Дик Фрэнсис - Slay-Ride

Even seven stone nothing of fainting girl is hard to support without letting her lie on a cold city pavement. Two passing strangers proved to have friendly faces but no English, and the third, who had the tongue, muttered something about the disgrace of being drunk at four in the afternoon and scurried away. I held her up against me with my arms under hers and asked the next woman along to call a taxi.

She too looked disapproving and backed away, but a boy of about sixteen gave her a withering glance and came to the rescue.

‘Is she ill?’ he asked. His English was punctilious stuff, learned in school.

‘She is. Can you get a taxi?’

‘ Ja . I will return. You will...’ he thought, then found the word... ‘Wait?’

‘I will wait,’ I agreed.

He nodded seriously and darted away round the nearest corner, a slim figure in the ubiquitous uniform of the young, blue jeans and a padded jacket. He came back, as good as his word, with a taxi, and helped me get the girl into it.

‘Thank you very much,’ I said.

He beamed. ‘I learn English,’ he said.

‘You speak it very well’

He waved as the taxi drew away: a highly satisfactory encounter to both parties.

She began to wake up during the short journey, which seemed to reassure the taxi driver. He spoke no English except one word which he repeated at least ten times with emphasis, and which was ‘doctor’.

‘ Ja ’ I agreed, Ja . At the Grand Hotel.’

He shrugged, but drove us there. He also helped me support her through the front doors and accepted his fare after she was safely sitting down.

‘Doctor,’ he said as he left, and I said, ‘ Ja .’

‘No,’ said Bob Sherman’s wife, in little more than a whisper. ‘What... happened?’

‘You fainted,’ I said briefly. ‘And doctor or no doctor, you need to lie down. So up you come...’ I more or less lifted her to her feet, walked her to the lift, and took her up the one floor to my room. She flopped full length on the bed without question and lay there with her eyes closed.

‘Do you mind if I feel your pulse?’ I asked.

She gave no answer either way, so I put my fingers on her wrist and found the slow heartbeat. Her arm was slippery with sweat though noticeably cold, and all in all she looked disturbingly frail.

‘Are you hungry?’ I said.

She rolled her head on the pillow in a slow negative, but I guessed that what was really wrong with her, besides strain, was simple starvation. She had been too worried to take care of herself, and besides, eating came expensive in Norway.

A consultation on the telephone with the hotel restaurant produced a promise of hot meat soup and some bread and cheese.

‘And brandy,’ I said.

‘No brandy, sir, on Saturday. Or on Sunday. It is the rule.’

I had been warned, but had forgotten. Extraordinary to find a country with madder licensing laws than Britain’s. There was a small refrigerator in my room, however, which stocked, among the orangeade and mineral waters, a quarter bottle of champagne. It had always seemed to me that bottling in quarters simply spoiled good fizz, but there’s an occasion for everything. Emma said she couldn’t, she shouldn’t; but she did, and within five minutes was looking like a long-picked flower caught just in time.

I’m sorry,’ she said, leaning on one elbow on my bed and sipping the golden bubbles from my tooth mug.

‘You’re welcome.’

‘You must think me a fool.’

‘No.’

‘It’s just... No one seems to care any more. Where he’s gone. They just say they can’t find him. They aren’t even looking.’

‘They’ve looked,’ I began, but she wasn’t ready to listen.

‘Then Gunnar Holth said... the Jockey Club had sent their chief investigator... so I’ve been hoping so hard all day that at last someone would find him, and then... and then... you...’

‘I’m not the father-figure you were hoping for,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘I didn’t think you’d be so young.’

‘Which do you want most,’ I asked. ‘A father-figure, or someone to find Bob?’ But it was too soon to expect her to see that the two things didn’t necessarily go together. She needed the comfort as much as the search.

‘He didn’t steal that money,’ she said.

‘How do you know?’

‘He just wouldn’t.’ She spoke with conviction, but I wondered if the person she most wanted to convince was herself.

A waiter knocked on the door, bringing a tray, and Emma felt well enough to sit at the table and eat. She started slowly, still in a weak state, but by the end it was clear she was fiercely hungry.

As she finished the last of the bread I said, ‘In about three hours we’ll have dinner.’

‘Oh no.’

‘Oh yes. Why not? Then you’ll have plenty of time to tell me about Bob. Hours and hours. No need to hurry.’

She looked at me with the first signs of connected thought and almost immediately glanced round the room. The awareness that she was in my bedroom flashed out like neon in the North Pole. I smiled. ‘Would you prefer the local nick? One each side of a table in an interview room?’

‘Oh! I... suppose not.’ She shuddered slightly. ‘I’ve had quite a lot of that, you see. In a way. Everyone’s been quite kind, really, but they think Bob stole that money and they treat me as if my husband was a crook. It’s... it’s pretty dreadful.’

‘I understand that,’ I said.

‘Do you?’

The meal had done nothing for her pallor. The eyes still looked as hollowed and black-smudged, and the strain still vibrated in her manner. It was going to take more than champagne and soup to undo the knots.

‘Why don’t you sleep for a while?’ I suggested. ‘You look very tired. You’ll be quite all right here, and I’ve some reports which I ought to write. I’d be glad to get them out of the way.’

‘I can’t sleep,’ she said automatically, but when I determinedly took papers out of my briefcase, spread them on the table, and switched on a bright lamp to see them by, she stood up and hovered a bit and finally lay down again on the bed. After five minutes I walked over to look, and she was soundly asleep with sunken cheeks and pale blue veins in her eyelids.

She wore a camel coloured coat, which she had relaxed as far as unbuttoning, and a brown and white checked dress underneath. With the coat falling open, the bulge in her stomach showed unmistakably. Five months, I thought, give or take a week or two.

I pushed the papers together again and returned them to the briefcase. They were the various statements and accounts relating to her husband’s disappearance, and I had no report to write on them. I sat instead in one of the Grand’s comfortable armchairs and thought about why men vanished.

In the main they either ran to something or from something: occasionally a combination of both. To a woman; from a woman. To the sunshine; from the police. To political preference; from political oppression. To anonymity: from blackmail.

Sometimes they took someone else’s money with them to finance the future. Bob Sherman’s sixteen thousand kroner didn’t seem, at first sight, to be worth what he’d exchanged for it. He earned five times as much every year.

So what had he gone to?

Or what had he gone from?

And how was I to find him by Monday afternoon?

She slept soundly for more than two hours with periods of peaceful dreaming, but after that went into a session which was distressing her. She moved restlessly and sweat appeared on her forehead, so I touched her hand and called her out of it.

‘Emma. Wake up. Wake up, now, Emma.’

She opened her eyes fast and wide with the nightmare pictures still in them. Her body began to tremble.