 1,806 plus one. There was the usual line of false-fronted buildings trying to look bigger than they were and holding the commercial enterprises by which the locals tried to make an honest dollar – the gas stations and auto dealers, a grocery that called itself a supermarket, a barber’s shop, ‘Paris Modes’ selling women’s fripperies, a store selling fishing tackle and hunting gear. I noticed that the name of Matterson came up with monotonous regularity and concluded that Matterson was a big pumpkin in Fort Farrell.
Ahead was surely the only real, honest-to-God building in the town: an eight-storeyed giant which, I was sure, must be the Matterson Building. Feeling hopeful for the first time, I quickened my pace, but slowed again as High Street widened into a small square, green with cropped lawns and shady with trees. In the middle of the square was a bronze statue of a man in uniform, which at first I thought was the war memorial; but it turned out to be the founding father of the city – one William J. Farrell, a lieutenant of the Royal Corps of Engineers. Pioneers, O Pioneers – the guy was long since dead and the sightless eyes of his effigy stared blindly down false-fronted High Street while the irreverent birds made messes in his uniform cap.
Then I stared unbelievingly at the name of the square while an icy shudder crawled down my spine. Trinavant Park stood on the intersection of High Street and Farrell Street and the name, dredged out from a forgotten past, hit me like a blow in the belly. I was still shaken when I reached the Matterson Building.
Howard Matterson was a hard man to see. I smoked three cigarettes in his outer office while I studied the pneumatic charms of his secretary and thought about the name of Trinavant. It was not so common a name that it cropped up in my life with any regularity; in fact, I had come across it only once before and in circumstances I preferred not to remember. You might say that a Trinavant had changed my life, but whether he had changed it for better or worse there was no means of knowing. Once again I debated the advisability of staying in Fort Farrell, but a thin wallet and an empty belly can put up a powerful argument so I decided to stick around and see what Matterson had to offer.
Suddenly and without warning Matterson’s secretary said, ‘Mr Matterson will see you now.’ There had been no telephone call or ring of bell and I smiled sourly. So he was one of those, was he? One of the guys who exercised his power by saying, ‘Keep Boyd waiting for half an hour, Miss So-and-so, then send him in,’ with the private thought – ’That’ll show the guy who is boss around here.’ But maybe I was misjudging him – maybe he really was busy.
He was a big, fleshy man with a florid face and, to my surprise, not any older than me – say, about thirty-three. Going by the extensive use of his name in Fort Farrell, I had expected an older man; a young man doesn’t usually have time to build an empire, even a small one. He was broad and beefy but tending to run to fat, judging by the heaviness of his jowls and the folds about his neck, yet big as he was I topped him by a couple of inches. I’m not exactly a midget.
He stood up behind his desk and extended his hand. ‘Glad to meet you, Mr Boyd. Don Halsbach has said a lot of nice things about you.’
So he ought, I thought; considering I found him a fortune. Then I was busy coping with Matterson’s knuckle-cracking grip. I mashed his fingers together hard to prove I was as big a he-man as he was and he grinned at me. ‘Okay, take a seat,’ he said, releasing my hand. ‘I’ll fill you in on the deal. It’s pretty routine.’
I sat down and accepted a cigarette from the box he pushed across the desk. ‘There’s just one thing,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t want to fool you, Mr Matterson. This hasn’t got to be a long job. I want to get clear of it by the spring thaw.’
He nodded. ‘I know. Don told me about that – he said you want to get back to the North-West Territories for the summer. Do you think you’ll make any money at that kind of geology?’
‘Other people have,’ I said. ‘There have been lots of good strikes made. I think there’s more metal in the ground up there than we dream of and all we have to do is to find it.’
He grinned at me. ‘We meaning you.’ Then he shook his head. ‘You’re in advance of your time, Boyd. The North-West isn’t ready for development yet. What’s the use of making a big strike in the middle of a wilderness when it would cost millions in development?’
I shrugged. ‘If the strike is big enough the money will be there.’
‘Maybe,’ Matterson said noncommittally. ‘Anyway, from what Don told me, you want a short-term job so you can get a grubstake together in order to go back. Is that it?’
‘Just about.’
‘All right, we’re your boys. This is the situation. The Matterson Corporation has a lot of faith in the potentialities of this section of British Columbia and we’re in development up to our necks. We run a lot of interlinked operations – logging-centred mostly – like pulp for paper, plywood, manufactured lumber and so on. We’re going to build a newsprint plant and we’re making extensions to our plywood plants. But there’s one thing we’re short of and that’s power – specifically electrical power.’
He leaned back in his chair. ‘Now we could run a pipeline to the natural gas fields around Dawson Creek, pipe in the gas and use it to fuel a power station, but it would cost a lot of money and we’d be paying for the gas for evermore. If we did that the gas suppliers would have a hammerlock on us and would want to muscle in with their surplus money to buy a slice of what we’ve got – and they’d be able to do it, too, because they’d control our power.’ He stared at me. ‘We don’t want to give away slices – we want the whole goddam pie – and this is how we do it.’
He waved at a map on the wall. ‘British Columbia is rich in water power but for the most part it’s undeveloped – we get 1,500,000 kilowatts out of a possible 22,000,000. Up here in the North-East there are a possible 5,000,000 kilowatts without a single generating set to make the juice. That’s a hell of a lot of power going to waste.’
I said, ‘They’re building the Portage Mountain Dam on the Peace River.’
Matterson snorted. ‘That’ll take years and we can’t wait for the Government to build a billion-dollar dam – we need the power now. So that is what we do. We’re going to build our own dam – not a big one but big enough for us and for any likely expansion in the foreseeable future. We have a site staked out and we have Government blessing. What we want you to do is to see we don’t make one of those mistakes for which we’ll kick ourselves afterwards. We don’t want to flood twenty square miles of valley only to find we’ve buried the richest copper strike in Canada under a hundred feet of water. This area has never been really checked over by a geologist and we want you to give it a thorough going-over before we build the dam. Can you do it?’
‘Seems easy enough from where I’m sitting,’ I said. ‘I’d like to see it on a map.’
Matterson gave a satisfied nod and picked up the telephone. ‘Bring in the maps of the Kinoxi area, Fred.’ He turned to me. ‘We’re not in the mining business but we’d hate to pass up a chance.’ He rubbed his chin reflectively. ‘I’ve been thinking for some time we ought to do a geological survey of our holdings – it could pay off. If you do a good job here you might be in line for the contract.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said coolly. I never liked to be tied down.
A man came in carrying a roll of maps. He looked more like a banker than J. P. Morgan – correctly dressed and natty in a conservative business suit. His face was thin and expressionless and his eyes were a cold, pale blue. Matterson said, ‘Thanks, Fred,’ as he took the maps. ‘This is Mr Boyd, the geologist we’re thinking of hiring. Fred Donner, one of our executives.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said. Donner nodded curtly and turned to Matterson who was unrolling the maps. ‘National Concrete want to talk turkey about a contract.’
‘Stall them,’ said Matterson. ‘We don’t sign a thing until Boyd has done his job.’ He looked up at me. ‘Here it is. The Kinoxi is a tributary of the Kwadacha which flows into the Finlay and so into the Peace River. Here, there’s an escarpment and the Kinoxi goes over in a series of rapids and riffles, and just behind the escarpment is a valley.’ His hand chopped down on the map. ‘We put the dam here to flood the valley and get a good and permanent head of water and we put the powerhouse at the bottom of the escarpment – that gives us a good fall. The survey teams tells us that the water will back up the valley for about ten miles, with an average width of two miles. That’ll be a new lake – Lake Matterson.’
‘That’s a lot of water,’ I observed.
‘It won’t be very deep,’ said Matterson. ‘So we figure we can get away with a low cost dam.’ He stabbed his finger down. ‘It’s up to you to tell us if we’re losing out on anything in those twenty square miles.’
I examined the map for a while, then said, ‘I can do that. Where exactly is this valley?’
‘About forty miles from here. We’ll be driving a road in when we begin to build the dam, but that won’t help you. It’s pretty isolated.’
‘Not so much as the North-West Territories,’ I said. ‘I’ll make out.’
‘I guess you will at that,’ said Matterson with a grin. ‘But it won’t be as bad as all that. We’ll fly you in and out in the Corporation helicopter.’
I was pleased about that; it would save me a bit of shoe-leather. I said, ‘I might want to sink some trial boreholes – depending on what I find. You can hire a drilling rig and I might want two of your men to do the donkey work.’
Donner said, ‘That’s going to an extreme length, isn’t it? I doubt if it’s justified. And I think your contract should specify that you do any necessary work yourself.’
I said evenly, ‘Mr Donner, I don’t get paid for drilling holes in the ground. I’m paid for using my brains in interpreting the cores that come out of those holes. Now, if you want me to do the whole job single-handed that’s all right with me, but it will take six times as long and you’ll be charged my rate for the job – and I don’t come cheap. I’m just trying to save you money.’
Matterson waved his hand. ‘Cut it out, Fred; it may never happen. You’ll only want to drill if you come across anything definite – isn’t that right, Boyd?’
‘That’s it.’
Donner looked down at Matterson with his cold eyes. ‘Another thing,’ he said. ‘You’d better not have Boyd survey the northern end. It’s not …’
‘I know what it’s not, Fred,’ cut in Matterson irritably. ‘I’ll get Clare straightened out on that.’
‘You’d better,’ said Donner. ‘Or the whole scheme might collapse.’
That exchange meant nothing to me but it was enough to give me the definite idea that these two were having a private fight and I’d better not get in the way. That wanted clearing up, so I butted in and said, ‘I’d like to know who my boss is on this survey. Who do I take my orders from – you, Mr Matterson? Or Mr Donner here?’
Matterson stared at me. ‘You take them from me,’ he said flatly. ‘My name is Matterson and this is the Matterson Corporation.’ He flicked his gaze up at Donner as though defying him to make an issue of it, but Donner backed down after a long moment by giving a sharp nod.
‘Just as long as I know,’ I said easily.
Afterwards we got down to dickering about the terms of my contract. Donner was a penny-pincher and, as he had made me mad by trying to skinflint on the possible boring operations, I set my price higher than I would have done normally. Although it seemed to be a straightforward job and I did need the money, there were undercurrents that I didn’t like. There was also the name of Trinavant that had come up, although that seemed to have no particular relevance. But the terms I finally screwed out of Donner were so good that I knew I would have to take the job – the money would set me up in business for a year in the North-West.
Matterson was no help to Donner. He just sat on the sidelines and grinned while I gouged him. It was certainly a hell of a way to run a corporation! After the business details had been settled Matterson said, ‘I’ll reserve a room for you at the Matterson House. It doesn’t compare with the Hilton, but I think you’ll be comfortable enough. When can you start on the job?’
‘As soon as I get my equipment from Edmonton.’
‘Fly it in,’ said Matterson. ‘We’ll pay the freight.’
Donner snorted and walked out of the room like a man who knows when he isn’t wanted.
II
The Matterson House Hotel proved to be incorporated into the Matterson Building so I hadn’t far to go when I left Matterson’s office. I also noticed a string of company offices all bearing the name of Matterson and there was the Matterson Bank on the corner of the block. It seemed that Fort Farrell was a real old-fashioned company town, and when Matterson built his dam there would be the Matterson Power Company to add to his list. He was getting a real stranglehold on this neck of the woods.
I arranged with the desk clerk to have my bag brought up from the bus depot, then said, ‘Do you have a newspaper here?’
‘Comes out Friday.’
‘Where’s the office?’
‘Trinavant Park – north side.’
I walked out into the fading afternoon light and back down High Street until I came to the square. Lieutenant Farrell was staring sightlessly into the low sun which illuminated his verdigris-green face blotched with white where the birds had made free with him. I wondered what he would have thought if he knew how his settlement had turned out. Judging by the expression on his face he did know – and he didn’t think much of it.
The office of the Fort Farrell Recorder seemed to be more concerned with jobbing printing than with the production of a newspaper, but my first question was answered satisfactorily by the young girl who was the whole of the staff – at least, all of it that was in sight.
‘Sure we keep back copies. How far do you want to go back?’
‘About ten years.’
She grimaced. ‘You’ll want the bound copies, then. You’ll have to come into the back office.’ I followed her into a dusty room. ‘What was the exact date?’
I had no trouble in remembering that – everyone knows his own birthday. ‘Tuesday, September 4th, 1956.’
She looked up at a shelf and said helplessly, ‘That’s the one up there. I don’t think I can reach it.’
‘Allow me,’ I said, and reached for it. It was a volume the size and weight of a dozen Bibles and it gave me a lot less trouble than it would have given her! I supposed it weighed pretty near as much as she did.
She said, ‘You’ll have to read it in here; and you mustn’t cut the pages – that’s our record copy.’
