by Dick Francis
I sighed. I supposed it made sense. ‘What’s a dayniter?’ I said.
‘A car with reclining seats, not bedrooms.’
‘And how many people altogether will be travelling?’
‘Difficult to say. Start with forty-eight owners … we call them owners to distinguish them from the racegoers … and the grooms. Then the actors and the people from the travel company. Then the train crew and stewards, waiters, chefs and so on. With all the racegoers … well, perhaps about two hundred people altogether. We won’t know until we start. Probably not then, unless we actually count.’
I could get lost among two hundred more easily than among forty-eight, I thought. Perhaps it might not be too bad. Yet the owners would be looking for actors … for people who weren’t what they seemed.
‘You asked about contact,’ Bill Baudelaire said.
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve discussed it with some of our Jockey Club, and we think you’ll simply have to telephone us from the stops.’
I said with some alarm, ‘How many of your Jockey Club know I’m going on the train?’
He looked surprised. ‘I suppose everyone in the executive office knows we’ll have a man in place. They don’t know exactly who. Not by name. Not yet. Not until I’d met you and approved. They don’t and won’t know what you look like.’
‘Would you please not tell them my name,’ I said.
He was half bewildered, half affronted. ‘But our Jockey Club are sensible men. Discreet.’
‘Information leaks,’ I said.
He looked at me broodingly, vodka and ice cubes tinkling in a fresh glass. ‘Are you serious?’ he said.
‘Yes, indeed.’
His brow wrinkled. ‘I’m afraid I may have mentioned your name to one or two. But I will impress on them not to repeat it.’
It was too late, I supposed, for much else. Perhaps I was getting too obsessed with secrecy. Still …
‘I’d rather not telephone direct to the Jockey Club,’ I said.
‘Couldn’t I leave messages where only you will get them? Like your own home?’
His face melted into an almost boyish grin. ‘I have three teenage daughters and a busy wife. The receiver is almost never in the cradle.’ He thought briefly, then wrote a number on a sheet of a small notepad and gave it to me.
‘Use this one,’ he said. ‘It’s my mother’s number. She’s always there. She’s not well and spends a good deal of time in bed. But her brains are intact. She’s quick-witted. And because she’s ill, if she calls me at the office she gets put straight through to me or else she gets told where to find me. If you give her a message, it will reach me personally with minimum delay. Will that do?’
‘Yes, fine,’ I said, and kept my doubts hidden. Carrier pigeons, I thought, might be better.
‘Anything else?’ he asked.
‘Yes … do you think you could ask Laurentide Ice’s owner why he sold a half-share to Filmer?’
‘It’s a she. I’ll enquire.’ He seemed to have hesitations in his mind but he didn’t explain them. ‘Is that all?’ he said.
‘My ticket?’
‘Oh yes. The travel company, Merry & Co, they’ll have it. They’re still sorting out who’s to sleep where, since we’ve added you in. We’ll have to tell them your name, of course, but all we’ve said so far is that we absolutely have to have another ticket and even if it looked impossible it would have to be done. They’ll bring your ticket to Union Station in Toronto on Sunday morning and you can pick it up there. All the owners are picking theirs up then.’
‘All right.’
He stood up to go. ‘Well … bon voyage,’ he said, and after a short pause added, ‘Perhaps he won’t try anything.’
‘Hope not.’
He nodded, shook my hand, finished the last of his vodka at a gulp and left me alone with my thoughts.
The first of those was that if I were going across a whole continent by train I might as well start out as I meant to go on. If there was a train from Ottawa to Toronto I would take it instead of flying.
There was indeed a train, the hotel confirmed. Leaving at five-fifty, arriving four hours later. Dinner on board.
Ottawa had shovelled its centre-of-town railway station under a rug, so to speak, as if railways should be kept out of sight like the lower orders, and built a great new station several miles away from anywhere useful. The station itself, however, proved a delight, a vast airy tent of glass set among trees with the sun flooding in with afternoon light and throwing angular shadows on the shiny black floor.
