Birgitta grunted. Harry went on.
‘Sometimes I think I’ve got something, only in the next minute to be thrown into confusion once again. I don’t like being confused; I have no tolerance for it. That’s why I wish either I didn’t have this ability to capture details, or I had a greater ability to assemble them into a picture that made some sense.’
He turned to Birgitta and buried his face in her hair.
‘It’s a bad job on God’s part to give a man with so little intelligence such a good eye for detail,’ he said, trying to place something that had the same scent as Birgitta’s hair. But it was so long ago he had forgotten what it was.
‘So what can you see?’ she asked.
‘Everyone’s trying to point my attention to something I don’t understand.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. They’re like women. They tell me stories that mean something else. What’s between the lines may be blindingly obvious, but, as I say, I don’t have the ability to see. Why can’t you women just say things as they are? You overestimate men’s ability to interpret.’
‘Is it my fault now?’ she exclaimed with a smile and smacked him. The echo rolled down the underwater tunnel.
‘Shh, don’t wake the Great White,’ said Harry.
It took Birgitta quite a while to spot that he hadn’t touched his wine glass.
‘A little glass of wine can’t hurt, can it?’ she said.
‘Yes, it can,’ Harry answered. ‘It can hurt.’ He pulled her towards him with a smile. ‘But let’s not talk about that.’ Then he kissed her, and she took a long, trembling breath, as though she had been waiting for this kiss for an eternity.
Harry woke with a start. He didn’t know where the green light in the water had come from, whether it was the moon over Sydney or searchlights on land, but now it was gone. The candle had burned out, and it was pitch black. Yet he had a feeling he was being watched. He located the torch beside Birgitta and switched it on – she was wrapped in her half of the rug, naked and with a contented expression. He shone the light on the glass.
At first he thought it was his own reflection he could see, then his eyes became accustomed to the light and he felt his heart register a last pounding beat before it froze. The Great White was beside him, watching him with cold, lifeless eyes. Harry breathed out and condensation formed on the glass in front of the pale, watery face, the apparition of a drowned man that was so large it seemed to fill the whole tank. The teeth protruded from the jaw, looking as if they had been drawn by a child, a zigzag line of triangles, white daggers, arranged at random in two gumless rows.
Then it floated up and above him, all the while with its dead eyes fixed on him, stiffened into a look of hatred, a white corpse-like body gliding past the torch beam in slow, undulating movements, seemingly never-ending.
25
Mr Bean
‘SO YOU’RE LEAVING soon?’
‘Yup.’ Harry sat with a cup of coffee in his lap, not knowing quite what to do with it. McCormack got up from his desk and started pacing by the window.
‘So you think we’re still a long way from cracking the case, do you? You think there’s some psychopath out there in the masses, a faceless murderer who kills on impulse and leaves no clues. And that we’ll have to hope and pray he makes a mistake next time he strikes?’
‘I didn’t say that, sir. I just don’t think I’ve got anything to offer here. Plus, I had a call to say they need me in Oslo.’
‘Fine. I’ll inform them you’ve acquitted yourself well here, Holy. I understand you’re being considered for promotion at home.’
‘No one said anything to me, sir.’
‘Take the rest of the day off and see some of Sydney’s sights before you go, Holy.’
‘I’ll just eliminate this Alex Tomaros from our inquiries first, sir.’
McCormack stood gazing out of the window at an overcast and stifling hot Sydney.
‘I long for home too, Holy. Across the beautiful sea.’
‘Sir?’
‘Kiwi. I’m a Kiwi, Holy. My parents came here when I was ten. Folk are nicer to each other over there. That’s how I remember it, anyway.’
‘We don’t open for several hours yet,’ said the grumpy woman at the door with a broom in her hand.
‘That’s all right. I’ve got an appointment with Mr Tomaros,’ Harry said, wondering whether she would be convinced by a Norwegian police badge. It proved to be unnecessary. She opened the door just wide enough for Harry to enter. There was a smell of stale beer and soap, and strangely enough the Albury seemed smaller now that he saw it empty and in daylight.