‘I won’t,’ I promised, and put it on a deal table. ‘Can I have a light, please?’
‘Sure.’ She switched on the light as she went out.
I pulled up a chair and opened the heavy cover of the book. It contained two years’ issues of the Fort Farrell Recorder – one hundred and four reports on the health and sickness of a community; a record of births and deaths, joys and sorrows, much crime and yet not a lot, all things considered, and a little goodness – there should have been more but goodness doesn’t make the headlines. A typical country newspaper.
I turned to the issue of September 7th – the week-end after the accident – half afraid of what I would find, half afraid I wouldn’t find anything. But it was there and it had made the front page headlines, too. It screamed at me in heavy black letters splashed across the yellowing sheet: JOHN TRINAVANT DIES IN AUTO SMASH.
Although I knew the story by heart, I read the newspaper account with care and it did tell me a couple of things I hadn’t known before. It was a simple story, regrettably not uncommon, but one which did not normally make headlines as it had done here. As I remembered, it rated a quarter-column at the bottom of the second page of the Vancouver Sun and a paragraph filler in Toronto.
The difference was that John Trinavant had been a power in Fort Farrell as being senior partner in the firm of Trinavant and Matterson. God the Father had suddenly died and Fort Farrell had mourned. Mourned publicly and profusely in black print on white paper.
John Trinavant (aged 56) had been travelling from Dawson Creek to Edmonton with his wife, Anne (no age given), and his son, Frank (aged 22). They had been travelling in Mr Trinavant’s new car, a Cadillac, but the shiny new toy had never reached Edmonton. Instead, it had been found at the bottom of a two-hundred-foot cliff not far off the road. Skid marks and slashes in the bark of trees had shown how the accident happened. ‘Perhaps,’ said the coroner, ‘it may be that the car was moving too fast for the driver to be in proper control. That, however, is something no one will know for certain.’
The Cadillac was a burnt-out hulk, smashed beyond repair. Smashed beyond repair were also the three Trinavants, all found dead. A curious aspect of the accident, however, was the presence of a fourth passenger, a young man now identified as Robert Grant, who had been found alive, but only just so, and who was now in the City Hospital suffering from third-degree burns, a badly fractured skull and several other assorted broken bones. Mr Grant, it was tentatively agreed, must have been a hitchhiker whom Mr Trinavant, in his benevolence, had picked up somewhere on the way between Dawson Creek and the scene of the accident. Mr Grant was not expected to live. Too bad for Mr Grant.
All Fort Farrell and, indeed, all Canada (said the leader writer) should mourn the era which had ended with the passing of John Trinavant. The Trinavants had been connected with the city since the heroic days of Lieutenant Farrell and it was a grief (to the leader writer personally) that the name of Trinavant was now extinguished in the male line. There was, however, a niece, Miss C. T. Trinavant, at present at school in Lausanne, Switzerland. It was to be hoped that this tragedy, the death of her beloved uncle, would not be permitted to interrupt the education he had so earnestly desired to give her.
I sat back and looked at the paper before me. So Trinavant had been a partner of Matterson – but not the Matterson I had met that day because he was too young. At the time of the smash he would have been in his early twenties – say about the age of young Frank Trinavant who was killed, or about my age at that time. So there must be another Matterson – Howard Matterson’s father, presumably – which made Howard the Crown Prince of the Matterson empire. Unless, of course, he had already succeeded.
I sighed as I wondered what devil of coincidence had brought me to Fort Farrell; then I turned to the next issue and found – nothing! There was no follow on to the story in that issue or the next. I searched further and found that for the next year the name of Trinavant was not mentioned once – no follow-up, no obituary, no reminiscences from readers – nothing at all. As far as the Fort Farrell Recorder was concerned, it was as though John Trinavant had never existed – he had been unpersonned.
I checked again. It was very odd that in Trinavant’s home town – the town where he was virtually king – the local newspaper had not coined a few extra cents out of his death. That was a hell of a way to run a newspaper!
I paused. That was the second time in one day that I had made the same observation – the first time in relation to Howard Matterson and the way he ran the Matterson Corporation. I wondered about that and that led me to something else – who owned the Fort Farrell Recorder?
The little office girl popped her head round the door. ‘You’ll have to go now; we’re closing up.’
I grinned at her. ‘I thought newspaper offices never closed.’
‘This isn’t the Vancouver Sun,’ she said. ‘Or the Montreal Star.’
It sure as hell isn’t, I thought.
‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ she asked.
I followed her into the front office. ‘I found some answers, yes; and a lot of questions.’ She looked at me uncomprehendingly. I said, ‘Is there anywhere a man can get a cup of coffee round here?’
‘There’s the Greek place right across the square.’
‘What about joining me?’ I thought that maybe I could get some answers out of her.
She smiled. ‘My mother told me not to go out with strange men. Besides, I’m meeting my boy.’
I looked at all the alive eighteen years of her and wished I were young again – as before the accident. ‘Some other time, perhaps,’ I said.
‘Perhaps.’
I left her inexpertly dabbing powder on her nose and headed across the square with the thought that I’d get picked up for kidnapping if I wasn’t careful. I don’t know why it is, but in any place that can support a cheap eatery – and a lot that can’t – you’ll find a Greek running the local coffee-and-doughnut joint. He expands with the community and brings in his cousins from the old country and pretty soon, in an average-size town, the Greeks are running the catering racket, splitting it with the Italians who tend to operate on a more sophisticated level. This wasn’t the first Greek place I’d eaten in and it certainly wouldn’t be the last – not while I was a poverty-stricken geologist chancing his luck.
I ordered coffee and pie and took it over to a vacant table intending to settle down to do some hard thinking, but I didn’t get much chance of that because someone came up to the table and said, ‘Mind if I join you?’
He was old, maybe as much as seventy, with a walnut-brown face and a scrawny neck where age had dried the juices out of him. His hair, though white, was plentiful and inquisitive blue eyes peered from beneath shaggy brows. I regarded him speculatively for a long time, and at last he said, ‘I’m McDougall – chief reporter for the local scandal sheet.’
I waved him to a chair. ‘Be my guest.’
He put down the cup of coffee he was holding and grunted softly as he sat down. ‘I’m also the chief compositor,’ he said. ‘And the only copy-boy. I’m the rewrite man, too. The whole works.’
‘Editor, too?’
He snorted derisively. ‘Do I look like a newspaper editor?’
‘Not much.’
He sipped his coffee and looked at me from beneath the tangle of his brows. ‘Did you find what you were looking for, Mr Boyd?’
‘You’re well-informed,’ I commented. ‘I’ve not been in town two hours and already I can see I’m going to be reported in the Recorder. How do you do it?’
He smiled. ‘This is a small town and I know every man, woman and child in it. I’ve just come from the Matterson Building and I know all about you, Mr Boyd.’
This McDougall looked like a sharp old devil. I said, ‘I’ll bet you know the terms of my contract, too.’
‘I might.’ He grinned at me and his face took on the look of a mischievous small boy. ‘Donner wasn’t too pleased.’ He put down his cup. ‘Did you find out what you wanted to know about John Trinavant?’
I stubbed out my cigarette. ‘You have a funny way of running a newspaper, Mr McDougall. I’ve never seen such a silence in print in my life.’
The smile left his face and he looked exactly what he was – a tired old man. He was silent for a moment, then he said unexpectedly, ‘Do you like good whisky, Mr Boyd?’
‘I’ve never been known to refuse.’
He jerked his head in the direction of the newspaper office. ‘I have an apartment over the shop and a bottle in the apartment. Will you join me? I suddenly feel like getting drunk.’
For an answer I rose from the table and paid the tab for both of us. While walking across the park McDougall said, ‘I get the apartment free. In return I’m on call twenty-four hours a day. I don’t know who gets the better of the bargain.’
‘Maybe you ought to negotiate a new deal with your editor.’
‘With Jimson? That’s a laugh – he’s just a rubber stamp used by the owner.’
‘And the owner is Matterson,’ I said, risking a shaft at random.
McDougall looked at me out of the corner of his eye. ‘So you’ve got that far, have you? You interest me, Mr Boyd; you really do.’
‘You are beginning to interest me,’ I said.
We climbed the stairs to his apartment, which was sparsely but comfortably furnished. McDougall opened a cupboard and produced a bottle. ‘There are two sorts of Scotch,’ he said. ‘There’s the kind which is produced by the million gallons: a straight-run neutral grain spirit blended with good malt whisky to give it flavour, burnt caramel added to give it colour, and kept for seven years to protect the sacred name of Scotch whisky.’ He held up the bottle. ‘And then there’s the real stuff – fifteen-year-old unblended malt lovingly made and lovingly drunk. This is from Islay – the best there is.’
He poured two hefty snorts of the light straw-coloured liquid and passed one to me. I said, ‘Here’s to you, Mr McDougall. What brand of McDougall are you, anyway?’
I would swear he blushed. ‘I’ve a good Scots name and you’d think that would be enough for any man, but my father had to compound it and call me Hamish. You’d better call me Mac like everyone else and that way we’ll avoid a fight.’ He chuckled. ‘Lord, the fights I got into when I was a kid.’
I said, ‘I’m Bob Boyd.’
He nodded. ‘And what interests you in the Trinavants?’
‘Am I interested in them?’
He sighed. ‘Bob, I’m an old-time newspaperman so give me credit for knowing how to do my job. I do a run-down on everyone who checks the back files; you’d be surprised how often it pays off in a story. I’ve been waiting for someone to consult that particular issue for ten years.’
‘Why should the Recorder be interested in the Trinavants now?’ I asked. ‘The Trinivants are dead and the Recorder killed them deader. You wouldn’t think it possible to assassinate a memory, would you?’
‘The Russians are good at it; they can kill a man and still leave him alive – the walking dead,’ said McDougall. ‘Look at what they did to Khrushchev. It’s just that Matterson hit on the idea, too.’
‘You haven’t answered my question,’ I said tartly. ‘Quit fencing around, Mac.’
‘The Recorder isn’t interested in the Trinavants,’ he said. ‘If I put in a story about any of them – if I even mentioned the name – I’d be out on my can. This is a personal interest, and if Bull Matterson knew I was even talking about the Trinavants I’d be in big trouble.’ He stabbed his finger at me. ‘So keep your mouth shut, you understand.’ He poured out another drink and I could see his hand shaking. ‘Now, what’s your story?’
I said, ‘Mac, until you tell me more about the Trinavants I’m not going to tell you anything. And don’t ask me why because you won’t get an answer.’
He looked at me thoughtfully for a long time, then said, ‘But you’ll tell me eventually?’
‘I might.’
That stuck in his gullet but he swallowed it. ‘All right; it looks as though I’ve no option. I’ll tell you about the Trinavants.’ He pushed the bottle across. ‘Fill up, son.’
The Trinavants were an old Canadian family founded by a Jacques Trinavant who came from Brittany to settle in Quebec back in the seventeen-hundreds. But the Trinavants were not natural settlers nor were they merchants – not in those days. Their feet were itchy and they headed west. John Trinavant’s great-great-grandfather was a voyageur of note; other Trinavants were trappers and there was an unsubstantiated story that a Trinavant crossed the continent and saw the Pacific before Alexander Mackenzie.
John Trinavant’s grandfather was a scout for Lieutenant Farrell, and when Farrell built the fort he decided to stay and put down roots in British Columbia. It was good country, he liked the look of it and saw the great possibilities. But just because the Trinavants ceased to be on the move did not mean they had lost their steam. Three generations of Trinavants in Fort Farrell built a logging and lumber empire, small but sound.
‘It was John Trinavant who really made it go,’ said McDougall. ‘He was a man of the twentieth century – born in 1900 – and he took over the business young. He was only twenty-three when his father died. British Columbia in those days was pretty undeveloped still, and it’s men like John Trinavant who have made it what it is today.’
He looked at his glass reflectively. ‘I suppose that, from a purely business point of view, one of the best things that Trinavant ever did was to join up with Bull Matterson.’
‘That’s the second time you’ve mentioned him,’ I said. ‘He can’t be the man I met at the Matterson Building.’
‘Hell, no; that’s Howard – he’s just a punk kid,’ said McDougall contemptuously. ‘I’m talking about the old man – Howard’s father. He was a few years older than Trinavant and they hooked on to each other in 1925. John Trinavant had the brains and directed the policy of the combination while Matterson supplied the energy and drive, and things really started to hum around here. One or the other of them had a finger in every goddam pie; they consolidated the logging industry and they were the first to see that raw logs are no damn’ use unless you can do something with them, preferably on the spot. They built pulping plants and plywood plants and they made a lot of money, especially during the war. By the end of the war the folks around here used to get a lot of fun out of sitting around of an evening just trying to figure out how much Trinavant and Matterson were worth.’
