The Edge (42 page)

‘Oh good, but it sounds so dull.’

‘Not to him,’ Mercer murmured.

‘We’ll now return,’ Bill Baudelaire’s voice said more loudly, ‘to the matter of your attempt to wreck the train.’ He coughed. ‘Will you please come in, Mr Burley.’

I smiled at George who had been listening to the Horfitz part in non-comprehension and the rest in horrified amazement.

‘We’re on,’ I said, removing my raincoat and laying it on a serving counter. ‘After you.’

He and I, the last in the pantry, went through the door. He was wearing his grey uniform and carrying his Conductor’s cap. I was revealed in Tommy’s grey trousers, grey and white shirt, deep yellow waistcoat and tidy striped tie. Polished, pressed, laundered, brushed: a credit to VIA Rail.

Julius Filmer saw the Conductor and a waiter he’d hardly noticed in his preoccupation with his own affairs. The Brigadier and Bill Baudelaire saw the waiter for the first time, and there was an awakening and realisation on each of their faces. Although I’d told them by now that I’d worked with the crew, they hadn’t truly understood how perfect had been the bright camouflage.

‘Oh, that’s who you are!’ exclaimed Daffodil who was sitting now in one of the chairs round the conference table. ‘I couldn’t place you, outside.’

Mercer patted her hand which lay on the table, and gave me the faintest of smiles over her head. The three Vancouver big-wigs took me at face value, knowing no different.

‘Would you come forward, please,’ Bill Baudelaire said.

George and I both advanced past the conference table until we were nearer the desk. The two Directors were seated behind the desk, Filmer
in the chair in front of it. Filmer’s neck was rigid, his eyes were dark, and the sweat ran down his temples.

‘The Conductor, George Burley,’ Bill Baudelaire said, ‘yesterday gave VIA Rail an account of three acts of sabotage against the race train. Disaster was fortunately averted on all three occasions, but we believe that all these dangerous situations were the work of Alex McLachlan who was acting on your instructions and was paid by you.’

‘No,’ Filmer said dully.

‘Our enquiries are not yet complete,’ Bill Baudelaire said, ‘but we know that the VIA Rail offices in Montreal were visited three or four weeks ago by a man answering in general to your description who said he was researching for a thesis on the motivations of industrial sabotage. He asked for the names of any railroad saboteurs so that he could interview them and see what made them tick. He was given a short list of people no longer to be employed on the railroads in any capacity.’

Heads would roll, the VIA Rail executive had said. That list, although to be found in every railway station office in the country, should
never
have been given to an outsider.

‘McLachlan’s name is on that list,’ Bill Baudelaire observed.

Filmer said nothing. The realisation of total disaster showed in every line of his body, in every twitch in his face.

‘As we said,’ Bill Baudelaire went on, ‘McLachlan travelled on the train under the name of Johnson. During the first evening, at a place called Cartier, he uncoupled Mr Lorrimore’s private car and left it dead and dark on the track. The railroad investigators believe he waited in the vicinity to see the next train along, the regular transcontinental Canadian, come and crash into the Lorrimores’ car. He had always been around to watch the consequences of his sabotage in the past: acts he had been sent to prison for committing. When the race train returned to pick up the Lorrimores’ car, he simply reboarded and continued on the journey.’

‘He shouldn’t have done it,’ Filmer said.

‘We know that. We also know that in speech you continually mixed up Winnipeg with Vancouver. You instructed McLachlan to wreck the train before Winnipeg, when you meant before Vancouver.’

Filmer looked dumbfounded.

‘That’s right,’ Daffodil said, sitting up straight, ‘Winnipeg and Vancouver. He got them mixed up all the time.’

‘In Banff,’ Bill Baudelaire said, ‘someone loosened the drain plug on the fuel tank for the boiler that provides steam heat for the train. If it
hadn’t been discovered, the train would have had to go through a freezing evening in the Rockies without heat for horses or passengers. Mr Burley, would you tell us at first hand about both of these occurrences, please?’

George gave his accounts of the uncoupling and the missing fuel with a railwayman’s outrage quivering in his voice.

Filmer looked shrunken and sullen.

