The Edge

by Dick Francis

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘On the other hand, we are sitting with our backs to one of the greatest views on earth.’

  I twisted round and looked over the back of the chair, and saw, between thronging Japanese, black and white mountains, a turquoise blue lake, green pines and an advancing glacier, all looking like painted stage scenery, awesomely close and framed by the windows.

  ‘Wow,’ I said, impressed.

  ‘It won’t go away,’ Nell said, after a while. ‘It’ll all still be there tomorrow.’

  I flopped back into the chair. ‘It’s amazing.’

  ‘It’s why people have been coming here to stare for generations.’

  ‘I expected altogether more snow,’ I said.

  ‘It’ll be knee-deep by Christmas.’

  ‘Do you have any time off here?’ I asked.

  She looked at me sideways. ‘Five seconds now and then, but almost no privacy.’

  I sighed lightly, having expected nothing else. She was the focus, the centre round which the tour revolved: the most visible person, her behaviour vivisected.

  ‘Your room is in one of the wings,’ she said, handing me a card with a number on it. ‘You just have to sign in at the desk and they’ll give you the key. Your bag should be up there already. Most of the actors are in that wing. None of the owners.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘No.’

  She didn’t say where her room was, and I didn’t ask. ‘Where will you eat?’ she said doubtfully. ‘I mean … will you sit with the actors in the dining room?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘But not with the owners …’

  ‘It’s a lonely old life,’ I said.

  She looked at me with sudden sharp attention, and I thought ruefully that I’d told her a good deal too much.

  ‘Do you mean,’ she asked slowly, ‘that you do this all the time? Play a part? Not just on the train?’

  ‘No,’ I smiled. ‘I work alone. That’s all I meant.’

  She almost shivered. ‘Are you ever yourself?’

  ‘Sundays and Mondays.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Well … yes.’

  Her eyes, steady and grey, looked only moderately troubled. ‘You don’t seem unhappy,’ she observed, ‘being lonely.’

  ‘Of course not. I choose it, mostly. But not when there’s an alluring alternative hiding behind a clipboard.’

  The armour lay on her lap at that moment, off duty. She smoothed a hand over it, trying not to laugh.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said, retreating into common sense, ‘I’m escorting a bus load of passengers to a glacier, then to lunch in Banff, then up a mountain in cable cars.’

  ‘And may it keep fine for you.’

  ‘The Lorrimores have a separate chauffeur-driven car.’

  ‘Has anyone else?’

  ‘Not since Mrs Quentin’s left.’

  ‘Poor old Daffodil,’ I said.

  ‘Poor?’ Nell exclaimed. ‘Did you know she smashed the mirror in her room?’

  ‘Yes, I heard. Is Mr Filmer going on the bus trip?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. He wanted to know if there’s an exercise gym because he likes lifting weights. The bus is simply available for anyone who wants to go. I won’t know everyone who’ll be on it until we set off.’

  I would have to watch the departure, I thought, and that could be difficult as I would be half familiar to all of them by now and could hardly stand invisibly around for very long.

  ‘The Unwins have come down into the hall and are heading towards me,’ Nell said, looking away from me.

  ‘Right.’

  I stood up without haste, took the card she’d given me to the desk, and signed the register. Behind me, I could hear the Unwins’ Australian voices telling her they were going for a stroll by the shore and it was the best trip they’d ever taken. When I turned round, holding my own key, they were letting themselves out through the glass doors to the garden.

  I paused again beside Nell who was now standing up. ‘Maybe I’ll see you,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe.’

  I smiled at her eyes. ‘If anything odd happens …’

  She nodded. ‘You’re in room six sixty-two.’

  ‘After Vancouver,’ I said, ‘what then?’

  ‘After the races I’m booked straight back to Toronto on the red-eye special.’

  ‘What’s the red-eye special?’

  ‘The overnight flight.’

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘How was I to know I wouldn’t want to?’

  ‘That’ll do fine,’ I said, ‘for now.’

  ‘Don’t get ideas,’ Nell said sedately, ‘above your lowly station.’

