The Bat (4 page)

“Shit,” he mumbled to himself. “Should I, shouldn’t I?”

In the club all the transvestites plus a fair number of the other customers were standing on the counter miming to Katrina & the Waves. “Walking on Sunshine” boomed out of the speakers.

“There’s not much time for grief and reflection at a place like the Albury,” Andrew commented.

“Suppose that’s the way it should be,” Harry said. “Life goes on.” He asked Andrew to hang on for a minute, went back to the bar and waved to Birgitta.

“Sorry, just one last question.”

“Yes?”

Harry took a deep breath. He was already regretting his decision, but it was too late. “Do you know a good Thai restaurant in town?”

Birgitta had a think. “Mmm, there’s one in Bent Street, in the city center. Do you know where that is? It’s supposed to be pretty good, I’m told.”

“So good you would go with me?”

That didn’t come out right, Harry thought. Besides, it was unprofessional. Very unprofessional, in fact. Birgitta gave a groan of despair, but the despair was not so convincing that Harry couldn’t see an opening. Anyway, the smile was still in residence.

“That one of your more frequent lines, Officer?”

“Fairly frequent.”

“Does it work?”

“Statistically speaking? Not really.”

She laughed, inclined her head and studied Harry with curiosity. Then she shrugged.

“Why not? I’m free tomorrow. Nine o’clock. And you’re paying.”

Harry jammed the blue light on top of the car and got behind the wheel. The wind rushed through the car as he took the curves. Stiansen’s voice. Then silence. A bent fence post. A hospital room, flowers. A photograph in the corridor, fading.

Harry sat bolt upright. The same dream again. It was still only four o’clock in the morning. He tried to go back to sleep, but his mind turned to Inger Holter’s unknown murderer.

At six he reckoned he could get up. After an invigorating shower, he walked out to a pale blue sky with an ineffectual morning sun to find somewhere to go for breakfast. There was a buzz coming from the city center, but the morning rush hour had not yet reached the red lamps and black mascara eyes here. King’s Cross had a certain slapdash charm, a lived-in beauty that made him hum as he walked. Apart from a few late, slightly worse-for-wear night birds, a couple sleeping under a rug on some steps and a wan, thinly clad prostitute on the early shift, the streets were empty for the moment.

Outside a terrace cafe the owner stood hosing down the pavement and Harry smiled his way to an impromptu
breakfast. As he was eating his toast and bacon, a teasing breeze tried to whisk away his serviette.

“You’re up at sparrow’s fart, Holy,” McCormack said. “It’s good. The brain works best between half past six and eleven. After that it’s mush, if you ask me. It’s also quiet here in the morning. I can hardly add two and two with the racket after nine. Can you? My boy claims he has to have the stereo on to do his homework. He gets so distracted if it’s bloody quiet. Can you understand that?”

“Er—”

“Anyway, yesterday I’d had enough and marched in and switched off the sodding machine. ‘I need it to think!’ screamed the boy. I said he would have to read like normal folk. ‘People are different, Dad,’ he said, pissed off. Yup, he’s at that age, you know.”

McCormack paused and looked at a photograph on the desk.

“You got kids, Holy? No? Sometimes I wonder what the hell I’ve done. What rathole did they book you into, by the way?”

“Crescent Hotel in King’s Cross, sir.”

“King’s Cross, OK. You’re not the first Norwegian to have stayed there. A couple of years ago we had an official visit from the Bishop of Norway, or someone like that, can’t remember his name. Anyway, his staff in Oslo had booked a room for him at King’s Cross Hotel. Perhaps the name had some biblical connotation or other. When the bishop arrived with his retinue one of the seasoned prostitutes caught sight of the clerical collar and harangued him with a few juicy suggestions. Think the bishop checked out before they’d even carried his bags up the stairs …”

McCormack laughed so much there were tears in his eyes.

“Yeah, well, Holy, what can we do for you today?”

“I was wondering if I could see Inger Holter’s body before it’s sent to Norway, sir.”

“Kensington can take you to the morgue when he comes in. But you’ve got a copy of the autopsy report, haven’t you?”

“Yes, sir, I just …”

“You just?”

“Think better with the body in front of me, sir.”

