by Dick Francis
I could see figures walking about by the shore in the Chateau garden, and thought without hurry of perhaps bringing out the binoculars to see if any of them was Julius Apollo. Not that it would have been of much help, I supposed, if he’d been there. He wouldn’t be doing anything usefully criminal under the gaze of the Chateau’s serried ranks of windows.
Someone with quiet footsteps came along the path from the shelter of the trees and stopped, looking down at the lake. Someone female.
I glanced at her incuriously, seeing a backview of jeans, blue parka, white trainers and a white woollen hat with two scarlet pompoms: and then she turned round, and I saw that it was Xanthe Lorrimore.
She looked disappointed to find the bench already occupied.
‘Do you mind if I sit here?’ she said. ‘It’s a long walk. My legs are tired.’
‘No, of course not.’ I stood up and brushed the raindrops off the rest of the bench, making a drier space for her.
‘Thanks.’ She flopped down in adolescent gawkiness and I took my own place again, with a couple of feet between us.
She frowned. ‘Haven’t I seen you before?’ she asked. ‘Are you on the train?’
‘Yes, miss,’ I said, knowing that there was no point in denying it, as she would see me again and more clearly in the dining room. ‘I’m one of the crew.’
‘Oh.’ She began as if automatically to get to her feet, and then, after a moment, decided against it out of tiredness and relaxed. ‘Are you,’ she said slowly, keeping her distance, ‘one of the waiters?’
‘Yes, Miss Lorrimore.’
‘The one who told me I had to pay for a coke?’
‘Yes, I’m sorry.’
She shrugged and looked down at the lake. ‘I suppose,’ she said in a disgruntled voice, ‘all this is pretty special, but what I really feel is bored.’
She had thick almost straight chestnut hair which curved at the ends over her shoulders, and she had clear fine skin and marvellous eyebrows. She was going to be beautiful, I thought, with maturity, unless she let the sulky cast of her mouth spoil not just her face but her life.
‘I sometimes wish I was poor like you,’ she said. ‘It would make everything simple.’ She glanced at me. ‘I suppose you think I’m crazy to say that.’ She paused. ‘My mother would say I shouldn’t be talking to you anyway.’
I moved as if to stand up. ‘I’ll go away, if you like,’ I said politely.
‘No, don’t.’ She was unexpectedly vehement and surprised even herself. ‘I mean … there’s no one else to talk to. I mean … well.’
‘I do understand,’ I said.
‘Do you?’ She was embarrassed. ‘I was going to go on the bus, really. My parents think I’m on the bus. I was going with Rose … Mrs Young … and Mr Young. But he …’ She almost stopped, but the childish urge in her to talk was again running strong, sweeping away discretion. ‘He’s never as nice to me as she is. I think he’s tired of me. Cumber, isn’t that a stupid name? It’s Cumberland, really. That’s somewhere in England where his parents went on their honeymoon, Rose says. Albert Cumberland Young, that’s what his name is. Rose started calling him Cumber when they met because she thought it sounded cosier, but he isn’t cosy at all, you know, he’s stiff and stern.’ She broke off and looked down towards the Chateau. ‘Why do all those Japanese go on their honeymoons together?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Perhaps they’ll all call their children Lake Louise.’
‘They could do worse.’
‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
‘Tommy, Miss Lorrimore.’
She made no comment. She was only half easy in my company, too conscious of my job. But above all, she wanted to talk.
‘You know my brother, Sheridan?’ she said.
I nodded.
‘The trouble with Sheridan is that we’re too rich. He thinks he’s better than everyone else because he’s richer.’ She paused. ‘What do you think of that?’ It was part a challenge, part a desperate question, and I answered her from my own heart.
‘I think it’s very difficult to be very rich very young.’
‘Do you really?’ She was surprised. ‘It’s what everyone wants to be.’
‘If you can have everything, you forget what it’s like to need. And if you’re given everything, you never learn to save.’
She brushed that aside. ‘There’s no point in saving. My grandmother left me millions. And Sheridan too. I suppose you think that’s awful. He thinks he deserves it. He thinks he can do anything he likes because he’s rich.’
