The Toe Tag Quintet

by Matthew Condon

  Susan Haag packed a lot into her twenty-one years. She’d had an unfortunate start to life. A bum of a father who’d scratched a living as a barman, trinket dealer and tannery workhorse before he discovered that getting his wife on the game and existing off the proceeds of her late-night work suited him to a tee. Susan’s mother had in fact become very successful at a very old profession and by 1967, when she’d died of a drug overdose, had shown her teenage daughter an irresistible, perhaps unavoidable, career. She had also passed on to her daughter something invaluable — account books that noted every cent of protection money she had paid to police both in New South Wales and Queensland, where her empire flourished.

  Susan took over her mother’s business. She secreted the damning account books. But she kept on with her mother’s profitable system of kickbacks to cops. Just as before with her mother, nobody bothered Ms Haag. The cash fell into the right hands. The money flowed, unimpeded.

  Then a new licensing branch officer, desperate for promotion, decided to charge Ms Haag with various offences. He could not be swayed. He was threatened, intimidated, shot at, and still he waved the flag for proper policing.

  The charges, subsequently, quietly slipped into and through the justice system, irrespective of the mayhem they caused outside on the streets.

  And that’s when Ms Haag made her fatal error. She would, in the name of her mother, spite the many dozens of officers, senior and junior, who had enjoyed the family’s largesse over many years. She would speak to the newspapers and allude to the account books.

  Sometimes events gather a life of their own, and this is precisely what happened to Ms Haag and her public allegations. She had lit a fuse in New South Wales. Cops were diving left, right and centre. It went all the way to the top, to the commissioner’s desk, then jumped species and grew more heads in state parliament. A fuse was also lit in Queensland, a thousand kilometres north, but Ms Haag, in her youth, ignored the volatility of the northerners. They were laid-back cow cockies. They were small fry.

  Which is why she accepted their invitation to fly north and disappear into the arms of their protection. They would look after her. Her mother was a Queenslander by birth, and they had an obligation to protect their own.

  She went north, all right. They put her in a safe house. And six days later she was dead. Pills and booze. No suicide note.

  And X, bless her cotton socks, had done my work for me.

  Inside the file were papers relating to a string of other prostitute suicides dating back to 1955. All had died from pills and booze in south-east Queensland. All, presumably, had been paying off cops for protection; some in New South Wales as well.

  In all the investigations, according to the police reports that X had dug up for me, two names kept appearing. One from Queensland. One from New South Wales. Throughout the dossier X had helpfully highlighted both names with a bright yellow marker.

  Was I surprised to find that the New South Wales gentleman who had looked into the deaths of several of these women, including Ms Haag and her mother, over a period of more than twenty years, was none other than the officer I knew, in my gut, had killed my dear old friend Hubert Dunkle Senior on that grey day in the washroom of police headquarters? Was I shocked to discover, via these old documents, that a sinister thread which stretched across at least two generations of cops and crims had found its way to me here in the cabin of my Kombi nearly forty years later? And that it had drawn to the surface of my memory a myth I had first heard as a young detective — a myth of a book, a handwritten book on how to commit the perfect murder, that was so preposterous and so well known in the ranks that it may well have been true?

  Well, yes. Enough for me to have left my coffee to go cold.

  But I had a meeting to attend. At a gravestone.

  ~ * ~

  7

  So while we’re being honest with each other, I’ll come clean about something. I’m a taphophiliac.

  A wha, I hear you say? I’m not a strict, letter-of-the-law taphophiliac. But there is a hint of taphophiliasm about me.

  As the Greeks once said, tapho is grave, and phileo is to love. There. Now you know. I love cemeteries.

  Pray, judge not. This, as far as I can tell, is not a morbid thing within me. I just like them. Full stop. They’re ordered. Often well organised. Quiet. Peaceful. They have trees and wildlife and occasionally fresh flowers. And they make great reading. All those words, chiselled in stone. The endless yarns. The cryptic messages. The joy. The tragedy. Cemeteries are the great books of human existence.

  While you as a kid were thumbing through National Geographies, and mounting your stamps and playing with your new Mister Potato Head toy, I was skipping across the gravestones at the Rookwood Cemetery and Necropolis. Oh, a day at Rookwood for me was up there with the Easter Show.

