The Bat Page 30

  ‘Anyone on board?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Not as far as I know,’ said the guard. ‘It’s a bit difficult to keep track of everything in the summer, but I don’t think there’s been anyone in the boat for a couple of days.’

  ‘Has anyone been there at all recently?’

  ‘Yes, if my memory serves me right. Mr Van Hoos was here late Tuesday. He usually parks close by the water. He left again later that night.’

  ‘And no one’s been on the boat since?’ Watkins asked.

  ‘Not on my watch. But, luckily, there are several of us.’

  ‘Was he alone?’

  ‘Far as I remember, yes.’

  ‘Was he carrying anything to the boat?’

  ‘Probably. I don’t remember. Most do.’

  ‘Could you give us a description of Mr Van Hoos?’ Harry said.

  The guard scratched his head. ‘Well, no, in fact I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’ Watkins asked, surprised.

  The guard looked sheepish. ‘To be quite honest, I think all Aborigines look the same.’

  The sun glittered on the water inside the marina, but further out the breakers rolled in off the sea, big and heavy. Harry could feel the wind was fresher here as they made a cautious approach along the pontoon. He recognised the name of the boat, Adelaide, and its registration number painted on the side. Adelaide wasn’t one of the biggest boats at the marina, but it looked well kept. Yong had explained to them that only boats with engines over a certain size had to be registered, so actually they’d had more than their share of luck. So much more that Harry had an unpleasant feeling their luck had been used up. The notion that Birgitta might be on board the boat made his heart throb.

  Watkins motioned for Lebie to enter first. Harry took the safety catch off his gun and pointed it at the lounge hatch as Lebie circumspectly placed his feet on the aft deck. Watkins tripped over the anchor rope as he went on board and landed on the deck with a thump. They stopped and listened, but all they could hear was the wind and the waves lapping and gurgling against the hull. Both the hatch to the lounge and the aft cabin were secured with padlocks. Lebie took out his picklock and got to work. After a few minutes both had been removed.

  Lebie opened the lounge hatch and Harry clambered in first. It was dark down below and Harry crouched with his gun in front of him until Watkins descended and drew the curtains aside. It was a plain but tastefully furnished boat. The lounge was made of mahogany but otherwise the interior bore no signs of excess. A sea chart lay rolled up on the table. Above it hung a picture of a young boxer.

  ‘Birgitta!’ Harry shouted. ‘Birgitta!’

  Watkins patted his shoulder.

  ‘She’s not here,’ Lebie confirmed after they had been through the boat from prow to stern.

  Watkins stood with his head buried in one of the boxes on the aft deck.

  ‘She might have been here,’ Harry said, scanning the sea. The wind was up and the tips of the waves beyond frothed white.

  ‘We’d better get Forensics over here and see what they can find,’ Watkins said, straightening. ‘This can only mean he has somewhere we don’t know about.’

  ‘Or—’ Harry said.

  ‘Rubbish! He’s got her hidden somewhere. It’s just a question of finding her.’

  Harry sat down. The wind ruffled and teased his hair. Lebie tried to light a cigarillo, but gave up after a couple of attempts.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Get out of his boat quick,’ Watkins said. ‘He can see us from the road if he drives this way.’

  They got up, locked the hatches and Watkins took a high step over the anchor rope so as not to trip again.

  Lebie stood still.

  ‘What is it?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Well,’ Lebie said, ‘I’m no expert on boats, but is this normal?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dropping the anchor when you’re moored fore and aft?’

  They exchanged glances.

  ‘Help me to pull it up,’ Harry said.

  53

  The Lizards Are Singing

  THREE O’CLOCK.

  They raced down the road. The clouds raced across the sky. The trees beside the road swayed and waved them on. The grass lay flat at the roadside and the radio crackled. The sun had paled and fleeting shadows rushed across the sea.

  Harry was sitting at the back, but saw nothing of the storm blowing up around them. He saw only the slimy green rope they had dragged from the sea in spasmodic jerks. The drops of water had fallen into the sea like glistening crystals, and deep below they had glimpsed a white outline slowly rising towards them.

