reading

THE TRAFFIC LIGHTS changed to green, and the roar from lorries, cars, motorbikes and tuk-tuks rose higher and higher until Dim could see the glass in Robinson’s department store vibrating. Then the queues started moving and the shop window displaying the long, red silk dress was lost behind them in the darkness.

She took a taxi. Not a packed bus or a tuk-tuk riddled with rust but a taxi with air conditioning and a driver who kept his mouth shut. She leaned back against the headrest and tried to enjoy the ride. No problem. A moped shot past and a girl on the pillion clinging to a red T-shirt with a visor helmet gave them a vacant look. Hold on tight, Dim thought.

On Rama IV Road the driver pulled in behind a lorry spewing exhaust fumes so thick and black she couldn’t see the number plate. After passing through the air-conditioning system the exhaust was chilled and almost odourless. Almost. She wafted her hand discreetly to show her reaction, and the driver glanced in his mirror and moved into the outside lane. No problem.

This was how her life had always been. On the farm where she had grown up she had been one of six girls. Six too many, according to her father. She had been seven years old when they stood coughing in the yellow dust and waving as the cart carrying her eldest sister trundled down the country road alongside the brown canal water. Her sister had been given clean clothes, a train ticket to Bangkok and an address in Patpong written on the back of a business card, and she had cried like a waterfall, even though Dim had waved so hard it felt as if her hand would fall off. Her mother had patted her on the head and said it wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t that bad, either. At least her sister wouldn’t have to wander from farm to farm as a kwai, as her mother had done before she got married. Besides, Miss Wong had promised she would take good care of her. Her father had nodded, spat betel juice from between black teeth and added that the farangs in the bars would pay well for fresh girls.

Dim hadn’t understood what her mother meant by kwai, but she wasn’t going to ask. She knew, of course, that a kwai was a bull. Like most people on the farms around them, they couldn’t afford a bull, so they hired one of the ones that circulated the district when the rice paddy had to be ploughed. It was only later she found out that the girl who accompanied the bull was also called a kwai as her services formed part of the deal. That was the tradition. She hoped she would meet a farmer who would have her before she got too old.

When Dim was fifteen her father had called her name as he waded across the paddy field with the sun behind him and his hat in hand. She hadn’t answered at once; she had straightened up and looked hard at the green ridges around the small farm, closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the trumpeter bird in the leaves and inhaled the smell of eucalyptus and rubber trees. She had realised it was her turn.

For the first year they had lived four girls to a room and shared everything: bed, food and clothes. The last of these was especially important, for without nice clothes you wouldn’t get the best customers. She had taught herself to dance, taught herself to smile, taught herself to see which men only wanted to buy drinks and which wanted to buy sex. Her father had already agreed with Miss Wong that the money was to be sent home, so she didn’t see much of it during the first few years, but Miss Wong was content and as time went by she kept more back for Dim.

Miss Wong had reason to be content. Dim worked hard, and the customers bought drinks. Miss Wong should be pleased she was still there because a couple of times it had been a close-run thing. A Japanese man had wanted to marry Dim, but withdrew his offer when she demanded money for the plane ticket. An American had taken her along to Phuket, postponed his journey home and bought her a diamond ring. She had pawned it the day after he left.

Some paid badly and told her to get lost if she complained; others reported her to Miss Wong if she didn’t comply with everything they wanted her to do. They didn’t understand that once they had bought her time from the bar Miss Wong had her money and Dim was her own boss. Her own boss. She thought about the red dress in the shop window. Her mother had been right: it wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t that bad, either.

And she had managed to retain her innocent smile and happy laughter. They liked that. Perhaps that was why she had been offered the job Wang Lee had advertised in Thai Rath under the heading of GRO, or Guest Relation Officer. Wang Lee was a small, dark-skinned Chinese man, who ran a motel some way out on Sukhumvit Road, and the customers were mainly foreigners with special requests but not so special that she couldn’t meet them. To tell the truth, she liked what she did better than dancing for hours in the bar. Besides, Wang Lee paid well. The sole disadvantage was that it took such a long time to get there from her apartment in Banglamphu.

The damn traffic! It had come to a standstill again, and she told the driver she would get out, even though it meant crossing six lanes of cars to reach the motel on the far side of the road. The air wrapped itself around her like a hot, wet towel as she left the taxi. She searched for a gap, holding her hand in front of her mouth, aware that it made no difference, that there was no other air to breathe in Bangkok, but at least she was spared the smell.

She slipped between vehicles, had to sidestep a pickup with the flatbed full of boys whistling, and she almost had her heel straps taken off by a kamikaze Toyota. Then she was across.

