The Edge (40 page)

He came in about two paces and then stopped and peered with displeasure at my face.

‘What is this?’ he demanded with growing anger, preparing to depart.

I closed the door behind him.

‘I work for the Jockey Club,’ I said. ‘The British Jockey Club. I am seconded here with the Canadian Jockey Club for the duration of the race train Celebration of Canadian Racing.’

‘But you’re … you’re …’

‘My name is Tor Kelsey,’ I said. ‘It was judged better that I didn’t go openly on the train as a sort of security agent for the Jockey Club, so I went as a waiter.’

He looked me over. Looked at the rich young owner’s good suit that I’d put on for the occasion. Looked at the expensive room.

‘My God,’ he said weakly. He took a few paces forward. ‘Why am I here?’

‘I work for Brigadier Valentine Catto in England,’ I said, ‘and Bill Baudelaire over here. They are the heads of the Jockey Club Security Services.’

He nodded. He knew them.

‘As they cannot be here, they have both given me their authority to speak to you on their behalf.’

‘Yes, but … what about?’

‘Would you sit down? Would you like … a drink?’

He looked at me with a certain dry humour. ‘Do you have any identification?’

‘Yes.’ I fetched my passport. He opened it. Looked at my name, at my likeness, and at my occupation: investigator.

He handed it back. ‘Yes, I’ll have a drink,’ he said, ‘as you’re so good at serving them. Cognac if possible.’

I opened the cupboard that the hotel had supplied at my request with wine, vodka, scotch and brandy, and poured the amount I knew he’d like, even adding the heretical ice. He took the glass with a twist of a smile, and sat in one of the armchairs.

‘No one guessed about you,’ he said. ‘No one came anywhere near it.’ He took a sip reflectively. ‘Why were you on the train?’

‘I was sent because of one of the passengers. Because of Julius Filmer.’

The ease that had been growing in him fled abruptly. He put the glass down on the table beside him and stared at me.

‘Mr Lorrimore,’ I said, sitting down opposite him, ‘I am sorry about
your son. Truly sorry. All of the Jockey Club send their sympathy. I think though that I should tell you straight away that Brigadier Catto, Bill Baudelaire and myself all know about the … er … incident … of the cats.’

He looked deeply shocked. ‘You can’t know!’

‘I imagine that Julius Filmer knows also.’

He made a hopeless gesture with one hand. ‘However did he find out?’

‘The Brigadier is working on that in England.’

‘And how did
you
find out?’

‘Not from anyone you swore to silence.’

‘Not from the college?’

‘No.’

He covered his face briefly with one hand.

‘Julius Filmer may still suggest you give him Voting Right in exchange for his keeping quiet,’ I said.

He lowered the hand to his throat and closed his eyes. ‘I’ve thought of that,’ he said. He opened his eyes again. ‘Did you see the last scene of the mystery?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I haven’t known what to do … since then.’

‘It’s you who has to decide,’ I said. ‘But … can I tell you a few things?’

He gave a vague gesture of assent, and I talked to him, also, for quite a long time. He listened with total concentration, mostly watching my face. People who were repudiating in their minds every word one said didn’t look at one’s face but at the floor, or at a table, at anything else. I knew, by the end, that he would do what I was asking, and I was grateful because it wouldn’t be easy for him.

When I’d finished, he said thoughtfully, ‘That mystery was no coincidence, was it? The father blackmailed because of his child’s crime, the groom murdered because he knew too much, the man who would kill himself if he couldn’t keep his racehorses …. Did you write it yourself?’

‘All that part, yes. Not from the beginning.’

He smiled faintly. ‘You showed me what I was doing … was prepared to do. But beyond that … you showed Sheridan.’

‘I wondered,’ I said.

‘Did you? Why?’

‘He looked different afterwards. He had changed.’

Mercer said, ‘How could you see that?’

‘It’s my job.’

He looked startled. ‘There isn’t such a job.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘there is.’

‘Explain,’ he said.

‘I watch … for things that aren’t what they were, and try to understand, and find out why.’

‘All the time?’

I nodded. ‘Yes.’

He drank some brandy thoughtfully. ‘What change did you see in Sheridan?’

I hesitated. ‘I just thought that things had shifted in his mind. Like seeing something from a different perspective. A sort of revelation. I didn’t know if it would last.’

‘It might not have done.’

