by Dick Francis
I hadn’t the faintest idea, and he knew it. With a gleam of a smile he bought himself a double Scotch drowned in a large glass of water, and led the way to one of the small tables round the edge of the room, still chatting on about the whys and wherefores of the selected team.
‘Now,’ he said without change of speed or volume, ‘Welfram’s dead, Shacklebury’s dead, Gideon’s dead, and the problem is what do we do next.’
The question, I knew, had to be rhetorical. He never called me to the Hobbs Sandwich to ask my advice but always to direct me towards some new course of action, though he would listen and change his requirements if I put forward any huge objections, which I didn’t often. He waited for a while, though, as if for an answer, and took a slow contemplative mouthful of weak whisky.
‘Did Mr Gideon leave any notes?’ I asked eventually.
‘Not as far as we know. Nothing as helpful as telling us why he sold his horses to Filmer, if that’s what you mean. Not unless a letter comes in the post next week, which I very much doubt.’
Gideon had been frightened beyond death, I thought. The threat must have been to the living: an ongoing perpetual threat.
‘Mr Gideon has daughters,’ I said.
The Brigadier nodded. ‘Three. And five grandchildren. His wife died years ago, I suppose you know. Am I reading you aright?’
‘That the daughters and grandchildren were hostages? Yes. Do you think they could know it?’
‘Positive they don’t,’ the Brigadier said. ‘I talked with his eldest daughter today. Nice, sensible woman, about fifty. Gideon shot himself yesterday evening, around five they think, but no one found him for hours as he did it out in the woods. I went down to the house today. His daughter, Sarah, said he’s been ultra-depressed lately, going deeper and deeper, but she didn’t know what had caused it. He wouldn’t discuss it. Sarah was in tears, of course, and also of course feeling guilty because she didn’t prevent it, but she couldn’t have prevented it, it’s almost impossible to stop a determined suicide, you can’t force people to go on living. Short of imprisonment, of course. Anyway, if she was any sort of a hostage, she didn’t know it. It wasn’t that sort of guilt.’
I offered him one of my so far uneaten sandwiches. He took one absentmindedly and began to chew, and I ate one myself. The problem of what to do about Filmer lay in morose wrinkles across his brow and I’d heard he considered the collapse of the conspiracy trial a personal failure.
‘I went to see Ezra Gideon myself after you and John Millington flushed out Welfram,’ he said. ‘I showed Ezra your photograph of Welfram. I thought he would faint, he went so white, but he still wouldn’t speak. And now, God damn it, in one day we’ve lost both contacts. We don’t know who Filmer will get to next, or if he’s already active again, and we’ll have the devil’s own job spotting another frightener.’
‘He won’t have found one himself yet, I shouldn’t think,’ I said. ‘Certainly not one as effective. They aren’t that common, are they?’
‘The police say they’re getting younger.’
He looked unusually discouraged for someone whose success rate in all other fields was impressive. The lost battle rankled: the victories had been shrugged off. I drank some wine and waited for the commanding officer to emerge from the worried man, waited for him to unfold the plan of campaign.
He surprised me, however, by saying, ‘I didn’t think you’d stick this job this long.’
‘Why not?’
‘You know damn well why not. You’re not dim. Clement told me the pile your father left you simply multiplied itself for twenty years, growing like a mushroom. And still does. Like a whole field of mushrooms. Why aren’t you out there picking them?’
I sat back in my chair wondering what to say. I knew very well why I didn’t pick them, but I wasn’t sure it would sound sensible.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I need to know.’
I glanced at his intent eyes and sensed his concentration, and realised suddenly that he might mean in some obscure way to base the future plan on my answer.
‘It isn’t so easy,’ I said slowly, ‘and don’t laugh, it really isn’t so easy to be able to afford anything you want. Short of the Crown Jewels and trifles like that. Well … I don’t find it easy. I’m like a child loose in a sweet shop. I could eat and eat … and make myself sick … and greedy … and a jellyfish. So I keep my hands off the sweets and occupy my time following crooks. Is that any sort of answer?’
