Slay Ride

by Dick Francis

  Knut asked her. She answered. Knut said, ‘He was wearing a woollen cap, like a sailor.’

  ‘What did his eyes look like?’

  Knut asked. Her little voice rose clear, high, definite, and all the children looked interested.

  ‘He had yellow eyes. Sharp, like a bird.’

  ‘Did he have gloves?’

  Knut asked. ‘Yes,’ he reported.

  ‘What sort of shoes?’

  Back came the answer: big soft squashy shoes, like on a boat.

  Children were the best witnesses on earth. Their eyes saw clearly, their memories were accurate, and their impressions weren’t interpreted by probability or prejudice. So when Liv added something which made Knut and Erik and the older children laugh, I asked what she’d said.

  ‘She must have been mistaken,’ Knut said.

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said he had a butterfly on his neck.’

  ‘Ask her what sort of butterfly,’ I said.

  ‘It’s too late for butterfles,’ Knut said patiently. ‘Too cold.’

  ‘Ask her what it was like,’ I urged.

  He shrugged, but he asked. The reply surprised him, because Liv described it with sharp positive little nods. She knew she’d seen a butterfly.

  Knut said, ‘She says it was on the back of his neck. She saw it because his head was bent forward. It was between his woolly cap and his collar and it didn’t move.’

  ‘What colour?’

  He consulted. ‘Dark red.’

  ‘Birth mark?’

  ‘Could be,’ he agreed. He asked her one or two more questions and nodded to me. ‘I should think so,’ he said. ‘She says it had two wings lying open flat, but one was bigger than the other.’

  ‘So all we need now is a big man with yellow eyes and a butterfly birthmark.’

  ‘Or a small man,’ Erik said, ‘With the sun in his eyes and a dirty neck.’

  ‘No sun,’ I said. The iron grey sky pressed down like an army blanket, without warmth. The shivers in my gut, however, had little to do with the cold.

  Knut sent his policeman to fetch experts in fingerprints and explosives and took the names and addresses of half the children. The crowd of watchers grew a bit, and Erik restively asked Knut when he could go home.

  ‘What in?’ said Knut pointedly, so we stamped around on the pavement for nearly another hour.

  With darkness we returned to Knut’s office. He took his coat and cap off and looked wearier than ever.

  I borrowed his telephone and rang the Sandviks to apologise for my non-arrival. I spoke, in the event, to Mrs Per Bjørn, who explained that her husband was out.

  ‘Mikkel did wait for you, Mr Cleveland,’ she said in heavily accented English. ‘But after one hour he went away with some friends.’

  ‘Please tell him I’m very sorry.’

  ‘I will tell him.’

  ‘What school does he go to?’

  ‘College of Gol,’ she said, and then thought better of it. ‘But I do not think that my husband would like…’

  I interrupted, ‘I just wondered if I could see him this evening before he goes back.’

  ‘Oh… He is going straight back with the friends. They will have started by now.’

  ‘Never mind, then.’

  I put down the receiver. Knut was organising coffee.

  ‘Where is the College of Gol?’ I asked.

  ‘Gol is in the mountains, on the way to Bergen. It is a holiday ski town, in the winter. The college is a boarding school for rich boys. Are you going all the way out there to see Mikkel Sandvik? He knows nothing about Bob Shermans’ death. When I saw him he was very upset about his friend dying like that. He would have helped me if he could.’

  ‘How upset? Crying?’

  ‘No, not crying. Pale. Very shocked. Trembling. Upset.’

  ‘Angry?’

  ‘No. Why should he be angry?’

  ‘People are usually furious when their friends are murdered. They feel like strangling the murderer, don’t they?’

  ‘Oh, that,’ he said, nodding. ‘No, I don’t remember that Mikkel was especially angry.’

  ‘What is he like?’ I asked.

  ‘Just a boy. Sixteen. No, seventeen. Intelligent, but not outstanding. Average height, slim build, light brown hair, good manners. Nothing unusual about him. A nice boy. A little nervous, perhaps.’

