by Dick Francis
Xanthe ambled in in a tousled yawning state and yesterday’s clothes and flopped into the empty chair beside Filmer. Interestingly he made no attempt to save the seat for Daffodil, but seemed to echo Mrs Young’s enquiries about how Xanthe had slept.
Like a log, it appeared, although she seemed to regret not reporting constant nightmares. Mr Young looked bored, as if he had tired of the subject a long time ago, but his wife retained her sweet comforting expression without any visible effort.
I waited with hovering impatience for Nell to arrive, which she did at length in a straight black skirt (worse and worse) with a prim coffee blouse and unobtrusive gold earrings. She had drawn her fair hair high into an elaborate plait down the back of her head and fastened it at the bottom with a wide tortoiseshell clasp: it looked distinguished and competent, but nowhere near cuddly.
People I hadn’t yet identified beckoned her eagerly to join them, which she did with the ravishing smile she had loosed once or twice in my direction. She told Cathy she would pass on the eggs but would like croissants and coffee, and presently I was bringing them to her as she sat with eyes demurely downwards, studiously ignoring my existence. I set butter, jam and breads before her. I poured into her cup. She told her table companions it was nice having hand-picked attendants all the way to Vancouver.
I knew it was a game but I could cheerfully have strangled her. I didn’t want them noticing me even a little. I went away and looked back, and met her eyes, which were laughing. It was the sort of look between us which would have started alert interest in me if I’d spotted it between others, and I thought I was near to losing my grip on what I was supposed to be doing, and that I’d better be more careful. I hadn’t needed to serve her: I’d taken the tray from Cathy. Temptation will be your downfall, Tor, I thought.
Except for Xanthe, Mercer was the only Lorrimore to surface for breakfast, and he came not to eat but to ask Emil to send trays through to his own private dining room. Emil himself and Oliver delivered the necessary, although Emil on his return said he hoped this wasn’t going to happen at lunch and dinner also, because it took too much time. Room service was strictly not available, yet one didn’t disoblige the Lorrimores if one could help it.
Daffodil arrived after everyone else with each bright curl in place and pleasantly sat across the aisle from the Filmer/Young table, asking for news of Xanthe’s night. The only people not bothering to ask, it seemed, were the near-victim’s own family. Xanthe chattered and could be heard telling Daffodil she felt snug and safe behind her curtain. The next time I went slowly past their table, refill coffee pot at the ready, the conversation was back to the journey, with Xanthe this time saying she basically thought horseracing boring and she wouldn’t have come on this trip if her father hadn’t made her.
‘How did he make you?’ Filmer said interestedly.
‘Oh!’ She sounded suddenly flustered and evaded an answer. ‘He made Sheridan come, too.’
‘But why, if you both didn’t want to?’ That was Daffodil’s voice, behind my back.
‘He likes us where he can see us, he says.’ There was a note of grudge and bitterness but also, it seemed to me, a realistic acknowledgment that father knew best: and judging from Sheridan’s behaviour to date, under his father’s long-suffering eye was certainly the son’s safest place.
The conversation faded into the distance and I paused to refill the Unwins’ cups, where the talk was about Upper Gumtree having the edge over Mercer’s Premiere that was coming to Winnipeg by road.
George Burley presently came into the dining car and spoke for a while to Nell, who subsequently went from table to table, clipboard in place, repeating what he’d said.
‘We’re stopping at Thunder Bay for longer than scheduled, as there’ll be an investigation there about the Lorrimores’ car being uncoupled. We’ll be there about an hour and a half, as we’re not going on until after the regular Canadian has gone through. The Canadian will be ahead of us then all the way to Winnipeg.’
‘What about lunch?’ Mr Young asked. Mr Young, though thinnish, had a habit of eating half his wife’s food as well as his own.
