The Bat Read online

  The other end of the line went quiet.

  ‘Wouldn’t you rather know how Birgitta is?’

  ‘No,’ Harry said. Not too fast, not too loud. ‘You said you would treat her like a gentleman. I trust you.’

  ‘I hope you’re not trying to give me a bad conscience, Harry. In any case, it’s a pointless exercise. I’m a psychopath. I know that, you know,’ Toowoomba said with a low chuckle. ‘Frightening, isn’t it. We psychopaths aren’t supposed to know. But I’ve always known. And Otto did. Otto even knew that now and then I would have to punish them. But Otto couldn’t keep his gob shut. He’d already told Andrew and was on the point of cracking up, so I was forced to act. The afternoon Otto was due to appear at St George’s I slipped into his flat, after he’d left, to remove anything that could connect him with me – photos, gifts, letters, that sort of thing. The doorbell rang. I carefully opened the bedroom window and, to my great surprise, saw that it was Andrew. My first instinct was not to open the door. But then I realised my original plan was about to be ruined. You see, I’d been intending to visit Andrew at the hospital the next day and discreetly donate him a teaspoon, a lighter, a disposable syringe, as well as a little bag of much-desired heroin with my own home-made mix added.’

  ‘A deadly cocktail.’

  ‘You might say so.’

  ‘How could you be sure he would take it? He knew you were a murderer, didn’t he.’

  ‘He didn’t know I knew he knew. If you follow me, Harry. He didn’t know Otto had told me. Anyway, a junkie with withdrawal symptoms is willing to take risks. Such as trusting someone he thinks regards him as a father. But there was no point speculating about all of that any more. He’d left the hospital and was standing at the entrance to the block.’

  ‘So you decided to let him in?’

  ‘Do you know how fast the human brain can work, Harry? Do you know that those dreams with long, convoluted plots which we think we spent all night concocting, in reality took place in a few seconds of feverish cerebral activity? That was how quickly it came to me, more or less, the plan to make it look as if Andrew had been behind everything. I swear I hadn’t given it a thought until then! So I pressed the buzzer and waited for him to come up. I stood behind the door with my magic cloth—’

  ‘Diethyl ether.’

  ‘—and afterwards tied Andrew to a chair, found his gear and the little dope he had left and gave him the lot so I could be sure he would be quiet until I returned from the theatre. On the way back I got hold of some more shit and Andrew and I had a real party. Yes, it really took off and when I left he was hanging from the ceiling.’

  Again the low chuckle. Harry concentrated on taking deep, calm breaths. He had never been so afraid in his whole life.

  ‘What do you mean by you had to punish them?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said before you had to punish them.’

  ‘Oh, that. Yes, as I’m sure you know, psychopaths are often paranoid, or they suffer from other delusions. My delusion is that my mission in life is to avenge my people.’

  ‘By raping white women?’

  ‘Childless white women.’

  ‘Childless?’ Harry repeated, bemused. That was a feature common to the victims that the investigation hadn’t picked up, and why would they? There was nothing unusual about such young women not having had children.

  ‘Yes, indeed. Had you really not noticed? Terra Nullius, Harry! When you came here you defined us as nomads without property because we didn’t sow seeds in the earth. You took our country from us, raped and killed it in front of our very eyes.’ Toowoomba didn’t need to raise his voice. The words were loud enough. ‘Well, your childless women are now my terra nullius, Harry. No one has fertilised them, therefore no one owns them. I’m only following the white man’s logic and doing as he does.’

  ‘But you call it a delusion yourself, Toowoomba! You know how sick it is!’

  ‘Of course it’s sick. But sickness is normal, Harry. It’s the absence of sickness that’s dangerous, for then the organism stops fighting and it soon falls apart. But delusions, Harry, don’t underestimate them. They’re worth having in every culture. Take your own, for example. In Christianity there is open discussion about how difficult it is to have faith, how doubts can nag at even the cleverest, the most devout priest. But isn’t the very acknowledgement of doubt the same as admitting that the faith you choose to live by is a delusion? You shouldn’t renounce your delusions so easily, Harry. At the other end of the rainbow there may be a reward.’

