Slay Ride

by Dick Francis

  ‘Come,’ Arne said.

  Weak, that’s what I am. I said, ‘I’d love to.’

  He bustled off instantly to do the telephoning and soon returned beaming.

  ‘She is very pleased. She says we will give you cloudberries, she bought some yesterday.’

  We went out to the raw afternoon and watched the big flat race together, but then Arne was whisked off on official business and for a while I wandered around alone. Though its organisation and upkeep were clearly first class, it was not on British terms a big racecourse. Plenty of room, but few buildings. Everyone could see: no one was pushed, rushed or crushed. Space was the ultimate luxury, I thought, as I strolled past a small oblong ornamental pond with a uniformed military band playing full blast beside it. Several children sat in bright little heaps around the players’ feet and one or two were peering interestedly into the quivering business ends of trombones.

  Øvrevoll, someone had told me, was a fairly new racecourse, the only one in Norway to hold ordinary Flat and jump races. Most racing, as in Germany, was trotting, with sulkies.

  For the Grand National itself I went back up the tower, which I found stood in the smaller top part of the figure of eight, with the larger part lying in the main part of the course, inside the flat track. Twenty runners set off at a spanking pace to go three and a half times round, which set the binocular men in the tower rotating like gyros. Soon after the start the horses circled the tower, cut closer across beside it and sped towards the water jump and the farther part of the course, took the bottom bend, and returned towards the start. In the top part of the course, near the tower, lay a large pond with a couple of swans swimming in stately unison across from two small devoted black and white ducks. Neither pair took the slightest notice of the throng of horses thundering past a few feet from home.

  Rinty Ranger won the race, taking the lead at the beginning of the last circuit and holding off all challengers, and I saw the flash of his triumphant teeth as he went past the post.

  The misty daylight had already faded to the limit for jumping fences safely, but the two races still to come, in a card of ten altogether, were both on the Flat. The first was run in peering dusk and the second in total darkness, with floodlights from the tower illuminating just the winning line, bright enough to activate the photo finish. Eleven horses sped up the dark track, clearly seen only for the seconds it took them to flash through the bright patch, but cheered nonetheless by a seemingly undiminished crowd.

  So they literally did race in the dark. I walked thoughtfully back towards the officials’ room to meet up with Arne. It really had been night-black when Bob Sherman left the racecourse.

  There was bustle in the officials’ room and a lot of grins and assurances that the takings this day were safe in the safe. Arne reminded several of them that the Chairman had said they could come to the progress-report meeting if they liked: he said it in English in deference to me, and in English they answered. They would come, except for one or two who would wait for the night watchman. A right case of bolting stable doors.

  The Chairman’s room had too many people in it, as far as I was concerned. Fifteen besides myself. Every chair filled up, coffee and drinks circulated, and the eyes waited. Lars Baltzersen raised his eyebrows in my direction to tell me I was on, and shushed the low-key chatter with a single smooth wave of his hand.

  ‘I think you’ve all met Mr Cleveland at some time today…’ He turned directly to me and smiled forgivingly. ‘I know we have asked the impossible. Sherman left no traces, no clues. But is there any course of action you think we might take which we have not so far done?’

  He made it so easy.

  ‘Look for his body,’ I said.

  5

  It seemed that that was not what they expected.

  Per Bjørn Sandvik said explosively in his high distilled English, ‘We know he is a thief. Why should he be dead?’ and someone else murmured, ‘I still think he is in the south of France, living in the sun.’

  Rolf Torp, owner of the Grand National winner, lit a cigar and said, ‘I do not follow your reasoning.’ Arne sat shaking his head and blinking as if he would never stop.

  Lars Baltzersen gave me a slow stare and then invited me to explain.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Take first the mechanics of that theft. Everyone agrees that the officials’ room was empty for a very few minutes, and that no one could have predicted when it would be empty, or that it would be empty at all. Everyone agrees that Bob Sherman simply saw the money lying handy, was overcome with sudden temptation, and swiped it. Sorry…’ I said as I saw their puzzlement, ‘… stole it.’