He grunted noncommittally. ‘How strong is the temptation?’
‘On freezing cold days in sleet and wind at say Doncaster races, very strong indeed. At Ascot in the sunshine I don’t feel it.’
‘Be serious,’ he said. ‘Put it another way. How strong is your commitment to the Security Service?’
‘They’re really two different things,’ I said. ‘I don’t pick too many mushrooms because I want to retain order … to keep my feet well planted. Mushrooms can be hallucinogenic, after all. I work for you, for the Service, rather than in banking or farming and so on, because I like it and I’m not all that bad at what I do, really, and it’s useful, and I’m not terribly good at twiddling my thumbs. I don’t know that I’d die for you. Is that what you want?’
His lips twitched. He said, ‘Fair enough. How do you feel about danger nowadays? I know you did risky enough things on your travels.’
After a brief pause, I said, ‘What sort of danger?’
‘Physical, I suppose.’ He rubbed a thumb and forefinger down his nose and looked at me with steady eyes. ‘Perhaps.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
We had come to the point of the meeting, but he backed away from it still.
I knew in a way that it was because of what he’d called the mushrooms that he’d grown into the way of speaking to me as he did, proposing but seldom giving straight orders. He would have been more forthright if I’d been a junior army officer in uniform. Millington, who didn’t know about the mushrooms, could uninhibitedly boss me around like a sergeant-major, and did so pretty sharply under pressure.
Millington mostly called me Kelsey and only occasionally, on good days, Tor. (‘Tor? What sort of name is that?’ he’d demanded at the beginning. ‘Short for Torquil,’ I said. ‘Torquil? Huh. I don’t blame you.’) He always referred to himself as Millington (‘Millington here,’ when he telephoned) and that was how I thought of him: he had never asked me to call him John. I supposed that a man who had served in a strongly hierarchical organisation for a long time found surnames natural.
The Brigadier’s attention still seemed to be focused on the glass he was slowly revolving in his hands, but finally he put it down precisely in the centre of a beer mat as if coming to a precise conclusion in his thoughts.
‘I had a telephone call yesterday from my counterpart in the Canadian Jockey Club.’ He paused again. ‘Have you ever been to Canada?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Once, for a while, for maybe three months, mostly in the west. Calgary … Vancouver … I went up by boat from there to Alaska.’
‘Did you go to the races in Canada?’
‘Yes, a few times, but it must be about six years ago … and I don’t know anyone-’ I stopped, puzzled, not knowing what kind of response he wanted.
‘Do you know about this train?’ he said. ‘The Transcontinental Mystery Race Train? Ever heard of it?’
‘Um,’ I said, reflecting. ‘I read something about it the other day. A lot of top Canadian owners are going on a jolly with their horses, stopping to race at tracks along the way. Is that the one you mean?’
‘It is indeed. But the owners aren’t all Canadian. Some of them are American, some are Australian and some are British. One of the British passengers is Julius Filmer.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘Yes, oh. The Canadian Jockey Club has given its blessing to the whole affair because it’s attracting world-wide publicity and they are hoping for bumper attendances, hoping to give all Canadian racing an extra
boost. Yesterday, my counterpart, Bill Baudelaire, told me he’d been talking with the company who are arranging everything – they’ve had regular liaison meetings, it seems – and he found there was a late addition to the passenger list, Julius Filmer. Bill Baudelaire of course knows all about the conspiracy fiasco. He wanted to know if there wasn’t some way we could keep the undesirable Mr Filmer off that prestigious train. Couldn’t we possibly declare him persona non grata on all racetracks, including and especially Canadian. I told him if we’d had any grounds to warn Filmer off we’d have done it already, but the man was acquitted. We can’t be seen to disgrace him when he’s been declared not guilty, we’d be in all sorts of trouble. We can’t warn him off for buying two horses from Gideon. These days, we can’t just warn him off because we want to, he can only be warned off for transgressing against the rules of racing.’
