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  ‘Some beer?’ suggested Baltzersen.

  Arne said yes and I said no. Despite the glow from a huge stove it was a cold day for hops.

  ‘How far is it to the Swedish border?’ I asked.

  ‘By road, about eighty kilometres,’ Baltzersen said.

  ‘Any formalities there?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not for Scandinavians in their own cars. There are few inspections or customs. But none of the frontier posts remember an Englishman crossing on that evening.’

  ‘I know. Not even as a passenger in a Norwegian car. Would he have been spotted if he’d gone across crouching under a rug on the floor behind the driver’s seat?’

  They pondered. ‘Very probably not,’ Baltzersen said, and Arne agreed.

  ‘Can you think of anyone who might have taken him? Anyone he was close to here, either in business or friendship?’

  ‘I do not know him well enough,’ the Chairman said regretfully, and Arne blinked a little and said Gunnar Holth, or maybe some of the lads who worked for him.

  ‘Holth says he drove him only round to the races,’ I said: but he would have had plenty of time to drive into Sweden and back before Emma Sherman had rung him up.

  ‘Gunnar tells lies whenever it suits him,’ Arne said.

  Lars Baltzersen sighed. ‘I’m afraid that is true.’

  He had grey hair neatly brushed, with a tidy face and unimaginative clothes. I was beginning to get the feel of Norwegian behaviour patterns, and he came into the very large category of sober, slightly serious people who were kind, efficient, and under little stress. Get-up-and-go was conspicuously absent, yet the job would clearly be done. The rat race taken at a walk. Very civilised.

  There were other types, of course.

  ‘The people I hate here,’ Emma Sherman had said, ‘are the drunks.’

  I’d taken her to dinner in the hotel the evening before, and had listened for several hours, in the end, to details of her life with Bob, her anxieties, and her experiences in Norway.

  ‘When I first came,’ she said, ‘I used to have dinner in the dining-room, and all these men used to come and ask if they could share my table. They were quite polite, but very very persistent. They wouldn’t go away. The head waiter used to get rid of them for me. He told me they were drunk. They didn’t really look it. They weren’t rolling or anything.’

  I laughed. ‘Considering the price of alcohol here, you wouldn’t think they could.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Anyway I stopped having dinner. I needed to make my money go as far as possible and I hated eating on my own.’

  Arne said, ‘Where do you want to go first?’

  Arne came into a third group: the kinks. You find them everywhere.

  ‘Weighing room, I should think.’

  They both nodded in agreement. Arne pulled his hood back over his head and we went down into the raw outdoors. The crowd had swelled to what Arne described as ‘very big’, but there was still plenty of room. One of the greatest advantages of life in Norway, I guessed, was the small population. I had not so far in its leisurely capital seen a queue or a crush or anyone fighting to get anywhere first: as there always seemed to be room for all, why bother?

  The officials checking tickets at the gates between different enclosures were all keen young men of about twenty, most of them blond also, all with blue armbands on their anoraks. They knew Arne, of course, but they checked my pass even though I was with him, the serious faces hardly lightening as they nodded me through. Lars Baltzersen had given me a five-by-three-inch card stamped all over with adgang paddock, adgang stallomradet, adgang indre bane and one or two other adgangs, and it looked as if I wouldn’t get far if I lost it.

  The weighing room, black wood walls, white paint, red tiled roof, lay on the far side of the parade ring, where the jockeys were already out for the second race. Everything looked neat, organised and pleasing, and despite an eye trained to spot trouble at five hundred paces in a thick fog, I couldn’t see any. Even in racing, good nature prevailed. Several of the lads leading the horses round wore sweaters in the owner’s colours, matching the jockeys; a good and useful bit of display I’d seen nowhere else. I commented on it to Arne.

  ‘Ja,’ he said. ‘Many of the private stables do that now. It helps the crowd to know their colours.’

  Between the paddock and the U-shaped weighing room buildings, and up into the U itself, there was a grassy area planted thickly with ornamental bushes. Everyone walking between weighing room and paddock had to detour either to one side or the other along comparatively narrow paths: it made a change from the rolling acres of concrete at home but took up a lot of apology time.

