Chapter 21 My Talk with Mercer Lorrimore

So that evening the car I had ordered brought Mercer Lorrimore to my hotel for a meeting. The driver told him which room to go up to. He knocked on the door and I let him in.

He took about two steps into the room and stopped when he recognized me.

'What is this?' he said angrily.

He seemed ready to leave, so I closed the door behind him.

'I work for the British Jockey Club,' I said. 'I was sent here to work with the Canadian Jockey Club during the Race Train journey.'

'But you're . . . you're a waiter!'

'My name is Tor Kelsey,' I said. 'We thought it better if I didn't go openly on the train as a sort of policemen for the Jockey Club, so I went as a waiter.'

'My God,' he said weakly. He stepped further into the room. 'Why am I here? What do you want?'

'I believe you know both Bill Baudelaire and Brigadier Valentine Catto?'

He nodded.

'As they cannot be here, they have both given me permission to speak to you for them.'

'Yes, but about what?'

I showed him a chair. 'Would you like to sit down? And would you like a drink?'

He nearly smiled at the echo of my act as a waiter, but he sat down. He asked to see my passport to prove that I was who I was claiming to be. The passport gave my occupation as investigator.

He handed it back. 'Yes, I'll have a drink,' he said, 'as you're so good at serving them.' I served him his drink, as I had done so many times on the train. Then he said. 'No one on the train guessed about you. Why were you there, though?'

'I was sent because of one of the passengers. Because of Julius Filmer.'

He had been beginning to relax, but my statement made him tense again. He put the glass down on the table beside him and stared at me.

'Mr Lorrimore,' I said, sitting down opposite him, 'I am sorry about your son. And all the members of the Jockey Club send their sympathy. But I think you should know straight away that . . . er . . . the cats at Sheridan's college in Cambridge.'

He looked deeply shocked. 'You can't know!'

'Don't worry, it's not public knowledge. I found out, and I had to tell Catto and Baudelaire. But Filmer knows too, doesn't he?'

He made a helpless gesture with his hands. 'Yes, but I don't understand how he could have found out.'

'We're working on that very question,' I said.

'Sheridan knew,' Mercer said. 'I mean he knew I was worried, and he heard Filmer's nasty little remark about the cats, and whatever else Sheridan was, he was not stupid: he could add two and two. And that last evening, he was different - he seemed to be thinking something over.'

I nodded and said that I'd noticed.

'And then that morning,' Mercer continued, 'he said, "Sorry, Dad", just before he went out to the balcony. I asked him what he meant, and he said, "I made a real mess of things for you, didn't I?" We all knew he had, but it was the first time he had admitted it; and I didn't guess that he was talking specially about the situation with Filmer and Voting Right and the cats. You know what Filmer wanted, do you?'

I nodded.

'It wasn't the only time Sheridan had killed cats, you know,' Mercer went on. 'He killed two cats like that when he was fourteen, in our garden. A doctor said that it was just a phase and would pass ... It never did, but we hoped he would be all right at Cambridge. Instead, he got worse ... I'll never know if he intended to jump into the canyon, or if it was a sudden idea of his. . .' Mercer looked me in the eyes and made a simple statement: 'I loved my son.'

He stopped talking. I let him sit and drink in silence for a while. Eventually, a sigh showed that his thoughts were turning away from Sheridan. Then it was my turn, and not for the first time that day I talked for a long time about what I planned to do.

By the time I was half-way through, I knew that he would do what I was asking, and I was grateful, because it wouldn't be easy for him.

He sat in his chair, nodding in agreement with everything I was saying — with both the action and the thought behind the action. When I'd finished, he said, still surprised, 'The waiter

'I'd be grateful,' I said, 'if you don't tell anyone else about my disguise.'

'I won't,' he promised.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 641