Slay Ride Page 13

  The journey was a matter of staring death in the face, but we got there. The main gates of the racecourse stood open with various trade vans standing inside on the tarmac, so we simply drove in and stopped near the weighing room. Erik and Odin unfolded themselves and stretched their legs while I went on my short and abortive mission.

  There were cleaners, a man and two women, in the weighing room building, and none of them spoke English. I went outside and cajoled Erik, the easiest task on earth, to do my talking.

  He asked, listened, and passed on the bad news.

  ‘They say Bob Sherman’s saddle was here for a long time. In the changing room, on the peg nearest the corner.’

  I had just looked all round the changing room. No saddles on any pegs and no trace of Bob Sherman’s.

  ‘They say it went at about the time the body was found in the pond. They don’t know who took it.’

  ‘That’s that, then.’

  We left the weighing room building and strolled the few yards to the racecourse rails. The morning was icy, the wind fresh, the trees sighing. Winter on the doorstep, snow on the way.

  Down the sand track Gunnar Holth’s string was starting a canter, and as we watched they came up fast towards us and swept past along to the winning post and round the top of the course where the pond lay. Paddy O’Flaherty in his brilliant woollen cap rode in front, giving a lead and setting the pace. With racing the next day, it was little more than a pipe-opener, and the string presently slowed to walk home.

  ‘Next stop,’ I said, ‘is Gunnar Holth’s stable.’

  We drew up in the yard as the horses came back from the track steaming like kettles under their rugs. Gunnar Holth himself jumped down from Sandvik’s Whitefire, patted him vigorously, and waited for me to open the game.

  ‘Morning,’ I said.

  ‘Morning.’

  ‘Can we talk?’

  He nodded resignedly, led Whitefire off into the barn, returned, jerked his head towards his bungalow and opened his door. Erik this time chose to stay in the car for which Gunnar Holth, having spotted Odin, looked thankful.

  ‘Coffee?’

  Same orange pot on the stove. Same coffee, I dared say.

  ‘I am looking for Bob Sherman’s saddle,’ I said.

  ‘His saddle? Didn’t he leave it behind? I heard he did…’

  ‘I wondered if you knew who had it. I want to find it… It belongs to his wife now.’

  ‘And saddles are worth money,’ he said, nodding. ‘I haven’t seen it. I don’t know who has it.’

  I asked him obliquely twice more in different ways but in the end was satisfied that he knew nothing helpful.

  ‘I’ll ask Paddy,’ I said. But Paddy too had few ideas.

  ‘It was there, so it was, until they pulled the poor devil out of the water. Sure I saw it there myself on Grand National day. Then the next meeting, on the Thursday, it was gone.’

  ‘Are you sure of that?’

  ‘As sure as I’m standing here.’

  I said mildly, ‘Why? Why are you so sure?’

  His eyes flickered. ‘Well… as to that, now…’

  ‘Paddy,’ I said. ‘Come clean.’

  ‘Uh…’

  ‘Did you take it?’

  ‘No,’ he said positively. ‘That I did not.’ The idea apparently outraged him.

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Well now then, do you see, he was after being a real mate of mine, Bob was… Well I was sure now, in my own mind, that he would want me to do it…’ He ran down and stopped.

  To do what?’

  ‘Look now, it wasn’t stealing or anything like that.’

  ‘Paddy, what did you do?’

  ‘Well… there was my helmet, see, and there was his helmet, hanging there with his saddle. Well now, my helmet had a strap broken, so it had, and Bob’s was there, good as new, so I just swopped them over, do you see…’

  ‘And that was on Grand National day?’

  ‘That’s right. And the next race day, after Bob was found, his saddle was gone. And my helmet was gone with it, do you see.’

  ‘So Bob’s helmet is… here?’

  ‘It is so. In my box, now, under my bunk.’

  ‘Will you lend it to me for a while?’