  We sat around and drank the coffee. Odin had some too, in a bowl, with a lot of sugar. Erik had recovered from the nearness of losing his companion and was beginning to think about his car.

  ‘I’ll need to hire one, I suppose,’ he said. ‘For driving David around.’

  ‘You’re not driving David any more,’ Knut said positively.

  ‘Of course I am.’

  ‘No,’ said Knut. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

  There was a small meaningful silence. Anyone in future who drove me must be presumed to be at risk. Which put me high in the unpopularity stakes as a passenger.

  ‘I’ll manage,’ I said.

  Erik said, ‘Where do you plan to go?’

  ‘Tomorrow, to call on Sven Wangen, then to Øvrevoll. On Monday… I don’t know yet.’

  ‘I could do with another of those Grand breakfasts,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Knut. They argued heatedly in private, and Knut lost. He turned a grim face and a compressed mouth to me. ‘Erik says he never leaves a job unfinished.’

  Erik grinned and rubbed a hand over his straggly blond hair. ‘Only dull ones.’

  Knut said crossly, ‘I suppose you realise that one of these attempts will be successful? Two have failed, but…’

  ‘Three,’ I said. ‘Someone tried to drown me in the fjord the first day I came to Norway.’

  I told them about the black speedboat. Knut frowned and said, ‘But that could have been an accident.’

  I nodded. ‘At the time, I thought it was. I don’t think so any longer.’ I got up to pour myself some more hot strong black coffee. ‘I do rather agree with you that they will succeed in the end, but I don’t know what to do about it.’

  ‘Give up and go back to England,’ Knut said.

  ‘Would you?’

  He didn’t answer. Nor did Erik. There wasn’t an answer to give.

  * * *

  Knut sent me back in a police car to the Grand, where as the bar was again shut (Saturday) I ate an early dinner, collected my suitcases and Bob Sherman’s helmet from the porter, picked a room at random from those available, and spent the evening upstairs alone, sitting in an armchair and contemplating several unpalatable facts.

  Such as, there was a limit to luck and little girls.

  Such as, next time they could use a rifle, because sniping was the surest way of killing.

  Such as, tomorrow if I went to the races I would be scared to death the whole bloody day.

  Not much comfort in the hope that old yellow eyes with the birthmark might be a lousy shot.

  There were various other thoughts, chiefly that somewhere there existed a particular way of discovering who had killed Bob Sherman, and why. There had to be such a way, for if there wasn’t, no one would need to kill me. Knut hadn’t found it. Maybe he had looked the solution in the face and not recognised it, which was easy enough to do. Maybe I had, also, but could be expected to understand later what I had heard or seen.

  Yellow eyes must have followed Erik’s car, I thought. Erik’s breakneck driving and red light jumping made it exceedingly unlikely that anything bar a fire engine could have tailed us to Øvrevoll: but then I’d considerately returned to the Grand to dump the helmet, and made it easy for a watcher to pick us up again.

  I hadn’t spotted a follower, nor had Erik. But our trip to Baltzersen’s and from there to where we parked for lunch had been comparatively short and in retrospect almost legal. Anyone risking a couple of head-on crashes could have kept us in sight.

  Yellow eyes was the man who had attacked Emma; and it seemed likely that the man w
ho kicked her grandfather was the man who’d tried to knife me. Both, it seemed to me, were mercenaries, paid to do a violent job but not the instigators. They hadn’t the aura of principals.

  To my mind there were at least two others, one of whom I knew, one or more I didn’t. To bring out the unknown, I had to bamboozle the known. The big snag was that when it came to setting traps, the only bait at present available was myself, and this cheese could find itself eaten if it wasn’t extremely careful.

  It was easy to see that to bring out the big boys, yellow eyes and brown eyes would have to be decoyed away while at the same time a situation needing instant action was temptingly arranged elsewhere. How to do it was another matter. I stared at the carpet for ages and came up with nothing foolproof.

