by Dick Francis
I picked up a cloth and began polishing. The other three smiled.
In the hissing heat of the kitchen, Angus and Simone were arguing, Angus having asked Simone to shell a bowlful of hard-boiled eggs which she refused to do, saying he must do it himself.
Emil raised amused eyebrows. ‘She is getting crosser as time goes by. Angus is a genius and she doesn’t like it.’
Angus, as usual seeming to have six hands all busy at once, proved to be making dozens of fresh canapés on baking trays ready for ten minutes in a scorching oven. Crab and brie together in thin layers of pastry, he said of one batch, and chicken and tarragon in another, cheese and bacon in a third. Simone stood with her hands on her hips, a hoity-toity tilt to her chin. Angus had begun ignoring her completely, which was making things worse.
The passengers as usual came to the dining car well before the appointed hour, but seemed perfectly happy just to sit and wait. The theatrical entertainment outside the windows anyway claimed all eyes and tongues until the shadows grew long in the valleys and only the peaks were lit with slowly fading intensity, until they too were extinguished into darkness. Evening came swift and early in the mountains, twilight being a matter of a lingering lightness in the sky, night growing upwards from the earth.
A real shame, most of the passengers complained to Nell, that the train went through the best scenery in Canada in the dark. Someone in a newspaper, they were saying as I distributed the champagne glasses, had said that it was as if the French kept the lights off in the Louvre, in Paris. Nell said she was really sorry, she didn’t write the timetables, and she hoped everyone had been able to see a mountain or two at Lake Louise, which everyone had, of course. Most had gone up one, Sulphur Mountain, to the windy summit, in four-seater glass containers on wires. Others had said no way, and stayed at the bottom. Filmer, sitting this time with the ultra-rich owners of Redi-Hot, was saying pleasantly that no, he hadn’t been on the bus tour, he’d been content to take his exercise in the gym at Lake Louise.
Filmer had come into the dining room from the dome car end, not from his bedroom, and he arrived wearing a private smirk which sent uncomfortable shivers along my nerves. Any time Julius Apollo looked as pleased with himself as that, it was sure to mean trouble.
The Lorrimores arrived in a group and sat together at one table, the offspring both looking mutinous and the parents glum. Xanthe, it was clear, hadn’t yet made Mercer laugh. Rose and Cumber Young were with the Upper Gumtree Unwins and the Flokati people were with the owners of Wordmaster. It was interesting, I thought, that the owners of the horses tended to be attracted to each other, much as if they belonged to a brotherhood which clung naturally together.
Perhaps Filmer had understood that. Perhaps it was why he had made such efforts to go on the train as an owner: because being an owner of one of the horses gave him standing, gave him credibility, gave him a power base. If that was what he intended, he had achieved it. Everyone on the train knew Mr Julius Filmer.
Emil popped the champagne corks. Angus whizzed his succulent hot appetisers from oven to serving trays, seeming to summon from nowhere the now peeled and sliced eggs topped with caviar and lemon-skin twists on melba toast circles. We set off from the kitchen in a small procession, Emil and I pouring the bubbles, Oliver and Cathy doing the skilful stuff with silver serving tongs, giving everyone little platefuls of the hors d’oeuvre they preferred.
Nell was laughing at me silently. Well, she would. I kept a totally straight face while filling her glass and also that of Giles who was sitting beside her in the aisle seat, ready for action.
‘Thank you,’ Giles said in a bored voice when his glass was full.
‘My pleasure, sir,’ I said.
He nodded. Nell smothered her laughing mouth against her glass and the people sitting opposite her noticed nothing at all.
When I reached the Lorrimores, Xanthe was perceptibly anxious. I poured into Bambi’s glass and said to Xanthe, ‘For you, miss?’
She gave me a flicker of a glance. ‘Can I have coke?’
‘Certainly, miss.’
I poured champagne for Mercer and for Sheridan, and went back to the kitchen for the coke.
‘You have to pay for it,’ Xanthe said jerkily to her father when I returned.
‘How much?’ Mercer asked. I told him, and he paid. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘A pleasure, sir.’
