The Toe Tag Quintet

by Matthew Condon

  There were a thousand convicts in that early penal settlement, and each and every one had a decent motive. But why would anyone care so much all this time later? It didn’t make sense.

  If I was a detective at the time of Logan’s death, there was something I would need to see. The ‘leaves of his notebook’. Yes, I would very much have liked to see them.

  Still, I had to be content with his jacket, which I’d souvenired off the body in the freezer. I held it, thawed now and limp, and tried to will some truth from it. All I got was the smell of mud and copper. And blood.

  ~ * ~

  9

  Peg and I had breakfast on the back deck overlooking the canal at home on the Gold Coast. Just as I began scooping out my grapefruit, a huge tourist boat chugged past. Several people on the top deck took photographs of us. I found it peculiar that a distant shot of me and Peg having breakfast would be archived in someone’s holiday album on the other side of the world.

  My wife was unusually sullen. She rarely gets sullen. Cruelty to animals and starving children make her that way. And me, of course. Usually me.

  ‘How’s the tree going?’ she said, looking at me over the rim of her tea cup.

  ‘The tree?’

  ‘Family tree.’

  ‘Oh, the family tree. Very interesting. Fascinating, actually.’ I feigned a hearty laugh. ‘Oh, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree in my family, Peg.’

  ‘You found the bushranger, then?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ I avoided eye contact.

  ‘How’s that mobile phone I gave you?’

  ‘It’s good, Peg. Yes. Very clear reception.’

  ‘Do you have it with you?’

  ‘At all times. See?’ By chance and luck, I had slipped it into my shorts pocket that morning. I produced it, as proof.

  ‘Did you get my messages?’

  ‘Messages? It keeps messages?’

  ‘You don’t have a clue how to use it, do you?’

  ‘I have never even turned it off since you gave it to me. Look.’ The screen was blank. I fumbled with the on/off button. Nothing. ‘It’s broken,’ I said.

  ‘It’s out of battery power.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘How could one of the most intelligent and highly decorated detectives in the history of the New South Wales police force not be able to operate a mobile phone? Once you charge it up, you’ll find several messages from me, and another half dozen from your friend, Mr Carpenter.’

  ‘Mr Carpenter?’

  ‘An old friend of yours, he says. Knew you when he worked for the Sydney City Council. Then he migrated north, and worked for the Brisbane City Council. Ring a bell?’

  ‘Water infrastructure.’ I toyed with the empty half-bladder of the grapefruit skin.

  ‘Water?’

  ‘I had a case, in the seventies. Extortion. Some lunatic threatened to contaminate the Sydney water supply. Carpenter was a minor public servant, specialised in water.’

  ‘Well, he wants to talk to you.’

  ‘He told me once there were bodies all over the world sealed up in dam walls. A dam wall is quite possibly the most perfect place to conceal a murder victim. He believed there were criminals who licked their lips every time a government proposed a new dam, and through their contacts, or courtesy of a wad of cash, or a gun to the back of a head, bodies, some of them new, some years old and exhumed, were slipped into dam walls. He reckoned you just had to check with the cops, or read the newspapers, to see the statistical rise in killings prior to the concrete pouring of a dam wall. Through the roof. ‘

  ‘Ah,’ said Peg. ‘Another one of your conspiracy theorists. You collect them, like some people collect stamps.’

  ‘It’s such a crazy theory it might be true.’

  ‘Why do you think he might want to talk to you, after all these years?’ She was sullen again, and suspicious.

  ‘Well, he’d be retired, like me,’ I said. ‘Maybe he wants to go fishing. Reminisce on old times.’

  It was a Brisbane phone number. We spoke briefly. Carpenter certainly didn’t want to go fishing.

  An hour and a half later, I was walking with him through the Brisbane Botanic Gardens at Mount Coot-tha.

  ‘How’d you track me down?’ I asked him.

  We strolled slowly, with our hands behind our backs, just two retired gentlemen enjoying the gardenias.

  ‘How’d I track you down? For a private citizen living out a quiet retirement, you certainly make a large public target. Last year. The Fairweather escapade. You couldn’t have made yourself more conspicuous if you’d stripped off and ridden an elephant through the Queen Street Mall.’

  ‘The press. They made a big deal out of it, that’s all.’

  ‘Now you’re causing all sorts of waves behind the scenes, let me tell you. Serious waves. I felt obligated to warn you.’ He looked around furtively, like there might be electronic surveillance equipment in the herb garden, a sniper behind the bamboo.

  He was, I knew from past experience, secretly enjoying all this cloak and dagger stuff.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘There’s a lot of noise about you and the government’s water infrastructure, which is being put in place as we speak.’

  ‘Water infrastructure? I was researching my family’s ancestry in a little booth in the library, for crying out loud. And what would you know about government business these days anyway? How long you been retired? Ten years?’