  ‘Lend it?’ He was surprised. ‘I thought you’d be taking it away altogether, now, as by rights it belongs to his missus.’

  ‘I expect she’d be glad for you to keep it.’

  ‘It’s a good helmet, so it is.’

  He went and fetched it and handed it over, an ordinary regulation jockey helmet with a chin strap. I thanked him, told him I’d let him have it back, waved goodbye to Gunnar Holth, and set off on the perilous passage back to central Oslo.

  In between bounces I pulled out the padded lining of the helmet and looked underneath. No photographs, papers or other missing objects. Nothing but black regulation padding. I put it back into place.

  ‘No good?’ Erik said sympathetically, peering round Odin.

  ‘All stones have to be turned.’

  ‘Which stone next, then?’

  ‘Lars Baltzersen.’

  The route to his bank lay past the front door of the Grand, so I stopped off there and left Bob Sherman’s helmet with the hall porter, who was already sheltering my newly re-packed suitcase. He told me he would take good care of anything I left with him. I left three 10-kroner notes with him, and with a smile he took good care of those.

  Lars had almost given up.

  ‘Thought you’d changed your mind,’ he said, showing me into his office.

  ‘Had to make a detour,’ I said, apologising.

  ‘Well, now that you are here…’ He produced a bottle of red wine and two small glasses from a discreet cupboard, and poured for us both.

  His room, like Sandvik’s and Torp’s, was standard Scandinavian, modern vintage. Commerce, I supposed, must be seen to be up to date, but as a source of personal information these interiors were a dead loss.

  No maps on his walls. Pictures of houses, factories, office blocks, distant ports. When I asked him, he told me that his banking firm was chiefly concerned with financing of industrial projects.

  ‘Merchant banking,’ he said. ‘Also we run a building scheme very like an English building society. Except that here, of course, we lend at a much lower interest rate, so that mortgages are cheaper.’

  ‘Don’t the investors complain?’

  ‘They get almost the same return as British investors. It is just that Norwegian societies don’t have to pay big taxes. It is the tax which puts up the British mortgage rate.’

  He told me that there were many small private banks in Norway running building schemes, but that his own was one of the largest.

  ‘There is a terrible shortage of building land round Oslo,’ he said. ‘Young couples find it very difficult to find a house. Yet far out in the country there are whole farms standing empty and derelict. The old people have died or are too weak to work the fields, and the young people have left the hard life and gone to the towns.’

  ‘Same everywhere,’ I said.

  He liked wooden houses best, he said. ‘They breathe.’

  ‘How about fire?’ I asked.

  ‘It always used to be a fearful risk. Cities were burnt sometimes. But now our fire services are so fast, so expert, that I am told if you want to burn your house for the insurance, you have to hose it down with petrol. Otherwise the fire will be put out at the first puff of smoke.’

  We drank the wine and Lars smoked a cigarette. I asked him about his years in London and about his motor racing in Sweden, but he seemed to have no interest left in them.

  ‘The past is over,’ he said. ‘It is banking and Øvrevoll which I think about now.’

  He asked me if I yet knew who killed Bob Sherman. Such faith in the way he put it.

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘What’s my limit on expenses?’

  I couldn’t pin him to an amount. It seemed that if I succeeded there
was no limit. If I failed, I had already overspent.

  ‘Have you any ideas?’ he asked.

  ‘Ideas aren’t enough.’

  ‘You need proof as well, I suppose.’

  ‘Mm… have to make like a poacher.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Set traps,’ I said. ‘And keep my feet out of other poachers’ snares.’

  I stood up to go. He too said my visit had been a waste of time because he had told me nothing useful.

  ‘You never know,’ I said.

  Erik and I had lunch in a café not far from his brother’s headquarters because I wanted to call in afterwards to see him. He would be off duty at two o’clock, he said on the telephone; if that would do, he could see me before he went home.

  Erik spent most of lunch explaining with chapter and verse why all revolutions ended in gloom because all revolutionaries were incapable of humour.

