Dick Francis - The Edge

'What are you really on the train for?' he asked, frowning.

'You know what. To keep everyone happy and foil the wicked.'

'And this scene will help?'

'I hope so.'

'All right.' He made up his mind. 'I don't object to foiling the wicked. We'll give it our best shot.' He grinned suddenly. 'The others will love the Hamlet angle.'

I was alarmed. 'No… please don't tell them.'

'Why ever not?'

'I want the passengers to think that any similarity of the plot to their own lives is purely coincidental. I don't want the actors telling them afterwards that it was all deliberate.'

He smiled twistedly. 'Are we back to slander?'

'No. There's no risk of that. It's just… I don't want them identifying me as the one who knows so much about them. If anyone asks the actors where the plot came from, I'd far rather they said it was you.'

'And dump me in the shit?' He was good humoured, however.

'No one could have suspicions about you.' I smiled faintly. 'Apart from foiling villainy, success for me means hiding behind Tommy to the end and getting off the train unexposed.'

'Are you some sort of spy?'

'A security guard, that's all.'

'Can I put you in my next plot? In my next train mystery?'

'Be my guest.'

He laughed, yawned, put down his glass and stood up.

'Well, pal, whoever you are,' he said, 'it's been an education knowing you.'

Nell telephoned to my room at seven in the morning. 'Are you awake?' she said.

'Wide.'

'It snowed again in the night. The mountains are white.'

'I can see them,' I said, 'from my bed.'

'Do you sleep with your curtains open?'

'Always. Do you?'

'Yes.'

'Are you dressed?' I asked.

'Yes, I am. What's that to do with anything?'

'With defences, even over the telephone.'

'I hate you.'

'One can't have everything.'

'Listen,' she said severely, smothering a laugh. 'Be sensible. I phoned to ask if you wanted to walk down again to the station this afternoon when we board the train, or go down on the crew bus?'

I reflected. 'On the bus, I should think.'

'OK. That bus goes from outside the staff annexe at three-thirty-five. Take your bag with you.'

'All right. Thanks.'

'The whole train, with the horses and racegoers and everything, comes up from Banff to arrive at Lake Louise station at four-fifteen. That gives the passengers plenty of time to board and go to their bedrooms again and begin to unpack comfortably before we leave Lake Louise on the dot of four-thirty-five. The regular Canadian comes along behind us as before and leaves Lake Louise at ten past five, so we have to make sure everyone is boarded early so that our train can leave right on time.'

'Understood.'

'I'm going to tell all this to the passengers at breakfast, and also that at five-thirty we're serving champagne and canapes to everyone in the dining car, and at six we'll have the solution to the mystery, and after that cocktails for those who want them, and then the gala banquet. Then the actors return for photos and post-mortems over cognac. It all sounds like hell.'

I laughed. 'It will all work beautifully.'

'I'm going into a nunnery after this.'

'There are better places.'

'Where, for instance?'

'Hawaii?'

There was a sudden silence on the line. Then she said, 'I have to be back at my desk…'

'We could take the desk too.'

She giggled. 'I'll find out about shipment.'

'Done, then?'

'No… I don't know… I'll let you know in Vancouver.'

'Vancouver,' I said, 'is tomorrow morning.'

'After the race, then.'

'And before the red-eye special.'

'Do you ever give up?'

'It depends,' I said, 'on the signals.'

Filmer clung closely to his briefcase during the transit from Chateau to train at Lake Louise, although he had allowed his larger suitcase to be brought down with everyone else's to be arranged side by side in a long line at the station, waiting to be lifted aboard by porters.

From among the bunch of crew members, Emil, Oliver, Cathy, Angus, Simone, the barman and the sleeping-car attendants, I watched Filmer and most of the passengers disembark from the bus and check that their bags were in the line-up. The Lorrimores, arriving separately with their chauffeur, brought their cases with them, the chauffeur stacking them in an aloof little group.

A freight train clanked by, seemingly endless. A hundred and two grain cars, Cathy said, counting. A whole lot of bread.

I thought about Mrs Baudelaire to whom I'd been talking just before leaving the Chateau.

'Bill said to tell you,' she said, 'that Lenny Higgs did turn to jelly and is being safely taken care of, and a new groom has been engaged for Laurentide Ice with the approval, by telephone, of his trainer. They told the trainer that Lenny Higgs had done a bunk. Bill has left Winnipeg and has come back to Toronto. He says he has been consulting with the Colonel as a matter of urgency, and they agree that Bill will see Mrs Daffodil Quentin as soon as possible. Does that all make sense?'

'Indeed it does,' I said fervently.

'Good, then.'

'Is Bill still going to Vancouver? ' I asked.

'Oh, yes, I think so. Monday evening, I believe, ready for the race on Tuesday. He said he would be back here again on Wednesday. All these time changes can't be good for anybody.'

'Canada is so huge.'

'Five thousand five hundred and fourteen kilometres from side to side,' she said primly.

I laughed. 'Try me in miles.'

'You'll have to do your own sums, young man.'

I did them later, out of curiosity: three thousand four hundred and twenty-six miles, and a quarter.

She asked if I had any more questions, but I couldn't think of any, and I said I would talk to her again from Vancouver in the morning.

'Sleep well,' she said cheerfully.

'You too.'

'Yes.' There was reservation in her voice, and I realized that she probably never slept well herself.

'Sweet dreams, then,' I said.

'Much easier. Goodnight.'

She gave me no time, as usual, to answer.

The train hooted in the distance: one of the most haunting of seductive sounds to a wanderer. That, and the hollow breathy boom of departing ships. If I had any addiction, it was to the setting off, not the arrival.

Headlights bright in the ripening afternoon sunlight, the huge yellow-fronted engine slowed into the station with muted thunder, one of the engineers, as he passed us, looking down from his open window. The engineers were the only crew that hadn't come the whole way from Toronto, each stretch of track having its own specialists.

There being no sidings at Lake Louise, the abbreviated train that had brought us there had been returned to Banff for the. two mountain days, with George Burley going with it, in charge. He returned now with the whole train, his cheerful round figure climbing down in the station and greeting the passengers like long-lost friends.

With a visible lifting of spirits and freshening enjoyment, the whole party returned upwards to their familiar quarters; the Lorrimores, a glum quartet stepping on to their private railed platform entrance at the very rear of everything, being the only sad note Nell went along to speak to them, to try to cheer them up. Mercer stopped, answered, smiled: the others simply went on inside. Why bother with them, I thought. One would get no thanks. Yet one would always bother, somehow, for Mercer, the blind saint.

Filmer boarded through the open door at the end of his sleeping car and through his window I saw him moving about in his room. Hanging up jackets. Washing his hands. Ordinary things. What made one man good, I wondered, and another man bad. one man to seek to build, the other to frighten and destroy. The acid irony was that the bad might feel more satisfied and fulfilled than the good.