The Edge (21 page)

‘Hm,’ I said. ‘If that’s the case, the saboteur wouldn’t have walked back to Cartier but up to some vantage point from where he could watch the smash.’

George looked startled. ‘Well … I suppose he might.’

‘Arsonists often help to put out the fires they’ve started.’

‘You mean he would have waited around … to help with the wreck. Even to help with casualties?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Pure, heady power, to know you’d caused such a scene.’

‘I didn’t see anyone around,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘when we went back to the car. I shone the lamp … there wasn’t anyone moving, eh?, or anything like that.’

‘So, what are the investigators going to do?’ I asked.

His eyes crinkled and the familiar chuckle escaped. ‘Write long reports, eh? Tell us never to take private cars. Blame me for not preventing it, I dare say.’

He didn’t seem worried at the idea. His shoulders and his mind were broad.

I left him with appreciation and went forward into the central dining
car where all the actors were sitting in front of coffee cups and poring over typed sheets of stage directions, muttering under their breaths and sometimes exclaiming aloud.

Zak raised his eyes vaguely in my direction but it would have been tactless to disrupt the thoughts behind them, so I pressed on forwards, traversing the dayniter and the sleeping cars and arriving at the forward dome car. There were a lot of people about everywhere, but no one looked my way twice.

I knocked eventually on the door of the horse car and, after inspection and formalities that would have done an Iron Curtain country proud, was admitted again by Ms Brown to the holy of holies.

Rescrawling Tommy Titmouse on her list I was interested to see how long it had grown, and I noticed that even Mercer hadn’t been let in without signing. I asked the dragon-lady if anyone had come in who wasn’t an owner or a groom, and she bridled like a thin turkey and told me that she had conscientiously checked every visitor against her list of bona fide owners, and only they had been admitted.

‘But you wouldn’t know them all by sight,’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’ she demanded.

‘Supposing for instance someone came and said they were Mr Unwin, you would check that his name was on the list and let him in?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘And suppose he wasn’t Mr Unwin, although he said he was?’

‘You’re just being difficult,’ she said crossly. ‘I cannot refuse entry to the owners. They were given the right to visit, but they don’t have to produce passports. Nor do their wives or husbands.’

I looked down her visitors’ list. Filmer appeared on it twice, Daffodil once. Filmer’s signature was large and flamboyant, demanding attention. No one had written Filmer in any other way: it seemed that gaunt-face hadn’t gained entry by giving Filmer’s name, at least. It didn’t mean he hadn’t given someone else’s.

I gave Leslie Brown her list back and wandered around under her eagle eye looking at the horses. They swayed peacefully to the motion, standing diagonally across the stalls, watching me incuriously, seemingly content. I couldn’t perceive that Upper Gumtree looked any more sleepy than any of the others: his eyes were as bright, and he pricked his ears when I came near him.

All of the grooms, except one who was asleep on some hay bales, had chosen not to sit in the car with their charges, and I imagined it was because of Leslie Brown’s daunting presence: racing lads on the
whole felt a companionable devotion to their horses, and I would have expected more of them to be sitting on the hay bales during the day.

‘What happens at night on the train?’ I asked Leslie Brown. ‘Who guards the horses then?’

‘I do,’ she said tartly. ‘They’ve given me a roomette or some such, but I take this thing seriously. I slept in here last night, and will do so again after Winnipeg, and after Lake Louise. I don’t see why you’re so worried about anyone slipping past me.’ She frowned at me, not liking my suspicions. ‘When I go to the bathroom, I leave one groom in here and lock the horses’ car door behind me. I’m never away more than a few minutes. I insist on one of the grooms being in here at all times. I am very well aware of the need for security, and I assure you that the horses are well guarded.’

I regarded her thin obstinate face and knew she believed to her determined soul in what she said.

‘As for the barns at Winnipeg and the stabling at Calgary,’ she added righteously, ‘they are someone else’s responsibility. I can’t answer for what happens to the horses there.’ She was implying, plain enough, that no one else could be trusted to be as thorough as herself.

‘Do you ever have any fun, Ms Brown?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean,’ she said, raising surprised eyebrows. ‘All this is fun.’ She waved a hand in general round the horse car. ‘I’m having the time of my life.’ And she wasn’t being ironic: she truly meant it.