He leaned over and took the bottle. ‘Of course, it wasn’t all logging – they diversified early. They owned gas stations, ran a bus service until they sold out to Greyhound, owned grocery stores and dry goods stores – everyone in this area paid them tribute in one way or another.’ He paused, then said broodingly, ‘I don’t know if that’s a good thing for a community. I don’t like paternalism, even with the best intentions. But that’s the way it worked out.’
I said, ‘They also owned a newspaper.’
McDougall’s face took on a wry look. ‘It’s the only one of Matterson’s operations that doesn’t give him a cash return. It doesn’t pay. This town isn’t really big enough to support a newspaper, but John Trinavant started it as a public service, as a sideline to the print shop. He said the townsfolk had a right to know what was going on, and he never interfered with editorial policy. Matterson runs it for a different reason.’
‘What’s that?’
‘To control public opinion. He daren’t close it down because Fort Farrell is growing and someone else might start an honest newspaper which he doesn’t control. As long as he holds on to the Recorder he’s safe because as sure as hell there’s not room for two newspapers.’
I nodded. ‘So Trinavant and Matterson each made a fortune. What then?’
‘Then nothing,’ said McDougall. ‘Trinavant was killed and Matterson took over the whole shooting-match – lock, stock and barrel. You see, there weren’t any Trinavants left.’
I thought about that. ‘Wasn’t there one left? The editorial in the Recorder mentioned a Miss Trinavant, a niece of John.’
‘You mean Clare,’ said McDougall. ‘She wasn’t really a niece, just a vague connection from the East. The Trinavants were a strong stock a couple of hundred years ago but the Eastern branch withered on the vine. As far as I know Clare Trinavant is the last Trinavant in Canada. John came across her by accident when he was on a trip to Montreal. She was an orphan. He reckoned she must be related to the family somehow, so he took her in and treated her like his own daughter.’
‘Then she wasn’t his heir?’
McDougall shook his head. ‘Not his natural heir. He didn’t adopt her legally and it seems there’s never been any way to prove the family connection, so she lost out as far as that goes.’
‘Then who did get Trinavant’s money? And how did Matterson grab Trinavant’s share of the business?’
McDougall gave me a twisted grin. ‘The answers to those two questions are interlocked. John’s will established a trust fund for his wife and son, the whole of the capital to revert to young Frank at the age of thirty. All the proper safeguards were built in and it was a good will. Of course, provision had to be made in case John outlived everybody concerned and in that case the proceeds of the trust were to be devoted to the establishment of a department of lumber technology at a Canadian university.’
‘Was that done?’
‘It was. The trust is doing good work – but not as well as it might, and for the answer to that one you have to go back to 1929. It was then that Trinavant and Matterson realized they were in the empire-building business. Neither of them wanted the death of the other to put a stop to it, so they drew up an agreement that on the death of either of them the survivor would have the option of buying the other’s share at book value. And that’s what Matterson did.’
‘So the trust was left with Trinavant’s holdings but the trustees were legally obliged to sell to Matterson if he chose to exercise his option. I don’t see much wrong with that.’
McDougall clicked his tongue in annoyance. ‘Don’t be naïve, Boyd.’ He ticked off points on his fingers. ‘The option was to be exercised at book value and by the time Donner had finished juggling the books my guess is that the book value had slumped in some weird way. That’s one angle. Secondly, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees is William Justus Sloane, and W.J. practically lives in Bull Matterson’s pocket these days. The Board of Trustees promptly reinvested what little they got from Matterson right back into the newly organized Matterson Corporation, and if anyone controls that dough now it’s old Bull. Thirdly, it took the Board of Trustees an awful long time to get off its collective fanny to do anything about ratifying the terms of the trust. It took no less than four years to get that Department of Lumber Technology going, and it was a pretty half-hearted effort at that. From what I hear the department is awfully short of funds. Fourthly, the terms of the sale of Trinavant’s holdings to Bull were never made public. I reckon he should have cut up for something between seven and ten million dollars but the Board of Trustees only invested two million in the Matterson Corporation and in non-voting stock, by God, which was just ducky for Bull Matterson. Fifthly … aaah … what am I wasting my time for?’
‘So you reckon Bull Matterson practically stole the Trinavant money.’
‘There’s no practically about it,’ McDougall snapped.
‘Bad luck for Miss Clare,’ I said.
‘Oh, she did all right. There was a special codicil in the will that took care of her. John left her half a million dollars and a big slice of land. That’s something Bull hasn’t been able to get his hooks on – not that he hasn’t tried.’
I thought of the tone of the leader in which the recommendation had been made that Miss Trinavant’s education should not be interrupted. ‘How old was she when Trinavant was killed?’
‘She was a kid of seventeen. Old John had sent her to Switzerland to complete her education.’
‘And who wrote the leader on September 7th, 1956?’
McDougall smiled tightly. ‘So you caught that? You’re a smart boy, after all. The leader was written by Jimson but I bet Matterson dictated it. It’s a debatable point whether or not that option agreement could have been broken, especially since Clare wasn’t legally of John’s family, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He flew out to Switzerland himself and persuaded her to stay, and he put that leader under her nose as an indication that the people of Fort Farrell thought likewise. She knew the Recorder was an honest newspaper; what she didn’t know was that Matterson corrupted it the week Trinavant died. She was a girl of seventeen who knew nothing about business.’
‘So who looked after her half million bucks until she came of age?’
‘The Public Trustee,’ said McDougall. ‘It’s pretty automatic in cases like hers. Bull tried to horn in on it, of course, but he never got anywhere.’
I went over the whole unsavoury story in my mind, then shook my head. ‘What I don’t understand is why Matterson clamped down on the name of Trinavant. What did he have to hide?’
‘I don’t know,’ confessed McDougall. ‘I was hoping that the man who consulted that issue of the Recorder after ten years would be able to tell me. But from that day to this the name of Trinavant has been blotted out in this town. The Trinavant Bank was renamed the Matterson Bank, and every company that held the name was rebaptized. He even tried to change the name of Trinavant Square but he couldn’t get it past Mrs Davenant – she’s the old battle-axe who runs the Fort Farrell Historical Society.’
I said, ‘Yes, if it hadn’t been for that I wouldn’t have known this was Trinavant’s town.’
‘Would it have made any difference?’ When I made no answer McDougall said, ‘He couldn’t rename Clare Trinavant either. It’s my guess he’s been praying to God she gets married. She lives in the district, you know – and she hates his guts.’
‘So the old man’s still alive.’
‘He sure is. Must be seventy-five now, and he wears his age well – he’s still full of piss and vinegar, but he always was a rumbustious old stallion. John Trinavant was the brake on him, but when John went then old Bull really broke loose. He organized the Matterson Corporation as a holding company and really went to town on money-making, and he wasn’t particular how he made it – he still isn’t, for that matter. And the amount of forest land he owns …’
I broke in. ‘I thought all forest land was Crown land.’
‘In British Columbia ninety-five per cent is Crown land, but five per cent – say, seven million acres – is under private ownership. Bull owns no less than one million acres, and he has felling franchises on another two million acres of Crown land. He cuts sixty million cubic feet of lumber a year. He’s always on the edge of getting into trouble because of over-cutting – the Government doesn’t like that – but he’s always weaselled his way out. Now he’s starting his own hydroelectric plant, and when he has that he’ll really have this part of the country by the throat.’
I said, ‘Young Matterson told me the hydro plant was to supply power to the Matterson Corporation’s own operations.’
McDougall’s lip quirked satirically. ‘And what do you think Fort Farrell is but a Matterson operation? We have a two-bit generating plant here that’s never up to voltage and always breaking down, so now the Matterson Electricity Company moves in. And Matterson operations have a way of spreading wider. I believe old Bull has a vision of the Matterson Corporation controlling a slice of British Columbia from Fort St John to Kispiox, from Prince George clear to the Yukon – a private kingdom to run as he likes.’
‘Where does Donner come into all this?’ I asked curiously.
‘He’s a money man – an accountant. He thinks in nothing but dollars and cents and he’ll squeeze a dollar until it cries uncle. Now there’s a really ruthless, conniving bastard for you. He figures out the schemes and Bull Matterson makes them work. But Bull has put himself upstairs as Chairman of the Board – he leaves the day-to-day running of things to young Howard – and Donner is now riding herd on Howard to prevent him running hogwild.’
‘He’s not doing too good a job,’ I said, and told him of the episode in Howard’s office.
McDougall snorted. ‘Donner can handle that young punk with one hand tied behind his back. He’ll give way on things that don’t matter much, but on anything important Howard definitely comes last. Young Howard puts up a good front and may look like a man, but he’s soft inside. He’s not a tenth of the man his father is.’
I sat and digested all that for a long time, and finally said, ‘All right, Mac; you said you had a personal interest in all this. What is it?’
He stared me straight in the eye and said, ‘It may come as a surprise to you to find that even newspapermen have a sense of honour. John Trinavant was my friend; he used to come up here quite often and drink my whisky and have a yarn. I was sick to my stomach at what the Recorder did to him and his family when they died, but I stood by and let it happen. Jimson is an incompetent fool and I could have put such a story on the front page of this newspaper that John Trinavant would never have been forgotten in Fort Farrell. But I didn’t, and you know why? Because I was a coward; because I was scared of Bull Matterson; because I was frightened of losing my job.’
His voice broke a little. ‘Son, when John Trinavant was killed I was rising sixty, already an elderly man. I’ve always been a free-spender and I had no money, and it’s always been in my mind that I come from a long-lived family. I reckoned I had many years ahead of me, but what can an old man of sixty do when he loses his job?’ His voice strengthened. ‘Now I’m seventy-one and still working for Matterson. I do a good job for him – that’s why he keeps me on here. It’s not charity because Matterson doesn’t even know the meaning of the word. But in the last ten years I’ve saved a bit and now that I don’t have so many years ahead of me I’d like to do something for my friend, John Trinavant. I’m not running scared any more.’
I said, ‘What would you propose to do?’
He took a deep breath. ‘You can tell me. A man doesn’t walk in off the street and read a ten-year-old issue of a newspaper without a reason. I want to know that reason.’
‘No, Mac,’ I said. ‘Not yet. I don’t know if I have a reason or not. I don’t know if I have a right to interfere. I came to Fort Farrell purely by chance and I don’t know if this is any of my business.’
He puffed out his cheeks and blew out his breath explosively. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘I just don’t get it.’ He wore a baffled look. ‘Are you telling me that you read that ten-year-old issue just for kicks – or just because you like browsing through crummy country newspapers? Maybe you wanted to check which good housewife won the pumpkin pie baking competition that week. Is that it?’
‘No dice, Mac,’ I said. ‘You won’t get it out of me until I’m ready, and I’m a long way off yet.’
‘All right,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ve told you a lot – enough to get my head chopped off if Matterson hears about it. I’ve put my neck right on the block.’
‘You’re safe with me, Mac.’
He grunted. ‘I sure as hell hope so. I’d hate to be fired now with no good coming of it.’ He got up and took a file from a shelf. ‘I might as well give you a bit more. It struck me that if Matterson wanted to erase the name of Trinavant the reason might be connected with the way Trinavant died.’ He took a photograph from the file and passed it to me. ‘Know who that is?’
I looked at the fresh young face and nodded. I had seen a copy of the same photograph before but I didn’t tell McDougall. ‘Yes, it’s Robert Grant.’ I laid it on the table.
‘The fourth passenger in the car,’ said McDougall, tapping the photograph with his fingernail. ‘That young man lived. Nobody expected him to live, but he did. Six months after Trinavant died I had a vacation coming, so I used it to do some quiet checking out of reach of old Bull. I went over to Edmonton and visited the hospital. Robert Grant had been transferred to Quebec; he was in a private clinic and he was incommunicado. From then on I lost track of him – and it’s a hard task to hide from an old newspaperman with a bee in his bonnet. I sent copies of this photograph to a few of my friends – newspapermen scattered all over Canada – and not a thing has come up in ten years. Robert Grant has disappeared off the face of the earth.’
‘So?’
‘Son, have you seen this man?’
I looked down at the photograph again. Grant looked to be only a boy, barely in his twenties and with a fine full life ahead of him. I said slowly, ‘To my best knowledge I’ve never seen that face.’
‘Well, it was a try,’ said McDougall. ‘I had thought you might be a friend of his come to see how the land lies.’
‘I’m sorry, Mac,’ I said. ‘I’ve never met this man. But why would he want to come here, anyway? Isn’t Grant an irrelevancy?’
‘Maybe,’ said McDougall thoughtfully. ‘And maybe not. I just wanted to talk to him, that’s all.’ He shrugged. ‘Let’s have another drink, for God’s sake!’
That night I had the Dream. It was at least five years since I had had it last and, as usual, it frightened hell out of me. There was a mountain covered with snow and with jagged black rocks sticking out of the snow like snaggle teeth. I wasn’t climbing the mountain or descending – I was merely standing there as though rooted. When I tried to move my feet it was as though the snow was sticky like an adhesive and I felt like a fly trapped on flypaper.