  He flicked his nose with his forefinger.

  ‘Either you’re allergic to pollen or you know more than you’re letting on,’ I said. Carpenter didn’t smile. Public servants whose whole lives have been the past, present and future of water infrastructure don’t seem to have a huge sense of humour.

  ‘Let me just say that you are being discussed in the highest of circles.’

  The highest of circles? Who was he kidding?

  ‘Would you care to illuminate me on the circles? And the talk?’

  We had entered a mini-rainforest, and Carpenter became more jittery in the humid shadows. We re-emerged at the far side of the gardens. There were, down behind some gums, huge mountains of mulch. They looked, from this distance, as big as the pyramids in Egypt.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I might be retired, but there is a little group of us who meet regularly, once a month, to discuss water-related matters.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ I said. ‘Not your own waters, I assume, but the public sort.’

  ‘This is deadly serious.’

  ‘I apologise.’

  ‘We are — and I’m sure this will surprise you — called upon now and again as “consultants” to council and government projects regarding water. And even you would know that water, at this very moment in time, is a major issue in the community, and to governments. This is the worst drought in a century. We are under the most severe water restrictions in this city’s history. There is a very real concern we will be the first city in the twenty-first century to run out of water, unless the infrastructure is up and running in time.’

  ‘Or it rains.’

  ‘Or it rains like it’s never rained before.’

  I was sweating, and thirsty, now that we’d left the shaded area of the gardens and walked under the ferocious midday sun.

  ‘Well, I may be the first retired detective in the Mount Coot-tha gardens to run out of water in the twenty-first century,’ I said, punching him lightly on the arm. There was no cheering Mr Carpenter.

  ‘I can see I’ve wasted my time.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Go on. No more jokes.’

  ‘This thing you’ve got yourself caught up in. Out at Wivenhoe. I can’t tell you what to do, but I can make a recommendation. That’s what I was good at all my life.’

  ‘And what is your recommendation?’

  ‘I would suggest that if you want to see your grandchildren out of nappies, go back home and forget all about it.’

  ‘You’re not the first to make that re
commendation in recent times.’

  ‘I know men like you,’ Carpenter went on. ‘If someone warns you off something, you’ll go at it even harder.’

  ‘Now you’re getting warm.’

  ‘And I assume there is nothing anyone could say to dissuade you once you’ve made up your mind to solve a puzzle.’

  ‘Now you’re even warmer. Puzzles are for children, Carpenter. I’m more interested in matters of life and death. That’s the greatest puzzle of all, for grown-ups.’

  I was sweating like a plump hog waiting for the knives of Christmas. Yet Carpenter, in his neat, white short-sleeved shirt, didn’t appear to have raised a single bead of the stuff.

  ‘What if that matter of death happened to be your own?’ he said finally, stopping and leaning in to smell a rose bush.

  We ended up, to my surprise, in the Bonsai House. Could Carpenter have possibly known about the little bonsai I’d received in the library that day? The miniature fig tree that kicked off this bizarre adventure? Exactly how much did this diminutive public servant know?

  We were the only two in the house. I could hear water trickling. It was momentarily soothing.

  ‘If my warnings aren’t enough to dissuade you, then there’s someone I’d like you to meet. Someone from our little water circle.’

  ‘Brisbane sure has a lot of powerful, secret circles.’

  ‘If you want to learn about this city’s water infrastructure, its life source, then he’s the only man to talk to.’

  ‘I didn’t say I wanted to learn about that.’

  ‘Oh, you do,’ said Carpenter, effecting what could have been at the least the vague beginnings of an all-knowing smile. ‘You most certainly do.’

  I admired a number of healthy bonsais, then remembered, with a start, seeing my tiny fig on the kitchen windowsill back home that morning while I was on the phone to Carpenter. Several leaves had fallen from its branches and turned yellow. The soil was dry and crumbling. My bonsai was dying.

  If I was a superstitious sort of fellow, I might have seen that as an omen.

  ~ * ~

  10

  Sometimes life seems to conspire to play quirky practical jokes on certain people. I happen to be one of those people.

  A few days after meeting Carpenter in the Brisbane Botanic Gardens I was back again at Wivenhoe Dam for a top-secret meeting with an eighty-three-year-old man who went by the name of Walt Whitman.

  Walt Whitman, as it turned out, was to be my informant on all things water-related, and was able to explain why my life was in danger because I’d accidentally crossed the path of a bonsai and a picture of an ancient corpse in the State Library of Queensland. Walt Whitman would fill me in on why the innocent meanderings of an ex-cop and budding family historian could suddenly cause rumblings at the highest levels of government.

  Carpenter had called me from a payphone the night before and simply muttered the name and location — Walt Whitman; Captain Logan’s Camp. Then he’d hung up.

