The Edge

by Dick Francis

  ‘Neat,’ I said.

  He had only one more room to do, he said, and he should have finished long before this but he’d been badly delayed in the car on the other side of the dining car, which he had in his care also.

  I nodded – and several thoughts arrived simultaneously in a rush on my mental doorstep. They were that Filmer’s bedroom was in that car. Filmer was at that moment with the Lorrimores. The only locks on the bedroom doors were inside, in the form of bolts to ensure privacy. There was no way of preventing anyone from walking in if a room were empty.

  I went along to the sleeping car on the far side of the kitchen and opened the door of the abode of Julius Apollo.

  CHAPTER NINE

  By virtue of having paid double and possibly treble, Filmer had a double bedroom all to himself. Only the lower bunk had been prepared for the night: the upper was still in the ceiling.

  For all that he could be expected to stay in the Lorrimores’ car for at least fifteen more minutes I felt decidedly jittery, and I left the door open so that if he did come back unexpectedly I could say I was merely checking that everything was in order. My uniform had multiple advantages.

  The bedrooms were small, as one would expect, though in the daytime, with the beds folded away, there was comfortable space. There was a washbasin in full view, with the rest of the plumbing in a discreet little closet. For hanging clothes there was a slot behind the bedheads of about eight inches wide, enough in Filmer’s case for two suits. Another two jackets hung on hangers on pegs on the wall.

  I searched quickly through all the pockets, but they were mostly empty. There was only, in one inner pocket, a receipt for a watch repair which I replaced where I found it.

  There were no drawers: more or less everything else had to be in his suitcase which stood against the wall. With an eye on the corridor outside, I tried one of the latches and wasn’t surprised to find it locked.

  That left only a tiny cupboard above the hanging space, in which Julius Apollo had stored a black leather toilet bag and his brushes.

  On the floor below his suits, pushed to the back of the hanging space, I found his briefcase.

  I put my head out of the door which was directly beside the hanging space, and looked up and down the corridor.

  No one in sight.

  I went down on hands and knees, half in and half out of the doorway, with an excuse ready of looking for a coin I’d dropped. I put a hand into the hanging space and drew the briefcase to the front; and it was of black crocodile skin with gold clasps, as Id’ seen at Nottingham races.

  The fact of its presence was all I was going to learn, however, as it had revolving combination locks which were easy enough to undo, but only if one had two hours to spend on each lock, which I hadn’t. Whether or not the briefcase still contained whatever Horfitz had given Filmer at Nottingham was anyone’s guess, and dearly though I would have liked to look at the contents, I didn’t want to risk any more at that point. I pushed the black case deep into the hanging space again, stood up outside the door, closed it and went back to the scenes of jollity to the rear.

  It was, by this time, nearly midnight. The Youngs were standing up in the dining room, ready to go to bed. Xanthe however, alarmed by the departure of her new-found friend, was practically clinging to Mrs Young and with an echo of the earlier hysteria was saying that she couldn’t possibly sleep in the private car, she would have nightmares, she would be too scared to stay, she was sure whoever had uncoupled the car before would do it again in the middle of the night, and they would all be killed when the Canadian crashed into them, because the Canadian was still there behind us, wasn’t it, wasn’t it?

  Yes, it was.

  Mrs Young did her best to soothe her, but it was impossible not to respect her fears. She had undoubtedly nearly been killed. Mrs Young told her that the madman who had mischievously unhitched the car was hours behind us in Cartier, but Xanthe was beyond reassurance.

  Mrs Young appealed to Nell, asking if there was anywhere else that Xanthe could sleep, and Nell, consulting the ever-present clipboard, shook her head doubtfully.

  ‘There’s an upper berth in a section,’ she said slowly, ‘but it only has a curtain, and no facilities except at the end of the car, and it’s hardly what Xanthe’s used to.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Xanthe said passionately. ‘I’ll sleep on the floor or on the seats in the lounge, or anywhere. I’ll sleep in that upper berth … please let me.’

  ‘I don’t see why not, then,’ Nell said. ‘What about night things?’