He looked abstracted, not his usual placatory self. Xanthe risked another semi-frightened glance at me and seemed to be greatly reassured when I didn’t refer in any way to our encounter above the lake. The most I gave her was the faintest of deferential smiles, which even her mother couldn’t have disapproved of, if she had seen it: but she, like Mercer, seemed more than usually preoccupied.
I went on to the next table and hoped that Filmer’s smirk and Mercer’s gloom were not connected, although I was afraid that they might be. The smirk had been followed into the dining room by the gloom.
When Angus’s canapes had been devoured to the last melting morsel and the champagne glasses refilled, Zak arrived with a flourish for the long wrap-up scene. First of all, he said, he had to announce that a thorough search of the rooms in the Chateau had produced no sign of Mavis Bricknell’s jewels.
Commiserations were expressed for Mavis, the passengers entering into the fantasy with zest. Mavis accepted them gracefully.
Raoul came bursting into the dining car, furious with Walter Bricknell who was looking upset enough already.
It was too much, Raoul loudly said. It was bad enough Walter firing him as his trainer when he had done nothing to deserve it, but now he had found out that Walter had sent a letter from the Chateau to the racing authorities saying his horse, Calculator, wouldn’t be running in his, Walter’s, name at Vancouver, and that Raoul wouldn’t be credited as trainer.
‘It’s unfair,’ he shouted. ‘I’ve trained the horse to the minute for that race. I’ve won five races with him for you. You’re cheating me. You’re damned ungrateful. I’m going to complain to the Jockey Club.’
Walter looked stony. Raoul had another go. Walter said he would do what he liked, Calculator was his. If he wanted to sell it … or give it away … that was entirely his own business and nobody else’s.
‘You said yesterday,’ Raoul yelled, ‘that if you didn’t have horses, if you couldn’t go racing, you’d kill yourself. So kill yourself. Is that what you’re going to do?’
Everyone looked at Walter in shocked disbelief.
Zak invited Walter to explain. Walter said it was none of Zak’s business. Everything on the train was his business, Zak said. ‘Could we all please know,’ he asked Walter, ‘who the new owner of Calculator is going to be?’
No, no one could ask. Mavis, bewildered, did ask. Walter was rude to her, which no one liked. Walter realised that no one liked it, but said he couldn’t help it, he was getting rid of Calculator, and since the horse was in his name only, not Mavis’s, she couldn’t do anything about it. Mavis began to cry.
Donna went to her mother’s defence and verbally attacked her father.
‘You be quiet,’ he said angrily. ‘You’ve done enough harm.’
Pierre put his arm round Donna’s shoulders and told Walter not to talk to his daughter that way. He, Pierre, would borrow some money to pay his gambling debts, he said, and work, really work this time and save until it was paid off, and he would never let Donna take a penny from her father, and when he was out of debt he and Donna would get married and there was nothing Walter could do to stop them.
‘Oh, Pierre,’ Donna wailed, and hid her face against his chest. Pierre, in snow-white shirt-sleeves, put both arms round her, stroked her hair and looked very manly, handsome and protective. The audience approved of him with applause.
‘Oh, goody,’ Cathy said from beside me. ‘Isn’t he cute?’
‘He sure is.’
We were standing in the little lobby, watching from the shadows and, by a malign quirk of fate, all t
he faces I was most interested in were sitting with their backs to me. Filmer’s neck, not far off, was rigid with tension, and Cumber Young, one table further along, had got compulsively to his feet when Raoul had told Walter to kill himself, and had only slowly subsided, with Rose talking to him urgently. Mercer, just over midway along, sitting against the far right-hand side wall, had his head bowed, not watching the action. He couldn’t help but hear, however. The actors were all courting laryngitis, making sure that those in the furthest corners weren’t left out.
Mavis had a go at Walter, first angry, then pleading, then saying she might as well leave him, she obviously didn’t count with him any more. She prepared to go. Walter, stung beyond bearing, muttered something to her that stopped her dead.
‘What?’ she said.
Walter muttered again.
‘He says he’s being blackmailed,’ Mavis said in a high voice. ‘How can anyone blackmail someone into getting rid of a horse?’
