The Bat (19 page)

“I don’t know. They’re like women. They tell me stories that mean something else. What’s between the lines may be blindingly obvious, but, as I say, I don’t have the ability to see. Why can’t you women just say things as they are? You overestimate men’s ability to interpret.”

“Is it my fault now?” she exclaimed with a smile and smacked him. The echo rolled down the underwater tunnel.

“Shh, don’t wake the Great White,” said Harry.

It took Birgitta quite a while to spot that he hadn’t touched his wineglass.

“A little glass of wine can’t hurt, can it?” she said.

“Yes, it can,” Harry answered. “It can hurt.” He pulled her toward him with a smile. “But let’s not talk about that.” Then he kissed her, and she took a long, trembling breath, as though she had been waiting for this kiss for an eternity.

Harry woke with a start. He didn’t know where the green light in the water had come from, whether it was the moon over Sydney or searchlights on land, but now it was gone. The candle had burned out, and it was pitch-black. Yet he had a feeling he was being watched. He located the torch beside Birgitta and switched it on—she was wrapped in her half of the rug, naked and with a contented expression. He shone the light on the glass.

At first he thought it was his own reflection he could see, then his eyes became accustomed to the light and he felt his heart register a last pounding beat before it froze. The Great White was beside him, watching him with cold, lifeless eyes. Harry breathed out and condensation formed on
the glass in front of the pale, watery face, the apparition of a drowned man that was so large it seemed to fill the whole tank. The teeth protruded from the jaw, looking as if they had been drawn by a child, a zigzag line of triangles, white daggers, arranged at random in two gumless rows.

Then it floated up and above him, all the while with its dead eyes fixed on him, stiffened into a look of hatred, a white corpse-like body gliding past the torch beam in slow, undulating movements, seemingly never-ending.

“So you’re leaving soon?”

“Yup.” Harry sat with a cup of coffee in his lap, not knowing quite what to do with it. McCormack got up from his desk and started pacing by the window.

“So you think we’re still a long way from cracking the case, do you? You think there’s some psychopath out there in the masses, a faceless murderer who kills on impulse and leaves no clues. And that we’ll have to hope and pray he makes a mistake next time he strikes?”

“I didn’t say that, sir. I just don’t think I’ve got anything to offer here. Plus, I had a call to say they need me in Oslo.”

“Fine. I’ll inform them you’ve acquitted yourself well here, Holy. I understand you’re being considered for promotion at home.”

“No one said anything to me, sir.”

“Take the rest of the day off and see some of Sydney’s sights before you go, Holy.”

“I’ll just eliminate this Alex Tomaros from our inquiries first, sir.”

McCormack stood gazing out of the window at an overcast and stifling hot Sydney.

“I long for home too, Holy. Across the beautiful sea.”

“Sir?”

“Kiwi. I’m a Kiwi, Holy. My parents came here when I was ten. Folk are nicer to each other over there. That’s how I remember it, anyway.”

“We don’t open for several hours yet,” said the grumpy woman at the door with a broom in her hand.

“That’s all right. I’ve got an appointment with Mr. Tomaros,” Harry said, wondering whether she would be convinced by a Norwegian police badge. It proved to be unnecessary. She opened the door just wide enough for Harry to enter. There was a smell of stale beer and soap, and strangely enough the Albury seemed smaller now that he saw it empty and in daylight.

He found Alex Tomaros, alias Mr. Bean, alias Fiddler Ray, inside his office behind the bar. Harry introduced himself.

“How can I help you, Mr. Holy?” He spoke quickly and with an unmistakable accent, the way foreigners, even when they have lived in a country for years, often do.

“Thank you for agreeing to meet at such short notice, Mr. Tomaros. I know other officers have been here and asked you a whole load of things, so I won’t detain you any longer than necessary. I—”

“That’s fine. As you see, I have quite a bit to do. Accounts, you know …”

“I understand. From your statement I saw that you were doing accounts on the evening Inger Holter went missing. Was there anyone here with you?”

“If you’d read my statement thoroughly I’m sure you’d have seen I was on my own. I’m always on my own …” Harry studied Tomaros’s arrogant face and slavering mouth. I believe you, he thought. “… doing accounts. Completely and utterly. If I’d wanted, I could have swindled this place
out of hundreds of thousands of dollars without anyone noticing a thing.”

