The Bat (34 page)

“The radio transmitter,” Harry said. “It must still be working!”

“Bravo, bravo! Watkins here. Are you getting any signals from her transmitter? … Yes? … Direction of the Albury? Then she isn’t far away. Quick, quick, quick! Great! Out!”

The three men sat in silence. Lebie shot Harry a glance.

“Ask if they’ve seen White’s car,” Harry said.

“Bravo, come in. Lebie here. What about the black Holden? Has anyone seen it yet?”

“Negative.”

Watkins jumped up and began to pace the floor while swearing under his breath. Harry had been crouched down
ever since he came into the sitting room and only noticed now that his thigh muscles were quivering.

The radio crackled.

“Charlie, this is Bravo. Come in.”

Lebie pressed the loudspeaker button. “Charlie here, Bravo. Speak.”

“Stolz here. We’ve found the bag with the transmitter and microphone in Green Park. The girl’s vanished into thin air.”

“In the bag?” Harry said. “Wasn’t it supposed to have been taped to her body?”

Watkins squirmed. “Probably I forgot to say, but we discussed what would happen if he got into a clinch with her … er, held her and, well, you know. Made a move. Miss Enquist agreed it would be safer to keep the equipment in the bag.”

Harry already had his jacket on.

“Where are you going?” Lebie asked.

“He was waiting for her,” Harry said. “Maybe he followed her from the Albury. She didn’t even have a chance to scream. My guess is he used a cloth with diethyl ether. Same as Otto Rechtnagel got.”

“In the street?” Lebie said with a skeptical tone.

“Nope. In the park. I’m on my way now. Somebody I know there.”

Joseph kept blinking. He was incredibly drunk.

“I think they stood there smooching, Harry.”

“You’ve said that four times now, Joseph. What did he look like? Where were they going? Did he have a car?”

“Mikke and I, we commented, when he dragged her past, that she was even drunker than we were. I think Mikke envied her that. Hee hee. Say hello to Mikke. He’s from Finland.”

Mikke was lying on the other bench and was well gone.

“Look at me, Joseph. Look at me! I have to find her. Do you understand? The guy’s probably a murderer.”

“I’m trying, Harry. I’m really trying. Shit, I wish I could help you.”

Joseph squeezed his eyes shut and groaned as he banged his forehead with his fist.

“The light’s so bloody bad in this park I didn’t see much. I think he was quite big.”

“Fat? Tall? Blond? Dark? Lame? Glasses? Beard? Hat?”

Joseph rolled his eyes in answer. “D’ya have a fig, mate. Makes me think better, you know.”

But all the cigarettes in the world could not blow away the alcoholic mist wreathing Joseph’s brain. Harry gave him the rest of the packet and told him to ask Mikke what he remembered when he came round. Not that he reckoned there would be much.

When Harry returned to Birgitta’s flat it was two in the morning. Lebie was sitting by the radio and watched Harry with sympathetic eyes.

“Gave it a burl, did ya? No good, eh?”

Burl? It was beyond Harry, but he nodded in agreement.

“No good,” he said, crashing down into a chair.

“What was the mood like at the station?” Lebie asked.

Harry fumbled for a cigarette before realizing he had given them to Joseph.

“One notch from chaos. Watkins is close to going off the rails, and cars are racing round Sydney like headless chickens, with their sirens on in full-pursuit mode. The only thing they know about White is he left his flat in Nimbin early today and caught the four o’clock flight to Sydney. Since then no one’s seen him.”

He bummed a cigarette off Lebie and they smoked in silence.

“Nip home and get yourself a few hours’ sleep, Sergey.
I’ll stay here tonight in case Birgitta turns up. Leave the radio on, so it can keep me posted.”

“I can sleep here, Harry.”

Harry shook his head. “Get yourself home. I’ll ring you if there is anything.”

Lebie put a Sydney Bears cap on his polished skull. He loitered by the door.

“We’ll find her, Harry. I can feel it in my bones. So hang in there, mate.”

Harry looked at Lebie. It was hard to say whether Lebie believed what he said.

As soon as he was alone he opened the window and gazed across the rooftops. It had turned cooler, but the air was still mild and mingling with the smell of town, people and food from all corners of the earth. It was one of the planet’s most beautiful summer nights in one of the planet’s most beautiful towns. He looked up at the starry sky. An infinity of small, flashing lights that seemed to pulsate with life if he watched for long enough. All this meaningless beauty.

