The Bat

  ‘The latest,’ mumbled Watkins, just loud enough for everyone to hear.

  ‘Well,’ Harry began, ‘we never found the witness who Andrew said had seen Evans White in Nimbin on the day Inger Holter was murdered. What we know now is that White is more than usually captivated by blondes, he had an unstable childhood and it might be interesting to examine his relationship with his mother. He’s never had a steady job or a fixed abode and for that reason following his movements is tricky. It’s not impossible that he may have had a clandestine relationship with Otto Rechtnagel, and it’s not inconceivable that he joined Otto on his travels. He may have rented a room in a hotel and found his victims wherever he came across them. This is all theory, of course.’

  ‘Maybe Otto’s the serial killer,’ Watkins speculated. ‘Maybe someone else killed him and Kensington and had nothing to do with the other murders?’

  ‘Centennial Park,’ Lebie said. ‘That’s our serial killer. I would bet everything I own. Not that I have a lot to lose there . . .’

  ‘Lebie’s right,’ Harry said. ‘He’s still out there somewhere.’

  ‘OK,’ said McCormack. ‘I can hear our friend Holy’s using expressions like not impossible and not inconceivable to launch his theories now, which may be wise. We have nothing to gain by being cocky. Furthermore, it should be clear to all of us now that we’re dealing with a very intelligent man. And very confident. He handed out the ready-made answers we were after, gave us the murderer on a silver platter and assumes now these answers have calmed our fevered brows and that we regard the case as solved, since the perpetrator died by his own hand. By fingering Kensington he knew, of course, that we would decide to hush the matter up – which you have to admit is clever thinking.’

  McCormack glanced at Harry as he said the latter.

  ‘Our advantage lies in the fact that he thinks he’s safe. People who think they’re safe are often reckless. Now, however, it’s time we decided how we’re going to tackle this matter. We have a new suspect and we cannot afford another blunder. The problem is that if we make too much of a splash we risk frightening off the big fish. We have to have stomachs of steel and stand quite still, until we can see the big fish clearly beneath us, so clear that it’s unmistakable and so close we can’t miss. Then, and only then, can we throw the harpoon.’

  He gazed at each in turn. Everyone nodded to confirm the boss’s indisputable good sense.

  ‘And to do this we need to work defensively, quietly and systematically.’

  ‘Disagree,’ said Harry.

  The others turned to him.

  ‘There is, you see, another way to catch fish without making a splash,’ Harry said. ‘A piece of string and a hook with some bait we know he’ll go for.’

  44

  A Box Jellyfish

  THE WIND DROVE dust clouds ahead as it whirled up along the gravel road and over the low stone wall around the cemetery and into the small gathering of mourners. Harry had to squeeze his eyes shut to avoid getting dust particles in them, and the wind caught shirts and jacket tails, making those assembled look from a distance as if they were dancing on Andrew Kensington’s grave.

  ‘Hellish wind,’ Watkins whispered during the priest’s recitations.

  Harry stood thinking about Watkins’s choice of words, hoping he was wrong. It was of course difficult to say where the wind was coming from, but it was certainly in a hurry. And if it was here to take Andrew’s soul with it, no one could say it was taking its job lightly. The pages of hymn books were fluttering, the green soil-laden tarpaulin beside the grave flapped and those who didn’t have hats to hold on to watched comb-overs and other hairstyles unravel.

  Harry wasn’t listening to the priest, he was looking through scrunched-up eyes across the grave. Birgitta’s hair was flying backwards like a red jet of flame. She met his stare with a blank expression. A grey-haired old woman sat trembling on a chair with a stick in her lap. Her skin was yellow, and her age could not conceal her distinctly English equine face. The wind had knocked her hat skew-whiff. Harry had worked out that she was Andrew’s foster-mother, but she was so old and fragile she had scarcely registered Harry’s condolences outside the church – she’d just nodded, mumbling an incomprehensible sentence over and over again. Behind her stood a small, barely visible black woman with a girl in each hand.

