The Bat (2 page)

“Thank you for that, sir,” Harry said, and he meant it. The thought of panting Norwegian journalists looking over his shoulder was not a welcome one.

“OK, Holy, I’ll be honest with you and tell you how the land lies. I’ve been told in no uncertain terms by my governor that councillors in Sydney would like to see this case cleared up as soon as possible. As usual, it’s all about politics and dosh.”

“Dosh?”

“Well, we reckon unemployment in Sydney will rise to over ten percent this year, and the town needs every cent we can get from the tourists. We’ve got the Olympic Games just round the corner, in 2000, and tourism from Scandinavia’s on the up. Murder, especially one which hasn’t been cleared up, isn’t a good advert for the town, so we’re doing what we can. We have a team of four detectives on the case plus high-priority access to the force’s resources—all the computers, forensic staff, lab people. And so on.”

McCormack pulled out a sheet of paper which he studied with a frown.

“In fact, you should be working with Watkins, but since you specifically asked for Kensington, I see no reason to refuse your request.”

“Sir, to my knowledge I haven’t—”

“Kensington’s a good man. There are not many Indigenous officers who have come up through the ranks like him.”

“No?”

McCormack shrugged. “That’s just the way it is. Well, Holy, if there’s anything else, you know where I hang out. Any questions?”

“Er, just a formality, sir. I was wondering whether
sir
was the right mode of address to a superior officer in this country, or whether it was a little too …”

“Formal? Stiff? Yes, I guess it probably is. But I like it. It reminds me that I am in fact the boss of this outfit.” McCormack burst out laughing and concluded the meeting with a bone-crunching handshake.

“January’s the tourist season in Australia,” Andrew explained as they lurched forward in the traffic around Circular Quay.

“Everyone comes to see the Sydney Opera House and go on boat trips round the harbor and admire the women on Bondi Beach. Shame you’ve got to work.”

Harry shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. I break out in a cold sweat around tourist traps.”

They emerged onto New South Head Road, where the Toyota sped eastward to Watson’s Bay.

“The East Side of Sydney’s not exactly like the East End of London,” Andrew explained as they passed one fashionable house after another. “This district’s called Double Bay. We call it Double Pay.”

“Where did Inger Holter live?”

“She lived with her boyfriend in Newtown for a while before they split up and she moved to a little one-room flat in Glebe.”

“Boyfriend?”

Andrew shrugged. “He’s Australian, a computer engineer and met her when she came here on holiday two years ago. He’s got an alibi for the night of the murder and is not exactly the prototype of a murderer. But you never know, do you?”

They parked below Gap Park, one of Sydney’s many green lungs. Steep stone steps led up to the windblown park that lay high above Watson’s Bay to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the east. The heat hit them when they opened the car doors. Andrew put on a big pair of shades, which made Harry think of a laid-back porn king. For some reason his Australian colleague was wearing a tight suit today, and Harry thought the broad-shouldered black man looked a bit comical as he rolled and pitched up the path in front of him to the viewpoint.

Harry looked around. To the west he saw the city center with the Harbor Bridge, to the north the beach and yachts in Watson’s Bay and, further in the distance, verdant Manly, the suburb on the northern side of the bay. To the east the horizon curved in a spectrum of various shades of blue. The cliffs plunged down in front of them, and way below the ocean breakers ended their long voyage in a thunderous crescendo among the rocks.

Harry felt a bead of sweat running down between his shoulder blades. This heat was giving him goose pimples.

“You can see the Pacific Ocean from here, Harry. Next stop New Zealand, after about twelve hundred wet miles,” Andrew said, spitting a thick gobbet off the edge of the cliff. They followed it down for a while until the wind dispersed it.

“Good job she wasn’t alive when she fell,” he said. “She must have hit the cliffs on the way down; there were large chunks of flesh torn from her body when they found her.”

“How long had she been dead before she was found?”

Andrew pulled a grimace. “The police doctor said forty-eight hours. But he …”

He put a backward-facing thumb in front of his mouth. Harry nodded. So the doctor was a thirsty soul.

“And you become skeptical when the figures are too rounded?”

“She was found on a Friday morning, so let’s say she died some time during Wednesday night.”

“Any clues here?”

