The Edge (6 page)

I told him about the briefcase and read him the number plate still ahead in my sight.

‘The car’s going north, though,’ I said. ‘How far do you want me to go?’

‘What time’s your flight tomorrow?’

‘Noon, from Heathrow. But I have to go home first to pick up my gear and passport.’

He thought for a few moments. ‘You’d better decide for yourself. If he gets on the motorway to Scotland … well, don’t go.’

‘All right.’

‘Very interesting,’ Millington said, ‘that he didn’t want to be seen in public accepting that briefcase.’

‘Very.’

‘Anything special about it?’

‘As far as I could see,’ I said, ‘it was black, polished, possibly crocodile, with gold clasps.’

‘Well, well,’ Millington said vaguely. ‘I’ll get back to you with that car number.’

The thin man’s car aimed unerringly for the motorway in the direction of Scotland. I decided to keep on going at least until Millington called back, which he did with impressive speed, telling me that my quarry was registered to I. J. Horfitz, resident of Doncaster, address supplied.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll go to Doncaster.’ An hour and a bit ahead, I thought, with plenty of time to return.

‘Does that name Horfitz ring any bells with you?’ Millington asked.

‘None at all,’ I said positively. ‘And by the way, you know that promising young apprentice of Pete Shaw’s? All that talent? The silly young fool passed some verbal info to a new character on the racecourse who turned out to be writing the book for Collie Goodboy. Collie Goodboy thought it good news.’

‘What was it, do you know?’

‘Pete Shaw had a runner in the second race, third favourite, finished nearly last. The apprentice knew the score, though he wasn’t riding it.’

‘Huh,’ Millington said. ‘I’ll put the fear of God into the lot of them, Pete Shaw, the owner, the jockey, the apprentice and Collie Goodboy. Stir them up and warn them. I suppose,’ he said as an afterthought, ‘you didn’t get any photos? We haven’t any actual proof?’

‘Not really. I took one shot of the apprentice talking to Collie’s man, but they had their backs to me. One of Collie’s man with Collie. One of Collie’s board with the generous odds.’

‘Better than nothing,’ he said judiciously. ‘It’ll give them all an unholy fright. The innocent ones will be livid and sack the guilty, like they usually do. Clean their own house. Save us a job. And we’ll keep a permanent eye on that stupid apprentice. Ring me when you get to Doncaster.’

‘OK. And I took some more photos. One of the nervous young man with the briefcase, one of him with the thin man … er … I. J. Horfitz possibly, I suppose, and one of Filmer with the briefcase, though I’m not sure if that one will be very clear, I had almost no time and I was quite far away, and I was using the cigarette lighter camera, it’s less conspicuous.’

‘All right. We need that film before you go. Um … er … you’d better give me a ring when you’re on the way back, and I’ll have thought of somewhere we can meet tonight. Right?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Right.’

‘This Horfitz person, what did he look like?’

‘Thin, elderly, wore a dark overcoat and a black trilby, and glasses. Looked ready for a funeral, not the races.’

Millington grunted in what seemed to me to be recognition.

‘Do you know him?’ I asked.

‘He was before your time. But yes, I know him. Ivor Horfitz. It must be him. We got him warned off for life five years ago.’

‘What for?’

‘It’s a long story. I’ll tell you later. And I don’t think after all you need to spend all that time going to Doncaster. We can always find
him, if we want to. Turn round at the next exit and come back to London, and I’ll meet you in that pub at Victoria. Not the snack-bar; the pub.’

‘Yes, right. See you in about … um … two and a half hours, with luck.’

Two and a half hours later, beer and pork pie time in a dark far corner in a noisy bar, Millington’s preferred sort of habitat.

I gave him the exposed but undeveloped film, which he put in his pocket saying, ‘Eyes in the back of my head,’ with conspicuous satisfaction.

‘Who is Horfitz?’ I said, quenching the long drive’s thirst in a half-pint of draught. ‘Did you know he knew Filmer?’

