The Edge

'That's a bit of an exaggeration,' I commented, sighing in my turn. 'I suppose you were there?'

'Yes. You could have cut the fury on both sides with a knife. Very vicious, all of it.'

'So,' I said regretfully, 'Filmer might indeed see the train as a target.'

'He might.'

The trouble and expense he had gone to to get himself on board looked increasingly ominous, I thought.

'There's one other thing you might care to know,' the Brigadier said. 'John saw Ivor Horfitz's son Jason hanging around outside the weighing-room at Newmarket yesterday and had a word with him.'

When Millington had a word with people they could take days to recover. In his own way, he could be as frightening as Derry Welfram or Filmer himself.

'What happened?' I asked.

'John spoke to him about the inadvisability of running errands on racecourses for his warned-off father, and said that if Jason had any information, he should pass it on to him, John Millington. And apparently Jason Horfitz then said he wouldn't be passing on the information he had to anybody else as he didn't want to end up in a ditch.'

'What?'I said.

'John Millington pounced on that but he couldn't get another word out of the wretched Jason. He turned to jelly and literally ran away, John says.'

'Does Jason really know,' I said slowly, 'what Paul Shacklebury knew? Did he tell Paul Shacklebury whatever it was he knew? Or was it just a figure of speech?'

'God knows. John's working on it.'

'Did he ask Jason what was in the briefcase?'

'Yes, he did, but Jason either didn't know or was too frightened to speak. John says he was terrified that we even knew about the briefcase. He couldn't believe we knew.'

'I wonder if he'll tell his father.'

'Not if he has any sense.'

He hadn't any sense, I thought, but he did have fear, which was almost as good a life preserver.

'If I hear anything more,' the Brigadier said, 'I'll leave a message with…' his voice still disapproved '… with Mrs Baudelaire senior. Apart from that… good luck.'

I thanked him and hung up, and with considerable contentment took my two bags in a taxi to Union Station.

The train crew were already collecting in the locker room when I made my way there and introduced myself as Tommy, the actor.

They smiled and were generous. They always enjoyed the mysteries, they said, and had worked with an actor among them before. It would all go well, I would see.

The head waiter, head steward, chief service attendant, whatever one called him, was a neat small Frenchman named Emil. Late thirties, perhaps, I thought, with dark bright eyes.

'Do you speak French?' he asked first, shaking my hand. 'All VIA employees have to be able to speak French. It is a rule.'

'I do a bit,' I said.

'That is good. The last actor, he couldn't. This time the chef is from Montreal, and in the kitchen we may speak French.'

I nodded and didn't tell him that, apart from my school days, my working French had been learned in stables, not kitchens, and was likely to be rusty in any case. But I'd half-learned several languages on my travels, and somehow they each floated familiarly back at the first step on to the matching soil. Everything in bilingual Canada was written in both English and French and I realized that since my arrival I'd been reading the French quite easily.

'Have you ever worked in a restaurant?' Emil asked.

'No, I haven't.'

He shrugged good humouredly. 'I will show you how to set the places, and to begin with, this morning, perhaps you will serve only water. When you pour anything, when the train is moving, you pour in small amounts at a time, and you keep the cup or glass close to you. Do you understand? It is always necessary to control, to use small movements.'

'I understand,' I said, and indeed I did.

He put a copy of the timetable into my hands and said, 'You will need to know where we stop. The passengers always ask.'

'OK. Thanks.'

He nodded with good humour.

I changed into Tommy's uniform and met some others of the crew; Oliver, who was a waiter in the special dining car, like myself, and several of the sleeping-car attendants, one to each car the whole length of the train. There was a smiling Chinese gentleman who cooked in the small forward dining car where the grooms, among others, would be eating, and an unsmiling Canadian who would be cooking in the main central dining car for the bulk of the racegoers and the crew themselves. The French chef from Montreal was not there, I soon discovered, because he was a she, and could only be found in the women's changing room.

Everyone put on the whole uniform including the grey raincoat on top, and I put on my raincoat also; I packed Tommy's spare garments and my own clothes into the holdall, and was ready.

Nell had said she would meet me this Sunday morning in the coffee shop in the Great Hall, and had told me that the crews often went there to wait for train time. Accordingly, accompanied by Emil and a few of the others, I carried my bags to the coffee shop where everyone immediately ordered huge carrot cakes, the speciality of the house, as if they were in fear of famine.

Nell wasn't there, but Zak and some of the other actors were, sitting four to a table, drinking pale-looking orange juice and not eating carrot cake because of the calories.

Zak said Nell was along with the passengers in the reception area, and that he wanted to go and see how things were shaping.

'She said something about you checking a suitcase through to Vancouver in the baggage car,' he added, standing up.

'Yes, this one.'

'Right. She said to tell you to bring it along to where the passengers are. I'll show you.'

I nodded, told Emil I'd be back, and followed Zak down the Great Hall and round a corner or two and came to a buzzing gathering of people in an area like an airport departure lounge.

An enormous banner across a latticed screen left no one in any doubt. Stretching for a good twelve feet it read in red on white THE GREAT TRANSCONTINENTAL MYSTERY RACE TRAIN, and in blue letters a good deal smaller underneath, THE ONTARIO JOCKEY CLUB, MERRY amp; Co AND VIA RAIL PRESENT A CELEBRATION OF CANADIAN RACING.

The forty or so passengers already gathered in happy anticipation wore name badges and carnations and held glasses of orange juice convivially.

'There was supposed to be champagne in the orange juice,' Zak said dryly. 'There isn't. Something to do with the Sunday drink law.' He searched the throng with his eyes from where we stood a good twenty paces away out in the station. 'There's Ben doing his stuff, see? Asking Raoul to lend him money.'

I could indeed see. It looked incredibly real. People standing around them were looking shocked and embarrassed.

Zak was nodding his mop of curls beside me and had begun snapping his fingers rather fast. I could sense the energy starting to flow in him now that this fiction was coming alive, and I could see that he had used make-up on himself; not greasepaint or anything heavy, more a matter of darkening and thickening his eyebrows and darkening his mouth, emphasizing rather than disguising. An actor in the wings, I thought, gathering up his power.

I spotted Mavis and Walter Bricknell being fussy and anxious as intended, and saw and heard Angelica asking if anyone had seen Steve.

'Who's Steve?' I asked Zak. 'I forget.'

'Her lover. He misses the train.'

Pierre and Donna began to have their row which made a different bunch of passengers uncomfortable. Zak laughed. 'Good,' he said, 'that's great.'

Giles-the-murderer, who had been in the coffee shop, strolled along into the melee and started being frightfully nice to old ladies. Zak snapped his fingers even faster and started humming.

The crowd parted and shifted a little and through the gap I saw Julius Apollo Filmer, another murderer, being frightfully nice to a not-so-old lady, Daffodil Quentin.

I took a deep breath, almost of awe, almost on a tremble. Now that it was really beginning, now that I was going to be near him, I felt as strung up and as energized as Zak, and no doubt suffered the same compelling anxiety that things shouldn't go wrong.