“Technically, then, you don’t have an alibi.”

Tomaros removed his glasses. “Technically, I rang my mother at two and said I’d finished and was on my way home.”

“Technically, there’s a great deal you could have done between one, when the bar closed, and two, Mr. Tomaros. Not that I’m saying you’re under suspicion or anything.”

Tomaros stared at him without blinking.

Harry flicked through his empty notepad and pretended to be looking for something.

“Why did you ring your mother, by the way? Isn’t it a bit unusual to ring someone at two o’clock in the morning with that kind of message?”

“My mother likes to know where I am. The police have spoken to her too, so I don’t know why we have to go through this again.”

“You’re Greek, aren’t you?”

“I’m an Australian and have lived here for twenty years. My mother’s an Australian national now. Anything else?” He was controlling himself well.

“You showed a personal interest in Inger Holter. How did you react when she rejected you?”

Tomaros licked his lips, and he was about to say something but paused. The tongue appeared again. Like a snake’s, Harry thought. A poor little black snake everyone despises and believes is harmless.

“Miss Holter and I talked about having dinner together, if that’s what you’re alluding to. She’s the only person here I’ve asked out. You can check with any of the others. Cathrine and Birgitta, for example. I set great store by having a good relationship with my employees.”

“
Your
employees?”

“Well, technically, I’m—”

“The bar manager. Well, Mr. Bar Manager, how did you like her boyfriend making an appearance here?”

Tomaros’s glasses had started misting up. “Inger had a good relationship with many of the customers, so it was impossible for me to know which of them was her boyfriend. So she had a boyfriend? Good for her …”

Harry didn’t need to be a psychologist to see through Tomaros’s attempt to sound indifferent.

“You had no idea, then, who she was on intimate terms with, Tomaros?”

He rolled his shoulders. “There was the clown, of course, but his inclinations were elsewhere …”

“The clown?”

“Otto Rechtnagel, a regular here. She used to give him food for—”

“The dog!” Harry shouted. Tomaros jumped in his chair.

Harry got up and smacked a fist into his palm.

“That’s it! Otto was given a bag yesterday. It was leftovers for the dog! I remember now, he said he had a dog. Inger told Birgitta she was taking leftovers for the dog on the evening she went missing, and all the time we assumed they were for the landlord’s dog. But the Tasmanian Devil’s a vegetarian. Do you know what the leftovers were? Do you know where Rechtnagel lives?”

“Good God, how should I know?” Tomaros said, horrified. He had pushed his chair right back against the bookcase.

“OK, listen to me. Keep quiet about this conversation, don’t even mention it to your beloved mother, otherwise I’ll be back to cut your head off. Do you understand, Mr. Bea—Mr. Tomaros?”

Alex Tomaros just nodded.

“And now I need to make a phone call.”

*   *   *

The fan creaked abjectly, but no one in the room noticed. Everyone’s attention was focused on Yong, who had placed a transparency showing a map of Australia on the overhead projector. On the map he had put small red dots with dates next to them.

“These are the times and places of the rapes and murders which we feel our man is responsible for,” he said. “We’ve tried before to find some geographical or temporal pattern without any success. Now it looks as if Harry’s found one for us.”

Yong put another transparency over the first with the same map. This one had blue dots, which covered almost all the red ones beneath.

“What’s this?” Watkins asked tetchily.

“This is taken from the list of shows performed by the Australian Travelling Show Park, a circus, and indicates where they were on the relevant dates.”

The fan continued its lament, but otherwise the conference room was utterly still.

“Holy Dooley, we’ve got ’im!” Lebie shouted.

“The chances of this being a coincidence are, statistically speaking, about one in four million,” Yong smiled.

“Wait, wait, who is it we’re looking for now?” Watkins interjected.

“We’re looking for this man,” Yong said, placing a third transparency on the overhead. Two sad eyes set in a pale, slightly bloated face with a tentative smile looked at them from the screen. “Harry can tell you who this is.”

Harry got up.

