by Dick Francis
‘Has anyone asked anything that was different, or surprised you?’
‘Nothing surprises me, sonny.’ He glowed with irony and bonhomie. ‘What would you expect them to ask?’
I shrugged in frustration. ‘What happened before Thunder Bay that shouldn’t have?’
‘The Lorrimores’ car, eh?’
‘Apart from that.’
‘You think something happened?’
‘Something happened, and I don’t know what, and it’s what I’m here to prevent.’
He thought about it, then said, ‘When it turns up, you’ll know, eh?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Like if someone put something in the food, eh?, sooner or later everyone will be ill.’
‘George!’ I was dumbstruck.
He chuckled. ‘We had a waiter once years ago who did that. He had a grudge against the world. He put handfuls of ground-up laxative pills into the chocolate topping over ice cream and watched the passengers eat it, and they all had diarrhoea. Dreadful stomach pains. One woman had to go to hospital. She’d bad two helpings. What a to-do, eh?’
‘You’ve frightened me stiff,’ I said frankly. ‘Where do they keep the fodder for the horses?’
He stared, his perpetual smile fading.
‘Is that what you’re afraid of? Something happening to the horses?’
‘It’s a possibility.’
‘All the fodder is in the horse car,’ he said, ‘except for some extra sacks of those cubes most of the horses are having, which are in the baggage car. Some of the horses have their own special food brought along with them, sent by their trainers. One of the grooms had a whole set of separate bags labelled, “Sunday evening”, “Monday morning” and so on. He was showing them to me.’
‘Which horse was that for?’
‘Um … the one that belongs to that Mrs Daffodil Quentin, I think. The groom said one of her horses died of colic or some such recently, from eating the wrong things, and the trainer didn’t want any more accidents, so he’d made up the feeds himself.’
‘You’re brilliant, George.’
His ready laugh came back.
‘Don’t forget the water tank, eh? You can lift the lid … where the plank floats, remember? You could dope all those horses at once with one quick cupful of mischief, couldn’t you?’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Leslie Brown told us adamantly that no one could possibly have tampered with either the fodder or the water.
‘When did the grooms last fill the buckets?’ I asked.
During the morning, she said. Each groom filled the bucket for his own horse, when he wanted to. All of them had been in there, seeing to their charges.
The horses’ drinking water tank had been topped up, she said, by a hosepipe from the city’s water supply during the first twenty minutes of our stop in Thunder Bay, in a procedure that she herself had supervised.
George nodded and said the whole train had been rewatered at that point.
‘Before Thunder Bay,’ I said, ‘could anyone have put anything in the water?’
‘Certainly not. I’ve told you over and over again, I am here all the time.’
‘And how would you rate all the grooms for trustworthiness?’ I said.
She opened her mouth and closed it again and gave me a hard look.
‘I am here to supervise them,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know any of them before yesterday. I don’t know if any of them could be bribed to poison the water. Is that what you want?’
‘It’s realistic,’ I said with a smile.
She was unsoftened, unsoftenable.
‘My chair, as you see,’ she said carefully, ‘is next to the water tank. I sit there and watch. I do not think … I repeat, I do not believe, that anyone has tampered with the water.’
‘Mm,’ I said calmingly. ‘But you could ask the grooms, couldn’t you, if they’ve seen anything wrong?’
She began to shake her head automatically, but then stopped and shrugged. ‘I’ll ask them, but they won’t have.’
‘And just in case,’ I said, ‘in case the worst happens and the horses prove to have been interfered with, I think I’ll take a sample of what’s in the tank and also what’s in their buckets at this moment. You wouldn’t object to that, Ms Brown, would you?’
She grudgingly said she wouldn’t. George elected himself to go and see what could be done in the way of sample jars and presently returned with gifts from the Chinese cook in the dome car, in the shape of four rinsed-out plastic tomato sauce bottles rescued from the rubbish bin.
