High Stand Read online

  She turned then, very abruptly and without another word, and after she’d gone I went back to my desk and sat there for a moment thinking about Halliday, trying to imagine what must have been going on in his mind as he’d waited here in my office for the girl to type the codicil. He hadn’t talked. He’d just sat there, his grey eyes staring out to the high ridge of the downs, quite expressionless, so that I had had the feeling he was mentally far away.

  It was about an hour later that a freelance journalist based in Brighton phoned me to enquire whether it was true Tom Halliday had left his wife. He wouldn’t say where he had picked up the information, only that it was another woman, and he then suggested that Halliday had ‘gone walkabout’ did I have any information on that? I said no, I had not; that in fact I had seen Mr Halliday as recently as last Tuesday and there had been nothing to suggest my client was going ‘walkabout’, as he put it. He then asked me a lot of questions, personal questions, mostly about money, which I refused to answer. Finally I put the phone down.

  I found that call very disturbing. For one thing, it was a reminder of how little I knew about Tom Halliday; I knew more about his father. But my main concern was the fact that a journalist was taking an interest in his movements; it suggested that there really was something seriously wrong. I must have smoked most of a full pipe while thinking about it. In the end, I put the thought that he might really have disappeared out of my mind and got on with the day’s work. I had been in Ditchling now three and a half years and in that time I had built up a thriving practice based largely on the precept that when it comes to Wills people want a solicitor who is of the locality and readily available, but not living in the same town and thus a part of their own community. Ditchling was perfect, being little more than a village and removed from the seaside towns of Eastbourne, Brighton and Worthing that were my main catchment area by the downland barrier. And now that I’d taken on a junior partner, my weekends were beginning to be my own. I had just bought my first boat, a junk-rigged Jester-type craft, and with it the dream of going trans-Atlantic had come one step nearer.

  Next day, Saturday, I was into Shoreham early, driving the long dock road out to the east harbour entrance where I had left my pram dinghy on a dirty patch of gravel among a litter of old rowing boats, rusting buoys and baulks of timber. The boat was over on the far side of the harbour on a borrowed mooring. There was still a lot to be done and I stayed the night on board so that I was there to give a hand when the moonlighting engineer arrived on the Sunday morning to install the single-pot diesel I’d finally bought in preference to an outboard motor. I worked with him for a couple of hours or so, then rowed over to the yacht club for a drink. There was some sort of race on that afternoon and the bar was fairly crowded. I found myself next to a man with one of the Sundays spread out in front of him; that was how I heard about it - not from Miriam or the police or any official communication, but haphazardly, peering at a headline over another man’s shoulder:

  GOLD MINE OWNER DISAPPEARS

  MILLIONAIRE’S CHEQUES BOUNCE

  ‘COULD BE SUICIDE’ SAYS SON.

  Good God! I must have said it aloud, for the man looked up. ‘Do you know him?’ And when I nodded, he pushed the paper across to me. ‘Help yourself, I’ve finished with it. But a man with a gold mine in the Yukon — you’d think he’d have more sense than to let it run through his fingers, all of it, so that he’s dead broke.’ He turned the pages, laying the paper flat where a large headline screamed across two pages: GOLDEN PLAYBOY COMES TO GRIEF - His Three Loves- Beautiful Cars — Beautiful Women — and Speed. The full story of the ‘lush life’ of Thomas Francis Halliday and his ‘Klondike Gold’ was carried over from the front page to almost two full inside pages. The three investigative journalists involved had clearly been putting in a lot of overtime, for it was a very full, very colourful account of the life of a gold-rich playboy, and it made good reading, the sort of life-style that half the commuters in the country would give their souls for.

  Poor Miriam! They had treated her kindly, but it was hard all the same: names, and sometimes the addresses, of several of the girls who had claimed his attentions, including one he had talked to in a club bar in Brighton on the Tuesday evening. A reference to drugs, too, and how he had gone into silver mining in Peru and failed. But the main story was his disappearance, speculation as to the reasons for it and whether he was alive or dead. Somebody answering his description had taken the late night Townsend-Thoresen ferry from Felixstowe to Rotterdam on the Wednesday. He was also thought to have been seen at the Aust service station by the Severn Bridge. That was on Friday. There was a quote from a garage owner at Polegate and a builder at Lewes, both of whom had presented cheques on a joint account signed by Miriam and had been told to refer to drawer. The Hallidays’ bank manager had, of course, refused to comment. The journalists had then gone on to discuss the possibility of suicide and the article finished up with a quote from his doctor - ‘Nothing organically wrong with him, nothing at all.’