‘No.’

‘He said,’ Mercer said, ‘ “Sorry, Dad.” ’

It was my turn to stare.

‘He said it before he went out onto the platform.’ Mercer swallowed with difficulty and eventually went on. ‘He had been so quiet. I couldn’t sleep. I went out to the saloon about dawn, and he was sitting there. I asked him what was the matter, and he said, “I fucked things up, didn’t I?” We all knew he had. It wasn’t anything new. But it was the first time he’d said so. I tried … I tried to comfort him, to say we would stand by him, no matter what. He knew about Filmer’s threat, you know. Filmer said in front of all of us that he knew about the cats.’ He looked unseeingly over his glass. ‘It wasn’t the only time it had happened. Sheridan killed two cats like that in our garden when he was fourteen. We got therapy for him.… They said it was the upheaval of adolescence.’ He paused. ‘One psychiatrist said Sheridan was psychopathic, he couldn’t help what he did … but he could, really, most of the time. He could help being discourteous, but he thought being rich gave him the right … I told him it didn’t.’

‘Why did you send him to Cambridge?’ I asked.

‘My father was there, and established a scholarship. They gave it to Sheridan as thanks – as a gift. He couldn’t concentrate long enough to get into college otherwise. But then … the Master of the college said they couldn’t keep him, scholarship or not, and I understood … of course they couldn’t. We thought he would be all right there … we so hoped he would.’

They’d spent a lot of hope on Sheridan, I thought.

‘I don’t know if he meant to jump this morning when he went out on the platform,’ Mercer said. ‘I don’t know if it was just an impulse. He gave way to impulses very easily. Unreasonable impulses … almost insane, sometimes.’

‘It was seductive, out there,’ I said. ‘Easy to jump.’

Mercer looked at me gratefully. ‘Did you feel it?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Sheridan’s revelation lasted until this morning,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I saw … when I brought your tea.’

‘The waiter …’ He shook his head, still surprised.

‘I’d be grateful,’ I said, ‘if you don’t tell anyone else about the waiter.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because most of my work depends on anonymity. My bosses don’t want people like Filmer to know I exist.’

He nodded slowly with comprehension. ‘I won’t tell.’

He stood up and shook my hand. ‘What do they pay you?’ he asked.

I smiled. ‘Enough.’

‘I wish Sheridan had been able to have a job. He couldn’t stick at anything.’ He sighed. ‘I’ll believe that what he did this morning was for us. “Sorry, Dad …” ’

Mercer looked me in the eyes and made a simple statement, without defensiveness, without apology.

‘I loved my son,’ he said.

On Monday morning, I went to Vancouver station to back up George Burley in the rail company’s dual enquiry into the hot box and the suicide.

I was written down as T. Titmuss, Acting Crew, which amused me and seemed to cover several interpretations. George was stalwart and forthright, with the ironic chuckles subdued to merely a gleam. He was a railwayman of some prestige, I was glad to see, who was treated with respect if not quite deference, and his were the views they listened to.

He gave the railway investigators a photograph of Johnson and said that while he hadn’t actually seen him pour liquid into the radio, he could say that it was in this man’s roomette that he had awakened bound and gagged, and he could say that it was this man who had attacked Titmuss, when he, Titmuss, went back to plant the flares.

‘Was that so?’ they asked me. Could I identify him positively?

‘Positively,’ I said.

They moved on to Sheridan’s death. A sad business, they said. Apart from making a record of the time of the occurrence and the various radio messages, there was little to be done. The family had made no complaint to or about the railway company. Any other conclusions would have to be reached at the official inquest.

‘That wasn’t too bad, eh?’ George said afterwards.

‘Would you come in uniform to the races?’ I asked.

‘If that’s what you want.’

‘Yes, please.’ I gave him a card with directions and instructions and a pass cajoled from Nell to get him in through the gates.

‘See you tomorrow, eh?’

I nodded. ‘At eleven o’clock.’

We went our different ways, and with some reluctance but definite purpose I sought out a doctor recommended by the hotel and presented myself for inspection.

The doctor was thin, growing old and inclined to make jokes over his half-moon glasses.

‘Ah,’ he said, when I’d removed my shirt. ‘Does it hurt when you cough?’

‘It hurts when I do practically anything, as a matter of fact.’

‘We’d better have a wee X-ray then, don’t you think?’