People waiting for the train had put their luggage down in a line and gone to sit on the seats along the glass walls, and thinking it a most civilised arrangement I put my suitcase at the rear of the queue and found myself a seat also. Filmer or not, I thought, I was definitely enjoying myself.
Dinner on the train was arranged as in aeroplanes with several stewards in shirtsleeves and deep yellow waistcoats rolling first a drinks trolley, then a food trolley down the centre aisle, serving to right and left as they went. I watched them idly for quite a long time, and when they’d gone past me I couldn’t remember their faces. I drank French wine as the daylight faded across the flying landscape and ate a better-than-many-airlines dinner after dark, and thought about chameleons: and at Toronto I took a cab and booked into another in the chain of the Four Seasons hotels, as I had told Bill Baudelaire I would.
In the morning, a few hundred thoughts later, I followed the hotel porter’s directions and walked to the offices of the travel organisers, Merry & Co, as given in their brochure.
The street-level entrance was unimposing, the building deceptively small, but inside there seemed to be acres of space all brightly lit, with pale carpeting, blond woods and an air of absolute calm. There were some green plants, a sofa or two and a great many desks behind which quiet unhurried conversations seemed to be going on at a dozen telephones. All the telephonists faced the centre of the huge room, looking out and not at the walls.
I walked to one desk whose occupant wasn’t actually speaking on the wire, a purposeful looking man with a beard who was cleaning his nails.
‘Help you?’ he asked economically.
I said I was looking for the person organising the race train.
‘Oh yes. Over there. Third desk along.’
I thanked him. The third desk along over there was unoccupied.
‘She’ll be back in a minute,’ comforted the second desk along. ‘Sit down if you like.’
There were chairs, presumably for clients, on the near sides of the desks. Comfortable chairs, clients for the pampering of, I thought vaguely, sitting in one.
The empty desk had a piece of engraved plastic on it announcing its absent owner’s name: Nell. A quiet voice behind me said, ‘Can I help you?’ and I stood up politely and said, ‘Yes, please.’
She had fair hair, grey eyes, a sort of clean look with a dust of freckles, but she was not as young, I thought, as her immediate impression, which was about eighteen.
‘I came about the train,’ I said.
‘Yes. Could you possibly compress it into five minutes? There’s such a lot still to arrange.’ She walked round to the back of her desk and sat, looking down at an array of list upon list.
‘My name is Tor Kelsey,’ I began.
Her head lifted fast. ‘Really? The Jockey Club told us your name this morning. Well, we’ve put you in because Bill Baudelaire said he’d cancel the whole production if we didn’t.’ The unemphatic grey eyes assessed me, not exactly showing that she didn’t think the person she saw to be worth the fuss, but pretty near. ‘It’s the dining car that’s the trouble,’ she said. ‘There are only forty-eight places. We have to have everyone seated at the same time because the mystery is acted before and after meals, and two or three of those places are taken by actors. Or are supposed to be, only now there isn’t room for them either, as my boss sold too many tickets to late applicants, and you are actually number forty-nine.
’ She stopped briefly. ‘I suppose that’s our worry, not yours. We’ve given you a roomette for sleeping, and Bill Baudelaire says anything you ask for will we please let you have. We said what would you ask for and he didn’t know. Maddeningly unhelpful. Do you yourself know what you want?’
‘I’d like to know who the actors are, and the story they’re going to enact.’
‘No, we can’t do that. It’ll spoil it for you. We never tell the passengers anything.’
‘Did Bill Baudelaire tell you,’ I asked, ‘why he so particularly wanted me on the train?’
‘Not really.’ She frowned slightly. ‘I didn’t give it much thought, I’ve so much else to see to. He simply insisted we take you, and since the Jockey Club are our clients, we do what the client asks.’
‘Are you going on the train?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I am. There has to be someone from the company to sort out the crises.’
