The Bat (13 page)

“You just say things like that to get me going,” Birgitta said, as they launched themselves at each other once more.

Harry found Sandra in front of Dez Go-Go. She was standing by the curb scanning her little queendom in King’s Cross, her legs tired from balancing on high heels, her arms crossed, a cigarette between her fingers and the Sleeping Beauty eyes that are both inviting and repelling at once. In short, she looked like a prostitute in any part of the world.

“Morning,” Harry said. Sandra gazed at him without a sign of recognition. “Remember me?”

She raised the corners of her mouth. It might have been intended as a smile. “Sure, love. Let’s go.”

“I’m Holy, the policeman.”

Sandra peered at him. “So it bloody is. At this hour my contact lenses are beginning to go on strike. Must be all the exhaust fumes.”

“Can I buy you a coffee?” Harry asked politely.

She shrugged. “Not much going on here anymore, so I may as well call it a night.”

Teddy Mongabi suddenly appeared in the strip-club door chewing a matchstick. He nodded briefly to Harry.

“How did your parents take it?” Sandra asked when the coffee came. They were sitting in Harry’s breakfast place,
Bourbon & Beef, and the waiter remembered Harry’s regular order: Eggs Benedict, hash browns, flat white. Sandra took her coffee black.

“Excuse me?”

“Your sister …”

“Oh, yes, right.” He lifted the cup to his mouth to gain time.

“Mm, yes, as well as can be expected. Thank you for asking.”

“It’s a terrible world we live in.”

The sun had not yet cleared the rooftops in Darlinghurst Road, but the sky was already azure with a few circular puffs of cloud here and there. It looked like wallpaper for a child’s room. But it didn’t help, because the world was a terrible place.

“I talked to some of the girls,” Sandra said. “The bloke’s name in the picture is White. He’s a dealer. Speed and acid. Some of the girls buy from him, but none of them has had him as a customer.”

“Perhaps he doesn’t have to pay to have his needs covered,” Harry said.

Sandra snorted. “Need for sex is one thing. Need to buy sex is quite another. For lots of men that’s the kick. There’s plenty we can do for you that you don’t get at home, believe you me.”

Harry glanced up. Sandra was staring straight at him and the glaze in her eyes was gone for a moment.

He believed her.

“Did you check the dates we talked about?”

“One of the girls says she bought acid off him the night before your sister was found.”

Harry put down the cup of coffee, spilling it, and leaned across the table. He spoke quickly and softly. “Can I talk to her? Is she reliable?”

Sandra’s broad, red mouth parted in a smile. There was a black cavity where the tooth was missing. “As I said, she
bought acid, which is forbidden in Australia. And is she reliable? She’s an acidhead …” She hunched her shoulders. “I’m only telling you what she told me. But she doesn’t have the world’s clearest concept of what day a Wednesday or a Thursday is, let’s put it like that.”

The mood at the morning meeting was irritable. Even the fan’s growl was deeper than usual.

“Sorry, Holy. We’re dropping White. No motive, and that woman of his says he was in Nimbin at the time of the murder,” Watkins said.

Harry raised his voice. “Listen, Angelina Hutchinson is on speed and God knows what else. She’s pregnant, probably by Evans White. He’s her pusher, for Christ’s sake! God and Jesus rolled into one! She’ll do whatever he tells her. We spoke to the landlord and the woman hated Inger Holter, and with good reason. The Norwegian girl tried to steal her golden goose.”

“Perhaps we’d better have a closer look at the Hutchinson woman,” Lebie said quietly. “At least she has a clear motive. Perhaps she’s the one who needs White as an alibi and not the other way round.”

“White’s lying, isn’t he. He was seen in Sydney the day before Inger Holter was found.” Harry had gotten up and walked the two paces the conference room allowed.

“By a prostitute on LSD and we don’t even know if she’ll make a statement,” Watkins pointed out, turning to Yong. “What did the airlines say?”

“The Nimbin police themselves saw White in the main street three days before the murder. Neither Ansett Airlines nor Qantas has had White on the passenger lists between that time and the murder.”

“Doesn’t mean a thing,” Lebie growled. “If you sell dope you don’t travel under your own name. Anyway, he could have caught the train. Or driven if he’d had the time.”

