by Dick Francis
‘Yes,’ I agreed, and felt a certain amount of awe at the energy and organisation put into the enterprise.
‘So when the trainer ratted we set a few traps with his help and caught Horfitz with his pants down, so to speak. He got warned off for life and swore to kill his trainer, which he hasn’t done so far. The trainer was warned off for three years with a severe caution, but he got his licence back two years ago. Part of the bargain. So he’s in business again in a small way but we keep his runners under a microscope, checking their passports every time they run. We’re a lot hotter at checking passports randomly all over the place now, as of course you know.’
I nodded.
Then Millington’s jaw literally dropped. I looked at the classic sign of astonishment and said, ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Gawd,’ he said. ‘What a turn up. Can you believe it? Paul Shackle-bury, that murdered stable lad, he was working for Horfitz’s old trainer.’
I left Millington frowning with concentration over a replenished pint while he tried to work out the significance of Horfitz’s old trainer employing a lad who was murdered for knowing too much about Filmer. What had Paul Shacklebury known, Millington demanded rhetorically for the hundredth time. And, more to the minute, what was in the briefcase, and why was Horfitz giving it to Filmer?
‘Work on the sweating messenger,’ I suggested, getting up to go. ‘He might crack open like the trainer. You never know.’
‘Maybe we will,’ Millington said. ‘And Tor … look out for yourself on the train.’
He could be quite human sometimes, I thought.
I flew to Ottawa the next day and gave in to temptation at Heathrow to the extent of changing my ticket from knees-against-chest economy to full-stretch-out first class. I also asked the Ottawa taxi driver who took me into the city from the airport to find me a decent hotel; he cast a rapid eye over my clothes and the new suitcase and said the Four Seasons should suit.
It suited. They gave me a small pleasant suite and I telephoned straight away to the number I’d been given for Bill Baudelaire. He answered himself at the first ring, rather to my surprise, and said yes, he’d had a telex to confirm I was on my way. He had a bass voice with a lot of timbre even over the wires and was softly Canadian in accent.
He asked where I would be in an hour and said he would come around then to brief me on the matter in hand, and I gathered from his circumspect sentences that he wasn’t alone and didn’t want to be understood. Just like home, I thought comfortably, and unpacked a few things, and showered off the journey and awaited events.
Outside, the deepening orange of the autumn sunshine was turning the green copper roofs of the turreted stone government buildings to a transient shimmering gold, and I reflected, watching from the windows, that I’d much liked this graceful city when I’d been here before. I was filled with a serene sense of peace and contentment, which I remembered a few times in the days lying ahead.
Bill Baudelaire came when the sky had grown dark and I’d switched on the lights, and he looked round the suite with quizzical eyebrows.
‘I’m glad to see old Val has staked you to rooms befitting a rich young owner.’
I smiled and didn’t enlighten him. He’d shaken my hand when I opened the door to him and looked me quickly, piercingly up and down in the way of those used to assessing strangers instantly and with no inhibitions about letting them know it.
I saw a man of plain looks but positive charm, a solid man much younger than the Brigadier, maybe forty, with reddish hair, pale blue eyes and pale skin pitted by the scars of old acne. Once seen, I thought, difficult to forget.
He was wearing a dark grey business suit with a cream shirt and a red tie out of step with his hair, and I wondered if he were colour-blind or simply liked the effect.
He walked straight across the sitting room, sat in the armchair nearest to the telephone and picked up the receiver.
‘Room service?’ he said. ‘Please send up as soon as possible a bottle of vodka and … er …’ He raised his eyebrows in my direction, in invitation.
‘Wine,’ I said. ‘Red. Bordeaux preferably.’
Bill Baudelaire repeated my request with a ceiling price and disconnected.
‘You can put the drinks on your expense sheet and I’ll initial it,’ he said. ‘You do have an expense sheet, I suppose?’
‘I do in England.’
‘Then start one here, of course. How are you paying the hotel bills?’
‘By credit card. My own.’
‘Is that usual? Never mind. You give all the bills to me when you’ve paid them, along with your expense sheet, and Val and I will deal with it.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. Val would have a fit, I thought, but then on second thoughts, no he probably wouldn’t. He would pay me the agreed budget; fair was fair.
‘Sit down,’ Bill Baudelaire said, and I sat opposite him in another armchair, crossing one knee over the other. The room seemed hot to me with the central heating, and I wasn’t wearing a jacket. He considered me for a while, his brow furrowing with seeming uncertainty.
‘How old are you?’ he said abruptly.
‘Twenty-nine.’
‘Val said you were experienced.’ It wasn’t exactly a question, nor a matter of disbelief.
‘I’ve worked for him for three years.’
‘He said you would look this part … and you do.’ He sounded more puzzled than pleased, though. ‘You seem so polished … I suppose it’s not what I expected.’
I said, ‘If you saw me in the cheaper sections of a racecourse, you would think I’d been born there, too.’
