Slay Ride Read online

  The movement galvanised the figure inside into action, and it was only something half seen, half instinctive, which had me leaping sideways away from the entrance with adrenalin scorching down to my toes. Blast from a shotgun roared through the doorway, and I pressed myself against the heavy log wall alongside and hoped to God it was impervious to pellets.

  A voice shouted something hysterically from inside.

  Not Arne’s voice. Young. Stretched to breaking.

  ‘Mikkel,’ I said. ‘I will not harm you. I am David Cleveland.’

  Silence.

  ‘Mikkel…’

  ‘If you come in, I will shoot you.’ His voice was naturally high pitched like his father’s, and the tension in it had strung it up another octave.

  ‘I only want to talk to you.’

  ‘No. No. No.’

  ‘Mikkel… You can’t stay here for ever.’

  ‘If you come in, I’ll shoot.’

  ‘All right… I’ll talk from here.’ I shivered with cold and wholeheartedly cursed him.

  ‘I will not talk to you. Go away. Go away.’ I didn’t answer. Five minutes passed with no sound except the blustering wind. Then his voice from inside, tight and frightened. ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘We have to talk sometime. Might as well be now.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where is Arne Kristiansen?’ I asked.

  His reply was a high keening wail which raised goose-bumps up my spine. What followed it was a thoroughly normal sob.

  I crouched down low and risked a quick look through the door. The gun lay in one hand on the floor and with the other he was trying to wipe away tears. He looked up and saw me, and again immediately began to aim.

  I retreated smartly and stood up outside against the wall, as before.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me?’ I said.

  A long pause of several minutes.

  ‘You can come in.’

  I took another quick look. He was sitting straight legged on the floor with the gun pointing at the door.

  ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘I won’t shoot.’

  ‘Put the gun on the floor and slide it away.’

  ‘No.’

  More time passed.

  ‘The only way I’ll talk,’ he said, ‘is if you come in. But I will keep the gun.’

  I swallowed. ‘All right.’

  I stepped into the doorway. Looked down the double barrels. He sat with his back against the wall, holding the gun steady. A box of cartridges lay open beside him, with one or two scattered around.

  ‘Shut the door,’ he said. ‘Sit down opposite me, against the wall. On the floor.’

  I did as he said.

  He was slight and not full grown. Brown hair, dark frightened eyes. Cheeks still round from childhood; the jaw line of an adult. Half boy, half man, with tear stains on his face and his finger on the trigger.

  Everything movable in the bare little cabin had been stacked in a neat pile to one side. A heavy table and two solid chairs were the total to be left. No curtains at the single small window. No rugs on the bare wood floor. Two collapsible camp beds, folded and strapped together for transport, leaned against a wall. A pair of skis stood beside them.

  No logs by the cold stove, and no visible food.

  ‘It’ll be dark soon,’ I said. ‘Within an hour.’

  ‘I don’t care.’ He stared at me with burning eyes and unnerving intensity.

  ‘We should go down to Berit’s house while we can still see the way.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’ll freeze up here.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  I believed him. Anyone as distracted as he was tended to blot even extreme discomforts out of his mind: and although he had allowed me into the hut he was far from coming down off the high wire. Little tremors of tension ran in his body and twitched his feet. Occasionally the gun shook in his hands. I tried not to think gloomy thoughts.

  ‘We must go,’ I said.

  ‘Sit still,’ he said fiercely, and the right forefinger curled convulsively. I looked at it. And I sat.

  Daylight slowly faded and the cold crept in inexorably. The wind outside whined like a spoilt child, never giving up. I thought I might as well face it: the prospect of the night ahead made the fjord water seem in retrospect as cosy as a heated pool. I put my padded mitts inside my padded pockets and tried to kid myself that my fingers were warm. And it was a minor disaster that the jacket wasn’t really long enough for sitting on.

  ‘Mikkel,’ I said. ‘Just tell me. You’ll explode if you don’t talk to someone. And I’m here. So just… tell me. Whatever you like.’

