Dick Francis - The Edge

The party atmosphere went on all through dinner, prevailed through a short scene put on by Zak to explain that the Mountie had been left behind in Winnipeg for investigations on the ground and heated up thoroughly afterwards with more unsteady dancing and laughter in the dome car.

Nell wandered about looking slightly less starchy in a fuller-cut black skirt with her tailored white silk blouse, telling me in passing that Cumber and Rose wanted to give a similar party at Chateau Lake Louise.

'Who?' I said.

'Cumber and Rose. Mr and Mrs Young.'

'Oh.'

'I've spent most of the day with them.' She smiled briefly and went on her way. No clipboard, I noticed.

Cumber and Rose, I thought, collecting ashtrays. Well, well. Rose suited Mrs Young fine. Cumber was appropriate also, I supposed, though Mr Young wasn't cumbersome; perhaps a shade heavy in personality, but not big, not awkward.

Mercer and Bambi again invited Filmer and Daffodil into their private car, although it was Oliver, this time, who obliged them with a bowl of ice. Mercer came back after a while to collect the Unwins and the Youngs, and the general jollifications everywhere wore on without any alarms.

After midnight Nell said she was going to bed, and I walked up the train with her to her roomette, almost opposite mine. She paused in the doorway.

'It's all going well, don't you think?' she said.

'Terrific.' I meant it. 'You've worked very hard.'

We looked at each other, she in executive black and white, I in my yellow waistcoat.

'What are you really?' she said.

'Twenty-nine.'

Her lips twitched. 'One day I'll crack your defences.'

'Yours are half down.'

'What do you mean?'

I made a hugging movement across my own chest. 'No clipboard,' I said.

'Oh… well… I didn't need it this evening.'

She wasn't exactly confused. Her eyes were laughing.

'You can't,' she said.

'Can't what?'

'Kiss me.'

I'd wanted to. She'd seen it unerringly.

'If you come into my parlour, I can,' I said.

She shook her head, smiling. 'I am not going to lose my credibility on this train by being caught coming out of the help's bedroom.'

'Talking in the corridor is almost as bad.'

'Yes, it is,' she said, nodding. 'So good night.'

I said with regret, 'Good night,' and she went abruptly into her own domain and closed the door.

With a sigh I went on a few steps further to George's office and found him as I'd expected, fully dressed, lightly napping, with worked-on forms pushed to one side beside an empty coffee cup.

'Come in,' he said, fully alert in an instant. 'Sit down. How's it going?'

'So far, so good.'

I sat on the facilities, and told him that the water samples from the horse car had been pure and simple H 2O.

'That'll please the dragon-lady, eh?' he said.

'Did you go to the races?' I asked.

'No, I've got family in Winnipeg, I went visiting. And I slept most of today, as I'll be up all night, with the stops.' He knew, however, that Upper Gumtree had won. 'You should see the party going on in the forward dome car. All the grooms are drunk. The dragon-lady's in a sober tizzy, eh?, because they tried to give a bucket of beer to the horse. They're singing gold-rush songs at the tops of their voices in the dayniter and it's a wonder they haven't all rocked the train right off the rails, with the noise and the booze.'

'I guess it wouldn't be easy to rock the train off the rails,' I said thoughtfully.

'Easy?' George said. 'Of course it is. Go too fast round the curves.'

'Well… suppose it was one of the passengers who wanted to stop the train getting happily to Vancouver, what could he do?'

He looked at me with bright eyes, unperplexed. 'Besides doping the horses' water? Do what they're doing in the mystery, I'd say. Throw a body off the train, eh? That would stop the parties pretty quick.' He chuckled. 'You could throw someone off the Stoney Creek bridge-that's a high curved bridge over Roger's Pass. It's a long way down into the gulch. Three hundred feet and a bit more. If the fall didn't kill them, the bears would.'

'Bears!' I exclaimed.

He beamed. 'Grizzly bears, eh? The Rocky Mountains aren't anyone's tame backyard. They're raw nature. So are the bears. They kill people, no trouble.' He put his head on one side. 'Or you could throw someone out into the Connaught Tunnel. That tunnel's five miles long with no lights. There's a species of blind mice that live in there, eating the grain that falls from the grain trains.'

'Jolly, 'I said.

'There's a wine storage under the floor of your dining car,' he said with growing relish. They decided not to use it on this trip because opening it might disrupt the passengers. It's big enough to hide a body in.'

His imagination, I saw, was of a scarier dimension than my own.

'Hiding a body in the wine store,' I said politely, 'might indeed disrupt the passengers.'

He laughed. 'Or how about someone alive and tied up in there, writhing in agony?'

'Shouting his head off?' Ragged.'

'If we miss anyone,' I promised, 'that's where we'll look.' I stood up and prepared to go. 'Where exactly is the Stoney Creek bridge,' I asked, pausing in the doorway, 'over Roger's Pass?'

His eyes gleamed, the lower lids pouching with enjoyment. 'About a hundred miles further on from Lake Louise. High up in the mountains. But don't you worry, eh?, you'll be going across it in the dark.'

Everyone survived the night, although there were a few obvious hangovers at breakfast. Outside the windows, the seemingly endless rock, lakes and conifer scenery had dramatically given way to the wide sweeping rolling prairies, not yellow with the grain that had already been harvested, but greenish grey, resting before winter.

There was a brief stop during breakfast at the town of Medicine Hat which lay in a valley and looked a great deal more ordinary than its name. The passengers dutifully put back their watches when Nell told them we were now in Mountain Time, but where, they asked, were the mountains.

'This afternoon,' she answered, and handed out the day's printed programme which promised Dreadful Developments in The Mystery at eleven-thirty a. m., followed by an early lunch. 'We would reach Calgary at twelve-forty, where the horse car would be detached, and leave at one-thirty, heading up into the Rockies to Banff and Lake Louise. At Lake Louise, the owners would disembark and be ferried by bus to the Chateau, the huge hotel sitting on the Lake's shore, amid Snowy Scenes of Breathtaking Beauty. Cocktails and Startling Discoveries would be offered at six-thirty in a private conference room in the hotel. Have a nice day.'

Several people asked if we were now in front or behind the regular Canadian.

'We're in front,' I said.

'If we break down,' Mr Unwin said facetiously, 'it will be along to help us out.'

Xanthe, sitting next to him, didn't laugh. 'I wish we were behind it,' she said. 'I'd feel safer.'

'Behind the Canadian there are freight trains,' Mr Unwin said reasonably, 'and ahead of us there are freight trains. And coming the other way there are freight trains. We're not all alone on these rails.'

'No, I suppose not.' She seemed doubtful still and said she had slept much better again that past night in her upper bunk than she would have done in her family's own quarters.

I brought her the French toast and sausages she ordered from the menu and filled her coffee cup, and Mr Unwin, holding out his own cup for a refill, asked if I had backed his horse to win at Winnipeg.

'I'm afraid not, sir,' I said regretfully. I put his cup on the tray and poured with small movements, 'But congratulations, sir.'

'Did you go to the races?' Xanthe asked me without too much interest.