The snow was falling all the time; drifts were building up and presently the snow was knee-high and then at midthigh. I knew that if I didn’t move I would be buried so I struggled again and bent down and pushed at the snow with my bare hands.
It was then that I found that the snow was not cold, but red hot in temperature, even though it was perfectly white in my dreams. I cried in agony and jerked my hands away and waited helplessly as the snow imperceptibly built up around my body. It touched my hands and then my face and I screamed as the hot, hot snow closed about me burning, burning, burning …
I woke up covered in sweat in that anonymous hotel room and wished I could have a jolt of Mac’s fine Islay whisky.
TWO (#ulink_b518ba02-9a76-58a9-9ea3-30d6ef026f12)
The first thing I can ever remember in my life is pain. It is not given to many men to experience their birth-pangs and I don’t recommend it. Not that any commendation of mine, for or against, can have any effect – none of us chooses to be born and the manner of our birth is beyond our control.
I felt the pain as a deep-seated agony all over my body. It became worse as time passed by, a red-hot fire consuming me. I fought against it with all my heart and seemed to prevail, though they tell me that the damping of the pain was due to the use of drugs. The pain went away and I became unconscious.
At the time of my birth I was twenty-three years old, or so I am reliably informed.
I am also told that I spent the next few weeks in a coma, hovering on that thin marginal line between life and death. I am inclined to think of this as a mercy because if I had been conscious enough to undergo the pain I doubt if I would have lived and my life would indeed have been short.
When I recovered consciousness again the pain, though still crouched in my body, had eased considerably and I found it bearable. Less bearable was the predicament in which I found myself. I was spreadeagled – tied by ankles and wrists – lying on my back and apparently immersed in liquid. I had very little to go on because when I tried to open my eyes I found that I couldn’t. There was a tightness about my face and I became very much afraid and began to struggle.
A voice said urgently, ‘You must be quiet. You must not move. You must not move.’
It was a good voice, soft and kind, so I relaxed and descended into that merciful coma again.
A number of weeks passed during which time I was conscious more frequently. I don’t remember much of this period except that the pain became less obtrusive and I became stronger. They began to feed me through a tube pushed between my lips, and I sucked in the soups and the fruit juices and became even stronger. Three times I was aware that I had been taken to an operating theatre; I learned this not from my own knowledge but by listening to the chatter of nurses. But for the most part I was in a happy state of thoughtlessness. It never occurred to me to wonder what I was doing there or how I had got there, any more than a newborn baby in a cot thinks of those things. As a baby, I was content to let things go their own way so long as I was comfortable and comforted.
The time came when they cut the bandage from my face and eyes. A voice, a man’s voice I had heard before, said, ‘Now, take it easy. Keep your eyes closed until I tell you to open them.’
Obediently I closed my eyes tightly and heard the snip of the scissors as they clipped through the gauze. Fingers touched my eyelids and there was a whispered, ‘Seems to be all right.’ Someone was breathing into my face. The voice said, ‘All right; you can open them now.’
I opened my eyes to a darkened room. In front of me was the dim outline of a man. He said, ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’
A white object swam into vision. I said, ‘Two.’
‘And how many now?’
‘Four.’
He gave a long, gusty sigh. ‘It looks as though you are going to have unimpaired vision after all. You’re a very lucky young man, Mr Grant.’
‘Grant?’
The man paused. ‘Your name is Grant, isn’t it?’
I thought about it for a long time and the man assumed I wasn’t going to answer him. He said, ‘Come now; if you are not Grant, then who are you?’
It is then they tell me that I screamed and they had to administer more drugs. I don’t remember screaming. All I remember is the awful blank feeling when I realized that I didn’t know who I was.
I have given the story of my rebirth in some detail. It is really astonishing that I lived those many weeks, conscious for a large part of the time, without ever worrying about my personal identity. But all that was explained afterwards by Susskind.
Dr Matthews, the skin specialist, was one of the team which was cobbling me together, and he was the first to realize that there was something more wrong with me than mere physical disability, so Susskind was added to the team. I never called him anything other than Susskind – that’s how he introduced himself – and he was never anything else than a good friend. I guess that’s what makes a good psychiatrist. When I was on my feet and moving around outside hospitals we used to go out and drink beer together. I don’t know if that’s a normal form of psychiatric treatment – I thought head-shrinkers stuck pretty firmly to the little padded seat at the head of the couch – but Susskind had his own ways and he turned out to be a good friend.
He came into the darkened room and looked at me. ‘I’m Susskind,’ he said abruptly. He looked about the room. ‘Dr Matthews says you can have more light. I think it’s a good idea.’ He walked to the window and drew the curtains. ‘Darkness is bad for the soul.’
He came back to the bed and stood looking down at me. He had a strong face with a firm jaw and a beak of a nose, but his eyes were incongruously soft and brown, like those of an intelligent ape. He made a curiously disarming gesture, and said, ‘Mind if I sit down?’
I shook my head so he hooked his foot on a chair and drew it closer. He sat down in a casual manner, his left ankle resting on his right knee, showing a large expanse of sock patterned jazzily and two inches of hairy leg. ‘How are you feeling?’
I shook my head.
‘What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?’ When I made no answer he said, ‘Look, boy, you seem to be in trouble. Now, I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me.’
I’d had a bad night, the worst in my life. For hours I had struggled with the problem – who am I? – and I was no nearer to finding out than when I started. I was worn out and frightened and in no mood to talk to anyone.
Susskind began to talk in a soft voice. I don’t remember everything he said that first time but he returned to the theme many times afterwards. It went something like this:
‘Everyone comes up against this problem some time in his life; he asks himself the fundamentally awkward question: ‘Who am I?’ There are many related questions, too, such as, ‘Why am I?’ and ‘Why am I here?’ To the uncaring the questioning comes late, perhaps only on the death-bed. To the thinking man this self-questioning comes sooner and has to be resolved in the agony of personal mental sweat.
‘Out of such self-questioning have come a lot of good things – and some not so good. Some of the people who have asked these questions of themselves have gone mad, others have become saints, but most of us come to a compromise. Out of these questions have arisen great religions. Philosophers have written too many books about them, books containing a lot of undiluted crap and a few grains of sense. Scientists have looked for the answers in the movement of atoms and the working of drugs. This is the problem which exercises all of us, every member of the human race, and if it doesn’t happen to an individual then that individual cannot be considered to be human.
‘Now, you’ve bumped up against this problem of personal identity head-on and in an acute form. You think that just because you can’t remember your name you’re a nothing. You’re wrong. The self does not exist in a name. A name is just a word, a form of description which we give ourselves – a mere matter of convenience. The self – that awareness in the midst of your being which you call I – is still there. If it weren’t, you’d be dead.
‘You also think that just because you can’t remember incidents in your past life your personal world has come to an end. Why should it? You’re still breathing; you’re still alive. Pretty soon you’ll be out of this hospital – a thinking, questioning man, eager to get on with what he has to do. Maybe we can do some reconstructions; the odds are that you’ll have all your memories back within days or weeks. Maybe it will take a bit longer. But I’m here to help you do it. Will you let me?’
I looked up at that stern face with the absurdly gentle eyes and whispered, ‘Thanks.’ Then, because I was very tired, I fell asleep and when I woke up again Susskind had gone.
But he came back next day. ‘Feeling better?’
‘Some.’
He sat down. ‘Mind if I smoke?’ He lit a cigarette, then looked at it distastefully. ‘I smoke too many of these damn’ things.’ He extended the pack. ‘Have one?’
‘I don’t use them.’
‘How do you know?’
I thought about that for fully five minutes while Susskind waited patiently without saying a word. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I don’t smoke. I know it.’
‘Well, that’s a good start,’ he said with fierce satisfaction. ‘You know something about yourself. Now, what’s the first thing you remember?’
I said immediately, ‘Pain. Pain and floating. I was tied up, too.’
Susskind went into that in detail and when he had finished I thought I caught a hint of doubt in his expression, but I could have been wrong. He said, ‘Have you any idea how you got into this hospital?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I was born here.’
He smiled. ‘At your age?’
‘I don’t know how old I am.’
‘To the best of our knowledge you’re twenty-three. You were involved in an auto accident. Have you any ideas about that?’
‘No.’
‘You know what an automobile is, though.’
‘Of course.’ I paused. ‘Where was the accident?’
‘On the road between Dawson Creek and Edmonton. You know where those places are?’
‘I know.’
Susskind stubbed out his cigarette. ‘These ash-trays are too damn’ small,’ he grumbled. He lit another cigarette. ‘Would you like to know a little more about yourself? It will be hearsay, not of your own personal knowledge, but it might help. Your name, for instance.’
I said, ‘Dr Matthews called me by the name of Grant.’
Susskind said carefully, ‘To the best of our knowledge that is your name. More fully, it is Robert Boyd Grant. Want to know anything else?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What was I doing? What was my job?’
‘You were a college student studying at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Remember anything about that?’
I shook my head.
He said suddenly, ‘What’s a mofette?’
‘It’s an opening in the ground from which carbon dioxide is emitted – volcanic in origin.’ I stared at him. ‘How did I know that?’
‘You were majoring in geology,’ he said drily. ‘What was your father’s given name?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said blankly. ‘You said “was”. Is he dead?’
‘Yes,’ said Susskind quickly. ‘Supposing you went to Irving House, New Westminster – what would you expect to find?’
‘A museum.’
‘Have you any brothers or sisters?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Which – if any – political party do you favour?’
I thought about it, then shrugged. ‘I don’t know – but I don’t know if I took any interest in politics at all.’
There were dozens of questions and Susskind shot them at me fast, expecting fast answers. At last he stopped and lit another cigarette. ‘I’ll give it to you straight, Bob, because I don’t believe in hiding unpleasant facts from my customers and because I think you can take it. Your loss of memory is entirely personal, relating solely to yourself. Any knowledge which does not directly impinge on the ego, things like the facts of geology, geographical locations, car driving know-how – all that knowledge has been retained whole and entire.’
He flicked ash carelessly in the direction of the ash-tray. ‘The more personal things concerning yourself and your relationships with others are gone. Not only has your family been blotted out but you can’t remember another single person – not your geology tutor or even your best buddy at college. It’s as though something inside you decided to wipe the slate clean.’
I felt hopelessly lost. What was there left for a man of my age with no personal contacts – no family, no friends? My God, I didn’t even have any enemies, and it’s a poor man who can say that.
Susskind poked me gently with a thick forefinger. ‘Don’t give up now, bud; we haven’t even started. Look at it this way – there’s many a man who would give his soul to be able to start again with a clean slate. Let me explain a few things to you. The unconscious mind is a funny animal with its own operating logic. This logic may appear to be very odd to the conscious mind but it’s still a valid logic working strictly in accordance within certain rules, and what we have to do is to figure out the rules. I’m going to give you some psychological tests and then maybe I’ll know better what makes you tick. I’m also going to do some digging into your background and maybe we can come up with something there.’
I said, ‘Susskind, what chance is there?’
‘I won’t fool you,’ he said. ‘Due to various circumstances which I won’t go into right now, yours is not entirely a straightforward case of loss of memory. Your case is one for the books – and I’ll probably write the book. Look, Bob; a guy gets a knock on the head and he loses his memory – but not for long; within a couple of days, a couple of weeks at the most, he’s normal again. That’s the common course of events. Sometimes it’s worse than that. I’ve just had a case of an old man of eighty who was knocked down in the street. He came round in hospital the next day and found he’d lost a year of his life – he couldn’t remember a damn’ thing of the year previous to the accident and, in my opinion, he never will.’
He waved his cigarette under my nose. ‘That’s general loss of memory. A selective loss of memory like yours isn’t common at all. Sure, it’s happened before and it’ll happen again, but not often. And, like the general loss, recovery is variable. The trouble is that selective loss happens so infrequently that we don’t have much on it. I could give you a line that you’ll have your memory back next week, but I won’t because I don’t know. The only thing we can do is to work on it. Now, my advice to you is to quit worrying about it and to concentrate on other things. As soon as you can use your eyes for reading I’ll bring in some textbooks and you can get back to work. By then the bandages will be off your hands and you can do some writing, too. You have an examination to pass, bud, in twelve months’ time.’
II
Susskind drove me to work and ripped into me when I lagged. His tongue could get a vicious edge to it when he thought it would do me good, and as soon as the bandages were off he pushed my nose down to the textbooks. He gave me a lot of tests – intelligence, personality, vocational – and seemed pleased at the results.
‘You’re no dope,’ he announced, waving a sheaf of papers. ‘You scored a hundred and thirty-three on the Wechsler-Bellevue – you have intelligence, so use it.’
