Was this Logan’s fatal error? The smallest crevice of humanity that led to his downfall?
Now I came to the final diary entries of Logan.
During much of October 1830, as he trudged about the future Wivenhoe Dam region, his explorer’s entries were fantastically dull. Then it all changed. The hunter had become the prey.
‘Unsure of Collison,’ he wrote. ‘Since Christmas last he has uttered hardly a dozen sentences, yet continues about his work as if I don’t exist ... carries my scars with silence ... I have observed him staring at me with what could only be ill-intent.’
Then the final two days. History told us Logan wandered alone after he left the party in search of the lost horse from a previous expedition. The journal entries, however, told something else: ‘Collison refusing to take orders but still he follows ... on his face he expresses the malice of a common convict ... raised the crop to him to no avail.’
He then described their final breakfast. ‘Roasted chestnuts in the fire and hailed him but no response ... he has become a madman, crouched on the far bank of the creek, staring at his master ... he remains armed ... fail to recall the number of shots Collison discharged at the natives yesterday evening ... fail to recall…’
And that was the last earthly journal entry of Captain Patrick Logan. I was shaking as I folded Walt Whitman’s notes.
It had been a strange and confusing few weeks. All I’d wanted was to research my family tree and discover that elusive bushranger in its straggly branches. Yet I’d found myself digging out the roots of a far more dangerous and immovable tree — that of history — and bodies had fallen around me, and still I was groping in the dark.
What had happened between Collison and Logan? The supposedly intractable books kept telling us Logan had been bludgeoned to death with a waddy. But had he?
I smelled a rat. Several, in fact. And that was when I reached the inevitable and familiar trigger point of any frustrating investigation. It’s a dangerous tactic, but sometimes it’s the only one you have left.
I marched up to the John Oxley Library and demanded of the gentle, elderly lady behind the front desk that I speak to the man in black. Ringo. The shadow over this entire mystifying case.
‘You must be mistaken,’ she said. ‘There is nobody of that description here, nor has there ever been. And if you don’t leave quietly, I will have to call security.’
I sat in the Peugeot in the library car park, confused and disappointed. I kept hearing Peg in my head — Let it go, let it go.
So I let it go, reached for the ignition key, and that’s when I got belted across the back of the head with a waddy.
~ * ~
13
So here I am. Probably the first prisoner of the Old Windmill on Wickham Terrace since the nineteenth century. Though that would not be revealed to me immediately. At first, I didn’t know where I was. One minute I’d been sitting in the old Peugeot in the library car park, the next — oblivion.
When I came to, I was trussed up like a Christmas turkey with an eyeless hood over my sore and sorry head. I instinctively reverted to my training, tried to smell beyond the cloth that sucked in and out against my nostrils like a blacksmith’s bellows, and found nothing identifiable. Or did I? Wherever I was smelled very old, and beyond that? Was that the scent of rusted copper?
As for my life flashing before my eyes, it had come not as a pleasurable epic film in a cinema, suffused with the wonderful aroma of buttered popcorn, but as a scratchy sequence of old Kodak slides juggled out of sequence. Suddenly, there was my dad in his new Fairlane, both of them beaming and gleaming outside my childhood home. There was me on my graduation day from the police academy. There was Peg standing atop a set of stairs by the door of a TAA aircraft. There was my mother in her Sunday hat.
Then a padlock was sprung, a door was opened and shut, and heavy footsteps approached.
The hood was reefed off and I faced the disconcerting visage of a man who himself had his head hooded.
‘Well, that’s weird,’ I said.
My captor pulled up a wooden chair and slowly sat down opposite me. I could hear traffic outside. Pale light fell through a distant window. My new best friend in the Abu Ghraib hat was wearing overalls, work boots and what appeared to be gardening gloves.
‘You’re a nuisance,’ he said. He sounded like Chips Rafferty, if Chips had been raised in Windsor Castle in Old Blighty.
‘You’re not the first to tell me that,’ I said.
‘I’m sure I’m not.’
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, clouting innocent old pensioners over the head?’ It was all I could think of saying. Getting on the offensive. Dale Carnegie would not have approved.
‘You have become what my grandmother would have described as a nosey parker,’ he said.
‘And as my grandmother would have said, your grandmother didn’t know diddly-squat.’
‘It’s time you joined the animals in the mill work,’ he said in his lovely baritone voice, ‘despite any unexplained affections I might have towards you.’
The phrase jarred in my brain. I had read it just hours (or was it days?) before in the transcripts of Logan’s journal. ‘So you’re familiar with Captain Logan, then?’ I asked.
‘Indeed,’ he said, folding his arms. ‘And where better to quote him than in this, his cathedral.’
‘His cathedral?’
‘Oh yes, you don’t know where you are. Let’s keep it that way for the moment.’
‘And who might you be?’
‘That’s not important, for the time being.’
‘What sort of lunatic wanders about in the height of summer wearing a boiler suit, a hood and a pair of gardening gloves?’ I was trying to tease him into action, to make something happen. He was either going to kill me or he wasn’t. I’m the sort of person that doesn’t like to be kept guessing. He remained silent.