  I wished there was a way of knowing what Bob Sherman had been bringing to Norway. Unlikely to be straight pornography, because Bob had told Paddy O’Flaherty that he, Bob, had been conned. If he had opened the packet and found that it did not contain ordinary pornography, he might well have thought that.

  Suppose… he had opened the packet and reckoned he was not being paid enough for what he was carrying.

  Suppose… he had removed something from the packet, meaning to use it to up the stakes.

  But… he couldn’t have used it, because, if he had, the enemy would have known he had taken it, and would not have killed him without getting it back.

  So suppose… simply opening the packet and seeing the contents was in itself a death warrant.

  Suppose… the enemy killed him for knowing the contents, and only discovered afterwards that he had removed some of them.

  It came back to that every time.

  So… what the hell was in that packet?

  Start another way.

  When had he opened the packet?

  Probably not at home. Emma had seen him put it in his overnight bag so as not to risk forgetting it. Yellow eyes and friend had subsequently smashed the place up looking for things from it, and hadn’t found any. So it seemed reasonable to suppose that he had set off from home with the envelope intact.

  He had had all day at Kempton races. Time enough if he’d urgently wanted to open it: but if he’d felt like that, he’d already had it available all night.

  Not much time at Heathrow between arriving from Kempton and boarding the aeroplane. Hardly the opportunity for an impulsive bit of snooping.

  He had turned up at Gunnar Holth’s an hour or so later than expected. So he could have done his lethal bit of nosey-parkering either on the flight or in the first hour after he’d landed.

  On the flight, I thought, was most likely of all.

  A couple of drinks under his belt, an hour or so to while away, and a packet of blue pictures temptingly to hand.

  Open the packet and see… what?

  Suppose he had had perhaps half an hour before landing to come up with the idea of demanding a larger freight fee. Suppose he took something out of the envelope and hid it… where had he hidden it?

  Not in his pockets or his overnight bag. Perhaps in his saddle, but doubtful, because for one thing his racing saddle was tiny, and for another he’d ridden three races on it the following day.

  Not in his helmet: no papers or photographs lurked inside the padded headband.

  Which left one unaccounted-for hour, during which he could have left any object at the reception desk of any hotel in Oslo, with a request to keep it for him until he returned.

  In one hour he could have hidden something anywhere.

  I sighed. It was hopeless.

  I stood up, stretched, unpacked a few things, undressed, brushed my teeth.

  Bob’s helmet lay on my bed. I picked it up and dangled it by the chin strap as I pulled back the quilt and pushed up the pillows as a back-rest for reading before sleep. Sitting between the sheets I turned the helmet idly over in my hands, scarcely looking at it, thinking about Bob and the last day he’d worn it.

  I thought seriously about wearing it myself to Øvrevoll to protect my head, and buying a bullet-proof vest besides. I thought ungenerous thoughts about Emma’s husband because I too could still die for what he’d done.

  No papers. No photographs. I pulled the soft black padding out again. Nothing, still nothing tucked behind it.

  In the crown there was just the small round centrepiece of black-covered padding suspended by straps fixed into the shell itself. A marvellous piece of engineering, designed to prevent a man falling on his nut at thirty miles an hour off a galloping horse from bashing his skull in. The central suspended piece of padding shielded the top of the head and stopped it crashing into the shell itself at concussion speed.

  Underneath the central piece of padding there was no room at all for any papers or photographs or anything out of magazine-sized packets. I put my hand below it, just to make sure.

  And there, in the roof of his helmet, Bob had left the key.

  Literally, the key.

  I felt it there with complete disbelief.

  Fixed to the hard outer casing by two crossed strips of sellotape, unseen until one deliberately pushed the central piece of padding sideways out of position, was a key.

  I unstuck it from the helmet and pulled off the sticky tape. It was a yale type key, but with a small black tag bonded on instead of the usual round metal thumb plate. A small white number, C14, was stamped on the black plastic on the side which had been against the helmet’s wall. The key itself, at first, second, third glance, had been unnoticeable: and Bob certainly could have ridden his races with it firmly and invisibly in place.

  C14.