‘During that last evening,’ Bill Baudelaire said, ‘you decided to cancel your instructions to McLachlan and you went forward to speak to him. You had a disagreement with him. You told him to do no more, but you had reckoned without McLachlan. He really is a perpetual saboteur. You misunderstood his mentality. You could start him off, but you couldn’t stop him. You were responsible for putting him on the train to wreck it, and we will make that responsibility stick.’

Filmer began weakly to protest, but Bill Baudelaire gave him no respite.

‘Your man McLachlan,’ he said, ‘knocked out the Conductor and left him tied up and gagged in the roomette he had been given in the name of Johnson. McLachlan then put the radio out of order by pouring liquid into it. These acts were necessary, as he saw it, because he had already, at a place called Revelstoke, removed oily waste from the journal-box holding one of the axles under the horse car. One of two things could then happen: if the train crew failed to notice the axle getting red hot, the axle would break, cause damage, possibly derail the train. If it were discovered, the train would stop for the axle to be cooled. In either case, the Conductor would radio to the despatcher in Vancouver, who would radio to the Conductor of the regular train, the Canadian, coming along behind, to tell him to stop, so that there shouldn’t be a collision. Is that clear?’

It was pellucid to everyone in the room.

‘The train crew,’ he went on, ‘did discover the hot axle and the engineers stopped the train. No one could find the Conductor, who was tied up in Johnson’s roomette. No one could radio to Vancouver as the radio wouldn’t work. The only recourse left to the crew was to send a man back along the line to light flares, to stop the Canadian in the old historic way.’ He paused briefly. ‘McLachlan, a railwayman, knew this would happen, so when the train stopped he went himself along the track, armed himself with a piece of wood and lay in wait for whomever came with the flares.’

Filmer stared darkly, hearing it for the first time.

‘McLachlan attacked the man with the flares, but by good fortune
failed to knock him out. It was this man here who was sent with the flares.’ He nodded in my direction. ‘He succeeded in lighting the flares and stopping the Canadian.’ He paused and said to me. ‘Is that correct?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said. Word perfect, I thought.

He went on, ‘The race train engineers cooled the journal-box with snow and refilled it with oil, and the train went on its way. The Conductor was discovered in McLachlan’s roomette. McLachlan did not reboard the train that time, and there will presently be a warrant issued for his arrest. You, Mr Filmer, are answerable with McLachlan for what happened.’

‘I told him not to,’ Filmer’s voice was a rising shout of protest. ‘I didn’t want him to.’

His lawyers would love that admission, I thought.

‘McLachlan’s assault was serious,’ Bill Baudelaire said calmly. He picked up my X-ray and the doctor’s report, and waved them in Filmer’s direction. ‘McLachlan broke this crewman’s shoulder blade. The crewman has positively identified McLachlan as the man who attacked him. The Conductor has positively identified McLachlan as the passenger known to him as Johnson. The Conductor has suffered concussion, and we have here another doctor’s report on that.’

No doubt a good defence lawyer might have seen gaps in the story, but at that moment Filmer was beleaguered and confounded and hampered by the awareness of guilt. He was past thinking analytically, past asking how the crewman had escaped from McLachlan and been able to complete his mission, past wondering what was conjecture with the sabotage and what was provable fact.

The sight of Filmer reduced to sweating rubble was the purest revenge that any of us – Mercer, Daffodil, Val Catto, Bill Baudelaire, George Burley or I – could have envisaged, and we had it in full measure. Do unto others, I thought dryly, what they have done to your friends.

‘We will proceed against you on all counts,’ the Brigadier said magisterially.

Control disintegrated in Filmer. He came up out of his chair fighting mad, driven to lashing out, to raging against his defeat, to punishing someone else for his troubles, even though it could achieve no purpose.

He made me his target. It couldn’t have been a subconscious awareness that it was I who had been his real enemy all along: much the reverse, I supposed, in that he saw me as the least of the people there, the one he could best bash with most impunity.

I saw him coming a mile off. I also saw the alarm on the Brigadier’s face and correctly interpreted it.

