by Dick Francis
‘Family?’
‘Dutch wife, lots of solid children.’
I paid the bill and we strolled back to the car. Odin stared out of the front window with his huge head close to the glass and his eyes unblinking. Some people who stopped to try ‘isn’t-he-a-nice-boy’ noises got a big yawn and a view down a cavernous throat.
Erik opened his door, gave the dog a shove and said ’Fanden ta dig.’ The Dane shifted his bulk towards the back seat without taking offence, and the journey continued.
‘What did Lars do in the war?’
‘He wasn’t here,’ he said promptly. ‘He was in London, reading the news in Norwegian on the radio.’
‘He didn’t tell me he’d lived in London.’
‘He’s quiet now. Another dead volcano. More pummice.’
Erik crossed some traffic lights three seconds after they turned red and genuinely didn’t seem to hear six other motorists grinding their brake drums to screaming point. Odin gave him an affectionate nudge in the neck and Erik put out the hand he needed on the gear lever and fondled the huge wet nose.
He pulled up in front of a modern square-built glass and slab affair a mile out of the city centre, a far cry from Sandvik’s architectural elegance.
‘This is the address you gave me,’ Erik said dubiously.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Would you like to wait inside?’
He shook his head, though the afternoon was cold and rapidly growing dark. ‘Odin gives off heat like a nuclear reactor and I don’t like sitting in plastic lobbies being stared at.’
‘O.K.’
I left them to their companionship and rode a lift up to Rolf Torp’s office, where again as I was early I was asked to wait. This time not in Torp’s own office, but a small purpose-decorated room overflowing with useful handouts about ‘Torp-Nord Associates’.
The walls here also were hung with diagrams of rock formations, charts of progress and maps showing areas being worked. These maps were not of the North Sea but of the mainland, with the thickest cluster of work-tags to the west of Oslo, in the mountains.
Someone had told me Rolf Torp’s business was silver, but it wasn’t or no longer chiefly. His associates had switched to titanium.
Before he finally turned up (at four twenty) for his four o’clock appointment I had learnt a good deal I didn’t especially want to know about titanium. For example that it weighed only 0.163 lbs per cubic inch and in alloy form could reach a tensile strength of 200,000 lbs per square inch. Bully for titanium, I thought.
Rolf Torp was much like his product in tensile strength but couldn’t match it for lightness. He made no effort to conceal that my visit was a nuisance, bursting into the waiting room saying, ‘Come on, come on then. I can give you ten minutes, that’s all,’ and stomping off to his own office without waiting to see if I followed.
I did, of course. His office was much like Sandvik’s: same type of furniture, fabrics and carpet, a reflection of prevailing style but no clue to the occupant. The walls here were dotted with framed photographs of various stages of metal production, and another large map with thumb tacks took pride of place.
‘How do you mine titanium?’ I asked, and sat in the visitors’ chair without being invited. Irritably he took his own place behind half an acre of tidy desk and lit a cigarette.
‘Like one?’ he said belatedly, pushing a box towards me.
‘No, thank you.’
He flicked a lighter and deeply inhaled the smoke.
‘You don’t find titanium lying around like coal,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you want to use your ten minutes on this?’
‘Might as well.’
He gave me a puzzled look over the heavy black moustache, but seemed to find his own subject a lot less temper-disturbing than mine.
‘Titanium is the ninth most common element on earth. It is found in ninety-eight per cent of rocks and also in oil, coal, water, plants, animals, and stars.’
‘You can hardly dig it out of people.’
‘No. It is mostly mined as a mineral called ilmenite… which is one third titanium.’
‘Does your firm do the actual mining?’
He shook his head. ‘We survey, do first drillings, advise and establish.’
I looked vaguely at the photographs on the walls.
‘Apart from high speed aircraft, what’s the stuff used for?’
