The Edge

Chapter Five

I walked back to the hotel and at two o'clock local time telephoned to England, reckoning that seven o'clock Friday evening was perhaps a good time to catch Brigadier Catto relaxing in his Newmarket house after a busy week in London. I was lucky to catch him, he said, and he had news for me.

'Remember Horfitz's messenger who gave the briefcase to Filmer at Nottingham?' he asked.

'I sure do.'

'John Millington has identified him from your photographs. He is Ivor Horfitz's son, Jason. He's not bright, so they say. Not up to much more than running errands. Delivering briefcases would be just about his mark.'

'And he got that wrong, too, according to his father.'

'Well, there you are. It doesn't get us anywhere much, but that's who he is. John Millington has issued photos to all the ring inspectors, so that if that they see him they'll report it. If Horfitz plans on using his son as an on-course errand boy regularly, we'll make sure he knows we're watching.'

'He'd do better to find someone else.'

'A nasty thought.' He paused briefly. 'How are you doing, your end?'

'I haven't seen Filmer yet. He's staying tomorrow night at a hotel with most of the owners' group, according to the travel company's lists. Presumably he'll be at the official lunch with the Ontario Jockey Club at Woodbine tomorrow. I'll go to the races, but probably not to the lunch. I'll see that what he's doing, as best I can.' I told him about Bill Baudelaire's mother, and said, 'After we've started off on the train, if you want to get hold of me direct, leave a message with her, and I'll telephone back to you or John Millington as soon as I'm able.'

'It's a bit hit or miss,' he grumbled, repeating the number after I'd dictated it.

'She's an invalid,' I added, and laughed to myself at his reaction.

When he'd stopped spluttering, he said, 'Tor, this is impossible.'

'Well, I don't know. It's an open line of communication, after all. Better to have one than not. And Bill Baudelaire suggested it himself. He must know she's capable.'

'All right then. Better than nothing.' He didn't sound too sure, though, and who could blame him. Brigade commanders weren't accustomed to bedridden grandmothers manning field telephones. 'I'll be here at home on Sunday,' he said. 'Get through to me, will you, for last-minute gen both ways, before you board?'

'Yes, certainly.'

'You sound altogether,' he said with a touch of disapproval, 'suspiciously happy.'

'Oh! Well… this train looks like being good fun.'

'That's not what you're there for.'

'I'll do my best not to enjoy it.'

'Insubordination will get you a firing squad,' he said firmly, and put down his receiver forthwith.

I put my own receiver down more slowly and the bell rang again immediately.

'This is Bill Baudelaire,' my caller said in his deep-down voice. 'So you arrived in Toronto all right?'

'Yes, thank you.'

'I've got the information you asked for about Laurentide Ice. About why his owner sold a half-share.'

'Oh, good.'

'I don't know that it is, very. In fact, not good at all. Apparently Filmer was over here in Canada at the end of last week enquiring of several owners who had horses booked on the train if they would sell. One of them mentioned it to me this morning and now I've talked to the others. He offered a fair price for a half-share, they all say. Or a third-share. Any toe-hold, it seems. I would say he methodically worked down the list until he came to Daffodil Quentin.'

'Who?'

'The owner of Laurentide Ice.'

'Why is it bad news?' I asked, taking the question from the disillusionment in his voice.

'You'll meet her. You'll see,' he said cryptically.

'Can't you tell me?'

He signed audibly. 'Her husband, Hal Quentin, was a good friend of Canadian racing, but he died this time last year and left his string of horses to his wife. Three of them so far have died in accidents since then, with Mrs Quentin collecting the insurance.'

'Three!' I said. 'In a year?'

'Exactly. They're all been investigated but they all seem genuine. Mrs Quentin says it's a dreadful coincidence and she is most upset.'

'She would be,' I said dryly.

'Anyway, that is who has sold a half-share to Julius Filmer. What a pair! I phoned just now and asked her about the sale. She said it suited her to sell, and there was no reason not to. She says she is going to have a ball on the train.' He sounded most gloomy, himself.

'Look on the bright side,' I said. 'If she's sold a half-share she can't be planning to push Laurentide Ice off the train at high speed for the insurance.'