  She moved away with a mischievous glint and I went contentedly up to the sixth floor in the wing where there were no owners, and found that the room allocated to me was near the end of the passage and next door to Zak’s.

  His door was wide open with Donna and Pierre standing half in, half out.

  ‘Come on in,’ Donna said, seeing me. ‘We’re just walking through tonight’s scene.’

  ‘And we’ve a hell of a crisis on our hands,’ Pierre said. ‘We need all the input we can get.’

  ‘But Zak might not …’ I began.

  He came to the door himself. ‘Zak is taking suggestions from chimpanzees,’ he said.

  ‘OK. I’ll just take off my coat.’ I pointed. ‘I’m in the room next along.’

  I went into my room which proved to have the same sweeping view of the mountains, the lake, the trees and the glacier, and it was if anything more spectacular than in the lobby from being higher up. I took off the raincoat and the uniform it had hidden, put on a tracksuit and trainers, and returned to Zak’s fray.

  The crisis was the absence of an actor who was supposed to have arrived but had sent apologies instead.

  ‘Apologies!’ Zak fumed. ‘He broke his goddam arm this morning and he’s not coming. I ask you! Is a broken arm any sort of excuse?’

  The others, the whole troupe, were inclined to think not.

  ‘He was supposed to be Angelica’s husband,’ Zak said.

  ‘What about Steve?’ I asked.

  ‘He was her lover, and her business partner. They were both killed by Giles because they had just found out he had embezzled all the capital and the bloodstock business was bankrupt. Now Angelica’s husband comes on the scene to ask where her money is, as she hasn’t changed her will and he inherits. He decided to investigate her death himself because he doesn’t think either the Mounties or I have done a good enough job. And now he isn’t even here.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘why don’t you discover that it is Raoul who is really Angelica’s husband and who stands to inherit, which gives him a lot of motive as he doesn’t know yet that Giles has embezzled the money, does he? No one does. And also Raoul is only free to marry Donna because Angelica is now dead, which can give the Bricknells hysterics. And how about if Raoul says the Bricknells themselves have been doping their horses, not Raoul, but they deny it and are very pleased that he should be judged guilty of everything now they know he can’t marry their daughter because he is probably a murderer and will go to jail. And how about if it was the Bricknells’ horse that was really supposed to be kidnapped, but by Giles, as you can later discover, so that he could sell it and gain enough to skip the country once he got safely to Vancouver.’

  They opened their mouths.

  ‘I don’t know that it actually makes sense,’ Zak said eventually.

  ‘Never mind, I don’t suppose they’ll notice.’

  ‘You cynical son-of-a …’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ Donna said. ‘And I can have a nice weepy scene with Pierre.’

  ‘Why?’ Zak said.

  ‘I like doing them.’

  They all fell about, and in a while walked through dramatic revelations (received by Zak from Outside Sources) of Raoul’s marriage to Angelica five years earlier, which neither had acknowledged at
Toronto station because, Raoul said unconvincingly, they were both shocked to find the other there, as he wanted to meld with Donna as she with Steve.

  They all went away presently to get into their character clothes, and from Zak, very much later, I heard that the whole thing, played at the tops of their voices, had been a galvanic riot. He came to my door with a bottle in each hand, scotch for him, red wine for me, and sank exhaustedly into an armchair with an air of having nobly borne the weight of the world on his shoulders and bravely survived.

  ‘Did you have any dinner?’ he said, yawning. ‘Didn’t see you.’

  ‘I had some sent up.’

  He looked at the television programme with which I’d passed the time.

  ‘Rotten reception in these mountains,’ he said. ‘Look at that idiot.’ He stared at the screen. ‘Couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag.’

  We drank companionably and I asked if the party were all generally happy without Daffodil Quentin.

