by Dick Francis
‘Could the pathologist be prosecuted for the cover-up?’ the Brigadier had asked.
‘Doubtful,’ Millington had said, ‘now that Sheridan’s dead.’
Filmer’s voice, slightly hoarse, came out of the loudspeaker into the pantry. ‘This is rubbish.’
‘You kept the letter,’ the Brigadier said. ‘It was dynamite, if you could find who it referred to. No doubt you kept all three of the letters, though the other two didn’t concern criminal acts. Then you saw one day in your local paper that Mercer Lorrimore was putting up money for a new college library. And you would have had to ask only one question to find out that Mercer Lorrimore’s son had left that college in a hurry during May. After that, you would have found that no one would say why. You became sure that the letter referred to Sheridan Lorrimore. You did nothing with your information until you heard that Mercer Lorrimore would be on the Transcontinental Race Train, and then you saw an opportunity of exploring the possibility of blackmailing Mr Lorrimore into letting you have his horse, Voting Right.’
‘You can’t prove any of this,’ Filmer said defiantly.
‘We all believe,’ said Bill Baudelaire’s voice, ‘that with you, Mr Filmer, it is the urge to crush people and make them suffer that sets you going. We know you could afford to buy good horses. We know that for you simply owning horses isn’t enough.’
‘Save me the sermon,’ Filmer said. ‘And if you can’t put up, shut up.’
‘Very well,’ the Brigadier said. ‘We’ll ask our next visitor to come in, please.’
Daffodil Quentin, who was standing beside George in the pantry and had been listening with parted mouth and growing anger, opened the dividing door dramatically and slammed it shut behind her.
‘You unspeakable toad,’ her voice said vehemently over the loudspeaker.
Attagirl, I thought.
She was wearing a scarlet dress and a wide shiny black belt and carrying a large shiny black handbag. Under the high curls and in a flaming rage, she attacked as an avenging angel in full spate.
‘I will never give you or sell you my half of Laurentide Ice,’ she said forcefully, ‘and you can threaten and blackmail until you’re blue in the face. You can frighten my stable lad until you think you’re God Almighty, but you can’t from now on frighten me – and I think you’re contemptible and should be put in a zoo.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Bill Baudelaire, who had persuaded her to come with him to Vancouver, cleared his throat and sounded as if he were trying not to laugh.
‘Mrs Quentin,’ he said to the world at large, ‘is prepared to testify …’
‘You bet I am,’ Daffodil interrupted.
‘… that you threatened to have her prosecuted for killing one of her own horses if she didn’t give … give… you her remaining share of Laurentide Ice.’
‘You used me,’ Daffodil said furiously. ‘You bought your way onto the train and you were all charm and smarm and all you were aiming to do was ingratiate yourself with Mercer Lorrimore so you could sneer at him and cause him pain and take away his horse. You make me puke.’
‘I don’t have to listen to this,’ Filmer said.
‘Yes, you damned well do. It’s time someone told you to your face what a slimy putrid blob of spit you are and gave you back some of the hatred you sow.’
‘Er,’ Bill Baudelaire said. ‘We have here a letter from Mrs Quentin’s insurance company, written yesterday, saying that they made exhaustive tests on her horse that died of colic and they are satisfied that they paid her claim correctly. We also have here an affidavit from the stable lad, Lenny Higgs, to the effect that you learned about the colic and the specially numbered feeds for Laurentide Ice from him during one of your early visits to the horse car. He goes on to swear that he was later frightened into saying that Mrs Quentin gave him some food to give to her horse who died of colic.’ He cleared his throat. ‘As you have heard, the insurance company are satisfied that whatever she gave her horse didn’t cause its death. Lenny Higgs further testifies that the man who frightened him, by telling him he would be sent to prison where he would catch AIDS and die, that man is an ex-baggage handler once employed by VIA Rail, name of Alex Mitchell McLachlan.’
‘What?’ For the first time there was fear in Filmer’s voice, and I found it sweet.