George and Leslie Brown took a sample from the tank, draining it, at the dragon’s good suggestion, from the tap lower down, where the buckets were filled. I visited Voting Right, Laurentide Ice and Upper Gumtree, who all graciously allowed me to dip into their drink. With Leslie Brown’s pen, we wrote the provenance of each sample on the sauce label and put all four containers into a plastic carrier bag which Leslie Brown happened to have handy.
Carrying the booty, I thanked her for her kindness in answering our questions, and helping, and George and I retreated.
‘What do you think?’ he said, as we started back through the train.
‘I think she now isn’t as sure as she says she is.’
He chuckled. ‘She’ll be doubly careful from now on.’
‘As long as it’s not already too late.’
He looked as if it were a huge joke. ‘We could get the tank emptied, scrubbed and refilled at Winnipeg,’ he said.
‘Too late. If there’s anything in it, it was there before Thunder Bay, and the horses will have drunk some of it. Some horses drink a lot of water … but they’re a bit fussy. They won’t touch it if they don’t like the smell. If there’s traces of soap in it, for instance, or oil. They’d only drink doped water if it smelled all right to them.’
‘You know a lot about it,’ George commented.
‘I’ve spent most of my life near horses, one way and another.’
We reached his office where he said he had some paperwork to complete before we stopped fairly soon for ten minutes at Kenora. We would be there at five-twenty, he said. We were running thirty minutes behind the Canadian. There were places the race train didn’t really need to stop, he said, except to keep pace with the Canadian. We needed always to stop where the trains were serviced for water, trash and fuel.
I had nowhere on our journey to and from the horse car seen the man with the gaunt face. George had pointed someone out to me in the dayniter, but he was not the right person: grey haired, but too ill-looking, too old. The man I was looking for, I thought, was fifty-something, maybe less, still powerful; not in decline.
In a vague way, I thought, he had reminded me of Derry Welfram. Less bulky than the dead frightener, and not as smooth, but the same stamp of man. The sort Filmer seemed to seek out naturally.
I sat for an hour in my roomette looking out at the unvarying scenery and trying to imagine anything else that Filmer might have paid to have done. It was all the wrong way round, I thought: it was more usual to know the crime and seek the criminal, than to know the criminal and seek his crime.
The four sample bottles of water stood in their plastic carrier on my roomette floor. To have introduced something noxious into that tank, gaunt-face would certainly have to have bribed a groom. He wasn’t one of the grooms himself, though perhaps he had been one, somewhere, some time. The grooms on the train were all younger, thinner and from what I’d seen of them in their uniform T-shirts, less positive. I couldn’t imagine any of them having the nerve to stand up to Filmer and demand their money.
I spent the brief stop at the small town of Kenora hanging out of the open doorway past George’s office, watching him, on the station side of the train, walk a good way up and down outside while he checked that all looked well. The Lorrimores’ car, it appeared, was still firmly tacked on. Up behind the engine, two baggage handlers were loading a small pile of boxes. I hung out of the door on the other side of
the train for a while, but no one was moving out there at all.
George climbed back on board and closed the doors, and presently we set off again from our last stop before Winnipeg.
I wished intensely that I had the power to see into Filmer’s mind. I ached to foresee what he was planning. I felt blind, and longed for second sight. Failing such superhuman qualities, however, there was only as usual ordinary observation and patience, and they both seemed inadequate and tame.
I went along to the dining car where I found that Zak had already positioned some of the actors at the tables for the cocktail-hour double length scene. He and Nell were agreeing that after the scene the actors would leave again (all except Giles-the-murderer), even though they didn’t like being banished all the time and were complaining about it.
Emil, laying tablecloths, said that wine alone was included in the fare, all other cocktails having to be paid for, and perhaps I’d better just serve the wine; he and Oliver and Cathy would do the rest. Fine by me, I said, distributing ashtrays and bud vases. I could set the wine glasses also, Emil said. Glasses for red wine and for white at each place.