  ‘The dear in the Mont Blanc curls?’ he said. ‘Oh, sure. They were all in a great mood. That man who used to be with her all the time was dripping charm all over Bambi Lorrimore and that nutter of a son of hers didn’t open his mouth once. Those Australians are still in the clouds …’

  He described the reactions of some of the others to the evening’s scene and then said he would rely on me for another scintillating bit of scrambled plot for the next night. Not to mention, he added, a denouement and finale for the night after, our last on the train. The mystery had to be solved then before a Gala Dinner of epic proportions comprising five courses produced by Angus by sleight of hand.

  ‘But I only said it all off the top of my head,’ I said.

  ‘The top of your head will do us all fine.’ He yawned. ‘Tell you the truth, we need a fresh mind.’

  ‘Well … all right.’

  ‘So how much do I pay you?’

  I was surprised. ‘I don’t want money.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘Um,’ I said. ‘I do earn more than Tommy.’

  He looked at me over his whisky glass. ‘You don’t really surprise me.’

  ‘So thanks a lot,’ I said, meaning it, ‘but no thanks.’

  He nodded and left it: the offer honourably made, realistically declined. Anything he would have paid me would have come directly out of his own pocket: impossible to accept.

  ‘Oh!’ he said, clearly hit by a shaft of memory, ‘Nell asked me to give you this.’ He dug into a pocket and produced a sealed envelope which he handed over. It said ‘Nell Richmond’ on the outside, and ‘Photographs, do not bend.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, relieved. ‘I was beginning to think it hadn’t got here.’

  I opened the envelope and found three identical prints inside, but no letter. The pictures were clear, sharp and in black and white owing to the fast high-definition film I habitually used in the binoculars–camera. The subject, taken from above, was looking upwards and to one side to a point somewhere below the lens, so that one couldn’t see his eyes clearly; but the sharply jutting cheekbones, the narrow nose, the deep eye sockets, the angled jaw-bone and the hairline retreating from the temples, all were identifiable at a glance. I handed one of the prints to Zak, and he looked at it curiously.

  ‘Who is it?’ he said.

  ‘That’s the point. Who is he? Have you seen him on the train?’

  He looked again at the picture which showed, below the head, the shoulders and neck, with the sheepskin collar of the padded jacket over a sweater of some sort and a checked shirt unbuttoned at the top.

  ‘A tough looking man,’ Zak said. ‘Is he a militant union agitator?’

  I was startled. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Don’t know. He has the look. All intensity and aggression. That’s what I’d cast him as.’

  ‘And is that how you’d also act a union agitator?’

  ‘Sure.’ He grinned. ‘If he was described in the script as a trouble maker.’ He shook his head. ‘I haven’t seen him on the train or anywhere else that I know of. Is he one of the racegoers, then?’

  ‘I don’t know for sure, but he was at Thunder Bay station and also at Winnipeg races.’

  ‘The sleeping car attendants will know.’

  I nodded. ‘I’ll ask them.’

  ‘What do you want him for?’

  ‘Making trouble.’

  He handed back the photograph with a smile. ‘Type cast,’ he said, nodding.

  He ambled off to bed, and early the next morning I telephoned Mrs Baudelaire who sounded as if she rose with the lark.

  I asked her to tell Bill the photos had arrived safely.

  ‘Oh, good,’ she said blithely. ‘Did you get my message with the numbers?’

  ‘Yes, I did, thank you very much.’

  ‘Val called with them from London, sounding very pleased. He said he wasn’t having so much success with whatever it was that Sheridan Lorrimore did at Cambridge. No one’s talking. He thinks the gag is cash for the new library being built at Sheridan’s old college. How immoral can academics get? And Bill said to tell you that they went round to the Winnipeg barns with that photo, but no one knew who the man was, except that he did go there asking for Lenny Higgs. Bill says they will ask all the Ontario racing people they can reach and maybe print it in the racing papers coast to coast.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Bill wants to know what name you’re using on the train.’

  I hesitated, which she picked up at once with audible hurt. ‘Don’t you trust us?’

  ‘Of course I do. But I don’t trust everyone on the train.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘You were right to send the message to Nell.’

  ‘Good, then.’

  ‘Are you well?’ I asked.

  The line said, ‘Have a nice day, young man,’ and went dead.