‘Lenny Higgs positively identifies him from this photograph.’ There was a pause while Bill Baudelaire handed it over. ‘This man travelled in the racegoers’ part of the train under the name of Johnson. During yesterday, the photograph was shown widely to VIA employees in Toronto and Montreal, and he was several times identified as Alex McLachlan.’
There was silence where Filmer might have spoken.
‘You were observed to be speaking to McLachlan …’
‘You bet you were,’ Daffodil interrupted. ‘You were talking to him … arguing with him … at Thunder Bay, and I didn’t like the look of him. This is his picture. I identify it too. You used him to frighten Lenny, and you told me Lenny would give evidence against me, and I didn’t know you’d frightened the poor boy with such a terrible threat. You told me he hated me and would be glad to tell lies about me …’ The enormity of it almost choked her. ‘I don’t know how you can live with yourself. I don’t know how anyone can be so full of sin.’
Her voice resonated with the full old meaning of the word: an offence against God. It was powerful, I thought, and it had silenced Filmer completely.
‘It may come as an anti-climax,’ the Brigadier said after a pause, ‘but we will now digress to another matter entirely. One that will be the subject of a full Stewards’ enquiry at the Jockey Club, Portman Square, in the near future. I refer to the ownership of a parcel of land referred to in the Land Registry as SF 90155.’
The Brigadier told me later that it was at that point that Filmer turned grey and began to sweat.
‘This parcel of land,’ his military voice went on, ‘is known as West Hillside Stables, Newmarket. This was a stables owned by Ivor Horfitz and run by his paid private trainer in such a dishonest manner that Ivor Horfitz was barred from racing – and racing stables – for life. He was instructed to sell West Hillside Stables, as he couldn’t set foot there, and it was presumed that he had. However, the new owner in his turn wants to sell and has found a buyer, but the buyer’s lawyers’ searches have been very thorough, and they have discovered that the stables were never Horfitz’s to sell. They belonged, and they still do legally belong, to you, Mr Filmer.’
There was a faint sort of groan which might have come from Filmer.
‘That being so, we will have to look into your relationship with Ivor Horfitz and with the illegal matters that were carried on for years at West Hillside Stables. We also have good reason to believe that Ivor Horfitz’s son, Jason, knows you owned the stables and were concerned in its operation, and that Jason let that fact out to his friend, the stable lad Paul Shacklebury who, as you will remember, was the subject of your trial for conspiracy to murder, which took place earlier this year.’
There was a long long silence.
Daffodil’s voice said, murmuring, ‘I don’t understand any of this, do you?’
Mercer, as quietly, answered: ‘They’ve found a way of warning him off for life.’
‘Oh good, but it sounds so dull.’
‘Not to him,’ Mercer murmured.
‘We’ll now return,’ Bill Baudelaire’s voice said more loudly, ‘to the matter of your attempt to wreck the train.’ He coughed. ‘Will you please come in, Mr Burley.’
I smiled at George who had been listening to the Horfitz part in non-comprehension and the rest in horrified amazement.
‘We’re on,’ I said, removing my raincoat and laying it on a serving counter. ‘After you.’
He and I, the last in the pantry, went through the door. He was wearing his grey uniform and carrying his Conductor’s cap. I was revealed in Tommy’s grey trousers, grey and white shirt, deep yellow waistcoat and tidy striped tie. P
olished, pressed, laundered, brushed: a credit to VIA Rail.
Julius Filmer saw the Conductor and a waiter he’d hardly noticed in his preoccupation with his own affairs. The Brigadier and Bill Baudelaire saw the waiter for the first time, and there was an awakening and realisation on each of their faces. Although I’d told them by now that I’d worked with the crew, they hadn’t truly understood how perfect had been the bright camouflage.
‘Oh, that’s who you are!’ exclaimed Daffodil who was sitting now in one of the chairs round the conference table. ‘I couldn’t place you, outside.’
Mercer patted her hand which lay on the table, and gave me the faintest of smiles over her head. The three Vancouver big-wigs took me at face value, knowing no different.
‘Would you come forward, please,’ Bill Baudelaire said.