  Once inside the weighing room Arne forgot about bugging machines and introduced me rapidly to a stream of people like the secretary, clerk of the course, clerk of the scales, without once looking over his shoulder. I shook hands and chatted a bit, but although they all knew I was looking for Bob Sherman, I couldn’t see anyone feeling twitchy about my presence.

  ‘Come this way, David,’ Arne said, and took me down a side passage with an open door at the end leading out to the racecourse. A step or two before this door, Arne turned smartly right, and we found ourselves in the officials’ room from which the money had been stolen. It was just an ordinary businesslike room, wooden walls, wooden floor, wooden tables acting as desks, wooden chairs. (With all those forests, what else?). There were pleasant red checked curtains, first class central heating, and in one corner, a no-nonsense safe.

  Apart from us, there was no one there.

  ‘That’s all there is,’ Arne said. ‘The money bags were left there on the floor…’ he pointed, ‘and the lists of totals from each collecting point were put on that desk, same as usual. We still have the lists.’

  It had struck me several times that Arne felt no responsibility for the loss of the money, nor did anyone seem in the remotest way to blame him, but by even the most elementary requirements of a security officer, he’d earned rock bottom marks.

  ‘Do you still have the same system,’ I asked, ‘with the bags?’

  Arne gave me a look somewhere between amusement and hurt.

  ‘No. Since that day, the bags are put immediately into the safe.’

  ‘Who has the keys?’

  ‘I have some, and the secretary, and the clerk of the course.’

  ‘And each of you three thought one of the other two had stowed the money away safely?’

  ‘That is right.’

  We left the room and stepped out into the open air. Several jockeys, changed into colours for later races but with warm coats on at the moment, came along the passage and out through the same door, and they, Arne, and I climbed an outside staircase onto a small open stand attached to the side of the weighing room buildings. From there, a furlong or more from the winning post, we watched the second race.

  Arne had begun looking apprehensively around again, though there were barely twenty on the stand. I found I had begun doing it myself: it was catching. It netted, however, the sight of an English jockey who knew me, and as everyone after the finish poured towards the stairs I arranged to fetch up beside him. Arne went on down the steps, but the jockey stopped when I touched his arm, and was easy to keep back.

  ‘Hallo,’ he said in surprise. ‘Fancy seeing you here.’

  ‘Came about Bob Sherman,’ I explained.

  I’d found that if I said straight out what I wanted to know, I got better results. No one wasted time wondering what I suspected them of, and if they weren’t feeling on the defensive they talked more.

  ‘Oh. I see. Found the poor bugger, then?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said.

  ‘Let him go, why don’t you?’

  Rinty Ranger knew Bob Sherman as well as anyone who’d been thrown together in the same small professional group for five years, but they were not especially close friends. I took this remark to be a general statement of sympathy for the fox and asked if he didn’t think stealing the money
had been a bloody silly thing to do.

  ‘Too right,’ he said. ‘I’ll bet he wished he hadn’t done it, five minutes after. But that’s Bob all over, smack into things without thinking.’

  ‘Makes him a good jockey,’ I said, remembering how he flung his heart over fences regardless.

  Rinty grinned, his thin sharp face looking cold above his sheepskin coat. ‘Yeah. Done him no good this time, though.’

  ‘What else has he done that was impulsive?’

  ‘I don’t know… Always full of get-rich-quick schemes like buying land in the Bahamas or backing crazy inventors, and I even heard him on about pyramid selling once, only we told him not to be such a bloody fool. I mean, it’s hard enough to earn the stuff, you don’t actually want to throw it down the drain.’

  ‘Were you surprised when he stole the money?’ I asked.

  ‘Well of course I was, for Chrissakes. And even more by him doing a bunk. I mean, why didn’t he just stash away the loot and carry on with business as usual?’

  ‘Takes nerve,’ I said, but of course that was just what Bob Sherman had. ‘Also the money was in heavy canvas bags which would take a lot of getting into. He wouldn’t have had time time to do that and catch his flight home.’