My body was dreadfully scarred, especially on the chest. My hands were unnaturally pink with new skin and when I touched my face I could feel crinkled scar tissue. And that led to something else. One day Matthews came to see me with Susskind in attendance. ‘We’ve got something to talk about, Bob,’ he said.
Susskind chuckled and jerked his head at Matthews. ‘A serious guy, this – very portentous.’
‘It is serious,’ said Matthews. ‘Bob, there’s a decision you have to make. I’ve done all I can do for you in this hospital. Your eyes are as good as new but the rest of you is a bit battered and that’s something I can’t improve on. I’m no genius – I’m just an ordinary hospital surgeon specializing in skin.’ He paused and I could see he was selecting his words. ‘Have you ever wondered why you’ve never seen a mirror?’
I shook my head, and Susskind chipped in, ‘Our Robert Boyd Grant is a very undemanding guy. Would you like to see yourself, Bob?’
I put my fingers to my cheeks and felt the roughness. ‘I don’t know that I would,’ I said, and found myself shaking.
‘You’d better,’ Susskind advised. ‘It’ll be brutal, but it’ll help you make up your mind in the next big decision.’
‘Okay,’ I said.
Susskind snapped his fingers and the nurse left the room to return almost immediately with a large mirror which she laid face down on the table. Then she went out again and closed the door behind her. I looked at the mirror but made no attempt to pick it up. ‘Go ahead,’ said Susskind, so I picked it up reluctantly and turned it over.
‘My God!’ I said, and quickly closed my eyes, feeling the sour taste of vomit in my throat. After a while I looked again. It was a monstrously ugly face, pink and seamed with white lines in arbitrary places. It looked like a child’s first clumsy attempt to depict the human face in wax. There was no character there, no imprint of dawning maturity as there should have been in someone of my age – there was just a blankness.
Matthews said quietly, ‘That’s why you have a private room here.’
I began to laugh. ‘It’s funny; it’s really damn’ funny. Not only have I lost myself, but I’ve lost my face.’
Susskind put his hand on my arm. ‘A face is just a face. No man can choose his own face – it’s something that’s given to him. Just listen to Dr Matthews for a minute.’
Matthews said, ‘I’m no plastic surgeon.’ He gestured at the mirror which I still held. ‘You can see that. You weren’t in any shape for the extensive surgery you needed when you came in here – you’d have died if we had tried to pull any tricks like that. But now you’re in good enough shape for the next step – if you want to take it.’
‘And that is?’
‘More surgery – by a good man in Montreal. The top man in the field in Canada, and maybe in the Western Hemisphere. You can have a face again, and new hands, too.’
‘More surgery!’ I didn’t like that; I’d had enough of it.
‘You have a few days to make up your mind,’ said Matthews.
‘Do you mind, Matt?’ said Susskind. ‘I’ll take over from here.’
‘Of course,’ said Matthews. ‘I’ll leave you to it. I’ll be seeing you, Bob.’
He left the room, closing the door gently. Susskind lit a cigarette and threw the pack on the table. He said quietly, ‘You’d better do it, bud. You can’t walk round with a face like that – not unless you intend taking up a career in the horror movies.’
‘Right!’ I said tightly. I knew it was something that had to be done. I swung on Susskind. ‘Now tell me something – who is paying for all this? Who is paying for this private room? Who is paying for the best plastic surgeon in Canada?’
Susskind clicked his tongue. ‘That’s a mystery. Someone loves you for sure. Every month an envelope comes addressed to Dr Matthews. It contains a thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills and one of these.’ He fished in his pocket and threw a scrap of paper across the table.
I smoothed it out. There was but one line of typescript on it: FOR THE CARE OF ROBERT BOYD GRANT.
I looked at him suspiciously. ‘You’re not doing this, are you?’
‘Good Christ!’ he said. ‘Show me a hospital headshrinker who can afford to give away twelve thousand bucks a year. I couldn’t afford to give you twelve thousand cents.’ He grinned. ‘But thanks for the compliment.’
I pushed the paper with my finger. ‘Perhaps this is a clue to who I am.’
‘No, it’s not,’ said Susskind flatly. He looked unhappy. ‘Maybe you’ve noticed I’ve not told you much about yourself. I did promise to dig into your background.’
‘I was going to ask you about that.’
‘I did some digging,’ he said. ‘And what I’ve been debating is not what I should tell you, but if I should tell you at all. You know, Bob, people get my profession all wrong. In a case like yours they think I should help you to get back your memory come hell or high water. I take a different view. I’m like the psychiatrist who said that his job was to help men of genius keep their neuroses. I’m not interested in keeping a man normal – I want to keep him happy. It’s a symptom of the sick world we live in that the two terms are not synonymous.’
‘And where do I come in on this?’
He said solemnly, ‘My advice to you is to let it go. Don’t dig into your past. Make a new life for yourself and forget everything that happened before you came here. I’m not going to help you recover your memory.’
I stared at him. ‘Susskind, you can’t say that and expect me just to leave it there.’
‘Won’t you take my word for it?’ he asked gently.
‘No!’ I said. ‘Would you if you were in my place?’
‘I guess not,’ he said, and sighed. ‘I suppose I’ll be bending a few professional ethics, but here goes. I’m going to make it short and sharp. Now, take a hold of yourself, listen to me and shut up until I’ve finished.’
He took a deep breath. ‘Your father deserted your mother soon after you were born, and no one knows if he’s alive or dead. Your mother died when you were ten and, from what I can gather, she was no great loss. She was, to put it frankly, nothing but a cheap chippy and, incidentally, she wasn’t married to your father. That left you an orphan and you went into an institution. It seems you were a young hellion and quite uncontrollable so you soon achieved the official status of delinquent. Had enough?’
‘Go on,’ I whispered.
‘You started your police record by the theft of a car, so you wound up in reform school for that episode. It seems it wasn’t a good reform school; all you learned there was how to make crime pay. You ran away and for six months you existed by petty crime until you were caught. Fortunately you weren’t sent back to the same reform school and you found a warden who knew how to handle you and you began to straighten out. On leaving reform school you were put in a hostel under the care of a probation officer and you did pretty well at high school. Your good intelligence earned you good marks so you went to college. Right then it looked as though you were all right.’
Susskind’s voice took on a savage edge. ‘But you slipped. You couldn’t seem to do anything the straight way. The cops pulled you in for smoking marijuana – another bad mark on the police blotter. Then there was an episode when a girl died in the hands of a quack abortionist – a name was named but nothing could be proved, so maybe we ought to leave that one off the tab. Want any more?’
‘There’s more?’
Susskind nodded sadly. ‘There’s more.’
‘Let me have it,’ I said flatly.
‘Okay. Again you were pulled in for drug addiction; this time you were mainlining on heroin. You just about hit the bottom there. There was some evidence that you were pushing drugs to get the dough to feed the habit, but not enough to nail you. However, now the cops were laying for you. Then came the clincher. You knew the Dean of Men was considering throwing you out of college and, God knows, he had enough reason. Your only hope was to promise to reform but you had to back it up with something – such as brilliant work. But drugs and brilliant work don’t go hand in hand so you were stupid enough to break into an office and try to doctor your examination marks.’
‘And I was caught at it,’ I said dully.
‘It would have been better if you were,’ said Susskind. ‘No, you weren’t caught red-handed but it was done in such a ham-fisted way that the Principal sent a senior student to find you. He found you all right. He found you hopped up on dope. You beat this guy half to death and lit out for places unknown. God knows where you thought you were going to take refuge – the North Pole, maybe. Anyway, a nice guy called Trinavant gave you a lift and the next thing was – Bingo! – Trinavant was dead, his wife was dead, his son was dead, and you were seven-eighths dead.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘That just about wraps it up,’ he said tiredly.
I was cold all over. ‘You think I killed this man, Trinavant, and his family?’
‘I think it was an accident, nothing more,’ said Susskind. ‘Now listen carefully, Bob; I told you the unconscious mind has its own brand of peculiar logic. I found something very peculiar going on. When you were pulled in on the heroin charge you were given a psychiatric examination, and I’ve seen the documents. One of the tests was a Bernreuter Personality Inventory and you may remember that I also gave you that test.’
‘I remember.’
Susskind leaned back in his chair. ‘I compared the two profiles and they didn’t check out at all; they could have been two different guys. And I’ll tell you something, Bob: the guy that was tested by the police psychiatrist I wouldn’t trust with a bent nickel, but I’d trust you with my life.’
‘Someone’s made a mistake,’ I said.
He shook his head vigorously. ‘No mistake. Do you remember the man I brought in here who sat in on some of your tests? He’s an authority on an uncommon condition of the human psyche – multiple personality. Did you ever read a book called The Three Faces of Eve?’
‘I saw the movie – Joanne Woodward was in it.’
‘That’s it. Then perhaps you can see what I’m getting at. Not that you have anything like she had. Tell me, what do you think of the past life of this guy called Robert Boyd Grant?’
‘It made me sick to my stomach,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe I did that.’
‘You didn’t,’ said Susskind sharply. ‘This is what happened, to the best of my professional belief. This man, Robert Boyd Grant, was a pretty crummy character, and he knew it himself. My guess is that he was tired of living with himself and he wanted to escape from himself – hence the drugs. But marijuana and heroin are only temporary forms of escape, and like everyone else he was locked in the prison of his own body. Perhaps he sickened himself but there was nothing he could do about it – a conscious and voluntary change of basic personality is practically an impossibility.
‘But as I said, the unconscious has its own logic and we, in this hospital, accidentally gave it the data it needed. You had third-degree burns over sixty per cent of your body when you were brought in here. We couldn’t put you in a bed in that condition, so you were suspended in a bath of saline solution which, to your unconscious, was a pretty good substitute for amniotic fluid. Do you know what that is?’
‘A return to the womb?’
Susskind snapped his fingers. ‘You’re with it. Now I’m speaking in impossibly untechnical terms, so don’t go quoting me, especially to other psychiatrists. I think this condition was tailor-made for your unconscious mind. Here was a chance for rebirth which was grabbed at. Whether the second personality was lying there, ready to be used, or whether it was constructed during the time you were in that bath, we shall never know – and it doesn’t matter. That there is a second personality – a better personality – is a fact, and it’s something I’d swear to in a court of law, which I might have to do yet. You’re one of the few people who can really call yourself a new man.’
It was a lot to take in at once – too much. I said, ‘God! You’ve handed me something to think about.’
‘I had to do it,’ said Susskind. ‘I had to explain why you mustn’t probe into the past. When I told you what a man called Robert Grant had done it was like listening to an account of the actions of someone else, wasn’t it? Let me give you an analogy: when you go to the movies and see a lion jumping at you, well – that’s just the movies and there’s no harm done; but if you go to Africa and a lion jumps at you, that’s hard reality and you’re dead. If you insist on digging into the past and succeed in remembering as personal memories the experiences of this other guy, then you’ll split yourself down the middle. So leave it alone. You’re someone with no past and a great future.’
I said, ‘What chance is there that this other – bad – personality might take over again spontaneously?’
‘I’d say there’s very little chance of that,’ said Susskind slowly. ‘You rate as a strong-willed individual; the other guy had a weak will – strong-willed people generally don’t go for drugs, you know. We all of us have a devil lurking inside us; we all have to suppress the old Adam. You’re no different from anyone else.’
I picked up the mirror and studied the reflected caricature. ‘What did I … what did he look like?’
Susskind took out his wallet and extracted a photograph. ‘I don’t see the point in showing you this, but if you want to see it, here it is.’
Robert Boyd Grant was a fresh-faced youngster with a smooth, unlined face. There was no trace of dissipation such as one might have expected – he could have been any college student attending any college on the North American continent. He wasn’t bad-looking, either, in an immature way, and I doubted if he’d had any trouble finding a girl-friend to put in the family way.
‘I’d forget about that face,’ advised Susskind. ‘Don’t go back into the past. Roberts, the plastic surgeon, is a sculptor in flesh; he’ll fix you up with a face good enough to play romantic lead with Elizabeth Taylor.’
I said, ‘I’ll miss you, Susskind.’
He chuckled fatly. ‘Miss me? You’re not going to miss me, bud; I’m not going to let you get away – I’m going to write the book on you, remember.’ He blew out a plume of smoke. ‘I’m getting out of hospital work and going into private practice. I’ve been offered a partnership – guess where? Right – Montreal!’
Suddenly I felt much better now I knew Susskind was still going to be around. I looked at the photograph again and said, ‘Perhaps I’d better go the whole way. New man … new face … why not new name?’
‘A sound idea,’ agreed Susskind. ‘Any ideas on that?’
I gave him the photograph. ‘That’s Robert Grant,’ I said. ‘I’m Bob Boyd. It’s not too bad a name.’
III
I had three operations in Montreal covering the space of a year. I spent many weeks with my left arm strapped up against my right cheek in a skin grafting operation and, no sooner was that done, than my right arm was up against my left cheek.