His face lightened into a smile. ‘Right, then. I’ll accept that. Well, I’ve brought you a whole lot of papers.’ He glanced at the large envelope that he had put on the table beside the telephone. ‘Details about the train and about some of the people who’ll be on it, and details about the horses and the arrangements for those. This has all been an enormous undertaking. Everyone has worked very hard on it. It’s essential that it retains a good, substantial, untarnished image from start to finish. We’re hoping for increased world-wide awareness of Canadian racing. Although we do of course hit world headlines with the Queen’s Plate in June or July, we want to draw more international horses here. We want to put our programmes more on the map. Canada’s a great country. We want to maximise our impact on the international racing circuit.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do understand.’ I hesitated. ‘Do you have a public relations firm working on it?’
‘What? Why do you ask? Yes, we do, as a matter of fact. What difference does it make?’
‘None, really. Will they have a representative on the train?’
‘To minimise negative incidents? No, not unless …’ he stopped and listened to what he’d said. ‘I’m using their jargon, damn it. I’ll watch that. So easy to repeat what they say.’
A knock on the door announced the drinks in charge of an ultra-polite slow-moving waiter who knew where to find ice and mixers in the room’s own refrigerator. The waiter took his deliberate time over uncorking the wine, and Bill Baudelaire, stifling impatience, said we would do the pouring ourselves. When the tortoise waiter had gone he gestured to me to help myself, and on his own account fixed a lengthy splash of vodka over a tumblerful of cubes.
He had suggested to the Brigadier that I should meet him first here in Ottawa, as he had business in that city which couldn’t be postponed. It would also, they both thought, be more securely private, as everyone going on the train in the normal way would be collecting in Toronto.
‘You and I,’ Bill Baudelaire said over his vodka, ‘will fly to Toronto tomorrow evening on separate planes, after you’ve spent the day absorbing all the material I’ve brought you and asking any questions that arise. I propose to drop by your sitting-room here again at two o’clock for a final briefing.’
‘Will I be able to get in touch with you fairly easily after tomorrow?’ I asked. ‘I’d like to be able to
.’
‘Yes, indeed. I’m not going on the train myself, as of course you know, but I’ll be at Winnipeg for the races there, and at Vancouver. And at Toronto, of course. I’ve outlined everything. You’ll find it in the package. We can’t really discuss anything properly until you’ve read it.’
‘All right.’
‘There’s one unwelcome piece of news, however, that isn’t in there because I heard it too late to include. It seems Julius Filmer has bought a share in one of the horses travelling on the train. The partnership was registered today and I was told just now by telephone. The Ontario Racing Commission is deeply concerned, but we can’t do anything about it. No regulations have been broken. They won’t let people who’ve been convicted of felonies such as arson, fraud or illegal gambling own horses, but Filmer hasn’t been convicted of anything.’
‘Which horse?’ I said.
‘Which horse? Laurentide Ice. Quite useful. You can read about it in there.’ He nodded to the package. ‘The problem is that we made a rule that only owners could go along to the horse car to see the horses. We couldn’t have everyone tramping about there, both for security reasons and for preventing the animals being upset. We thought the only comfort left to us about Filmer’s being on the train was that he wouldn’t have access to the horse car, and now he will.’
‘Awkward.’
‘Infuriating.’ He refilled his glass with the suppressed violence of his frustration. ‘Why for God’s sake couldn’t that goddam crook have kept his snotty nose out. He’s trouble. We all know it. He’s planning something. He’ll ruin the whole thing. He practically said as much.’ He looked me over and shook his head. ‘No offence to you, but how are you going to stop him?’
‘It depends what needs to be stopped.’
His face lightened suddenly to a smile as before. ‘Yes, all right, we’ll wait and see. Val said you don’t miss things. Let’s hope he’s right.’
He went away after a while and with a great deal of interest I opened the package and found it absolutely fascinating from start to finish.
‘The Great Transcontinental Mystery Race Train’, as emblazoned in red on the gold cover of the glossy prospectus, had indeed entailed an enormous amount of organisation. Briefly, the enterprise offered to the racehorse owners of the world a chance to race a horse in Toronto, to go by train to Winnipeg, and race a horse there, to stop for two nights at a hotel high in the Rockies, and to continue by train to Vancouver, where they might again race a horse. There was accommodation for eleven horses on the train, and for forty-eight human V.I.P. passengers.
At each of Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver there would be overnight stays in top-class hotels. Transport from train to hotels to races and back to the train was also included as required. The entire trip would last from lunch at Toronto races on the Saturday, to the end of the special race day at Vancouver ten days later.
On the train there would be special sleeping cars, a special dining car, two private chefs and a load of good wine. People who owned their own private rail cars could, as in the past, apply for them to be joined to the train.
Every possible extra luxury would be available if requested in advance, and in addition, for entertainment along the way, an intriguing mystery would be enacted on board and at the stop-overs, which passengers would be invited to solve.
I winced a shade at that last piece of information: keeping eyes on Filmer would be hard enough anyhow without all sorts of imaginary mayhem going on around him. He himself was mystery enough.