He tested his feelings. He couldn’t afford to give way to them. Not yet, not now. First, the good feelings. Birgitta’s face between his hands, the traces of laughter in her eyes. The bad feelings. Those were the ones he had to keep at arm’s length, but he entertained them, as if to form an impression of the power they had.

He felt as though he were sitting in a submarine at the bottom of a very deep ocean. The sea was pressing in; around him the creaks and bangs had already started. He could only hope the hull would hold, that a lifetime’s training in self-discipline would finally reveal its worth. Harry thought of the souls that became stars when their earthly shells died. He managed to restrain himself from searching for one star in particular.

After the accident Harry had repeatedly asked himself whether he would have exchanged fates if he had been able. So that he would have been the person who had bent the fence post in Sørkedalsveien, who had been given a ceremonial funeral with full police honors and grieving parents, who had a photograph in a corridor at Grønland Police Station and who in time had become a pale but dear memory to colleagues and relatives. Was it not a tempting alternative to the lie he had to live, which in many ways was even more humiliating than accepting the guilt and shame?

But Harry knew he would not have swapped his fate. He was happy to be alive.

Every morning he woke in the hospital, his mind dizzy from pills and void of thoughts, it was with a sense that something had gone terribly wrong. As a rule it took a couple of drowsy seconds before his memory reacted, told him who and where he was and reconstructed the situation for him with relentless horror. His next thought was that he was alive. That he was still on course, it wasn’t over yet.

After being discharged he was given a session with a psychiatrist.

“In point of fact, you’re a bit late,” the psychiatrist said.
“Your subconscious has probably already chosen how it wants to work with what’s happened, so we can’t influence its first decision. It may, for example, have chosen to repress events. But if it has made such a choice we can try to make it change its mind.”

All Harry knew was that his subconscious told him it was a good thing to be alive, and he wasn’t willing to take the risk that a psychiatrist might make him change his mind, so that was the first and last time he went to see him.

In the days that followed he taught himself it was also a bad strategy to fight against everything he felt at once. Firstly, he wasn’t sure what he felt—at least he didn’t have the whole picture, so it was like challenging a monster he hadn’t even seen. Secondly, his chances of winning were better if he divided the war up into small skirmishes where he might gain some perspective of the enemy, find his weak points and over time break him down. It was like inserting paper into a shredder. If you inserted too much at once, the machine panicked, coughed and died with a clunk. And you had to start again.

A friend of a colleague, whom Harry had met at a rare dinner engagement, was a local council psychologist. He had sent Harry a quizzical look when Harry elucidated on his method for combating emotions.

“War?” he’d said. “Shredder?” He had appeared to be genuinely concerned.

Harry opened his eyes. The first morning light was seeping in through the curtains. He looked at his watch. Six o’clock. The radio crackled.

“This is Delta. Charlie, come in.”

Harry jumped up from the sofa and grabbed the microphone.

“Delta, this is Holy. What’s up?”

“We’ve found Evans White. We got an anonymous tip-off from a woman who had seen him in King’s Cross, so we sent three patrol cars and picked him up. He’s being questioned now.”

“What’s he said?”

“He denied everything until we played him the tape of his conversation with Miss Enquist. He told us he’d driven by Hungry Jack’s three times after eight o’clock, in a white Honda. But he gave up when he didn’t see her and drove back to a flat he’s renting. Later he went to a nightclub, and that was where we found him. By the way, the tip-off asked after you.”

“I thought as much. Her name’s Sandra. Have you searched his flat?”

“Yeah. Nada. Zilch. And Smith says he saw the same white Honda drive past him three times outside Hungry Jack’s.”

“Why didn’t he drive the black Holden as arranged?”

“White says he lied about the car to Miss Enquist in case someone was trying to set him up, so that he could do a couple of circuits and check the coast was clear.”

“All right. I’m on my way now. Ring the others and wake them up, will you?”

“They drove home two hours ago, Holy. They’d been up all night and Watkins told us—”

“I don’t give a shit what Watkins said. Call them.”

They had put back the old fan. It was hard to say if it had benefited from its break; at any rate it creaked in protest at being brought out of retirement.

The meeting was over, but Harry was still sitting in the conference room. His shirt had large, wet patches under his arms, and he had placed a phone on the table in front of him. He closed his eyes and mumbled something to himself. Then he lifted the receiver and dialed the number.