  Heads nodded all round. This was well-worn ground.

  ‘After that,’ I said, ‘we come to a few difficulties. That money was enclosed in five hefty… er, bulky… canvas bags fastened with straps and padlocks. Now a hundred and thirty-three pound jockey couldn’t stow five such bags out of sight under his coat. Anyone, however big, would have found it awkward to pick all of them up at once. To my mind, if Sherman’s first impulse was to steal, his second would instantly be to leave well alone. He had no way of knowing how much the bags contained. No way of judging whether the theft would be worthwhile. But in fact there is no evidence at all to suggest that he even felt any impulse to steal, even if he saw the bags on the floor when he went earlier to ask some question or other. There is no evidence whatsoever to prove that Bob Sherman stole the money.’

  ‘Of course there is,’ Rolf Torp said. ‘He disappeared.’

  ‘How?’ I asked.

  There were several puzzled frowns, one or two blank faces, and no suggestions.

  ‘This must have been a spur of the moment theft,’ I said, ‘so he could have made no preparations. Well, say for argument he had taken the bags, there he is staggering around with the swag… the stolen goods… in full view. What does he do? Even with a sharp knife it would have taken some time to slit open those bags and remove the money. But we can discount that he did this on the racecourse, because the bags in fact have never been found.’

  Some heads nodded. Some were shaken.

  ‘Bob Sherman had a small overnight grip with him, which I understand from his wife was not big enough to contain five canvas bags, let alone his clothes as well. No one has found his clothes lying around, so he could not have packed the money in his grip.’

  Lars Baltzersen looked thoughtful.

  ‘Take transport,’ I said. ‘He had ordered a taxi to take him to Fornebu airport, but he didn’t turn up. The police could find no taxi driver who took one single Englishman anywhere. Gunnar Holth says he drove him round to the racecourse at midday, but not away. Because the theft has to be unpremeditated, Sherman could not have hired himself a getaway car, and the police anyway could trace no such hiring. He did not steal a car to transport the money: no cars were stolen from here that day. Which leaves friends…’ I paused. ‘Friends who could be asked to take him say to Sweden, and keep quiet afterwards.’

  ‘They would be also guilty,’ said Rolf Torp disbelievingly.

  ‘Yes. Well… he had been to Norway seven times but only for a day or two each time. The only friends I can find who might conceivably have known or liked him well enough to get themselves into trouble on his account are Gunnar Holth’s head lad Paddy O’Flaherty, and perhaps… if you’ll forgive me, sir… Mikkel Sandvik.’

  He was much more annoyed this time, but protested no further than a grim stare.

  ‘But Paddy O’Flaherty’s car has been up on bricks for six weeks,’ I said. ‘And Mikkel Sandvik cannot drive yet. Neither of them had wheels… er, transport… ready and waiting for Sherman’s unexpected need.’

  ‘What you are saying,’ Baltzersen said, ‘Is that once he’d stolen the money, he couldn’t have got it away. But suppose he hid it, and came back for it later?’

  ‘He would still have much the same transport problem, and also the night watchmen to contend with. No… I think if he had stolen and hidden the money, h
e would not have gone back for it, but just abandoned it. Sense would have prevailed. Because there are other things about that cash… To you, it is familiar. It is money. To Bob Sherman, it was foreign currency. All British jockeys riding abroad have enough trouble changing currency as it is: they would not leap at stealing bagfuls of something they could not readily spend. And don’t forget, a large proportion of it was in coins, which are both heavy and even more difficult to exchange in quantity than notes, once they are out of Norway.’

  Per Børn Sandvik was studying the floor and looking mild again. Arne had blinked his eyes to a standstill and was now holding them shut. Rolf Torp puffed his cigar with agitation and Lars Baltzersen looked unhappy.

  ‘But that still does not explain why you think Sherman is dead,’ he said.