‘We’ll leave Thunder Bay at about a quarter to one,’ Nell said, ‘so we’ll have lunch soon after. And a more leisurely dinner before we get to Winnipeg, instead of having to crowd it in early. It will all fit in quite well.’ She was smiling, reassuring, keeping the party from unravelling. ‘You’ll be glad to stretch your legs for a bit longer in Thunder Bay, and some of you might visit your horses.’
The owner of Redi-Hot, who seemed to spend most of his time reading a guide book, told Mr and Mrs Wordmaster, who looked suitably impressed, that Thunder Bay, one of Canada’s largest ports, was at the far west end of the St Lawrence-Great Lakes seaway and should really be called what the locals called it, The Lakehead. Grain from the prairies was shipped from there to throughout the world, he said.
‘Fancy that,’ said Mrs Wordmaster, who was English.
I retreated from this scintillating conversation and helped Oliver and Cathy clear up in the kitchen, and shortly before eleven we slid to a halt in the port that was halfway across Canada on some rails parallel with but a little removed from the station buildings.
Immediately a waiting double posse of determined looking men advanced from the station across two intervening tracks, one lot sprouting press cameras, the other notebooks. George stepped down from the train to meet the notebook people, and the others fanned out and began clicking. One of the notebook crowd climbed aboard and came into the dining car, inviting anyone who had seen anyone or anything suspicious the previous evening to please unbutton, but of course no one had, or no one was saying, because otherwise the whole train would have known about it by now.
The investigator said he would try his luck with the scenery-watchers in the dome car, with apparently the same result, and from there he presumably went in to see the Lorrimores, who apart from Xanthe were still in seclusion. He then reappeared in the dining car with an interested crowd of people following him and asked to speak to Xanthe, who up until then had kept palely quiet.
He identified her easily because everyone looked her way. Filmer was still beside her: the passengers tended all the time to linger at the tables, talking, after the meals had been cleared, rather than return to the solitude of their bedrooms. Nearly everyone, I would have guessed, had been either in the dining room or the dome car all morning.
Mrs Young squeezed Xanthe’s hand encouragingly from across the table while the half-child half-young-woman shivered her way through the dangerous memory.
‘No,’ she said, with everyone quiet and attentively listening, ‘no one suggested I went to our car.… I just wanted to go to the bathroom. And I could … I … could have been killed.’
‘Yes …’ The investigator, middle-aged and sharp-eyed, was sympathetic but calming, speaking in a distinct voice that carried easily through the dining car, now that we weren’t moving. ‘Was there anyone in the dome car lounge when you went through?’
‘Lots of people.’ Xanthe’s voice was much quieter than his.
‘Did you know them?’
‘No. I mean, they were on this trip. Everyone there was.’ She was beginning to speak more loudly, so that all could hear.
A few heads nodded.
‘No one you now know was a stranger?’
‘No.’
Mrs Young, intelligent besides comforting, asked, ‘Do you mean it’s possible to uncouple a car while you’re actually on the train? You don’t have to be on the ground to do it?’
The investigator gave her his attention and everyone leaned forward slightly to hear the answer.
‘It’s possible. It can be done also while the train is moving, which is why we want to know if there was anyone in the dome car who was unknown to you all. Unknown to any of you, I should say.’
There was a long, respectful, understanding silence.
Nell said, ‘I suppose I know most of our passengers by sight b
y now. I identified them all at Toronto station when I was allocating their sleeping quarters. I didn’t see anyone yesterday evening who puzzled me.’
‘You don’t think,’ Mrs Young said, putting her finger unerringly on the implication, ‘that the car was unhitched by someone in our party?’
‘We’re investigating all possibilities,’ the investigator said without pompousness. He looked around at the ranks of worried faces and his slightly severe expression softened. ‘The private car was deliberately uncoupled,’ he said, ‘but we’re of the preliminary opinion that it was an act of mischief committed by someone in Cartier, the last place you stopped before Miss Lorrimore found the car was missing. But we do have to ask if the saboteur could have been on the train, just in case any of you noticed anything wrong.’
