The Bat

by Jo Nesbo

  Genghis didn’t answer, just stared at Harry with his slanting, sorrowful eyes beneath the white bandage.

  ‘I’m getting sick of sitting in this hospital, Genghis, so I’ll make this brief. Your assault on me resulted in two broken ribs and a punctured lung. Since I was not in uniform, did not show ID and wasn’t working under the auspices of the police department, and Australia is beyond my area of jurisdiction, the authorities have declared that from a legal point of view I was acting as a private person and not as a civil servant. In other words, I can decide whether I report you for violent assault or not. Which brings us back to your relatively clean record. You see, there is a matter of a conditional sentence for grievous bodily harm hanging over your head, is that not correct? Add six months to this and we’re up to a year. A year, or you could tell me . . .’ he went up to the ear that was sticking out from Genghis Khan’s bandaged head like a pink mushroom and shouted, ‘. . . WHAT THE HELL’S GOING ON!’

  Harry dropped back on his chair.

  ‘So what do you say?’

  31

  A Fat Lady

  McCORMACK STOOD WITH his back to Harry, his arms crossed and a hand propping up his chin while staring out of the window. The thick mist had erased the colours and frozen movement so that the view was more like a blurred black-and-white picture of the town. The silence was broken by a tapping noise. Harry eventually realised it was McCormack’s fingernails drumming on the teeth in his upper jaw.

  ‘So Kensington knew Otto Rechtnagel. And you were aware of that all along.’

  Harry shrugged. ‘I know I should have said before, sir. But I didn’t feel—’

  ‘—it was your business to say who Andrew Kensington knew or didn’t know. Fair enough. But now Kensington’s done a runner, no one knows where he is and you suspect mischief?’

  Harry nodded confirmation to his back.

  McCormack watched him in the window reflection. Then he swivelled round in a semi-pirouette to stand face to face with Harry.

  ‘You seem a bit . . .’ he completed the pirouette and had his back to him again, ‘. . . restless, Holy. Is something bothering you? Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?’

  Harry shook his head.

  Otto Rechtnagel’s flat was in Surry Hills; to be exact, on the road between the Albury and Inger Holter’s room in Glebe. A mountain of a woman was blocking their way up the stairs when they arrived.

  ‘I saw the car. Are you the police?’ she asked in a high-pitched, shrill voice, and continued without waiting for an answer. ‘You can hear the dog yourselves. It’s been like that since this morning.’

  They heard the hoarse barking from behind the door marked Otto Rechtnagel.

  ‘It’s sad about Mr Rechtnagel, it is, but now you’ve got to take his dog. It’s been barking non-stop and it’s driving us all out of our minds. You shouldn’t be allowed to keep dogs here. Unless you do something we’ll be forced to . . . er, well, you know what I mean.’

  The woman rolled her eyes and thrust out two podgy arms. There was an immediate tang of sweat and compensatory perfume. Harry disliked her intensely.

  ‘Dogs know,’ Lebie said, running two fingers over the balustrade and examining his forefinger with disapproval.

  ‘What do you mean by that, young man?’ the fat woman asked, dropping her arms to her sides and still looking as if she had no intention of moving.

  ‘It knows its master is dead, ma’am,’ Harry said. ‘Dogs have a sixth sense about things like that. It’s grieving.’

  ‘Grieving?’ She eyed them suspiciously. ‘A dog? What rubbish.’

  ‘What would you do if someone cut off the arms and legs of your master, ma’am?’ Lebie looked at the woman. Her jaw dropped.

  After the landlady had made way they took out the various keys they had found in Otto’s trouser pockets in the dressing room. The barking had changed to growling; Otto Rechtnagel’s dog had probably heard the approach of strangers.

  The bull terrier was standing in the hall as the door opened, its legs positioned ready for action. Lebie and Harry stood motionless, signalling to the comical white dog that the ball was in its court. The growling changed to half-hearted barking, then it gave up the whole idea and slunk into the living room. Harry followed.

  Daylight flooded in through the large windows in the living room which was lavishly over-furnished: a solid red sofa covered with huge colourful cushions, sizeable paintings on the walls and a low but vibrant green glass table. In the corners of the room there were two china leopards.

