I signed. I supposed it made sense. 'What's a dayniter?' I said.

'A car with reclining seats, not bedrooms.'

'And how many people altogether will be travelling?'

'Difficult to say. Start with forty-eight owners… we call them owners to distinguish them from the racegoers… and the grooms. Then the actors and the people from the travel company. Then the train crew and stewards, waiters, chefs and so on. With all the racegoers… well, perhaps about two hundred people altogether. We won't know until we start. Probably not then, unless we actually count.'

I could get lost among two hundred more easily than among forty-eight, I thought. Perhaps it might not be too bad. Yet the owners would be looking for actors… for people who weren't what they seemed.

'You asked about contact,' Bill Baudelaire said.

'Yes.'

'I've discussed it with some of our Jockey Club, and we think you'll simply have to telephone us from the stops.'

I said with some alarm, 'How many of your Jockey Club know I'm going on the train?'

He looked surprised. 'I suppose everyone in the executive office knows we'll have a man in place. They don't know exactly who. Not by name. Not yet. Not until I'd met you and approved. They don't and won't know what you look like.'

'Would you please not tell them my name,' I said.

He was half bewildered, half affronted. 'But our Jockey Club are sensible men. Discreet.'

'Information leaks,' I said.

He looked at me broodingly, vodka and ice cubes tinkling in a fresh glass. 'Are you serious?' he said.

'Yes, indeed.'

His brow wrinkled. 'I'm afraid I may have mentioned your name to one or two. But I will impress on them not to repeat it.'

It was too late, I supposed, for much else. Perhaps I was getting too obsessed with secrecy. Still…

'I'd rather not telephone direct to the Jockey Club,' I said.

'Couldn't I leave messages where only you will get them? Like your own home?'

His face melted into an almost boyish grin. 'I have three teenage daughters and a busy wife. The receiver is almost never in the cradle.' He thought briefly, then wrote a number on a sheet of a small notepad and gave it to me.

'Use this one,' he said. 'It's my mother's number. She's always there. She's not well and spends a good deal of time in bed. But her brains are intact. She's quick-witted. And because she's ill, if she calls me at the office she gets put straight through to me or else she gets told where to find me. If you give her a message, it will reach me personally with minimum delay. Will that do?'

'Yes, fine,' I said, and kept my doubts hidden. Carrier pigeons, I thought, might be better.

'Anything else?' he asked.

'Yes… do you think you could ask Laurentide Ice's owner why he sold a half-share to Filmer?'

'It's a she. I'll enquire.' He seemed to have hesitations in his mind but he didn't explain them. 'Is that all?' he said.

'My ticket?'

'Oh yes. The travel company, Merry amp; Co, they'll have it. They're still sorting out who's to sleep where, since we've added you in. We'll have to tell them your name, of course, but all we've said so far is that we absolutely have to have another ticket and even if it looked impossible it would have to be done. They'll bring your ticket to Union Station in Toronto on Sunday morning and you can pick it up there. All the owners are picking theirs up then.'

'All right.'

He stood up to go. 'Well… bon voyage,' he said, and after a short pause added, 'Perhaps he won't try anything.'

'Hope not.'

He nodded, shook my hand, finished the last of his vodka at a gulp and left me alone with my thoughts.

The first of those was that if I were going across a whole continent by train I might as well start out as I meant to go on. If there was a train from Ottawa to Toronto I would take it instead of flying.

There was indeed a train, the hotel confirmed. Leaving at five-fifty, arriving four hours later. Dinner on board.

Ottawa had shovelled its centre-of-town railway station under a rug, so to speak, as if railways should be kept out of sight like the lower orders, and built a great new station several miles away from anywhere useful. The station itself, however, proved a delight, a vast airy tent of glass set among trees with the sun flooding in with afternoon light and throwing angular shadows on the shiny black floor.

People waiting for the train had put their luggage down in a line and gone to sit on the seats along the glass walls, and thinking it a most civilized arrangement I put my suitcase at the rear of the queue and found myself a seat also. Filmer or not, I thought, I was definitely enjoying myself.

Dinner on the train was arranged as in aeroplanes with several stewards in shirtsleeves and deep yellow waistcoats rolling first a drinks trolley, then a food trolley down the centre aisle, serving to right and left as they went. I watched them idly for quite a long time, and when they'd gone past me I couldn't remember their faces. I drank French wine as the daylight faded across the flying landscape and ate a better-than-many-airlines dinner after dark, and thought about chameleons: and at Toronto I took a cab and booked into another in the chain of the Four Seasons hotels, as I had told Bill Baudelaire I would.

In the morning, a few hundred thoughts later, I followed the hotel porter's directions and walked to the offices of the travel organizers, Merry amp; Co, as given in their brochure.

The street-level entrance was unimposing, the building deceptively small, but inside there seemed to be acres of space all brightly lit, with pale carpeting, blond woods and an air of absolute calm. There were some green plants, a sofa or two and a great many desks behind which quiet unhurried conversations seemed to be going on at a dozen telephones. All the telephonists faced the centre of the huge room, looking out and not at the walls.

I walked to one desk whose occupant wasn't actually speaking on the wire, a purposeful-looking man with a beard who was cleaning his nails.

'Help you?' he asked economically.

I said I was looking for the person organizing the race train.

'Oh yes. Over there. Third desk along.'

I thanked him. The third desk along over there was unoccupied.

'She'll be back in a minute,' comforted the second desk along. 'Sit down if you like.'

There were chairs, presumably for clients, on the near sides of the desks. Comfortable chairs, clients for the pampering of, I thought vaguely, sitting in one.

The empty desk had a piece of engraved plastic on it announcing its absent owner's name: Nell. A quiet voice behind me said, 'Can I help you?' and I stood up politely and said, 'Yes, please.'

She had fair hair, grey eyes, a sort of clean look with a dust of freckles, but she was not as young, I thought, as her immediate impression, which was about eighteen.

'I came about the train,' I said.

'Yes. Could you possibly compress it into five minutes? There's such a lot still to arrange.' She walked round to the back of her desk and sat, looking down at an array of list upon list.

'My name is Tor Kelsey,' I began.

Her head lifted fast. 'Really? The Jockey Club told us your name this morning. Well, we've put you in because Bill Baudelaire said he'd cancel the whole production if we didn't.' The unemphatic grey eyes assessed me, not exactly showing that she didn't think the person she saw to be worth the fuss, but pretty near. 'It's the dining car that's the trouble,' she said. 'There are only forty-eight places. We have to have everyone seated at the same time because the mystery is acted before and after meals, and two or three of those places are taken by actors. Or are supposed to be, only now there isn't room for them either, as my boss sold too many tickets to late applicants, and you are actually number forty-nine.' She stopped briefly. 'I suppose that's our worry, not yours. We've given you a roomette for sleeping, and Bill Baudelaire says anything you ask for will we please let you have. We said what would you ask for and he didn't know. Maddeningly unhelpful. Do you yourself know what you want?'