Roberts was a genius. He measured my head meticulously and then made a plaster model which he brought to my room. ‘What kind of a face would you like, Bob?’ he asked.
It took a lot of figuring out because this was playing for keeps – I’d be stuck with this face for the rest of my life. We took a long time working on it with Roberts shaping modelling clay on to the plaster base. There were limitations, of course; some of my suggestions were impossible. ‘We have only a limited amount of flesh to work with,’ said Roberts. ‘Most plastic surgery deals mainly with the removal of flesh; nose-bobbing, for instance. This is a more ticklish job and all we can do is a limited amount of redistribution.’
I guess it was fun in a macabre sort of way. It isn’t everyone who gets the chance to choose his own face even if the options are limited. The operations weren’t so funny but I sweated it out, and what gradually emerged was a somewhat tough and battered face, the face of a man much older than twenty-four. It was lined and seamed as though by much experience, and it was a face that looked much wiser than I really was.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Roberts. ‘It’s a face you’ll grow into. No matter how carefully one does this there are the inevitable scars, so I’ve hidden those in folds of flesh, folds which usually come only with age.’ He smiled. ‘With a face like this I don’t think you’ll have much competition from people your own age; they’ll walk stiff-legged around you without even knowing why. You’d better take some advice from Susskind on how to handle situations like that.’
Matthews had handed over to Susskind the administration of the thousand dollars a month from my unknown benefactor. Susskind interpreted FOR THE CARE OF ROBERT BOYD GRANT in a wide sense; he kept me hard at my studies and, since I could not go to college, he brought in private tutors. ‘You haven’t much time,’ he warned. ‘You were born not a year ago and if you flub your education now you’ll wind up washing dishes for the rest of your life.’
I worked hard – it kept my mind off my troubles. I found I liked geology and, since I had a skull apparently stuffed full of geological facts it wasn’t too difficult to carry on. Susskind made arrangements with a college and I wrote my examinations between the second and third operations with my head and arm still in bandages. I don’t know what I would have done without him.
After the examinations I took the opportunity of visiting a public library and, in spite of what Susskind had said, I dug out the newspaper reports of the auto smash. There wasn’t much to read apart from the fact that Trinavant was a big wheel in some jerkwater town in British Columbia. It was just another auto accident that didn’t make much of a splash. Just after that I started to have bad dreams and that scared me, so I didn’t do any more investigations.
Then suddenly it was over. The last operation had been done and the bandages were off. In the same week the examination results came out and I found myself a B.Sc. and a newly fledged geologist with no job. Susskind invited me to his apartment to celebrate. We settled down with some beer, and he asked, ‘What are you going to do now? Go for your doctorate – ’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so – not just yet. I want to get some field experience.’
He nodded approvingly. ‘Got any ideas about that?’
I said, ‘I don’t think I want to be a company man; I’d rather work for myself. I reckon the North-West Territories are bursting with opportunities for a freelance geologist.’
Susskind was doubtful. ‘I don’t know if that’s a good thing.’ He looked across at me and smiled. ‘A mite self-conscious about your face, are you? And you want to get away from people – go into the desert – is that it?’
‘There’s a little of that in it,’ I said unwillingly. ‘But I meant what I said. I think I’ll make out in the north.’
‘You’ve been in hospitals for a year and a half,’ said Susskind. ‘And you don’t know many people. What you should do is to go out, get drunk, make friends – maybe get yourself a wife.’
‘Good God!’ I said. ‘I couldn’t get married.’
He waved his tankard. ‘Why not? You find yourself a really good girl and tell her the whole story. It won’t make any difference to her if she loves you.’
‘So you’re turning into a marriage counsellor,’ I said. ‘Why have you never got married?’
‘Who’d marry a cantankerous bastard like me?’ He moved restlessly and spilled ash down his shirt-front. ‘I’ve been holding out on you, bud. You’ve been a pretty expensive proposition, you know. You don’t think a thousand bucks a month has paid for what you’ve had? Roberts doesn’t come cheap and there were the tutors, too – not to mention my own ludicrously expensive services.’
I said, ‘What are you getting at, Susskind?’
‘When the first envelope came with its cargo of a thousand dollars, this was in it.’
He handed me a slip of paper. There was the line of typing: FOR THE CARE OF ROBERT BOYD GRANT. Underneath was another sentence: IN THE EVENT OF THESE FUNDS BEING INSUFFICIENT, PLEASE INSERT THE FOLLOWING AD IN THE PERSONAL COLUMN OF THE VANCOUVER SUN – R.B.G. WANTS MORE.
Susskind said, ‘When you came up to Montreal I decided it was time for more money so I put the ad. in the paper. Whoever is printing this money doubled the ante. In the last year and a half you’ve had thirty-six thousand dollars; there are nearly four thousand bucks left in the kitty – what do you want to do with it?’
‘Give it to some charity,’ I said.
‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Susskind. ‘You’ll need a stake if you’re setting off into the wide blue yonder. Pocket your pride and take it.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.
‘I don’t see what else you can do but take it,’ he observed; ‘You haven’t a cent otherwise.’
I fingered the note. ‘Who do you think this is? And why is he doing it?’
‘It’s no one out of your past, that’s for sure,’ said Susskind. ‘The gang that Grant was running with could hardly scratch up ten dollars between them. All hospitals get these anonymous donations. They’re not usually as big as this nor so specific, but the money comes in. It’s probably some eccentric millionaire who read about you in the paper and decided to do something about it.’ He shrugged. ‘There are two thousand bucks a month still coming in. What do we do about that?’
I scribbled on the note and tossed it back to him. He read it and laughed. ‘“R.B.G. SAYS STOP.” I’ll put it in the personal column and see what happens.’ He poured us more beer. ‘When are you taking off for the icy wastes?’
I said, ‘I guess I will use the balance of the money. I’ll leave as soon as I can get some equipment together.’
Susskind said, ‘It’s been nice having you around, Bob. You’re quite a nice guy. Remember to keep it that way, do you hear? No poking and prying – keep your face to the future and forget the past and you’ll make out all right. If you don’t you’re liable to explode like a bomb. And I’d like to hear how you’re getting on from time to time.’
Two weeks later I left Montreal and headed north-west. I suppose if anyone was my father it was Susskind, the man with the tough, ruthless, kindly mind. He gave me a taste for tobacco in the form of cigarettes, although I never got around to smoking as many as he did. He also gave me my life and sanity.
His full name was Abraham Isaac Susskind.
I always called him Susskind.
THREE (#ulink_91259d60-2f45-5986-9818-c2b610f2bf97)
The helicopter hovered just above treetop height and I shouted to the pilot, ‘That’ll do it; just over there in the clearing by the lake.’
He nodded, and the machine moved sideways slowly and settled by the lakeside, the downdraught sending ripples bouncing over the quiet water. There was the usual soggy feeling on touchdown as the weight came on to the hydraulic suspension and then all was still save for the engine vibrations as the rotor slowly flapped around.
The pilot didn’t switch off. I slammed the door open and began to pitch out my gear – the unbreakable stuff that would survive the slight fall. Then I climbed down and began to take out the cases of instruments. The pilot didn’t help at all; he just sat in the driving seat and watched me work. I suppose it was against his union rules to lug baggage.
When I had got everything out I shouted to him, ‘You’ll be back a week tomorrow?’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘About eleven in the morning.’
I stood back and watched him take off and the helicopter disappeared over the trees like a big ungainly grasshopper. Then I set about making camp. I wasn’t going to do anything more that day except make camp and, maybe, do a little fishing. That might sound as though I was cheating the Matterson Corporation out of the best part of a day’s work, but I’ve always found that it pays not to run headlong into a job.
A lot of men – especially city men – live like pigs when they’re camping. They stop shaving, they don’t dig a proper latrine, and they live exclusively on a diet of beans. I like to make myself comfortable, and that takes time. Another thing is that you can do an awful lot of work when just loafing around camp. When you’re waiting for the fish to bite your eye is taking in the lie of the land and that can tell an experienced field geologist a hell of a lot. You don’t have to eat all of an egg to know it’s rotten and you don’t have to pound every foot of land to know what you’ll find in it and what you won’t find.
So I made camp. I dug the latrine and used it because I needed to. I got some dry driftwood from the shore and built a fire, then dug out the coffee-pot and set some water to boil. By the time I’d gathered enough spruce boughs to make a bed it was time to have coffee, so I sat with my back against a rock and looked over the lake speculatively.
From what I could see the lake lay slap-bang on a discontinuity. This side of the lake was almost certainly mesozoic, a mixture of sedimentary and volcanic rocks – good prospecting country. The other side, by the lie of the land and what I’d seen from the air, was probably palaeozoic, mostly sedimentary. I doubted if I’d find much over there, but I had to go and look.
I took a sip of the scalding coffee and scooped up a handful of pebbles to examine them. Idly I let them fall from my hand one at a time, then threw the last one into the lake where it made a small ‘plop’ and sent out a widening circle of ripples. The lake itself was a product of the last ice age. The ice had pushed its way all over the land, the tongues of glaciers carving valleys through solid rock. It lay on the land for a long time and then, as quickly as it had come, so it departed.
Speed is a relative term. To a watching man a glacier moves slowly but it’s the equivalent of a hundred yards’ sprint when compared to other geological processes. Anyway, the glaciers retreated, dropping the rock fragments they had fractured and splintered from the bedrock. When that happened a rock wall was formed called a moraine, a natural dam behind which a lake or pond can form. Canada is full of them, and a large part of Canadian geology is trying to think like a piece of ice, trying to figure which way the ice moved so many thousands of years ago so that you can account for the rocks which are otherwise unaccountably out of place.
This lake was more of a large pond. It wasn’t more than a mile long and was fed by a biggish stream which came in from the north. I’d seen the moraine from the air and traced the stream flowing south from the lake to where it tumbled over the escarpment and where the Matterson Corporation was going to build a dam.
I threw out the dregs of coffee and washed the pot and the enamel cup, then set to and built a windbreak. I don’t like tents – they’re no warmer inside than out and they tend to leak if you don’t coddle them. In good weather all a man needs is a windbreak, which is easily assembled from materials at hand which don’t have to be back-packed like a tent, and in bad weather you can make a waterproof roof if you have the know-how. But it took me quite a long time in the North-West Territories to get that know-how.
By mid-afternoon I had the camp ship-shape. Everything was where I wanted it and where I could get at it quickly if I needed it. It was a standard set-up I’d worked out over the years. The Polar Eskimos have carried that principle to a fine art; a stranger can drop into an unknown igloo, put out his hand in the dark and be certain of finding the oil-lamp or the bone fish-hooks. Armies use it, too; a man transferred to a strange camp still knows where to find the paymaster without half trying. I suppose it can be defined as good housekeeping.
The plop of a fish in the lake made me realize I was hungry, so I decided to find out how good the trout were. Fish is no good for a sustained diet in a cold climate – for that you need good fat meat – but I’d had all the meat I needed in Fort Farrell and the idea of lake trout sizzling in a skillet felt good. But next day I’d see if I could get me some venison, if I didn’t have to go too far out of my way for it.
That evening, lying on the springy spruce and looking up at a sky full of diamonds, I thought about the Trinavants. I’d deliberately put the thing out of my mind because I was a little scared of monkeying around with it in view of what Susskind had said, but I found I couldn’t leave it alone. It was like when you accidentally bite the inside of your cheek and you find you can’t stop tongueing the sore place.
It certainly was a strange story. Why in hell should Matterson want to erase the name and memory of John Trinavant? I drew on a cigarette thoughtfully and watched the dull red eye of the dying embers on the fire. I was more and more certain that whatever was going on was centred on that auto accident. But three of the participants were dead, and the fourth couldn’t remember anything about it, and what’s more, didn’t want to. So that seemed a dead end.
Who profited from the Trinavants’ death? Certainly Bull Matterson had profited. With that option agreement he had the whole commercial empire in his fist – and all to himself. A motive for murder? Certainly Bull Matterson ran his business hard on cruel lines if McDougall was to be believed. But not every tight-fisted businessman was a murderer.
Item: Where was Bull Matterson at the time of the accident?
Who else profited? Obviously Clare Trinavant. And where was she at the time of the accident? In Switzerland, you damn’ fool, and she was a chit of a schoolgirl at that. Delete Clare Trinavant.
Who else?
Apparently no one else profited – not in money, anyway. Could there be a way to profit other than in money? I didn’t know enough about the personalities involved even to speculate, so that was another dead end – for the time being.
I jerked myself from the doze. What the hell was I thinking of? I wasn’t going to get mixed up in this thing. It was too dangerous for me personally.
I was even more sure of that when I woke up at two o’clock in the morning drenched with sweat and quivering with nerves. I had had the Dream again.