  He stared fixedly through the gathering dusk. I waited a long time.

  ‘I killed him,’ he said.

  Oh God.

  A long pause. Then on a rising note he said it again, ‘I killed him.’

  ‘Who?’ I said.

  Silence.

  ‘How?’ I said.

  The question surprised him. He took his gaze for one moment off my face and glanced down at the gun.

  ‘I… shot…’

  With an effort I said, ‘Did you shoot… Arne?’

  ‘Arne…’ The hysteria rose again. ‘No. No. No. Not Arne. I didn’t kill Arne. I didn’t. I didn’t.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘All right, Mikkel. Let’s wait a bit… until you can tell me. Until you feel it is the right time to tell me.’ I paused. ‘Is that O.K.?’

  After a while he said, ‘Ja. O.K.’

  We waited.

  It got darker until it seemed that the only light left was the reflection from the window in his eyes. I could see them long after the rest of him dissolved into one amorphous shadow, two live agonised signals of a mind desperately afraid of the help it desperately needed.

  It must have occurred to him as to me that after total darkness I would be able to jump his gun, because he stirred restlessly on the floor and muttered something in Norwegian, and finally in a much more normal voice said ‘There is a lamp in a box. On top of the things.’

  ‘Shall I find it and light it?’

  ‘Ja.’

  I stood up stiffly, glad of the chance to move, but sensing him lift the gun to keep me where it mattered.

  ‘I won’t try to take the gun away,’ I said.

  No answer.

  The heap of gear was to my right, near the window. I moved carefully, but with many small noises so that he should know where I was and not be alarmed, and felt around for the box on top. Nothing wrong with his memory: the box was there, and the lamp in it, and also a box of matches.

  ‘I’ve found the lamp,’ I said. ‘Shall I strike a match?’

  A pause.

  ‘Ja.’

  It proved to be a small gas lamp. I lit it and put it on the table from where it cast a weak white light into every corner. He blinked twice as his irises adjusted, but his concentration never wavered.

  ‘Is there any food?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Where you were.’

  I sat. The gun barrels followed. In the new light I could fee down them a lot too well.

  Time passed. I lit the lamp at four thirty in the afternoon and it was eight before he began to talk.

  By then, if I was anything to go by, he had lost all feeling from the waist down. He wore no gloves and his hands had turned blue-white, but he still held the gun ready, with his finger inside the trigger guard. His eyes still watched. His face, his whole body, were still stiff with near unbearable tension.

  He said suddenly, ‘Arne Kristiansen told me that my father was arrested. He told me he was arrested because of you.’

  His voice came out high and his breath condensed into a frosty plume.

  Once started, he found it easier.

  ‘He said… my father wanted us to go to Bergen… and on a boat to Stavanger… and fly…
’ He stopped.

  ‘And you didn’t go,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you go?’

  The gun shook.

  ‘They came in…’ he said.

  I waited.

  He said, ‘I was talking to him. Outside. About going away.’ A pause. ‘They came over the hill. On skis, with goggles.’ Another pause. ‘One of them told Arne to step away from me.’ After a longer pause and with an even sharper burst of remembered terror he said, ‘He had a knife.’

  ‘Oh Mikkel,’ I said.

  He talked faster, tumbling it out.

  ‘Arne said “You can’t. You can’t. He wouldn’t send you to kill his own son. Not Mikkel.” He pushed me behind him. He said “You’re crazy. I talked to his father myself. He told me to come here to take Mikkel away.”’

  He stared across at me with stretched eyes, reliving it.

  ‘They said… my father had changed his mind about Arne going. They said they were to take me themselves on a ship to Denmark and wait until my father sent money and instructions. Arne said it was not true. They said… it was true… and they said… Arne was going no further than right here… He didn’t believe it… he said not even my father would do that. He watched only the one with the knife and the other one swung a ski stick and hit him on the head… He fell down in the snow… I tried to stop them… they just pushed me off… and they put him on the sleigh… they strapped him on… and pulled him up the path.’