‘You could give it away,’ I said, ‘if you think it’s awful.’
‘Would you?’
I said regretfully, ‘No.’
‘There you are, then.’
‘I’d give some of it away.’
‘I’ve got trustees and they won’t let me.’
I smiled faintly. I’d had Clement Cornborough. Trustees, he’d told me once austerely, were there to preserve and increase fortunes, not to allow them to be squandered, and no, he wouldn’t allow a fifteen-year-old boy to fund a farm for pensioned-off racehorses.
‘Why do you think it’s difficult to be rich?’ she demanded. ‘It’s easy.’
I said neutrally, ‘You said just now that if you were poor, life would be simple.’
‘I suppose I did. I suppose I didn’t mean it. Or not really. I don’t know if I meant it. Why is it difficult to be rich?’
‘Too much temptation. Too many available corruptions.’
‘Do you mean drugs?’
‘Anything. Too many pairs of shoes. Self-importance.’
She put her feet up on the bench and hugged her knees, looking at me over the top. ‘No one will believe this conversation.’ She paused. ‘Do you wish you were rich?’
It was an unanswerable question. I said truthfully in evasion, ‘I wouldn’t like to be starving.’
‘My father says,’ she announced, ‘that one’s not better because one’s richer, but richer because one’s better.’
‘Neat.’
‘He always says things like that. I don’t understand them sometimes.’
‘Your brother Sheridan,’ I said cautiously, ‘doesn’t seem to be happy.’
‘Happy!’ She was scornful. ‘He’s never happy. I’ve hardly seen him happy in his whole life. Except that he does laugh at people sometimes.’ She was doubtful. ‘I suppose if he laughs, he must be happy. Only he despises them, that’s why he laughs. I wish I liked Sheridan. I wish I had a terrific brother who would look after me and take me places. That would be fun. Only it wouldn’t be with Sheridan, of course, because it would end in trouble. He’s been terrible on this trip. Much worse than usual. I mean, he’s embarrassing.’ She frowned, disliking her thoughts.
‘Someone said,’ I said without any of my deep curiosity showing, ‘that he had a bit of trouble in England.’
‘Bit of trouble! I shouldn’t tell you, but he ought to be in jail, only they didn’t press charges. I think my father bought them off … and anyway, that’s why Sheridan does what my parents say, right now, because they threatened to let him be prosecuted if he as much as squeaks.’
‘Could he still be prosecuted?’ I asked without emphasis.
‘What’s a statute of limitations?’
‘A time limit,’ I said, ‘after which one cannot be had up for a particular bit of law-breaking.’
‘In England?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re English, aren’t you?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘He said, “Hold your breath, the statute of limitations is out of sight.” ’
‘Who said?’
‘An attorney, I think. What did he mean? Did he mean Sheridan is … is …’
‘Vulnerable?’
She nodded. ‘… for ever?’
‘Maybe for a long time.’
‘Twenty years?’ An unimaginable time, her voice said.
‘It w
ould have to have been bad.’
‘I don’t know what he did,’ she said despairingly. ‘I only know it’s ruined this summer. Absolutely ruined it. And I’m supposed to be in school right now, only they made me come on this train because they wouldn’t leave me in the house alone. Well, not alone, but alone except for the servants. And that’s because my cousin Susan Lorrimore, back in the summer, she’s seventeen, she ran off with their chauffeur’s son and they got married and there was an earthquake in the family. And I can see why she did, they kept leaving her alone in that huge house and going to Europe and she was bored out of her skull and, anyway, it seems their chauffeur’s son is all brains and cute, too, and she sent me a card saying she didn’t regret a thing. My mother is scared to death that I’ll run off with some …’
She stopped abruptly, looked at me a little wildly and sprang to her feet.
‘I forgot,’ she said. ‘I sort of forgot you are …’
‘It’s all right,’ I said, standing also. ‘Really all right.’
‘I guess I talk too much.’ She was worried and unsure. ‘You won’t …’
‘No. Not a word.’