II
Things seemed brighter in the light of the dawn, but then they always do. I cooked breakfast – beans, bacon and fried eggs – and wolfed it down hungrily, then picked up the pack I had assembled the night before. A backwoods geologist on the move resembles a perambulating Christmas tree more than anything else, but I’m a bigger man than most and it doesn’t show much on me. However, it still makes a sizeable load to tote, so you can see why I don’t like tents.
I made certain that the big yellow circle on the back of the pack was clearly visible. That’s something I consider really important. Anywhere you walk in the woods on the North American continent you’re likely to find fool hunters who’ll let loose a 30.30 at anything that moves. That big yellow circle was just to make them pause before they squeezed the trigger, just time enough for them to figure that there are no yellow-spotted animals haunting the woods. For the same reason I wore a yellow-and-red checkered mackinaw that a drunken Indian wouldn’t be seen dead in, and a woollen cap with a big red bobble on the top. I was a real colourful character.
I checked the breech of my rifle to make sure there wasn’t one up the spout, slipped on the safety-catch and set off, heading south along the lake shore. I had established my base and I was ready to do the southern end of the survey. In one week the helicopter would pick me up and take me north, ready to cover the northern end. This valley was going to get a thorough going-over.
At the end of the first day I checked my findings against the Government geological map which was, to say the best of it, sketchy; in fact, in parts it was downright blank. People sometimes ask me: ‘Why doesn’t the Government do a real geological survey and get the job done once and for all?’ All I can say is that those people don’t understand anything about the problems. It would take an army of geologists a hundred years to check every square mile of Canada, and then they’d have to do it again because some joker would have invented a gadget to see metals five hundred feet underground; or, maybe, someone else would find a need for some esoteric metal hitherto useless. Alumina ores were pretty useless in 1900 and you couldn’t give away uranium in the 1930s. There’ll still be jobs for a guy like me for many years to come.
What little was on the Government map checked with what I had, but I had it in more detail. A few traces of molybdenum and a little zinc and lead, but nothing to get the Matterson Corporation in an uproar about. When a geologist speaks of a trace, he means just that.
I carried on the next day, and the day after that, and by the end of the week I’d made pretty certain that the Matterson Corporation wasn’t going to get rich mining the southern end of the Kinoxi Valley. I had everything packed back at the camp and was sitting twiddling my thumbs when the helicopter arrived, and I must say he was dead on time.
This time he dropped me in the northern area by a stream, and again I spent the day making camp. The next day I was off once more in the usual routine, just putting one foot in front of the other and keeping my eyes open.
On the third day I realized I was being watched. There wasn’t much to show that this was so, but there was enough; a scrap of wool caught on a twig near the camp which hadn’t been there twelve hours earlier, a fresh scrape on the bark of a tree which I hadn’t made and, once only, a wink of light from a distant hillside to show that someone had incautiously exposed binoculars to direct sunlight.
Now, in the north woods it’s downright discourteous to come within spitting distance of a man’s camp and not make yourself known, and anyone who hadn’t secrecy on his mind wouldn’t do it. I don’t particularly mind a man having his secrets – I’ve got some of my own – but if a man’s secrets involve me then I don’t like it and I’m apt to go off pop. Still, there wasn’t much I could do about it except carry on and hope to surprise this snoopy character somehow.
On the fifth day I had just the far northern part of the valley to inspect, so I decided to go right as far as I had to and make an overnight camp at the top of the valley. I was walking by the stream, trudging along, when a voice behind me said, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’
I froze, then turned round carefully. A tall man in a red mackinaw was standing just off the trail casually holding a hunting rifle. The rifle wasn’t pointing right at me; on the other hand, it wasn’t pointing very far away. In fact, it was a moot point whether I was being held up at gun-point or not. Since this guy had just stepped out from behind a tree he had deliberately ambushed me, so I didn’t care to make an issue of it right then – it wouldn’t have been the right time. I just said, ‘Hi! Where did you spring from?’
His jaw tightened and I saw he wasn’t very old, maybe in his early twenties. He said, ‘You haven’t answered my question.’
I didn’t like that tightening jaw and I hoped his trigger finger wasn’t tightening too. Young fellows his age can go off at half-cock awfully easily. I shifted the pack on my back. ‘Just going up to the head of the valley.’
‘Doing what?’
I said evenly, ‘I don’t know what business it is of yours, buster, but I’m doing a survey for the Matterson Corporation.’
‘No, you’re not,’ he said. ‘Not on this land.’ He jerked his head down the valley. ‘See that marker?’
I looked in the direction he indicated and saw a small cairn of stones, much overgrown, which is why I hadn’t spotted it before. It would have been pretty invisible from the other side. I looked at my young friend. ‘So?’
‘So that’s where Matterson land stops.’ He grinned, but there was no humour in him. ‘I was hoping you’d come this way – the marker makes explanations easier.’
I walked back and looked at the cairn, then glanced at him to find he had followed me with the rifle still held easily in his hands. We had the cairn between us, so I said, ‘It’s all right if I stand here?’
‘Sure,’ he said airily. ‘You can stand there. No law against it.’
‘And you don’t mind me taking off my pack?’
‘Not so long as you don’t put it this side of the marker.’ He grinned and I could see he was enjoying himself. I was prepared to let him – for the moment – so I said nothing, swung the pack to the ground and flexed my shoulders. He didn’t like that – he could see how big I was, and the rifle swung towards me, so there was no question now about being held up.
I pulled the maps out of a side pocket of the pack and consulted them. ‘There’s nothing here about this,’ I said mildly.
‘There wouldn’t be,’ he said. ‘Not on Matterson maps. But this is Trinavant land.’
‘Oh! Would that be Clare Trinavant?’
‘Yeah, that’s right.’ He shifted the rifle impatiently.
I said, ‘Is she available? I’d like to see her.’
‘She’s around, but you won’t see her – not unless she wants to see you.’ He laughed abruptly. ‘I wouldn’t stick around waiting for her; you might take root.’
I jerked my head down the valley. ‘I’ll be camped in that clearing. You push off, sonny, and tell Miss Trinavant that I know where the bodies are buried.’ I don’t know why I said it but it seemed a good thing to say at the time.
His head came up. ‘Huh?’
‘Run away and tell Miss Trinavant just that,’ I said. ‘You’re just an errand boy, you know.’ I stooped, picked up the pack, and turned away, leaving him standing there with his mouth open. By the time I reached the clearing and looked back he had gone.
The fire was going and the coffee was bubbling when I heard voices from up the valley. My friend, the young gunman, came into sight but he’d left his artillery home this time. Behind him came a woman, trimly dressed in jeans, an open-necked shirt and a mackinaw. Some women can wear jeans but not many; Ogden Nash once observed that before a woman wears pants she should see herself walking away. Miss Trinavant definitely had the kind of figure that would look well in anything, even an old burlap sack.
And she looked beautiful even when she was as mad as a hornet. She came striding over to me in a determined sort of way, and demanded, ‘What is all this? Who are you?’
‘My name’s Boyd,’ I said. ‘I’m a geologist working on contract for the Matterson Corporation. I’m …’
She held up her hand and looked at me with frosty eyes. I’d never seen green frost before. ‘That’s enough. This is as far up valley as you go, Mr Boyd. See to it, Jimmy.’
‘That’s what I told him, Miss Trinavant, but he didn’t want to believe me.’
I turned my head and looked at him. ‘Stay out of this, Jimmy boy: Miss Trinavant is on Matterson land by invitation – you’re not, so buzz off. And don’t point a gun at me again or I’ll wrap it round your neck.’
‘Miss Trinavant, that’s a lie,’ he yelled. ‘I never—’
I whirled and hit him. It’s a neat trick if you can get in the right position – you straighten your arm out stiff and pivot from the hips – your hand picks up a hell of a velocity by the time it makes contact. The back of my hand caught him under the jaw and damn’ near lifted him a foot off the ground. He landed flat on his back, flopped around a couple of times like a newly landed trout, and then lay still.
Miss Trinavant was looking at me open-mouthed – I could see her lovely tonsils quite plainly. I rubbed the back of my hand and said mildly, ‘I don’t like liars.’
‘He wasn’t lying,’ she said passionately. ‘He had no gun.’
‘I know when I’m being looked at by a 30.30,’ I said, and stabbed my finger at the prostrate figure in the pine needles. ‘That character has been snooping after me for the last three days: I don’t like that, either. He just got what was coming to him.’
By the way she bared her teeth she was getting set to bite me. ‘You didn’t give him a chance, you big barbarian.’
I let that one go. I’ve been in too many brawls to be witless enough to give the other guy a chance – I leave that to the sporting fighters who earn a living by having their brains beaten out.
She knelt down, and said, ‘Jimmy, Jimmy, are you all right?’ Then she looked up. ‘You must have broken his jaw.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t hit him hard enough. He’ll just be sore in body and spirit for the next few days.’ I took a pannikin and filled it with water from the stream and dumped it on Jimmy’s face. He stirred and groaned. ‘He’ll be fit to walk in a few minutes. You’d better get him back to wherever you have your camp. And you can tell him that if he comes after me with a gun again I’ll kill him.’
She breathed hard but said nothing, concentrating on arousing Jimmy. Presently he was conscious enough to stand up on groggy feet and he looked at me with undisguised hatred. I said, ‘When you’ve got him bedded down I’ll be glad to see you again, Miss Trinavant. I’ll still be camped here.’
She turned a startled face towards me. ‘What makes you think I ever want to see you again?’ she flared.
‘Because I know where the bodies are buried,’ I said pleasantly. ‘And don’t be afraid; I’ve never been known to hit a woman yet.’
I would have sworn she used some words I’d heard only in logging camps, but I couldn’t be certain because she muttered them under her breath. Then she turned to give Jimmy a hand and I watched them go past the marker and out of sight. The coffee was pretty nigh ruined by this time so I tossed it out and set about making more, and a glance at the sun decided me to think about bedding down for the night.
It was dusk when I saw her coming back, a glimmering figure among the trees. I had made myself comfortable and was sitting with my back to a tree tending the fat duck which was roasting on a spit before the fire. She came up and stood over me. ‘What do you really want?’ she asked abruptly.
I looked up. ‘You hungry?’ She stirred impatiently, so I said, ‘Roast duck, fresh bread, wild celery, hot coffee – how does that sound?’
She dropped down to my level. ‘I told Jimmy to watch out for you,’ she said. ‘I knew you were coming. But I didn’t tell him to go on Matterson land – and I didn’t say anything about a gun.’
‘Perhaps you should have,’ I observed. ‘Perhaps you should have said, “No gun”.’
‘I know Jimmy’s a bit wild,’ she said. ‘But that’s no excuse for what you did.’
I took a flat cake of bread out of the clay oven and slapped it on a platter. ‘Have you ever looked down the muzzle of a gun?’ I asked. ‘It’s a mighty unsettling sensation, and I tend to get violent when I’m nervous.’ I handed her the platter. ‘What about some duck?’
Her nostrils quivered as the fragrance rose from the spitted bird and she laughed. ‘You’ve sold me. It smells so good.’
I began to carve the duck. ‘Jimmy’s not much hurt except in what he considers to be his pride. If he goes around pointing guns at people, one of these days there’s going to be a bang and he’ll hang as high as Haman. Maybe I’ve saved his life. Who is he?’
‘One of my men.’
‘So you knew I was coming,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘News gets around these parts fast, considering it’s so underpopulated.’
She selected a slice of breast from her platter and popped it into her mouth. ‘Anything that concerns me I get to know about. Say, this is good!’
‘I’m not such a good cook,’ I said. ‘It’s the open air that does it. How do I concern you?’
‘You work for Matterson; you were on my land. That concerns me.’
I said, ‘When I contracted to do this job Howard Matterson had a bit of an argument with a man called Donner. Matterson said he’d straighten out the matter with someone called Clare – presumably you. Did he?’
‘I haven’t seen Howard Matterson in a month – and I don’t care if I never see him again.’
‘You can’t blame me for not knowing the score,’ I said. ‘I thought the job was above board. Matterson has a strange way of running his business.’
She picked up a drumstick and gnawed on it delicately. ‘Not strange – just crooked. Of course, it all depends on which Matterson you’re talking about. Bull Matterson is the crooked one; Howard is just plain sloppy.’
‘You mean he forgot to talk to you about it?’ I said unbelievingly.
‘Something like that.’ She pointed the drumstick at me. ‘What’s all this about bodies?’
I grinned. ‘Oh, I just wanted to talk to you. I knew that would bring you running.’
She stared at me. ‘Why should it?’
‘It did – didn’t it?’ I pointed out. ‘It’s a variation of the old story of the practical joker who sent a cable to a dozen of his friends: FLY – ALL IS DISCOVERED. Nine of them hastily left town. Everyone has a skeleton in some cupboard of their lives.’