  ‘There has been no trace of him from that day to this… No one even thinks they might have seen him. There have been no reports from anywhere. His pregnant wife has had no word of reassurance. All this is highly unusual in the case of a thief on the run, but entirely consistent with the man being dead.’

  Baltzersen took his bottom lip between his teeth.

  I said, ‘It is usually fairly easy to account for a man’s abrupt disappearance… during an investigation his motive emerges pretty strongly. But there seems to have been no factor in Bob Sherman’s life likely to prompt him into impulsive and irreversible flight. No one would exchange a successful career for an unknown but not huge amount of foreign currency unless some secondary force made it imperative. Neither your police, nor the British police, nor his wife, nor Arne Kristiansen, nor I, have found any suggestion, however faint or unlikely, that there was such force at work.’

  Arne opened his eyes and shook his head.

  ‘Suppose,’ I said ‘that someone else stole the money, and Bob Sherman saw him.’

  The Stewards and officials looked startled and intensely gloomy. No one needed to have it spelled out that anyone caught red-handed might have had too much to lose, and from there it was a short step to imagine the thief desperate enough to kill Bob Sherman to keep him quiet.

  ‘Murder?’ Baltzersen spoke the word slowly as if it were strange on his tongue. ‘Is that what you mean?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ I said.

  ‘But not certain.’

  ‘If there were any clear pointers to murder,’ I said, ‘your police would have already found them. There is no clarity anywhere. But if there are no answers at all to the questions where he went, why he went, and how he went, I think one should then ask whether he went.’

  Baltzersen’s strained voice mirrored their faces: they did not want me to be right. ‘You surely don’t think he is still here? On the racecourse?’

  Rolf Torp shook his head impatiently. He was a man most unlike the Chairman, as quick tempered as Baltzersen was steady. ‘Of course he doesn’t. There are people here every day training their horses, and we have held eight race meetings since Sherman disappeared. If his body had been here, it would have been found at once.’

  Heads nodded in unanimous agreement, and Baltzersen said regretfully, ‘I suppose he could have been driven away from here unconscious or dead, and hidden… buried… later, somewhere else.’

  ‘There’s a lot of deep water in Norway, I said.

  My thoughts went back to our little junket in the fjord, and I missed some lightning reaction in someone in that room. I knew that a shift had been made, but because of that gap in concentration I couldn’t tell who had made it. Fool, I thought, you got a tug on the line and you didn’t see which fish, and even the certainty that a fish was there was no comfort.

  The silence lengthened, until finally Per Børn Sandvik looked up from the floor with a thoughtful frown. ‘It would seem, then, that no one can ever get to the truth of it. I think David’s theory is very plausible. It fits all the facts… or rather, the lack of facts… better than any explanation we have discussed before.’

  The heads nodded.

  ‘We will tell our police here what you have suggested,’ Baltzersen said in a winding-up-the-meeting voice, ‘but I agree with Per… After so long a time, and after so much fruitless investigation, we will never really know what happened either to Sherman or to the money. We are all most grateful that you took the trouble to come over, and I know that for most of us, on reflection, your answer to the puzzle will seem the one most likely to be right.’

  They gave me a lot of worried half-smiles and some more nods. Rolf Torp stubbed out his cigar vigorously and everyone shifted on their chairs and waited for Baltzersen to stand up.

  I thought about the two graceful swans and the two little black and white ducks swimming around quietly out there on the dark side of the tower.

  ‘You could try the pond,’ I said.

  The meeting broke up half an hour later, after it had been agreed with a certain amount of horror that the peaceful little water should be dragged the following morning.

  Arne had some security jobs to see to, which he did with painstaking slowness. I wandered aimlessly around, listening to the Norwegian voices of the last of the crowd going home. A good hour after the last race, and still a few lights, still a few people. Not the most private place for committing murder.