  Harry lay back in bed. He tried not to think about Birgitta, about her not having had any children.

  ‘How could you know they were childless?’ he heard himself say in a husky voice.

  ‘I asked.’

  ‘How . . .?’

  ‘Some of them said they had children because they believed I would spare them if they said they provided for a bunch of kids. They had thirty seconds to prove it. A mother who doesn’t carry a photo of her child is no mother, if you ask me.’

  Harry swallowed. ‘Why blonde?’

  ‘This isn’t a hard and fast rule. It just minimises the chance of them having any of my people’s blood in their veins.’

  Harry tried not to think about Birgitta’s milky-white skin. Toowoomba gave a low chuckle.

  ‘I can see there’s a lot you want to know, Harry, but using mobile phones is expensive and idealists like me aren’t rich. You know what you must do and what you mustn’t.’

  Then he was gone. The quickly falling dusk had cast a grey darkness over the room during the conversation. Two circling feelers of a cockroach poked through the crack in the doorway, checking to see if the coast was clear. Harry pulled the sheet over him and huddled up. On the roof outside the window a solitary kookaburra started the evening concert, and King’s Cross wound itself up for another long night.

  Harry dreamed about Kristin. He may have done that during two seconds of REM sleep, but there was half a lifetime to unravel, so it might have taken longer. She was wearing his green dressing gown; she stroked his hair and told him to accompany her. He asked her where to, but she was standing in the half-open balcony door with the curtains flapping around her and the children in the backyard were making such a racket that he didn’t hear her answer. Every now and then he was so dazzled by the sun that she completely disappeared from view.

  He got off his bed and went closer to hear what she was saying, but then she laughed and ran onto the balcony, climbed up the railing and floated off like a green balloon. Up she floated to the rooftops, shouting: ‘Come on, everyone! Come on, everyone!’ Later in the dream he ran around asking everyone he knew where the party was, but either they didn’t know or they’d already gone. Then he went down to Frogner Lido, but he didn’t have enough money for a ticket and had to clamber over the fence. Once on the other side, he discovered he’d cut himself, and blood was leaving a trail behind him on the grass, over the tiles and up the steps to the ten-metre diving board. No one else was there, so he lay on his back and looked up at the sky, listening to the tiny wet splashes as drops of blood fell and hit the edge of the swimming pool far below. High up, towards the sun, he thought he could discern a floating green figure. He put his hands in front of his eyes, like a pair of binoculars, and then he could see her quite clearly. She was so beautiful and almost transparent.

  He was woken once by a bang that might have been a gunshot, and lay listening to the rain and the hum of life in King’s Cross. After a while he went back to sleep. Then Harry dreamed about Kristin again, or so he imagined, for the rest of the night. Except that, in brief moments, she had red hair and spoke Swedish.

  52

  A Computer

  NINE O’CLOCK.

  Lebie rested his forehead against the door and closed his eyes. Two policemen in black bulletproof vests stood beside him watching closely. They had their weapons at the ready. Behind them on the stairs were Watkins, Yong and Harry.

  ‘There we
are!’ Lebie said and carefully withdrew the picklock.

  ‘Remember, don’t touch anything if the flat’s empty,’ Watkins whispered to the officers.

  Lebie stood to the side and opened the door for the two officers, who entered the flat textbook style, each holding a gun in both hands.

  ‘Sure there’s no alarm here?’ Harry whispered.

  ‘We’ve checked all the security companies in town, and no one has anything registered for this flat,’ Watkins said.

  ‘Shh, what’s that sound?’ Yong said.

  The others pricked up their ears, but couldn’t hear anything unusual.

  ‘There goes the bomb-expert theory,’ Watkins said drily.

  One of the officers came back out. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. They breathed a sigh of relief and went in. Lebie tried switching on the light in the hall, but it didn’t work.

  ‘Odd,’ he said, trying the light in the small but clean and tidy sitting room, but that didn’t work either. ‘A fuse must have blown.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Watkins said. ‘It’s more than light enough in here to do a search. Harry, you take the kitchen. Lebie, you take the bathroom. Yong?’

  Yong was standing in front of the computer on the desk by the sitting-room window.

