‘Tell her she’s right, will you? You can’t trust any Frenchman in Ottawa.’
They sat there, grinning at each other.
Salter said, ‘Let’s get down to it, Onree. What you are asking me to do is take over the investigation from here and give it back when I’ve got something for you.’
‘If you have the time and the men.’
‘I’ve got me, and Frank, and all the time I need. Now, what else? The suitcase. Anything unusual in it?’
‘Nothing. Underwear, shirts, socks, two books. What you could expect.’
‘The wallet?’
O’Brien read from the list. ‘One hundred and six dollars. Two credit cards. Two library cards. Driving licence. Some lottery tickets. Membership of a squash club. A dirty piece of paper with some numbers on it—they look like telephone numbers—some charge slips. Here.’ He dug into the envelope again and produced the wallet. ‘You’d better take it. Show it to the wife when you talk to her.’
Salter took the wallet and dropped it into a drawer. ‘That’s it then. Coffee now?’
‘Tea, if you don’t mind.’
‘Frank!’ Salter gave the order and waited until the door closed. ‘Anything I can do for you here in town, Onree? You know Toronto?’
‘Not much. I thought I would spend a few hours here. I have a reservation on the overnight train, so my evening is free. But you weren’t expecting me, so just point me in the right direction and I’ll leave you to solve my case.’
‘Which direction is that?’ Sherlock Holmes would have known. The tan, the windswept haircut—what did they point to? The harbour for a quick sail around the islands?
‘Greenwood racetrack. I’ve never been to the races in Toronto.’
Of course. ‘I’ve never been either. Would you like some company? I wonder what time they start.’
‘Seven-thirty.’
‘Ah. Well, then, we could go and have some dinner, and go out to the track afterwards.’
‘Fine, Inspector.’
‘Charlie.’
‘Fine, Charlie, But why don’t I come back at, say, five-thirty, and then we could go out and have dinner at the track.’
‘I don’t know if they have a restaurant, Onree.’
O’Brien looked knowing. ‘They all have restaurants. I will be back at five-thirty.’ He put his envelope back in his briefcase and shook hands with Salter.
When the door closed, Salter phoned his wife. ‘I won’t be home for dinner,’ he said. ‘I think I may have a real job.’
Annie said, ‘Fraud, arson, robbery with violence?’
‘Murder.’
‘And they gave it to you!’
‘It’s not on our turf so “DeeCee” and “Chiefie” don’t give a pinch. But it’s just like a real job to me.’
‘Now we start skipping dinner again? Working all night?’
‘Not yet. But you never know. It might come to that. I hope so. Don’t wait up. First, I’m going to the races. ‘Bye, dear.’ He hung up, agreeably mysterious.
Annie was waiting up for him when he got home.
‘You look pleased with yourself,’ she said. ‘Did you win?’
‘I didn’t lose,’ he said smugly, and waited to be asked again.
‘How much?’ she asked.
‘A “C-note”,’ Salter said, out of the corner of his mouth like a regular gambler.
‘Enjoy yourself?’
‘Bloody marvellous. Want to hear about it?’
‘Of course. I’ll make some tea.’
What’s going on with her? Salter wondered. She’s acting strange.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked truculently. ‘You jealous of my night out?’
‘Don’t be silly, Charlie. Just tell me about it. What happened?’
Salter gave a mental shrug and resumed his euphoric mood. ‘The thing is,’ he began. ‘It’s harness racing—you know—chariots.’
She nodded, a little girl hearing about Daddy’s day.
‘They have two kinds of horses—trotters and pacers—you know about this? The trotters move differently from the pacers.’
‘They trot?’
‘Yes.’ What the hell was going on? ‘They move diagonally, but the pacers move one side at a time—or is it the other way round? I couldn’t really see the difference, even when I knew. Anyway, it’s quite a sight when the lights go up and there they go.’
‘Did you bet on every race?’
‘Yes. Onree explained it to me . . .’
‘Onree?’
‘This Frenchman whose case I’m on. I picked out my own horses, though. I chose ones with names I liked, although the trouble was, half of them seemed to have similar names like Armbro or Hanover or something. Anyway, to make the story short, I won on seven races and picked up a hundred and twenty dollars. Onree lost fifty, betting on form. Ha, ha, ha. It was terrific. I would have won on eight but my horse stopped running properly—they had a name for what it did wrong.’
‘Broke stride.’
‘What?’
‘It’s called breaking stride.’
‘How do you know?’
‘They use the same term on the Island.’
Salter was dumbfounded. ‘You mean those races in Charlottetown are the same as these?’
‘That’s right, Charlie. The races we’ve been trying to get you to come to for the last fifteen years. The trots, we call them. Daddy used to own a standardbred—that’s what the horses are called. You have refused to have anything to do with them all this time and now some Montreal policeman comes to town and you come home to tell the world about this new thing you’ve discovered. Charlie, you are the bloody limit.’ She walked past him up to bed.
After a while Salter had found enough justification to stop feeling horrible. Surely no one had mentioned horses around the Montagu home for years? (Right, but only out of politeness to him.) Certainly no one had taken the trouble to explain the sport to him lately. (No, not in the face of his “I-don’t-want-to-know” attitude.) The truth was that harness-racing was only one, if the most outrageous, example of Salter’s attitude to the whole Montagu world when he was there. From the beginning, he had defended himself against feeling like the poor cousin by refusing to get involved in activities such as sailing, playing bridge, tennis, trout-fishing with flies, and constructing bonfires suitable for baking clams. Apart from the skills involved, he was sure he would get the costume wrong, and appear in sandals for some activity that required hiking boots or bare feet. So when he was on the Island he played golf, a game he had been introduced to by some police pals; he swam; and he watched the other activities from a distance, or ignored them altogether. Over the years his bloody-mindedness and their consideration for his feelings had created two worlds, one which involved him, and the other one which they talked about and enjoyed among themselves. It was an arrangement that suited him, preserved his independence, as he put it to himself, and he took the same attitude in Toronto to his wife’s interest in and understanding of art, horticulture, and science fiction. Salter came