Filmer, pinned against the left-hand wall by the Unwins in the aisle seats, sat as if with a rod up his backbone. Mercer turned his head to stare at Walter. Mercer had his back towards Filmer, and I wondered whether he’d sat that way round on purpose so as not to see his recent friend. He was sitting beside Sheridan and opposite Bambi. Xanthe sat opposite her brother, both in aisle seats. I could see both of the female faces, where I wanted to see the male. I would have done better, I supposed, to have watched from the far end, but on the other hand they might have seen me watching: watching them instead of the action.
Walter, under pressure, said loudly that yes, he was being blackmailed, and by the very nature of blackmail he couldn’t say what about … he categorically refused to discuss it further. He had good and sufficient reasons and he was angry and upset enough about losing his horse without everyone attacking him.
And who was he losing it to? Zak asked. Because whoever’s name turned up on the race-card at Vancouver as the owner, he or she would be the blackmailer.
Heads nodded. Walter said it wasn’t so. The blackmailer had just said he must give the horse away.
‘Who to?’ Zak asked insistently. ‘Tell us. We’ll soon know. We’ll know at the races on Tuesday.’
Walter, defeated, said, ‘I’m giving the horse to Giles.’
General consternation followed. Mavis objected. Giles was a very nice, comforting fellow, but they hardly knew him, she said.
Raoul said bitterly that Walter should have given him the horse. He’d worked so hard …
Giles said that Walter had asked him, Giles, to have the horse, and of course he’d said yes. After the race on Tuesday, he would decide Calculator’s future.
Walter looked stony. Giles was being frightfully nice.
Donna suddenly detached herself from Pierre and said rather wildly, ‘No, Daddy, I won’t let you do it. I understand what’s happening … I won’t let it happen.’
Walter told her thunderously to shut up. Donna wouldn’t be stopped. It was her fault that her father was being blackmailed and she wouldn’t let him give his horse away.
‘Be quiet,’ Walter ordered.
‘I stole Mother’s jewels,’ she said miserably to everyone. ‘I stole them to pay Pierre’s debts. They said he would be beaten up if he didn’t pay. Those jewels were going to be mine anyway, one day, they’re in Mother’s will … so I was only stealing from myself really … but then, he guessed …’
‘Who guessed?’ Zak demanded.
‘Giles,’ she said. ‘He saw me coming out of Mother’s room. I suppose I looked scared … maybe guilty. I had her jewels in a tote bag. I suppose it was afterwards, when Mother came to say someone had stolen them, that he guessed …. He made me give them to him … he said he’d have me arrested otherwise, and my parents wouldn’t like that …’
‘Stop him!’ Zak yelled peremptorily as Giles made a dash for the lobby, and Raoul, a big fellow, intercepted him and twisted his arm up behind his back. Giles displayed pain.
Zak invited Walter to talk.
Walter, distressed, said that Giles had threatened to prove publicly that Donna had stolen the jewels if Walter wouldn’t give him the horse. Even if Walter refused to press charges against his daughter, Giles had said, everyone would know she was a thief. Walter confessed that Giles had said, ‘What is one horse against your daughter’s reputation?’ Walter thought he’d had no choice.
Donna wept. Mavis wept. Half the audience wept.
Filmer was rigid. Also Mercer, Bambi and Sheridan; all unmoving in their seats.
‘It wasn’t sensible to love your daughter so much,’ Raoul said. ‘She stole the jewels. You shouldn’t cover up for her. Look where it got you. Into the hands of a blackmailer, and losing the horse you love. And did you think it would stop there, with just one horse? You’ve got two more in my care, don’t forget.’
‘Stop it,’ Mavis said, defending Walter now. ‘He’s a wonderful man to give up his dearest possession to save his daughter.’
‘He’s a fool,’ Raoul said.
During this bit, Zak came to the lobby as if to receive a message and went back into the centre of the dining car opening an envelope and reading the contents.
He said the letter was from Ben, who had begged for money, did they remember? They remembered.
Ben, Zak said, had run away off the train because he was frightened, but he had left this letter to be opened after he’d gone. Zak read the letter portentously aloud.