‘Yes,’ she lied. He meant well, but she was not in the mood for the watery noodles he boiled up in the back room.

‘You’ll have to wait,’ he said. ‘The farang wanted to have a sleep first. He’ll ring when he’s ready.’

She shrugged and sat down. If it had been a year ago he would probably have thrown her out for speaking like that, but now he needed all the income he could get. Of course, she could go, but then the long journey would have been wasted. Also, she owed Lee a favour; she had worked for worse pimps.

After stubbing out the third cigarette she rinsed her mouth with Lee’s bitter Chinese tea and rose for a final check of her make-up in the mirror over the counter.

Her heels crunched on the gravel of the empty drive between the low motel rooms. Room 120 was right at the back, she couldn’t see a car outside, but there was a light in the window. So perhaps he had woken up. A little breeze lifted her short skirt, but failed to cool her. She longed for a monsoon, for rain. Just as after a few weeks of flooding, muddy streets and mildew on her washing she would long for the dry, windless months.

She tapped the door lightly with her knuckles and put on her bashful smile with the question ‘What’s your name?’ already on her lips. No one answered. She tapped again and looked at her watch. She could probably haggle a few hundred baht off the price of the dress, even if it was Robinson’s. She turned the door handle and discovered to her surprise that the door was unlocked.

He was lying prone on the bed, and her first impression was that he was asleep. Then she saw the glint of the knife’s blue glass handle sticking out of the loud yellow jacket. It’s hard to say which of all the thoughts racing through her brain appeared first, but one of them was definitely that the trip to Banglamphu had been wasted anyway. Then she finally gained control of her vocal cords. The scream, however, was drowned out by a resounding blast on a lorry’s horn as it avoided an inattentive tuk-tuk on Sukhumvit Road.

ALSO BY JO NESBO

Detective Harry Hole is meant to keep out of trouble. A young Norwegian girl taking a gap year in Sydney has been murdered, and Harry has been sent to Australia to assist in any way he can.

When the team unearths a string of unsolved murders and disappearances, nothing will stop Harry from finding out the truth. The hunt for a serial killer is on, but the murderer will talk only to Harry.

Appearing in English for the first time, The Bat is the legendary first novel from the worldwide phenomenon Jo Nesbo.

Jo Nesbo is a musician, songwriter, economist and author. The Bat, his first crime novel featuring Harry Hole, was published in Norway in 1997 and was an instant hit, winning the Glass Key Award for best Nordic crime novel (an accolade shared with Peter Høeg, Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson). This bestselling novel appears in English for the first time.

The Bat

Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett

Jo Nesbo

WALLA

Sydney

‘I’m fine,’ Harry Hole had lied. It was more than thirty hours since he had taken off from Oslo via London, and after the change of planes in Bahrain he had sat in the same bloody seat by the emergency exit. For security reasons it could only be tipped back a little, and his lumbar region had almost crumbled by the time they reached Singapore.

She had scrutinised his passport with conspicuous interest. Whether it was the photograph or his name that had initially put her in such a cheery mood was hard to say.

Harry Hole had a suspicion that passport officials in most places in the world would have added a ‘sir’, but he had read that this type of formal pleasantry wasn’t especially widespread in Australia. It didn’t really matter; Harry wasn’t particularly accustomed to foreign travel or snobbish – all he wanted was a hotel room and a bed as quickly as possible.

And that was when her lips had pursed, turned ugly and articulated, with a pointed tone: ‘Why isn’t there a visa in your passport, sir?’

His heart sank, as it invariably did when there was a hint of a catastrophe in the offing. Perhaps ‘sir’ was used only when situations became critical?

‘Sorry, I forgot,’ Harry mumbled, searching feverishly through his inside pockets. Why had they not been able to pin a special visa in his passport as they do with standard visas? Behind him in the queue he heard the faint drone of a Walkman and realised it was his travelling companion from the plane. He had been playing the same cassette the whole flight. Why the hell could he never remember which pocket he put things in? It was hot as well, even though it was getting on for ten o’clock at night. Harry could feel his scalp beginning to itch.

At last he found the document and placed it on the counter, to his great relief.

The passport official looked up from the special visa and studied him, but the pursed mouth was gone.

The arrivals hall was crowded with travel reps and limousine drivers, holding up signs with names on, but not a Hole in sight. He was on the point of grabbing a taxi when a black man wearing light blue jeans and a Hawaiian shirt, and with an unusually broad nose and dark, curly hair ploughed a furrow between the signs and came striding towards him.