All the frustrated fury of the Jockey Club vibrated in his voice. He wasn’t a man to take impotence lightly.
‘Bill Baudelaire knows all that, of course,’ he went on. ‘He said if we couldn’t get Filmer off the train, would we please get one of our grandees on. Although the whole thing is sold out, he twisted the arms of the promoters to say they would let him have one extra ticket, and he wanted one of our Stewards, or one of the Jockey Club department heads, or me myself, to go along conspicuously, so that Filmer would know he was being closely watched and would refrain from any sins he had in mind.’
‘Are you going?’ I asked, fascinated.
‘No, I’m not. You are.’
‘Um …’ I said a shade breathlessly, ‘I hardly fit the bill.’
‘I told Bill Baudelaire,’ the Brigadier said succinctly, ‘that I would send him a passenger Filmer didn’t know. One of my men. Then if Filmer does try anything, and after all it’s a big if, we might have a real chance of finding out how and what, and catching him at it.’
My God, I thought. So simple, put like that. So absolutely impossible of performance.
I swallowed. ‘What did Mr Baudelaire say?’
‘I talked him into agreeing. He’s expecting you.’
I blinked.
‘Well,’ the Brigadier said, ‘not you by name. Someone. Someone fairly young, I said, but experienced. Someone who wouldn’t seem out of place …’ his teeth gleamed briefly ‘… on the millionaires’ express.’
‘But –’ I said, and stopped dead, my mind full of urgent reservations and doubts that I was good enough for a job like that. Yet on the other hand, what a lark.
‘Will you go?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘I hoped you might.’
Brigadier Catto, who lived ninety miles from London in Newmarket, was staying overnight, as he often did, in a comfortable bedroom upstairs in the club. I left him in the bar after a while and drove the last half-mile home to where I lived in a quiet residential street in Kennington.
I had looked in that district for somewhere to put down a few roots on the grounds that I wouldn’t be bothered to use the club much if I lived on the other side of London. Kennington, south of the Thames, rubbing shoulders with the grittiness of Lambeth and Brixton, was not where the racing crowd panted to be seen, and in fact I’d never spotted anyone locally that I knew by sight on the racecourse.
I’d come across an advertisement: ‘House share available, for single presentable yuppy. 2 rooms, bath, share kit, mortgage and upkeep. Call evenings’, and although I’d been thinking in terms of a flat on my own, house sharing had suddenly seemed attractive, especially after the loneliness of work. I’d presented myself by appointment, been inspected by the four others in residence, and let in on trial, and it had all worked very well.
The four others were currently two sisters working in publishing (whose father had originally bought the house and set up the running-mortgage scheme), one junior barrister who tended to stutter, and an actor with a supporting role in a television series. The house rules were simple: pay on the dot, show good manners at all times, don’t pry into the others’ business, and don’t let overnight girl/boy friends clog up any of the three bathrooms for hours in the morning.
There was a fair amount of laughter and camaraderie, but we tended to share coffee, beer, wine and saucepans more than confidences. I told them I was a dedicated racegoer and no one asked whether I won or lost.
The actor, Robbie, on the top floor, had been of enormous use to me, though I doubted he really knew it. He’d invited me up for a beer early one evening a few days after I went to live there, and I’d found him sitting before a brightly-lit theatrical dressing table creating, as he said, a new make-up for a part he’d accepted in a play. I’d been startled to see how a different way of brushing his hair, how a large false moustache and heavier eyebrows had changed him.
‘Tools of the trade,’ he said, gesturing to the grease paints and false hair lying in neat rows and boxes before him. ‘Instant stubble, Fauntleroy curls – what would you like?’
‘Curls,’ I said slowly.
‘Sit down, then,’ he said cheerfully, getting up to give me his place, and he brought out a butane hair curler and wound my almost straight hair onto it bit by bit there and then, and within minutes I looked like a brown poodle, tousled, unbrushed, totally different.