‘And how good are you at secrets?’
‘I keep half a dozen before breakfast every day.’
Her telephone rang quietly and she answered it in a quiet voice, adding her murmur to the hum of other murmurs all round the room. I realised that the quiet was a deliberate policy, as otherwise they would all have been shouting at the tops of their lungs and not hearing a word their callers said.
‘Yes,’ she was saying. ‘Out at Mimico before ten. Four dozen, yes. Load them into the special dining car. Right. Good.’ She put the phone down and without pause said to me, ‘What secret do you want kept?’
‘That I’m employed by the Jockey Club … to deal with crises.’
‘Oh.’ It was a long sound of understanding. ‘All right, it’s a secret.’ She reflected briefly. ‘The actors are holding a run-through right now, not far away. I’ve got to see them some time today, so it may as well be at once. What do you want me to tell them?’
‘I’d like you to say that your company are putting me on the train as a trouble-spotter, because a whole train of racing people is a volatile mass looking for an excuse to explode. Say it’s a form of insurance.’
‘Which it is,’ she said.
‘Well, yes. And I also want to solve your problem of the forty-ninth seat. I want to go on the train as a waiter.’
She didn’t blink but nodded. ‘Yes, OK. Good idea. Quite often we put one of the actors in as a waiter, but not actually on this trip, luckily. The rail company are very helpful when we ask. I’ll fix it. Come on, then, there’s such a lot still to do.’
She moved fast without seeming to, and presently we were skimming round corners in her small blue car, pulling up with a jerk outside the garage of a large house.
The rehearsal, if you could call it that, was actually going on in the garage itself, which held no car but a large trestle table, a lot of folding chairs, a portable gas heater and about ten men and women standing in groups.
Nell introduced me without mentioning my name. ‘We’re taking him on the train as company eyes and ears. Anything you think might turn into trouble, tell him or me. He’s going as a service attendant, which will mean he can move everywhere through the train without question. OK? Don’t tell the paying passengers he’s one of us.’
They shook their heads. Keeping the true facts from the passengers was their daily occupation.
‘OK,’ Nell said to me. ‘I’ll leave you here. Phone me later.’ She put a large envelope she was carrying onto the table, waved to the actors and vanished, and one of them, a man of about my own age with a mop-head of tight, light brown curls came forward, shook my hand and said, ‘She’s the best in the business. My name’s David Flynn, by the way, but call me Zak. That’s my name in the mystery. From now on, we call each other by the mystery names, so as not to make mistakes in front of the passengers. You’d better have an acting name, too. How about … um … Tommy?’
‘It’s all right by me.’
‘Right, everybody, this is Tommy, a waiter.’
They nodded, smiling, and I was introduced to them one by one in the names they would use on the train.
‘Mavis and Walter Bricknell, racehorse owners.’ They were middle-aged, dressed like the others in jeans and casual sweaters. ‘They’re married in real life too.’
David/Zak went briskly along the row, an enormously positive person, wasting no time. ‘Ricky … a groom in the mystery, though he’ll be travelling with the racegoers, not the grooms. His part in the mystery finishes at Winnipeg, and he’ll be getting off there. This is Raoul, racehorse trainer for the Bricknells, their guest on the train. Ben, he’s an old groom who has ridden a few races.’ Ben grinned from a small, deeply-lined face, looking the part. ‘This is Giles: don’t be taken in by his good looks, he’s our murderer. This is Angelica, who you won’t see much of as she’s the first victim. And Pierre, he’s a compulsive gambler in love with the Bricknells’ daughter, Donna, and this is Donna. And last, this is James Winterbourne, he’s a big noise in the Ontario Jockey Club.’
I don’t think I jumped. The big name in the Ontario Jockey Club wore a three-day beard and a red trilby hat, which he lifted to me ceremoniously. ‘Alas,’ he said, ‘I’m not travelling. My part ends with giving the train an official blessing. Too bad.’