  The panic he had felt then came crowding back into his face. He said painfully, ‘I remembered the gun in the cabin… I went inside and loaded it… and put on my skis and went after them… to stop them… but when I found them they were coming back… without the sleigh… and I thought… I thought… they were going to… they were going to…’

  He took a deep shuddering breath. ‘I fired the gun. The one with the knife… he fell down…’

  ‘I fired again,’ he said. ‘But the other one was still on his skis… So I came back to the cabin because I thought he would come after me… I came back to reload the gun. But he didn’t come… He didn’t come…

  ‘You came,’ he said. ‘I thought it was him.’

  He stopped.

  ‘Did you know the two men? ‘I asked. ‘Had you ever seen them before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How long was it before I came?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know. A long time.’

  ‘Hours?’

  ‘I think so.’

  I hadn’t seen any of them on my way up.

  ‘Killing is wrong,’ he said jerkily.

  ‘It depends.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘To defend your life, or someone else’s life, it would be all right,’ I said.

  ‘I… I believe… I know it is wrong. And yet I… when I was so afraid…’ His high voice cracked. ‘I have done it. I despise killing and I’ve done it. And I would have killed you too. I know I would. If you hadn’t jumped.’

  ‘Never mind,’ I said: but the horrors were still there in his eyes. Making it deliberately an emotion-reducing question I asked, ‘Have you known Arne Kristiansen long? ‘

  ‘What…?’ His own voice came down a bit. ‘About three years, I suppose.’

  ‘And how well do you know him?’

  ‘Not very well. On the racecourse. That’s all.’

  ‘Has your father known him long?’

  ‘I don’t think so… The same as me. At the races.’

  ‘Are they close friends?’

  He said with sudden extreme bitterness, ‘My father has no close friends.’

  ‘Will you put the gun down now?’ I said.

  He looked at it.

  ‘All right.’

  He put it beside him on the floor. A relief not to be looking down those two round holes.

  The lamp chose that moment to give notice it was running out of gas. Mikkel switched his gaze from me to the table, but the message of fading light didn’t seem to pierce through the inner turmoil.

  ‘The lamp is going out,’ I said. ‘Is there a spare gas cylinder?’

  He slowly shook his head.

  ‘Mikkel,’ I said. ‘It is freezing and it will soon be dark. If we are to survive the night we must keep warm.’

  No response.

  ‘Are you listening?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You are going to have to face life as it is.’

  ‘I… can’t…’

  ‘Are there any blankets?’

  ‘There is one.’

  I began to try to stand up and he reached immediately for the gun.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘I won’t hurt you. And you won’t shoot me. So let’s just both relax, huh?’

  He said uncertainly. ‘You had my father arrested.’

  ‘Do you know why? ‘

  ‘Not… not really.’

  I told him about the oil transaction, playing down the disloyalty, to put it no higher, that Per Bjørn had shown to his country, but there was, it seemed, nothing basically wrong with Mikkel’s brains. He was silent for some time after I’d finished and the muscles slowly relaxed limb by limb.

  ‘Once he had been found out,’ he said, ‘he would lose his job. He would lose the respect of everyone. He wouldn’t be able to live like that… not my father.’

  His voice at last was sane and controlled; and almost too late. The lamp was going out.

  ‘The blanket,’ he said, ‘is in the beds.’

  He tried to stand up and found his legs were as numb and useless as mine, if not more so. It kicked him straight back to practical sense.

  ‘I’m cold!’

  ‘So am I.’

  He looked across, seeing our predicament squarely for the first time.

  ‘Stand up,’ he said. ‘Walk about.’

  Easier said, but it had to be done.

  ‘Can we light the stove?’ I said. ‘There are four more matches, the cardboard boxes, and the table and chairs, if we can break them up.’