“As you can see, cars can park down below and the area is unlit at night and relatively deserted. We haven’t got any reports from witnesses, and to be frank, we don’t reckon we’ll get any.”

“So what do we do now?”

“Now we do what the boss told me, we go to a restaurant and spend a bit of the force’s entertainment budget. After all, you’re Norway’s highest police rep in a radius of more than twelve hundred miles. At least.”

Andrew and Harry sat at a table with a white cloth. Doyle’s, a seafood restaurant, was situated at the furthest end of Watson’s Bay with only a strip of sand between itself and the sea.

“Ridiculously beautiful, isn’t it?” Andrew said.

“Picture postcard.” A small boy and a girl were building sandcastles on the beach in front of them, against a background of a deep blue sea and luxuriant green hills with Sydney’s proud skyline in the distance.

Harry chose scallops and Tasmanian trout, Andrew an Australian flatfish which Harry, quite reasonably, had never heard of. Andrew ordered a bottle of Chardonnay Rose-mount, “quite wrong for this meal, but it’s white, it’s good and it’s smack on budget,” and looked mildly surprised when Harry said he didn’t drink.

“Quaker?”

“No, nothing like that,” Harry said.

Doyle’s was an old family-run restaurant and considered one of Sydney’s best, Andrew informed Harry. It was peak season and packed to the rafters and Harry presumed that was why it was so difficult to gain eye contact with the waiters.

“The waiters here are like the planet Pluto,” Andrew said. “They orbit on the periphery, only making an appearance every twentieth year, and even then are impossible to glimpse with the naked eye.”

Harry couldn’t work up any indignation and leaned back in his chair with a contented sigh. “But they have excellent food,” he said. “So that explains the suit.”

“Yes and no. As you can see, it’s not exactly formal here. But it’s better for me
not
to wear jeans and a T-shirt in places like this. Because of my appearance I have to make an effort.”

“What do you mean?”

Andrew stared at Harry. “Aboriginal people don’t have very high status in this country, as you may perhaps appreciate. Years ago the English wrote home that the natives had a weakness for alcohol and property crime.”

Harry listened with interest.

“They thought it was in our genes. ‘All they were good for was making a hell of a racket blowing through long pieces of hollow wood, which they call didgeridoos,’ one of them wrote. Well, this country boasts that it’s managed to integrate several cultures into one cohesive society. But cohesive for who? The problem, or the advantage, according to your perspective, is that the natives aren’t seen anymore.

“Aboriginal folks are as good as totally absent from social life in Australia, apart from political debates that affect Indigenous interests and culture. Australians pay lip-service by having Aboriginal art hanging on the walls of their houses. However, we Blackfellas are well represented in the dole queues, suicide statistics and prisons. If you’re
Aboriginal the chances of ending up in prison are twenty-six times greater than for any other Australian. Chew on that, Harry Holy.”

Andrew drank the rest of his wine while Harry chewed on that. And the fact that he’d probably just eaten the best fish dish in his thirty-two years.

“And yet Australia’s no more racist than any other country. After all, we’re a multicultural nation with people from all over the world living here. It just means that dressing in a suit whenever you go to a restaurant is worth the trouble.”

Harry nodded again. There was no more to say on that subject.

“Inger Holter worked in a bar, didn’t she?”

“Yes, she did. The Albury in Oxford Street, Paddington. I thought we could wander up there this evening.”

“Why not now?” Harry was beginning to be impatient with all this leisure.

“Because first we have to say hello to her landlord.”

Pluto appeared unbidden in the firmament.

Glebe Point Road turned out to be a cozy, not too frenetic street where small, plain and, for the most part, ethnic restaurants from various parts of the world stood cheek by jowl.

“This used to be Sydney’s bohemian quarter,” Andrew explained. “I lived here as a student in the seventies. You can still find typical veggie restaurants for people with conservation on the brain and alternative lifestyles, bookshops for lesbians and so on. But the old hippies and acidheads have gone. As Glebe became an ‘in’ place rent went up—I doubt if I’d be able to live here now, even on my police salary.”

