Дик Фрэнсис - Slay-Ride

They waited while I changed at the Grand, so that they could take back the lent clothes. We parted with warm handshakes and great camaraderie, and it was only after they had gone that I realised that I didn’t know their names.

I would have liked nothing better than to go to bed and sleep for half a century, but the thought of Arne’s wife waiting for him to come home put a damper on that. So I spent the next couple of hours with various Norwegian authorities, reporting what had happened.

When the police finished taking notes and said they would send someone to tell Mrs Kristiansen, I suggested that I should go too. They agreed. We went in an official car and rang the bell of Flat C on the first floor of a large timber house in a prosperous road not far from the city centre.

The girl who opened the door looked enquiringly out at us from clear grey eyes in a firm, friendly, thirtyish face. Behind her the flat looked warm and colourful, and the air was thick with Beethoven.

‘Is Mrs Kristiansen in?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am Mrs Kristiansen.’

Not in the least what I would have expected. Oddballs like Arne shouldn’t turn out to have slender young wives with thick pale blonde hair falling in loose curls on their shoulders. She looked away from my own less striking face to the policeman behind me, and the eyes widened.

‘I’m David Cleveland,’ I said. ‘I was with Arne this afternoon...’

‘Oh were you?’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh, do come in... I’m so glad...’

She held the door wider and turned to call over her shoulder.

‘Arne,’ she said. ‘Arne, see who’s here.’

He stepped into the hall. Very much alive.

We stared at each other in consternation. My own face must have mirrored the surprise and shock I saw on his, and then he was striding forward with his hand outheld and his face creasing into the most gigantic smile of all time.

‘David! I don’t believe it. I have reported you drowned.’ He clasped both my hands in both of his and shook them warmly. ‘Come in, come in, my dear fellow, and tell me how you were saved. I have been so grieved... I was telling Kari...’

His wife nodded, as delighted as he was.

The policeman behind me said, ‘It would seem Mr Kristiansen wasn’t drowned after all, then,’ which seemed in our high state of relief to be extremely funny. We all laughed. Even the policeman smiled.

‘I was picked up by some fisherman near Nesodden,’ Arne told him. ‘I reported the accident to the police there. They said they would send a boat to look for Mr Cleveland, but they weren’t very hopeful of finding him. I’d better call them...’

‘Thank you,’ said the policeman. ‘That would be helpful,’ and he smiled once more at us all and went away.

Kari Kristiansen shut the front door and said ‘Do come in, we must celebrate,’ and led me through into the living room. Beethoven was thundering away in there, and Kari switched him off. ‘Arne always plays loud music when he’s upset,’ she said.

Out in the hall Arne busied himself with the telephone, and among his explanatory flow of Norwegian I caught my own name spoken with astonishment and relief.

‘It is wonderful,’ he said, coming into the room and rubbing his hands together. ‘Wonderful.’ He gestured to me to sit on a deep comfortable sofa near a cheerful wood-burning fire. ‘The Nesodden police say they sent a boat out to search for you, but it was too dark and raining and they could see nothing.’

‘I’m sorry they had the trouble,’ I said.

‘My dear fellow...’ He spread his fingers, ‘It was nothing. And now, a drink, eh? To celebrate.’

He filled glasses of red wine from a bottle standing already open on a side-table.

‘Arne has been so depressed all evening,’ Kari said. ‘It is truly a miracle that you were both saved.’

We exchanged stories. Arne had torn off the red clothes and kicked his boots off instantly (I suppose I should have known that a man at home on the sea would wear loose gumboots), but although he had called my name and searched around for some minutes he had caught no sign of me.

‘When I last saw you,’ he said apologetically, ‘You were still in the dinghy, and I thought the speedboat must have hit you directly, so when I could not see you I thought that you must be already dead.’

He had started swimming, he said; and knowing a lot more than I did about tides and winds, had taken almost the opposite direction. He had been picked up near the coast by a small home-going fishing boat which was too low on fuel to go out into the fjord to look for me. It had however landed him in the small town where he reported my loss, and from there he had returned by hired boat to the city.

My story was so much the same that it could be told in two sentences: I swam to an island. Two men brought me back in a boat.

Arne searched among an untidy pile of papers and triumphantly produced a map. Spreading it out, he pointed to the widest part of the fjord and showed both Kari and me where we had been sunk.

‘The worst possible place,’ Kari exclaimed. ‘Why did you go so far?’

‘You know me,’ said Arne, folding the map up again. ‘I like to be moving.’

She looked at him indulgently. ‘You don’t like to be followed, you mean.’

Arne looked a little startled, but that complex of his stood out like Gulliver in Lilliput.

I said, ‘The police asked me if I saw the name of that speedboat.’

‘Did you?’ asked Arne.

I shook my head. ‘No. Did you?’

He blinked through one of those maddening pauses into which the simplest question seemed to throw him, but in the end all he said was ‘No, I didn’t.’

‘I don’t think there was any name to see,’ I said.

They both turned their faces to me in surprise’

There must have been,’ Kari said.

‘Well... I’ve no impression of one.... no name, no registration number, no port of origin. Perhaps you don’t have things like that in Norway.’

‘Yes we do,’ Kari said, puzzled. ‘Of course we do.’

Arne considered lengthily, then said, ‘It was going too fast... and straight towards us. It must have had a name. We simply didn’t see it.’ He spoke with finality, as if the subject could hold no more interest. I nodded briefly and let it go, but I was certain that on that thundering black hull there had been nothing to see but black paint. How were they off for smugglers, I wondered, in this neck of the North Sea?

‘It’s a pity,’ I said. ‘Because you might have got compensation for your dinghy.’

‘It was insured,’ he said. ‘Do not worry.’

Kari said, ‘It’s disgraceful he did not stop. He must have felt the bump... even a big heavy speedboat, like Arne says it was, could not crush a dinghy without feeling it.’

Hit and run, I thought flippantly. Happens on the roads, why not on the water?

‘Arne was afraid you could not swim.’

‘Up and down a pool or two,’ I said. ‘Never tried such long-distance stuff before.’

‘You were lucky,’ she said seriously.

‘Arne too.’ I looked at him thoughtfully, for I was younger by a good ten years and I had been near to exhaustion.

‘Oh no. Arne’s a great swimmer. A great sportsman, all round. Very fit and tough.’ She smiled ironically, but the wifely pride was there. ‘He used to win across-country ski races.’

There had been several sets of skis stacked casually in an alcove in the hall, along with squash rackets, fishing rods, mountain walking boots and half a dozen anoraks like the lost red one. For a man who liked to keep moving, he had all the gear.

‘Have you eaten?’ Kari asked suddenly. ‘Since your swim, I mean? Did you think of eating?’