Slay Ride

by Dick Francis

  Nothing.

  ‘This is speculation,’ he said.

  Knut sat still and quiet, keeping his promise that he would make no comment whatever I said. The young policeman’s pencil had made scarcely a mark on the page.

  ‘Arne stole the money himself,’ I said. ‘To provide a reason for Bob Sherman’s disappearance.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘The impression of most people in the officials’ room was that the money had been put in the safe. And so it had. Arne himself had put it there, as he usually does. He has keys to every gate, every building, every door on the place. He didn’t take the money during the five minutes that the room happened to be empty. He had all night to do it in.’

  ‘I don’t believe it. Arne Kristiansen is a respected servant of the racecourse.’

  He sat there listening to me with long-suffering courtesy as if I were a rather boring guest he was stuck with.

  ‘Bob Sherman brought a packet of papers with him from England,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, you’ve already asked about that. I told you I couldn’t help you.’

  ‘Unfortunately for him, he was curious. He opened the package and saw what he had no business to see. He must have done this on the flight over, as he left some of the contents in a locker at Fornebu.’

  Per Bjørn slowly turned his good-looking head until he was facing Knut, not me, and he spoke to him in Norwegian. Knut made gestures of regret and helplessness, and said nothing at all.

  ‘Bob Sherman was too fond of schemes for getting rich quickly,’ I said. ‘He was being paid for bringing the envelope, but it seemed to him that he could push the price up a bit. Very much his mistake, of course. He got bonked on the head for his pains. And no one discovered until long after he was dead and in the pond that when he’d opened the envelope he’d taken something out.’

  Per Bjørn sat impassively, waiting for the annoying gnat to stop buzzing around him.

  I buzzed a bit more.

  ‘Because what he took out was in a way a duplication of what he left in.’

  That one hit home. His eye muscles jumped. He knew that I’d noticed. He smiled.

  I said ‘Bob Sherman took the precaution of hiding the key to the Fornebu locker in his racing helmet. By the time he was brought out of the pond it had been discovered that he had removed a paper from the envelope, but a search of his waterlogged clothes and overnight bag failed to produce any sign of it. So did a search of his house in England. By the time I realised what must be going on, and came to wonder if Bob had somehow hidden the missing object in his racing saddle or helmet, others had had the same idea. His saddle, which had stayed on its peg in the changing room for a month after he disappeared, was suddenly nowhere to be found.’

  He sat. Quiet.

  ‘However, the helmet with the saddle was no longer Bob’s but Paddy O’Flaherty’s. I told Arne about the exchange. I told him I’d found the key.’

  Per Bjørn crossed one leg over the other and took out his cigarettes. He offered them round, then when no one accepted, returned his case to his pocket and lit his own with a practised flick on a gas lighter. The hand which held the lighter was rock steady.

  ‘I didn’t tell him that we had already opened the locker and seen what it contained,’ I said. ‘We wanted to find out who else besides Arne was looking for the missing paper, so we gave that person an opportunity of finding it.’

  ‘Ingenious,’ he said. ‘What a pity you had made the fundamental mistake of believing Arne Kristiansen to be connected with Bob Sherman’s death. If he had been guilty of all you say, of course it would have been an excellent trap. As it is, of course…’

  He delicately shrugged. Knut looked worried.

  ‘There was the problem of the two men who searched Bob Sherman’s house,’ I said. ‘If we didn’t decoy them away they would be available to fetch the key and open the locker. So we provided an urgent reason for them to leave Oslo. We invented, in fact, a possible eye-witness to the killing of Bob Sherman. I told only Arne Kristiansen that I was going to Lillehammer to meet this man, and I asked Arne to come with me. On the train I told him about the key and said that as soon as I got back I was going to give it to the police. I told him that the police were expecting me to report to them at once on my return, to tell them what the man in Lillehammer had said. This meant to Arne that if I didn’t return the hunt would be on immediately and there might be no later opportunity to get into my room for the key. It had to be done quickly. A risk had to be taken.’