  One summer holiday his father had taken him out in a rowing boat and they had caught a halibut. It had been white and unimaginably large and even then Harry’s mouth had gone dry and his hands had begun to tremble. His mother and grandmother had clapped their hands with excitement as they entered the kitchen with their catch and straight away began to cut up the cold, bleeding fish with big, shiny knives. For the rest of the summer Harry had dreamed about the huge halibut in the boat with its protruding eyes and expression frozen with shock, as though it could not believe it was actually dying. The following Christmas Harry had been given some jelly-like pieces on his plate, and his father had proudly told everyone how he and Harry had been fishing for halibut in Isfjorden. ‘We thought we would try something new this Christmas,’ his mother had said. It had tasted of death and depravity, and Harry had left the table with tears in his eyes, furious with indignation.

  And now Harry was sitting in the back of a car as it sped along; he closed his eyes and saw himself staring down into the water where something resembling a sea nettle jellyfish gathered its red tentacles alongside at every heave of the rope, stopped and spread them out into a new swimming stroke. As it approached the surface it spread them into a fan shape trying to conceal the naked white body beneath. The rope was wound around her neck, and the lifeless corpse seemed strangely alien and extraneous to Harry.

  But when they turned her onto her back, Harry felt it again. It was the expression from that summer. Dimmed eyes with a surprised, accusatory final question: Is this all there is? Is the purpose really that it should all end like this? Is life, and death, really so banal?

  ‘Is that her?’ Watkins had asked, and Harry had answered in the negative.

  When he repeated the question Harry spotted her shoulder blades sticking out, showing red skin next to a white strip where her bikini top had been.

  ‘She was sunburnt,’ he answered in astonishment. ‘She asked me to put sun cream on her back. She said she trusted me. But she was burnt.’

  Watkins stood in front of him and placed his hands on Harry’s shoulders. ‘It’s not your fault, Harry. Do you hear me? It would have happened anyway. It’s not your fault.’

  It had become noticeably darker now, and gusts of wind tore in with such force that the eucalyptus trees shook and waved their branches, seemingly intending to detach themselves from the ground and lumber around like John Wyndham’s triffids, brought to life by the storm that was on its way.

  ‘The lizards are singing,’ Harry said suddenly from the back seat. They were the first words that had been spoken since they’d got into the car. Watkins turned and Lebie watched him in the mirror. Harry coughed.

  ‘Andrew said that once. That lizards and humans from the lizard family had the power to create rain and storms by singing. He told me the Great Flood was created by the lizard family singing and cutting themselves with flint knives to drown the platypus.’ He smiled weakly. ‘Almost all the platypuses died. But a few survived. Do you know what they did? They taught themselves to breathe underwater.’

  The first large drops of rain landed with a shiver on the windscreen.

  ‘We haven’t got much time,’ Harry said. ‘Toowoomba will soon realise we’re after him, and then he’ll disappear like a rat into the ground. I’m the only link we have with him, and now you’re wonde
ring whether I can handle it. Well, what can I say? I think I loved the girl.’

  Watkins looked uneasy. Lebie nodded slowly.

  ‘But I’m going to breathe underwater,’ Harry said.

  THREE THIRTY.

  No one in the conference room took any notice of the fan’s lament.

  ‘OK, we know who our man is,’ Harry said. ‘And we know he thinks the police don’t know. He’s probably thinking that I’m trying to falsify evidence against Evans White. But I’m afraid this is a very temporary situation. We can’t keep households without a phone for much longer, and besides it will soon start to look suspicious if the alleged fault isn’t fixed.

  ‘We have officers in position if he should appear at his home. Ditto the boat. But personally I’m convinced he’s much too careful to do anything stupid without being one hundred per cent sure that the coast is clear. It’s probably realistic to assume that at some point this evening he’ll know we’ve been in his flat. That gives us two options. We can sound the alarm bells, go out live on TV and hope we find him before he disappears. The counter-argument is that anyone who’s rigged up a system like the one he has is certain to have planned ahead. As soon as he sees his picture on the screen we risk him going underground. The second option is, therefore, to use the little time we have before he feels us breathing down his neck, to catch him while he is relatively unsuspecting.’