George and I both advanced past the conference table until we were nearer the desk. The two Directors were seated behind the desk, Filmer in the chair in front of it. Filmer’s neck was rigid, his eyes were dark, and the sweat ran down his temples.
‘The Conductor, George Burley,’ Bill Baudelaire said, ‘yesterday gave VIA Rail an account of three acts of sabotage against the race train. Disaster was fortunately averted on all three occasions, but we believe that all these dangerous situations were the work of Alex McLachlan who was acting on your instructions and was paid by you.’
‘No,’ Filmer said dully.
‘Our enquiries are not yet complete,’ Bill Baudelaire said, ‘but we know that the VIA Rail offices in Montreal were visited three or four weeks ago by a man answering in general to your description who said he was researching for a thesis on the motivations of industrial sabotage. He asked for the names of any railroad saboteurs so that he could interview them and see what made them tick. He was given a short list of people no longer to be employed on the railroads in any capacity.’
Heads would roll, the VIA Rail executive had said. That list, although to be found in every railway station office in the country, should never have been given to an outsider.
‘McLachlan’s name is on that list,’ Bill Baudelaire observed.
Filmer said nothing. The realisation of total disaster showed in every line of his body, in every twitch in his face.
‘As we said,’ Bill Baudelaire went on, ‘McLachlan travelled on the train under the name of Johnson. During the first evening, at a place called Cartier, he uncoupled Mr Lorrimore’s private car and left it dead and dark on the track. The railroad investigators believe he waited in the vicinity to see the next train along, the regular transcontinental Canadian, come and crash into the Lorrimores’ car. He had always been around to watch the consequences of his sabotage in the past: acts he had been sent to prison for committing. When the race train returned to pick up the Lorrimores’ car, he simply reboarded and continued on the journey.’
‘He shouldn’t have done it,’ Filmer said.
‘We know that. We also know that in speech you continually mixed up Winnipeg with Vancouver. You instructed McLachlan to wreck the train before Winnipeg, when you meant before Vancouver.’
Filmer looked dumbfounded.
‘That’s right,’ Daffodil said, sitting up straight, ‘Winnipeg and Vancouver. He got them mixed up all the time.’
‘In Banff,’ Bill Baudelaire said, ‘someone loosened the drain plug on the fuel tank for the boiler that provides steam heat for the train. If it hadn’t been discovered, the train would have had to go through a freezing evening in the Rockies without heat for horses or passengers. Mr Burley, would you tell us at first hand about both of these occurrences, please?’
George gave his accounts of the uncoupling and the missing fuel with a railwayman’s outrage quivering in his voice.
Filmer looked shrunken and sullen.
‘During that last evening,’ Bill Baudelaire said, ‘you decided to cancel your instructions to McLachlan and you went forward to speak to him. You had a disagreement with him. You told him to do no more, but you had reckoned without McLachlan. He really is a perpetual saboteur. You misunderstood his mentality. You could start him off, but you couldn’t stop him. You were responsible for putting him on the train to wreck it, and we will make that responsibility stick.’
Filmer began weakly to protest, but Bill Baudelaire gave him no respite.
‘Your man McLachlan,’ he said, ‘knocked out the Conductor and left him tied up and gagged in the roomette he had been given in the name of Johnson. McLachlan then put the radio out of order by pouring liquid into it. These acts were necessary, as he saw it, because he had already, at a place called Revelstoke, removed oily waste from the journal-box holding one of the axles under the horse car. One of two things could then happen: if the train crew failed to notice the axle getting red hot, the axle would break, cause damage, possibly derail the train. If it were discovered, the train would stop for the axle to be cooled. In either case, the Conductor would radio to the despatcher in Vancouver, who would radio to the Conductor of the regular train, the Canadian, coming along behind, to tell him to stop, so that there shouldn’t be a collision. Is that clear?’
It was pellucid to everyone in the room.
