The Bat(4)

‘Good job she wasn’t alive when she fell,’ he said. ‘She must have hit the cliffs on the way down; there were large chunks of flesh torn from her body when they found her.’

‘How long had she been dead before she was found?’

Andrew pulled a grimace. ‘The police doctor said forty-eight hours. But he . . .’

He put a backward-facing thumb in front of his mouth. Harry nodded. So the doctor was a thirsty soul.

‘And you become sceptical when the figures are too rounded?’

‘She was found on a Friday morning, so let’s say she died some time during Wednesday night.’

‘Any clues here?’

‘As you can see, cars can park down below and the area is unlit at night and relatively deserted. We haven’t got any reports from witnesses, and to be frank, we don’t reckon we’ll get any.’

‘So what do we do now?’

‘Now we do what the boss told me, we go to a restaurant and spend a bit of the force’s entertainment budget. After all, you’re Norway’s highest police rep in a radius of more than twelve hundred miles. At least.’

Andrew and Harry sat at a table with a white cloth. Doyle’s, a seafood restaurant, was situated at the furthest end of Watson’s Bay with only a strip of sand between itself and the sea.

‘Ridiculously beautiful, isn’t it?’ Andrew said.

‘Picture postcard.’ A small boy and a girl were building sandcastles on the beach in front of them, against a background of a deep blue sea and luxuriant green hills with Sydney’s proud skyline in the distance.

Harry chose scallops and Tasmanian trout, Andrew an Australian flatfish which Harry, quite reasonably, had never heard of. Andrew ordered a bottle of Chardonnay Rosemount, ‘quite wrong for this meal, but it’s white, it’s good and it’s smack on budget’, and looked mildly surprised when Harry said he didn’t drink.

‘Quaker?’

‘No, nothing like that,’ Harry said.

Doyle’s was an old family-run restaurant and considered one of Sydney’s best, Andrew informed Harry. It was peak season and packed to the rafters and Harry presumed that was why it was so difficult to gain eye contact with the waiters.

‘The waiters here are like the Planet Pluto,’ Andrew said. ‘They orbit on the periphery, only making an appearance every twentieth year, and even then are impossible to glimpse with the naked eye.’

Harry couldn’t work up any indignation and leaned back in his chair with a contented sigh. ‘But they have excellent food,’ he said. ‘So that explains the suit.’

‘Yes and no. As you can see, it’s not exactly formal here. But it’s better for me not to wear jeans and a T-shirt in places like this. Because of my appearance I have to make an effort.’

‘What do you mean?’

Andrew stared at Harry. ‘Aboriginal people don’t have very high status in this country, as you may perhaps appreciate. Years ago the English wrote home that the natives had a weakness for alcohol and property crime.’

Harry listened with interest.

‘They thought it was in our genes. “All they were good for was making a hell of a racket blowing through long pieces of hollow wood, which they call didgeridoos,” one of them wrote. Well, this country boasts that it’s managed to integrate several cultures into one cohesive society. But cohesive for who? The problem, or the advantage, according to your perspective, is that the natives aren’t seen any more.

‘Aboriginal folks are as good as totally absent from social life in Australia, apart from political debates that affect Indigenous interests and culture. Australians pay lip-service by having Aboriginal art hanging on the walls of their houses. However, we Blackfellas are well represented in the dole queues, suicide statistics and prisons. If you’re Aboriginal the chances of ending up in prison are twenty-six times greater than for any other Australian. Chew on that, Harry Holy.’

Andrew drank the rest of his wine while Harry chewed on that. And the fact that he’d probably just eaten the best fish dish in his thirty-two years.

‘And yet Australia’s no more racist than any other country. After all, we’re a multicultural nation with people from all over the world living here. It just means that dressing in a suit whenever you go to a restaurant is worth the trouble.’

Harry nodded again. There was no more to say on that subject.

‘Inger Holter worked in a bar, didn’t she?’

‘Yes, she did. The Albury in Oxford Street, Paddington. I thought we could wander up there this evening.’

‘Why not now?’ Harry was beginning to be impatient with all this leisure.