He mouthed a silent ‘ah’ in acknowledgement as if this was just as he’d suspected.
We dined with Edgbaston and the girl in Welsh national dress who was sharing the compartment with Calamity. Her name was Natasha and she was returning to Hughesovka from her finishing school in Caerphilly. When I arrived, Edgbaston was talking about the day he killed himself.
‘For twenty years we had been telling our customers that plastic was no good, that aluminium was the only suitable material for replacing a wooden door. We preached it every day, from morning to night, like Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was a mission. They used to come back at us and say, “Ah yes, but aluminium sweats doesn’t it? You get condensation, don’t you, which you don’t get with plastic?” And they were right, of course, but then we confounded them by thermally breaking our aluminium. You probably don’t know what that is but it means joining two sections with a seal of resin so that the heat can’t transfer. It was a masterstroke. Suddenly you get the strength and resilience and good looks of aluminium combined with the thermal properties of plastic. The bloke who thought of that should have got the Nobel Prize. That was in 1981. There was no stopping us then, or so we thought. And then one day we were all called in to a special sales meeting and the marketing director gave us the news that we would be selling plastic alongside aluminium from now on. He even had the gall to suggest that it would be a boon to us, an extra string to our bow. Not a nod to the fact that we had spent all our lives insisting it was no good. Our universe fell apart. We weren’t spivs, you see, we were honest guys. People think salesmen are all full of shit, but it’s not true. Most of them find it easy to do their job because they believe what they are saying. Selling doors might not be heroic like being a fireman or something, but we can’t all be firemen and there is a quiet satisfaction that comes from knowing that you’ve been persuading people to buy your product because it is genuinely in their best interests. You’ve been telling them the truth. And then you find that you’ve been talking a load of crap all your life like some cheap sit-com parody of a travelling salesman . . .’ He stopped and lowered his head as if once again reliving the pain. Natasha looked moved and squeezed his forearm as if to say that no matter how black things got he must not give up. When he spoke again it was in a distant voice, as if addressing someone from his burned up past.
‘When we raised this point in the meeting, the point about our shattered credibility, they said, “Oh, now we’ve addressed that. We’ve been working on this plastic system for three years in close partnership with the Swedish manufacturers and we’ve ironed out all the problems.” But you only had to take one look at the suite to know the truth: it was just a cheap off-the-shelf system hastily branded with our name and brought in from the continent to stem the haemorrhage of sales figures to plastic. And because it was a cheap off-the-peg system it had all the problems we had been descrying for years, in spades. Plus a few more we had never thought of.’
‘And so you burned your business cards,’ said Natasha sadly.
‘What else was there to do?’
‘But what about your little children?’
He looked up and now there were tears in his eyes. ‘Leaving them was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make. But what sort of father would I have been to them if I had continued living that lie?’
Silence engulfed us for a while. On the other side of the window a group of ghostly
I said to Natasha, ‘You must have loved Caerphilly, the pleasure pier is wonderful.’
‘Yes,’ said Natasha, ‘although I didn’t spend too much time there, the sea makes my tummy queasy.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ said Edgbaston, ‘Caerphilly is thirty miles from the sea.’
Natasha gasped. ‘Oh!’
‘And there’s definitely no pier there, I know that because I’ve been.’
‘There’s a nice castle,’ I said. ‘It looks a little like a pier from a distance.’
She thought for a second and then exhaled as if defeated. ‘I’m such an idiot. I told them I could never hope to fool a guy like you.’
‘Told who?’
‘Them.’
‘Who?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
Edgbaston and Calamity and I exchanged automatic glances, empty of meaning.
‘Please don’t ask me about it . . . Oh, this is all so . . . all so . . . so horrible!’ She flung her napkin down and threw her face into her hands and emitted the sounds of muffled weeping.
‘Steady on, miss,’ said Edgbaston.
‘No! Don’t! Please . . . please don’t say anything.’ She stood up and rushed away in the direction of the sleeping carriage. The waiter observed through half-closed eyes and gave out a studied yawn, expressing the deepest imaginable ennui.
‘Women!’ said Edgbaston. ‘Can’t live with them, can’t bury them beneath the patio . . . oops! What have I said!’ He gave me a bone-chilling wink.
During the night, to the soothing background sound of clanking wheels and creaking wood, France turned into Germany. Periodically the hypnotic rocking of the train would subside, imperceptibly, until it had gone completely and a tingling silence remained. At such times I would crawl to the end of my bed and peer out through the gap between the edge of the blind and the window frame at an unknown station, bathed in yellow electric light. No one would be around except perhaps a station master somewhere cradling a cup of coffee, listening to the radio, his presence sensed rather than seen. Moths swarmed round the lights, and far away other lights flickered green and red. By dawn we had reached Munich. I ate breakfast alone, neither Stanley, Calamity nor Natasha turned out. I took out the photo of the invisible imaginary friend holding the levitated dog. What did it mean? Assuming the imaginary presence of Gethsemane Walters did not really have corporeal form, it meant somebody must have rigged this shot up. But to what purpose? And was it really possible that the spirit of Gethsemane could have travelled to Hughesovka?
The next day dragged by, we skirted alpine foothills and entered Austria. Vienna arrived and four Austrian policemen boarded the train and took Edgbaston away. They saluted me and called me ‘sir’ but didn’t say why they were taking him away and I knew cops well enough not to waste time asking. Stanley avoided my gaze.
The sky filled with cloud, the light dimmed, the waiter was replaced by a plumper, less supercilious one with a moustache. Dumplings appeared on the menu and Budapest station slid past the window. It was nice being alone in the compartment. I examined the letter Sospan had given me to deliver to Mr Tepes. It seemed improbably light considering its contents were somehow of such moment that they were paying for our travel expenses to Hughesovka. I obtained a flask of boiling water from the dining car and back in the compartment I steamed open the letter. It was empty. I was a courier for an empty envelope.
That evening, Natasha was late for dinner and missed the soup course. Calamity read through the itinerary. ‘We need to get the local train to Sighisoara and then look out for Igor. He’s got a walleye. We deliver the envelope . . .’
‘Which is empty.’
‘Which is empty. We deliver it to the Count and dine tonight as his guest. Tomorrow we get the milk train back to Brasov and pick up the Orient Express from there.’
‘Are you sure he is a Count?’ I asked.
Calamity looked mildly irritated. ‘Of course he is! He’s directly descended from Vlad the Impaler. That makes him a count or something like it.’
‘It just says Mr on the envelope.’
‘He probably doesn’t like to give himself airs.’ She considered for a second and then said, ‘So, how much of the fare does this side-trip pay for?’
‘All of it. Our entire trip to Hughesovka is being paid for by the Count.’
‘That’s a bit strange, isn’t it?’
‘Considering the envelope we are delivering seems to be empty, that’s very strange.’
‘Maybe he likes Welsh envelopes.’
‘That’s possible but for a man of such means there must be easier ways of satisfying his craving.’
‘Maybe he likes visitors from Wales.’ Calamity scraped her soup spoon in random circles across the base of her dish, her brow furrowed by the intrusion of a new thought. ‘So who do you think killed Arianwen?’