‘Well,’ I said a little feebly, ‘then that’s fine.’

She gave two sharp little nods, as if that finished the matter, which no doubt it did, except that I still looked for gaps in her defences. I wandered one more time round the whole place, seeing the sunlight slant in through the barred unopenable windows (which would keep people out as well as horses in), smelling the sweet hay and the faint musty odour of the horses themselves, feeling the swirls of fresh air coming from the rows of small ventilators along the roof, hearing the creaking and rushing noises in the car’s fabric and the grind of the electricity-generating wheels under the floor.

In that long, warm, friendly space there were animals worth at present a total of many millions of Canadian dollars: worth more if any of them won at Winnipeg or Vancouver. I stood for a long while looking at Voting Right. If Bill Baudelaire’s mother knew her onions, in this undistinguished looking bay lay the dormant seed of greatness.

Maybe she was right. Vancouver would tell.

I turned away, cast a last assessing glance at Laurentide Ice, who looked coolly back, thanked the enthusiastic dragon for her cooperation
(prim acknowledgment) and began a slow walk back through the train, looking for gaunt-face.

I didn’t see him. He could have been behind any of the closed doors. He wasn’t in the forward dome car, upstairs or down, nor in the open dayniter. I sought out and consulted separately with three of the sleeping car attendants in the racegoers’ sleeping cars who frowned in turn and said that first, the sort of jacket I was describing was worn by thousands, and second, everyone tended to look gaunt outside in the cold air. All the same, I said, if they came across anyone fitting that description in their care, please would they tell George Burley his name and room number.

Sure, they each said, but wasn’t this an odd thing for an actor to be asking? Zak, I improvised instantly at the first enquiry, had thought the gaunt man had an interesting face and he wanted to ask if he could use him in a scene. Ah, yes, that made sense. If they found him, they would tell George.

When I got back to George, I told him what I’d asked. He wrinkled his brow. ‘I saw a man like that at Thunder Bay,’ he said. ‘But I probably saw several men like that in all this trainload. What do you want him for?’

I explained that I’d told the sleeping car attendants that Zak wanted to use him in a scene.

‘But you?’ George said. ‘What do you want him for yourself?’

I looked at him and he looked back. I was wondering how far I should trust him and had an uncomfortable impression that he knew what I was thinking.

‘Well,’ I said finally, ‘he was talking to someone I’m interested in.’

I got a long bright beam from the shiny eyes.

‘Interested in … in the line of duty?’

‘Yes.’

He didn’t ask who it was and I didn’t tell him. I asked him instead if he himself had talked to any of the owners’ party.

‘Of course I have,’ he said. ‘I always greet passengers, eh? when they board. I tell them I’m the Conductor, tell them where my office is, tell them if they’ve any problems to bring them to me.’

‘And do they? Have they?’

He chuckled. ‘Most of the complaints go to your Miss Richmond, and she brings them to me.’

‘Miss Richmond …’ I repeated.

‘She’s your boss, isn’t she? Tall pretty girl with her hair in a plait today, eh?’

‘Nell,’ I said.

‘That’s right. Isn’t she your boss?’

‘Colleague.’

‘Right, then. The sort of problems the owners’ party have had on this trip so far are a tap that won’t stop dripping, a blind that won’t stay down in one of the bedrooms, eh?, and a lady who thought one of her suitcases had been stolen, only it turned up in someone else’s room.’ He beamed. ‘Most of the owners have been along to see the horses. When they see me, they stop to talk.’

‘What do they say?’ I asked. ‘What sort of things?’

‘Only what you’d expect. The weather, the journey, the scenery. They ask what time we get to Sudbury, eh? Or Thunder Bay, or Winnipeg, or whatever.’

‘Has anyone asked anything that was different, or surprised you?’

‘Nothing surprises me, sonny.’ He glowed with irony and bonhomie. ‘What would you expect them to ask?’

I shrugged in frustration. ‘What happened before Thunder Bay that shouldn’t have?’

‘The Lorrimores’ car, eh?’

‘Apart from that.’

‘You think something happened?’

‘Something happened, and I don’t know what, and it’s what I’m here to prevent.’