  It looked like a locker key. Very like those from the left-luggage lockers of any big airport or railway station in the world. Nothing at all to show to which city, country or continent it belonged.

  I thought.

  If the key had been in the package, one would have expected it to be of extreme importance. Vital enough to be worth dragging the pond for, when it was found to be missing. Or searching for at once in the house in England.

  The men searching the house in England had specifically mentioned papers. They had been looking for papers, not a key.

  So suppose Bob had left the papers somewhere in a locker, and this was the key to it.

  Much easier. It cut out New York, Nairobi and outer Mongolia and narrowed the search to most of southern England or anywhere in Oslo.

  The harmless looking little key promised to be everything I needed. I closed my hand over it, with an illogical instinct to hide it, to keep it safe.

  Bob too must have felt like that. The care with which he’d hidden it revealed the strength of his instinct. And he hadn’t known at the time how true that instinct had been.

  Smiling at myself I nevertheless followed his example.

  There was in my suitcase a fresh unopened dressing for the cut on my chest, thoughtfully provided by Charles Stirling in case I needed it: but since the intermittent throbbing had faded to an intermittent itch, I’d left his original handiwork undisturbed.

  Laying the key on the bedside table I pulled off the old dressing to take a look: and dark, dry and healthy, the slit was healing fast.

  I fetched the new plaster and stuck it on, with Bob Sherman’s precious key snug inside it against my skin.

  13

  Erik came to breakfast looking almost as depressed as the freezing wet day outside. He brought two plates heaped like the Matterhorn over from the buffet, sat opposite me, and toyed with the foothills.

  ‘Did you sleep well?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nor did I. Kept hearing the bang of that bloody bomb.’ He looked at the smoked fish I had acquired before his arrival. ‘Aren’t you eating?’

  ‘Not madly hungry.’

  He raised a grin. ‘The condemned man syndrome?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He sighed, adjusted his mind to the task and began proving his stomach was as big as his eyes. When both plates were empty of all but a trace of oil and six
dorsal fins he patted his mouth with a napkin and resurfaced to the dangerous Sunday.

  ‘Are you seriously going to the races?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t know yet.’

  ‘I didn’t bring Odin today. Left him with a neighbour.’ He drank his coffee. ‘I hired a bigger Volvo. A fast one. Here’s the bill.’ He dug in his pocket and produced a receipt.

  I took out my wallet and paid him. He didn’t say leave it until later.

  A party of English racing people came into the restaurant in ones and twos and sat together at a table near the window. I knew most of them: a top amateur jump rider, a pro from the Flat, an assistant trainer, an owner and his wife. When they’d chosen their food and begun to eat I drifted over to them and pulled up a chair.

  ‘Hi,’ they said. ‘How’s things?’

  Things, meaning mostly their chances that afternoon, were relaxedly discussed, and after a while I asked the question I had joined them for.

  ‘Remember the weekend Bob Sherman disappeared? Did any of you happen to come over with him on the same night? ‘

  The top amateur rider had. Glory be.

  ‘Did you sit next to each other?’

  He explained delicately that he had travelled first class, Bob tourist.

  ‘But,’ he said, ‘I gave him a lift into Oslo in my taxi.’

  ‘Where did you drop him?’

  ‘Oh… here. I was staying here, but he was going on to that trainer feller he rode for. He thanked me for the ride… and I think he said he would catch the Lijordet tram if there was one. Anyway, I remember him standing on the pavement with his bag and saddle and stuff. But does it matter? After all, he rode next day, all right.’

  ‘Was the flight on time?’

  ‘Don’t remember that it wasn’t.’

  I asked a few more questions, but the amateur remembered nothing else of much significance.

  ‘Thanks anyway,’ I said.

  ‘Hope you get whoever did it,’ he said. He smiled. ‘I expect you will.’

  If he didn’t get me, I thought with a twinge, and went back to collect Erik.

  ‘Where first?’

  ‘All the railway stations.’

  ‘All the what?’

  ‘The nearest railway station,’ I amended.

  ‘Whatever for?’