  ‘I have a feeling . . .’ he said. ‘Lebie, take the torch and check the fuse box in the hall.’

  Lebie went out, and immediately the light came on and the computer sprang into life.

  ‘Shit,’ said Lebie, as he returned to the sitting room. ‘There was a piece of thread tied round the fuse that I had to remove first. I followed it along the wall and it goes into the door.’

  ‘That’s an electronic lock, isn’t it? The fuse was connected to the lock in such a way that the electricity went off as we opened the door. The sound I heard was the fan in the computer switching off,’ Yong said, pressing the keyboard. ‘This machine has rapid resume, so we can see which programs were on before it turned itself off.’

  A picture of the earth appeared on the screen, and a cheery jingle rang out through the speakers.

  ‘Thought so!’ Yong said. ‘You crafty bastard! Look there!’ He pointed to an icon on the screen.

  ‘Yong, for God’s sake, let’s not waste time on this now,’ said Watkins.

  ‘Sir, may I borrow your mobile phone for a moment?’ The little officer snatched Watkins’s Nokia without waiting for an answer. ‘What’s the number here?’

  Harry read out the number on the phone beside the computer while Yong tapped it in. Then he pressed the call key. As the phone rang a buzzing sound came from the computer, and the icon on the screen became larger and jumped up and down.

  ‘Shh,’ said Yong.

  After a few seconds a beep sounded. He quickly switched off the mobile phone.

  Watkins had a deep frown between his eyebrows. ‘What in the Lord’s name are you doing, Yong?’

  ‘Sir, I’m afraid Toowoomba has rigged up an alarm for us after all. And it’s gone off.’

  ‘Explain yourself!’ Watkins’s patience had clear limits.

  ‘Do you see the program coming up? That’s a standard answering phone service connected to the phone via a modem. Before Toowoomba goes out he reads in his welcome message to the computer through this microphone. When people ring they activate the program, play Toowoomba’s message, and after the little beep you heard, you can leave your message on the computer.’

  ‘Yong, I know what an answerphone is. What’s the point?’

  ‘Sir, did you hear a message before the beep when I rang just now?’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘That’s because the message was given, but it wasn’t saved.’

  Watkins began to see the light.

  ‘What you’re saying is that when the power went and the computer turned itself off the answerphone message went, too.’

  ‘Exactly, sir.’ Occasionally Yong’s reactions were unusual. Like now. His face was beaming. ‘And that’s his alarm system, sir.’

  Harry wasn’t smiling when he grasped the scope of the disaster. ‘So all Toowoomba has to do is ring his own number and hear the message is missing to know that someone has broken into his flat.’

  The room went silent.

  ‘He’ll never turn up here without ringing first,’ Lebie said.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ said Watkins.

  ‘He could ring at any moment,’ Harry said. ‘We have to gain some time. Any suggestions?’

  ‘Well,’ Yong said. ‘We could talk to the phone company and get them to block the number and deliver a malfunction message.’

  ‘And if he rings the phone company?’

  ‘Cable fault in the area due to . . . er, digging.’

  ‘That sounds fishy. He’ll just check his neighbour’s number,’ Lebie said.

  ‘We’ll have to get the whole area cut off,’ Harry said. ‘Can you do that, sir?’

  Watkins scratched behind his ear. ‘There’ll be chaos. Why the hell—?’

  ‘It’s urgent, sir!’

  ‘Shit! Give me the phone, Yong. McCormack will have to sort this one out. Whatever happens we can’t have the phones in a whole district down for too long, Holy. We’ll have to start planning our next move. Shit, shit, shit!’

  ELEVEN THIRTY.

  ‘Nothing,’ said a desperate Watkins. ‘Not a bloody thing!’

  ‘Well, we could hardly expect him to leave a note saying where she was, could we,’ Harry said.

  Lebie emerged from the bedroom. He shook his head. Not even Yong, who had gone through the whole block, had anything to report.

  They sat down in the sitting room.

  ‘It’s actually a bit odd,’ Harry said. ‘If we’d searched each other’s flats we would have found something. An interesting letter, a stained porn mag, a photo of an old flame, a stain on the sheet, something. But this guy’s a serial killer, and we’ve found absolutely nothing to suggest he has a life.’