  On the table was a lampshade which did not belong there.

  The dog had its nose in a wet patch in the middle of the floor. A pair of men’s shoes were hanging above it in the air. There was a stench of urine and excrement. Harry followed the shoe and sock up the foot and saw the black skin between where the sock stopped and the trousers began. He let his gaze wander further up the trousers, to the enormous hands limply hanging down and had to force his eyes upwards to the white shirt. Not because he hadn’t seen a man hanging before, but because he had recognised the shoes.

  The head rested against one shoulder, and the end of the cable with a grey light bulb dangled from his chest. The cable had been tied around a solid hook in the ceiling – perhaps a chandelier had hung from there at some point – and wound round Andrew’s neck three times. His head was almost touching the ceiling. Dreamy, dimmed eyes stared out and a bluish-black tongue protruded from his mouth as though he had made a defiant gesture at death. Or life. An overturned chair lay on the floor.

  ‘Fuck,’ Harry muttered under his breath. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ He fell into a chair, the energy knocked out of him. Lebie entered and a short cry escaped his lips.

  ‘Find a knife,’ Harry whispered. ‘And ring for an ambulance. Or whatever it is you usually ring for.’

  From where Harry was sitting daylight was behind Andrew’s back, and the swaying body was just an alien, black silhouette against the window. Harry begged his Maker to put another man at the end of the cable before he got to his feet again. He promised not to say a word to anyone about the miracle. He would even pray, if it would help.

  He heard steps in the hallway and Lebie screaming from the kitchen: ‘Get out, you fat cow!’

  After they had buried Harry’s mother he had gone five days without feeling anything, other than that he ought to have felt something. He was therefore surprised when he slumped back among the cushions on the sofa and his eyes filled and sobs forced their way up his throat.

  Not that he hadn’t cried at other times. He had felt a lump in his throat as he sat alone in the room at the Bardufoss barracks reading the letter from Kristin that said ‘this is the best thing that has happened to me in the whole of my life’. It was not clear from the context whether she meant leaving him or meeting the English musician she would be travelling with. He had only known it was one of the worst things that had happened to him in the whole of his life. Yet the sobs had stopped there, some way up his throat. Like nausea and almost vomiting.

  He got to his feet and looked up. Andrew had not been replaced. Harry went to take a few steps across the floor, to pull up a chair to have something to stand on when they cut him down, but was unable to move. He remained motionless until Lebie came in with a kitchen knife. When Lebie started sending him strange looks Harry realised that hot tears were running down his cheeks.

  Jeez, is that all? Harry thought, perplexed.

  Without saying a word, they cut Andrew down, laid him on the floor and searched his pockets. There were two bunches of keys, one big and one small, as well as a loose key Lebie immediately confirmed fitted in the front-door lock.

  ‘No signs of external violence,’ Lebie said, after a quick inspection.

  Harry unbuttoned Andrew’s shirt. He had a crocodile tattooed on his chest. Harry also pulled up Andrew’s trouser legs and checked.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘We’ll have to wait and see wha
t the doctor says,’ Lebie said.

  Harry felt tears coming again and barely managed to shrug his shoulders.

  32

  Chatwick

  AS HARRY HAD suspected, there was feverish activity at the office.

  ‘It’s on Reuters,’ Yong said. ‘Associated Press’s sending over a photographer, and they’ve rung from the mayor’s office saying NBC’s going to fly in a TV crew to do a story.’

  Watkins shook his head. ‘Six thousand people die in a tidal wave in India and are mentioned in a single newsflash. One homosexual clown has a few limbs cut off and it’s a world event.’

  Harry asked them to come into the conference room. He closed the door.

  ‘Andrew Kensington’s dead,’ he said.

  Watkins and Yong stared at him in disbelief. In brief, direct terms Harry told them how they had found Andrew hanging from the ceiling in Otto Rechtnagel’s flat.

  He looked them straight in the eye and his voice was unwavering. ‘We didn’t ring you because we wanted to be sure there wouldn’t be any leaks. Perhaps we ought to keep a lid on this for the time being.’

