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progress. I took a tray, slid it along the rails in front of the glass-fronted serving display and picked a slice of cheesecake from behind one of the small hinged doors. I actually approved of the glass-door arrangement: it meant that with luck one’s cheesecake wouldn’t have been sneezed on by the general public, but only by a cook or two and the snack-bar staff.
    Millington eyed my partially hygienic wedge and said he preferred the lemon meringue pie, himself.
    ‘I like that too,’ I said equably.
    Millington was a big beer-and-any-kind-of-pie man who must have given up thankfully on weight control when he left the police. He looked as if he now weighed about seventeen stone, and while not gross was definitely a solid mass, but with an agility also that he put to good use in his job. Many petty racecourse crooks had made the mistake of believing Millington couldn’t snake after them like an eel through the crowds, only to feel the hand of retribution falling weightily on their collar. I’d seen Millington catch a dipping pickpocket on the wing: an impressive sight.
    The large convenience-food snack-bar, bright and clean, was always infernally noisy, pop music thumping away to the accompaniment of chairs scraping the floor and the clatter of meals at a gallop. The clientele were mostly travellers, coming or going on trains lacking buffet cars, starving or prudent; travellers checking their watches, gulping too-hot coffee, uninterested in others, leaving in a hurry. No one ever gave Millington and me a second glance, and no one could ever have overheard what we said.
    We never met there when there was racing at places like Plumpton, Brighton, Lingfield and Folkestone: on those days the whole racing circus could wash through Victoria Station. We never met, either, anywhere near the Security Service head office in the Jockey Club, in Portman Square. It was odd, I sometimes thought, that I’d never once been through my employer’s door.
    Millington said, ‘I don’t approve of you travelling with Filmer.’
    ‘So I gathered,’ I said. ‘You said so earlier.’
    ‘The man’s a murderer.’
    He wasn’t concerned for my safety, of course, but thought me unequal to the contest.
    ‘He may not actually murder anyone on the train,’ I said flippantly.
    ‘It’s no joke,’ he said severely. ‘And after this he’ll know you, and you’ll be no use to us on the racecourse, as far as he’s concerned.’
    ‘There are about fifty people going on the trip, the Brigadier said. I won’t push myself into Filmer’s notice. He quite likely won’t remember me afterwards.’
    ‘You’ll be too close to him,’ Millington said obstinately.
    ‘Well,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘it’s the only chance we’ve ever had so far to get really close to him at all. Even if he’s only going along for a harmless holiday, we’ll know a good deal more about him this way.’
    ‘I don’t like wasting you,’ Millington said, shaking his head.
    I looked at him in real surprise. ‘That’s a change,’ I said.
    ‘I didn’t want you working for us, to begin with,’ he said, shrugging. ‘Didn’t see what good you could do, thought it was stupid. Now you’re my eyes. The eyes in the back of my head, that the villains have been complaining about ever since you started. I’ve got the sense to know it. And if you must know, I don’t want to lose you. I told the Brigadier we were wasting our trump card, sending you on that train. He said we might be playing it, and if we could get rid of Filmer, it was worth it.’
    I looked at Millington’s worried face. I said slowly, ‘Do you, and does the Brigadier, know something about Filmer’s travel plans that you’ve not told me?’
    ‘When he said that,’ Millington said, looking down at his sausage rolls, ‘I asked him that same question. He didn’t answer. I don’t know of anything myself. I’d tell you, if I did.’
    Perhaps he would, I thought. Perhaps he wouldn’t.
    The next