  ‘I’ve never seen such a tidy bachelor pad before,’ Lebie said.

  ‘It’s too tidy,’ Yong said. ‘It’s almost weird.’

  ‘There’s something we’ve overlooked,’ Harry said, studying the ceiling.

  ‘We’ve been everywhere,’ Watkins said. ‘If he’s left any clues, they aren’t here. All the bloke does is eat, sleep, watch TV, shit and leave messages on his computer.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Harry broke in. ‘This isn’t where Toowoomba the murderer lives. The person who lives here is an abnormally tidy guy who isn’t worried about any close interest being taken in him. But what about the other one? Could he have another place? Another flat, a holiday cottage?’

  ‘Nothing registered in that name anyway,’ Yong said. ‘I checked before we set out.’

  The mobile phone rang. It was McCormack. He had spoken to the phone company. To the argument that this was a life and death matter they had retorted that it could also be a life and death matter for neighbours ringing for an ambulance. But with a little help from the mayor’s office McCormack had managed to have the lines blocked until seven in the evening.

  ‘Nothing to stop us smoking in here now,’ Lebie said, plucking out a thin cigarillo. ‘Or dropping ash on the carpet and leaving big, fat footprints in the hall. Anyone got a light?’

  Harry cast about for some matches and struck one. He sat staring at the box. And found his interest engaged.

  ‘Do you know what’s special about this box?’ he said.

  The others dutifully shook their heads.

  ‘It says it’s waterproof. And it says it’s for use in the mountains and at sea. Do any of you walk around with waterproof matchboxes?’

  More head-shaking.

  ‘Would I be wrong to say you can only buy these in specialist shops, and they cost a bit more than standard boxes?’

  The others shrugged.

  ‘They’re not standard anyway. I’ve never seen any like it,’ Lebie said.

  Watkins scrutinised the box closely. ‘I think my brother-in-la
w had boxes like that on board his boat,’ he said.

  ‘I was given this box by Toowoomba,’ Harry said. ‘At the funeral.’

  There was a silence.

  Yong coughed. ‘There’s a picture of a yacht in the hall,’ he said tentatively.

  ONE O’CLOCK.

  ‘Thanks for your help, Liz,’ Yong said, ending the call. ‘We’ve got it! It’s in the marina in Lady Bay where it’s registered to one Gert Van Hoos.’

  ‘OK,’ Watkins said. ‘Yong, you stay here in case Toowoomba turns up. Lebie, Harry and I will head out there now.’

  The traffic was light and Lebie’s new Toyota purred with contentment doing 120 kph up New South Head Road.

  ‘No backup, sir?’ Lebie enquired.

  ‘If he’s there three men are more than enough,’ Watkins said. ‘According to Yong, there’s no arms licence registered, and I have a feeling he’s not the type to brandish weapons.’

  Harry was unable to restrain himself.

  ‘What feeling is that, sir? The same one that told you it was a good idea to break into the flat? The same one that said she should keep the radio transmitter in her bag?’

  ‘Holy, I—’

  ‘I’m just asking, sir. If we have to use your feeling as a guide for anything, that will mean, in light of what’s happened so far, he’ll be brandishing a gun. Not that—’

  Harry realised he’d raised his voice, and shut up. Not now, he told himself. Not yet. In a lower voice he finished the sentence.

  ‘Not that I mind. It just means I can pepper him with lead.’

  Watkins chose not to answer; instead he glared sulkily out of the window as they drove on in silence. In the mirror Harry saw Lebie’s cautious, inscrutable smile.

  ONE THIRTY.

  ‘Lady Bay Beach,’ Lebie said, pointing. ‘Fitting name, as well. You see, this is Sydney’s number-one gay beach.’

  They decided to park outside the fence to the marina, and walked down a grassy mound to the little harbour where the masts huddled together each side of narrow pontoons. At the gate was a sleepy guard wearing a sun-bleached, blue uniform shirt. He perked up when Watkins flashed his police badge and described to them where Gert Van Hoos’s boat was moored.