I agreed to the X-ray and waited around for ages until he reappeared with a large sheet of celluloid which he clipped in front of a light.

‘Well, now,’ he said, ‘the good news is that we don’t have any broken ribs or chipped vertebrae.’

‘Fine.’ I was relieved and perhaps a bit surprised.

‘What we do have is a fractured shoulder blade.’

I stared at him. ‘I didn’t think that was possible.’

‘Anything’s possible,’ he said. ‘See that,’ he pointed, ‘that’s a real grand-daddy of a break. Goes right across, goes right through. The bottom part of your left scapula,’ he announced cheerfully, ‘is to all intents and purposes detached from the top.’

‘Um,’ I said blankly. ‘What do we do about it?’

He looked at me over the half-moons. ‘Rivets,’ he said, ‘might be extreme, don’t you think? Heavy strapping, immobility for two weeks, that’ll do the trick.’

‘What about,’ I said, ‘if we do nothing at all? Will it mend?’

‘Probably. Bones are remarkable. Young bones especially. You could try a sling. You’d be more comfortable though, if you let me strap your arm firmly skin to skin to your side and chest, under your shirt.’

I shook my head and said I wanted to go on a sort of honeymoon to Hawaii.

‘People who go on honeymoons with broken bones,’ he said with a straight face, ‘must be ready to giggle.’

I giggled there and then. I asked him for a written medical report and the X-ray, and paid him for them, and bore away my evidence.

Stopping at a pharmacy on my way back to the hotel, I bought an elbow-supporting sling made of wide black ribbon, which I tried on for effect in the shop, and which made things a good deal better. I was wearing it when I opened my door in the evening, first to the Brigadier on his arrival from Heathrow, and then to Bill Baudelaire, from Toronto.

Bill Baudelaire looked around the sitting room and commented to the Brigadier about the lavishness of my expense account.

‘Expense account, my foot!’ the Brigadier said, drinking my scotch. ‘He’s paying for it himself.’

Bill Baudelaire looked shocked. ‘You can’t let him,’ he said.

‘Didn’t he tell you?’ the Brigadier laughed. ‘He’s as rich as Croesus.’

‘No … he didn’t tell me.’

‘He never tells anybody. He’s afraid of it.’

Bill Baudelaire, with his carroty hair and pitted skin, looked at me with acute curiosity.

‘Why do you do this job?’ he said.

The Brigadier gave me no time to answer. ‘What else would he do to pass the time? Play backgammon? This game is better. Isn’t that it, Tor?’

‘This game is better,’ I agreed.

The Brigadier smiled. Although shorter than Bill Baudelaire, and older and leaner, and with fairer, thinning hair, he seemed to fill more of the room. I might be three inches taller than he, but I had the impression always of looking up to him, not down.

‘To work, then,’ he suggested. ‘Strategy, tactics, plan of attack.’

He had brought some papers from England, though some were still to come, and he spread them out on the coffee table so that all of us, leaning forward, could see them.

‘It was a good guess of yours, Tor, that the report on the cats was a computer print-out, because of its lack of headings. The Master of the college had a call from Mercer Lorrimore at eight this morning … must have been midnight here … empowering him to tell us everything, as you’d asked. The Master gave us the name of the veterinary pathology lab he’d employed and sent us a Fax of the letter he’d
received from them. Is that the same as the one in Filmer’s briefcase, Tor?’

He pushed a paper across and I glanced at it. ‘Identical, except for the headings.’

‘Good. The path lab confirmed they kept the letter stored in their computer but they don’t know yet how anyone outside could get a print-out. We’re still trying. So are they. They don’t like it happening.’

‘How about a list of their employees,’ I said, ‘including temporary secretaries or wizard hacker office boys?’

‘Where do you get such language?’ the Brigadier protested. He produced a sheet of names. ‘This was the best they could do.’

I read the list. None of the names was familiar.

‘Do you really need to know the connection?’ Bill Baudelaire asked.

‘It would be neater,’ I said.

The Brigadier nodded. ‘John Millington is working on it. We’re talking to him by telephone before tomorrow’s meeting. Now, the next thing,’ he turned to me. ‘That conveyance you saw in the briefcase. As you suggested, we checked the number SF 90155 with the Land Registry.’ He chuckled with all George Burley’s enjoyment. ‘That alone would have been worth your trip.’