The Edge (26 page)

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.

‘Yes, miss,’ I said.

I finished pouring Mr Unwin’s coffee and put it by his place, then took my tray and coffee pot along to the next table where the conversation seemed to be about Zak’s mystery rather than directly about horses.

‘I think the trainer killed Angelica. And the groom too.’

‘Why ever should he?’

‘He wants to marry Donna for her money. Angelica knew something that would make the marriage impossible, so he killed her.’

‘Knew what?’

‘Maybe that he’s already married.’

‘To Angelica?’

‘Well … why not?’

‘But where does the dead groom come in?’

‘He saw the murderer getting rid of the blood-spattered plastic.’

They laughed. I filled their cups and moved on and poured for Daffodil, who had an empty place on her far side. Daffodil, smoking with deep sucking lungfuls, sat with the Flokatis, and nobody else.

No Filmer.

I glanced back along the whole dining car, but couldn’t see him anywhere. He hadn’t come in while I was serving others, and he hadn’t been at the kitchen end when I’d started.

Daffodil said to me, ‘Can you bring me some vodka? Ice and lemon.’

‘I’ll ask, madam,’ I said, and asked Emil, and it was he who civilly explained to her that the barman wouldn’t be back on duty until eleven, and meanwhile everything was locked up.

Daffodil received the bad news without speaking but jabbed the fire out of her cigarette with some violent stabs and a long final grind. The Flokatis looked at her uncertainly and asked if they could help.

She shook her head. She seemed angry and near tears, but determinedly in control.

‘Give me some coffee,’ she said to me, and to the Flokatis she said, ‘I think I’ll get off the train at Calgary. I think I’ll go home.’

Small movements saved the day, as I would have spilled the brown liquid all over her hand.

‘Oh no!’ exclaimed the Flokatis, instantly distressed. ‘Oh, don’t do that. Your horse ran splendidly yesterday, even if it was only fifth. Ours was nearly last … and we are going on. You can’t give up. And you have Laurentide Ice, besides, for Vancouver.’

Daffodil looked at them as if bemused. ‘It’s not because of yesterday,’ she said.

‘But why, then?’

Daffodil didn’t tell them. Maybe wouldn’t; maybe couldn’t. She merely pursed her lips tight, shook her curly head, and dug out another cigarette.

The Flokatis having declined more coffee, I couldn’t stay to listen any further. I moved across the aisle and stretched my ears, but the Flokatis seemed to get nothing extra from Daffodil except a repeated and stronger decision to go home.

Nell in her straight grey skirt, clipboard in attendance, was still talking to passengers up by the kitchen end. I took my nearly empty coffee pot up there and made a small gesture onwards to the lobby, to where presently she came with enquiring eyebrows.

‘Daffodil Quentin,’ I said, peering into the coffee pot, ‘is upset to the point of leaving the train. She told the Flokatis, not me … so you don’t know, OK?’

‘Upset about what?’ Nell was alarmed.

‘She wouldn’t tell them.’

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

Smoothing ruffled feelings, keeping smiles in place; all in her day’s work. She started casually on her way through the dining car and I went into the kitchen to complete my mission. By the time I was out again with a full pot, Nell had reached Daffodil and was standing by her, listening. Nell appealed to the Youngs and the Unwins at adjacent tables for help, and presently Daffodil was out of sight in a bunch of people trying to persuade her to change her mind.

I had to wait quite a while to hear what was happening, but finally the whole little crowd, Daffodil among them, went out at the far end into the dome car and Nell returned to the lobby, relaying the news to me in snatches as I paused beside her on to and fro journeys to clear away the breakfast debris.

‘Cumber and Rose …’ The Youngs, I thought. ‘Cumber and Rose
and also the Unwins say there was nothing wrong last night, they all had a splendid time in the Lorrimores’ car. Daffodil finally said she’d had a disagreement with Mr Filmer after the party had broken up. She said she had hardly slept and wasn’t sure what to do, but there was no fun left in taking Laurentide Ice to Vancouver, and she couldn’t face the rest of the journey. The Youngs have persuaded her to go up into the dome with them to think things over, but I honestly think she’s serious. She’s very upset.’

‘Mm.’ I put the last of the debris into the kitchen and excused myself apologetically from washing the dishes.

‘How can Mr Filmer have upset Daffodil so much?’ Nell exclaimed. ‘She’s obviously been enjoying herself, and he’s such a nice man. They were getting on together so well, everyone thought.’ She paused. ‘Mr Unwin believes it’s a lovers’ quarrel.’

‘Does he?’ I pondered. ‘I think I’ll make a recce up the train. See if anything else is happening.’

Maybe Daffodil had made advances and been too roughly repulsed, I thought. And maybe not.

‘Mr Filmer hasn’t been in to breakfast,’ Nell said. ‘It’s all very worrying. And last night everyone was so happy.’

If Daffodil’s leaving the train was the worst thing that happened, I thought, we would have got off lightly. I left Nell and set off up the corridor, coming pretty soon to Filmer’s bedroom door, which was uninformatively closed.

I checked with the sleeping car attendant further along the car who was in the midst of folding up the bunks for the day and unfolding the armchairs.