‘No,’ he said, answering the second question first. ‘And Filmer wouldn’t want to be seen with him, nor to be seen in any sort of contact.’

‘What you’re saying,’ I said slowly, ‘is that the messenger, the nervous young man, is also known by sight to the stewards … to you yourself probably … because if he were an unidentifiable stranger, why should Filmer react so violently to being seen with him; to being seen accepting something from him?’

Millington gave me a sideways look. ‘You’ve learned a thing or two, haven’t you, since you started.’ He patted the pocket containing the film. ‘This will tell us if we know him. What did he look like?’

‘Fairly plump, fairly gormless. Sweaty. Unhappy. A worm between two hawks.’

Millington shook his head. ‘Might be anyone,’ he said.

‘What did Horfitz do?’ I asked.

Millington bit into pork pie and took his time, speaking eventually round escaping crumbs of pastry.

‘He owned a small stableful of horses in Newmarket and employed his own trainer for them, who naturally did what he was told. Very successful little stable in a quiet way. Amazing results, but there you are, some owners are always lucky. Then the trainer got cold feet because he thought we were on to him, which we actually weren’t, we’d never reckoned him for a villain. Anyway, he blew the whistle on the operation, saying the strain was getting too much for him. He said all the horses in the yard were as good as interchangeable. They ran in whatever races he and Horfitz thought they could win. Three-year-olds in two-year-old races, past winners in maidens-at-starting, any old thing. Horfitz bought and sold horses continually so the yard never looked the same from week to week, and the stable lads came and
went like yo-yos, like they do pretty much anyway. They employed all sorts of different jockeys. No one cottoned on. Horfitz had some nice long-priced winners but no bookmakers hollered foul. It was a small unfashionable stable, see? Never in the newspapers. Because they didn’t run in big races, just small ones at tracks the press don’t go to, but you can win as much by betting on those as on any others. It was all pretty low key, but we found out that Horfitz had made literally hundreds of thousands, not just by betting but by selling his winners. Only he always sold the real horses which fitted the names on the race-card, not the horses that had actually run. He kept those and ran them again, and sold the horses in whose names they’d run, and so on and so on. Audacious little fiddle, the whole thing.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed, and felt a certain amount of awe at the energy and organisation put into the enterprise.

‘So when the trainer ratted we set a few traps with his help and caught Horfitz with his pants down, so to speak. He got warned off for life and swore to kill his trainer, which he hasn’t done so far. The trainer was warned off for three years with a severe caution, but he got his licence back two years ago. Part of the bargain. So he’s in business again in a small way but we keep his runners under a microscope, checking their passports every time they run. We’re a lot hotter at checking passports randomly all over the place now, as of course you know.’

I nodded.

Then Millington’s jaw literally dropped. I looked at the classic sign of astonishment and said, ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Gawd,’ he said. ‘What a turn up. Can you believe it? Paul Shackle-bury, that murdered stable lad, he was working for Horfitz’s old trainer.’

I left Millington frowning with concentration over a replenished pint while he tried to work out the significance of Horfitz’s old trainer employing a lad who was murdered for knowing too much about Filmer. What had Paul Shacklebury known, Millington demanded rhetorically for the hundredth time. And, more to the minute, what was in the briefcase, and why was Horfitz giving it to Filmer?

‘Work on the sweating messenger,’ I suggested, getting up to go. ‘He might crack open like the trainer. You never know.’

‘Maybe we will,’ Millington said. ‘And Tor … look out for yourself on the train.’

He could be quite human sometimes, I thought.

I flew to Ottawa the next day and gave in to temptation at Heathrow to the extent of changing my ticket from knees-against-chest economy to full-stretch-out first class. I also asked the Ottawa taxi driver who took me into the city from the airport to find me a decent hotel; he cast a rapid eye over my clothes and the new suitcase and said the Four Seasons should suit.