He reeled off technical uses as if he’d been asked that one once or twice before. Towards the end, slowing down, he included paint, lipstick and smokescreens. There was little you couldn’t do, it seemed, with the strength of the Titans.
‘Did Bob Sherman bring you any photographs?’
I asked him casually without looking at him directly, but if it jerked him at all I couldn’t tell, as he swept any involuntary movement into a quick gesture to flick off ash.
‘No, he didn’t.’
‘Did he ask your advice about anything?’
‘Why should he?’
‘People do need advice sometimes,’ I said.
He gave a laugh that was hah’ a scowl. ‘I gave him some. He didn’t ask. I told him to ride races better or stay in England.’
‘He didn’t please you?’
‘He should have won on my good horse. He went to sleep. He stopped trying to win, and he was beaten. Also he did not ride as I told him, all the way round.’
‘Do you think someone bribed him to lose?’
He looked startled. For all his bad-tempered criticism it hadn’t occurred to him, and to be fair, he didn’t pounce on the idea.
‘No,’ he said heavily. ‘He wanted to ride that horse in the Grand National. It started favourite and it won.’
I nodded. ‘I saw the race.’
‘That’s right. Bob Sherman wanted to ride it, but I would have got someone else anyway. He rode it very badly.’
I imagined that any time Rolf Torp’s jockey didn’t win, he had automatically ridden badly. I stood up to go, which puzzled him again, and shook his hand.
‘Coming here has been a waste of your time,’ he said.
‘Of course not… I’ll let myself out.’
He didn’t stop me, I closed his door and did a brief exploration. More offices. More bustle than at Sandvik’s. More impression of work being done, but nothing so earthy as a lump of ore.
Erik was not parked out front where I had left him. I went through the big glass entrance doors, peered briefly into the darkness, and ignominiously retreated. One thing I did not plan to do was walk around at night alone, making everything easy for assassins.
After ten minutes I began to wonder if he’d simply forgotten about me and gone home, but he hadn’t. The small cream Volvo returned at high speed and stopped outside in its own length. Its owner extricated himself from the quivering metal and strolled towards the building.
‘Hullo,’ he said, as I met him. ‘Hope you haven’t been waiting. I had to get Odin’s dinner. Forgot all about it.’
In the car, Odin loomed hungrily over my head, dribbling. Just as well, I thought, that he was about to be fed.
Erik returned us to the Grand at tar-melting speed and seemed disappointed that I hadn’t wanted any longer journeys.
11
The receptionists of the Grand considered me totally mad because I was insisting on changing my room every day, but they would have thought me even madder if I’d told them the reason. I asked them just to allocate me the last empty room, or if there were several, to give me a random choice at bed time. They did it with politely glazed eyes while I thankfully put my trust in unpredictability.
When Erik dropped me at the door and took his big friend home I telephoned to Arne and Kari and asked them to dinner.
‘Come here,’ Kari demanded warmly, but I said it was time I repaid their kindness, and after much demur they agreed to the Grand. I sat in the bar and read a newspaper until they arrived, and thought about growing old.
It was strange, but away from her chosen setting, Kari look
ed a different person. Not so young, not so domesticated, not so tranquil. This Kari, walking with assurance into the bar in a long black skirt and white ruffled shirt was the woman who designed interiors as a business. This Kari, wearing perfect make-up, diamonds in her ears and hair smoothly pinned up, looked at once cooler and more mature than the casual home-girl. When she put a smooth sweet-smelling cheek forward for a kiss and gave me a pretty look from under her lashes I found I both liked her less and wanted her more; both of which reactions were disconcerting and no good.
Arne was Arne, the antithesis of a chameleon, his personality so concretely formed that it retained its own shape whatever the environment. He swept four-square into the the bar and gave it a quick suspicious survey to make sure no one could listen at his shoulder.
‘Hallo David,’ he said, shaking my hand vigorously. ‘What have you been doing all day?’
‘Wasting time,’ I said smiling, ‘And wondering what to do next.’