‘How’s that?’ he said, bending to look with me into the looking glass.
‘Amazing.’ And easy, I thought. I could do it in the car, any time.
‘It suits you,’ Robbie said. He knelt down beside me, put his arm round my shoulders, gave me a little squeeze and smiled with unmistakable invitation into my eyes.
‘No,’ I said matter of factly. ‘I like girls.’
He wasn’t offended. ‘Haven’t you ever tried the other?’
‘It’s just not me, dear,’ I said, ‘as one might say.’
He laughed and took his arm away. ‘Never mind, then. No harm in trying.’
We drank the beer and he showed me how to shape and stick on a bold macho moustache, holding out a pair of thick-framed glasses for good measure. I regarded the stranger looking back at me from the glass and said I’d never realised how easy it was to mislead.
‘Sure thing. All it takes is a bit of nerve.’
And he was right about that. I bought a butane curler for myself, but I took it with me for a week in the car before I screwed myself up to stop in a lay-by on the way to Newbury races and actually use it. In the three years since then, I’d done it dozens of times without a thought, brushing and damping out the effects on the way home.
Sundays I usually spent lazily in my two big bright rooms on the first floor (the barrister directly above, the sisters below) sleeping, reading, pottering about. For about a year some time earlier I’d spent my Sundays with the daughter of one of the Hobbs Sandwich members, but it had been a mutual passing pleasure rather than a grand passion for both of us, and in the end she’d drifted away and married someone else. I supposed I too would marry one day: knew I would like to: felt there was no hurry this side of thirty.
On the Sunday morning after meeting the Brigadier in the club I began to think about what I should pack for Canada. He’d told me to be what I spent so much time not being, a rich young loafer with nothing to do but enjoy myself. ‘All you need to do is talk about horses to the other passengers and keep your eyes open.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Look the part.’
‘Yes, right.’
‘I’ve caught sight of you sometimes at the races, you know, looking like a stockbroker one day and a hillbilly the next. Millington says he often can’t see you, even though he knows you’re there.’
‘I’ve got better with practice, I suppose, but I never really do much. Change my hair, change my clothes, slouch a bit.’
‘It works,’ he said. ‘Be what Filmer would expect.’
It wasn’t so much what Filmer would expect, I thought, looking at the row of widely assorted jackets in my wardrobe, but what I could sustain over the ten days the pa
rty was due to take before it broke up.
Curls, for instance, were out, as they disappeared in rain. Stuck-on moustaches were out in case they came off. Spectacles were out, as one could forget to put them on. I would have to look basically as nature had ordained and be as nondescript and unnoticeable as possible.
I sorted out the most expensive and least worn of my clothes, and decided I’d better buy new shirts, new shoes and a cashmere sweater before I went.
I telephoned Millington on Monday morning as instructed and found him in a usual state of disgruntlement. He had heard about the train. He was not in favour of my going on it. The Security Service (meaning the Brigadier) should have sent a properly trained operative, an ex-policeman preferably. Like himself, for instance. Someone who knew the techniques of investigation and could be trusted not to destroy vital evidence through ignorance and clumsiness. I listened without interruption for so long that, in the end, he said sharply, ‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I want to see you, preferably later this morning. I’ll have your air ticket. I suppose you do have an up-to-date passport?’
We agreed to meet, as often before, in a reasonably good small snack-bar next to Victoria Station, convenient for both Millington who lived a couple of miles south-west across Battersea Bridge, and for me a few stops down the line to the south.
I arrived ten minutes before the appointed time and found Millington already sitting at a table with a mug of brown liquid and several sausage rolls in progress. I took a tray, slid it along the rails in front of the glass-fronted serving display and picked a slice of cheesecake from behind one of the small hinged doors. I actually approved of the glass-door arrangement: it meant that with luck one’s cheesecake wouldn’t have been sneezed on by the general public, but only by a cook or two and the snack-bar staff.
Millington eyed my partially hygienic wedge and said he preferred the lemon meringue pie, himself.