David/Zak said to me, ‘We’re walking through the first scene now. Everyone knows what to do. This is Union Station. This is the gathering point for the passengers. They’re all here. Right, guys, off we go.’
Mavis and Walter said, ‘We’re chatting to other passengers about the trip.’
Pierre and Donna said, ‘We’re having a quiet row.’
Giles said, ‘I’m being nice to the passengers.’
Angelica: ‘I am looking for someone called Steve. I ask the passengers if they’ve seen him. He is supposed to be travelling, but he hasn’t turned up.’
Raoul said, ‘I put my two cents’ worth into Pierre and Donna’s quarrel as I want to break them up so I can marry her myself. For her father’s money, of course.’
Pierre said, ‘Which I furiously point out.’
Donna: ‘Which I don’t like, and am near to tears.’
Ben: ‘I ask Raoul for a hand-out, which I don’t get. I tell a lot of people he’s stingy, after I worked for him all those years. The passengers are to find me a nuisance. I tell them I’m travelling on the racegoers’ part of the train.’
James Winterbourne said, ‘I ask for attention and tell everybody that we have horses, grooms, racegoers and all you owners and friends on the train. I hope everyone will have a great time on this historic re-enactment, etc, etc, for the glory of Canadian racing.’
Ricky said, ‘I arrive. One of the station staff – who will be Jimmy (not here now) in staff uniform – tries to stop me, but I run in among the passengers, bleeding all over the place, shouting that some thugs tried to hijack one of the horses off the train, but I shouted and the maintenance men in the loading yard chased them away. I think the owners should know.’
Zak said, ‘Jimmy runs off to fetch me and I stride in and tell everyone not to be worried, all the horses are safe and on the train, but to make sure things are all right in future I will go on the train myself. I am the top security agent for the railway.’ He looked round the company ‘All right so far? Then James Winterbourne calms everyone down and tells them to board the train at Gate 6, Track 7. I’ll check that that’s still right, on Sunday morning, but that’s what we’ve been told so far.’
The Bricknells said, ‘We ask you which horse they were trying to hijack, but you don’t know. We try to find Ricky, to ask him. He’s not our groom, but we are always anxious sort of people.’
‘Right,’ Zak said. ‘So we all board. It’ll take a good half hour. Ricky gets bandaged by Nell in plain view, beside the train. The train leaves at twelve. Then everyone gathers shortly afterwards in the dining room for champagne. We do scene two next, just before lunch.’
They ‘walked through’ scene two, which was shorter and chiefly established Zak as being in charge, and had Ricky comi
ng to say that he didn’t know which of the horses the horse-nappers had been making for … they had come into the horse car wearing masks, brandishing clubs.… Ricky had been alone out there in the loading yard as all the other grooms had gone back to the station’s coffee shop.
The Bricknells were a-twitter. Angelica was distraught that Steve hadn’t turned up. Who cared about a horse, where was Steve.
Who was Steve? Zak asked. Angelica said he was her business manager. What business? Zak asked. None of yours, Angelica tartly said.
‘Right,’ Zak said, ‘about now it has dawned on the thickest passenger that this is all fiction. They’ll be smiling. So lunch is next. Everyone gets the afternoon to relax. Our next scene is during drinks before dinner. That’s the one we rehearsed before Nell came. Right. We may have to change things a bit as we go along, so we’ll do the rest of the final walk-throughs in one of the bedrooms, a day at a time.’
The others thought this reasonable and began to put on their coats.
‘Don’t you have a script?’ I asked Zak.
‘Not formal words to learn, if that’s what you mean. No. We all know what we’ve got to establish in each scene, and we improvise. When we plan a mystery, the actors get a brief outline of what’s going to happen and basically what sort of people they are, then they invent their own imaginary life stories, so that if any passenger asks questions in conversation, they have the answers ready. I’d advise you to do it, too. Invent a background, a childhood … as near as possible to the real thing is always easiest.’