He thought about it, then said, ‘When it turns up, you’ll know, eh?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Like if someone put something in the food, eh?, sooner or later everyone will be ill.’

‘George!’ I was dumbstruck.

He chuckled. ‘We had a waiter once years ago who did that. He had a grudge against the world. He put handfuls of ground-up laxative pills into the chocolate topping over ice cream and watched the passengers eat it, and they all had diarrhoea. Dreadful stomach pains. One woman had to go to hospital. She’d bad two helpings. What a to-do, eh?’

‘You’ve frightened me stiff,’ I said frankly. ‘Where do they keep the fodder for the horses?’

He stared, his perpetual smile fading.

‘Is that what you’re afraid of? Something happening to the horses?’

‘It’s a possibility.’

‘All the fodder is in the horse car,’ he said, ‘except for some extra sacks of those cubes most of the horses are having, which are in the
baggage car. Some of the horses have their own special food brought along with them, sent by their trainers. One of the grooms had a whole set of separate bags labelled, “Sunday evening”, “Monday morning” and so on. He was showing them to me.’

‘Which horse was that for?’

‘Um … the one that belongs to that Mrs Daffodil Quentin, I think. The groom said one of her horses died of colic or some such recently, from eating the wrong things, and the trainer didn’t want any more accidents, so he’d made up the feeds himself.’

‘You’re brilliant, George.’

His ready laugh came back.

‘Don’t forget the water tank, eh? You can lift the lid … where the plank floats, remember? You could dope all those horses at once with one quick cupful of mischief, couldn’t you?’

Leslie Brown told us adamantly that no one could possibly have tampered with either the fodder or the water.

‘When did the grooms last fill the buckets?’ I asked.

During the morning, she said. Each groom filled the bucket for his own horse, when he wanted to. All of them had been in there, seeing to their charges.

The horses’ drinking water tank had been topped up, she said, by a hosepipe from the city’s water supply during the first twenty minutes of our stop in Thunder Bay, in a procedure that she herself had supervised.

George nodded and said the whole train had been rewatered at that point.

‘Before Thunder Bay,’ I said, ‘could anyone have put anything in the water?’

‘Certainly not. I’ve told you over and over again, I am here all the time.’

‘And how would you rate all the grooms for trustworthiness?’ I said.

She opened her mouth and closed it again and gave me a hard look.

‘I am here to supervise them,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know any of them before yesterday. I don’t know if any of them could be bribed to poison the water. Is that what you want?’

‘It’s realistic,’ I said with a smile.

She was unsoftened, unsoftenable.

‘My chair, as you see,’ she said carefully, ‘is next to the water tank. I sit there and watch. I do not think … I repeat, I do not believe, that anyone has tampered with the water.’

‘Mm,’ I said calmingly. ‘But you could ask the grooms, couldn’t you, if they’ve seen anything wrong?’

She began to shake her head automatically, but then stopped and shrugged. ‘I’ll ask them, but they won’t have.’

‘And just in case,’ I said, ‘in case the worst happens and the horses
prove to have been interfered with, I think I’ll take a sample of what’s in the tank and also what’s in their buckets at this moment. You wouldn’t object to that, Ms Brown, would you?’

She grudgingly said she wouldn’t. George elected himself to go and see what could be done in the way of sample jars and presently returned with gifts from the Chinese cook in the dome car, in the shape of four rinsed-out plastic tomato sauce bottles rescued from the rubbish bin.

George and Leslie Brown took a sample from the tank, draining it, at the dragon’s good suggestion, from the tap lower down, where the buckets were filled. I visited Voting Right, Laurentide Ice and Upper Gumtree, who all graciously allowed me to dip into their drink. With Leslie Brown’s pen, we wrote the provenance of each sample on the sauce label and put all four containers into a plastic carrier bag which Leslie Brown happened to have handy.

Carrying the booty, I thanked her for her kindness in answering our questions, and helping, and George and I retreated.

‘What do you think?’ he said, as we started back through the train.

‘I think she now isn’t as sure as she says she is.’

He chuckled. ‘She’ll be doubly careful from now on.’

‘As long as it’s not already too late.’

He looked as if it were a huge joke. ‘We could get the tank emptied, scrubbed and refilled at Winnipeg,’ he said.