Harry Hole considered his options. He had decided to spend the first days in Australia correcting the pronunciation of his surname so that he wouldn’t be confused with apertures or orifices. Mr Holy however, was infinitely preferable.

‘Andrew Kensington. How are ya?’ the man grinned and stuck out an enormous fist.

‘Welcome to Sydney. Hope you enjoyed the flight,’ the stranger said with evident sincerity, like an echo of the air hostess’s announcement twenty minutes earlier. He took Harry’s battered suitcase and began to walk towards the exit without a backward glance. Harry kept close to him.

The swing door hit Harry in the face, right on the hooter, and made his eyes water. A bad slapstick sketch could not have started worse. He rubbed his nose and swore in Norwegian. Kensington sent him a sympathetic look.

Harry didn’t answer. He didn’t know how to answer that sort of comment down under.

In the car park Kensington unlocked the boot of a small, well-used Toyota and shoved in the suitcase. ‘Do you wanna drive, mate?’ he asked in surprise.

Harry realised he was sitting in the driver’s seat. Of course, they drove on the bloody left in Australia. However, the passenger seat was so full of papers, cassettes and general rubbish that Harry squeezed into the back.

‘Guess there’s no fooling you, Officer,’ Kensington answered, glancing in the mirror.

Harry began to feel ill at ease. ‘Er, by that I just mean that your forefathers obviously didn’t belong to the convicts sent here from England two hundred years ago.’ He wanted to show he had at least a modicum of knowledge about the country’s history.

‘That’s right, Holy. My forefathers were here a bit before them. Forty thousand years, to be precise.’

Kensington grinned into the mirror. Harry vowed to keep his mouth shut for a while.

Andrew ran the conversation for the rest of the ride. He drove Harry to King’s Cross, holding forth the whole way: this area was Sydney’s red-light district and the centre for the drugs trade and to a large extent all the other shady dealings in town. Every second scandal seemed to have a connection with some hotel or strip joint inside this square kilometre.

‘Here we are,’ Andrew said suddenly. He pulled into the kerb, jumped out and took Harry’s suitcase from the boot.

‘See you tomorrow,’ Andrew said, and with that he and the car were gone. With a stiff back and jet lag beginning to announce its presence, Harry and his suitcase were now alone on a pavement in a town boasting a population roughly equivalent to the whole of Norway, outside the splendid Crescent Hotel. The name was printed on the door next to three stars. Oslo’s Chief Constable was not known for largesse with regards to accommodation for her employees. But perhaps this one was not going to be too bad after all. There must have been a civil service discount and it was probably the hotel’s smallest room, Harry reflected.

Gap Park

A tall, broad man with a stomach designed to impress was standing by the window, behind an oak desk. Beneath a thinning mane protruded grey bushy eyebrows, but the wrinkles around his eyes smiled.

‘Take a pew, Holy. You look bloody fit for this time of the morning. I hope you haven’t been to see any of the boys in Narc, have you?’ Neil McCormack let out a huge laugh.

‘Of course. Just an in-joke. We had a pretty high-profile corruption case here a couple of years back, you see. Ten officers were convicted, among other things for selling drugs – to one another. Suspicion was raised because a couple of them were so alert – round the clock. No joke really.’ He chuckled contentedly, put on his glasses and flicked through the papers in front of him.

‘So you’ve been sent here to assist us with our investigation into the murder of Inger Holter, a Norwegian citizen with a permit to work in Australia. Blonde, good-looking girl, according to the photos. Twenty-three years old, wasn’t she?’

‘Found by fishermen on the ocean side of Watson’s Bay – to be more precise, Gap Park. Semi-naked. Bruising suggested she had been raped first and then strangled, but no semen was found. Later transported at the dead of night to the park where the body was dumped off the cliff.’

‘Had the weather been a little worse the waves would definitely have carried her out, but instead she lay among the rocks until she was found. As I said, there was no semen present, and the reason for that is that the vagina was sliced up like a filleted fish and the seawater did a thorough job of washing this girl clean. Therefore we have no fingerprints either, though we do have a rough estimate of time of death . . .’ McCormack removed his glasses and rubbed his face. ‘But we don’t have a murderer. And what the hell are you gonna do about that, Mr Holy?’

‘What you’re gonna do is watch carefully while we haul the bastard in, tell the Norwegian press along the way what a wonderful job we’re doing together – making sure we don’t offend anyone at the Norwegian Embassy, or relatives – and otherwise enjoy a break and send a card or two to your dear Chief Constable. How is she by the way?’

‘Great woman, she is. I s’pose she explained to you what’s expected of you?’