“Hello?”

“This is Harry Holy.”

“Harry! Pleased to hear you’re up early. A good habit. I’ve been waiting for you to ring. Are you alone?”

“I’m alone.”

There was heavy breathing at both ends of the line.

“You’re on to me, aren’t you, mate?”

“I’ve known for quite a while, yes.”

“You’ve done a good job, Harry. And now you’re ringing because I’ve got something you want, right?”

“That’s correct.” Harry wiped away the sweat.

“You understand that I had to take her, Harry?”

“No. No, I don’t understand.”

“Come on, Harry, you’re not stupid. When I heard someone was digging, I knew of course it would be you. I hope for your sake you’ve been smart enough to keep your mouth shut about this. Have you, Harry?”

“I’ve kept my mouth shut.”

“So there’s still a chance you could see your red-haired friend again.”

“How did you do it? How did you take her?”

“I knew when she was finishing work, so I waited outside the Albury in the car and drove behind her. When she went into the park I thought someone ought to tell her it wasn’t advisable to go there at night. So I jumped out of the car and ran after her. I let her have a sniff of a cloth I had with me, and after that I had to help her into the car.”

Harry realized he hadn’t found the transmitter in the bag.

“What do you want me to do?”

“You sound nervous, Harry. Relax. I don’t intend to ask for much. Your job is to catch murderers, and that’s what I’m asking you to do. To continue to do your job. You see, Birgitta told me that the main suspect was a drug dealer, a certain Mr. Evans White. Innocent or not, every year he
and others like him kill many more than I’ve ever done. And that’s not such a small number. Ha ha. I don’t think I need to go into details. All I want is for you to make sure Evans White is convicted for his crimes. Plus a couple of mine. The conclusive evidence could be traces of blood and skin belonging to Inger Holter in White’s flat? Since you know the pathologist he could supply you with some samples of the requisite evidence and you could plant it at the crime scene, couldn’t you? Ha ha. I’m joking, Harry. Perhaps I could get some for you? Perhaps I have traces of blood and skin of the various victims, and the odd hair, lying neatly sorted in plastic bags somewhere? Just in case. After all, you never know when you might need it to send people off on the wrong track. Ha ha.”

Harry squeezed the clammy receiver. He was trying to think. The man obviously didn’t know that the police were aware of Birgitta’s kidnapping and had revised their view of the possible murderer. That could only mean Birgitta hadn’t told him she’d been on her way to meet White, watched by the police. He had snaffled her right under the very noses of a dozen officers without even realizing.

The voice brought him back from his thoughts.

“An alluring possibility, Harry, isn’t it? The murderer helps you to put another enemy of society into the slammer. Well, let’s keep in contact. You have … forty-eight hours to bring the charges. I’ll be waiting to hear the glad tidings on Friday night’s TV news. In the meantime, I promise to treat the redhead with all the respect you might expect of a gentleman. If I don’t hear anything I’m afraid she won’t survive Saturday. But I can promise her one hell of a Friday night.”

Harry rang off. The fan was groaning and screeching wildly. He examined his hands. They were trembling.

*   *   *

“What do you think, sir?” Harry asked.

The motionless broad back that had been in front of the board the whole time stirred.

“I think we should nab the bastard,” McCormack said. “Before we call the others back, tell me exactly how you knew it was him.”

“To be honest, sir, I didn’t know for sure. It was just one of many theories that occurred to me and one in which at first I didn’t really have much faith. After the funeral I got a lift with Jim Connolly, an old boxing colleague of Andrew’s. With him was his wife who he said had been a contortionist with the circus when he met her. He said he had wooed her every day for a year before he got anywhere. At first I didn’t give this a second’s thought, then I realized that perhaps he meant it literally—that in other words the two of them had had the opportunity to see each other every day for a whole year. It struck me that the Jim Chivers crew were in a big tent when Andrew and I saw them in Lithgow, and that a fair was there as well. So I asked Yong to ring the Jim Chivers booking agent to check. And I was right. When Jim Chivers goes on tour it’s almost always as part of a traveling circus or fair. Yong had the old itineraries faxed over this morning, and it turns out that the fair Jim Chivers had been traveling with in recent years also had a circus troupe until a while ago. Otto Rechtnagel’s troupe.”