‘I know who killed Ricky. I know who threw him off the train. Ricky told me he knew who killed that lady, Angelica someone. Ricky saw the murderer with a lot of plastic rolled into a ball. He didn’t know he was a murderer then, like. This man came up the train into the part where the grooms are and he was in the join part between two sleeping cars and he pushed the plastic out through one of the gaps, until it fell off the train, and then he saw Ricky looking at him. Ricky didn’t think much of it until we were told about Angelica someone, and the plastic with her blood on, and then he was afraid, and told me. And then he was thrown off the train. I know who it was, I knew who must have did it, but I wasn’t saying. I didn’t want to end up dead beside the railway tracks. But now I’m safe out of here I’ll tell you, and it’s that good-looking one they was calling Giles on Toronto station. I saw him there too, same as Ricky. It was him.’
Zak stopped reading and Giles, struggling in Raoul’s grip, shouted that it was rubbish. Lies. All made up.
Raoul showed signs of breaking Giles’s arm on account of him having killed Angelica, who was his wife, even if they had separated.
How could a groom like Ben make up anything like this? Zak said, waving the note. He said it was time someone searched Giles’s room on the train for the jewels, and for anything else incriminating.
‘You’ve no right. You’ve no search warrant. And this man is breaking my arm.’
‘You murdered his wife, what do you expect?’ Zak said, ‘and I don’t need a search warrant. I’m chief of the railway detectives, don’t forget. On trains, I investigate and search where I like.’ He marched off past me and went swaying down the corridor, pausing down at the end of the kitchen wall where he’d left a sports bag full of props, and soon came marching back. The other actors, meanwhile, had been emoting in character over the disclosure of Giles as murderer as well as blackmailer. Zak took the sports bag, it seemed to me by accident, to the table across from the Lorrimores. The people sitting at the table cleared the glasses and empty plates into a stack and Zak, dumping the bag on the pink cloth, unfastened a few zips.
To no one’s surprise, he produced the jewels. Mavis was reunited with them, with joy slightly dampened by knowing who had stolen them. Reproachful looks, and so on.
Zak then discovered a folder of papers.
‘A-HAH!’ he said.
Giles struggled, to no avail.
Zak said, ‘Here we have the motive for Angelica’s murder. Here’s a letter to Giles from Steven, Angelica’s lover and business partner, complaining a
ccusingly that he has been checking up, and Giles, in his capacity of bloodstock agent, has not bought the horses that he says he has, that Angelica and Steve have given him the money for. Steve is saying that unless Giles comes up with a very good explanation he is going to the police.’
‘Lies,’ Giles shouted.
‘It’s all here.’ Zak waved the letter, which everyone later inspected, along with Ben’s note. They were accurately written: Zak’s props were thorough. ‘Giles embezzled Angelica and Steve’s money,’ he said, ‘and when they threatened him with disgrace, he killed them. Then he killed the groom who knew too much. Then he blackmailed Walter Bricknell, who was too fond of his daughter. This man Giles is beneath contempt. I will get the Conductor of the train to arrange for him to be arrested and taken away in Revelstoke, where we stop in two hours.’
He walked towards the lobby again.
Giles, finally breaking free of Raoul, snatched a gun that Zak was wearing in a holster on his hip and waved it about. Zak warned, ‘Put it down. This gun is loaded.’
Giles shouted at Donna, ‘It’s all your fault, you shouldn’t have confessed. You spoiled it all. And I’ll spoil you.’
He pointed the gun at Donna. Pierre leapt in front of her to save her. Giles shot Pierre, who had, it transpired, chosen a romantic shoulder for the affected part. He clapped a hand to his snow-white shirt which suddenly blossomed bright red. He fell artistically.
The audience truly gasped. Donna knelt frantically beside Pierre, having a grand dramatic time. Giles tried to escape and was subdued, none too gently, by Zak and Raoul. George Burley appeared on the scene, chuckling non-stop, waving a pair of stage handcuffs. As Zak later said, it was a riot.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Emil said there was enough champagne for everyone to have half a glass more, so he and I went around pouring while Oliver and Cathy cleared the hors d’oeuvre plates, straightened the cloths and began setting the places for the banquet.
I glanced very briefly at Filmer. He looked exceedingly pale, with sweat on his forehead. One hand, lying on the tablecloth, was tightly clenched. Beside him, the Redi-Hots were enthusing over Zak who was standing beside their table agreeing that Pierre was a redeemable character who would make good. Zak gave me a smile and stepped to one side to let me fill the Redi-Hots’ glasses.