Special races, I read, had been introduced into the regular programmes at Woodbine racecourse, Toronto, at Assiniboia Downs, Winnipeg and at Exhibition Park, Vancouver. The races had been framed to be ultra-attractive to the paying public, with magnificent prize money to please the owners. The owners of the horses and indeed all the train passengers would be given V.I.P. treatment at all the racecourses, including lunch with the presidents.
It wasn’t to be expected that owners would want to run the horses on the train three times in so short a span. Any owner was free to run a horse just once. Any owner (or any other passenger on the train) was free to bring any others of his horses to Toronto, Winnipeg or Vancouver by road or by air to run in the special races. The trip was to be a lighthearted junket for the visitors, a celebration of racing in Canada.
In smaller print after all that trumpeting came the information that accommodation was available also for one groom for each horse. If owners wanted space for extra attendants, would they please specify early. Grooms and other attendants would have their own dining and sleeping cars and their own separate entertainments.
Stabling had been reserved at Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver for the horses going by train, and they would be able to exercise normally at all three places. In addition, during the passengers’ visit to the mountains, the horses would be stabled and exercised in Calgary. The good care of the horses was of prime importance, and a veterinarian would be at once helicoptered to the train if his services should become necessary between scheduled stops.
Next in the package was a pencilled note from Bill Baudelaire:
All eleven horse places were sold out within two weeks of the first major announcement.
All forty-eight V.I.P. passenger places were sold within a month.
There are dozens of entries for the special races.
This is going to be a success!
After that came a list of the eleven horses, with past form, followed by a list of their owners, with nationalities. Three owners from England (including Filmer), one from Australia, three from the United States and five from Canada (including Filmer’s partner).
The owners, with husbands, wives, family and friends, had taken up twenty-seven of the forty-eight passenger places. Four of the remaining twenty-one places had also been taken by well-known Canadian owners (identified by a star against their names), and Bill Baudelaire, in a note pencilled at the bottom of this passenger list had put, ‘Splendid response from our appeal to our owners to support the project!’
There were no trainers mentioned on the passenger list, and in fact I later learned that the trainers were making their own way by air as usual to Winnipeg and Vancouver, presumably because the train trip was too time-consuming and expensive.
Next in the package came a bunch of hand-outs from the three racecourses, from the Canadian railway company and from the four hotels, all shiny pamphlets extolling their individual excellencies. Finally, a fat brochure with good colour plates put together by the travel organisers in charge of getting the show on the railroad, a job which seemed well within their powers since they apparently also arranged safaris to outer deserts, treks to the Poles and tours to anywhere anyone cared to go.
They also staged mysteries as entertainments; evenings, weekends, moving or stationary. They were experts from much practice.
For the Great Transcontinental Mystery Race Train, they said, they had arranged something extra-special. ‘A mystery that will grab you by the throat. A stunning experience. All around you the story will unfold. Clues will appear. BE ON YOUR GUARD.’
Oh great, I thought wryly. But they hadn’t finished. There was a parting shot.
‘BEWARE! MANY PEOPLE ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM.’
CHAPTER FOUR
‘How can they stage a play on a train?’ I asked Bill Baudelaire the next day. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it would work.’
‘Mysteries are very popular in Canada. Very fashionable,’ he said, ‘and they don’t exactly stage a play. Some of the passengers will be actors and they will make the story evolve. I went to a dinner party … a mystery dinner party … not long ago, and some of the guests were actors, and before we knew where we were we were all caught up in a string of events, just as if it were real. Quite amazing. I went because my wife wanted to. I didn’t think I would enjoy it in the least, but I did.’
‘Some of the passengers …’ I repeated slowly. ‘Do you know which ones?’
‘No, I d
on’t,’ he said, more cheerfully than I liked. ‘That’s part of the fun for everyone, trying to spot the actors.’
I liked it less and less.
‘And of course the actors may be hiding among the other lot of passengers until their turn to appear comes.’
‘What other lot of passengers?’ I said blankly.
‘The racegoers.’ He looked at my face. ‘Doesn’t it say anything about them in the package?’
‘No, it doesn’t.’
‘Ah.’ He reflected briefly. ‘Well, in order to make the trip economically viable, the rail company said we should add our own party onto the regular train which sets off every day from Toronto to Vancouver, which is called the Canadian. We didn’t want to do that because it would have meant we couldn’t stop the train for two nights in Winnipeg and again for the mountains, and although the carriages could be unhitched and left in a siding, we’d be faced with security problems. But our own special train was proving extremely, almost impossibly, expensive. So we advertised a separate excursion … a racegoing trip … and now we have our own train. But it has been expanded, with three or four more sleeping cars, another dining car, and a dayniter or two according to how many tickets they sell in the end. We had an enormous response from people who didn’t want to pay what the owners are paying but would like to go to the races across Canada on vacation. They are buying their tickets for the train at the normal fare and making their own arrangements at the stops … and we call these passengers the racegoers, for convenience.’