‘Great. Forget all that. Here are the new rules. Number one: from now on you listen to me, me and me alone. Number two: you don’t take part in anything you haven’t been instructed to do by me. And number three: one toe out of line and you’ll be on the first plane home.’

This was delivered with a smile, but the message was clear: paws off, he was here as an observer. He might just as well have brought his swimming things and a camera along.

‘A minor celeb, sir. She hosted a children’s programme broadcast a couple of years ago. I suppose before this happened she was on her way into oblivion.’

‘Yeah, I’ve been told that your papers are making a big thing of this murder. Couple of them have sent people here already. We’ve given ’em what we’ve got, and that’s not a great deal, so they’ll soon be bored and bugger off home. They don’t know you’re here. We’ve got our own nannies, so you won’t have to take care of them.’

‘Thank you for that, sir,’ Harry said, and he meant it. The thought of panting Norwegian journalists looking over his shoulder was not a welcome one.

‘OK, Holy, I’ll be honest with you and tell you how the land lies. I’ve been told in no uncertain terms by my governor that councillors in Sydney would like to see this case cleared up as soon as possible. As usual, it’s all about politics and dosh.’

‘Well, we reckon unemployment in Sydney will rise to over ten per cent this year, and the town needs every cent we can get from the tourists. We’ve got the Olympic Games just round the corner, in 2000, and tourism from Scandinavia’s on the up. Murder, especially one which hasn’t been cleared up, isn’t a good advert for the town, so we’re doing what we can. We have a team of four detectives on the case plus high-priority access to the force’s resources – all the computers, forensic staff, lab people. And so on.’

‘In fact, you should be working with Watkins, but since you specifically asked for Kensington, I see no reason to refuse your request.’

‘Kensington’s a good man. There are not many Indigenous officers who have come up through the ranks like him.’

McCormack shrugged. ‘That’s just the way it is. Well, Holy, if there’s anything else, you know where I hang out. Any questions?’

‘Er, just a formality, sir. I was wondering whether sir was the right mode of address to a superior officer in this country, or whether it was a little too . . .’

‘Formal? Stiff? Yes, I guess it probably is. But I like it. It reminds me that I am in fact the boss of this outfit.’ McCormack burst out laughing and concluded the meeting with a bone-crunching handshake.

‘January’s the tourist season in Australia,’ Andrew explained as they lurched forward in the traffic around Circular Quay.

‘Everyone comes to see the Sydney Opera House and go on boat trips round the harbour and admire the women on Bondi Beach. Shame you’ve got to work.’

Harry shook his head. ‘Doesn’t matter. I break out in a cold sweat around tourist traps.’

They emerged onto New South Head Road where the Toyota sped eastwards to Watson’s Bay.

‘The East Side of Sydney’s not exactly like the East End of London,’ Andrew explained as they passed one fashionable house after another. ‘This district’s called Double Bay. We call it Double Pay.’

‘She lived with her boyfriend in Newtown for a while before they split up and she moved to a little one-room flat in Glebe.’

Andrew shrugged. ‘He’s Australian, a computer engineer and met her when she came here on holiday two years ago. He’s got an alibi for the night of the murder and is not exactly the prototype of a murderer. But you never know, do you?’

They parked below Gap Park, one of Sydney’s many green lungs. Steep stone steps led up to the windblown park that lay high above Watson’s Bay to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the east. The heat hit them when they opened the car doors. Andrew put on a big pair of shades, which made Harry think of a laid-back porn king. For some reason his Australian colleague was wearing a tight suit today, and Harry thought the broad-shouldered black man looked a bit comical as he rolled and pitched up the path in front of him to the viewpoint.

Harry looked around. To the west he saw the city centre with the Harbour Bridge, to the north the beach and yachts in Watson’s Bay and, further in the distance, verdant Manly, the suburb on the northern side of the bay. To the east the horizon curved in a spectrum of various shades of blue. The cliffs plunged down in front of them, and way below the ocean breakers ended their long voyage in a thunderous crescendo among the rocks.

Harry felt a bead of sweat running down between his shoulder blades. This heat was giving him goose pimples.

‘You can see the Pacific Ocean from here, Harry. Next stop New Zealand, after about twelve hundred wet miles,’ Andrew said, spitting a thick gobbet off the edge of the cliff. They followed it down for a while until the wind dispersed it.

‘Good job she wasn’t alive when she fell,’ he said. ‘She must have hit the cliffs on the way down; there were large chunks of flesh torn from her body when they found her.’

Andrew pulled a grimace. ‘The police doctor said forty-eight hours. But he . . .’

He put a backward-facing thumb in front of his mouth. Harry nodded. So the doctor was a thirsty soul.