  I went back towards the weighing room and stood beside the clump of ornamental bushes on the grass outside. Well… they were thick enough and dark enough to have hidden a body temporarily, until everyone had gone. A jockey and his overnight grip, and five bags of stolen money. Plenty of room, in these bushes, for the lot. There were lights outside the weighing room, but the bushes threw heavy shadows and one could not see to their roots.

  Arne found me there and exclaimed with passionate certainty, ‘He can’t be in those, you know. Someone would have seen him long ago.’

  ‘And smelled him,’ I said.

  Arne made a choking noise and ‘Christ.’

  I turned away. ‘Have you finished now?’

  He nodded, one side of his face brightly lit, the other in shadow. ‘The night watchman is here and everything is as it should be. He will make sure all the gates are locked for the night. We can go home.’

  He drove me in his sturdy Swedish Volvo back towards the city and round to his leafy urban street. Kari greeted us with roaring logs on the fire and tall glasses of frosty thirstquenching white wine. Arne moved restlessly round the apartment like a bull and switched Beethoven on again fortissimo.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Kari asked him, raising her voice. For God’s sake turn it down.’

  Arne obliged, but the sacrifice of his emotional safety valve clearly oppressed him.

  ‘Let him rip,’ I told him. ‘We can stand it for five minutes.’

  Kari gave me a gruesome look and vanished into the kitchen as Arne with great seriousness took me at my word. I sat resignedly on the sofa while the stereophonies shook the foundations, and admired the forebearance of his neighbours. The man who lived alone below my own flat in London had ears like stethoscopes and was up knocking on my door at every dropped pin.

  The five minutes stretched to nearly twenty before Arne stopped pacing around and turned down the volume.

  ‘Great stuff, great stuff,’ he said.

  ‘Sure,’ I agreed, because it was, in its place, which was somewhere the size of the Albert Hall.

  Kari returned from exile with little wifely indulgent shakes of the head. She looked particularly disturbing in a copper-coloured silky trouser suit which did fantastic things for the hair, the colouring and the eyes and nothing bad for the rest of her. She refilled our glasses and sat on some floor cushions near the fire.

  ‘How did you enjoy the races?’ she asked.

  ‘Very much,’ I said.

  Arne blinked a bit, said he had some telephone calls to make, and removed himself to the hall. Kari said she had watched the Grand National on television but rarely went to the races herself.

  ‘I’m an indoors person,’ she said. ‘Arne says the outdoor life is healthier, but I don’t
enjoy being cold or wet or cut up by the wind, so I let him go off doing all those rugged things like skiing and sailing and swimming, and me, I just make a warm room for him to come back to.’

  She grinned, but I caught the faintest of impressions that wifely though she might thoroughly appear to be, she had feelings for Arne which were not wholehearted love. Somewhere deep lay an attitude towards the so-called manly pursuits which was far from admiration; and a basic antipathy to an activity nearly always extended, in my experience, to anyone who went in for it.

  Arne’s voice floated in from the hall, speaking Norwegian.

  ‘He is talking about dragging a pond,’ Kari said, looking puzzled. ‘What pond?’

  I told her what pond.

  ‘Oh dear… his poor little wife… I hope he isn’t in there… how would she bear it?’

  Better, I thought, on the whole, than believing he was a thief who had deserted her. I said ‘It’s only a possibility. But it’s as well to make sure.’

  She smiled. ‘Arne has a very high opinion of you. I expect you are right. Arne said when he came back from England that he would never want to be investigated by you, you seemed to know what people were thinking. When the Chairman asked for someone to find Bob Sherman and Arne heard that you were coming yourself, he was very pleased. I heard him telling someone on the telephone that you had the eyes of a hawk and a mind like a razor.’ She grinned ironically, the soft light gleaming on her teeth. ‘Are you flattered?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I wish it were true.’

  ‘It must be true if you are in charge when you are so young.’

  ‘I’m thirty-three,’ I said. ‘Alexander the Great had conquered the world from Greece to India by that time.’

  ‘You look twenty-five,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a great drawback.’

  ‘A… what?’