The Bat(45)

He gently squeezed the knifeman’s right shoulder. Tears appeared in the man’s eyes and his chest heaved violently. His eyes jumped from Harry to Lebie and back again. Human nature is a wild, impenetrable forest, but Harry thought he saw a firebreak in the forest when the knifeman opened his mouth. He was undoubtedly telling the truth.

‘You can’t do anything to me that Evans White can’t do ten times worse if he finds out I’ve grassed him up. But let me just say this: you’re barking up the wrong tree. You’ve got things seriously wrong.’

Harry looked at Lebie. He shook his head. Harry considered for a moment, then he got up and put the skewer on the bedside table.

‘Get well soon.’

‘Hasta la vista,’ the knifeman said, aiming an imaginary gun with his index finger.

At the hotel there was a message for Harry in reception. He recognised the main Sydney Police Station number and rang straight away from his room. Yong Sue answered.

‘We’ve been through all the records again,’ he said. ‘And carried out closer checks. Some misdemeanours are removed from official records after three years. That’s the law. We’re not allowed to register limitation misdemeanours. However, if it’s a sexual offence then . . . well, let me put it this way, we keep them noted in a highly unofficial backup file. I’ve dug up something interesting.’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘The official record of Inger Holter’s landlord, Hunter Robertson, was unblemished. But when we burrowed deeper we discovered he’d been fined twice for flashing. Indecent exposure.’

Harry tried to imagine indecent exposure.

‘How indecent?’

‘Playing with his sexual organs in a public place. Doesn’t have to mean anything, of course, but there’s more. Lebie drove past, but no one was at home, just an ill-tempered cur barking inside the door. However, a neighbour came out. Seems he had an arrangement with Robertson to let the dog out and feed it every Wednesday night, and he has the key. So, of course, Lebie asked if he’d unlocked the door and let the dog out the Wednesday night before they found Inger. He had.’

‘So?’

‘Robertson said in his statement that he’d been at home all night before Inger was found. I thought you’d want to know.’

Harry could feel his pulse beginning to race.

‘What are you going to do now?’

‘A police car will pick him up early, before he goes to work tomorrow.’

‘Hm. When and where did these awful misdeeds take place?’

‘Let me see. I think it was in a park. Here it is. Green Park, it says here. It’s a small—’

‘I know it.’ He thought quickly. ‘I reckon I might go for a walk. Seems like there’s a regular clientele hanging round there. Perhaps they know something.’

Harry was given the dates for the indecent exposure offences, which he noted down in a little black Sparebanken Nor almanac his father gave him every year for Christmas.

‘Just out of interest, Yong. What’s decent exposure?’

‘Being eighteen years old, drunk and mooning at a passing police patrol on Independence Day in Norway.’

He was so gobsmacked he couldn’t utter a word.

Yong was sniggering at the other end.

‘How . . .?’ Harry began.

‘It’s unbelievable what you can do with a couple of passwords and a Danish colleague in the adjacent office.’ Yong was laughing fit to burst.

Harry could feel a gasket beginning to blow.

‘I hope you don’t mind.’ Yong suddenly sounded concerned that he had gone too far. ‘I haven’t told anyone else.’

He seemed so contrite that Harry couldn’t be angry.

‘One of the police officers was a woman,’ Harry said. ‘She complimented me on my tight buttocks afterwards.’

Yong laughed with relief.

The photocells in the park considered it was dark enough and the lamps switched themselves on as Harry walked towards the bench. He recognised the grey man sitting there at once.

‘Evening.’

The head lying with its chin on the chest was slowly raised, and two brown eyes looked at Harry – or, to be more precise, through Harry – and fixed themselves on a very distant point.

‘Fig?’ he asked in a croaky voice.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Fig, fig,’ he repeated, waving two fingers in the air.

‘Oh, fag. You want a cigarette?’

Harry flicked two cigarettes from the packet and took one himself. They sat in silence for a moment, enjoying the smoke. They were sitting in a green lung in the middle of a large city, yet Harry had the feeling he was in a deserted remote area. Perhaps it was because night had fallen, accompanied by the electric sound of invisible grasshopper legs being rubbed against one another. Or perhaps it was the feeling of something ritualistic and timeless, this smoking together, the white policeman and the black man with the broad, outlandish face descended from this vast continent’s Indigenous population.