‘She was found on a Friday morning, so let’s say she died some time during Wednesday night.’

‘As you can see, cars can park down below and the area is unlit at night and relatively deserted. We haven’t got any reports from witnesses, and to be frank, we don’t reckon we’ll get any.’

‘Now we do what the boss told me, we go to a restaurant and spend a bit of the force’s entertainment budget. After all, you’re Norway’s highest police rep in a radius of more than twelve hundred miles. At least.’

Andrew and Harry sat at a table with a white cloth. Doyle’s, a seafood restaurant, was situated at the furthest end of Watson’s Bay with only a strip of sand between itself and the sea.

‘Picture postcard.’ A small boy and a girl were building sandcastles on the beach in front of them, against a background of a deep blue sea and luxuriant green hills with Sydney’s proud skyline in the distance.

Harry chose scallops and Tasmanian trout, Andrew an Australian flatfish which Harry, quite reasonably, had never heard of. Andrew ordered a bottle of Chardonnay Rosemount, ‘quite wrong for this meal, but it’s white, it’s good and it’s smack on budget’, and looked mildly surprised when Harry said he didn’t drink.

Doyle’s was an old family-run restaurant and considered one of Sydney’s best, Andrew informed Harry. It was peak season and packed to the rafters and Harry presumed that was why it was so difficult to gain eye contact with the waiters.

‘The waiters here are like the Planet Pluto,’ Andrew said. ‘They orbit on the periphery, only making an appearance every twentieth year, and even then are impossible to glimpse with the naked eye.’

Harry couldn’t work up any indignation and leaned back in his chair with a contented sigh. ‘But they have excellent food,’ he said. ‘So that explains the suit.’

‘Yes and no. As you can see, it’s not exactly formal here. But it’s better for me not to wear jeans and a T-shirt in places like this. Because of my appearance I have to make an effort.’

Andrew stared at Harry. ‘Aboriginal people don’t have very high status in this country, as you may perhaps appreciate. Years ago the English wrote home that the natives had a weakness for alcohol and property crime.’

‘They thought it was in our genes. “All they were good for was making a hell of a racket blowing through long pieces of hollow wood, which they call didgeridoos,” one of them wrote. Well, this country boasts that it’s managed to integrate several cultures into one cohesive society. But cohesive for who? The problem, or the advantage, according to your perspective, is that the natives aren’t seen any more.

‘Aboriginal folks are as good as totally absent from social life in Australia, apart from political debates that affect Indigenous interests and culture. Australians pay lip-service by having Aboriginal art hanging on the walls of their houses. However, we Blackfellas are well represented in the dole queues, suicide statistics and prisons. If you’re Aboriginal the chances of ending up in prison are twenty-six times greater than for any other Australian. Chew on that, Harry Holy.’

Andrew drank the rest of his wine while Harry chewed on that. And the fact that he’d probably just eaten the best fish dish in his thirty-two years.

‘And yet Australia’s no more racist than any other country. After all, we’re a multicultural nation with people from all over the world living here. It just means that dressing in a suit whenever you go to a restaurant is worth the trouble.’

‘Yes, she did. The Albury in Oxford Street, Paddington. I thought we could wander up there this evening.’

A Tasmanian Devil

GLEBE POINT ROAD turned out to be a cosy, not too frenetic street where small, plain and, for the most part, ethnic restaurants from various parts of the world stood cheek by jowl.

‘This used to be Sydney’s bohemian quarter,’ Andrew explained. ‘I lived here as a student in the seventies. You can still find typical veggie restaurants for people with conservation on the brain and alternative lifestyles, bookshops for lesbians and so on. But the old hippies and acidheads have gone. As Glebe became an “in” place rent went up – I doubt if I’d be able to live here now, even on my police salary.’

They turned right, up Hereford Street and went through the gate to number 54. A small furry black animal came towards them, barking, and revealing a row of tiny, sharp teeth. The mini-monster looked seriously angry and bore a striking similarity to the picture in the tourist brochure of the Tasmanian Devil. Aggressive and generally unpleasant to have hanging from your throat, it said. The species had been almost completely exterminated, which Harry sincerely hoped was true. As this specimen launched itself at him with jaws wide open, Andrew raised his foot and kicked the animal in mid-flight and volleyed it yelping into the bushes alongside the fence.

A man with a large gut who looked as though he had just got up was standing in the doorway with a sour expression on his face as they came up the steps.

‘It’s admiring the rose bushes,’ Andrew informed him with a smile. ‘We’re from the police. Crime Squad. Mr Robertson?’

‘Yeah, yeah. What do you lot want again? I told you I’ve told you everything I know.’