‘Mr Filmer? He’s in his room still, as far as I know. He was a bit short with me, told me to hurry up. And he’s not usually like that. He was eating something, and he had a thermos too. But then we do get passengers like that sometimes. Can’t get through the night without raiding the ice box, that sort of thing.’

I nodded noncommittally and went onwards, but I thought that if Filmer had brought food and a thermos on board for breakfast, he must have known in Winnipeg that he would need them, which meant that last night’s quarrel had been planned and hadn’t been caused by Daffodil.

George Burley was in his office, writing his records.

‘Morning,’ he said, beaming.

‘How’s the train?’

‘The forward sleeping car attendants are threatening to resign, eh?, over the vomit in the bathrooms.’

‘Ugh.’

He chuckled. ‘I brought extra disinfectants aboard in Winnipeg,’ he said. ‘Train-sickness gets them, you know.’

I shook my head at his indulgence and pressed forward, looking as always for gaunt-face but chiefly aiming for the horses.

Leslie Brown, hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, regarded me with only half the usual belligerence.

‘Come in,’ she said, stepping back from her door. ‘To be honest, I could do with some help.’

As I’d just passed several green-looking grooms being sorry for themselves in their sections, I supposed at first she meant simply physical help in tending the horses, but it appeared that she didn’t.

‘Something’s going on that I don’t understand,’ she said, locking the entrance door behind me and leading the way to the central space where her chair stood beside the innocent water tank.

‘What sort of thing?’ I asked, following her.

She mutely pointed further forward up the car, and I walked on until I came to the final space between the stalls, and there, in a sort of nest made of hay bales, one of the grooms half lay, half sat, curled like an embryo and making small moaning noises.

I went back to Leslie Brown. ‘What’s the matter with him?’ I said.

‘I don’t know. He was drunk last night, they all were, but this doesn’t look like an ordinary hangover.’

‘Did you ask the others?’

She sighed. ‘They don’t remember much about last night. They don’t care what’s the matter with him.’

‘Which horse is he with?’

‘Laurentide Ice.’

I’d have been surprised, I supposed, if she’d said anything else.

‘That’s the horse, isn’t it,’ I asked, ‘whose trainer sent separate numbered individual bags of food, because another of Mrs Quentin’s horses had died because of eating the wrong things?’

She nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘And this boy was with the horse all the time in the barns at Winnipeg?’

‘Yes, of course. They exercised the horses and looked after them, and they all came back to the train in horse vans yesterday after the races, while the train was still in the siding. I came with them. There’s nothing wrong with any of the horses, I assure you.’

‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘Laurentide Ice as well?’

‘See for yourself.’

I walked round looking at each horse but in truth they all appeared healthy and unaffected, even Upper Gumtree and Flokati who would have been excused seeming thin and fatigued after their exertions. Most of them had their heads out over the stall doors, sure sign of interest: a few were a pace or two back, semi-dreaming. Laurentide Ice watched me with a bright glacial eye, in far better mental health than his attendant.

I returned to Leslie Brown and asked her the groom’s name.

‘Lenny,’ she said. She consulted a list. ‘Leonard Higgs.’

‘How old is he?’

‘About twenty, I should think.’

‘What’s he like, usually?’

‘Like the others. Full of foul language and dirty jokes.’ She looked disapproving. ‘Every other word beginning with f.’

‘When did all this moaning and retreating start?’

‘He was lying there all night. The other boys said it was his turn to be in here, but it wasn’t really, only he was paralytic, and they just dumped him in the hay and went back to the party. He started the moaning about an hour ago and he won’t answer me at all.’ She was disturbed by him, and worried, I thought, that his behaviour might be held to be her responsibility.

Rather to her surprise, I took off my yellow waistcoat and striped tie and gave them to her to hold. If she would sit down for a while, I suggested, I would try to sort Lenny out.

Meekly for her, she agreed. I left her perching with my badges of office across her trousered knees and returned to the total collapse in the hay.

‘Lenny,’ I said, ‘give it a rest.’

He went on with the moaning, oblivious.

I sat down beside him on one of the hay bales and put my mouth near his one visible ear.

‘Shut up,’ I said, very loudly.

He jumped and he gasped and after a short pause he went back to moaning, though artificially now, it seemed to me.

‘If you’re sick from beer,’ I said forcefully, ‘it’s your own bloody fault, but I’ll get you something to make you feel better.’

He curled into a still tighter ball, tucking his head down into his arms as if shielding it from a blow. It was a movement impossible to misconstrue: what he felt, besides alcohol sickness, was fear.

Fear followed Julius Apollo Filmer like a spoor; the residue of his passing. Lenny, frightened out of his wits, was a familiar sight indeed.

I undid the top buttons of my shirt, loosening the collar, and rolled up my cuffs, aiming for informality, and I slid down until I was sitting on the floor with my head on the same level as Lenny’s.

‘If you’re shit scared,’ I said distinctly, ‘I can do something about that, too.’

Nothing much happened. He moaned a couple of times and fell silent and after a long while, I said, ‘Do you want help, or don’t you? This is a good offer. If you don’t take it, whatever you’re afraid of will probably happen.’

After a lengthy pause he rolled his head round, still wrapped in his arms, until I could see his face. He was red-eyed, bony, unshaven and dribbling, and what came out of his slack mouth wasn’t a groan but a croak.