  ‘Well, what do you make of it?’ the owner of the paper asked as I folded it up.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘can’t discuss it.’ I was thinking of Miriam alone in that big flint house below the downs surrounded by the relics of a long-dead gold rush. I couldn’t remember whether her family were still in Cambridge, even whether they were alive and she had someone to fall back on. I knew, in fact, less about her than I had known about her husband, only that I felt impelled to see her and make sure she was all right. Those newspapermen, they would have been on to her, and now there would be others, the phone constantly ringing.

  I thanked the man, tucked the paper under my arm and pushed my way out of the crowded bar, running down to my pram dinghy and rowing fast across the harbour to where I had left my car. In Brighton I stopped at a callbox and rang the Halliday home. There was no answer. It crossed my mind then that perhaps somebody had found the body, in which case it would have to be identified. I drove out past the marina, taking the coast road through Rortingdean and Peace-haven and up by Westdean Forest above the Cuckmere.

  It was just after twelve-thirty- when I reached the old flint farmhouse nestled into a hollow of the downs not far from the Long Man. Being the weekend, there was no one about and the place had a sleepy look, cows grazing in a paddock of lush grass and everything very still in the leaf} shadow of Bull’s Wood. Miriam opened the door to me herself, her face pale and set. ‘Philip!’ She didn’t smile. She just fell into my arms, clutching me tight for a moment. ‘God! I thought you were another reporter. I’ve had two this morning and the phone … You’ve seen that paper, have you?’

  ‘That’s why I came.’

  ‘They must have got it from the police. I notified the police the day after I saw you — Saturday.’ She shook herself free. ‘I didn’t realize you could cause such a stir just by walking away from everything. That’s what he’s done, isn’t it? Just walked out and left other people to pick up the pieces. Unless he’s killed himself. D’you think he’s killed himself?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  But she didn’t seem to hear me. ‘I should have got it out of him,’ she went on quickly. ‘I knew there was something … But to go off like that — without a word. Why?’ And she repeated it, her voice breaking and a little wild. ‘Why, for God’s sake why?’

  ‘Would you like to have lunch somewhere?’ I thought it might relax her a little to be away from the house.

  She nodded, and when she was in the car and we were out on the Lewes road, she said, ‘We had a row. No, not a row. That needs two. He just exploded, a nervous, end-of-his-tether son of eruption. I thought he was going to have a heart attack, his face all suffused, his hands trembling. He was quite overwrought, so I didn’t press him.’ And she added slowly, ‘Perhaps I should have, but at the time…’ She left it at that. ‘Did you come straight from your boat? I heard it was finished. You never asked us to the launching.’

  ‘We just dumped it in the water.’


  I took her to the Tiger Inn, and because I knew she wanted to be taken out of herself I talked to her about the boat, all my plans. It wasn’t until we had sat down to eat that we got back to the subject of Tom Halliday, and it was she who insisted on talking about him - not about what had happened, but about the man himself. Quite why she decided to tell me about him I’m not sure. Perhaps it was an attempt to explain, even justify, his action to herself. Whatever the reason, once she had started the words seemed to pour out of her, so that I had the feeling she couldn’t help herself, and at the end of it I was just thankful I hadn’t been born with a gold mine round my neck.