They turned right, up Hereford Street and went through the gate to number 54. A small furry black animal came toward them, barking, and revealing a row of tiny, sharp teeth. The mini-monster looked seriously angry and bore a striking similarity to the picture in the tourist brochure of the Tasmanian Devil. Aggressive and generally unpleasant to have hanging from your throat, it said. The species had been almost completely exterminated, which Harry sincerely hoped was true. As this specimen launched itself at him with jaws wide open, Andrew raised his foot and kicked the animal in mid-flight and volleyed it yelping into the bushes alongside the fence.

A man with a large gut who looked as though he had just got up was standing in the doorway with a sour expression on his face as they came up the steps.

“What happened to the dog?”

“It’s admiring the rose bushes,” Andrew informed him with a smile. “We’re from the police. Crime Squad. Mr. Robertson?”

“Yeah, yeah. What do you lot want again? I told you I’ve told you everything I know.”

“And now you’ve told us you’ve told us you’ve told us …” A long silence developed as Andrew continued to smile and Harry shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

“Apologies, Mr. Robertson, we won’t try to kill you with our charm, but this is Inger Holter’s brother and he would like to see her room if that’s not too much trouble.”

Robertson’s attitude changed dramatically.

“Sorry, I didn’t know … Come in!” He opened the door and went ahead of them up the stairs.

“Yeah, in fact I didn’t even know Inger had a brother. But now you say it of course I can see the family likeness.”

Behind him, Harry half turned to Andrew and rolled his eyes.

“Inger was a lovely girl and a fantastic tenant—indeed, a source of pride for the whole house and neighborhood too, probably.” He smelled of beer and his diction was already a bit slurred.

No attempt had been made to tidy Inger’s room. There were clothes, magazines, full ashtrays and empty wine bottles everywhere.

“Er, the police told me not to touch anything for the moment.”

“We understand.”

“She just didn’t come back one night. Vanished into thin air.”

“Thank you, Mr. Robertson, we’ve read your statement.”

“I told her not to take the route round Bridge Road and the fish market when she came home at night. It’s dark there and there are loads of blacks and Chinks …” He looked at Andrew Kensington in horror. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to …”

“That’s fine. You can go now, Mr. Robertson.”

Robertson padded down the stairs and they heard bottles clinking in the kitchen.

The room contained a bed, a few bookshelves and a desk. Harry looked around and tried to construct an impression of Inger Holter. Victimology: putting yourself in the victim’s shoes. He could just about recall the impish girl off the TV screen with her well-meaning, youthful commitment and innocent blue eyes.

She was definitely not a home bird. There were no pictures on the walls, just a poster of
Braveheart
with Mel Gibson—which Harry remembered only because for some incomprehensible reason it won an Oscar for Best Film. Bad taste, as far as films go, he thought. And men. Harry was one of those who felt personally let down when
Mad Max
made a Hollywood star out of him.

A photograph showed Inger sitting on a bench in front of some colorful Western-style houses with a gang of long-haired, bearded youths. She was wearing a loose, purple dress. Her blonde hair hung down flat against her pale, serious face. The young man whose hand she was holding had a baby in his lap.

On the shelf there was a pouch of tobacco. A few books about astrology and a roughly hewn wooden mask with a long, bent nose like a beak. Harry turned the mask over.
Made in Papua New Guinea
, it said on the price tag.

The clothes that weren’t lying on the bed and floor hung in a small wardrobe. There wasn’t much. A few cotton blouses, a worn coat and a large straw hat on the shelf.

Andrew picked up a packet of cigarette papers from the drawer in the desk.

“King Size Smoking Slim. She rolled herself some big cigarettes.”

“Did you find any drugs here?” Harry asked. Andrew shook his head and pointed to the cigarette paper.

“But if we’d hoovered the ashtrays I wouldn’t mind betting we’d have found traces of cannabis.”

“Why wasn’t it done? Didn’t the SOC people come here?”

“First of all, there’s no reason to believe that this was the scene of the crime. Second of all, smoking marijuana is nothing to shout about. Here in New South Wales we have a more pragmatic attitude to marijuana than in certain other Australian states. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the murder could be drugs-related, but the odd reefer or two is hardly relevant in this context. We can’t know for sure if she used other drugs. There’s a fair bit of coke and designer drugs on the go in the Albury, but no one we’ve spoken to has mentioned anything, and there wasn’t a trace of anything in the blood tests. At any rate, she wasn’t on the serious stuff. There were no needle marks, and we have a reasonable overview of the hard-core users.”