by Dick Francis
‘Come in,’ he invited, and I took my accustomed seat. ‘I showed that photo,’ he said. ‘Is that what you want to know about?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s definitely on the train. Name of Johnson, according to the passenger list. He has a roomette right forward, and he stays in it most of the time. He eats in the forward dome car dining room, but only dinner, eh? He was in there just now when I went up to the engine, but he’d gone when I came back. A fast eater, they say. Never goes for breakfast or lunch. Never talks to anyone, eh?’
‘I don’t like it,’ I said.
George chuckled. ‘Wait till you hear the worst.’
‘What’s the worst?’
‘My assistant conductor – he’s one of the sleeping car attendants up front – he says he’s seen him before, eh?’
‘Seen him where?’
George watched me for effect. ‘On the railways.’
‘On the—do you mean he’s a railwayman?’
‘He can’t be sure. He says he looks like a baggage handler he once worked with on the Toronto to Montreal sector, long time ago. Fifteen years ago. Twenty. Says if it’s him, he had a chip on his shoulder all the time, no one liked him. He could be violent. You didn’t cross him. Might not be him, though. He’s older. And he doesn’t remember the name Johnson, though I suppose it’s forgettable, it’s common enough.’
‘Would a baggage handler,’ I said slowly, ‘know how to drain a fuel tank … and uncouple the Lorrimores’ car?’
George’s eyes gleamed with pleasure. ‘The baggage handlers travel on the trains, eh? They’re not fools. They take on small bits of freight at the stops and see the right stuff gets off. If you live around trains, you get to know how they work.’
‘Is there a baggage handler on this train?’
‘You bet your life. He’s not always in the baggage car, not when we’re going along. He eats, eh? He’s always there in the stations, unlocking the doors. This one’s not the best we’ve got, mind. A bit old, a bit fat.’ He chuckled. ‘He said he’d never seen this man Johnson, but then he’s always worked Vancouver to Banff, never Toronto to Montreal.’
‘Has the baggage handler or your assistant talked to Johnson?’
‘My assistant conductor says the only person Johnson talks to is one of the owners who raps on Johnson’s door when he goes along to see his horse. He went up there this evening not long ago, and they had some sort of row in the corridor outside my assistant’s roomette.’
‘George! Did your assistant hear what it was about?’
‘Important, is it?’ George said, beaming.
‘Could be, very.’
‘Well, he didn’t.’ He shook his head regretfully. ‘He said he thought the owner told Johnson not to do something Johnson wanted to. They were shouting, he said, but he didn’t really listen, eh? He wasn’t interested. Anyway, the owner came back down here, he said, and he heard Johnson say, “I’ll do what I frigging like,” very loudly, but he doesn’t think the owner heard, as he’d gone by then.’
‘That’s not much help,’ I said.
‘It’s easier to start a train going downhill than to stop it, eh?’
‘Mm.’
‘It’s the best I can do for you.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘We do know he’s on the train, and we know his name may or may not be Johnson, and we know he may or may not be a railwayman, and I know for certain he has a violent personality. It sounds as if he’s still planning something and we don’t know what. I suppose you are certain he can’t get past the dragon-lady?’
‘Nothing is certain.’
‘How about if you asked the baggage handler to sit in with her, with the horses.’
He put his head on one side. ‘If you think she’d stand for it?’
‘Tell her it’s to keep the horses safe, which it is.’
He chuckled. ‘Don’t see why not.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Sicamous is coming up. I’ll go up there outside, when we stop. Three or five minutes there. Then it’ll be time to put the clocks forward an hour. Did your Miss Richmond remember to tell everyone?’
‘Yes. They’re all on Pacific time already, I think. Getting on for midnight.’
We had stopped towards the end of dinner in a small place called Revelstoke for half an hour for all the cars to be refilled with water. At Kamloops, a far larger town, we would stop at two in the morning very briefly. Then it was North Bend at five-forty, then the last stretch to Vancouver, arriving at five past ten on Sunday morning, a week from the day we set off.