‘Cumber told me I ought to mind my tongue,’ she said resentfully. ‘He doesn’t know what it’s like living in a mausoleum with everyone glowering at each other and Daddy trying to smile.’ She swallowed. ‘What would you do?’ she demanded, ‘if you were me?’
‘Make your father laugh.’
She was puzzled. ‘Do you mean … make him happy?’
‘He needs your love,’ I said. I gestured to the path back to the Chateau. ‘If you’d like to go on first, I’ll follow after.’
‘Come with me,’ she said.
‘No. Better not.’
In an emotional muddle that I hadn’t much helped, she tentatively set off, looking back twice until a bend in the path took her out of sight, and I sat down again on the bench, although growing cold now, and thought about what she’d said, and felt grateful, as ever and always, for Aunt Viv.
There wasn’t much wrong with Xanthe, I thought. Lonely, worried, only half understanding the adult world, needing reassurance, she longed primarily for exactly what Mercer himself wanted, a friendly united family. She hadn’t thought of affronting her parents by cuddling up to a waiter: very much the reverse. She hadn’t tried to put me into a difficult position: had been without guile or tricks. I wouldn’t have minded having a younger sister like her that I could take places for her to have fun. I hoped she would learn to live in peace with her money, and thought that a month or so of serving other people in a good crew like Emil, Oliver and Cathy would be the best education she could get.
After a while I scanned the whole Chateau and its gardens with the binoculars but I couldn’t see Filmer, which wasn’t really surprising, and in the end I set off again to walk, and detoured up onto the foot of the glacier, trudging on the cracked, crunchy, grey-brown-green fringe of the frozen river.
Laurentide Ice, one of the passengers had knowledgeably said early on, was the name given to one of the last great polar ice sheets to cover most of Canada twenty thousand years before. Daffodil, nodding, had said her husband had named the horse because he was interested in prehistory, and she was going to call her next horse Cordilleran Ice, the sheet that had covered the Rockies. Her husband would have been pleased, she said. I could be standing at that moment on prehistoric Cordilleran Ice perhaps, I thought, but if glaciers moved faster than history, perhaps not. Anyway, it gave a certain perspective to the concerns of Julius Apollo.
Back at the Chateau, I went upstairs and drafted a new scene for the script, and I’d barely finished when Zak came knocking to enquire for it. We went into his room where the cast had already gathered for the rehearsal, and I looked round their seven faces and asked if we still had the services of begging Ben, who was missing from the room. No, we didn’t, Zak said. He had gone back to Toronto. Did it matter?
‘No, not really. He might have been useful as a messenger, but I expect you can pretend a messenger.’
They nodded.
‘Right,’ Zak said, looking at his watch. ‘We’re on stage in two and a half hours. What do we do?’
‘First,’ I said, ‘Raoul starts a row with Pierre. Raoul is furious to have been discovered to be Angelica’s husband, and he says he positively knows Pierre owes thousands in gambling debts which he can’t pay, and he knows who he owes it to, and he says that that man is known to beat people up who don’t pay.’
Raoul and Pierre nodded. ‘I’ll put in some detail,’ Raoul said. ‘I’ll say the debts are from illegal racing bets, and I’ve been told because they were on the Bricknells’ horses, OK?’
‘OK?’ Zak said to me.
‘Yes, OK. Then Raoul taunts Pierre that his only chance of getting the money is to marry Donna, and Walter Bricknell says that if Donna’s so stupid as to marry Pierre, he will not give her a penny. He will in no circumstances pay Pierre’s debts.’
They all nodded.
‘At that point, Mavis Bricknell comes screaming into the cocktail room saying that all her beautiful jewels have been stolen.’
They all literally sat up. Mavis laughed and clapped her hands. ‘Who’s stolen them?’ she said.
‘All in good time,’ I smiled. ‘Raoul accuses Pierre, Pierre accuses Raoul, and they begin to shove each other around, letting all their mutual hatred hang out. Finally Zak steps in, breaks it up, and says they will all go and search both Pierre’s room and Raoul’s room for the jewels. Zak, Raoul, Pierre and Mavis go off.’