'That's a scurrilous statement.' He was not shocked, however. 'Will you be at Woodbine tomorrow?'

'Yes, but not at the lunch.'

'All right. If we bump into each other, of course it will be as strangers.'

'Of course,' I agreed; and we said goodbyes and disconnected.

Daffodil Quentin, I reflected, settling the receiver in its cradle, had at least not been intimidated into selling.

No one on the business end of Filmer's threats could be looking forward to having a ball in his company. It did appear that in order to get himself on to the train as an owner, he had been prepared to spend actual money. He had been prepared to fly to Canada to effect the sale, and to the return to England to collect the briefcase from Horfitz at Nottingham on Tuesday, and to fly back to Canada, presumably, in time for tomorrow's races.

I wondered where he was at that moment. I wondered what he was thinking, hatching, setting in motion. It was comforting to think that he didn't know I existed.

I spent the rest of the afternoon doing some shopping and walking and taxi-riding around, getting reacquainted with one of the most visually entertaining cities in the world. I'd found it architecturally exciting six years earlier, and it seemed to me now not less but more so, with glimpses of its slender tallest-in-the-world free-standing tower with the onion bulge near its top appearing tantalizingly between angular highrises covered with black glass and gold. And they had built a whole new complex, Harbourfront, since I'd been there before, a new face turned to Lake Ontario and the world.

At six, having left my purchases at the hotel, I went back to Merry amp; Go's warm pale office and found many of the gang still working. Nell, at her desk, naturally on the telephone, pointed mutely to her client chair, and I sat there and waited.

Some of the murmurers were putting on coats, yawning, switching off computers, taking cans of cold drinks out of the large refrigerator and opening them with the carbonation hissing. Someone put out a light or two. The green plants looked exhausted. Friday night; all commercial passion spent. Thank God for Fridays.

'I have to come in here tomorrow,' Nell said with resignation, catching my thought. 'And why I ever said I'd have dinner with you tonight I cannot imagine.'

'You promised.'

'I must have been mad.'

I'd asked her after she'd shown me the train's sleeping arrangements (which perhaps had been my subconscious making jumps unbeknown to me), and she'd said, 'Yes, all right, I have to eat,' and that had seemed a firm enough commitment.

'Are you ready?' I asked.

'No, there are two more people I positively must talk to. Can you… er… wait?'

'I'm quite good at it,' I said equably.

A few more lights went out. Some of those remaining shone on Nell's fair hair, made shadows of her eyes and put hollows in her cheeks. I wondered about her, as one does. An attractive stranger; an unread book; a beginning, perhaps. But there had been other beginnings, in other cities, and I'd long outgrown the need to hurry. I might never yet have come to the conventional ending, but the present was greatly OK, and as for the future… we could see.

I listened without concentration to her talking to someone called Lorrimore. 'Yes, Mr Lorrimore, your flowers and your bar bottles will already be on the train when it comes into the station… And the fruit, yes, that too… The passengers are gathering at ten-thirty for the reception at the station… Yes, we board at eleven-thirty and leave at twelve… We're looking forward to meeting you too… goodbye Mr Lorrimore.' She glanced over at me as she began to dial her next number, and said, 'The Lorrimores have the private car, the last car on the train. Hello, is that Vancouver racecourse…?'

I listened to her discussing entry arrangements for the owners. 'Yes, we're issuing them all with the special club passes… and yes, the other passengers from the train will be paying for themselves individually, but we're offering them group transport…' She put down the receiver eventually and sighed. 'We've been asked to fix moderate-price hotels and bus transport for so many of the racegoers that it's like duplicating the whole tour. Could you wait for just one more call… or two?'

We left the darkened office almost an hour later and even then she was still checking things off in her mind and muttering vaguely about not forgetting scissors and clips to go with the bandages for Ricky. We walked not very far to a restaurant called the Fluted Point People that she'd been to before and whose menu I had prospected earlier. Not very large, it had tables crammed into every cranny, each dimly lit by a candle lantern.

'Who are the Fluted Point People,' I asked, 'in general?'