  ‘If the activists knew how to be funny,’ he said, ‘the workers would have ruled the world long ago.’

  ‘Jokes should be taught in school,’ I suggested.

  He looked at me suspiciously. ‘Are you taking the micky?’

  ‘I thought that was the point.’

  ‘Oh God, yes.’ He laughed. ‘So it is. What makes you spend your life detecting?’

  ‘Curiosity.’

  ‘Killed the cat.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, grinning. ‘Anyway, you’re still alive. How did you train for it? Is there a school for detectives?’

  ‘Don’t think so. I went to university. Tried industry, didn’t like it. Didn’t want to teach. Liked going racing… so got a job going racing.’

  ‘That’s as smart a canter over the course as I’ve ever heard, and as a gossip columnist I’ve heard a lot. What did you read at which university?’

  ‘Psychology at Cambridge.’

  ‘Ah-hah,’ he said. ‘Ah absolutely Hah.’

  He came with me up to Knut’s office, leaving Odin in charge of the car. Knut was tired after an apparently frustrating spell of duty, yawning and rubbing his eyes when we walked in.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘But I have been awake since two o’clock this morning.’ He shook his head to clear it. ‘Never mind. How can I help you?’

  ‘Not in detail today. Tell me if your terms of reference would let you catch a rabbit if I enticed one out of a hole.’ I turned to Erik. ‘Explain to him. If I set a trap, can he help me to spring it? Is he allowed to, and would he personally want to?’

  The brothers consulted in their own language, Knut neat, restrained, over-tired, and Erik with undisciplined gestures, bohemian clothes and wild wispy hair. Erik was older, but in him the life force still flowed with generous vigour.

  In the end they both nodded. Knut said, ‘As long as it is not against the regulations, I will help.’

  ‘I’m very grateful.’

  He smiled faintly. ‘You are doing my work.’

  He collected his coat and cap and came down to the street with us. His car it appeared, was along with Erik’s in the side road running down beside a small railed public garden.

  Erik’s car was a centre of attention.

  About ten feet away from it, ranged round in a semicircle, stood about a dozen children and one uncertain looking policeman. His face changed thankfully at the sight of Knut, and he saluted and began to shift his anxiety on to someone else.

  Erik translated for me, looking puzzled.

  ‘One of the children says a man told her not on any account to go near my car. He told her to run home as fast as she could.’

  I looked at the car. Odin was not facing out of the front window as usual, but out of the back and he was looking down, not interestedly at the crowd. Something in the great dog’s world seemed wrong to him. He was standing rigidly. Much too tense. And the boot was no longer tied up with string.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ I said. ‘Get those children out of here. Make them run.’

  They simply stared at me and didn’t move. But they hadn’t been near the Old Bailey in London on 8th March 1973.

  ‘It could be a bomb,’ I said.

  12

  The children recognised the word but of course they didn’t believe it. The people in London hadn’t believed it until the flying glass ripped their faces.

  ‘Tell them to run,’ I said to Knut.

  He decided to take it seriously, even if it were a false alarm. He said something unequivocal to the policeman, and he grabbed hold of Erik’s arm.

  He knew his brother. He must have loved him more than most. He grabbed him tight just as Erik took his first step towards the car, saying ‘Odin,’ half under his breath.

  They more or less fought. Knut wouldn’t let go and Erik grew frantic. Knut put a lock on Erik’s arm which would have arrested a twenty stone boxer with a skinful, and Erik’s face crumpled into despair. The two of them, step by contested step, retreated from the car.

  The policeman had chased the children away to a safe distance and was yelling to approaching pedestrians to get behind cover. No one paid any attention to me, so I nipped smartly along the pavement, put my hand on the handle, wrenched the door open, and sprinted.

  Even then the wretched dog didn’t come out at once. It took a screeching whistle from Erik to get results, and Odin came bounding after me down the pavement as if it were playtime.