They nodded.
‘That leaves,’ I said, ‘Donna, Walter Bricknell and Giles in the cocktail room. Donna and Walter have another argument about Pierre, Donna stifles a few tears and then Giles comes out of the audience to support Donna and say she’s been having a bad experience, and he thinks it’s time for a little good feeling all round.’
Giles said, ‘OK, good. Here we go.’
‘Then,’ I said, ‘Zak and the others return. They haven’t found the jewels. Giles begins to comfort Mavis as well. Mavis says she lived for her collection, she loved every piece. She’s distraught. She goes on a bit.’
‘Lovely,’ Mavis said.
‘Walter,’ I went on, ‘says he can’t see any point in jewellery. His jewellery is his horses. He lives for his horses. He says extravagantly that if he couldn’t go racing to watch his horses, he’d rather die. He’d kill himself if he couldn’t have horses.’
Walter frowned but eagerly nodded. He hadn’t had much of a part so far: it would give him a big scene of his own, even if one difficult to make convincing.
‘Walter then says Raoul is ruining his pleasure in his horses, and ruining the journey for everyone, and he gives him the formal sack as his trainer. Raoul protests, and says he hasn’t deserved to be fired. Walter says Raoul is probably a murderer and a jewel thief and has been cheating him with his horses. Raoul in a rage tries to attack Walter. Zak hauls him off. Zak tells everyone to cool down. He says he will organise a search of everyone’s bedrooms to see if the jewels can be found, and he will consult with the hotel’s detective and call in the police if necessary. Everyone looks as if they don’t want the police. End of scene.’
I waited for their adverse comments and altering suggestions, but there were very few. I handed my outline to Zak who went over it again bit by bit with the actors concerned, and they all started murmuring, making up their own words.
‘And what happens tomorrow?’ Zak asked finally. ‘How do we sort it all out?’
‘I haven’t written it down yet,’ I said.
‘But you do have it in mind? Could you write it this evening?’
I nodded twice.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘We’d better all meet here tomorrow after breakfast. We’ll have to do a thorough walk through, maybe two or even three, to make sure we get it all right. Tie up the loose ends, that sort of thing. And don’t forget, everybody, tomorrow we’ll be back in the dining car. Not so much room for fi
ghting and so on, so make it full of action tonight.’
‘Tomorrow Pierre gets shot,’ I said.
‘Oh boy, oh boy,’ Pierre said.
‘But not fatally. You can go on talking.’
‘Better and better.’
‘But you’ll need some blood.’
‘Great,’ Pierre said. ‘How much?’
‘Well …’ I laughed. ‘I’ll let you decide where the bullet goes, and how much gore you think the passengers can stand, but you’d better be going to live, at the end of it.’
They wanted to know what else I had in store, but I wouldn’t tell them: I said they might give the future away by accident if they knew, and they protested they were too professional to do that. But I didn’t altogether trust their improvising tongues, and they shrugged and gave way with fair grace.
I watched the walk through which seemed to go pretty well, but it was nothing, Zak assured me afterwards, to the actual live performance among the cocktails.
He came back to my room at eleven, as on the previous night, drinking well-earned whisky exhaustedly.
‘Those two, Raoul and Pierre, they really gave it a go,’ he said. ‘They both learned stage fighting and stunts at drama school, you know. They’d worked out the fight beforehand, and it was a humdinger. All over the place. It was a shame to break it up. Half the passengers spilled their cocktails with Raoul and Pierre rolling and slogging on the floor near their feet and we had to give everyone free refills.’ He laughed. ‘Dear Mavis put on the grand tragedy for reporting the theft of the jewels and poured on some tremendous pathos later over losing all her happy memories of the gifts that were bound up in them. Had half the audience in tears. Marvellous. Then Walter did his thing quite well considering he complained to me that no one in their right mind would kill themselves because they couldn’t go racing. And afterwards, would you believe it, one of the passengers asked me where we got the idea from, about someone killing themselves because they couldn’t go racing.’
‘What did you say?’ I asked with a jerk of anxiety.