Slay Ride - By Dick Francis Page 0,1

in Norway.’

God give me strength.

Arne hadn’t actually finished. ‘Robert Sherman rode horses for the racecourse.’

I was puzzled. ‘How do you mean?’

He consulted his inner man again, who evidently said it was O.K. to explain.

‘The racecourse pays appearance money to some foreign jockeys, to get them to come to Norway. It makes the racing more interesting for the racegoers. So the racecourse paid Robert Sherman to ride.’

‘How much did they pay him?’

A rising breeze was stirring the fjord’s surface into proper little wavelets. The fjord just below Oslo is not one of those narrow canyon jobs on the Come-To-Scenic-Norway posters, but a wide expanse of sea dotted with rocky islands and fringed by the sprawling suburbs of the city. A coastal steamer surged past half a mile away and tossed us lightly in its wake. The nearest land looked a lot further off.

‘Let’s go back,’ I said abruptly.

‘No, no…’ He had no patience for such weak suggestions. ‘They paid him fifteen hundred kroner.’

‘I’m cold,’ I said.

He looked surprised. ‘It is not winter yet.’

I made a noise which was half laugh and half teeth beginning to chatter. ‘It isn’t summer either.’

He looked vaguely all around. ‘Robert Sherman had made six visits to race in Norway,’ he said. ‘This was his seventh.’

‘Look, Arne, tell me about it back at the hotel, huh?’

He attended to me seriously. ‘What is the matter?’

‘I don’t like heights,’ I said.

He looked blank. I took one frozen mitt out of its pocket, hung it over the side of the boat, and pointed straight down. Arne’s face melted into comprehension and a huge grin took the place of the usual tight careful configuration of his mouth.

‘David, I am sorry. The water to me, it is home. Like snow. I am sorry.’

He turned at once to start the outboard, and then paused to say, ‘He could simply have driven over the border to Sweden. The customs, they would not search for kroner.’

‘In what car?’ I asked.

He thought it over. ‘Ah yes.’ He blinked a bit. ‘Perhaps a friend drove him….’

‘Start the engine,’ I said encouragingly.

He shrugged and gave several small nods of the head, but turned to the outboard and pressed the necessary knobs. I had half expected it to prove as lifeless as my fingers, but the spark hit the gas in an orderly fashion and Arne pointed the sharp end back towards hot coffee and radiators.

The dinghy slapped busily through the little waves and the crosswind flicked spray onto my left cheek. I pulled my jacket collar up and made like a tortoise.

Arne’s mouth moved as he said something, but against the combined noises of the engine and the sea and the rustle of gaberdine against my ears, I couldn’t hear any words.

‘What?’ I shouted.

He started to repeat whatever it was, but louder. I caught only snatches like ‘ungrateful pig’ and ‘dirty thief, which I took to be his own private views of Robert Sherman, British steeplechase jockey. Arne had had a bad time since the said Bob Sherman disappeared with the day’s take from the turnstiles of Øvrevoll, because Arne Kristiansen, besides being the Norwegian Jockey Club’s official investigator, was also in charge of racecourse security.

The theft, he had told me on the outward chug, was an insult, first to himself, and secondly to Norway. Guests in a foreign country should not steal. Norwegians were not criminals, he said, and quoted jail statistics per million of population to prove it. When the British were in Norway, they should keep their hands to themselves.

Commiserating, I refrained from drawing his country’s raids on Britain to his attention: they were, after all, a thousand or so years in the past, and the modern Vikings were less likely to burn, rape, pillage and plunder than to take peaceable photographs of Buckingham Palace. I felt moreover a twinge of national shame about Bob Sherman: I had found myself apologising, of all things, for his behaviour.

Arne was still going on about it: on that subject unfortunately he needed no prompting. Phrases like ‘put me in an intolerable position’ slid off his tongue as if he had been practising them for weeks – which, on reflection, of course he had. It was three weeks and four days since the theft: and forty-eight hours since the Chairman of the racecourse had telephoned and asked me to send over a British Jockey Club investigator to see what he could do. I had sent (you will have guessed) myself.

I hadn’t met the Chairman yet, nor seen the racecourse,