McCormack turned to the window and mumbled something that Harry construed as “fine.”

The temperature in the cellar of South Sydney Morgue was 46 degrees, as opposed to 82 degrees on the street outside.

“Any the wiser?” Andrew asked. He shivered and pulled his jacket tighter around him.

“Wiser, no,” Harry said, looking at the earthly remains of Inger Holter. Her face had survived the fall relatively well. On one side the nostril had been torn open and the cheekbone knocked into a deep hollow, but there was no doubt that the waxen face belonged to the same girl with the radiant smile on the photo in the police report. There were black marks around the neck. The rest of the body was covered with bruises, wounds and some deep, deep cuts. In one of them you could see the white bone.

“The parents wanted to see the photos. The Norwegian ambassador explained that it was inadvisable, but the solicitor insisted. A mother shouldn’t have to see her daughter like that.” Andrew shook his head.

Harry studied the bruising on the neck with a magnifying glass.

“Whoever strangled her used his bare hands. It’s difficult to kill someone with that method. The murderer must be either very strong or very motivated.”

“Or have done it several times before.”

Harry looked at Andrew.

“What do you mean by that?”

“She has no fragments of skin under her nails, she has none of the murderer’s hair on her clothes and she has no grazing on her knuckles. She was killed so quickly and efficiently that she never had a chance to put up much of a fight.”

“Does this remind you of anything you’ve seen before?”

Andrew shrugged. “When you’ve worked here long enough all murders remind you of something you’ve seen before.”

No, Harry thought. It’s the other way round. Work long enough and you see the tiny nuances each murder has, the details that distinguish one from another and make each one unique.

Andrew glanced at his watch. “The morning meeting starts in half an hour. We’d better get a move on.”

The leader of the investigative unit was Larry Watkins, a detective with a legal background, on a swift upward curve through the ranks. He had narrow lips, thinning hair and spoke fast and efficiently without intonation or unnecessary adjectives.

“Or social antennae,” Andrew said, not mincing his words. “A very able investigator, but he’s not the person you ask to ring the parents when their daughter has been found dead. And then he starts swearing whenever he’s stressed,” he added.

Watkins’s right-hand man was Sergey Lebie, a well-dressed, bald Yugoslav with a black goatee that made him look like Mephisto in a suit. Andrew said he was usually skeptical of men who were so fussy about their appearance.

“But Lebie isn’t really a peacock, just very
meticulous
. Among other things he has a habit of studying his nails
when anyone talks to him, but he doesn’t mean it to seem arrogant. And then he cleans his shoes after the lunch break. Don’t expect him to say much, not about himself or anything else.”

The youngest member of the team was Yong Sue, a small, skinny, pleasant guy who always wore a smile above his bird-like neck. Yong Sue’s family had come to Australia from China thirty years ago. Ten years ago, when Yong Sue was nineteen, his parents went back to China on a visit. They were never seen again. The grandfather reckoned the son had been involved in “something political,” but he wouldn’t venture any deeper. Yong Sue never found out what had happened. Now he provided for his grandparents and his two younger sisters, worked twelve-hour days and smiled for at least ten of them. “If you’ve got a bad joke, tell it to Yong Sue. He laughs at absolutely everything,” Andrew had told him. Now they were all assembled in a tiny, narrow room in which a noisy fan in the corner was supposed to provide some air movement. Watkins stood by the board in front of them and introduced Harry to the others.

“Our Norwegian colleague has translated the letter we found in Inger’s room. Anything interesting you can tell us about that, Hole?”

“Hoo-Leh.”

“Sorry, Holy.”

“Well, she had obviously just started a relationship with someone called Evans. From what the letter says, there is good reason to assume that it’s his hand she’s holding in the photo above the desk.”

“We’ve checked,” Lebie said. “We think he’s one Evans White.”

“Uh-huh?” Watkins raised a thin eyebrow.

“We don’t have much on him. His parents came here from the US at the end of the sixties and were given a residence permit. It wasn’t a problem at that time,” Lebie added
by way of enlightenment. “Anyway, they traveled round the country in a VW camper, probably on the diet of veggie food, marijuana and LSD that was the norm in those days. They had a child, got divorced, and when Evans was eighteen the father went back to the US. The mother’s into healing, Scientology and all sorts of spiritual mysticism. She runs a place called the Crystal Castle on a ranch near Byron Bay. There she sells stones of karma and imported junk from Thailand to tourists and soul-seekers. When Evans was eighteen he decided to do what an increasing number of young Australians do,” he said, turning to Harry: “Nothing.”