We slowed towards Sicamous while I was still with George.
‘After here, though you won’t see it,’ he said, ‘we follow the shoreline of Shuswap Lake. The train goes slowly.’
‘It hasn’t exactly been whizzing along through the Rockies.’
He nodded benignly. ‘We go at thirty, thirty-five miles an hour. Fast enough, eh? Uphill, downhill, round hairpin bends. There are more mountains ahead.’
He swung down onto the ground when the train stopped and crunched off forwards to arrange things with the baggage handler.
It was snowing outside: big dry flakes settling on others that had already fallen, harbingers of deep winter. The trains almost always went through, George had said.
I thought I might as well see how the revelries were going but it seemed that, unlike after the Winnipeg race, most people were feeling the long evening was dying. The lounge in the dome car was only half full. The observation deck was scarcely populated. The poker school, in shirtsleeves, were counting their money. The actors had vanished. Nell was walking towards me with Xanthe whom she was seeing safely to bed in the upper bunk behind the felt curtains.
‘Goodnight,’ Nell said softly.
‘Sleep well,’ I replied.
‘Goodnight,’ Xanthe said.
I smiled. ‘Goodnight.’
I watched them go along the corridor beside the bar. Nell turned round, hesitated, and waved. Xanthe turned also, and waved. I waved back.
Gentle was the word, I thought. Go gentle into this good night … No, no! It should be, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night.’ Odd how poets’ words stuck in one’s head. Dylan Thomas, wasn’t it? Do not go gentle into that good night … because that good night was death.
The train was slowly going to sleep.
There would be precious little peace, I thought, in the minds of the Lorrimores, father, mother and son. Little peace also in Filmer who would know now from Johnson that the departure of Lenny Higgs had robbed him of the lever to be used against Daffodil; who would have doubts at the very least about Mercer’s future reactions; who would know that Cumber Young would find out soon who had taken Ezra Gideon’s horses; who would realise he was riding a flood tide of contempt. I wished him more than an upset stomach. I wished him remorse, which was the last thing he would feel.
I wandered back through the train past George’s office, which was empty, and stretched out in my own room on the bed, still dressed, with the door open and the light on, meaning just to rest but stay awake: and not surprisingly I went straight to sleep.
I awoke to the sound of someone calling ‘George … George …’ Woke with a start and looked at my watch. I hadn’t slept long, not more than ten minutes, but in that time the train had stopped.
That message got me off the bed in a hurry. The train should have been moving; there was no stop scheduled for almost an hour. I went out into the passage and found an elderly man in a VIA grey suit like George’s peering into the office. The elderly man looked at my uniform and said urgently, ‘Where’s George?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘We’ve got a hot box.’ He was deeply worried. ‘George must radio to the despatcher to stop the Canadian.’
Not again, I thought wildly. I went into George’s office, following the VIA Rail man who said he was the assistant conductor, George’s deputy.
‘Can’t you use the radio?’ I said.
‘The Conductor does it.’
The assistant conductor was foremost a sleeping car attendant, I supposed. I thought I might see if I could raise someone myself, as George would have already tuned in the frequency, but when I pressed the transmit switch, nothing happened at all, not even a click, and then I could see why it wouldn’t work … the radio was soaking wet.
There was an empty coffee cup beside it.
With intense alarm, I said to George’s assistant, ‘What’s a hot box?’
‘A hot axle, of course,’ he said. ‘A journal-box that holds the axle. It’s under the horse car, and it’s glowing dark red. We can’t go on until it cools down and we put more oil in.’
‘How long does that take?’
‘Too long. They’re putting snow on it.’ He began to understand about the radio. ‘It’s wet …’
‘It won’t work,’ I said. Nor would the cellular telephone, not out in the mountains. ‘How do we stop the Canadian? There must be ways, from before radio.’