  Rinty thought a bit but came up with nothing useful.

  ‘Stupid bugger,’ he said. ‘Nice wife, kid coming, good job. You’d think he’d have more sense.’ And I’d got as far as that myself.

  ‘Anyway, he’s done me a favour,’ Rinty said. ‘I’ve got his ride in this here Grand National.’ He opened his sheepskin a fraction to show me the colours underneath. ‘The owner, fellow called Torp, isn’t best pleased with Bob on any account. Says he should’ve won at a canter that last day he was here. Says he threw it away, left it too late, came through too soon, should’ve taken the outside, didn’t put him right at the water, you name it, Bob did it wrong.’

  ‘He got another English jockey, though.’

  ‘Oh sure. D’you know how many home-bred jump jocks there are here? About fifteen, that’s all, and some of those are English or Irish. Lads they are mostly. You don’t get many self-employed chaps, like us. There isn’t enough racing here for that. You get them going to Sweden on Saturdays, they race there on Saturdays. Here Thursdays and Sundays. That’s the lot. Mind you, they don’t keep the jumpers to look at. They all run once a week at least, and as there are only four or five jump races a week – all the rest are Flat – it makes life interesting.’

  ‘Were you and Bob often over here together?’

  ‘This year, three or four trips, I suppose. But I came last year too, which he didn’t.’

  ‘How long is a trip?’

  He looked surprised. ‘Only a day usually. We race in England Saturday afternoon, catch the six-thirty, race here Sunday, catch the late plane back if we can, otherwise the eight-fifteen Monday morning. Sometimes we fly here Sunday morning, but it’s cutting it a bit fine. No margin for hold-ups.’

  ‘Do you get to know people here well, in that time?’

  ‘I suppose it sort of accumulates. Why?’

  ‘Has Bob Sherman made any friendships here, would you say?’

  ‘Good God. Well, no, not that I know of, but then likely as not I wouldn’t know if he did. He knows a lot of trainers and owners, of course. Do you mean girls?’

  ‘Not particularly. Were there any?’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so. He likes his missus.’

  ‘Do you mind thinking fairly hard about it?’

  He looked surprised. ‘If you like.’

  I nodded. He lengthened the focus of his gaze in a most satisfactory manner and really concentrated. I waited without pressure, watching the crowd. Young, it was, by British standards: at least half under thirty, half blonde, all the youth dressed in anoraks of blue, red, orange and yellow in the sort of colourful haphazard uniformity that stage designers plan for the chorus.

  Rinty Ranger stirred and brought his vision back to the present.

  ‘I don’t know… He stayed with Mr Sandvik a couple of times, and said he got on better with his son than the old man… I met him once, the son, that is, with Bob when they were chatting at the races… but I wouldn’t say they were great friends or anything…’

  ‘How old is he, roughly?’

  ‘The son? Sixteen, seventeen. Eighteen maybe.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘Well… One of the lads at Gunnar Holth’s. An Irish lad, Paddy O’Flaherty. Bob knows him well, because Paddy used to work for old Tasker Mason, where Bob was apprenticed. They were lads together, one time, you might say. Bob likes staying at Gunnar Holth’s on account of Paddy, I think.’

  ‘Do you know if Paddy has a car?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue. Why don’t you ask him? He’s bound to be here.’

  ‘Were you here,’ I asked, ‘The day Bob disappeared?’

  ‘ ‘Fraid not.’

  ‘Well… Mm… anything you can think of which is not what you’d’ve expected?’

  ‘What bloody questions! Let’s see… can’t think of anything… except that he left his saddle here.’

  ‘Bob?’

  ‘Yes. It’s in the changing room. And his helmet. He must have known, the silly sod, that he’d never be able to race anywhere in the world again, otherwise he’d never have left them.’

  I moved towards the stairs. Rinty hadn’t told me a great deal, but if there had been much to tell the police of one country or the other would have found Bob long ago. He followed me down, and I wished him good luck in the National.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Can’t say I wish you the same, though. Let the poor bastard alone.’

