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 quartercolumn 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.