‘You were just pining for company,’ she said sardonically.
‘Would I pass up the chance of dining with a beautiful woman in the backwoods?’
‘I don’t believe you,’ she said flatly. ‘You can cut out the flattery. For all you knew I might have been an old hag of ninety, unless, of course, you’d been asking questions around beforehand. Which you obviously have. What are you up to, Boyd?’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘How’s this for a starter? Did you ever get around to investigating that Trinavant-Matterson partnership agreement, together with the deal Matterson made with the trustees of the estate? It seems to me that particular business transaction could bear looking into. Why doesn’t someone do something about it?’
She stared at me wide-eyed. ‘Wow! If you’ve been asking questions like that around Fort Farrell you’re going to be in trouble as soon as old Bull finds out.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I understand he’d rather forget the Trinavants ever existed. But don’t worry; he won’t get to hear of it. My source of information is strictly private.’
‘I wasn’t worrying,’ she said coldly. ‘But perhaps you think you can handle the Mattersons the same way you handled Jimmy. I wouldn’t bank on it.’
‘I didn’t think you cared – and I was right,’ I said with a grin. ‘But why doesn’t someone investigate that smelly deal? You, for instance.’
‘Why should I?’ she said offhandedly. ‘It has nothing to do with me how much Bull Matterson gyps the trustees. Tangling with the Mattersons wouldn’t put money in my pocket.’
‘You mean you don’t care that John Trinavant’s intentions have been warped and twisted to put money in Matterson’s pocket?’ I asked softly.
I thought she was going to throw the platter at me. Her face whitened and pink spots appeared in her cheeks. ‘Damn you!’ she said hotly. Slowly she simmered down. ‘I did try once,’ she admitted. ‘And I got nowhere. Donner has the books of the Matterson Corporation in such a goddam tangle it would take a team of high-priced lawyers ten years to unsnarl everything. Even I couldn’t afford that and my attorney advised me not to try. Why are you so interested anyway?’
I watched her sop up gravy with a piece of bread; I like a girl with a healthy appetite. ‘I don’t know that I am interested. It’s just another point to wonder about. Like why does Matterson want to bury the Trinavants – permanently?’
‘You stick your neck out, you’ll get it chopped off,’ she warned. ‘Matterson doesn’t like questions like that.’ She put down her platter, stood up and went down to the stream to wash her hands. When she came back she was wiping them on a man-sized handkerchief.
I poured her a cup of coffee. ‘I’m not asking Matterson – I’m asking a Trinavant. Isn’t it something a Trinavant wonders about from time to time?’
‘Sure! And like everyone else we get no answers.’ She looked at me closely. ‘What are you after, Boyd? And who the hell are you?’
‘Just a beat-up freelance geologist. Doesn’t Matterson ever worry you?’
She sipped the hot coffee. ‘Not much. I spend very little time here. I come back for a few months every year to annoy him, that’s all.’
‘And you still don’t know what he has against the Trinavants?’
‘No.’
I looked into the fire and said pensively, ‘Someone was saying that he wished you’d get married. The implication was that there’d be no one around with the name of Trinavant any more.’
She flared hotly. ‘Has Howard been – ?’ Then she stopped and bit her lip.
‘Has Howard been … what?’
She rose to her feet and dusted herself down. ‘I don’t think I like you, Mr Boyd. You ask too many questions, and I get no answers. I don’t know who you are or what you want. If you want to tangle with Matterson that’s your affair; my disinterested advice would be “Don’t!” because he’ll chop you up into little pieces. Still, why should I care? But let me tell you one thing – don’t interfere with me.’
‘What would you do to me that Matterson wouldn’t?’
‘The name of Trinavant isn’t quite forgotten,’ she said. ‘I have some good friends.’
‘They’d better be better than Jimmy,’ I said caustically. Then I wondered why I was fighting with her; it didn’t make sense. I scrambled to my feet. ‘Look, I have no fight with you and I’ve no cause to interfere in your life, either. I’m a pretty harmless guy except when someone pokes a gun in my direction. I’ll just go back and report to Howard Matterson that you wouldn’t let me on your land. There’s no grief in it for me.’
‘You do that,’ she said. There was puzzlement in her voice as she added, ‘You’re a funny one, Boyd. You come here as a stranger and you dig up a ten-year-old mystery everyone has forgotten. Where did you get it from?’
‘I don’t think my informant would care to be named.’
‘I bet he wouldn’t,’ she said with contempt. ‘I thought everyone in Fort Farrell had developed a conveniently bad memory as well as a yellow streak.’
‘Maybe you have friends in Fort Farrell, too,’ I said softly.
She zipped up her mackinaw against the chill of the night air. ‘I’m not going to stick around here bandying mysteries with you, Boyd,’ she said. ‘Just remember one thing. Don’t come on my land – ever.’
She turned to go away, and I said, ‘Wait! There are ghosties and ghoulies and beasties, and things that go bump in the night; I wouldn’t want you to walk into a bear. I’ll escort you back to your camp.’
‘My God, a backwoods cavalier!’ she said in disgust, but she stayed around to watch me kick earth over the embers of the fire. While I checked my rifle she looked around at my gear, dimly illuminated in the moonlight. ‘You make a neat camp.’
‘Comes of experience,’ I said. ‘Shall we go?’ She fell into step beside me and, as we passed the marker, I said, ‘Thanks for letting me on your land, Miss Trinavant.’
‘I’m a sucker for sweet talk,’ she said, and pointed. ‘We go that way.’
III
Her ‘camp’ was quite a surprise. After we had walked for over half an hour up a slope that tested the calf muscles there came the unexpected dark loom of a building. The hunting beam of the flashlamp she produced disclosed walls of fieldstone and logs and the gleam of large windows. She pushed open an unlocked door, then said a little irritably, ‘Well, aren’t you coming in?’
The interior was even more of a surprise. It was warm with central heating and it was big. She flicked a switch and a small pool of light appeared, and the room was so large that it retreated away into shadows. One entire wall was windowed and there was a magnificent view down the valley. Away in the distance I could see the moonglow on the lake I had prospected around.
She flicked more switches and more lights came on, revealing the polished wooden floor carpeted with skins, the modern furniture, the wall brightly lined with books and a scattering of phonograph records on the floor grouped around a built-in hi-fi outfit as though someone had been interrupted.
This was a millionaire’s version of a log cabin. I looked about, probably with my mouth hanging open, then said, ‘If this were in the States, a guy could get to be President just by being born here.’
‘I don’t need any wisecracks,’ she said. ‘If you want a drink, help yourself; it’s over there. And you might do something about the fire; it isn’t really necessary but I like to see flames.’
She disappeared, closing a door behind her, and I laid down my rifle. There was a massive fieldstone chimney with a fireplace big enough to roast a moose in which a few red embers glowed faintly, so I replenished it from the pile of logs stacked handily and waited until the flames came and I was sure the fire had caught hold. Then I did a tour of the room, hoping she wouldn’t be back too soon. You can find out a lot about a person just by looking at a room as it’s lived in.
The books were an eclectic lot; many modern novels but very little of the avant-garde, way-out stuff; a solid wedge of English and French classics, a shelf of biographies and a sprinkling of histories, mostly of Canada and, what was surprising, a scad of books on archaeology, mostly Middle-Eastern. It looked as though Clare Trinavant had a mind of her own.
I left the books and drifted around the room, noting the odd pieces of pottery and statuary, most of which looked older than Methuselah; the animal photographs on the walls, mainly of Canadian animals, and the rack of rifles and shotguns in a glassed-in case. I peered at these curiously through the glass and saw that, although the guns appeared to be well kept, there was a film of dust on them. Then I looked at a photograph of a big brute of a brown bear and decided that, even with a telephoto lens, whoever had taken that shot had been too damn’ close.
She said from close behind me, ‘Looks a bit like you, don’t you think?’
I turned. ‘I’m not that big. He’d make six of me.’
She had changed her shirt and was wearing a well-cut pair of slacks that certainly hadn’t been bought off any shelf. She said, ‘I’ve just been in to see Jimmy. I think he’ll be all right.’
‘I didn’t hit him harder than necessary,’ I said. ‘Just enough to teach him manners.’ I waved my arm about the room. ‘Some shack!’
‘Boyd, you make me sick,’ she said coldly. ‘And you can get the hell out of here. You have a dirty mind if you think I’m shacked up with Jimmy Waystrand.’
‘Hey!’ I said. ‘You jump to an awful fast conclusion, Trinavant. All I meant was that this is a hell of a place you have here. I didn’t expect to find this in the woods, that’s all.’
Slowly the pink spots in her cheeks died away, and she said, ‘I’m sorry if I took you the wrong way. Maybe I’m a little jumpy right now, and if I am, you’re responsible, Boyd.’
‘No apology necessary, Trinavant.’
She began to giggle and it developed into a full-throated laugh. I joined in and we had an hysterical thirty seconds. At last she controlled herself. ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘That won’t do. You can’t call me Trinavant – you’d better make it Clare.’
‘I’m Bob,’ I said. ‘Hello, Clare.’
‘Hello, Bob.’
‘You know, I didn’t really mean to imply that Jimmy was anything to you,’ I said. ‘He isn’t man enough for you.’
She stopped smiling and, folding her arms, she regarded me for a long time. ‘Bob Boyd, I’ve never known another man who makes my hackles rise the way you do. If you think I judge a man by the way he behaves in a fight you’re dead wrong. The trouble with you is that you’ve got logopaedia – every time you open your mouth you put your foot in it. Now, for God’s sake, keep your mouth shut and get me a drink.’
I moved towards what looked like the drinks cabinet. ‘You shouldn’t steal your wisecracks from the Duke of Edinburgh,’ I said. ‘That’s verging on lèse majesté. What will you have?’
‘Scotch and water – fifty-fifty. You’ll find a good Scotch in there.’
Indeed it was a good Scotch! I lifted out the bottle of Islay Mist reverently and wondered how long ago it was since Hamish McDougall had seen Clare Trinavant. But I said nothing about that. Instead, I kept my big mouth shut as she had advised and poured the drinks.
As I handed her the glass she said, ‘How long have you been in the woods this trip?’
‘Nearly two weeks.’
‘How would you like a hot bath?’
‘Clare, for that you can have my soul,’ I said fervently. Lake water is damned cold and a man doesn’t bathe as often as he should when in the field.
She pointed. ‘Through that door – second door on the left. I’ve put towels out for you.’
I picked up my glass. ‘Mind if I take my drink?’
‘Not at all.’
The bathroom was a wonder to behold. Tiled in white and dark blue, you could have held a convention in there – if that was the kind of convention you had in mind. The bath was sunk into the floor and seemed as big as a swimming-pool, and the water poured steaming out of the faucet. And there was a plenitude of bath towels, each about an acre in extent.
As I lay soaking I thought about a number of things. I thought of the possible reason why Clare Trinavant should bring up the name of Howard Matterson when I brought up the subject of her marriage. I thought of the design of the labels of Scotch, especially on those from the island of Islay. I thought of the curve of Clare Trinavant’s neck as it rose from the collar of her shirt. I thought of a man I had never seen – Bull Matterson – and wondered what he was like in appearance. I thought of the tendril of hair behind Clare Trinavant’s ear.
None of these thoughts got me anywhere in particular, so I got out of the bath and finished the Scotch while I dried myself. As I dressed I became aware of music drifting through the cabin – some cabin! – which drowned out the distant throbbing of a diesel generator, and when I got back to Clare I found her sitting on the floor listening to the last movement of Sibelius’s First Symphony.
She waved me to the drinks cabinet and held up an empty glass, so I gave us both a refill and we sat quietly until the music came to an end. She shivered slightly and pointed to the moonlit view down the valley. ‘I always think the music is describing this.’
‘Finland has pretty much the same scenery as Canada,’ I said. ‘Woods and lakes.’
One eyebrow lifted. ‘Not only a backwoods cavalier, but an educated one.’
I grinned at her. ‘I’ve had a college education, too.’
She coloured a little and said quietly, ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It was bitchy, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s all right.’ I waved my hand. ‘What made you build here?’
‘As your mysterious informant has probably told you, I was brought up around here. Uncle John left me this land. I love it, so I built here.’ She paused. ‘And, since you’re so well informed, you probably know that he wasn’t really my uncle.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I have only one criticism. Your rifles and shotguns need cleaning more often.’
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Desmond Bagley
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Триллеры
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 17.04.2024
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О книге: Action thriller by the classic adventure writer set in British Columbia.Bob Boyd is a geologist, as resilient as the British Columbia timber country where he works for the powerful Matterson Corporation. But his real name and his past are mysteries – wiped out by the accident that nearly killed him. Then Boyd reads a name that opens a door in his memory: Trinavant – and discovers that Bull Matterson and his son will do almost anything to keep the Trinavant family forgotten forever…