Andrew leaned over and muttered in a low voice: “Australia is perfect for those who want to travel around, do a bit of surfing and enjoy life at the taxpayer’s expense. Ace social network and ace climate. We live in a wonderful country.” He leaned back.

“At the moment he has no fixed abode,” Lebie continued, “but we think that until recently he was living in a shack on the outskirts of town with Sydney’s white trash. Those we spoke to out there said they hadn’t seen him for a while. He has never been arrested. So I’m afraid the only photograph we have of him is as a thirteen-year-old when he got his passport.”

“I’m impressed,” Harry said without any dissimulation. “How did you manage to find a guy without a record from one photo and a Christian name in a population of eighteen million in such a short time?”

Lebie nodded to Andrew.

“Andrew recognized the town in the photo. We faxed a copy to the local police station and they came up with this name. They say he has a role in the local milieu. Translated, that means he’s one of the spliff kings.”

“It must be a very small town,” Harry said.

“Nimbin, just over a thousand inhabitants,” Andrew
interposed. “By and large they lived off dairy products until Australia’s National Union of Students took it into their heads to arrange what they called the Aquarius Festival there in 1973.”

Chuckles rippled around the table.

“The festival was actually about idealism, alternative lifestyles, back to nature and that sort of stuff. The newspapers concentrated on the young people taking drugs and having rampant sex. The festival lasted for over ten days, and for some it never stopped. Growing conditions around Nimbin are good. For everything under the sun. Let me put it this way: I doubt that dairy products are the most important business up there any longer. In the main street, fifty meters from the local police station, you will find Australia’s most open marijuana market. And LSD market, I’m sorry to say.”

“At all events,” Lebie said, “he’s been seen in Nimbin recently, according to the police.”

“In fact, the Premier of New South Wales is about to launch a campaign there,” Watkins interjected. “The Federal government has apparently been pressing him to do something about the burgeoning trade in narcotics.”

“That’s true,” Lebie said. “The cops are using spotter planes and helicopters to take photos of the fields where they’re growing hemp.”

“OK,” Watkins said. “We’ll have to catch this guy. Kensington, you obviously know your way around there, and you, Holy, I don’t suppose you would object to seeing a bit more of Australia. I’ll get McCormack to give Nimbin a bell so they know you’re coming.”

They mingled with tourists and took the single-track railway to Darling Harbour, got off at Harbourside and found an outside table with a view of the quays.

A pair of long legs stalked past on stilettos. Andrew rolled his eyes and whistled in a very un-PC way. A couple of heads in the restaurant turned and sent them an irritated glare. Harry shook his head.

“How’s your friend Otto?”

“Well, he’s devastated. He’s been abandoned for a woman. If their lovers are bi they always end up with a woman, he says. But he’ll survive this time as well.”

To his surprise, Harry felt some raindrops, and sure enough: heavy cloud cover had drifted in from the northwest almost without his noticing.

“How did you recognize this Nimbin place with no more than a photo of a house front?”

“Nimbin? Did I forget to tell you that I’m an old hippie?” Andrew grinned. “It’s claimed that anyone who can remember the Aquarius Festival wasn’t there. Well, I remember the houses in the main street at least. It looked like an outlaw town in a middling Western, painted in psychedelic yellow and purple. Well, to tell the truth, I thought the yellow
and purple had been the result of taking certain substances. Until I saw the photo in Inger’s room.”

On their return from lunch Watkins called another meeting in the Ops Room. Yong Sue had unearthed some interesting cases on his computer.

“I’ve been through all the unsolved murder cases in New South Wales over the last ten years and I’ve found four cases that have similarities with this one. The bodies are found in out-of-the-way places, two in landfill sites, one on a road by the edge of a forest and one floating in the Darling River. The women have probably been killed and sexually abused elsewhere and then dumped. And crucially—all of them have been strangled and show bruising to the neck from fingers.” Yong Sue beamed.