‘And now you’ve told us you’ve told us you’ve told us . . .’ A long silence developed as Andrew continued to smile and Harry shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

‘Apologies, Mr Robertson, we won’t try to kill you with our charm, but this is Inger Holter’s brother and he would like to see her room if that’s not too much trouble.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t know . . . Come in!’ He opened the door and went ahead of them up the stairs.

‘Yeah, in fact I didn’t even know Inger had a brother. But now you say it of course I can see the family likeness.’

‘Inger was a lovely girl and a fantastic tenant – indeed, a source of pride for the whole house and neighbourhood too, probably.’ He smelt of beer and his diction was already a bit slurred.

No attempt had been made to tidy Inger’s room. There were clothes, magazines, full ashtrays and empty wine bottles everywhere.

‘I told her not to take the route round Bridge Road and the fish market when she came home at night. It’s dark there and there are loads of blacks and Chinks . . .’ He looked at Andrew Kensington in horror. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to . . .’

Robertson padded down the stairs and they heard bottles clinking in the kitchen.

The room contained a bed, a few bookshelves and a desk. Harry looked around and tried to construct an impression of Inger Holter. Victimology: putting yourself in the victim’s shoes. He could just about recall the impish girl off the TV screen with her well-meaning, youthful commitment and innocent blue eyes.

She was definitely not a home bird. There were no pictures on the walls, just a poster of Braveheart with Mel Gibson – which Harry remembered only because for some incomprehensible reason it won an Oscar for Best Film. Bad taste, as far as films go, he thought. And men. Harry was one of those who felt personally let down when Mad Max made a Hollywood star out of him.

A photograph showed Inger sitting on a bench in front of some colourful Western-style houses with a gang of long-haired, bearded youths. She was wearing a loose, purple dress. Her blonde hair hung down flat against her pale, serious face. The young man whose hand she was holding had a baby in his lap.

On the shelf there was a pouch of tobacco. A few books about astrology and a roughly hewn wooden mask with a long, bent nose like a beak. Harry turned the mask over. Made in Papua New Guinea, it said on the price tag.

The clothes that weren’t lying on the bed and floor hung in a small wardrobe. There wasn’t much. A few cotton blouses, a worn coat and a large straw hat on the shelf.

‘But if we’d hoovered the ashtrays I wouldn’t mind betting we’d have found traces of cannabis.’

‘First of all, there’s no reason to believe that this was the scene of the crime. Second of all, smoking marijuana is nothing to shout about. Here in New South Wales we have a more pragmatic attitude to marijuana than in certain other Australian states. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the murder could be drugs-related, but the odd reefer or two is hardly relevant in this context. We can’t know for sure if she used other drugs. There’s a fair bit of coke and designer drugs on the go in the Albury, but no one we’ve spoken to has mentioned anything, and there wasn’t a trace of anything in the blood tests. At any rate, she wasn’t on the serious stuff. There were no needle marks, and we have a reasonable overview of the hard-core users.’

‘That’s the official version, anyway. There is one thing they thought you could help us with though.’

There was a letter in Norwegian. ‘Dear Elisabeth,’ it started and obviously wasn’t finished. Harry skimmed through it.

Well, I’m just fine, and even more important, I’m in love! Of course, he’s as handsome as a Greek God with long, curly brown hair, a pert bum and eyes that tell you what he’s already whispered to you: he wants you now – this minute – behind the closest wall, in the loo, on the table, on the floor, anywhere. His name’s Evans, he’s 32, he’s been married (surprise, surprise) and has a lovely little boy of 18 months called Tom-Tom. Right now he doesn’t have a proper job, but drifts around doing things.

And, yes, I know you can smell trouble, and I promise not to let myself be dragged down. Not for the time being, anyway.

Enough about Evans. I’m still working at the Albury. ‘Mr Bean’ stopped inviting me out after Evans was in the bar one night, and that at least is progress. But he still follows me with those slimy eyes of his. Yuk! Actually I’m beginning to get sick of this job, but I’ll just have to hang on until I can have my residence permit extended. I’ve had a word with NRK – they’re planning a follow-up to the TV series for next autumn and I can carry on if I want. Decisions, decisions!

A Clown

‘To the circus! I promised a friend I would pop by one day. And today is one day, isn’t it.’

At the Powerhouse a small circus troupe had already started the free afternoon performance for a sparse but young and enthusiastic audience. The building had been a power station and a tram hall when Sydney had trams, Andrew elucidated. Now it was functioning as a kind of contemporary museum. A couple of well-built girls had just completed a not very spectacular trapeze number, but had reaped a great round of friendly applause.