We sat in a comfortable corner and drank (as for once it was the right hour on the right day) whisky.
Arne wanted to know what progress I had made.
‘Not much,’ I said. ‘You might practically say none.’
‘It must be very difficult,’ Kari said sympathetically, with Arne nodding in agreement. ‘How do you know what to look for?’
‘I don’t often look for things. I look at what’s there.’
‘All detectives look for things. Look for clues and follow trails. Of course they do.’
‘And trudge up dead ends and find red herrings,’ I said.
‘Herrings are not red,’ Kari said in puzzlement.
Fifty-seven varieties of herring in Norway, and not one of them red.
‘A red herring is something that doesn’t exist,’ Arne said, but had to explain it again to her in Norwegian.
She laughed, but returned to her questions. ‘How do you solve a crime?’
‘Um… you think what you might have done if you’d been the crook, and then you look to see if that’s what he did. And sometimes it is.’
‘No one else solves crimes like David,’ Arne said.
‘Believe me,’ I said. ‘They do.’
‘What do you think the crook did this time?’ Kari asked.
I looked at her clear grey eyes, asking the question I couldn’t answer without freezing the evening in its tracks.
‘There’s more than one,’ I said neutrally. ‘Emma Sherman saw two.’
We talked about Emma for a while. Arne had met her grandfather during his brief visit, and knew he had not been able to identify either of the intruders.
‘And nobody knows what they were looking for,’ Kari said thoughtfully.
‘The men knew,’ I said.
Arne’s eyes stretched suddenly wide, which made a change from blinking. ‘So they did,’ he said.
‘Of course they did,’ she said. ‘I don’t see the point.’
‘It isn’t really a point. Only that someone somewhere does know what is missing. Or what was missing, because it may have been found now.’
Kari thought it over. ‘Why do you think they didn’t search the Shermans’ house at once, as soon as they’d killed Bob Sherman? Why wait a month?’
Arne went back to blinking fit to bust, but he left it to me to answer.
‘I think,’ I said, ‘It was because Bob Sherman was found, and whatever it was that was missing wasn’t found with him.’ I paused. ‘Say Mr X kills Bob and dumps him in the pond, for a reason as yet unknown. Suppose this was after Bob delivered a package he had been bringing with him. Suppose also that Bob had opened the package and taken out some of the contents, but that Mr X did not discover this until after he’d killed Bob and put him in the pond. O.K. so far? So then he has to guess whether Bob had the missing contents in his pockets or his overnight bag, in which case they too are safely in the pond, or whether he passed them on to someone else, or even posted them home to himself in England, before he was killed. Short of getting Bob out of the pond, Mr X can’t find out for certain, but the longer the missing contents don’t turn up, the surer Mr X becomes that they are with Bob. Right. But then Bob is found, and the missing contents are still missing. So a search party is sent out to find out if Bob took them out of the package at home before he even left England, and Emma was unfortunate enough to choose just that moment to go back for some fresh clothes.’
Kari’s mouth had slowly opened. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘And it seemed such a simple little question.’
‘I told you,’ Arne said. ‘Give him one fact and he guesses the rest.’
‘And a guess is all it is.’ I smiled. ‘I don’t know why they took a month to start searching. Do you?’
Kari said ‘But you must be right. It sounds so reasonable.’
‘Like the earth is flat.’
‘What?’
‘Sounds reasonable until you know different.’
We went in to dinner. There was an orchestra playing, and dancing, and later, with the coffee, a singer. It was all too much in the end for Arne who stood up abruptly, said he needed some air, and made a compulsive dash for the door.
We watched his retreating back.
‘Has he always been like that?’ I asked.
‘Always since I’ve known him. Though lately, perhaps, it has been worse. He used not to worry about bugging machines.’
‘He used not to know they existed.’
‘Well… that’s true.’
‘How did it start? His persecution complex, I mean.’