  At the bottom of the steps, Arne was talking to Per Bjørn Sandvik. They turned to include me with smiles, and I asked the offensive question with as much tact as possible.

  ‘Your son Mikkel, Mr Sandvik. Do you think he could’ve driven Bob Sherman away from the races? Without knowing, of course, that he had the money with him?’

  Per Bjørn reacted less violently than many a father would to the implication that his son, having entertained a thief even if unawares, had nonetheless kept quiet about it. Scarcely a ripple went through him.

  He said smoothly, ‘Mikkel cannot drive yet. He is still at school… his seventeenth birthday was six weeks ago.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said in apology; and I thought, that’s that.

  Per Bjørn said ‘Excuse me,’ without noticeable resentment, and walked away. Arne, blinking furiously, asked where I wanted to go next. To see Paddy O’Flaherty, I said, so we went in search and found him in the stables getting Gunnar Holth’s runner ready for the Grand National. He turned out to be the lad in the woolly cap with uncomplimentary opinions of a mare, and described himself as Gunny’s head lad, so I am.

  ‘What did I do after the races?’ he repeated. ‘Same as I always do. Took the runners home, squared e’m up and saw to their scoff.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘After that, same as always, down to the local hop. There’s a good little bird there, d’you see?’

  ‘Do you have a car?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, sure I have now, but the tyres are as thin as a stockpot on Thursday and I wouldn’t be after driving on them any more at all. And there’s the winter coming on, so there’s my car up on bricks, d’you see?’

  ‘When did you put it on bricks?’

  ‘The police stopped me about those tyres, now… well, there’s the canvas peeping through one or two, if you look close. Sure it’s all of six weeks ago now.’

  After that we drifted around while I took in a general view of what went on, and then walked across the track to watch a race from the tower. This looked slightly like a small airfield control tower, two storeys high with a glass-walled room at the top. In this eyrie during races sat two keen-eyed men with fierce raceglasses clamped to their eyes: they were non-automatic patrol cameras, and never missed a trick.

  Arne introduced me. Feel free, they said,
smiling, to come up into the tower at any time. I thanked them and stayed to watch the next race from there, looking straight down the narrow elongated oval of the track. Sixteen hundred metres for staying two-year-olds: they started almost level with the tower, scurried a long way away, rounded the fairly sharp bottom bend, and streamed up the long straight to finish at the winning post just below where we stood. There was a photo-finish. The all-seeing eyes unstuck themselves from their raceglasses, nodded happily, and said they would be back for the next race.

  Before following them down the stairs I asked Arne which way the Grand National went, as there seemed to be fences pointing in every direction.

  ‘Round in a figure of eight,’ he said, sweeping a vague arm. ‘Three times round. You will see when they go.’ He seemed to want to be elsewhere fairly promptly, but when we had hurried back over to the paddock it appeared merely that he was hungry and had calculated enough eating time before the Norsk St. Leger. He magicked some huge open sandwiches on about a foot of french loaf, starting at one end with prawns and proceeding through herring, cheese, pâté and egg to beef at the far end, adorned throughout by pickled cucumber, mayonnaise and scattered unidentified crispy bits. Arne stayed the course, but I blew up in the straight.

  We drank wine: a bottle. We would come back later, Arne said, and finish it. We were in the big warm room he had shunned earlier, but the listeners weren’t troubling him at that moment.

  ‘If you’re going home tomorrow, David,’ he said, ‘come to supper with us tonight.’

  I hesitated. ‘There’s Emma Sherman,’ I said.

  ‘That girl,’ he exclaimed. He peered around, though there were barely six others in the room. ‘Where is she? She’s usually on my heels.’

  ‘I talked to her yesterday. Persuaded her not to come today and to go back to England tomorrow.’

  ‘Great. Great, my friend.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘She’ll be all right, then. You come to supper with us. I will telephone to Kari.’

  I thought of Kari’s hair and Kari’s shape. Everything stacked as I liked it best. I imagined her in bed. Very likely I should have allowed no such thoughts but you might as well forbid fish to swim. A pity she was Arne’s I thought. To stay away would make it easier on oneself.