‘No talkies? Okay. I’ll do it for both of us. Let me take a wild guess at this. You’re some sort of madman, still living at home with your mother — a motel, perhaps, on the outskirts of town? — and who has a grudge against Wivenhoe simpletons and Noosa millionaires. When you were a schoolboy here in Brisbane you identified with the colonial tyrant Patrick Logan. Throughout your teenage years his life and work spoke to you, and gradually you embodied his cruel and sadistic person. You tortured cats and birds, and incinerated ants with a magnifying glass. Now, in between killing people, you like to go out to the Brisbane Valley and dress up in old penal colony outfits and play war games with your beautifully restored muskets. Am I warm?’
‘Not even close.’
‘Maybe I’ve met you before. In the John Oxley Library. Black bob. Beatles fan. Spent most of your life defending The White Album over Sergeant Pepper. Maybe you’re not Captain Patrick Logan at all, but Sergeant Pepper.’
‘Give me The White Album any day. But wrong again.’
‘Then what’s your name? Come on. Give me a hint.’
‘My real name? Or the name I go by?’
‘How about the real one?’
‘Collison.’
I was left with my mouth half open. I couldn’t quite believe what I’d heard.
‘Would you mind repeating that?’
‘Sure. Collison.’
‘Do you happen to know a very short man, patron of the John Oxley Library, by the name of Logan?’
‘Sure I do.’
I had to take stock and think. ‘You would obviously know that in the history of Queensland, Logan’s personal servant was one Private Collison, or so my research tells me, and there has been conjecture, courtesy of Logan’s journals and apocryphal anecdote, that Logan was in fact murdered by Collison. This is no coincidence, is it?’
‘No, it’s not.’
‘Please,’ I said. ‘Before you kill me, or torture me with your thoughts on Beatles albums, could you tell me what in the world has been going on?’
‘I don’t see why not.’ He shuffled in
the chair. It barked on the floor and echoed. ‘As we both know, a government caretaker out near Esk recently came across a semi-mummified corpse on the edge of Lake Wivenhoe. The water levels have dropped. The drought. This is not news to anyone in Brisbane. He in turn believed he had made some sort of important historical find, and made several phone calls to young, time-poor, uninterested public servants and gatekeepers, who palmed him off to the John Oxley Library. With me so far?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s when you came in. The caretaker brought the picture of the body to the library, got his instructions wrong, and, voila, there you were in that little red room overlooking the river. Wrong place at the wrong time. It didn’t matter. Word was already out about the corpse. Historica. Are you familiar with them?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘The head of the Index is our friend Mr Logan. And yes, he is directly related to Captain Patrick Logan. It has been his role, as part of that long family line, to protect his forefather’s reputation as a frontiersman, a martyr of the Australian colonial experience.’
‘Then the caretaker found the real body of Captain Logan,’ I said. I wanted to hold up a revelatory index finger, but I couldn’t, manacled tight as I was.
‘After all those years, who would have thought? The official history was a lie. Logan had to be upheld as a shining example of colonisation. Murdered by an Indigenous tribe. Not delivered to God by a sensitive young private who had for years carried the guilt and shame of this man’s cruelty, and even more so been the recipient of it. On behalf of the penal colony of Brisbane, Collison snapped, and exacted retribution. How would Logan have looked then, murdered by an underling and no longer the heroic explorer, after which cities and rivers have been named? So the body of a convict was honoured in his place, and nobody was the wiser.’
‘And you, sir, are a descendant of Private Collison?’
‘Proudly so,’ he said. ‘You see, it was in our best interests, too, to keep the family secret. We may have changed our name more than a century ago to protect our interests, but we’re a very wealthy and influential Brisbane family, my friend, and a murderer in the cupboard would simply not do.’
‘Let alone a contemporary Collison going about murdering people.’
‘History is a very powerful thing,’ he said from under the hood, and Brisbane is full of very powerful secrets.’
‘And Mr Logan, from the library?’
‘A cruel little man. Wouldn’t it be deliciously ironic if he had suffered the identical fate as his long-lost relative after all this time? A blood relative of Logan, murdered by a blood relative of Collison. Two identical murders, mirroring each other, almost two centuries apart. Isn’t that interesting?’
‘And the corpse of Logan himself? The original Logan? The real Logan?’
‘He made a wonderful fire. And the chestnuts I roasted over the flames were delicious.’
‘You’re insane, Collison.’
‘But my dear fellow, that’s not my name. I’ve never heard of this Collison you talk of.’
I said: ‘Two lines of a family tree collide. The apple ...’
‘... doesn’t fall far from the tree,’ he said.
Of course he let me go. He muttered something about history not being history unless it had its witnesses. I walked out of the Old Windmill and was blinded by the afternoon light. And Collison was gone.