‘Oh… the war, I suppose. When he was a child. I wasn’t born until after, but Arne was a child then. His grandfather was shot as a hostage, and his father was in the resistance. Arne says he was always frightened when he was a child, but he wasn’t always sure what he was frightened of. Sometimes his father sent him to run with messages and told him to be sure not to be followed. Arne says he was always terrified those times that he would turn round and find a big man behind him.’
‘Poor Arne,’ I said.
‘He has been to psychiatrists,’ Kari said. ‘He knows… but he still can’t help it.’ She looked away from me, at the couples slowly circling on the square of polished floor. ‘He can’t bear dancing.’
After a few seconds I said ‘Would you like to?’
‘I don’t suppose he’d mind.’
She stood up without hesitation and danced with natural rhythm. She also knew quite well that I liked having her close: I could see it in her eyes. I wondered if she’d ever been unfaithful to Arne, or ever would be. I wondered about the age-old things. One can’t help it, I find.
She smiled and moved forward until our bodies were touching at more points than not, and no woman ever did that unless she meant to. What we were engaged in from that moment on was an act of sex: upright, dancing, public and fully clothed, but an act of sex none the less. I knew theoretically that a woman could reach a vivid orgasm without actual intercourse, that in fact some could do it when all alone simply by thinking erotic thoughts, but I had never before seen it happen.
It happened to Kari because she wanted it to. Because she rubbed closely against me with every turn of the dance. Because I didn’t expect it. Because I didn’t push her off.
Her breathing grew slower and deeper and her eyes lost their brightness. Her mouth was closed, half smiling. Head up, neck straight, she looked more withdrawn and absent-minded than passionately aroused. Then quite suddenly her whole body flushed with heat, and behind her eyes and right through her very deep I was for almost twenty seconds aware of a gentle intense throbbing.
After that she took a great deep gulping breath as if her lungs had been cramped. Her mouth opened, the smile broadened, and she unplastered herself from my front.
Her eyes grew bright as stars, and she laughed into mine.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
She had finished with dancing. She broke away and walked back to the table, sitting down sociably as if nothing had happened. Oh thanks ve
ry much, I thought, and where does that leave me? Dealing with an unscratchable itch and without the later comfort of doing it on my own like she had, because I’d never found that much fun.
‘More coffee?’ I said. One had to say something, I supposed. How about ‘Damn your eyes you selfish little pig’?
‘Thank you,’ she said.
The waiter brought more coffee. Civilisation won the day.
Arne returned looking windblown and a little happier. Kari put her hand on his with wifely warmth and understanding, and I remembered ironically that I had wondered if she were ever unfaithful to him. She was and she wasn’t: the perfect recipe for having it both ways.
They left shortly afterwards, pressing me to spend another evening at their flat before I went home.
‘See you on Sunday at Øvrevoll,’ Arne said. ‘If not before.’
When they had gone I collected my suitcase from the hall porter and took myself to the reception desk. There were five empty rooms to choose from, so I took a key at random and got myself a spacious double room with a balcony looking out towards the parliament building. I opened the well-closed double doors and let a blast from the Arctic play havoc with the central heating. Then I shut them again and went coldly to bed, and lay awake for a long time thinking about a lot of things but hardly at all about Kari.
Erik came to breakfast the next morning. He joined me with a grin, helped himself to half a ton of assorted pickled fish from the buffet, and ate as if there were no tomorrow.
‘Where to?’ he asked after two further bread rolls, four slices of cheese and several cups of coffee.
‘Øvrevoll,’ I said.
‘But there’s no racing today.’
‘I know.’
‘Well, if that’s what you want, let’s go.’
Odin, in a friendly mood, sat centrally with his rump wedged against the rear seat and his front paws and huge head burying the handbrake. When Erik gave him a nudge with his elbow the dog lifted his chin long enough for his master to release the wheels. A double act of long standing, it seemed.