The Edge

In that long, warm, friendly space there were animals worth at present a total of many millions of Canadian dollars: worth more if any of them won at Winnipeg or Vancouver. I stood for a long while looking at Voting Right. If Bill Baudelaire's mother knew her onions, in this undistinguished-looking bay lay the dormant seed of greatness.

Maybe she was right. Vancouver would tell.

I turned away, cast a last assessing glance at Laurentide Ice, who looked coolly back, thanked the enthusiastic dragon for her co-operation (prim acknowledgement) and began a slow walk back through the train, looking for gaunt-face.

I didn't see him. He could have been behind any of the closed doors. He wasn't in the forward dome car, upstairs or down, nor in the open dayniter. I sought out and consulted separately with three of the sleeping-car attendants in the racegoers' sleeping cars who frowned in turn and said that first, the sort of jacket I was describing was worn by thousands, and second, everyone tended to look gaunt outside in the cold air. All the same, I said, if they came across anyone fitting that description in their care, please would they tell George Burley his name and room number.

Sure, they each said, but wasn't this an odd thing for an actor to be asking? Zak, I improvised instantly at the first enquiry, had thought the gaunt man had an interesting face and he wanted to ask if he could use him in a scene. Ah, yes, that made sense. If they found him, they would tell George.

When I got back to George, I told him what I'd asked. He wrinkled his brow. 'I saw a man like that at Thunder Bay,' he said. 'But I probably saw several men like that in all this trainload. What do you want him for?'

I explained that I'd told the sleeping-car attendants that Zak wanted to use him in a scene.

'But you?' George said. 'What do you want him for yourself?'

I looked at him and he looked back. I was wondering how far I should trust him and had an uncomfortable impression that he knew what I was thinking.

'Well,' I said finally, 'he was talking to someone I'm interested in.'

I got a long bright beam from the shiny eyes.

'Interested in… in the line of duty?'

'Yes.'

He didn't ask who it was and I didn't tell him. I asked him instead if he himself had talked to any of the owners' party.

'Of course I have,' he said. 'I always greet passengers eh?, when they board. I tell them I'm the Conductor, tell them where my office is, tell them if they've any problems to bring them to me.'

'And do they? Have they?'

He chuckled. 'Most of the complaints go to your Miss Richmond, and she brings them to me.'

'Miss Richmond…' I repeated.

'She's your boss, isn't she? Tall pretty girl with her hair in a plait today, eh?'

'Nell, 'I said.

'That's right. Isn't she your boss?'

'Colleague.'

'Right, then. The sort of problems the owners' party have had on this trip so far are a tap that won't stop dripping, a blind that won't stay down in one of the bedrooms, eh?, and a lady who thought one of her suitcases had been stolen, only it turned up in someone else's room.' He beamed. 'Most of the owners have been along to see the horses. When they see me, they stop to talk.'

'What do they say?' I asked. 'What sort of things?'

'Only what you'd expect. The weather, the journey, the scenery. They ask what time we get to Sudbury, eh? Or Thunder Bay, or Winnipeg, or whatever.'

'Has anyone asked anything that was different, or surprised you?'

'Nothing surprises me, sonny.' He glowed with irony and bonhomie. 'What would you expect them to ask?

I shrugged in frustration. 'What happened before Thunder Bay that shouldn't have?''The Lorrimores' car, eh?'

'Apart from that.'

'You think something happened?'

'Something happened, and I don't know what, and it's what I'm here to prevent.'

He thought about it, then said, 'When it turns up, you'll know, eh?'

'Maybe.'

'Like if someone put something in the food, eh?, sooner or later everyone will be ill.'

'George!' I was dumbstruck.

He chuckled. 'We had a waiter once years ago who did that. He had a grudge against the world. He put handfuls of ground-up laxative pills into the chocolate topping over ice cream and watched the passengers eat it, and they all had diarrhoea. Dreadful stomach pains. One woman had to go to hospital. She'd had two helpings. What a to-do, eh?'

'You've frightened me stiff,' I said frankly. 'Where do they keep the fodder for the horses?'

He stared, his perpetual smile fading.

'Is that what you're afraid of? Something happening to the horses?'

'It's a possibility.'

'All the fodder is in the horse car,' he said, 'except for some extra sacks of those cubes most of the horses are having, which are in the baggage car. Some of the horses have their own special food brought along with them, sent by their trainers. One of the grooms had a whole set of separate bags labelled, "Sunday evening", "Monday morning" and so on. He was showing them to me.'

'Which horse was that for?'

'Um… the one that belongs to that Mrs Daffodil Quentin, I think. The groom said one of her horses died of colic or some such recently, from eating the wrong things, and the trainer didn't want any more accidents, so he'd made up the feeds himself.'

'You're brilliant, George.'

His ready laugh came back.

'Don't forget the water tank, eh? You can lift the lid… where the plank floats, remember? You could dope all those horses at once with one quick cupful of mischief, couldn't you? '

Chapter Eleven

Leslie Brown told us adamantly that no one could possibly have tampered with either the fodder or the water.

'When did the grooms last fill the buckets?' I asked.

During the morning, she said. Each groom filled the bucket for his own horse, when he wanted to. All of them had been in there, seeing to their charges.

The horses' drinking-water tank had been topped up, she said, by a hosepipe from the city's water supply during the first twenty minutes of our stop in Thunder Bay, in a procedure that she herself had supervised.

George nodded and said the whole train had been re-watered at that point.

'Before Thunder Bay,' I said, 'could anyone have put anything in the water?'

'Certainly not. I've told you over and over again, I am here all the time.'

'And how would you rate all the grooms for trustworthiness?' I said.

She opened her mouth and closed it again and gave me a hard look.

'I am here to supervise them,' she said. 'I didn't know any of them before yesterday. I don't know if any of them could be bribed to poison the water. Is that what you want?'

'It's realistic,' I said with a smile.

She was unsoftened, unsoftenable

'My chair, as you see,' she said carefully, 'is next to the water tank. I sit there and watch. I do not think… I repeat, I do not believe, that anyone has tampered with the water.'

'Mm,' I said calmingly. 'But you could ask the grooms, couldn't you, if they've seen anything wrong.'

She began to shake her head automatically, but then stopped and shrugged. 'I'll ask them, but they won't have.'

'And just in case,' I said, 'in case the worst happens and the horses prove to have been interfered with, I think I'll take a sample of what's in the tank and also what's in their buckets at this moment You wouldn't object to that, Ms Brown, would you?'

She grudgingly said she wouldn't. George elected himself to go and see what could be done in the way of sample jars and presently returned with gifts from the Chinese cook in the dome car, in the shape of four rinsed-out plastic tomato-sauce bottles rescued from the rubbish bin.

George and Leslie Brown took a sample from the tank, draining it, at the dragon's good suggestion, from the tap lower down, where the buckets were filled. I visited Voting Right, Laurentide Ice and Upper Gumtree, who all graciously allowed me to dip into their drink With Leslie Brown's pen, we wrote the provenance of each sample on the sauce label and put all four containers into a plastic carrier bag which Leslie Brown happened to have handy.