It suited. They gave me a small pleasant suite and I telephoned straight away to the number I’d been given for Bill Baudelaire. He answered himself at the first ring, rather to my surprise, and said yes, he’d had a telex to confirm I was on my way. He had a bass voice with a lot of timbre even over the wires and was softly Canadian in accent.

He asked where I would be in an hour and said he would come around then to brief me on the matter in hand, and I gathered from his circumspect sentences that he wasn’t alone and didn’t want to be understood. Just like home, I thought comfortably, and unpacked a few things, and showered off the journey and awaited events.

Outside, the deepening orange of the autumn sunshine was turning the green copper roofs of the turreted stone government buildings to a transient shimmering gold, and I reflected, watching from the windows, that I’d much liked this graceful city when I’d been here before. I was filled with a serene sense of peace and contentment, which I remembered a few times in the days lying ahead.

Bill Baudelaire came when the sky had grown dark and I’d switched on the lights, and he looked round the suite with quizzical eyebrows.

‘I’m glad to see old Val has staked you to rooms befitting a rich young owner.’

I smiled and didn’t enlighten him. He’d shaken my hand when I opened the door to him and looked me quickly, piercingly up and down in the way of those used to assessing strangers instantly and with no inhibitions about letting them know it.

I saw a man of plain looks but positive charm, a solid man much younger than the Brigadier, maybe forty, with reddish hair, pale blue eyes and pale skin pitted by the scars of old acne. Once seen, I thought, difficult to forget.

He was wearing a dark grey business suit with a cream shirt and a red tie out of step with his hair, and I wondered if he were colour-blind or simply liked the effect.

He walked straight across the sitting room, sat in the armchair nearest to the telephone and picked up the receiver.

‘Room service?’ he said. ‘Please send up as soon as possible a bottle
of vodka and … er …’ He raised his eyebrows in my direction, in invitation.

‘Wine,’ I said. ‘Red. Bordeaux preferably.’

Bill Baudelaire repeated my request with a ceiling price and disconnected.

‘You can put the drinks on your expense sheet and I’ll initial it,’ he said. ‘You do have an expense sheet, I suppose?’

‘I do in England.’

‘Then start one here, of course. How are you paying the hotel bills?’

‘By credit card. My own.’

‘Is that usual? Never mind. You give all the bills to me when you’ve paid them, along with your expense sheet, and Val and I will deal with it.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. Val would have a fit, I thought, but then on second thoughts, no he probably wouldn’t. He would pay me the agreed budget; fair was fair.

‘Sit down,’ Bill Baudelaire said, and I sat opposite him in another armchair, crossing one knee over the other. The room seemed hot to me with the central heating, and I wasn’t wearing a jacket. He considered me for a while, his brow furrowing with seeming uncertainty.

‘How old are you?’ he said abruptly.

‘Twenty-nine.’

‘Val said you were experienced.’ It wasn’t exactly a question, nor a matter of disbelief.

‘I’ve worked for him for three years.’

‘He said you would look this part … and you do.’ He sounded more puzzled than pleased, though. ‘You seem so polished … I suppose it’s not what I expected.’

I said, ‘If you saw me in the cheaper sections of a racecourse, you would think I’d been born there, too.’

His face lightened into a smile. ‘Right, then. I’ll accept that. Well, I’ve brought you a whole lot of papers.’ He glanced at the large envelope that he had put on the table beside the telephone. ‘Details about the train and about some of the people who’ll be on it, and details about the horses and the arrangements for those. This has all been an enormous undertaking. Everyone has worked very hard on it. It’s essential that it retains a good, substantial, untarnished image from start to finish. We’re hoping for increased world-wide awareness of Canadian racing. Although we do of course hit world headlines with the Queen’s Plate in June or July, we want to draw more international horses here.
We want to put our programmes more on the map. Canada’s a great country. We want to maximise our impact on the international racing circuit.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do understand.’ I hesitated. ‘Do you have a public relations firm working on it?’