The Toe Tag Quintet

by Matthew Condon

  ‘Owe it? Murder, rape, pillage? Nice chap.’

  ‘History never ends. You can shape it, prune it, tend to it, like your little fig tree there, but it keeps on flowing through like a subterranean river. Logan’s work. It’s not done with yet.’

  And there it was — the loony factor. I had waited for it, anticipated it, and it had arrived.

  ‘I’m sorry, who are you again? Curator of manuscripts, sadist and fetish section?’

  ‘You could call me a patron of the library.’

  ‘A patron. Aren’t patrons people with too much money who want to be a member of clubs that without the moolah wouldn’t have them in a pink fit?’

  ‘I am a custodian, of sorts.’

  ‘Now you’re a custodian. Of what?’

  ‘Why, history, of course.’

  ‘It’s almost six o’clock. Time for you to take your tablets, and for me to get home to dinner. ‘

  ‘Be careful around Captain Logan,’ he said, smirking again. ‘History has a habit of repeating itself.’

  ‘For a patron, or custodian, you’re fantastically unoriginal.’

  He turned his back on me and surveyed the city through the wide glass windows.

  I took the bonsai and returned to the Peugeot in the car park under the library. Hopping into the driver’s seat, I felt a crinkling in my trousers and retrieved the gold envelope.

  In the gloom of the cabin I once again studied the photograph of the corpse. For the first time I noticed a strange, dead tree in the distance, a hundred metres from the body, and around the body itself a patina of cracked and dried mud. It was a riverbed. Or possibly the floor of a country property’s dam.

  At that instant I heard the shriek of tyres in the underground car park, and just caught the sight of an old Toyota ute heading for the exit. The driver, from the rear, looked to be wearing a large farmer’s hat, and there were shovels and rakes poking out the back of the ute tray.

  On my new mobile Peg had left me a text message: Stay out of mischief.

  How I wish I’d taken her advice.

  ~ * ~

  5

  IF you’d told me when I first decided to retire to Queensland that just over a year later I might be squatting beside a 177-year-old corpse at Wivenhoe Dam, north-west of Brisbane, I’d have had you committed. Or committed myself. Indeed, if I’d done that when the little voice in my head told me to back away, I wouldn’t be in another damn pickle.

  But did I listen to the voice of reason? Of course I didn’t.

  And while I was aware of the severity of south-east Queensland’s water crisis, and had watched with mild amusement the political buck-passing, and even taken to using an egg timer in the shower to play my part in solving the wider problem, I could not have imagined in my wildest dreams that the drought would produce not just community angst and a boom in water-tank sales, but a body that just might rewrite the state’s history.

  For this was not just any corpse photographed halfburied in the cracked surface of one of Wivenhoe’s recently exposed flanks as the dam levels dropped, but the earthly remains — I was convinced — of one Captain Patrick Logan. At least that’s what my instinct told me.

  But let me explain how I got to this point.

  Reference books have Logan murdered in 1830 by an Aboriginal tribe during one of the brutal captain’s many explorations in and about the Brisbane valley. Cracked across the back of the head, stripped naked and partially hidden beneath tree branches in the vicinity of the modern-day Wivenhoe. Even his horse was slaughtered. History says Logan’s body was then taken back to the settlement and forwarded to Sydney, where he was buried.

  My advice to budding scholars? Don’t believe everything you read. History can reveal. But it can also conceal.

  On the drive back to the Gold Coast the day I got collared by Ringo Starr in the John Oxley Library, something nagged at me. And when I get nagged by something, I can’t rest until I’ve satiated the itch. It made me a good cop. But it has made me a somewhat reckless and unpredictable civilian.

  Quite simply, the object of my agitation was Ringo’s coat. It was eerily similar to the design of the coat on the unidentified corpse in the photograph that some stranger had left for me in the library’s meditation cube. Or had it been left for me? Was it intended for somebody else? Had I accidentally stumbled into a little mystery that might have gone unnoticed if I hadn’t decided to awaken my inner Buddhist in the red box by the Brisbane River? Perhaps the bonsai and gold envelope were meant for my friend in the John Oxley upstairs. He’d been waiting for them. I’d inadvertently got in first. Now I had the photograph of a very dead man, though I had only a supposition of who that man might be. I also had a pretty little bonsai, which I gifted to Peg who, astonished by my generosity, popped it on the kitchen windowsill and looked at me curiously throughout the evening. Can’t I buy my wife a dwarfed fig tree if I feel like it? said I, incredulous at her incredulity. Then seeing Logan’s portrait on the computer, there was the coat again. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

  Late that night, I rang the phone number on the back of the photograph.

  A man answered. ‘Yeah,’ he said. He sounded sleepy. Or drunk. Or drugged. Or both.

  ‘Thanks for the bonsai,’ I said, after several seconds of silence.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why don’t I come and see you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He gave me an address and the phone went dead.

  Esk, he’d said. What the hell is an esk?