'Heaven knows,' Nell said.

The waiter, who must have been asked a thousand times, said the fluted point people had lived on this land ten thousand years ago. Let's not worry about them, he said.

Nell laughed and I thought of ten thousand years and wondered who would be living on this land ten thousand years ahead. Fluted points, it transpired, described the stone tools in use over most of the continent: would our descendents call us the knife and fork people?

'I don't honestly care,' Nell said, to those questions. 'I'm hungry right now in Toronto today.'

We did something about that in the shape of devilled smoked salmon followed by roast quail. 'I hope this is all on your expense account,' she said without anxiety as I ordered some wine, and I said, 'Yes, of course,' untruthfully and thought there was no point in having money if one didn't enjoy it. 'Hamburgers tomorrow,' I said, 'to make up for it. 'Nell nodded as if that were a normal bargain she well understood and said with a galvanic jump that she had forgotten to order a special limousine to drive the Lorrimores around at Winnipeg.

'Do it tomorrow,' I said. 'They won't run away.'

She looked at me with a worried frown of indecision, and then round the comfortable little candlelit restaurant, and then at the shining glass and silver on the table and then back to me, and the frown dissolved into a smile of self-amusement.

'All right. Tomorrow. The Lorrimores may be the icing on this cake but they've meant a lot of extra work.'

'Who are the Lorrimores?' I asked.

She looked at me blankly and answered obliquely, 'Where do you live?'

'Ah,' I said. 'If I lived here, I would know the Lorrimores?'

'You certainly wouldn't ask who they are.'

'I live in London,' I said. 'So please tell me.'

She was wearing, as so many women in business tended to, a navy suit and white blouse of such stark simplicity as to raise questions about the warmth of the soul. Women who dressed more softly, I thought inconsequentially, must feel more secure in themselves, perhaps.

'The Lorrimores,' Nell said, showing no insecurity, 'are one of the very richest families of Toronto. Of Ontario. Of Canada, in fact. They are the society magazines' staple diet. They are into banking and good works. They own mansions, endow art museums, open charity balls and entertain heads of state. There are quite a few of them, brothers, sisters and so on, and I'm told that in certain circles, if Mercer Lorrimore accepts an invitation and comes to your house, you are made for life.' She paused, smiling. 'Also he owns great racehorses, is naturally a pillar of the Ontario Jockey Club and has this private rail car which used to be borrowed regularly by campaigning politicians.' She paused again for breath. 'That's who's honouring our train-Mercer Lorrimore, the big chief of the whole clan, also Bambi, his wife, and their son Sheridan and their daughter Xanthe. What have I left out?'

I laughed. 'Do you curtsy?'

'Pretty nearly. Well, to be honest, Mercer Lorrimore sounds quite nice on the telephone but I haven't met him yet or any of the others. And he phones me himself. No secretaries.'

'So,' I said, 'if Mercer Lorrimore is on the train, it will be even more in the news from coast to coast?'

She nodded. 'He's going For the Benefit of Canadian Racing in capital letters on the Jockey Club's PR handout.'

'And is he eating in the dining car?' I asked.

'Don't!' She rolled her eyes in mock horror. 'He is supposed to be. They all are. But we don't know if they'll retreat into privacy. If they stay in their own car, there might just be enough room for everyone else to sit down. It's a shambles in the making though, and it was made by my boss selling extra tickets himself when he knew we were full.' She shook her head over it, but with definite indulgence. The boss, it appeared, ranked high in her liking.

'Who did he sell them to?' I asked.

'Just people. Two friends of his. And a Mr Filmer, who offered to pay double when he found there was no room. No one turns down an extra profit of that sort.' She broke open a roll with the energy of frustration. 'If only there was more room in the dining car, we could have sold at least six more tickets.'

'David… er… Zak was saying the forty-eight-seater was already stretching the actors' vocal cords to the limit against the noise of the wheels on the rails.'

'It's always a problem.' She considered me over the candle flame. 'Are you married?' she said.

'No. Are you?'

'Actually, no.' Her voice was faintly defensive, but her mouth was smiling. 'I invested in a relationship which didn't work out.'