  ‘I’m not going into our car to fetch them. I’m not.’

  ‘All right,’ Nell said. ‘I’ll go and ask your mother.’

  Mrs Young stayed with Xanthe, who was again faintly trembling, until at length Nell returned with both a small grip and Bambi.

  Bambi tried to get her daughter to change her mind, but predictably without success. I thought it unlikely that Xanthe would ever sleep in that car again, so strong was her present reaction. She, Bambi, Nell and the Youngs made their way past me without looking at me and continued on along the corridor beside the kitchen, going to inspect the revised quarters which I knew were in the sleeping car forward of Filmer’s.

  After a while Bambi and Nell returned alone, and Bambi with an unexcited word of gratitude to Nell walked a few paces forward and stopped beside her son, who had done nothing to comfort or help his sister and was now sitting alone.

  ‘Come along, Sheridan,’ she said, her tone without peremptoriness but also without affection. ‘Your father asks you to come.’

  Sheridan gave her a look of hatred which seemed not in the least to bother her. She stood patiently waiting until, with exceedingly bad grace, he got to his feet and followed her homewards.

  Bambi, it seemed to me, had taught herself not to care for Sheridan so as not to be hurt by him. She too, like Mercer, must have suffered for years from his boorish behaviour in public, and she had distanced herself from it. She didn’t try to buy the toleration of the victims of his rudeness, as Mercer did: she ignored the rudeness instead.

  I wondered which had come first, the chill and disenchantment of her worldly sophistication, or the lack of warmth in her son: and perhaps there was ice in both of them, and the one had reinforced the other. Bambi, I thought, was a highly inappropriate name for her; she was no innocent wide-eyed smooth-skinned fawn but an experienced, aloof, good-looking woman in the skin of minks.

  Nell, watching them go, sighed and said, ‘She didn’t kiss Xanthe goodnight, you know, or give her even a hug to comfort her. Nothing. And Mercer’s so nice.’

  ‘Forget them.’

  ‘Yes.… You do realise the press will be down on this train like a pack of hunting lions at the next stop.’

  ‘Lionesses,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s the females who hunt in a pack. One male sits by, watching, and takes the lion’s share of the kill.’

  ‘I don’t want to know that.’

  ‘Our next stop,’ I said, ‘will be fifteen minutes at White River in the middle of the night. After the delay, we’ll aim to arrive at four-oh-five, depart four-twenty.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘Except for a three-minute pause in a back-of-beyond, we stop at Thunder Bay for twenty-five minutes at ten-fifty tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Do you know the whole timetable by heart?’

  ‘Emil told me to learn it. He was right when he said the question I would have to answer most was “When do we reach so and so“… and if I were a regular waiter he said I would know the answers, even though we’re thirty-five minutes earlier everywhere than the regular Canadian.’

  ‘Emil is cute,’ she said.

  I looked at her in surprise. I wouldn’t have thought of Emil as cute. Small, neat, bright and generous, yes. ‘Cute?’ I asked.

  ‘I would hope,’ she said, ‘that you don’t think so.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good.’ She was reliev
ed, I saw.

  ‘Weren’t you sure?’ I asked curiously. ‘Am I so … ambivalent?’

  ‘Well …’ There was a touch of embarrassment. ‘I didn’t mean to get into this sort of conversation, really I didn’t. But if you want to know, there’s something about you that’s secret … ultra-private … as if you didn’t want to be known too well. So I just wondered. I’m sorry …’

  ‘I shall shower you with ravening kisses.’

  She laughed. ‘Not your style.’

  ‘Wait and see.’ And two people didn’t, I thought, drift into talking like that after knowing each other for such a short while unless there was immediate trust and liking.

  We were standing in the tiny lobby between the kitchen and the dining room, and she still had the clipboard clasped to her chest. She would have to put it down, I thought fleetingly, before any serious ravening could take place.

  ‘You always have jokes in your eyes,’ she said. ‘And you never tell them.’

  ‘I was thinking about how you use your clipboard as chain mail.’