  I paused.

  ‘You took it,’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You believed no one knew of the existence of the key except Arne and myself. You were wrong. You believed there was a possible eye-witness to Bob’s murder and you sent your two assassins to deal with him. You expected them also to kill me as well. They aren’t very successful at that. You should sack them.’

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ he said.

  I said, ‘I asked the reception desk at the Grand not to worry if anyone asked for my room number or my door key.’ And extremely odd they’d thought it, after all the hide and seek of the previous days. ‘We made it as easy as we could.’

  He said nothing.

  Kurt had sprinkled the room with anthracene dust, which clung invisibly to any clothes or flesh which touched it and showed up with fluorescence under a strong ultra violet light. Anyone denying he’d been in my room would have been proved to be lying. But Per Bjørn had out-thought that one and hadn’t denied it. He must have done a great deal of fast figuring during his non-speaking ride from Fornebu to the police station. He couldn’t have known about the anthracene, but he must have guessed that a trap so complicated in some respects wasn’t likely to be naïve in others.

  I said, ‘The paper you were looking for is a chart of a core taken from area twenty-five/six of the North Sea.’

  He absorbed that shock as if he were made throughout of expanded polystyrene.

  I gave him some more. ‘It was stolen from the Wessex-Wells Research Laboratory in Dorset, England, and the information it contains was the property of the Interpetro Oil Company. It is a chart showing exceptionally rich oil-bearing rock of high porosity and good permeability at a depth of thirteen thousand feet.’

  It seemed to me that he had almost stopped breathing. He sat totally without movement, smoke from the cigarette between his fingers rising in a column as straight as honesty.

  I said, ‘The Interpetro Oil Company isn’t part of the consortium to which your own company belongs, but it is or was mainly Norwegian owned, and the well in question is in the Norwegian area of the North Sea. Immediately after Bob Sherman brought his package to Norway, the Interpetro shares started an upward movement on the world stock markets. Although a great deal of secrecy surrounds the buying, I’m told that the most active purchasers were in the Middle East. You would know far better than I do whether it is to Norway’s advantage to have one of her most promising oil fields largely bought up by oil-producing rivals.’

  Not a flicker.

  I said, ‘Norway has never really forgiven the citizens who collaborated with the Nazis. How would they regard one of their most respected businessmen who sold advance news of their best oil field to the Middle East for his own personal gain?’

  He uncrossed his legs and recrossed them the other way. He tapped the ash off his cigarette on to the floor, and inhaled a deep lungful of smoke.

  ‘I wish,’ he said, ‘to telephone to my lawyer. And to my wife.’

  16

  Knut and I went back to his office and sat one each side of his desk.

  ‘Can you prove it?’ he said.

  ‘We can prove he went to the Grand, fetched the key and opened the locker.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  I said gloomily, ‘It’s circumstantial. A good defence lawyer could turn everything inside out.’

  Knut chewed his pencil.

  ‘The scandal will ruin him,’ he said.

&
nbsp; I nodded. ‘I’ll bet he’s got a fortune tucked away somewhere safe, though.’

  ‘But,’ Knut said, ‘he must care more for his reputation ttan for just money, otherwise he would simply have left the country instead of having Bob Sherman killed.’

  ‘Yes.’

  We sat in silence.

  ‘You are tired,’ Knut said.

  ‘Yeah. So are you.’

  He grinned and looked suddenly very like Erik.

  I said, ‘Your brother told me Per Bjørn Sandvik was in the Resistance during the war.’

  ‘Ja. He was.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with his nerve,’ I said. ‘Nothing then, nothing now.’

  ‘And we are not the Gestapo,’ Knut said. ‘He knows we will not torture him. We must seem feeble to him, after what he risked when he was young. He is not going to give in and confess. Not ever.’

  I agreed.