~ * ~
Later, on the Gold Coast, Peg bathed the back of my head and wrists. I didn’t have the energy to explain the wounds, and she didn’t ask. How could I tell her that many years ago, a man had murdered his superior in the scrub outside Brisbane, and the descendant of the murderer had destroyed the corpse to keep the secret and protect the family name? Which suited a descendant of the victim, who also didn’t want his noble relative to lose his place in history?
‘History,’ I muttered to myself. ‘A minefield.’
When Peg was done patching me up, she said: ‘I’ve got a surprise for you.’
‘Please. No more surprises.’ I was finding Queensland simply too full of surprises.
She walked me onto the back deck and pointed to the bonsai in the centre of the table. It was my tiny fig. The soil was black and moist, the roots healthy and several baby shoots were appearing on the limbs.
History. It was never dead, fixed, chiselled into stone. It was like the bonsai. A little attention, a bit of close scrutiny and it could flare to life again.
‘The family tree,’ I muttered.
‘What?’ Peg asked.
‘Nothing.’
~ * ~
THREE
MURDER ON THE VINE
~ * ~
1
I would never have had the misfortune of meeting the reprobates from the Marx Brothers Kombi Auto Shoppe if I hadn’t had the dream. And I would never have had the dream of the Kombinationskraftwagen if I hadn’t watched that darned Kevin Costner film, Field of Dreams, for the ninety-third time. And I might not have watched the Costner film if I hadn’t been seduced by all that seventies ‘peace not war’ palaver, and the battered Kombi that Costner crosses the country in looking for the meaning of life, and James Earl Jones to boot. I don’t think I’d have even been watching Field of Dreams, either, if I hadn’t been invited back to the inner-city Brisbane apartment of my old friend, the bon vivant and restaurant critic Westchester Zim, to share a few bottles of some of his secret ‘finds’ — hush-hush.
We drank a lot of wine, and when I drink a lot of wine I get melancholy, and when I get melancholy I watch Field of Dreams. Enough said. Might I have been seduced by any of this if I wasn’t a sensitive soul with a nostalgic bent for the seventies, having lived it, and felt, in these troubled times, that what the world needed was a bit more love and a lot less war? I didn’t know my entry into the Kombi world would lead to very little love, and a whole lot of war.
You see, I had a dream. A dream where all vehicles were created equal. No, I said that for effect. For levity. For any pitiful little chortle that would take me away from the nightmare of my acquaintance with the Marx Brothers Kombi Auto Shoppe. You would think I could get through a single year without putting my life in danger, but no. Round the inside of the fishbowl I go, not recognising the same miserable sprig of weed, the lifeless, helmet-wearing deep-sea diver.
This time it wasn’t my fault. I could blame Zim, but he’s dead. I could point the finger at the unexpected demise of my beloved Peugeot 504, which accidentally caught fire in the car park of the Main Beach Surf Club late one afternoon as I was enjoying a dip at dusk. Oh, it caused all sorts of panic. The next morning the local rag claimed that Al Qaeda had come to the coast! Suicide bomber at the beach! But, alas, a post-mortem of the Peugeot’s charred remains revealed just a rupture in the fuel tank on a hot day. A veritable confluence of unfortunate circumstances, which saw her blow like a cheap Chinese firecracker. I have to say, it was pretty impressive. Even from the shallows, where I was wallowing, oblivious, the car park’s neighbouring casuarinas went up with an impressive whoof.
So I was car-less. And it was then that I felt a nostalgic pull for all things simpler and purer. Sure, I’d loved the Peugeot. But I’d always yearned for a Kombi van. And thus the dream of a Kombinationskraftwagen. Not a splitscreen, or a Splittie, as they’re so eye-wateringly known. No, nothing pre-seventies, but a classic Bay Window model. I would buy the ultimate freedom box. I would have one restored, fitted out as a camper, and I would take my son, Jack, away from his fraught, TV-dominated, computer-game-ravaged pixel-poxy future. I would remind him of the forests and the oceans, and we would sit about a campfire on weekends away and bond, as they say these days, and have real discussions, and we would fish and swim and take in lungfuls of fresh, eucalyptus-scented air on our bushwalks, and with any luck he would remember these moments, and possibly take them into his own fatherhood, and hand the baton over to his children. (And being happily predisposed to me, courtesy of all those Kombi trips, lodge his dribbling, incontine
nt, befuddled old father in a better class of nursing home.)
So where did I find the Kombi of my dreams? On the blasted computer, of course. And I made a phone call. ‘Could I see the Kombi you have advertised on the internet?’
‘Sure,’ said Rufus T. Firefly, owner and proprietor of the Marx Brothers Kombi Auto Shoppe. ‘I’ll need a two-thousand-dollar holding fee.’
You see? Can you already hear the jingle-jangle of coins in his malodorous voice? Can you detect, too, the whiff of a sucker coming?
I declined to hand over the fee and temporarily abandoned the idea. But the dream scratched away. So a month later I decided to drive down to Duck Soup Beach, home of the Shoppe, and see the freedom box for myself. And that’s when I stepped into the rabbit hole.
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