If I fought back as instinct dictated, if I did to Filmer the sort of damage I’d told the Brigadier I’d done to McLachlan, I would weaken our case.

Thought before action; if one had time.

Thought could be flash fast. I had time.
It would be an unexpected bonus for us if the damage were the other way round.

He had iron-pumping muscle power. It would indeed be damage.

Oh well …

I rolled my head a shade sideways and he punched me twice, quite hard, on the cheek and the jaw. I went back with a crash against the nearby wall, which wasn’t all that good for the shoulder blade, and I slid the bottom of my spine down the wall until I was sitting on the floor, knees bent up, my head back against the paintwork.

Filmer was above me, lunging about and delivering another couple of stingingly heavy cuffs, and I thought, come on guys, it’s high time for the arrival of the Cavalry, and the Cavalry – the Mounties – in the shape of George Burley and Bill Baudelaire obligingly grabbed Filmer’s swinging arms and hauled him away.

I stayed where I was, feeling slightly pulped, watching the action.

The Brigadier pressed a button on the desk which soon resulted in the arrival of two large racecourse security guards, one of whom, to Filmer’s furious astonishment, placed a manacle upon the Julius Apollo wrist.

‘You can’t do this,’ he shouted.

The guard phlegmatically fastened the hanging half of the metal bracelet to his own thick wrist.

One of the Vancouver top-brass spoke for the first time, in an authoritative voice. ‘Take Mr Filmer to the security office and detain him until I come down.’

The guards said, ‘Yes, sir.’

They moved like tanks. Filmer, humiliated to his socks, was tugged away between them as if of no account. One might almost have felt sorry for him … if one hadn’t remembered Paul Shacklebury and Ezra Gideon for whom he had had no pity.

Daffodil Quentin’s eyes were stretched wide open. She came over and looked down at me with compassion.

‘You poor boy,’ she said, horrified. ‘How perfectly
dreadful.’

‘Mr Burley,’ Bill Baudelaire said smoothly, ‘would you be so kind as to escort Mrs Quentin for us? If you turn right in the passage, you’ll
find some double doors ahead of you. Through there is the reception room where the passengers and the other owners from the train are gathering for cocktails and lunch. Would you take Mrs Quentin there? We’ll look after this crewman … get him some help …. And we would be pleased if you could yourself stay for lunch.’

George said to me, ‘Are you all right, Tommy?’ and I said, ‘Yes, George,’ and he chuckled with kind relief and said it would be a pleasure, eh?, to stay for lunch.

He stood back to let Daffodil lead the way out of the far door, and when she reached there she paused and looked back.

‘The poor boy,’ she said again. ‘Julius Filmer’s a
beast
.’

The Vancouver Jockey Club men rose and made courteous noises of sympathy in my direction; said they would hand Filmer on to the police with a report of the assault; said we would no doubt be needed to make statements later. They then followed Daffodil, as they were the hosts of the party.

When they’d gone, the Brigadier switched off the machine that had recorded every word.

‘Poor boy, my foot,’ he said to me. ‘You chose to let him hit you. I saw you.’

I smiled a little ruefully, acknowledging his perception.

‘He couldn’t!’ Mercer protested, drawing nearer. ‘No one could just let himself be …’

‘He could and he did.’ The Brigadier came round from behind the desk. ‘Quick thinking. Brilliant.’

‘But why?’ Mercer said.

‘To tie the slippery Mr Filmer in tighter knots.’ The Brigadier stood in front of me, put a casual hand down to mine and pulled me to my feet.

‘Did you truly?’ Mercer said to me in disbelief.

‘Mm.’ I nodded and straightened a bit, trying not to wince.

‘Don’t worry about him,’ the Brigadier said. ‘He used to ride bucking broncos, and God knows what else.’

The three of them stood as in a triumvirate, looking at me in my uniform, as if I’d come from a different planet.

‘I sent him on the train,’ the Brigadier said, ‘to stop Filmer doing whatever he was planning.’ He smiled briefly. ‘A sort of match … a two-horse race.’

‘It seems to have been neck and neck now and then,’ Mercer said.

The Brigadier considered it. ‘Maybe. But our runner had the edge.’