  I listened to her silence with regret. I should have known better. I did know better, but it seemed discourteous never to ask.

  With her much in mind I dressed for outdoors, hopped down the fire stairs and found an inconspicuous way out so as not to come face to face with any passengers who were en route to breakfast. In my woolly hat, well pulled down, and my navy zipped jacket, I found a good vantage point for watching the front door, then wandered round a bit and returned to the watching point a little before bus-boarding time for the joy-trip to Banff. Under the jacket I had slung the binoculars, just in case I could get nowhere near, but in fact, from leaning against the boot of an empty, parked, locked car where I hoped I looked as if waiting for the driver to return, I had a close enough view not to need them.

  A large ultra-modern bus with tinted windows rolled in and stationed itself obligingly so that I could see who walked from the hotel to board it, and very soon after, when the driver had been into the hotel to report his arrival, Nell appeared in a warm jacket, trousers and boots and shepherded her flock with smiles into its depths. Most of the passengers were going sightseeing, it seemed, but not all.

  Filmer didn’t come out. I willed him to: to appear without his briefcase and roll away for hours: to give me a chance of thinking of some way to get into his room in safety. Willing didn’t work. Julius Apollo didn’t seem to want to walk on a glacier or dangle in a cable car, and stayed resolutely indoors.

  Mercer, Bambi and Sheridan came out of the hotel together, hardly looking a lighthearted little family, and inserted themselves into a large waiting chauffeur-driven car which carried them off immediately.

  No Xanthe. No Xanthe on the bus either. Rose and Cumber Young had boarded without her. Xanthe, I surmised, was back in the sulks.

  Nell, making a note on her clipboard and looking at her watch, decided there were no more customers for the bus. She stepped inside it and closed the door and I watched it roll away.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I walked about on foot in the mountains thinking of the gifts that had been given me.

  Lenny Higgs. The combinations of the
locks of the briefcase. Nell’s friendship. Mrs Baudelaire. The chance to invent Zak’s scripts.

  It was the last which chiefly filled my mind as I walked round the path which circled the little lake; and the plans I began forming for the script had a lot to do with the end of my conversation with Bill Baudelaire, which had been disturbing.

  After he’d agreed to arrange a replacement groom for Laurentide Ice, he said he’d tried to talk to Mercer Lorrimore at Assiniboia Downs but hadn’t had much success.

  ‘Talk about what?’ I asked.

  ‘About our quarry. I was shocked to find how friendly he had become with the Lorrimores. I tried to draw Mercer Lorrimore aside and remind him about the trial, but he was quite short with me. If a man was found innocent, he said, that was an end of it. He thinks good of everyone, it seems – which is saintly but not sensible.’ Bill’s voice went even deeper with disillusion. ‘Our quarry can be over-poweringly pleasant, you know, if he puts his mind to it, and he had certainly been doing that. He had poor Daffodil Quentin practically eating out of his hand, too, and I wonder what she thinks of him now.’

  I could hear the echo of his voice in the mountains. ‘More saintly than sensible.’ Mercer was a man who saw good where no good existed. Who longed for goodness in his son, and would pay for ever because it couldn’t be achieved.

  The path round the lake wound up hill and down, sometimes through close-thronging pines, sometimes with sudden breath-stopping views of the silent giants towering above, sometimes with clear vistas of the deep turquoise water below in its perfect bowl. It had rained during the night so that the whole scene in the morning sunshine looked washed and glittering; and the rain had fallen as snow on the mountaintops and the glacier which now appeared whiter, cleaner and nearer than the day before.

  The air was cold, a cold descending perceptibly like a tide from the frozen peaks, but the sun, at its autumn highest in the sky, still kept enough warmth to make walking a pleasure, and when I came to a place where a bench had been placed before a stunning panorama of lake, the Chateau and the mountain behind it, it was warm enough also to pause and sit down. I brushed some raindrops off the seat and slouched on the bench, hands in pockets, gaze vaguely on the picture-postcard spectacle, mind in second gear on Filmer.