  He had had everything, the whole world handed to him on a plate. I could see him now, sitting at the end of the table, the little brushed-up moustache picked out in the candle light, his high cheekbones flushed pink as the port made its vintage ruby way round the table, telling the story once again of how his father had gone out to the Klondike as a young man, up the White Pass from Skagway all the way to Dawson, then along something called the Dalton Trail where the wild man who had hacked it out of the bush rode shotgun to keep out intruders who hadn’t paid his toll fee. Somewhere along that trail, or else in Dawson, Josh Halliday, who was the son of an insurance man in San Francisco, was sold that mine. ‘Lucky’ Carlos Despera. That was the name of the man who sold it to him, and the name of the mine was Ice Cold Creek. I remembered the names because of the way Tom had rolled them off his tongue, laughing as he did so - the Noisy Range, too. Then he was telling how his father had packed in to that mine and found it high up near a great mountain mass that roared with the sound of glaciers on the move.

  ‘Tom was like a little boy.’ Miriam was leaning forward then, her elbows on the table, her chin resting on her hands, which were closed fists, the knuckles white, her eyes staring at nothing. ‘A brash show-off. It was part of the attraction, that extraordinary charisma of his, all his energy - and he was tireless, quite tireless, bubbling over with vitality -all of it with no outlet. No positive, real, constructive outlet.’

  I could see him, so full of himself - and that picture of his father. The mine was a dud, of course. ‘Josh knew that as soon as he’d packed in to the white glacial heart of the mountain. There were men working claims lower down the creek, just managing to pan enough to give them hope, and they all said the upper end of Ice Cold Creek was worked out, gone, finished.’ And still, in desperation, the poor devil had gone on shovelling rock, working his guts out while the food lasted and he still had a few dollars left. Then, the day he decided to pull out - that was probably apocryphal, but when his money was just about gone - suddenly he struck lucky. ‘Not just ordinary pay dirt, but small nuggets of gold.’ And the way Tom said it, you could see the stuff there in the calloused hand, the mouth open in a great cry, the feet pounding to the excited, boisterous jig of joy.

  ‘Cars, speedboats, Le Mans, the RAC - aircraft, too. He flew his own plane. And women. I didn’t understand that at first. His need of women. I think he’d have liked to bed every one of them that took his fancy. Just to prove something. That he was a man, I suppose.’ She gave a quick shake of her head, smiling. ‘He wasn’t homosexual - I don’t mean that. But when you’ve got a pot of gold up there in the Yukon, where nobody can see it… It’s different for you, Philip. You can take people along to your office and say, Look, this is what I’ve done with my life. I’ve built a practice. You are possessed of an expertise that brings people to you, for your advice, for your help. But Tom had nothing like that.’

  ‘The factory,’ I said.

  She shrugged. ‘It wasn’t his. It was Martin’s. Martin ran it. The thing was his idea. Tom paid for it, that’s all. Just as he paid for his cars, his plane, a speedboat that could flash him around the Royal Yacht at Cowes and into an occasional picture in one of the glamour mags. But nothing of his own, nothing he had created himself. It all came from the mine, everything he possessed. Periodically he’d go out there. I don’t know why. He had an excellent manager. Jonny Epinard. Absolutely straight. But every so often he’d take off for the Yukon. Sometimes I thought it was just to make sure it was still there, that it was real.’

  She shook her head slowly. ‘I wondered myself sometimes. All those years — through his father’s lifetime, and now his — all that time and steadily yielding its golden harvest, keeping the Hallidays in the manner to which …’ She laughed, a mocking sound. ‘But, oh, the damage a thing like that can do to an insecure youngster! He went out to South America once, did he tell you?’

  I shook my head and she smiled. ‘Peru. He bought a silver mine ten thousand feet up in the Andes, just above Cajamarca where Pizarro murdered the Inca King’s helpless retinue. But he didn’t have Pizarro’s luck. He was there several years, the mine steadily yielding less and less, and when it finally petered out he came home. That was the only time he ever made a serious attempt to build an empire of his own. It was just toys after that, playthings. All he got out of Peru was a sense of failure that increased his already well-developed inferiority complex — and a bitch of a wife to make sure he never forgot it. A termagant. That’s Brian’s view of her, not mine. I never met the woman, thank God. She was a mestizo. Mixed Spanish and native Indian blood. She claimed descent from an Inca chieftain slaughtered by the Conquistadors. That’s why Brian is the way he is, why he looks a little strange - those ears, the nose, those broad cheekbones. And his temperament, his hot aggressive, solemn manner, the lightning changes of mood…’ She shrugged. ‘A little of his father - the machismo, the panache, the determination to project himself as an image, a figment of his own imagination if you like.’ She sighed, a deep breath. ‘But Tom was still a wonderful person to be with. All that vitality, and now and then the stars in my lap like a gift from heaven. He plucked them out of the night in the early hours, made me feel I was riding the world — a whirlwind. Sometimes. At others …’ The corners of her lips flickered, a glint of amusement at her own ingenuousness. ‘At other times …’ She turned, her face to the window, her eyes towards the downs humped above the houses and the sea. ‘I could have killed him for his brazen stupidity, his insensitivity, his total involvement in himself -his bloody-minded selfishness. His egotism. Christ! what a bastard!’