The passengers drifted in from their rooms and the dome car and fell into by now predictable patterns of seating. Even though to my mind Bambi Lorrimore and Daffodil Quentin were as compatible as salt and strawberries, the two women were again positioned opposite each other, bound there by the attraction between their men. When I put the wine glasses on their table, Mercer and Filmer were discussing world-wide breeding in terms of exchange rates. Daffodil told Bambi there was a darling little jewellery store in Winnipeg.
Xanthe was still clinging to Mrs Young. Mr Young looked exceedingly bored.
Sheridan had struck up an acquaintanceship with the actor-murderer Giles, a slightly bizarre eventuality which might have odd consequences.
The Upper Gumtree Unwins and the Flokati couple seemed locked in common interest: whether the instant friendship would wither after their mutual race would be Wednesday evening’s news.
Most of the other passengers I knew only vaguely, by face more than by name. I’d learned their names only to the extent that they owned horses in the horse car or had touched bases with Filmer, which came to only about half. They were all in general pleasant enough, although one of the men sent nearly everything back to the kitchen to be reheated, and one of the women pushed the exceptional food backwards and forwards across her plate with flicking movements of her fork, sternly remarking that plain fare was all anyone needed for godliness. What she was doing among the racing fraternity, I never found out.
Zak’s long scene began with impressive fireworks as soon as everyone in the dining car had been served with a drink.
A tall man dressed in the full scarlet traditional uniform of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police strode into the dining car and in a conversation-stopping voice said he had some serious information for us. He had come aboard at Kenora, he said, because the body of a groom from this train called Ricky had been found lying beside the railway lines near Thunder Bay. He had been wearing his Race Train T-shirt, and he had identification in his pocket.
The passengers looked horrified. The Mountie’s impressive presence dominated the whole place and he sounded undoubtedly authentic. He understood, he said, that the groom had been attacked earlier, in Toronto, when he foiled the kidnapping of a horse, but he had insisted on making the journey nevertheless, having been bandaged by a Miss Richmond. Was that correct?
Nell demurely said that it was.
Among the actual owners of the horses, disbelief had set in the quickest. Mercer Lorrimore enjoyed the joke. Mounties, when investigating, didn’t nowadays go around dressed for parades.
‘But we are in Manitoba,’ Mercer could be heard saying in a lull, ‘they’ve got that right. We passed the boundary with Ontario a moment ago. The Mounted Police’s territory starts right there.’
‘You seem to know all about it,’ our Mountie said. ‘What do you know about this dead groom?’
‘Nothing,’ Mercer said cheerfully.
I glanced briefly at Filmer. His face was hard, his neck rigid, his eyes narrow; and I thought in a flash of Paul Shacklebury, the lad dead in his ditch. Stable lads in England … grooms in Canada: same job. What had Paul Shacklebury known about Filmer … same old unanswerable question.
‘And why was he killed?’ the Mountie asked. ‘What did he know?’
I risked a glance, looked away. Filmer’s mouth was a tight line. The answer to the question had to be in his tautly-held head at that moment and it was as inaccessible to me as Alpha Centauri.
Zak suggested that Ricky had identified one of the hijackers. Perhaps, he said, the hijackers had come on the train. Perhaps they were among the racegoers, waiting another chance to kidnap their quarry.
Filmer’s neck muscles slowly relaxed, and I realised that for a moment he must have suspected that the scene had been specifically aimed at him. Perhaps he spent a lot of his time reacting in that way to the most innocent of remarks.
Mavis and Walter Bricknell demanded that the Mountie should keep their own precious horse safe.
The Mountie brushed them aside. He was taking over the enquiry into the death of Angelica Standish, he said. Two deaths connected to the same train could be no coincidence. What was the connection between Angelica and Ricky?
Zak said that he was in charge of the Angelica investigation.
No longer, said the Mountie. We were now in the province of Manitoba, not Ontario. His territory, exclusively.
Zak’s intended scene of investigation into Angelica’s murder had been upstaged by the reality of the Lorrimores’ car and then aborted by the long stop at Thunder Bay. Passing the questioning to the Mountie bridged the void neatly, and the Mountie told us that the reason that Steve, Angelica’s business manager, also her lover, had not turned up at Toronto station was because he too was dead, struck down in his apartment by blows to the head with a mallet.