  We had both by then tottered to our feet. The lamp shone with one candle power, sadly.

  ‘There is no axe,’ Mikkel said.

  The lamp went out.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Never mind.’

  We jumped up and down in total darkness. Funny if it hadn’t been urgent. Blood started circulating again, though, to the places where it was needed, and after half an hour or so we were both warm enough to give it a rest.

  ‘I can find the blanket,’ Mikkel said, and did so. ‘Shall we share it?’

  ‘We certainly shall.’

  We both wore warm jackets and he, when he remembered where he’d put them, had a cap and mitts like my own. We laid the folded canvas beds on an insulating foundation of cardboard boxes, and wrapped ourselves from the waist down in one cocoon in the single blanket, sitting close together to share every scrap of warmth. It was too dark to see what he was thinking, but there were faint tremors still, occasionally, through his body.

  ‘I took the rest of the bedding down to Berit’s house yesterday,’ he said. ‘On the sleigh.’

  ‘Pity.’

  The word switched his thoughts. He said abruptly ‘Do you think Arne is dead?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. But I did think so.

  ‘What will happen to me, for killing that man?’

  ‘Nothing. Just tell it as you told me. No one will blame you.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I am as bad as anyone else who kills,’ he said, but this time there was adult acceptance and despair in his voice, not hysteria. I wondered if it were possible for a boy to age ten years in one night, because it would be better for him if he could.

  ‘Tell me about Bob Sherman,’ I said; and felt the jolt that went through him at the name.

  ‘I… can’t…’

  ‘Mikkel… I know that Bob brought the stolen surveys from England to give to your father…’

  ‘No,’ he interrupted.

  �
��What, then?’

  ‘He had to deliver them to Arne. I didn’t know they were for my father when I…’ He stopped dead.

  ‘When you what?’

  ‘I musn’t tell you. I can’t.’

  In the darkness I said calmly, almost sleepily, ‘Did Bob tell you he had brought a package?’

  He said unwillingly, ‘Yes.’

  I yawned. ‘When?’

  ‘When I met him in Oslo. The night he came.’

  I wondered if he felt in his turn the thud with which that news hit me.

  ‘Where in Oslo?’ I said casually.

  ‘He was outside the Grand with his saddle and his overnight bag. I was walking home from a friend’s house, and I stopped. He said he might go and catch the tram. I asked him if he would like some coffee first, so we walked along to our house. I carried his saddle.’ He paused. ‘I liked Bob. We were friends.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘My father was out. He usually is. Mother was watching television. Bob and I went into the kitchen, and I made the coffee. We ate some cake my mother had made.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘At first about the horses he was riding the next day… Then he said he had brought a package from England, and he’d opened it, and it didn’t contain what he’d been told. He said he had to give it to Arne Kristiansen at the races but he was going to ask a bit more money before he landed it over.’

  His body trembled against mine within the blanket.

  ‘He was laughing about it, really. He said they’d told him it was pornography, but it wasn’t, and he didn’t know what it was even though he’d seen it. Then he took the package out of his case and told me to look.’

  He stopped.

  ‘And,’ I said, ‘when you saw what was in the package, you knew what it was?’

  ‘I’d seen papers like that before… I mean… I knew it was an oil survey. Yes.’

  ‘Did you tell Bob what it was?’

  ‘Yes. I did. We talked about it a bit’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘It was late. Too late for the tram. Bob took a taxi out to Gunnar Holth’s stable, and I went to bed.’

  ‘What happened the next day?’

  ‘I promised… I promised I wouldn’t tell anybody. I didn’t tell the police. I mustn’t tell you. Especially not you. I know that.’

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  Time passed. It was almost too cold to think.

  ‘I told my father about Bob Sherman’s package on the way to the races,’ he said. ‘He took me in the car. I only told him for something to say. Because I thought he might be interested. But he didn’t say much. He never does. I never know what he’s thinking.’