An enormous guillotine was rolled in as a clown entered the stage. He was wearing a brightly coloured uniform and a striped hat, obviously inspired by the French Revolution. He tripped and got up to all sorts of pranks to the huge amusement of the children. Then another clown came onto the stage wearing a long white wig, and it gradually dawned on Harry that he was meant to be Louis XVI.

‘By unanimous vote, sentenced to death,’ announced the clown with the striped hat.

Soon the condemned man was led to the scaffold where he – still to the amusement of the children – laid his head, after much screaming and yelling, on the block below the blade. There was a brief roll of the drums, the blade fell and to everyone’s amazement, Harry’s included, it cut off the monarch’s head with a sound reminiscent of an axe blow in the forest on a bright winter’s morning. The head, still bearing the wig, fell and rolled into a basket. The lights went out, and when they were switched back on, the headless king stood in the spotlight with his head under his arm. Now the children’s cheering knew no bounds. Then the lights went out again, and when they came back on for the second time, the whole troupe was assembled and bowing, and the performance was over.

As people poured towards the exit, Andrew and Harry went backstage. In the makeshift dressing room the performers were already removing their costumes and make-up.

A face turned. Louis XVI looked less majestic with make-up smeared over his face and without his wig. ‘Well, hello, it’s Tuka the Indian!’

Otto proffered his hand elegantly with a kink in the wrist and looked indignant when Harry, slightly perplexed, made do with a light press.

‘Otto thinks he’s a woman. A woman of noble descent,’ Andrew said, to illuminate.

‘Stuff and nonsense, Tuka. Otto knows very well she’s a man. You look confused, handsome. Perhaps you’d like to check for yourself?’ Otto emitted a high-pitched chuckle.

Harry felt his earlobes go warm. Two false eyelashes fluttered accusingly at Andrew.

‘Sorry. My name’s Harry . . . er . . . Holy. Clever number out there. Nice costumes. Very . . . lifelike. And unusual.’

‘The Louise Seize number? Unusual? On the contrary. It’s an old classic. The first time it was done was by the Jandaschewsky clown family just two weeks after the real execution in January 1793. People loved it. People have always loved public executions. Do you know how many reruns there are of the Kennedy assassination on American TV stations every year?’

‘Otto sees himself as the heir of the great Jandy Jandaschewsky,’ Andrew added.

‘I don’t think your friend here is quite with us, Tuka. The Jandaschewsky family, you see, was a travelling troupe of musical clowns who came to Australia at the beginning of the twentieth century and settled here. They ran the circus until Jandy died in 1971. I saw Jandy for the first time when I was six. From that moment I knew what I wanted to be. And now that’s what I am.’

‘How do you two know each other?’ Harry asked. Andrew and Otto exchanged glances. Harry saw their mouths twitch and knew he had committed a gaffe.

‘It’s a long story,’ Andrew said. ‘I suppose you could say we grew up together. Otto would have sold his mother for a piece of my arse of course, but even at a young age I felt a strange attraction to girls and all those awful hetero things. It must have been something to do with genes and environment. What do you think, Otto?’

‘You have no style, you have no money and your arse is overrated,’ Otto squealed. Harry gazed round at the others in the troupe; they seemed quite unfazed by the performance. One of the well-built trapeze artists sent him an encouraging wink.

‘Harry and I are going up to the Albury tonight. Would you like to join us?’

‘Everyone else’s life goes on, you mean. Mine stops here, right here. When love dies, I die.’

‘Besides, I have to go home and feed Waldorf. You go, and I may come a bit later.’

‘See you soon,’ Harry said, putting his lips dutifully to Otto’s outstretched hand.

A Swede

THE SUN HAD gone down as they drove along Oxford Street in Paddington and pulled up by a small open space. ‘Green Park’ the sign said, but the grass was scorched brown, and the only green was a pavilion in the middle of the park. A man with Aboriginal blood in his veins lay on the grass between the trees. His clothes were in tatters and he was so dirty that he was more grey than black. On seeing Andrew, he raised his hand in a kind of greeting, but Andrew ignored him.

The Albury was so full they had to squeeze their way inside the glass doors. Harry stood still for a few seconds taking in the scene before him. The clientele was a motley collection, mostly young men: rockers in faded denim, suit-clad yuppies with slicked hair, arty types with goatees and champagne, blond and good-looking surfers with bleached smiles, and bikers – or bikies as Andrew called them – in black leathers. At the centre of the room, in the very bar itself, the show was in full swing with long-legged, semi-naked women wearing purple, plunging tops. They were cavorting about and miming with wide, red-painted mouths to Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’. The girls took turns so that those who were not performing served the customers with winks and outrageous flirting.