  Her own eyes widened. ‘A lousy man in the magazine office squeezed my breast … Why am I telling you? It was years ago. Why should I care? Anyway, where else would you carry a clipboard?’

  She put it down, all the same, on the counter, but we didn’t talk much longer as the revellers from the rear began coming through to go to the bedrooms. I retreated into the kitchen and I could hear people asking Nell what time they could have breakfast.

  ‘Between seven and nine-thirty,’ she said. ‘Sleep well, everybody.’ She put her head into the kitchen. ‘Same to you, sleep well. I’m off to bed.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ I said, smiling.

  ‘Aren’t you going?’

  ‘Yes, in a while.’

  ‘When everything’s … safe?’

  ‘You might say so.’

  ‘What exactly does the Jockey Club expect you to do?’

  ‘See trouble before it comes.’

  ‘But that’s practically impossible.’

  ‘Mm,’ I said. ‘I didn’t foresee anyone uncoupling the Lorrimores.’

  ‘You’ll be fired for that,’ she said dryly, ‘so if you sleep, sleep well.’

  ‘Tor would kiss you,’ I said. ‘Tommy can’t.’

  ‘I’ll count it done.’

  She went away blithely, the clipboard again in place: a habit, I supposed, as much as a defence.

  I walked back to the bar and wasted time with the barman. The intent poker school looked set for an all-night session, the dancing was still causing laughter in the lounge and the northern lights were entrancing the devotees in the dome. The barman yawned and said he’d be closing the bar soon. Alcohol stopped at midnight.

  I heard Daffodil’s voice before I saw her, so that when Filmer came past the door of the bar I was bending down with my head below the counter as if to be tidying things there. I had the impression they did no more than glance in as they passed, as Filmer was saying ‘… when we get to Winnipeg.’ ‘You mean Vancouver,’ Daffodil said. ‘Yes, Vancouver.’ ‘You always get them mixed …’ Her voice, which had been raised, as his had been, so as to be heard while one of them walked ahead of the other, died away as they passed down the corridor, presumably en route to bed.

  Giving them time to say goodnight, as Daffodil’s room was one of the three just past the bar, I slowly followed. They were nowhere in sight as I went through to the dining car, and Filmer seemed to have gone straight to his room, as there was a thread of light shining along the bottom of his door; but Daffodil, I discovered, had after all not. Instead of being cosily tucked up in her bunk near the bar, she surprisingly came walking towards me from the sleeping car forward of Filmer’s, her diamonds lighting small bright fires with every step.

  I stood back to let her pass, but she shimmered to a stop before me and said, ‘Do you know where Miss Lorrimore is sleeping?’

  ‘In the car you’ve just come from, madam,’ I answered helpfully.

  ‘Yes, but where? I told her parents that I would make sure she was all right.’

  ‘The sleeping car attendant will know,’ I said. ‘If you would like to follow me?’

  She nodded assent and as I turned to lead the way I thought that at close quarters she was probably younger than I’d assumed, or else that she was older but immature: an odd impression, fleeting and gone.

  The middle-aged sleeping car attendant was dozing but dressed. He obligingly showed Daffodil the upper berth where Xanthe was sleeping, but the thick felt curtains were closely fastened, and when Daffodil called the girl’s name quietly, there was no response. The slightly fatherly attendant said he was sure she was safely asleep, as he’d seen her returning from the washroom at the end of the car and climbing up to her bunk.

  ‘I guess that will do,’ Daffodil said, shrugging off someone else’s problem. ‘Goodnight, then, and thank you for your help.’

  We watched her sway away holding on to the rails, her high curls shining, her figure neat, her intense musky scent lingering like a memory in the air after she herself had gone. The sleeping car attendant sighed deeply at so much opulent femininity and philosophically returned to his roomette, and I went on up the train into the next car, where my own bed lay.

  George Burley’s door, two along from mine, was wide open, and I found he was in residence, dressed but asleep, quietly snoring in his armchair. He jerked awake as if with a sixth sense as I paused in his doorway and said, ‘What’s wrong, eh?’

  ‘Nothing that I know of,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, it’s you.’