  ‘These two men,’ I said. ‘Yellow eyes and brown eyes. They’re too young to have been in the Resistance themselves. But… is there a chance their fathers were? Arne’s father was. Could you run a check on the group Per Bjørn belonged to, and see if any of them fathered yellow eyes?’

  ‘You ask such impossible things.’

  ‘And it’s a very long shot indeed,’ I sighed.

  ‘I’ll start tomorrow,’ he said.

  Some coffee arrived, very milky. I could have done with a treble scotch and a batch of Emma’s scones.

  ‘You know,’ I said after another silence, ‘There’s something else. Some other way… There has to be.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean… It was just luck finding that key. If Paddy hadn’t swapped the helmets we would never have found the paper at Fornebu.’ I drank the coffee. It wasn’t strong enough to deal with anything but thirst. ‘But… they tried to kill me before they knew the chart wasn’t in the pond with Bob Sherman. So there must be something else which they couldn’t afford for me to find.’

  I put down the cup with a grimace.

  ‘But what?’ Knut asked.

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘Something I missed.’ he said with gloom.

  ‘Why would they think I would see it if you didn’t?’

  ‘Because you do,’ he said. ‘And Arne knows it.’

  Arne… My friend Arne.

  ‘Why didn’t he kill you himself, out on the fjord?’ Knut asked. ‘Why didn’t he just bang you on the head and push you overboard?’

  ‘It isn’t that easy to bang someone on the head when you’re sitting at opposite ends of a small dinghy. And besides… leading a beast to the abattoir and slitting its neck are two different things.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Arne was keen for me to die but wouldn’t do it himself.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because he didn’t. Over the last few weeks he’s had more chance than anybody, but he didn’t do it.’

  ‘You couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t.’

  ‘He’s a complex person but his attitudes are all fixed… if he didn’t do it the first time he wouldn’t do it afterwards.’

  A few more minutes dawdled by while I tried to concentrate on what I hadn’t discovered.

  Useless, I thought.

  Yesterday, I thought, I didn’t know who had manipulated Interpetro Oil. Today I did. Did that make any difference?

  ‘Oh my Christ,’ I said, and nearly fell out of my chair.

  ‘What is it?’ Knut said.

  ‘I’m bloody mad.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You remember that bomb…’

  ‘Well, of course I do.’

  ‘It was such a sloppy way to kill someone,’ I said. ‘It might have gone off before we got back to the car… It didn’t kill us, so we thought of it as a failure. But it didn’t Jail. Not a bit. It was a roaring success. It did just what it was meant to.’

  ‘David…’

  ‘Do you remember where I was going that afternoon? I didn’t go, because the bomb stopped me. I’m so damned stupid… it isn’t what I haven’t seen, it’s who.’

  He just stared.

  ‘It’s Mikkel Sandvik.’

  I telephoned to the college of Gol and spoke to the headmaster.

  ‘Oh, but Mikkel isn’t here,’ he said. ‘His father telephoned on Sunday morning to say that Mikkel must go and visit his aunt, who was dying and asking for him.’

  ‘Where does the aunt live?’

  ‘I don’t know. Mr Sandvik talked to Mikkel himself.’

  There was some speaking in the background, and then he said, ‘My wife says Mikkel told her his Aunt Berit was dying. He went to catch the Bergen train. We don’t know where he went after that… Why don’t you ask his father?’

  ‘Good idea,’ I said.

  ‘What now?’ Knut said, when I told him.

  ‘I think… I’ll go and see Mrs Sandvik, and see if she’ll tell me where Mikkel is.’

  ‘All right. And I will do what I must about keeping Mr Sandvik here all night.’ He sighed. ‘A man like that… it doesn’t seem right to put him in a cell.’

  ‘Don’t let him go,’ I said.

  ‘Oh no.’

  Erik had gone home long ago but Knut reckoned I was on police business and sent me to the Sandvik house in a police car. I walked through the arch into the courtyard, turned right, and rang the bell outside the well-lit imposing front door.