  ‘I vote we go for him,’ Lebie said, removing a hair from his shoulder.

  ‘Catch him?’ Watkins said. ‘Sydney has over four million inhabitants and we don’t have the slightest idea where he could be. We don’t even bloody know if he is in Sydney!’

  ‘No question about that,’ Harry said. ‘He’s definitely been in Sydney for the last one and a half hours.’

  ‘What? Are you saying he’s been seen?’

  ‘Yong.’ Harry gave the floor to the ever-smiling officer.

  ‘The mobile phone!’ he began. As though he had been asked to read his essay aloud to the class.

  ‘All mobile-phone conversations are linked via what are known as base stations, which receive and transmit signals. A phone company can see which subscriber’s signals the various base stations receive. Every one covers a radius of about ten kilometres. Where there is good coverage, i.e. in built-up areas, your phone is generally covered by two or more stations at once, a bit like with radio transmitters. That means that when you’re talking on the phone a phone company can locate your position to within ten kilometres. If the conversation can be picked up by two stations at once, that will reduce the area to the zone where the coverage of the two stations overlaps. If your signals are picked up by three stations, the zone is even smaller, and so on. Thus, mobiles phones cannot be traced to a single address like a standard phone, but we do have a pointer.

  ‘At this minute we’re in touch with three blokes from the phone company following Toowoomba’s signals. We can connect them to an open line here in the conference room. For the moment we’re receiving simultaneous signals from only two stations and the overlapping area covers the whole of the city, the harbour and half of Woolloomooloo. The good news is that he’s on the move.’

  ‘And what we need is a spot of luck,’ Harry chimed in.

  ‘We hope he moves into one of the small pockets covered by three base stations or more. If so, we can launch all the civilian cars we have at a moment’s warning and have a crumb of hope that we might find him.’

  Watkins didn’t look convinced. ‘So he’s spoken to someone now, and he also called an hour and a half ago, and both times the signals were picked up by base stations in Sydney?’ he said. ‘And we’re dependent on him continuing to chat on the bloody phone to find him? And what if he doesn’t ring?’

  ‘We can ring him, can’t we?’ Lebie said.

  ‘Wonderful!’ Watkins said. His cheeks were very flushed. ‘Great idea! We can ring him every quarter of an hour pretending to be the speaking clock or some such bollocks! Which will tell him it might not be a smart idea to talk on the phone!’

  ‘He doesn’t need to do that,’ Yong said. ‘He doesn’t need to speak to anyone.’

  ‘How . . .?’

  ‘It’s enough for his phone to be switched on,’ Harry said. ‘It seems Toowoomba isn’t aware of this, but as long as a phone isn’t switched off, it automatically sends out a little beep every half an hour, to say it’s still alive. This beep is registered by the base stations in the same way as a conversation.’

  ‘So . . .’

  ‘So let’s keep the line open, brew up some coffee, sit tight and keep our fingers crossed.’

  54

  A Good Ear

  A METALLIC VOICE came through the telephone loudspeaker.

  ‘His signal’s coming through on base stations 3 and 4.’

  Yong pointed to the map of Sydney spread over the board. Numbered circles had been drawn to show the areas of coverage for the various base stations.

  ‘Pyrmont, Glebe and a chunk of Balmain.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Watkins swore. ‘Much too big an area. What’s the time? Has he tried to ring home?’

  ‘It’s six,’ Lebie said. ‘He’s dialled the number of his flat twice in the last hour.’

  ‘He’ll soon twig there’s something amiss,’ McCormack said, getting up again.

  ‘He hasn’t yet though,’ Harry said quietly. He’d been sitting still on a chair tilted against the back wall for the last two hours.

  ‘Any news on the weather warning?’ Watkins asked.

  ‘Only that it’s going to get worse,’ Lebie said. ‘Gale-force winds, hurricane force tonight.’

