The Bat(94)

Toowoomba laughed. ‘Can you hear that so easily?’

‘His master’s voice,’ Harry said. ‘The man should have been a priest.’

They stopped by a dusty little car, which was obviously Toowoomba’s.

‘Listen, I might need someone who knew Andrew,’ Harry said, reacting to a hunch. ‘The way he thought. Why he did what he did.’

He straightened up, and their eyes met.

‘I think someone killed Andrew,’ Harry said.

‘Bullshit!’ Toowoomba burst out. ‘You don’t think, you know! Everyone who knew Andrew knows he would never willingly leave a party. For him, life was the biggest party. I don’t know anyone who loved life more than him. Whatever it did to him. If he was going to check out there would have been plenty of opportunities – and reasons – before.’

‘Then we agree,’ Harry said.

‘You can usually reach me on this number,’ Toowoomba said, scribbling on a matchbox. ‘It’s a mobile phone number.’

Toowoomba was going north and clattered off in his old white Holden. Birgitta and Harry stood watching, then Harry suggested hitching a ride with one of his colleagues into town. But it seemed most of them had gone. Then a magnificent old Buick pulled up in front of them, the driver rolled down the window and stuck out a red face with a striking nose. It was like the kind of potato where several tubers had grown into one, and, if possible, even redder than the rest of his face with its fine network of thin veins.

‘Going to town, folks?’ the nose asked, and told them to hop in.

‘My name’s Jim Connolly. This is my wife, Claudia,’ he said, after they had settled onto the broad back seat. A tiny, dark face with a beaming smile turned to them from the front seat. She looked Indian, and was so small they could barely see her above the headrest.

Jim observed Harry and Birgitta in the rear-view mirror.

‘Friends of Andrew? Colleagues?’

He steered the jalopy carefully down the gravel road while Harry explained the connections.

‘Right, so you’re from Norway and you’re from Sweden. That’s a long way away, that is. Well, almost everyone here comes from somewhere far away. Take Claudia, for example, she’s from Venezuela, where they have all the Miss Universes, you know. How many titles have you had, Claudia? Including your own. Ha ha.’ He laughed so much his eyes disappeared beneath laughter lines, and Claudia joined in.

‘I’m Australian,’ Jim continued. ‘My great-great-great-grandfather came here from Ireland. He was a murderer and a thief. Ha ha ha. Some time back people didn’t like to admit they were descendants of convicts, even though it was nearly two hundred years ago. But I’ve always been proud of it. They were the ones plus a bunch of sailors and soldiers who founded this country. And a fine country it is, too. We call it the lucky country down here. Yeah, yeah, things change. Now I hear it’s “in” to trace your forefathers back to the convicts. Ha ha ha. Too bad about Andrew, wasn’t it?’

Jim was like a verbal machine gun, and Harry and Birgitta couldn’t manage to chip in much before he took over again. And the faster he spoke, the slower he drove. Like David Bowie on Harry’s old cassette player. Years ago he’d been given a battery-powered recorder by his father, and the louder you turned up the volume the slower the tape went.

‘Andrew and I used to box together on the Jim Chivers roadshows. You know, Andrew never had his nose broken. No sirree, no one ever sullied his pugilistic virtue. They’ve got pretty flat noses, these Aboriginal guys, p’raps that’s why no one ever gave it a thought. But Andrew was fit and healthy on the inside. He had a healthy heart and a healthy nose. Well, as healthy as a heart can be after you’ve been kidnapped by the authorities at birth. And his heart wasn’t as healthy after the row during the Australian championships in Melbourne. I suppose you heard about that, did you? He lost quite a lot then.’ They were doing less than forty now.

‘The champion, Campbell, well, his girl, she was after Andrew, on her knees she was, but she’d probably been so stunningly beautiful all her life that she’d never experienced rejection. If she had, everything would have been very different. But when she knocked on Andrew’s hotel door that night and he politely asked her to leave, she couldn’t cope with it; she went straight back to her boyfriend and told him Andrew had groped her. They rang his room and told him to go down to the kitchen. Rumours are still circulating about the fight down there. Andrew’s life went into a siding after that. But they never got his nose. Ha ha ha. Are you a couple?’