  A heavy middle-aged woman opened it. She wore frumpy clothes and no make-up, and had a positive, slightly forbidding manner.

  ‘Ja?’ she said enquiringly.

  I explained who I was and asked to see Mrs Sandvik.

  ‘I am Mrs Sandvik. I spoke to you on the telephone a few days ago.’

  ‘That’s right.’ I swallowed my surprise. I had thought she would already have known about her husband being at the police station, but apparently he hadn’t yet made his two calls. When we had left him, Knut had said he would arrange for a telephone to be taken to the interview room and plugged into the socket there, which I supposed took time. No one was positively rushing to provide facilities for a suspect, not even for Per Bjørn Sandvik.

  It made it easier, however, for me to ask questions.

  ‘Come inside,’ she said. ‘It is cold with the door open.’

  I stepped into the hall. She invited me no further.

  ‘Mikkel?’ she said in surprise. ‘He is at school. I told you.’

  I explained about his Aunt Berit.

  ‘He has no Aunt Berit.’

  Wow.

  ‘Er…’ I said. ‘Does he know anyone at all called Berit?’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Is this important?’

  ‘I cannot go home until I have seen Mikkel. I am sorry.’

  She shrugged. After a longish pause for thought she said, ‘Berit is the name of an old nurse of my husband. I do not know if Mikkel knows any other person called Berit. I expect so.’

  ‘Where does your husband’s old nurse live?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She couldn’t remember the old nurse’s surname, and she wasn’t sure if she was still alive. She said her husband would be able to tell me, when he came home. She opened the door with finality for me to leave, and with a distinct feeling of cowardice, I left. Per Bjørn had smashed up her secure world and he would have to tell her about it himself.

  ‘He might be with his father’s old nurse,’ I told Knut. ‘And he might not.’

  He reflected. ‘If he caught the Bergen train, perhaps the Gol ticket office would remember him.’

  ‘Worth a try. But he could be anywhere by now. Anywhere in the world.’

  ‘He’s barely seventeen,’ Knut said.

  ‘That’s old, these days.’

  ‘How did Mrs Sandvik take the news of her husband’s arrest?’

  ‘I didn’t tell her. I thought Per Bjørn should do that.’

  ‘But he has!’

  ‘She didn’t know,’ I said blan
kly.

  ‘But,’ Knut said, ‘I am sure he made his two calls almost half an hour ago.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I said.

  He steamed out of the office at twenty knots and yelled at several unfortunate subordinates. When he returned he was carrying a piece of paper and looking grim, worried and apologetic all at once.

  ‘They find it difficult not to obey a man with such prestige,’ he said. ‘He told them to wait outside the door while he spoke to his wife and his lawyer, as both calls were of a private nature. They did what he said.’ He looked at the paper in his hand. ‘At least they had the sense to dial the numbers for him, and to write them down. They are both Oslo numbers.’

  He handed the paper over for me to see. One of the numbers meant nothing. The other meant too much.

  ‘He talked to Arne,’ I said.

  I pressed the bell outside Arne’s flat and after a long interval Kari opened the door.

  ‘David.’ She seemed neither surprised nor pleased to see me. She seemed drained.

  ‘Come in,’ she said.

  The flat seemed somehow colder, less colourful, much quieter than before.

  ‘Where’s Arne?’ I said.

  ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Tell me everything he did since he came home.’

  She gave me an empty stare, then turned away and walked through to the sitting-room. I followed her. She sat on the cream coloured sofa and shivered. The stove no longer glowed with warmth and welcome and the stereo record player was switched off.

  ‘He came home upset. Well… he’s been upset ever since this Bob Sherman thing started. But today he was very worried and puzzled and disturbed. He played two long records and marched about… he couldn’t keep still.’

  Her voice had the calmness of shock. The reality of whatever had happened had not yet tipped her into anger or fear or despair: but tomorrow, I thought, she might suffer all three.