A man at the back of the crowd said, ‘I was sitting in the dome car lounge when Xanthe came through, and I can tell you that no one had come the other way. I mean, we all knew that only the Lorrimores’ car was behind the dome car. If anyone except the Lorrimores had gone that way and come back again … well … we would have noticed.’
Another nodding of heads. People noticed everything to do with the Lorrimores.
I was watching the scene from the kitchen end of the dining car, standing just behind Emil, Cathy and Oliver. I could see Xanthe’s troubled face clearly, and also Filmer’s beside her. He seemed to me to be showing diminishing interest in the enquiry, turning his tidily brushed head away to look out of the window instead. There was no tension in him: when he was tense there was a rigidity in his neck muscles, a rigidity I’d watched from the depths of the crowd during the brief day of his trial and seen a few times since, as at Nottingham. When Filmer felt tense, it showed.
Even as I watched him, his neck went rigid.
I looked out of a window to see what he was looking at, but there seemed to be nothing of great note, only the racegoing passengers streaming off their forward carriages en route to write postcards home from the station.
Filmer looked back towards Xanthe and the investigator and made a small gesture of impatience, and it seemed to trigger a response from the investigator because he said that if anyone remembered any helpful detail, however small, would they please tell him or one of his colleagues, but meanwhile everyone was free to go.
There was a communal sigh as the real-life investigation broke up. Zak, I thought, would be finding the competition too stiff, the fiction an anti-climax after the fact. He hadn’t appeared for this scene: none of the actors had.
Most of the passengers went off to don coats against what appeared to be a cold wind outside, but Filmer climbed down from the door of the dome car end of the dining car without more protection than his carefully casual shirt and aristocratic tweed jacket. He paused irresolutely, not scrunching, as the others were beginning to, across the two sets of rails between our train and the station but meandering at an angle forwards in the direction of the engine.
Inside, I followed him, easily keeping pace with his slow step. I thought at first that he was merely taking an open air path to his own bedroom, but he went straight past the open door at the end of his sleeping car, and straight on past the next car also. Going to see his horse, no doubt. I went on following: it had become a habit.
At the end of the third car, just past George Burley’s office, he stopped, because someone was coming out from the station to meet him: a gaunt man in a padded short coat with a fur collar, with grey hair blowing in disarray in the wind.
They met between George’s window and the open door at the end of the car and although at first they looked moderately at peace with each other, the encounter deteriorated rapidly.
I risked them seeing me so as to try to hear, but in fact by the time I could hear them they were shouting, which meant I could listen through the doorway without seeing them or being seen.
Filmer was yelling furiously, ‘I said before Vancouver.’
The gaunt man with a snarl in his Canadian voice said, ‘You said before Winnipeg, and I’ve done it and I want my money.’
‘Coo-ee’ trilled Daffodil, teetering towards them in chinchillas and high-heeled boots. ‘Are we going to see Laurentide Ice?’
CHAPTER TEN
Blast her, I thought intensely. Triple bloody shit, and several other words to that effect.
I watched through George’s window as Filmer made great efforts to go towards her with a smile, drawing attention away from the gaunt-faced man, who returned to the station.
Before Winnipeg, before Vancouver. Julius Apollo had mixed them up yet again. ‘You said before Winnipeg, and I’ve done it. I want my money.’ Heavy words, full of threat.
What before Winnipeg? What had he done?
What indeed.
It couldn’t have been the Lorrimores’ car, I thought. Filmer had shown no interest and no tension; had been obviously uninvolved. But then he would have been calm, I supposed, if he hadn’t been expecting anything to happen except before Vancouver. He hadn’t been expecting the Lorrimores’ car to be uncoupled before either city, of that I was certain. He had instead been cultivating his acquaintanceship with Mercer, a game plan that would have come to an abrupt end if the Lorrimores had deserted the trip, which they would have done at once if the Canadian had ploughed into their home-from-home.
If not the Lorrimores’ car, what else had happened? What had happened before Winnipeg that Filmer had intended to happen before Vancouver? In what way had the gaunt man already earned his money?