Harry had some steam up now. “I repeat. American statistics show that in seventy percent of all murder cases the victim knows the murderer. Yet we’re focusing the investigation on a serial killer we all know we have as much chance of catching as winning the pools. Shouldn’t we do something with better odds? After all, we have a guy who has quite a bit of circumstantial evidence stacked against him. The point is that now we have to shake him. Act while the trail’s still hot. Bring him in and wave a charge in his face. Push him into making a mistake. Right now he has us where he wants us: in … a … a …” He searched in vain for the English word for
bakevja
. Rut.

“Hm,” Watkins said, thinking aloud. “Course it won’t look too good if someone we had right under our noses turns out to be guilty, and we did nothing.”

At that moment the door opened and Andrew entered. “G’day, folks, sorry I’m late. But someone has to keep the streets safe. What’s up, boss? You’ve got a frown on you like the Jamison Valley.”

Watkins sighed.

“We’re wondering whether to redistribute some of the resources here. Drop the serial-killer theory for a while and put all our energies into Evans White. Or Angelina Hutchinson. Holy seems to think her alibi’s not up to much.”

Andrew laughed and plucked an apple from his pocket. “I’d like to see a pregnant girl of forty-five kilos squeeze the life out of a sturdy Scandinavian woman. And then fuck her afterward.”

“Just a thought,” muttered Watkins.

“And as far as Evans White’s concerned, you can forget it.” Andrew shone the apple on his sleeve.

“Oh yes?”

“I’ve just been talking to a contact. He was in Nimbin buying some grass on the day of the murder, having heard about White’s wonderful products.”

“And?”

“No one told him White didn’t do business from home, so he went to his flat only to be chased away by a raving lunatic with a rifle under his arm. I showed him the photo. Sorry, but there’s no doubt that Evans White was in Nimbin on the day of the murder.”

The room fell silent. Just the whirr of the fan, and the crunch as Andrew took a large bite out of his apple.

“Back to the drawing board,” said Watkins.

Harry had arranged to meet Birgitta in the Opera House at five for a coffee before she went to work. When they arrived the cafe was closed. A notice said it was something to do with a ballet performance.

“There’s always something,” Birgitta said. They stood against the railing and looked across the harbor to Kirribilli on the other side. “I want the rest of the story.”

“He was called Stiansen, my colleague. Ronny. Thuggish name in Norway, but he wasn’t a thug. Ronny Stiansen was a nice, kind boy who loved being a policeman. Mostly, at any rate. The funeral took place while I was still in hospital. My boss at the police station visited me later. He passed on the Chief of Police’s best wishes, and perhaps I should have smelled a rat then. But I was sober and my mood was rock bottom. The nurse had discovered the alcohol I’d had smuggled in and shifted my neighbor to another ward, so I hadn’t had a drink for two days. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said my boss. ‘But stop it. You’ve got a job to do.’ He thought I was considering suicide. He was mistaken. I was thinking about how I could get hold of some booze.

“My boss isn’t the type to beat about the bush. ‘Stiansen’s dead. There’s nothing you can do to help him now,’ he said. ‘All you can do is help yourself and your family. And us. Have you read the newspapers?’ I answered that I hadn’t read anything—my father had been reading books
to me and I had asked him not to say a word about the accident. My boss said that was fine. That made it much easier. ‘You see, it wasn’t you driving the car,’ he said. ‘Or to put it another way, there wasn’t a drunk from Oslo Police HQ sitting behind the wheel.’ He asked me if I understood. Stiansen was driving. Of the two of us he was the one whose blood test showed he was stone-cold sober.

“He produced some old newspapers and I could see with my somewhat blurred vision that they had written that the driver had been killed instantaneously while the colleague in the passenger seat had been seriously injured. ‘But I was in the driver’s seat,’ I said. ‘I doubt it. You were found in the rear seat,’ the boss said. ‘Remember you had serious concussion. My guess is you can’t remember anything about the drive at all.’ Of course I knew where this was heading. The press was interested only in the driver’s blood test, and so long as that was clean no one would bother about mine. The incident was bad enough for the force already.”