  The priest threw earth into the grave in Lutheran manner. Harry had been told that Andrew had belonged to the Anglican Church, which, alongside the Catholic Church, was by far the biggest in Australia, but Harry, who had been to only a few funerals, couldn’t see that this service was much different from those in Norway. Even the weather was the same. When they had buried his mother, turbulent, blue-grey clouds had chased each other above the cemetery, but fortunately they had been in too much haste to rain on them. There had been sun the day they buried Ronny. At that time, though, Harry was in hospital with blinds drawn because the light gave him a headache. Just like today, police officers had constituted the majority of the funeral gathering. Perhaps they had sung the same hymn at the end: ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee!’

  The gathering dissolved, people began to move towards their cars and Harry walked behind Birgitta. She stopped so that he could catch up with her.

  ‘You look ill,’ she said without an upward glance.

  ‘You don’t know what I look like when I’m ill,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you look ill when you’re ill? All I’m saying is you look ill. Are you ill?’

  A gust of wind blew, and Harry’s tie lifted and covered his face.

  ‘Perhaps I’m a little ill,’ he said. ‘Not very ill. You look like a jellyfish with all that hair flapping in . . . my face.’ Harry took a red strand out of his mouth.

  Birgitta smiled. ‘You should thank your lucky stars I’m not a box jellyfish,’ she said.

  ‘A what?’ Harry said.

  ‘A box jellyfish,’ Birgitta said. ‘It’s very common in Australia. Its sting is worse than an ordinary jellyfish’s, you could say . . .’

  ‘Box jellyfish?’ Harry heard a familiar voice behind him say. He turned. It was Toowoomba.

  ‘How are you?’ Harry said and explained that it was Birgitta’s hair blowing into his face that had prompted the comparison.

  ‘Well, if it had been a box jellyfish it would have left red stripes across your face and you would have been screaming like a man being given twenty lashes,’ Toowoomba said. ‘And within a few seconds you would have collapsed, the poison would have paralysed your respiratory organs, you would have had difficulty breathing, and if you hadn’t got immediate help, you would have died an extremely painful death.’

  Harry held his palms up in defence. ‘Thanks, there have been enough deaths for today.’

  Toowoomba nodded. He was wearing a black silk smoking jacket with a bow tie. He noticed Harry’s gaze.

  ‘It’s the only thing I have remotely resembling a suit. Besides, I inherited it from him.’ He nodded towards the grave. ‘Not recently, but a number of years ago. Andrew said he’d grown out of it. Rubbish, of course. He didn’t want to admit it, but I knew he’d bought it to wear at the banquet after the Australian championships. He probably hoped the outfit would experience with me what it never experienced with him.’

  They walked along the gravel road as cars slowly passed.

  ‘May I ask you a personal question, Toowoomba?’ Harry said.

  ‘I reckon so.’

  ‘Where do you think Andrew will end up?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Do you think his soul will go up or down?’

  Toowoomba wore a serious expression. ‘I’m a simple man, Harry. I don’t know much about that kind of thing, and I don’t know much about souls. But I do know a couple of things about Andrew Kensington, and if there’s something up there, and if it’s beautiful souls they want that’s where his belongs.’ He smiled. ‘But if there’s anything down there, I think that’s where he’d prefer to be. He hated boring places.??
?

  They chuckled quietly.

  ‘But since this is a personal question, Harry, I’ll give you a personal answer. I think Andrew’s parents and my own had a point. They had a sober view of death. Although it’s true to say many tribes believed in a life after death, some believed in reincarnation, the soul wandering from human to human, and some believed souls could return as spirits. Some tribes believed the souls of the dead could be seen in the firmament as stars. And so on. But the common thread was that they believed humans, sooner or later, after all these stages, died a proper, final, definitive death. And that was that. You became a pile of stones and were gone. For some reason I like the thought of that. These perspectives of eternity leave you so weary, don’t you think?’

  ‘I think it sounds like Andrew left you more than the smoking jacket, that’s what I think,’ Harry said.

  Toowoomba laughed. ‘Can you hear that so easily?’

  ‘His master’s voice,’ Harry said. ‘The man should have been a priest.’