'And which was some time ago?'

'Long enough for me to be over it.'

The exchange cleared the ground, I thought, and maybe set the rules. She wasn't looking for another relationship that was going nowhere. But dalliance? Have to see…

'What are you thinking?' she asked.

'About life in general '

She gave me a dry look of disbelief but changed the subject back to the almost as compelling matter of trains, and after a while I asked her the question I'd had vaguely in mind all day.

'Besides the special passes for the races, and so on,' I said, 'is there anything else an owner of a horse is entitled to? An owner, that is to say, of one of the horses travelling on the train?'

She was puzzled. 'How do you mean?'

'Are they entitled to any privileges that the other people in the special dining car don't have?'

'I don't think so.' Her brow wrinkled briefly. 'Only that they can visit the horse car, if that's what you mean.'

'Yes, I know about that. So there's nothing else?'

'Well, the racecourse at Winnipeg is planning a group photograph of owners only, and there's television coverage of that.' She pondered. 'They're each getting a commemorative plaque from the Jockey Club when we get back on the train at Banff after the days in the mountains.' She paused again. 'And if a horse that's actually on the train wins one of the special races, the owner gets free life membership of the clubs at all three racecourses.'

The last was a sizeable carrot to a Canadian, perhaps, but not enough on its own, surely, to attract Filmer. I sighed briefly. Another good idea down the drain. So I was left with the two basic questions, why was Filmer on the train, and why had he worked so hard to be an owner. And the answers were still I don't know and I don't know. Highly helpful.

We drank coffee, dawdling, easy together, and she said she had wanted to be a writer and had found a job with a publisher ('which real writers never do, I found out') but was very much happier with Merry amp; Co., arranging mysteries.

She said, 'My parents always told me practically from birth that I'd be a writer, that it ran in the family, and I grew up expecting it, but they were wrong, though I tried for a long time, and then I was also living with this man who sort of bullied me to write. But, you know, it was such a relief the day I said to myself, some time after we'd parted and I'd dried my eyes, that I was not really a writer and never would be and I'd much rather do something else. And suddenly I was liberated and happier than I could remember. It seems so stupid, looking back, that it took me so long to know myself. I was in a way brainwashed into writing, and I thought I wanted it myself, but I wasn't good enough when it came to the point, and it was such hard work, and I was depressed so much of the time.' She half laughed. 'You must think I'm crazy.'

'Of course not. What did you write?'

'I was writing for a women's weekly magazine for a while, going to interview people and writing up their lives, and making up lives altogether sometimes if I couldn't find anyone interesting or lurid enough that week. Don't let's talk about it. It was awful.'

'I'm glad you escaped.'

'Yes, so am I,' she said with feeling. 'I look different, I feel different, and I'm much healthier. I was always getting colds and flu and feeling ill, and now I don't.' Her eyes sparkled in the light, proving her right. 'And you,' she said, 'you're the same. Lighthearted. It shows all over you.'

'Does it, indeed?'

'Am I right?'

'On the button, I suppose.'

And we were lucky, I thought soberly, paying the bill. Lightheartedness was a treasure in a world too full of sorrows, a treasure little regarded and widely forfeited to aggression, greed and horrendous tribal rituals. I wondered if the Fluted Point People had been lighthearted ten thousand years ago. But probably not.

Nell and I walked back to where she had parked her car near the office: she lived twenty minutes' drive away, she said, in a very small apartment by the lake.

To say good night we kissed cheeks and she thanked me for the evening, saying cheerfully that she would see me on Sunday if she didn't sink without trace under all the things she still had to do on the next day, Saturday. I watched her tail lights recede until she turned a corner, then I walked back to the hotel, slept an untroubled night, and presented myself next morning at ten sharp in the Public Affairs office, at Union Station.

The Public Affairs officer, a formidably efficient lady, had gathered from Nell that I was one of the actors, as they had helped with actors before, and I didn't change that understanding. She wheeled me back into the cavernous Great Hall of the station (which she briskly said was 250 feet long, 84 feet wide and had a tiled arched ceiling 88 feet above the floor) and led me through a heavy door into an undecorated downstairs duplication of the grandeur upstairs, a seemingly endless basic domain where the food and laundry and odd jobs of the trains got seen to. There was a mini power station also, and painting and carpentering going on all over the place.