  It struck him that it was easier to speak about this as a police matter. He could be objective and he knew how to deal with it. A body, a cause of death and a course of events, which they would try to keep under wraps. It kept Death – the stranger he didn’t know how to confront – at arm’s length for the moment.

  ‘OK,’ Watkins said, flustered. ‘Careful now. Let’s not jump to any hasty conclusions.’

  He wiped the sweat off his top lip. ‘I’ll get McCormack. Shit, shit, shit. What have you done, Kensington? If the press gets a sniff of this . . .’ And Watkins was gone.

  The three left behind sat listening to the fan’s lament.

  ‘He worked with us here in Homicide now and then,’ Lebie said. ‘He wasn’t really one of us, I suppose, nevertheless he was . . .’

  ‘A kind man,’ Yong said, studying the floor. ‘A kind man. He helped me when I was new here. He was . . . a kind man.’

  McCormack agreed they should keep it under their hats. He was not at all happy, pacing up and down, heavier on his feet than usual, and his bushy eyebrows gathered like a grey trough of low pressure above his nose.

  After the meeting Harry sat in Andrew’s chair and flicked through his notes. He didn’t glean much, just a few addresses, a couple of phone numbers that turned out to be for garage workshops and some incomprehensible doodles on a sheet of paper. The drawers were as good as empty, just office equipment. Then Harry examined the two bunches of keys they had found on him. One had Andrew’s initials on the leather holder, so he assumed they were his private keys.

  He picked up the phone and rang Birgitta. She was shocked, asked some questions, but left the talking to Harry.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Harry said. ‘A guy I’ve known for little more than a week dies and I cry like a baby, while I couldn’t shed so much as a tear for my mother for five days. My mother, the greatest woman in the world! Where’s the logic to it?’

  ‘Logic?’ Birgitta said. ‘I doubt it has much to do with logic.’

  ‘Well, I just wanted to let you know. Keep it to yourself. Will I be getting a visit after you finish work?’

  She hesitated. She was expecting a phone call from Sweden tonight. From her parents.

  ‘It’s my birthday,’ she said.

  ‘Many happy returns.’

  Harry rang off. He sensed an old foe growling in his stomach.

  Lebie and Harry headed towards Andrew Kensington’s home in Chatwick.

  ‘The number where the man hunts the bird . . .’ Harry began.

  The sentence hung in the air between two sets of traffic lights.

  ‘You were saying . . .?’ Lebie said.

  ‘Nothing. I was just thinking about the show. I’m mystified by the bird number. It didn’t seem to have any point. A hunter who thinks he’s hunting a bird and suddenly discovers the prey is a cat, so a hunter is hunted. OK, but so what?’

  After half an hour’s drive they reached Sydney Road, a nice street in a pleasant district.

  ‘Jeez, is this right?’ Harry said as they saw the house number they had been given by the HR department. It was a large brick house with a double garage, a well-tended lawn and a fountain at the front. A gravel path led to an impressive mahogany door. A young boy opened it after they had rung. He nodded gravely when they mentioned Andrew, pointed to himself and covered his mouth with a hand to show them he was mute. Then he took them round the back and pointed to a small, low brick building on the other side of the enormous garden. Had it been an English estate one might have called it the gatekeeper’s cottage.

  ‘We are going to go in,’ Harry said and noticed that he was over-articulating. As if there was something wrong with the boy’s hearing as well. ‘We’re . . . we were colleagues of Andrew. Andrew’s dead.’

  He held up Andrew’s bunch of keys with the leather holder. For a moment the boy looked at the keys in bewilderment, gasping for air.

  ‘He died suddenly last night,’ Harry said. The boy stood in front of them with his arms hanging by his sides and his eyes slowly moistening. Harry realised the two of them must have known each other well. He’d been told Andrew had lived at this address for almost twenty years, and it occurred to him the boy had probably grown up in the big house. An involuntary image appeared to Harry: the little boy and the black man playing with a ball in the garden, the boy being given money to run and buy an ice cream. Perhaps he had been raised with well-intentioned advice and semi-true stories about the policeman in the cottage, and, when he was old enough, he would have found out how to treat girls and throw a straight left without dropping his guard.