  They stopped by a dusty little car, which was obviously Toowoomba’s.

  ‘Listen, I might need someone who knew Andrew,’ Harry said, reacting to a hunch. ‘The way he thought. Why he did what he did.’

  He straightened up, and their eyes met.

  ‘I think someone killed Andrew,’ Harry said.

  ‘Bullshit!’ Toowoomba burst out. ‘You don’t think, you know! Everyone who knew Andrew knows he would never willingly leave a party. For him, life was the biggest party. I don’t know anyone who loved life more than him. Whatever it did to him. If he was going to check out there would have been plenty of opportunities – and reasons – before.’

  ‘Then we agree,’ Harry said.

  ‘You can usually reach me on this number,’ Toowoomba said, scribbling on a matchbox. ‘It’s a mobile phone number.’

  Toowoomba was going north and clattered off in his old white Holden. Birgitta and Harry stood watching, then Harry suggested hitching a ride with one of his colleagues into town. But it seemed most of them had gone. Then a magnificent old Buick pulled up in front of them, the driver rolled down the window and stuck out a red face with a striking nose. It was like the kind of potato where several tubers had grown into one, and, if possible, even redder than the rest of his face with its fine network of thin veins.

  ‘Going to town, folks?’ the nose asked, and told them to hop in.

  ‘My name’s Jim Connolly. This is my wife, Claudia,’ he said, after they had settled onto the broad back seat. A tiny, dark face with a beaming smile turned to them from the front seat. She looked Indian, and was so small they could barely see her above the headrest.

  Jim observed Harry and Birgitta in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Friends of Andrew? Colleagues?’

  He steered the jalopy carefully down the gravel road while Harry explained the connections.

  ‘Right, so you’re from Norway and you’re from Sweden. That’s a long way away, that is. Well, almost everyone here comes from somewhere far away. Take Claudia, for example, she’s from Venezuela, where they have all the Miss Universes, you know. How many titles have you had, Claudia? Including your own. Ha ha.’ He laughed so much his eyes disappeared beneath laughter lines, and Claudia joined in.

  ‘I’m Australian,’ Jim continued. ‘My great-great-great-grandfather came here from Ireland. He was a murderer and a thief. Ha ha ha. Some time back people didn’t like to admit they were descendants of convicts, even though it was nearly two hundred years ago. But I’ve always been proud of it. They were the ones plus a bunch of sailors and soldiers who founded this country. And a fine country it is, too. We call it the lucky country down here. Yeah, yeah, things change. Now I hear it’s “in” to trace your forefathers back to the convicts. Ha ha ha. Too bad about Andrew, wasn’t it?’

  Jim was like a verbal machine gun, and Harry and Birgitta couldn’t manage to chip in much before he took over again. And the faster he spoke, the slower he drove. Like David Bowie on Harry’s old cassette player. Years ago he’d been given a battery-powered recorder by his father, and the louder you turned up the volume the slower the tape went.

  ‘Andrew and I used to box together on the Jim Chivers roadshows. You know, Andrew never had his nose broken. No sirree, no one ever sullied his pugilistic virtue. They’ve got pretty flat noses, these Aboriginal guys, p’raps that’s why no one ever gave it a thought. But Andrew was fit and healthy on the inside. He had a healthy heart and a healthy nose. Well, as healthy as a heart can be after you’ve been kidnapped by the authorities at birth. And his heart wasn’t as healthy after the row during the Australian championships in Melbourne. I suppose you heard about that, did you? He lost quite a lot then.’ They were doing less than forty now.

  ‘The champion, Campbell, well, his girl, she was after Andrew, on her knees she was, but she’d probably been so stunningly beautiful all her life that she’d never experienced rejection. If she had, everything would have been very different. But when she knocked on Andrew’s hotel door that night and he politely asked her to leave, she couldn’t cope with it; she went straight back to her boyfriend and told him Andrew had groped her. They rang his room and told him to go down to the kitchen. Rumours are still circulating about the fight down there. Andrew’s life went into a siding after that. But they never got his nose. Ha ha ha. Are you a couple?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Harry composed himself enough to say.

