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would have been more forthright if I’d been a junior army officer in uniform. Millington, who didn’t know about the mushrooms, could uninhibitedly boss me around like a sergeant-major, and did so pretty sharply under pressure.
    Millington mostly called me Kelsey and only occasionally, on good days, Tor. (‘Tor? What sort of name is that?’ he’d demanded at the beginning. ‘Short for Torquil,’ I said. ‘
Torquil?
Huh. I don’t blame you.’) He always referred to himself as Millington (‘Millington here,’ when he telephoned) and that was how I thought of him: he had never asked me to call him John. I supposed that a man who had served in a strongly hierarchical organisation for a long time found surnames natural.
    The Brigadier’s attention still seemed to be focused on the glass he was slowly revolving in his hands, but finally he put it down precisely in the centre of a beer mat as if coming to a precise conclusion in his thoughts.
    ‘I had a telephone call yesterday from my counterpart in the Canadian Jockey Club.’ He paused again. ‘Have you ever been to Canada?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Once, for a while, for maybe three months, mostly in the west. Calgary … Vancouver … I went up by boat from there to Alaska.’
    ‘Did you go to the races in Canada?’
    ‘Yes, a few times, but it must be about six years ago … and I don’t know anyone-’ I stopped, puzzled, not knowing what kind of response he wanted.
    ‘Do you know about this train?’ he said. ‘The Transcontinental Mystery Race Train? Ever heard of it?’
    ‘Um,’ I said, reflecting. ‘I read something about it the other day. A lot of top Canadian owners are going on a jolly with their horses, stopping to race at tracks along the way. Is that the one you mean?’
    ‘It is indeed. But the owners aren’t all Canadian. Some of them are American, some are Australian and some are British. One of the British passengers is Julius Filmer.’
    ‘Oh,’ I said.
    ‘Yes, oh. The Canadian Jockey Club has given its blessing to thewhole affair because it’s attracting world-wide publicity and they are hoping for bumper attendances, hoping to give all Canadian racing an extra boost. Yesterday, my counterpart, Bill Baudelaire, told me he’d been talking with the company who are arranging everything – they’ve had regular liaison meetings, it seems – and he found there was a late addition to the passenger list, Julius Filmer. Bill Baudelaire of course knows all about the conspiracy fiasco. He wanted to know if there wasn’t some way we could keep the undesirable Mr Filmer off that prestigious train. Couldn’t we possibly declare him
persona non grata
on all racetracks, including and especially Canadian. I told him if we’d had any grounds to warn Filmer off we’d have done it already, but the man was acquitted. We can’t be seen to disgrace him when he’s been declared not guilty, we’d be in all sorts of trouble. We can’t warn him off for buying two horses from Gideon. These days, we can’t just warn him off because we want to, he can only be warned off for transgressing against the rules of racing.’
    All the frustrated fury of the Jockey Club vibrated in his voice. He wasn’t a man to take impotence lightly.
    ‘Bill Baudelaire knows all that, of course,’ he went on. ‘He said if we couldn’t get Filmer off the train, would we please get one of our grandees
on.
Although the whole thing is sold out, he twisted the arms of the promoters to say they would let him have one extra ticket, and he wanted one of our Stewards, or one of the Jockey Club department heads, or me myself, to go along conspicuously, so that Filmer would know he was being closely watched and would refrain from any sins he had in mind.’
    ‘Are you going?’ I asked, fascinated.
    ‘No, I’m not. You are.’
    ‘Um …’ I said a shade breathlessly, ‘I hardly fit the bill.’
    ‘I told Bill Baudelaire,’ the Brigadier said succinctly, ‘that I would