The Bat(41)

‘You’re so wise,’ Harry said and Birgitta punched him in the stomach. He fell onto the pavement screaming, she laughed and begged him not to make a scene, and he got up and chased her up Oxford Street.

‘I hope he moved here,’ Harry said afterwards.

Having left Birgitta (he was worried that he had begun to think of every separation from her, short or long, as leave-taking), he queued at a bus stop. A boy with a Norwegian flag on his rucksack was in front of him. Harry was wondering if he should make his presence known when the bus arrived.

The bus driver groaned when Harry gave him a twenty-dollar note.

‘S’pose you didn’t have a fifty, did ya?’ he said sarcastically.

‘If I’d had one, I’d have given it to you, you stupid bastard,’ he said in eloquent Norwegian while smiling innocently. The bus driver glowered ferociously at him as he handed out the change.

He had decided to follow the route Inger took to walk home on the night of the murder. Not because it hadn’t been walked by others – Lebie and Yong had visited the bars and restaurants on the route and shown the photo of Inger Holter, without any success, of course. He had tried to take Andrew along with him, but he had dug his heels in and said it was a waste of valuable time better spent in front of the TV.

‘I’m not kidding, Harry. Watching TV gives you confidence. When you see how stupid people generally are on the box it makes you feel smart. And scientific studies show that people who feel smart perform better than people who feel stupid.’

There was little Harry could say to such logic, but Andrew had at any rate given him the name of a bar in Bridge Road where he could pass on Andrew’s greetings to the owner. ‘Doubt he’s got anything to tell you but he might knock fifty per cent off the coke,’ Andrew had said with a cheerful grin.

Harry got off the bus at the town hall and ambled in the direction of Pyrmont. He looked at the tall blocks and the people walking round them the way city folk do, without being any the wiser as to how Inger Holter had met her end that night. At the fish market he went into a cafe and ordered a bagel with smoked salmon and capers. From the window he could see the bridge across Blackwattle Bay and Glebe on the other side. They had started setting up an outdoor stage in the open square, and Harry saw from the posters it was to do with Australia Day, which was that weekend. Harry asked the waiter for a coffee and started to wrestle with the Sydney Morning Herald, the kind of paper you can use to wrap up a whole cargo of fish, and it is a real job to get through even if you only look at the pictures. But there was still an hour’s daylight left and Harry wanted to see what creatures emerged in Glebe after the onset of darkness.





20


Cricket


THE OWNER OF the cricket was also the proud owner of the shirt Allan Border wore when Australia beat England four times during the 1989 Ashes series. It was exhibited behind glass and a wooden frame above the poker machine. On the other wall there were two bats and a ball used in a 1979 series when Australia drew with Pakistan. After someone had pinched the stumps from the South Africa game, which used to hang over the exit, the owner had deemed it necessary to nail his treasures down – whereupon one pad belonging to the legendary Don Bradman was shot to pieces by a customer who was unable to wrest it from the wall.

When Harry entered and saw the combination of treasures on the walls and the ostensible cricket fans forming the clientele of the Cricket, the first thing that struck him was that he ought to revise his perception of cricket as a toffs’ sport. The customers were neither groomed nor particularly sweet-smelling, and nor was Borroughs behind the bar.

‘Evenin’,’ he said. His voice sounded like a blunt scythe against a whetstone.

‘Tonic, no gin,’ Harry said and told him to keep the change from the ten-dollar bill.

‘A lot for a tip, more like a bribe,’ Borroughs said, waving the note. ‘Are you a policeman?’

‘Am I so easy to spot?’ Harry asked with a resigned expression.

‘Apart from the fact you sound like a bloody tourist, yeah.’

Borroughs put down the change and turned away.

‘I’m a friend of Andrew Kensington,’ Harry said.

Borroughs swivelled round as fast as lightning and picked up the money.

‘Why didn’t you say that straight away?’ he mumbled.

Borroughs couldn’t remember having seen or heard about Inger Holter, which in fact Harry already knew as he and Andrew had spoken about him. But as his old tutor in the Oslo Police Force, ‘Lumbago’ Simonsen, always said: ‘Better to ask too many times than too few.’

Harry looked around. ‘What have you got here?’ he asked.