Birgitta had a deep frown between her eyes and looked shaken.

“But how could you tell Stiansen’s parents that he had been driving? These people must be totally without feeling. How …?”

“As I said, loyalty within the police is strong. In some cases the force can come before family considerations. But maybe on this occasion Stiansen’s family had been given a version that was easier to digest. In the boss’s version Stiansen had taken a calculated risk to chase a potential drug dealer and murderer, and accidents can happen to anyone on duty. After all, the boy in the other car was inexperienced and another driver in the same situation would have reacted more quickly, and wouldn’t have driven in front of us. Remember we had the siren on.”

“And were doing 110 kilometers an hour.”

“In a 50 kph area. Well, the boy couldn’t be blamed of
course. The point was how to present the case. Why should the family be told their son was a passenger? Would it be any better for the parents if their son was thought to be someone who passively allowed a drunken colleague to drive the car? The boss went through the arguments over and over again. My head ached so much I thought it was going to explode. In the end I leaned over the edge of the bed and was throwing up as the nurse charged in. The next day the Stiansen family came. The parents and a younger sister. They brought flowers and hoped I would soon be on the road to recovery. The father said he blamed himself because he hadn’t been strict enough with his son about speeding. I cried like a baby. Every second was like a slow execution. They sat with me for over an hour.”

“God, what did you say to them?”

“Nothing. They did all the talking. About Ronny. About all the plans he’d had, about what he was going to be and do. About his girlfriend, who was studying in America. He had mentioned me. Said I was a good police officer and a good friend. Someone you could trust.”

“What happened then?”

“I was in hospital for two months. The boss dropped by now and again. Once he repeated what he’d said before. ‘I know what you’re thinking. Stop it.’ And this time he was right. I just wanted to die. Maybe there was a trace of altruism in keeping the truth hidden; lying in itself was not the worst part. The worst part was that I’d saved my own skin. This may sound odd, and I’ve mulled it over often enough, so let me explain.

“In the fifties there was a young university lecturer called Charles Van Doren who was famous all over the USA for his appearances on a game show. Week after week he beat off all the challengers. The questions were at times unbelievably difficult and everyone was speechless with admiration that this guy could apparently answer all of them. He received
marriage proposals in the post, he had his own fan club and his lectures at the university were packed, of course. In the end he announced publicly that the producers had given him all the questions beforehand.

“When asked why he had exposed the scam he told them about an uncle who had admitted to his wife, Van Doren’s aunt, that he had been unfaithful. It had caused quite a stir in the family, and afterward Van Doren had asked his uncle why he’d told her. The affair had taken place many years before, after all, and he hadn’t had any contact with the woman subsequently. The uncle had answered that being unfaithful hadn’t been the worst part. It was the getting away with it that he couldn’t hack. And so it was for Charles Van Doren as well.

“I think people feel a kind of need for punishment when they can no longer accept their own actions. At any rate I yearned for it: to be punished, to be whipped, to be tortured, to be humiliated. Anything so long as I felt accounts were settled. But there was no one to punish me. They couldn’t even give me the boot; officially I’d been sober, hadn’t I. On the contrary, I received recognition from the Chief of Police in the press because I had been seriously injured on active service. So I punished myself instead. I gave myself the worst punishment I could think of: I decided to live and I decided to stop drinking.”

“And afterward?”

“I got to my feet again and started working. Worked longer days than all the others. Trained. Went on long walks. Read books. Some on law. Stopped meeting bad friends. Good ones too, by the way. The ones I had left after all the boozing. I don’t know why in fact, it was like a big cleanup. Everything in my old life had to go, good as well as bad. One day I sat down and rang round all those I thought I had known in my former life and said: ‘Hi, we can’t meet anymore. It was nice knowing you.’ Most accepted it. A couple
were even glad, I suppose. Some maintained I was walling myself in. Well, they may have been right. For the last three years I’ve spent more time with my sister than anyone else.”

“And the women in your life?”

“That’s another story and at least as long. And as old. After the accident there’s been no one worth the breath. I suppose I’ve become a lone wolf preoccupied with my own concerns. Who knows, I might simply have been more charming when I was drunk.”

“Why did they send you here?”