'This way,' she said, clattering ahead on snapping heels. 'Here is the uniform centre. They'll see to you.' She pushed open a door to let me through, said briefly, 'Here's the actor to the staff inside, and with a nod abandoned me to fate.

The staff inside were were good-natured and equally efficient. One was working a sewing machine, another a computer, and a third asked me what collar size I took.

There were shelves all round the room bearing hundreds of folded shirts of fine light grey and white vertical stripes, with striped collars, long striped sleeves and buttoned cuffs. 'The cuffs must remain buttoned at all times unless you are washing dishes.'

'Catch me, I thought mildly, washing dishes.

There were two racks of the harvest gold waistcoats on hangers. 'All the buttons must be fastened at all times.'

There were row on row of mid-grey trousers and mid-grey jackets tidily hung, and boxes galore of grey, yellow and maroon striped ties.

My helper was careful that everything he gave me should fit perfectly. 'VIA Rail staff at all times are well turned out and spotlessly clean. We give everyone tips on how to care for the clothes.'

He gave me a grey jacket, two pairs of grey trousers, five shirts, two waistcoats (which he called vests), two ties and a grey raincoat to go over all, and as he passed each garment as suitable he called out the size to the man with the computer. 'We know the sizes of every VIA employee right across Canada.'

I looked at myself in the glass in my shirtsleeves and yellow waistcoat, and the waiter Tommy looked back.

I smiled at my reflection. Tommy looked altogether too pleased with himself, I thought.

'Comfortable?' my helper asked.

'Very.'

'Don't vary the uniform at all,' he said. 'Any variation would mark you out straight away as an actor.'

'Thank you.'

'This uniform,' he said, 'trousers, shirt, tie and vest, is worn by all male service attendants and assistant service attendants when on duty. That's to say, the sleeping-car attendants and the dining-car staff, except that sometimes they wear aprons in the dining car.'

'Thank you.' I said again.

The chief service attendant, who is in charge of the dining car, wears a grey suit, not a vest or an apron. That's how you'll know him.'

'Right.'

He smiled. 'They'll teach you what to do. Now, we'll lend you a locker for these clothes until Sunday morning. Collect the clothes and put them on in the changing room here before boarding, and take your own clothes with you on to the train. When you've finished with the VIA uniform, please see that we get it back.'

'Right,' I said again.

When I'd put my own clothes on once more, he took me along a few passages into a room with ultra-narrow lockers into which Tommy's clothes barely slotted. He locked the metal door, gave me the key, showed me the way back into the Great Hall and smiled briefly.

'Good luck,' he said. 'Don't spill anything.'

'Thank you,' I said, 'very much.'

I went back to the hotel and had them arrange a car with a driver to take me to Woodbine, wait through the afternoon and bring me back. No trouble at all, they said, so as it was a nice bright autumn day with no forecast of rain I curled my hair and put on some sunglasses and a Scandinavian patterned sweater to merge into the crowd at the races.

It actually isn't easy to remember a stranger's face after a fleeting meeting unless one has a special reason for doing so, or unless there is something wholly distinctive about it, and I was reasonably certain no one going on the train would know me again even if I inadvertently stood next to them on the stands. I had spectacular proof of this, in fact, almost as soon as I'd paid my way into the paddock, because Bill Baudelaire was standing nearby, watching the throng coming in, and his eyes paused on me for a brief second and slid away. With his carroty hair and the acne scars, I thought, he would have trouble getting lost in a crowd.

I walked over to him and said, 'Could you tell me the time, sir, please?'

He glanced at his watch but hardly at me and said, 'One twenty-five,' in his gravelly voice, and looked over my shoulder towards the gate.

'Thank you,' I said. 'I'm Tor Kelsey.'

His gaze sharpened abruptly on my face and he almost laughed.

'When Val told me about this I scarcely believed him.'

'Is Filmer here?' I asked.