‘The train crew,’ he went on, ‘did discover the hot axle and the engineers stopped the train. No one could find the Conductor, who was tied up in Johnson’s roomette. No one could radio to Vancouver as the radio wouldn’t work. The only recourse left to the crew was to send a man back along the line to light flares, to stop the Canadian in the old historic way.’ He paused briefly. ‘McLachlan, a railwayman, knew this would happen, so when the train stopped he went himself along the track, armed himself with a piece of wood and lay in wait for whomever came with the flares.’
Filmer stared darkly, hearing it for the first time.
‘McLachlan attacked the man with the flares, but by good fortune failed to knock him out. It was this man here who was sent with the flares.’ He nodded in my direction. ‘He succeeded in lighting the flares and stopping the Canadian.’ He paused and said to me. ‘Is that correct?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said. Word perfect, I thought.
He went on, ‘The race train engineers cooled the journal-box with snow and refilled it with oil, and the train went on its way. The Conductor was discovered in McLachlan’s roomette. McLachlan did not reboard the train that time, and there will presently be a warrant issued for his arrest. You, Mr Filmer, are answerable with McLachlan for what happened.’
‘I told him not to,’ Filmer’s voice was a rising shout of protest. ‘I didn’t want him to.’
His lawyers would love that admission, I thought.
‘McLachlan’s assault was serious,’ Bill Baudelaire said calmly. He picked up my X-ray and the doctor’s report, and waved them in Filmer’s direction. ‘McLachlan broke this crewman’s shoulder blade. The crewman has positively identified McLachlan as the man who attacked him. The Conductor has positively identified McLachlan as the passenger known to him as Johnson. The Conductor has suffered concussion, and we have here another doctor’s report on that.’
No doubt a good defence lawyer might have seen gaps in the story, but at that moment Filmer was beleaguered and confounded and hampered by the awareness of guilt. He was past thinking analytically, past asking how the crewman had escaped from McLachlan and been able to complete his mission, past wondering what was conjecture with the sabotage and what was provable fact.
The sight of Filmer reduced to sweating rubble was the purest revenge that any of us – Mercer, Daffodil, Val Catto, Bill Baudelaire, George Burley or I – could have envisaged, and we had it in full measure. Do unto others, I thought dryly, what they have done to your friends.
‘We will proceed against you on all counts,’ the Brigadier said magisterially.
Control disintegrated in Filmer. He came up out of his chair fighting mad, driven to lashing out, to raging against his defeat, to punishing someone else for his troubles, even though it could achieve no purpose.
He made me his tar
get. It couldn’t have been a subconscious awareness that it was I who had been his real enemy all along: much the reverse, I supposed, in that he saw me as the least of the people there, the one he could best bash with most impunity.
I saw him coming a mile off. I also saw the alarm on the Brigadier’s face and correctly interpreted it.
If I fought back as instinct dictated, if I did to Filmer the sort of damage I’d told the Brigadier I’d done to McLachlan, I would weaken our case.
Thought before action; if one had time.
Thought could be flash fast. I had time. It would be an unexpected bonus for us if the damage were the other way round.
He had iron-pumping muscle power. It would indeed be damage.
Oh well …
I rolled my head a shade sideways and he punched me twice, quite hard, on the cheek and the jaw. I went back with a crash against the nearby wall, which wasn’t all that good for the shoulder blade, and I slid the bottom of my spine down the wall until I was sitting on the floor, knees bent up, my head back against the paintwork.
Filmer was above me, lunging about and delivering another couple of stingingly heavy cuffs, and I thought, come on guys, it’s high time for the arrival of the Cavalry, and the Cavalry – the Mounties – in the shape of George Burley and Bill Baudelaire obligingly grabbed Filmer’s swinging arms and hauled him away.
I stayed where I was, feeling slightly pulped, watching the action.
The Brigadier pressed a button on the desk which soon resulted in the arrival of two large racecourse security guards, one of whom, to Filmer’s furious astonishment, placed a manacle upon the Julius Apollo wrist.
‘You can’t do this,’ he shouted.
The guard phlegmatically fastened the hanging half of the metal bracelet to his own thick wrist.