  ‘That’s not how it looks,’ Jim said, watching them in the mirror. ‘Perhaps you just don’t know it yourselves yet, but even though you look a bit weighed down by the gravity of circumstances today, there’s a glow there. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you look like Claudia and I did when we were young and in love, the way we were for the first twenty or thirty years. Ha ha ha. Now we’re just in love. Ha ha ha.’

  Claudia looked at her husband with sparkling eyes.

  ‘I met Claudia at one of the roadshows. She was performing as a contortionist. She can fold herself up like an envelope even today. So I don’t know what I’m doing with this big Buick. Ha ha ha. I wooed her every day for more than a year before she so much as allowed me to kiss her. And afterwards she told me she had fallen in love the first time she saw me. That alone was sensational, bearing in mind that this nose of mine had already taken a lot of beatings. Then she went and played the prude for one whole, long, awful year. Women scare the wits out of me sometimes. What do you say, Harry?’

  ‘Well,’ Harry said, ‘I know what you mean.’

  He looked at Birgitta. She put on a weak smile.

  After spending three-quarters of an hour covering a distance that normally takes twenty minutes, they pulled in at the town hall, where Harry and Birgitta thanked him for the lift and jumped out. The wind had picked up in the town as well, and they stood in the gusts palpably not knowing quite what to say.

  ‘A very unusual couple,’ Harry said.

  ‘Yes,’ Birgitta said. ‘They’re happy.’

  The wind whirled and shook a tree in the park, and Harry imagined he saw a hirsute shadow dart for cover.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Harry said.

  ‘You come home with me.’

  ‘OK.’

  45

  Payback

  BIRGITTA POKED A cigarette into Harry’s mouth and lit it.

  ‘Well earned,’ she said.

  Harry reflected. He didn’t feel too bad. He pulled the sheet over him.

  ‘Are you embarrassed?’ Birgitta laughed.

  ‘I just don’t like your lustful eyes on me. You may not want to believe it, but in fact I’m not a machine.’

  ‘Really?’ Birgitta playfully nibbled his lower lip. ‘You could have fooled me. That piston of—’

  ‘All right, all right. Do you have to be so vulgar now that life has become so blissful, sweetheart?’

  She cuddled up to him, resting her head on his chest.

  ‘You promised another story,’ she whispered.

  ‘Indeed.’ Har
ry took a deep breath. ‘Let me see. So this is the start. I was in the eighth year and a new girl joined the parallel class. Her name was Kristin, and it took only three weeks for her and my best pal, Terje, who had the whitest teeth in the school and played guitar in a band, to become officially declared boyfriend and girlfriend. The problem was she was the girl I had been waiting for all my life.’ He paused.

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘Nothing. Went on waiting. In the meantime I became Kristin’s pal – she could chat about everything under the sun with me, she felt. She could confide when things between her and Terje weren’t working, without realising that her pal was quietly exultant, waiting for the moment to strike.’

  He grinned.

  ‘Christ, how I hated myself.’

  ‘I’m shocked,’ mumbled Birgitta, affectionately stroking his hair.

  ‘A friend invited a gang of us to his grandparents’ unoccupied farmhouse the same weekend that Terje’s band had a gig. We drank home-made wine and Kristin and I sat on the sofa chatting late into the night. After a while we decided to explore the house and went up to the loft. There was a locked door, but Kristin found a key hanging on a hook and unlocked it. We lay side by side on the duvet of a very undersized four-poster. In the hollows of the bedlinen there was a layer of something black, and I jumped when I saw it was dead flies. There must have been thousands of them. I saw her face close to mine, surrounded by dead flies on the white pillow, bathed in a bluish light from the moon, so big and round outside the window, which made her skin seem transparent.’

  ‘Pah!’ Birgitta said and rolled on top of him. His eyes lingered on hers.

  ‘We talked about everything and nothing. Lay quite still listening to nothing. In the night a car drove past on the road and the light from the headlamps swept across the ceiling and all kinds of strange shadows stole through the room. Kristin finished with Terje two days later.’

  He turned on his side with his back to Birgitta. She snuggled up to him.