The audience received the news of still more carnage with round eyes. The said Steven, the Mountie went on, seemed to have been in bed asleep at the time of his murder, and the Ontario police were wanting to interview Angelica Standish as a suspect.
‘But she’s dead!’ Mavis Bricknell said.
After a pause, Donna said she and Angelica had talked for maybe two hours between Toronto and Sudbury, and Donna was sure Angelica couldn’t have murdered Steve, she was lost without him.
Maybe, the Mountie said, but if she was as upset as all that, why had she come on the train at all? Couldn’t it have been to escape from having to realise that she’d killed her lover?
Giles-the-murderer calmly enquired whether any murder weapon had been found after Angelica had been killed.
Also, Pierre asked, wouldn’t Angelica’s murderer have been covered with blood? The whole toilet compartment had been splashed.
Zak and the Mountie exchanged glances. The Mountie said grudgingly that a blood-covered rolled-up sheet of plastic had been found on the track near the area where Angelica must have been battered, and it could have been used as a poncho, and it was being investigated for blood type and fingerprints.
Donna said couldn’t Steve and Angelica both have been killed by a mallet? That would make her innocent, wouldn’t it? She couldn’t believe that anyone as nice as Angelica could have been mixed up in an insurance swindle.
What? What insurance swindle?
I glanced involuntarily at Daffodil, but if there had been a flicker of her eyelids, I had missed it.
Donna in confusion said she didn’t know what insurance swindle. Angelica had just mentioned that Steve was mixed up in an insurance swindle, and she was afraid that was why he had missed the train. Donna hadn’t liked to probe any further.
Sheridan Lorrimore, saying loudly that Angelica had been a bitch, made a lunging grab at the pistol sitting prominently in a holster on the Mountie’s hip. The Mountie, feeling the tug, turned fast and put his hand down on Sheridan’s wrist. It was a
movement in a way as dexterous as John Millington on a good day, speaking of razor sharp reactions, more like an athlete than an actor.
‘That gun’s mine, sir,’ he said, lifting Sheridan’s wrist six inches sideways and releasing it. ‘And, everybody, it’s not loaded.’
There was a general laugh. Sheridan, universally unpopular and having made a boorish fool of himself yet again, looked predictably furious. His mother, I noticed, had turned her head away. Mercer was shaking his.
The Mountie, unperturbed, said he would be proceeding vigorously with the enquiries into both Angelica’s and Ricky’s deaths and perhaps he would have news for everyone in Winnipeg. He and Zak went away together, and Donna drifted around from table to table for a while telling everyone that poor Angelica had really been very sweet, not a murderess, and she, Donna, was dreadfully upset at the suggestion. She wrung out a real tear or two. She was undoubtedly an effective actress.
‘What do you care?’ Sheridan asked her rudely. ‘You only met her yesterday morning and she was dead before dinner.’
Donna looked at him uncertainly. He’d sounded as if he really believed in Angelica’s death.
‘Er …’ she said, ‘some people you know at once.’ She moved on gently and presently disappeared with disconsolate-looking shoulders down the corridor beside the kitchen. Sheridan muttered under his breath several times, making the people he was sitting with uncomfortable.
Emil and his crew, including me, immediately began setting the tables round the passengers for dinner, and were soon serving warm goat’s cheese and radicchio salads followed by circles of rare Chateaubriand with snow peas and matchstick carrots and finally rich orange sorbets smothered in fluffy whipped cream and nuts. Most of the passengers persevered to the end and looked as though it were no torture.
My suggestion to Angus, while we were dishwashing after the battle, that maybe his food could have been injected somehow with a substance that even now could be working away to the detriment of everyone’s health was received by him with frosty amusement. Absolutely impossible, he assured me. I had surely noticed that nearly all the ingredients had come onto the train fresh? He was cooking this food, not bringing it in pre-frozen packs.