Anyone’s guess, I thought.
He could have robbed someone, bribed a stable lad, nobbled a horse …
Nobbled a horse that was going to run at Winnipeg, instead of one running at Vancouver?
From the fury in their voices, the mistake had been devastating.
Only Flokati and Upper Gumtree were due to run at Winnipeg … Laurentide Ice was running at Vancouver against Voting Right and Sparrowgrass.… Could Filmer have been so stupid as to get the horses’ names wrong in addition to the cities? No, he couldn’t.
Impasse. Yet … gaunt-face had done something.
Sighing, I watched the Youngs walk past the window en route, I supposed, to the horse car. Soon after, the Unwins followed. I would have liked to have checked at once on the state of the horses, but I supposed if there were something wrong with any of them I would hear soon enough.
I wished I’d been able to take a photograph of gaunt-face, but I’d been more keen to listen.
If he’d done something to or around the horses, I thought, then he had to have travelled with us on the train. He hadn’t just met us in Thunder Bay. If he’d been on the train and had walked with the other racegoers towards the station, Filmer could have seen him through the window … and just the sight of him had caused the tensing of the neck muscles … and if Filmer hadn’t yet paid him for whatever … then he would come back to the train …
I left George’s office and went two doors along to my roomette to dig my telescopic-lens binoculars–camera out of Tommy’s holdall, and I sat and waited by the window for gaunt-face’s return.
What happened instead was that after a while Filmer and Daffodil appeared in my view, making a diagonal course towards the station buildings, and pretty soon afterwards, accompanied by a lot of bell-ringing and warning hooters, a huge bright yellow diesel engine came grinding and groaning past my window followed by long corrugated silver coaches as the whole of the regular Canadian rolled up the track next to the race train and stopped precisely alongside.
Instead of a nice clear photographic view of the station, I now faced the black uninformative window of someone else’s roomette.
Frustration and damnation, I thought. I tucked the binoculars into the holdall again and without any sensible plans wandered back towards the dining car. If I went on like this, I would fulfil the gloomiest fears of Bill Baudelaire, the Brigadier and, above all, John Millington. ‘I told you we should have sent an ex-policeman …’ I could hear his voice in my ear.
It occurred to me, when I reached Julius Apollo’s door, that the Canadian would be standing where it was for the whole of the twenty-five minutes of its daily scheduled stop. For twenty-five minutes … say twenty-two by now … Filmer would stay over in the station. He would not walk round either end of the lengthy Canadian to return to his room.
Would he?
No, he would not. Why should he? He had only just gone over there. I had twenty minutes to see what I could do about his combination locks.
If I’d paused for more thought I perhaps wouldn’t have had the nerve, but I simply opened his door, checked up and down the corridor for observers (none) and went inside, shutting myself in.
The black briefcase was still on the floor at the back of the hanging space, under the suits. I pulled it out, sat on one of the armchairs, and with a feeling of unreality started on the right-hand lock. If anyone should come in, I thought confusedly … if the sleeping car attendant for instance came in … whatever excuse could I possibly find?
None at all.
The right-hand combination wheels were set at one-three-seven. I methodically went on from there, one-three-eight, one-three-nine, one-four-zero, trying the latch after each number change.
My heart hammered and I felt breathless. I was used to long-distance safety in my work, and in the past to many physical dangers, but never to this sort of risk.
One-four-one, one-four-two, one-four-three.… I tried the latch over and over and looked at my watch. Only two minutes had gone. It felt like a lifetime. One-four-four, one-four-five.… There were a thousand possible combinations … one-four-six, one-four-seven … in twenty minutes I could perhaps try a hundred and fifty numbers.… I had done this process before, once, but not under pressure, when Aunt Viv had set a combination on a new suitcase and then forgotten it … one-four-eight, one-four-nine … my face was sweating, my fingers slipping on the tiny wheels from haste … one-five-zero, one-five-one …
With a snap the latch flew open.