‘Yes, but …’ He looked strained, the full enormity of the situation sinking in. ‘You’ll have to go back along the track and plant fusees.’
‘Fusees?’
‘Flares, of course. You’re younger than me … you’ll have to go … you’ll be faster.’
He opened a cupboard in George’s office and pulled out three objects, each about a foot in length, with a sharp metal spike at one end, the rest being tubular with granulations on the tip. They looked like oversized matches, which was roughly what they were.
‘You strike them on any rough or hard surface,’ he said. ‘Like a rock, or the rails. They burn bright red … they burn for twenty minutes. You stick the spike … throw it … into the wooden ties, in the middle of the track. The driver of the Canadian will stop at once when he sees it.’ His mind was going faster almost than his tongue. ‘You’ll have to go half a mile, it’ll take the Canadian that much time to stop …. Hurry, now … half a mile at least. And if the engineers are not in the cab …’
‘What do you mean,’ I asked aghast, ‘if they’re not in the cab?’
‘They aren’t always there. One of them regularly flushes out the boiler … the other could be in the bathroom …. If they aren’t there, if they haven’t seen the fusees and the train isn’t stopping, you must light another flare and throw it through the window into the cab. Then when they come back, they’ll stop.’
I stared at him. ‘That’s impossible.’
‘They’ll be there, they’ll see the flares. Go now. Hurry. But that’s what you do if you have to. Throw one through the window.’ He suddenly grabbed a fourth flare from the cupboard. ‘You’d better take another one, just in case.’
‘In case of what?’ What else could there be?
‘In case of bears,’ he said.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
With a feeling of complete unreality I set off past the end of the train and along the single railway track in the direction of Toronto.
With one arm I clasped the four flares to my chest, in the other hand I carried George’s bright-beamed torch, to show me the way.
Half a mile. How long was half a mile?
Hurry, George’s assistant had said. Of all unnecessary instructions …
I half walked, half ran along the centre of the track, trying to step on the flat wood of the ties, the sleepers, because the stones in between were rough and speed-inhibiting.
Bears … my God.
It was cold. It had stopped snowing, but some snow was lying … not enough to give me problems. I hadn’t thought to put on a coat. It didn’t matter, movement would keep me warm. Urgency and fierce anxiety would keep me warm.
I began to feel it wasn’t totally impossible. After all, it must have been done often in the old days. Standard procedure still, one might say. The flares had been there, ready. All the same, it was fairly eerie running through the night with snow-dusted rocky tree-dotted hillsides climbing away on each side and the two rails shining silver into the distance in front.
I didn’t see the danger in time, and it didn’t growl; it wasn’t a bear, it had two legs and it was human. He must have been hiding behind rocks or trees in the shadow thrown by my torch. I saw his movement in the very edge of my peripheral vision after I’d passed him. I sensed an upswept arm, a weapon, a blow coming.
There was barely a hundredth of a second for instinctive evasion. All I did as I ran was to lean forward a fraction so that the smash came across my shoulders, not on my head.
It felt as if I had cracked apart, but I hadn’t. Feet, hands, muscles were all working. I staggered forward, dropped the flares and the torch, went down on one knee, knew another bang was travelling. Thought before action … I didn’t have time. I turned towards him, not away. Turned inside and under the swinging arm, rising, butting upwards with my head to find the aggressive chin, jerking my knee fiercely to contact between the braced legs, punching with clenched fist and the force of fury into the Adam’s apple in his throat. One of the many useful things I’d learned on my travels was how to fight dirty, and never had I needed the knowledge more.
He grunted and wheezed with triple unexpected pain and dropped to his knees on the ground, and I wrenched the long piece of wood from his slackening hand and hit his own head with it, hoping I was doing it hard enough to knock him out, not hard enough to kill him. He fell quietly face down in the snow between the rails, and I rolled him over with my foot, and in the deflected beam of the torch which lay unbroken a few paces away, saw the gaunt features of the man called Johnson.