  The following morning, under the pretext of once more climbing the family tree, I hit the road for Brisbane and Esk, an hour or so north-west of the city.

  It’s a delightful drive, if you haven’t done it. And it’s my belief that everyone should see at least once their city’s water supply. Why? It’s the source of life. It says a lot about the community it serves. It can tell you things about your past, and your future.

  I should have told Peg about my latest bout of mischief. But, I’ll be honest — it gave me a thrill to be back on the trail of a mystery. I had not anticipated the stupefying boredom of retirement. I hadn’t prepared for it. I hadn’t established a little safety net of hobbies and activities for myself. Granted, I didn’t expect to be plugged full of holes within months of leaving work. But those many months of rehabilitation brought home the reality of my position.

  Peg said my subconscious had sought out danger and adventure during that near-fatal Fairweather farrago last year. I asked her if it was the habit of the subconscious to willingly get its backside shot up. I was being facetious, but I know there was some truth in what she said.

  And here I was again, driving to a remote farmhouse outside Esk to meet a stranger who had a corpse on his property, most likely a gun in the rack beside the front door, and an expansive and lovingly tended Slim Dusty record collection.

  I stopped in Esk itself and had a coffee and a sandwich. As I sat there, beside the main drag, I began thinking of Logan and his ill-fated expedition into the valley. He had convicts with him, supplies, horses, and when he set out from the Old Windmill, the soil around it infused with wheat husks and men’s blood, he couldn’t have known he was soon to meet his death. Or could he? Men like Logan believe they’re invincible. Yet history has shown, over and over, that invincible men usually suffer horrible and premature deaths. The frontier. It can be a hell of a dangerous place.

  I tried to imagine the valley and the virgin river back in 1830. It must have been extraordinary. The forests untouched. The pristine river beginning its long, winding journey to Moreton Bay. And a hundred years later it was all gone, submerged beneath the Somerset and Wivenhoe dams.

  Logan was fearless, I’ll give him that. It’s no picnic, the Australian bush. It’s claimed its share of lives, broken countless men and women, devoured innocent children. It was and is, as they say, unforgiving.

  So Logan came in search of pastures and water, and was delivered into the great void. Had local Aboriginal trib
es been responsible? That seemed to be accepted fact. But there would have been hundreds of men with a motive to end his miserable existence. A pack of them who had suffered at the end of his lash and been humiliated as beasts of burden at his beck and call. Logan was a murder waiting to happen.

  If the corpse in the photograph was indeed the real Logan, whose body had been brought back to the settlement in 1830, dispatched to Sydney and buried with military honours? Why had the switch been made? And why had the body of the real Logan been buried with such determination that it avoided detection for almost two centuries?

  I found the property a further twenty minutes out of town, drove over the cattle grid at the front gate and parked beside a dilapidated farmhouse. I could see a Toyota ute with shovels and mattocks poking out of its tray in a nearby shed.

  I knocked on the door and waited. Nothing. The tin roof pinged and groaned in the sunshine.

  ‘Hello?’

  Still nothing. I opened the door and peered into a long hallway that ran from the front to the back of the house. There was old, cracked linoleum on the floor.

  ‘Anybody home?’ I walked through to the kitchen at the back. I nosed about. There were photographs of the same man with various women and children pinned to the fridge. In each photo his grin was broad enough to reveal two missing front teeth, and in each picture he wore a large, battered straw hat.

  Call it an old copper’s instinct, but I went down the back steps and climbed through a fence and took a stroll across the dry paddocks. The grass was brittle beneath my boots. Grasshoppers clung to my trouser legs. I could see in the distance the tip of one of the smaller arms of the Wivenhoe Dam. I needed to find that body in the picture. I needed to see it with my own eyes. In this digital age, no photograph can be trusted.

  I went down to the edge of the water. You could clearly see the rings, like dirt in a bathtub, where the water level had been, and the layers of caked mud, dry and hard furthest from shore. There were bird, kangaroo and wallaby tracks stitched crazily across the surface. I walked across the hardened mud until I saw a dead tree just like the one in the photograph.

  I found the corpse all right.

  But it wasn’t Captain Logan. There, in a dried-out mud bog and positioned in exactly the same way as our historic corpse, was the body of my toothless friend in the pictures on the fridge in the farmhouse. His straw hat was tilted sideways on his head.

  And he had a perfectly neat, ruby-red bullet hole slap-bang in the centre of his forehead.

  ~ * ~

  6

  There are many, many people in the world who never leave even the barest trace of a footprint. Nothing — not a scintilla nor skerrick — to mark their time on Earth.

  I’m not talking about this carbon-footprint nonsense we hear so much about these days. This great global push to make all of us even smaller, less offensive, less significant. This urgency to turn us into soft-stepping sheep lest we actually show we exist. Trust me, when I’m ready to buy the farm, so to speak, I want to leave one big, rude, noticeable divot behind.