“This is Otto Rechtnagel, a professional clown, forty-two years old, who has been on the road with the Australian Travelling Show Park for the last ten years. When the circus isn’t working he lives alone in Sydney and performs freelance. At the moment he’s started up a small troupe giving shows in town. He’s got a clean record as far as we can
see, has never been in the spotlight in connection with any sexual offenses and is considered a convivial, quiet fellow, though somewhat eccentric. The crunch is that he knew the deceased, he was a regular at the bar where Inger Holter worked and they had become good friends over time. She was probably on her way to Rechtnagel’s the night she was killed. With food for his dog.”

“Food for his dog?” Lebie laughed. “At half past one in the morning? I think our clown had something else on his mind.”

“And right there you’ve put your finger on the bizarre side of the case,” Harry said. “Otto Rechtnagel has maintained a facade as a hundred percent, card-carrying homosexual since the age of ten.”

This information occasioned mumbling round the table.

Watkins groaned. “Do you believe that a homosexual man like this could have killed seven women and raped six times as many?”

McCormack had entered the room. He had been briefed. “If you’ve been a happy homo with exclusively homo friends for the whole of your life, it’s perhaps not so surprising that you become anxious the day you discover that the sight of a shapely pair of tits makes John Thomas twitch. Christ, we’re living in Sydney, the only town in the world where people are closet heteros.”

McCormack’s booming laugh drowned the braying of Yong, who was laughing so much his eyes had become two narrow slits in his face.

Watkins didn’t let himself get carried away by all this good humor. He scratched his head. “Nonetheless, there are a couple of things here that don’t stack up. Why would someone who has been so cold and calculating right through suddenly reveal himself like this? Why invite a victim home in this way? I mean, he couldn’t know if Inger had told others where she was going. If she had, she would have led us
directly to him. Besides, it looks like the other victims were chosen at random. Why would he suddenly break the pattern and choose a girl he knows?”

“The only thing we know about this poor bastard is that he has no clear pattern,” Lebie said, blowing at one of his rings. “However, it seems as if he likes variety. Except that the victims have to be blondes”—he polished the ring on his shirtsleeve—“and that they are often strangled afterward.”

“One in four million,” Yong repeated.

Watkins sighed. “OK, I give in. Perhaps we’re simply having our prayers answered. Perhaps he has finally committed the all-important mistake.”

“What are you going to do now?” McCormack asked.

Harry spoke up. “Otto Rechtnagel is unlikely to be at home, he’s got a performance with his circus troupe on Bondi Beach tonight. I suggest we go and watch the show and arrest him straight afterward.”

“I can see our Norwegian colleague has a sense for the dramatic,” McCormack said.

“If the performance has to be interrupted the media will be onto it straightaway, sir.”

McCormack nodded slowly. “Watkins?”

“Fine by me, sir.”

“OK, haul him in, boys.”

Andrew had pulled the duvet up to his chin and looked as if he was already lying in state. The swellings on the side of his face had acquired a spectrum of entertaining colors, and when he tried to smile at Harry his face distorted in pain.

“Jeez, does it hurt so much to smile?” Harry said.

“Everything hurts. Thinking hurts.”

There was a bouquet of flowers on his bedside table.

“From a secret admirer?”

“If you like. His name’s Otto. And tomorrow Toowoomba’s coming, and today you’re here. It’s good to feel loved.”

“I’ve brought something for you, too. You’ll have to smoke it when no one’s watching.” Harry held up a long, dark cigar.

“Ah, a Maduro. Of course. From my dear Norwegian
rubio
.” Andrew beamed and allowed himself a careful laugh.

“How long have I known you now, Andrew?”

Andrew stroked the cigar as if it were a pussy cat.

“Must be about a week now, mate. We’ll soon be like brothers.”

“And how long does it take to
really
know someone?”

“Well, Harry, it doesn’t necessarily take very long to get to know the beaten tracks through the big, dark forest. Some people have fine, straight paths and streetlamps
and road signs. They seem to tell you everything. But that’s where you should be careful you don’t take anything for granted. Because you don’t find the forest’s animals on illuminated paths, you find them in the bushes and the scrub.”

“And how long does it take to know them?”