‘Coming up right away, blondie,’ said the barmaid in the Roman helmet with a deep voice and a mischievous smile.

‘Tell me, are you and I the only straight guys in this town?’ Harry asked, returning with a beer and a glass of juice.

‘After San Francisco Sydney has the biggest gay population in the world,’ Andrew said. ‘The Australian outback is not exactly known for its tolerance of sexual diversity, so it’s not surprising that all the queer farmer boys in Australia want to come to Sydney. Not just from Australia, by the way, there are gay people from all over the world pouring into town every day.’

They went to another bar at the back of the room where Andrew called a girl behind the counter. She was standing with her back to them and had the reddest hair Harry had ever seen. It hung down to the rear pocket of her tight blue jeans, but was unable to conceal the willowy back and pleasingly rounded hips. She turned and a row of pearly-white teeth smiled from a slim, radiant face with two azure eyes and innumerable freckles. What a waste, if this isn’t a woman, Harry thought.

‘Remember me?’ Andrew shouted above the noise of seventies disco music. ‘I was here asking about Inger. Can we have a word?’

The redhead became serious. She nodded, passed on a message to one of the other girls and led the way to a little smoking room behind the kitchen.

‘Any news?’ she asked, and Harry needed no more to be able to determine with some certainty that she spoke better Swedish than English.

‘I met an old man once,’ Harry said in Norwegian. She glanced at him in surprise. ‘He was the captain of a boat on the Amazon River. Three words from him in Portuguese and I knew he was Swedish. He had lived there for thirty years. And I can’t speak a word of Portuguese.’

At first the redhead looked perplexed, but then she laughed. A trill of cheery laughter that reminded Harry of some rare forest bird.

‘Is it really so obvious?’ she said in Swedish. She had a deep, calm voice and softly rolled rrrs.

The redhead’s name was Birgitta Enquist. She had been in Australia for four years and working at the Albury for one.

‘Of course we talked when we were working, but I didn’t really have any close contact with Inger. She kept herself to herself mostly. There’s a gang of us who go out together and she occasionally tagged along, but I didn’t know her that well. She had just left some guy in Newtown when she started here. The most personal detail I know about her is that the relationship became too intense for her in the long run. I suppose she needed a fresh start.’

‘Not really. As I said, we talked, but she never gave me a full rundown of her life. Not that I asked her to. In October she went up north to Queensland and apparently fell in with a crowd from Sydney there who she stayed in contact with afterwards. I think she met a guy up there – he came by here one night. I’ve told you all this before though, haven’t I?’ she said with an enquiring glance.

‘I know, my dear Miss Enquist, I just wanted my Norwegian colleague here to have a first-hand report and see where Inger worked. Harry Holy is regarded as Norway’s best investigator after all and he may be able to put his finger on things we Sydney police have overlooked.’

‘Someone who looked like the English comedian . . . er, Rowan Atkinson, isn’t that his name?’

‘Alex had his eye on Inger, yes, he did. And not just Inger, most girls in this bar have at one time or another been subjected to his desperate efforts. Or Fiddler Ray, as we call him. It was Inger who came up with Mr Bean. He doesn’t have an easy time of it, poor thing. Over thirty, lives at home with his mum and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. But he’s perfectly OK as a boss. And quite harmless, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘Well, there are so many types of guy that drop in here. Not all of them are gay, and there were quite a few who noticed Inger – she’s so attractive. Was. But off the top of my head I can’t think of anyone. There was . . .’

‘I read in the report that Inger was working here the night we assume she was killed. Do you know if she had a date after work or did she go straight home?’

‘She took a few scraps from the kitchen, said they were for the mutt. I knew she didn’t have a dog, so I asked her where she was going. She said home. That’s all I know.’

‘The Tasmanian Devil,’ Harry muttered. She sent him a curious look. ‘Her landlord has a dog,’ he said. ‘I suppose it had to be bribed so she could enter the house in one piece.’

Harry thanked her for talking to them. As they were about to leave, Birgitta said, ‘We’re really upset at the Albury about what happened. How are her parents taking it?’

‘Not too well, I’m afraid,’ Harry said. ‘They’re in shock, of course. And blame themselves for letting her come here. The coffin’s being sent to Norway tomorrow. I can get hold of the address if you want to send flowers for the funeral.’

Harry was on the verge of asking something else, but couldn’t bring himself to do it with all the talk about death and funerals. On the way out her farewell smile was burning on his retina. He knew it was going to be there for a while.

1

Tuesday 7 January