'Yes. He arrived for the lunch.'

'OK,' I said. Thanks again.' I nodded and walked on past him and bought a race-card, and when in a moment or two I looked back, he had gone.

The racecourse was packed with people and there were banners everywhere announcing that this was the opening event of The Great Transcontinental Mystery Race Train's journey. Race Train Day, they economically said. There was a splendid colour photograph of a train crossing a prairie on the race-card's cover. There were stalls selling red and white Race Train T-shirts, with a horse face to face with a locomotive across the chest. There were Race Train flags and scarves and baseball caps; and a scatter of young ladies with Support Canadian Racing sashes across their bosoms were handing out information leaflets. The PR firm, I thought with amusement, were leaving no one in any doubt.

I didn't see Filmer until just before the Race Train's special race, which had been named without subtlety The Jockey Club Race Train Stakes at Woodbine. I'd spent some of the afternoon reading the information in the race-card about the owners and their horses and had seen that whereas all the owners were on the train's passenger list, none of the horses were. We would be taking fresh animals to Winnipeg and Vancouver

Filmer wasn't on the race-card as an owner, but Mrs Daffodil Quentin was, and when she came down to see the saddling of her runner, Filmer was with her, assiduous and smiling.

Daffodil Quentin had a big puff-ball hair arrangement of blonde curls above a middle-aged face with intense shiny red lipstick. She wore a black dress with a striped chinchilla coat over it: too much fur, I briefly thought, for the warmth of the afternoon sun.

There was hardly time to identify all the other owners as the pre-race formalities were over much more quickly than in England, but I did particularly look for and sort out Mercer Lorrimore.

Mercer Lorrimore, darling of the glossy mags, was running two horses in the race, giving it his loyal support. He was a man of average height, average build, average weight, and was distinguishable chiefly because of his well-cut, well-brushed full head of white hair. His expression looked reasonable and pleasant, and he was being nice to his trainer.

Beside him was a thin well-groomed woman whom I supposed to be his wife, Bambi and in attendance were a supercilious-looking young man and a sulking teenage girl. Son and daughter, Sheridan and Xanthe, no doubt.

The jockeys were thrown up like rainbow thistledown on to the tiny saddles and let their skinny bodies move to the fluid rhythm of the walking thoroughbreds. Out on the track with the horses' gait breaking into a trot or canter they would be more comfortable standing up in the stirrups to let the bumpier rhythms flow beneath them, but on the way out from the parade ring they swayed languorously like a camel train. I loved to watch them: never grew tired of it. I loved the big beautiful animals with their tiny brains and their overwhelming instincts and I'd always, all over the world, felt at home tending them, riding them and watching them wake up and perform.

The Lorrimore colours were truly Canadian, bright red and white like the maple leaf flag. Daffodil Quentin's colours weren't daffodil yellow but pale blue and dark green, a lot more subdued than the lady.

She and Filmer and all the other owners disappeared upstairs behind glass to watch the race, and I went down towards the track to wait and watch from near where the lucky owner would come down to greet his winner.

There were fourteen runners for the mile-and-a-half race and I knew nothing about the form of any of them except for the information on the race-card. In England I knew the current scene like a magnified city map, knew the thoroughfares, the back alleys, the small turnings. Knew who people knew, who they would turn to and turn away from, who they lusted after. In Canada, I was without radar and felt blind.

The Race Train Stakes at Woodbine, turning out to be hot enough in the homestretch to delight the Ontario Jockey Club's heart, was greeted with roars and screams of encouragement from the stands. Lorrimore's scarlet-and-white favourite was beaten in the last stride by a streak in pale blue and dark green and a good many of the cheers turned to groans.

Daffodil Quentin came down and passed close by me in clouds of chinchilla, excitement and a musky scent. She preened coquettishly, receiving compliments and the trophy, and Filmer, ever at her side, gallantly kissed her hand.

A let-off murderer, I thought, kissing an unproven insurance swindler. How very nice. Television cameras whirred and flash photographers outdid the sun.

I caught sight of Bill Baudelaire scowling, and I knew what John Millington would have said.

It was enough to make you sick.