  The bomb went off just as he drew level, twenty feet from the car. The blast slammed us both down in a heap, hitting like a fierce blow in the back, knocking all breath out, leaving one limp, weak, and shaken.

  Not a big bomb by Irish standards. But this one had presumably not been meant to destroy the neighbourhood. Just the occupants of a car. Two men and a dog.

  Knut helped me to my feet and Erik took hold of Odin’s collar, kneeling down and patting him solicitously. Odin slobbered all over him, as good as new.

  ‘That was stupid,’ Knut said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You deserve to be.’

  ‘It might not have gone off for hours.’

  ‘It might have gone off while you were beside it.’

  Erik’s car was gutted. Windows blown out, interior torn to shreds, boot burst wide open. I picked splinters of glass out of the hair on the back of my head and asked him if it was insured.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said vaguely. He rubbed his arm where Knut had locked it. ‘Knut wanted me to wait for an expert to come to see if it was a bomb, and if it was, to dismantle it.’

  ‘Knut was quite right.’

  ‘He didn’t stop you.’

  ‘I’m not his brother. He had his hands full with you, and the bomb probably had my name on it in the first place.’

  ‘What a bloody awful way to die.’ He stood up and grinned suddenly, his whole face lighting up. ‘Thanks anyway,’ he said. Which was pretty generous, considering the state of his Volvo.

  Once the fireworks were over the children came back, staring at the wreck with wide eyes. I asked Knut to find the little girl who’d been told to run home, and he said he’d already sent his policeman to bring her.

  Apart from the car, there was little damage. The windows had been broken in a severe looking building on the far side of the road, but neither the railings nor the shivering bushes in the little public garden nearest the Volvo seemed to have suffered. Cars parked several yards away fore and aft were slightly scratched with glass splinters but otherwise undamaged. If the bomb had gone off while we had been driving along a busy street, there would have been a lot more mess.

  The little girl was blonde, solemn, hooded and zipped into a red anorak, and accompanied now by a scolding older child of about thirteen who had fallen down on the job of looking after her and was busy justifying herself. Knut, as with the boy on the racecourse, won the smaller girl’s confidence by squatting down to her level and chatting along quietly.

  I leant against the railings
and felt cold, and watched Erik smoothing Odin’s sand-coloured skin over and over, seeing him dissipate an overwhelming build-up of tension and release in small self-controlled gestures. Odin himself seemed to be enjoying it.

  Knut stood up, holding the little girl’s hand.

  ‘Her name is Liv. She is four. She lives about half a mile away and she was playing in the park with her big sister. She came out of the gate down there and walked up the road here. Her sister had told her not to, but Liv says she doesn’t do what her sister says.’

  ‘The sister’s too damn bossy,’ Erik said unexpectedly. ‘Little Fascist.’

  ‘Liv says there was a man cutting some string at the back of the car and the big dog looking at him out of the window. She stopped to watch. She was behind the man. He didn’t see her or hear her. She says he took something out of his coat and put it inside the boot, but she didn’t see what shape it was. She says the man tried to shut the back of the car, but it wouldn’t shut. Then he tried to tie the string where it had been before, but it was too short because he had cut it. He put the string in his pocket, and that was when he saw Liv. He told her to go away, but she seems to be a child who does the opposite of what she’s told. She says she went up to the car and looked through the side window at the dog, but the dog went on looking out of the back. Then the man shook her and told her to run home at once and not to play near the car. Then he went away.’

  Knut looked at the small crowd of children beginning to cluster again round Liv.

  ‘She is one of those children who draws others to her. Like now. They came out of the park to join her, and she told them about the man cutting the string and trying to tie the boot shut again. It was that which interested her most, it seemed. Then my policeman came along, on his way to start his afternoon duty, and he asked the children why they were standing there.’

  ‘Then we came?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Has Liv said what the man looked like?’

  ‘Big, she said. But all men are big to little girls.’

  ‘Could she see his hair?’