  The minutes ticked by. Yong went for more coffee.

  ‘Hello?’ It was the telephone loudspeaker.

  Watkins jumped up. ‘Yes?’

  ‘The subscriber’s just used his phone. We have him in base stations 3, 4 and 7.’

  ‘Wait!’ Watkins looked at the map. ‘That’s a bit of Pyrmont and Darling Harbour, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Shit! If he’d been in 9 and 10 as well, we’d have had him!’

  ‘Who did he call?’ McCormack said.

  ‘Our central switchboard,’ said the metallic voice. ‘He asked what the matter was with his home number.’

  ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ Watkins was as red as a beetroot. ‘He’s getting away! Let’s sound the alarm bells now!’

  ‘Shut up!’ came the stinging response. The room fell silent. ‘Apologies for my choice of words, sir,’ Harry said. ‘But I suggest we wait until the next beep before we do anything hasty.’

  Watkins looked at Harry with his eyes popping out.

  ‘Holy’s right,’ McCormack said. ‘Sit down, Watkins. In less than an hour the block on the phones will be lifted. That means we have one, maximum two, beeps left before Toowoomba finds out it’s only his phone that’s still cut off. Pyrmont and Darling Harbour are not large areas in geographical terms, but we’re talking about one of Sydney’s most populated central districts at night. Sending a load of cars down there will only create the kind of chaos Toowoomba will use to escape. We wait.’

  At twenty to seven the message came over the loudspeaker:

  ‘A beep has been received at base stations 3, 4 and 7.’

  Watkins groaned.

  ‘Thank you,’ Harry said, disconnecting the microphone. ‘Same area as last time, which suggests he isn’t moving any more. So where can he be?’

  They crowded round the map.

  ‘Maybe he’s doing some boxing training,’ Lebie said.

  ‘Good suggestion!’ said McCormack. ‘Are there are any gyms in the area? Anyone know where the bloke trains?’

  ‘I’ll check, sir,’ Yong said, and was gone.

  ‘Other suggestions?’

  ‘The area’s full of tourist attractions which are open in the evening,’ Lebie said. ‘Maybe he’s in the Chinese Gardens?’

  ‘He’ll be staying indoors in this weather,’ McCormack said.

&n
bsp; Yong returned, shaking his head. ‘I rang his trainer. He wouldn’t say anything, so I had to say I was the police. Toowoomba’s gym’s in Bondi Junction.’

  ‘Nice one!’ said Watkins. ‘How long do you think it’ll be before the trainer rings Toowoomba’s mobile phone and asks what the hell the police want him for?’

  ‘This is urgent,’ Harry said. ‘I’ll ring Toowoomba.’

  ‘To ask him where he is?’ Watkins asked.

  ‘To see what’s happening,’ Harry said, picking up the receiver. ‘Lebie, check the tape recorder’s on and everyone keep quiet!’

  Everyone froze. Lebie cast a glance at the old tape recorder and gave Harry a thumbs up. Harry gulped. His fingers felt numb on the keys. The phone rang three times before Toowoomba answered.

  ‘Hello?’

  The voice . . . Harry held his breath and pressed the receiver to his ear. In the background he could hear people.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Toowoomba said in a low voice.

  There was a sound in the background followed by children’s exuberant cries. Then he heard Toowoomba’s deep, calm laugh.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t Harry. Odd that you’re calling, because I was just thinking about you. There seems to be something wrong with my home phone, and I was wondering if you had anything to do with it. I hope you don’t, Harry.’

  There was another sound. Harry concentrated but he was unable to identify what it was.

  ‘It makes me nervous when you don’t answer, Harry. Very nervous. I don’t know what you want, but perhaps I should switch off this phone. Is that it, Harry? Are you trying to find me?’

  The sound . . .

  ‘Shit!’ Harry shouted. ‘He hung up.’ He flopped onto a chair. ‘Toowoomba knew it was me. How on earth could he know?’

  ‘Rewind the tape,’ McCormack said. ‘And get hold of Marguez.’

  Yong ran out of the room while they played the tape.