He had got, I reckoned, a lot more than he was used to, and I felt intense satisfaction which was no doubt reprehensible but couldn’t be helped.
I bent down, lifted one of his wrists and hauled him unceremoniously over the rail and into the shadows away from the track. He was heavy. Also the damage he’d done me, when it came to lugging unconscious persons about, was all too obvious. He might not have broken my back, which was what it had sounded like, but there were some badly squashed muscle fibres somewhere that weren’t in first class working order and were sending stabbing messages of protest besides.
I picked up the torch and looked for the flares, filled with an increased feeling of urgency, of time running out. I found three of the flares, couldn’t see the fourth, decided not to waste time, thought the bears would have to lump it.
Must be lightheaded, I thought. Got to get moving. I hadn’t come anything like half a mile away from the train. I swung the beam back the way I’d come, but the train was out of sight round a corner that I hadn’t noticed taking. For a desperate moment I couldn’t remember which direction I’d come from: too utterly stupid if I ran the wrong way.
Think, for God’s sake.
I swung the torch both ways along the track. Trees, rocks, silver parallel rails, all exactly similar.
Which way? Think.
I walked one way and it felt wrong. I turned and went back. That was right. It felt right. It was the wind on my face, I thought. I’d been running before into the wind.
The rails, the ties seemed to stretch to infinity. I was going uphill also, I thought. Another bend to the right lay ahead.
How long did half a mile take? I stole a glance at my watch, rolling my wrist round which hurt somewhere high up, but with remote pain, not daunting. Couldn’t believe the figures. Ten minutes only … or twelve … since I’d set off.
A mile in ten minutes was ordinarily easy … but not a mile of sleepers and stones.
Johnson had been waiting for me, I thought. Not for me personally, but for whomever would come running from the train with the flares.
Which meant he knew the radio wouldn’t work.
I began actively to worry about George being missing.
Perhaps Johnson had fixed the hot box, to begin with.
Johnson had meant the trains to crash with himself safely away to the rear. Johnson was darned well not going to succeed.
With renewed purpose, w
ith perhaps at last a feeling that all this was really happening and that I could indeed stop the Canadian, I pressed on along the track.
George’s voice floated into my head, telling me about the row between Johnson and Filmer. Filmer told Johnson not to do something, Johnson said, ‘I’ll do what I frigging like.’ Filmer could have told him not to try any more sabotage tricks on the train, realising that trouble was anyway mounting up for him, trouble from which he might not be able to extricate himself if anything disastrous happened.
Johnson, once started, couldn’t be stopped. ‘Easier to start a train running downhill than to stop it, eh?’ Johnson with a chip on his shoulder from way back; the ex-railwayman, the violent frightener.
I had to have gone well over half a mile, I thought. Half a mile hadn’t sounded far enough: the train itself was a quarter mile long. I stopped and looked at my watch. The Canadian would come in a very few minutes. There was another curve just ahead. I mustn’t leave it too late.
I ran faster, round the curve. There was another curve in a further hundred yards, but it would have to do. I put the torch down beside the track, rubbed the end of one of the flares sharply against one of the rails, and begged it, implored it, to ignite.
It lit with a huge red rush for which I was not prepared. Nearly dropped it. Rammed the spike into the wood of one of the ties.
The flare burned in a brilliant fiery scarlet that would have been visible for a mile, if only the track had been straight.
I picked up the torch and ran on round the next bend, the red fire behind me washing all the snow with pink. Round that bend there was a much longer straight: I ran a good way, then stopped again and lit a second flare, jamming its point into the wood as before.
The Canadian had to be almost there. I’d lost count of the time. The Canadian would come with its bright headlights and see the flare and stop with plenty of margin in hand.
I saw pin-point lights in the distance. I hadn’t known we were anywhere near habitation. Then I realised the lights were moving, coming. The Canadian seemed to be advancing slowly at first … and then faster … and faster … and it wasn’t stopping …. There was no screech of brakes urgently applied.