  She laughed. ‘Then — when I thought I couldn’t stand it any longer’ — she was shaking her head, as though in wonder at her own behaviour - ‘then there’d be flowers, champagne, and the man, that mercurial, impossible man at my feet, the stars in my lap again.’ She leaned forward, her large eyes suddenly staring at me, almost imploring. ‘Do you understand, Philip? He was so alive, so wonderful to be with. When he was on top of the world.’ I couldn’t help noticing that she was talking about him in the past tense, and she went on, still in a rush of words, ‘Then, when he’d taken too much — flown too high - the reaction would set in, everything crashing down — from the stars to despair in one quick devilish leap — Christian’s Slough of Despond.

  ‘My God! Living with a man like that, knowing it was that bitch Martina who’d introduced him to the stuff, and nothing I could do about it. He wouldn’t listen. Said he’d been taking coke off and on ever since he’d gone to South America in his early twenties. At times he even had a little mini-spoon, silver-gilt I think, hung round his neck on a thin golden chain. All part of the mystique. Oh, I know, I shouldn’t be telling you all this, but I’ve got to talk to somebody about him.’ And she went on, ‘Cocaine has always been an elitist drug, and it’s not really addictive. Least, that’s what he said, not the good stuff. He had me try it once or twice and I didn’t get hooked. But the way he’s been taking it recently … I don’t know, perhaps he’d reached the age when he found himself looking over the edge and not liking what he saw, his sexual prowess declining, his competitive spirit flagging. Even his interest in cars had lessened and he hadn’t visited Martin at die factory for ages, the mine taking up more and more of his time, his temper short, his face strained, that little stutter of his suddenly noticeabl
e, and sometimes at night I’d hear him muttering to himself. Do you think he’s had a nervous breakdown?’

  But I had only seen him a couple of times in the past year and I had had no idea he took drugs until I had read the piece in that Sunday paper. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure how people behave on the verge of a nervous breakdown.’

  ‘No, nor do I. I can only guess. And his doctor didn’t say anything about a breakdown - I phoned him last night. He said he thought his nerves were on edge, that he needed a rest. From what? That’s what I said. What the hell did Tom need a rest from? And he repeated what he’d written in his report — get him out somewhere on his own to lie in the sun, swim, do nothing and take the minimum of food - healthy, natural food - no alcohol. I don’t think Tom had told him about taking cocaine, but he probably guessed. He was overfed, he said, depleted, suffering from nervous exhaustion.’

  I didn’t understand it either, and I said so - a man with all the money in the world, a lovely wife, a beautiful home, cars, interests, a man who’d never had to work in his life… he’d no bloody right to be suffering from nervous exhaustion.

  ‘It’s all very well for you,’ she went on. ‘You’re so solid, so dependable.’ I could have slapped her face the way she had been talking about her husband, but she went on, the words still tumbling out of her - Tom was just a child. A spoilt child, yes. But something more. A sort of real life Peter Pan, with all that creature’s selfishness, and fascination.’ She nodded, her hair glistening reddish in the sunlight. ‘Yes, that’s it — a fair simile — and if Peter Pan had suddenly found himself growing up…’ She sat for a while, her head bowed, thinking about it. ‘But to take off like that, without a word - to me, to anyone. He told nobody, nobody at all. He’s just thrown off everybody, his whole life - like a snake discarding its old skin…’ And suddenly she was crying, her shoulders shaking, but no sound coming.