  ‘Actually, that’s wrong. We were more than colleagues. We were friends, we were friends too,’ Harry said. ‘Is it all right if we go in?’

  The boy blinked, pinched his mouth and nodded.

  The first thing that struck him on entering the small bachelor pad was how clean and tidy it was. In the frugally furnished sitting room, there were no newspapers lying around on the coffee table in front of the portable TV, and in the kitchen no dishes waiting to be washed. In the hall, shoes and boots were lined up with laces inside. The strict order reminded him of something.

  In the bedroom, the bed was made immaculately, white sheets tucked in so tightly at the side that getting under the blankets required an aerobatic manoeuvre. Harry had already cursed this arrangement in his hotel bedroom. He peeped into the bathroom. Razor and soap were laid out in military order next to aftershave, toothpaste, toothbrush and shampoo on the vanity shelf over the sink. That was all. No extravagant toiletries either, Harry observed – and suddenly became aware of what this meticulousness reminded him of: his own flat after he stopped drinking.

  Harry’s new life had in fact started there, with the simple exercise of discipline, based on everything having its place, shelf or drawer and being returned there after use. Not so much as a biro was left out, not a blown fuse in a fuse box. In addition to the practical application there was of course a symbolic significance: rightly or wrongly, he used the level of chaos in his flat as a thermometer for the state of the rest of his life.

  Harry asked Lebie to go through the wardrobe and the chest of drawers in the bedroom, and waited until he had gone out to open the cupboard beside the mirror. They were on the top shelf, neatly stacked in rows and pointing at him, like a warehouse of miniature missiles: a couple of dozen vacuum-packed disposable syringes.

  Genghis Khan had not been lying when he said Andrew was a junkie. For that matter, Harry had been in no doubt either when they found Andrew in Otto’s flat. He knew that in a climate that generally necessitates short sleeves and T-shirts a police officer cannot walk around with a forearm covered with needle holes. Therefore he had to insert the syringe where the marks wouldn’t be seen, such as, for example, on the back of his legs. Andrew’s calves and the backs of his knees were full of them.

  Andre
w had been a customer of the guy with the Rod Stewart voice for as long as Genghis could remember. He reckoned Andrew was the type who could consume heroin and continue to function almost as normal both socially and professionally. ‘That’s not as unusual as many like to think,’ Genghis had said.

  ‘But when Speedy discovered round and about that this bloke was a police officer he got paranoid and wanted to shoot him. Thought he was an undercover cop. But we talked him out of it. The bloke had been one of Speedy’s best customers for years. Never any haggling, always had his money ready, kept arrangements, no chat, never any shit. I’ve never seen an Aboriginal deal with dope so well. Bloody hell, I’ve never seen anyone deal with dope so well!’

  Nor had he seen or heard any rumours about Andrew talking to Evans White.

  ‘White hasn’t got anything to do with the customer side down here any more. He’s a wholesaler, that’s all. He pushed stuff in King’s Cross for a while – I have no idea why, he earns enough as it is. Apparently he stopped – had some trouble with a couple of prostitutes, I heard.’

  Genghis had spoken openly. More openly than was necessary to save his hide. In fact, he had seemed to find it amusing. He must have reckoned there was no great danger of Harry going after them as long as they had at least one of his colleagues on their books.

  ‘Say hello and tell the bloke he’s welcome back. We don’t hold grudges,’ Genghis had grinned at length. ‘Whoever they are, they always come back, you know. Always.’

  33

  A Pathologist

  THE CARETAKER AT St George’s Theatre was in the lunch room and remembered Harry from the previous night. He seemed relieved.

  ‘F-finally someone who’s not going to dig and ask questions about what it looked like. We’ve had journalists buzzing round here the wh-whole day,’ he said. ‘Plus those forensic fellas of yours. But they’ve got enough work to do of their own; they don’t b-bother us.’

  ‘Yes, they have quite a job on their hands.’