'Don't know. He has the look. All intensity and aggression. That's what I'd cast him as.'

'And is that how you'd also act a union agitator?'

'Sure.' He grinned. 'If he was described in the script as a trouble maker.' He shook his head. 'I haven't seen him on the train or anywhere else that I know of. Is he one of the racegoers, then?’

'I don't know for sure, but he was at Thunder Bay station and also at Winnipeg races.'

'The sleeping-car attendants will know.'

I nodded. 'I'll ask them.'

'What do you want him for?'

'Making trouble.'

He handed back the photograph with a smile. 'Type cast,' he said, nodding.

He ambled off to bed, and early the next morning I telephoned Mrs Baudelaire who sounded as if she rose with the lark.

I asked her to tell Bill the photos had arrived safely.

'Oh, good,' she said blithely. 'Did you get my message with the numbers?'

'Yes, I did, thank you very much.'

Val called with them from London, sounding very pleased. He said he wasn't having so much success with whatever it was that Sheridan Lorrimore did at Cambridge. No one's talking. He thinks the gag is cash for the new library being built at Sheridan's old college. How immoral can academics get? And Bill said to tell you that they went round to the Winnipeg barns with that photo, but no one knew who the man was, except that he did go there asking for Lenny Higgs. Bill says they will ask all the Ontario racing people they can reach and maybe print it in the racing papers coast to coast.'

'Great.'

'Bill wants to know what name you're using on the train.'

I hesitated, which she picked up at once with audible hurt. 'Don't you trust us?'

'Of course I do. But I don't trust everyone in the train.'

'Oh, I see.'

'You were right to send the message to Nell.'

'Good, then.'

'Are you well?' I asked.

The line said, 'Have a nice day, young man,' and went dead.

I listened to her silence with regret. I should have known better. I did know better, but it seemed discourteous never to ask.

With her much in mind I dressed for outdoors, hopped down the fire stairs and found an inconspicuous way out so as not to come face to face with any passengers who were en route to breakfast. In my woolly hat, well pulled down, and my navy zipped jacket, I found a good vantage point for watching the front door, then wandered round a bit and returned to the watching point a little before bus-boarding time for the joy-trip to Banff. Under the jacket I had slung the binoculars, just in case I 'could get nowhere near, but in fact, from leaning against the boot of an empty, parked, locked car where I hoped I looked as if I was waiting for the driver to return, I had a close enough view not to need them.

A large ultra-modern bus with tinted windows rolled in and stationed itself obligingly so that I could see who walked from the hotel to board it, and very soon after, when the driver had been into the hotel to report his arrival, Nell appeared in a warm jacket, trousers and boots and shepherded her flock with smiles into its depths. Most of the passengers were going sightseeing, it seemed, but not all.

Filmer didn't come out. I willed him to: to appear without his briefcase and roll away for hours: to give me a chance of thinking of some way to get into his room in safety. Willing didn't work. Julius Apollo didn't seem to want to walk on a glacier or dangle in a cable car, and stayed resolutely indoors.

Mercer, Bambi and Sheridan came out of the hotel together, hardly looking a lighthearted little family, and inserted themselves into a large waiting chauffeur-driven car which carried them off immediately.

No Xanthe. No Xanthe on the bus either. Rose and Chamber Young had boarded without her. Xanthe, I surmised, was back in the sulks.

Nell, making a note on her clipboard and looking at her watch, decided there were no more customers for the bus. She stepped inside it and closed the door and I watched it roll away.

Chapter Fifteen

I walked about on foot in the mountains thinking of the gifts that had been given me.

Lenny Higgs. The combinations of the locks of the briefcase. Nell's friendship. Mrs Baudelaire. The chance to invent Zak's scripts.

It was the last which chiefly filled my mind as I walked round the path which circled the little lake; and the plans I began forming for the script had a lot to do with the end of my conversation with Bill Baudelaire, which had been disturbing.

After he'd agreed to arrange a replacement groom for Laurentide Ice, he said he'd tried to talk to Mercer Lorrimore at Assimboia Downs but hadn't had much success.

'Talk about what?' I asked.

'About our quarry I was shocked to find how friendly he had become with the Lorrimores I tried to draw Mercer Lorrimore aside and remind him about the trial, but he was quite short with me If a man was found innocent, he said, that was an end of it. He thinks good of everyone, it seems-which is saintly but not sensible.' Bill's voice went even deeper with disillusion 'Our quarry can be overpoweringly pleasant, you know, if he puts his mind to it, and he had certainly been doing that He had poor Daffodil Quentin practically eating out of his hand, too, and I wonder what she thinks of him now.'

I could hear the echo of his voice in the mountains. 'More saintly than sensible.' Mercer was a man who saw good where no good existed. Who longed for goodness m his son, and would pay for ever because it couldn't be achieved.

The path round the lake wound up hill and down, sometimes through close-thronging pines, sometimes with sudden breath-stopping views of the silent giants towering above, sometimes with clear vistas of the deep turquoise water below in its perfect bowl. It had rained during the night so that the whole scene in the morning sunshine looked washed and glittering, and the rain had fallen as snow on the mountaintops and the glacier which now appeared whiter, cleaner and nearer than the day before.

The air was cold, descending perceptibly like a tide from the frozen peaks, but the sun, at its autumn highest in sky, still kept enough warmth to make walking a pleasure, and when I came to a place where a bench had been placed before a stunning panorama of lake, the Chateau and the mountain behind it, it was warm enough also to pause and sit down. I brushed some raindrops off the seat and slouched on the bench, hands in pockets, gazed vaguely on the picture-postcard spectacle, mind in second gear on Filmer.

I could see figures walking about by the shore in the Chateau garden, and thought without hurry of perhaps bringing out the binoculars to see if any of them was Julius Apollo. Not that it would have been of much help, I supposed, if he'd been there. He wouldn't be doing anything usefully criminal under the gaze of the Chateau's serried ranks of windows.

Someone with quiet footsteps came along the path from the shelter of the trees and stopped, looking down at the lake. Someone female.

I glanced at her incuriously, seeing a backview of jeans, blue Parka, white trainers and a white woollen hat with two scarlet pompoms: and then she turned round, and I saw that it was Xanthe Lorrimore.

She looked disappointed to find the bench already occupied.

'Do you mind if I sit here?' she said. 'It's a long walk. My legs are tired.'

'No, of course not.' I stood up and brushed the raindrops off the rest of the bench, making a drier space for her.

'Thanks.' She flopped down in adolescent gawkiness and I took my own place again, with a couple of feet between us.

She frowned. 'Haven't I seen you before?' she asked. 'Are you on the train?'

'Yes, miss,' I said, knowing that there was no point in denying it, as she would see me again and more clearly in the dining room. 'I'm one of the crew.'