  Was this a public service-style joke? That this strange case of death and drought should involve an informant named after the famous American poet, hobo and author of the world classic Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman, author of a poem called ‘The Waters’, that began ‘The world below the brine’. Was this their tacky and obvious and profoundly unfunny code? Or one of those cosmic jokes that had begun to attach themselves to me like summer flies on the back of a crisp white tennis shirt? Or both?

  Ho, ho, Carpenter, I said to myself as I drove into the camping grounds named after the area’s most infamous celebrity, the good Captain Logan himself, which lay on the banks of the Wivenhoe.

  It was another hot day and the Peugeot had not taken kindly to the conditions and the airless Brisbane Valley Highway out of Ipswich. The car was hissing as I cruised down past empty tent sites and dormant barbecue pits and parked within sight of the dam water.

  ‘Cool down,’ I said to the Peugeot and made my way to the picnic tables and benches under a stand of gums, overlooking the dam. I shared the shade with several kangaroos and wallabies.

  Within minutes I heard a car approaching, and turned to see a rich maroon ZB Custom Ford Fairlane winding its way towards me. As it got closer, I could see it still bore the original raised crest hood ornament. It would have had a Selectair ventilation system inside and bench seats. I knew this car inside out. My father had owned one.

  I vaguely recalled Ford’s advertising at the time, announcing that the ZB was the car ‘most people move up to’, and as the Fairlane squeaked to a halt next to the Peugeot, I was filled with nostalgia for my father and the smell of the car when he’d first brought it home, and the maiden voyage I took with him that night, a young copper still living with his parents (though Peg was on the horizon), cruising the streets of South Sydney and Surry Hills and out to Bondi and back.

  The driver’s door creaked open loudly and several of the smaller wallabies rose and bolted. An old man emerged and then fastidiously locked the vehicle. It had to be Walt Whitman.

  I thought of how he had locked the car and realised that this possession, now almost forty years old, must have been the pinnacle of his achievement as a professional working man. This must have been the symbol of his success as a middle-aged public servant, and from there perhaps he had hit a plateau until retirement.

  He shuffled over to the picnic bench.

  ‘You’re the idiot who’s been causing all the troubles?’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Mr Whitman.’

  ‘We had a place for idiots like you in my day. A small room in George Street with no windows. You’d count paper clips till you learned to shut your trap.’

  ‘And nice to meet you too.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Walt Whitman had reached an age where the entire architecture of human courtesy and decency had collapsed. At his age, on the shoreline of death, so to speak, why be polite?

  ‘Carpenter suggested…’

  But he wasn’t listening to me. He was gazing across the water of the dam, or what was left of it.

  ‘I worked on the Somerset Dam,’ he said, ‘before and after the war. I knew it’d never be enough for Brisbane and I told them so. Bloody war blew out the construction time. We’d ordered the gates and steelworks from England in the late thirties, and the rearmament program put that on hold. The evil ot Hitler, you see, even reached up the Brisbane River. We thought Somerset would see the city through to the eighties, but Brisbane boomed after forty-five. The city got real thirsty. So we had to start looking around again.’

  ‘Wivenhoe,’ I said.

  ‘Wivenhoe. It’d been on the drawing board as early as 1902. Not many people know that. They wanted something here for flood mitigation after the great 1883 deluge. But the wheels of government. They move slow.’

  I wasn’t sure where Walt Whitman’s history lesson was leading. But he certainly knew his water.

  ‘In the late sixties, old Bjelke gave it the green light, so we had to start reclaiming land. You got to give people time when you take their land. Twenty years or so, to get used to the idea, to get prepared. Twenty or so years, that’s half a working lifetime. That’s what we did here. But one person didn’t want to leave. We had strife from the start. You’d think he’d found gold and didn’t want anyone else to know about it. Then we had a young surveyor from the university out here in the mid-seventies, doing a doctorate or something. Found him with a bullet wound to the chest. Died in hospital. It was covered up, of course. The papers were told it was a roo-hunting accident. Poor kid. We never could prove who did it, but I bet my bottom dollar it was that pest Collison.’

  ‘Collison?’

  ‘The old guy who didn’t want to give up his land. He did, in the end. He was hauled off by the cops, and his farm went under.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘Never found out.’

  ‘There was another shooting out here recently, you know.’

&nbs
p; ‘Course I bloody well know. You think I’m an idiot? That was no suicide. That fellow was no farmer either. He was a caretaker, for the government, trying to get by as best he could.’

  ‘Don’t you find it coincidental? The young surveyor you just told me about, and the so-called farmer? Both shot dead?’

  ‘You been touched by the sun or something? Nothing is coincidental. Not when it involves the most precious resource on earth. When it starts to run out — water — you can forget about diamonds and gold and oil. People’ll be tearing each other’s hearts out for water.’