  ‘I’m sorry I woke you.’

  ‘I wasn’t asleep … well, napping, then. I’m used to that. I’ve been on the railways all my life, eh?’

  ‘A love affair?’ I said.

  ‘You can bet your life.’ He rubbed his eyes, yawning. ‘In the old days there were many big railway families. Father to son … cousins, uncles … it got handed down. My father, my grandfather, they were railwaymen. But my sons, eh? They’re behind desks in big cities tapping at computers.’ He chuckled. ‘They run the railways too now from behind desks, eh? They sit in Montreal making decisions and they’ve never heard a train’s call at night across the prairie. They’ve missed all that. These days the top brass fly everywhere, eh?’ His eyes twinkled. Anyone who wasn’t a wheels-on railwayman was demonstrably stupid. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said, ‘I hope to die on the railways.’

  ‘Not too soon, though.’

  ‘Not before White River, at any rate.’

  I said goodnight and went to my own room where I found the sleeping car attendant had duly lowered my bed and laid a chocolate truffle on the pillow.

  I ate the chocolate. Very good.

  I took off the yellow waistcoat with its white lining and hung it on a hanger, and I took off my shoes, but rather like George I still felt myself to be on duty, so I switched off the light and lay on top of the bedclothes watching the black Canadian land slide by, while the free northern show went on above for hours in the sky. There seemed to be wide horizontal bands of light which slowly changed in intensity, with brighter spots growing and fading in places mysteriously against the deeps of eternity. It was peaceful more than frenetic, a mirage of slow dawns and sunsets going back to the fluted point people: humbling. In the context of ten thousand years, I thought, what did Filmer and his sins matter. Yet all we had was here and now, and here and now … always through time … was where the struggle towards goodness had to be fought. Towards virtue, morality, uprightness, order: call it what one liked. A long, ever-recurring battle.

  In the here and now we stopped without incident at White River. I saw George outside under the station lights and watched him set off towards the rear of the train. Apparently the Lorrimores were still safely with us as he came back presently without haste or alarm, and after a while the train made its usual unobtrusive departure westwards.

  I slept for a couple of hours and was awakened while it was still dark by a gentle ra
pping on my door: it proved to be Emil, fully dressed and apologetic.

  ‘I didn’t know if I should wake you. If you are serious about this, it is time to set the tables for breakfast.’

  ‘I’m serious,’ I said.

  He smiled with seeming satisfaction. ‘It is much easier with four of us.’

  I said I would come at once and made it, washed, shaved and tidy, in roughly ten minutes. Oliver and Cathy were already there, wide awake. The kitchen was filled with glorious smells of baking and Angus, with languid largesse, said he wouldn’t notice if we ate a slice or two of his raisin bread, or of his apple and walnut. Simone said dourly that we were not to eat the croissants as there wouldn’t be enough. It was all rather like school.

  We set the places, put fresh water and carnations in bud vases, one flower to each table, and folded pink napkins with precision. By seven-fifteen, the first breakfasters were addressing themselves to eggs Benedict and I was pouring tea and coffee as to the service born.

  At seven-thirty, in struggling daylight, we stopped briefly in a place identified in suitably small letters on the small station as Schreiber.

  It was from here, I reflected, looking through the windows at a small scattered town, that the despatcher had spoken to George and me the previous evening: and while I watched, George appeared outside and was met by a man who came from the station. They conferred for a while, then George returned to the train, and the train went quietly on its way.

  A spectacular way: all through breakfast, the track ran along the north shore of Lake Superior, so close that at times the train seemed to be overhanging the water. The passengers oohed and aahed, the Unwins (Upper Gumtree) sitting with the owners of Flokati, the Redi-Hots with a couple talking incessantly of the prowess of their horse, Wordmaster, also on the train.

  Filmer came alone to sit at an untenanted table, ordering eggs and coffee from Oliver without looking at him. Presently the Youngs appeared and with smiling acquaintanceship joined Filmer. I wondered if he thought immediately of Ezra Gideon, the Youngs’ dear friend, but his face showed nothing but politeness.