  Still, as a former homicide detective, I’ve known the cheapness of life. I’ve seen the waste. The slaughter of innocents. With each one, it never gets any easier.

  This is how the job gets to you. It scratches at the essence of your being, bit by bit. It can throw you into a philosophical cast of mind if you’re not careful.

  In my early days, as a young cop, I didn’t handle it well. I was perfectly ordered and stoic on the outside, but I’d go home at the end of a shift, just as bankers and street cleaners and trawler fishermen clock off, and I’d sit alone in the lounge room into the early hours, leaden with the sights and sounds of the day, strangely uncomforted by the feather snores of my wife coming from the bedroom. We all have our crosses to bear. But I’m not putting down accountants, say, when you compare a day busy with figures and book balancing and one where you come upon a teenager who has decided to end it all by blowing off half her face with Daddy’s hunting rifle, or the mummified remains of an elderly lady in an outer suburb, dead of a heart attack for a year without entering the thoughts of anybody living, a plastic shopping bag still gripped in her right hand. Put side by side, the columns don’t exactly equate.

  Once, during my apprenticeship years, my education on the force, a question presented itself to me — how many people have ever lived on Earth since time began? (These sort of maddening conundrums slip in under the door when you work with violent death.) I read and spoke with people and could never get a satisfactory answer.

  Then I discovered a foreword the science-fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke wrote to his famous novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey. I wrote it out on one of my five- by three-inch index cards and kept it in my wallet, and when the card got dog-eared and fragile I copied it out again, and again.

  Clarke wrote: ‘Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this universe, there shines a star.’

  For the umpteenth time in my life I thought of these words as I sat beside the body of the straw-hatted farmer by the feeble waters of the Wivenhoe Dam.

  The blood around the bullet wound in his head had crusted and turned rust-brown. His hands were folded in his lap. His head was turned slightly to the side, his eyes were half-open and drowsy-looking, as if he’d been woken from a deep sleep. One eyebrow was lifted a little higher than the other, giving him a visage of dumb surprise. He had not, I reasoned, expected to be turned into a Milky Way star quite so soon.

  I tried to close those eyes but they didn’t hold. I left him staring into space. As I walked back to his farmhouse I could hear the flies making their ghastly music about him.

  I didn’t immediately call the police. There was some real work to do before the blue shirts stormed in and turned the place upside down, and decided, considering I’d found the body, that I might make a decent suspect and even contribute to alleviating their murder clear-up statistics as the New Year approached.

  My toothless farmer friend in the straw hat, he kept what must have once been a decent spread. His fences were all intact, though the pastures were ankle-high and dry as a bone and hadn’t seen cattle in some time. The whole place had the feel of something on the point of collapse. Of desperation. Despite this simple man’s incessant labour, fate and nature had conspired against him, and it all felt tired. The drought. It had hollowed him out.

  Not far from the old Queenslander he’d called home, I noticed a shed that seemed different from the rest. It had crude, homemade skylights built into the corrugated-iron roof sheeting, and there were new water pumps and a crazy maze of plastic pipes tangled down one side.

  I peered through the open doorway. It was hot in there, humid and oven-like. The shed was dominated by two long hand-made trestle tables. A rudimentary watering system had been rigged up above the tables. Right at the end of one of the tables was a cluster of small potted plants. There were boxes and boxes of unopened glazed pots, made in China, and a side-table on which was a selection of small, delicate pruning tools. They were bonsai implements.

  I sighed for the poor man. He was starting a new business for himself. Diversifying, in the face of the great drought. At some point he had lit upon the idea of growing and selling bonsai trees. It was doomed from the start. He was a farmer. He worked with living things. It was all he knew. Yet he saw a future in plants, and water. He could not step out of this small, dry square of his. He would have had a better shot at things selling hand-squeezed lemonade out by his front gate, poor man.

  I went up into the house and started looking around in the kitchen. In the country, the kitchen is the focal point of business, of family, of life. In one of the drawers of an ancient hutch I found th
e farmer’s paperwork. I tipped it onto the kitchen table. There, near the top of the pile, were more photographs of the corpse I had been abruptly introduced to in the meditation room at the State Library.

  I put the kettle on and made a cup of tea, then I sat at the table and carefully studied the pictures for almost an hour.

  The dozens of photos, taken from several angles, gave me a greater appreciation of the victim. I had no trained eye for historical apparel, but the jacket that adorned the body looked, to my schoolboy knowledge of Australian history, to be from the 1800s. It was also richly decorated with braid and buttons. Whoever it was had rank of some sort. There were what appeared to be spurs on his rotting boots.

  It was the close-up of the skull, though, that fascinated me. There was a huge, shattered entrance wound to the flat forehead. And the photographer, presumably the farmer himself, had rested what could only have been a lead ball nearby, presumably found inside the old skull, rattling about like a marble for an aeon. This was, without hesitation, a most heinous murder. Though I had no concrete evidence, I had no doubt it was Logan.