  So it was that I found Toowong a big thrill that afternoon. It was close to the city. Had good geography — hills and valleys. It was chock-a-block with history. And it had excellent mobile-phone coverage.

  As I waited in the van on a dirt road not far from Samuel Griffith’s last resting place, I got a call from my detective mate down on the Gold Coast.

  ‘Firstly,’ he said, ‘if you could stay away from me for about the next fifty years I’d be really grateful.’

  ‘You’re not the first person to say that,’ I told him.

  ‘Secondly, there’s all sorts ot stuff going down here that I’m not sure I understand.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I overheard a couple of hard heads in here saying you were a nuisance.’

  ‘That so?’

  ‘A big nuisance.’

  ‘Did they actually use the word “nuisance”?’

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘I didn’t think so.’

  ‘Anyway, they’ve thrown a wall around the Dunkle case. Closed shop. All superfluous bodies have been told to go away. ‘

  ‘That’d be us.’

  ‘That’d be me. And word has it the Dunkle matter has gone to the big boss in Brisbane.’

  ‘That’d be the commissioner.’

  ‘That’d be him.’

  I’d heard all this before. I had a call coming through.

  ‘Call you back,’ I said.

  ‘Please don’t,’ he said, and hung up.

  I could smell pine needles outside the cabin of the Kombi. There was a gentle whoosh of breeze through the trees. I felt like a nap.

  I took the other call.

  ‘Fire away,’ I said into the phone, ‘but not literally.’

  ‘Tapas here.’

  ‘Ah, Mr Tapas. I hear your name and it makes me feel peckish. Why do you think that is?’

  ‘Congratulations,’ Tapas said. ‘You are the five millionth person to make that joke.’

  I’d heard this numerical gag before.

  ‘Get on with it, Disco Boy.’

  ‘The police want to bring more serious charges against you over the Dunkle diary business.’

  ‘What are they proposing? Manslaughter? That Dunkle Junior read my diary and I bored him to death?’

  ‘They’ve got a witness.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘Says she saw you hanging around the high-rise three weeks before the murder. Says she was in Junior’s apartment one night for dinner and Junior brought out an old photograph album and, bingo, there you were.’

  Dolly Varden, the leathery stickybeak from down the hall.

  ‘Did you just say “bingo”? Who says “bingo” in the twenty-first century, Tapas, except people actually playing bingo?’

  ‘I’m telling you what I heard.’

  ‘You’re telling me diddly, and you’re telling me squat,’ I said. ‘Get off the line, Tapas. The line’s probably Tapas’ed.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Do you get it? The phone line. It’s probably Tapas’ed.’

  ‘Congratulations. You’re the six millionth person to make that joke.’

  ‘Anyway, all will be reve
aled in about ten minutes. I’m here in Brisbane to meet your special client. The one who employed you as my lawyer.’

  He was silent for a moment. I could still smell his Old Spice down the line.

  ‘You’re mistaken,’ Tapas said quietly.

  ‘Afraid not, Johnny old boy. You’re behind on this one, and you’ve been lagging all the way.’

  ‘You’re wrong, because I just saw our special client five minutes ago. Here on the Gold Coast.’

  ‘You did?’

  It was then I saw the car in my rear-vision mirror, creeping past the graves.

  ‘Gotta go,’ I said.

  I stepped out of the Kombi, walked the short distance to Samuel’s broken gravestone, and waited. I scoped the surrounding laneways. The trees. The headstones that might provide me with some cover.

  I had no weapon.

  The car stopped behind the Kombi, and the driver waited. He kept his motor running for a full minute, then cut it.

  ‘If there’s any justice in this world,’ I whispered to Samuel out of the corner of my mouth, ‘you won’t let me die here. Be a good boy, Sammy.’

  A tall young man stepped out of the car. He was wearing a suit and tie. He looked around, adjusted his belt, then his tie, and walked towards me.

  Gravel crunched beneath his highly polished black shoes.

  ‘Samuel Pepys, I presume,’ I said to him.

  He was clean-cut and did not seem to have the face of a murderer. Then again, killers came in all shapes and sizes these days.

  ‘You’ve gotta come with me,’ he said. He had a firm stare. But I had stared down the best of them. He looked strangely familiar. It was something about the eyes.

  ‘Have we met before?’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘I don’t gotta go nowhere,’ I said. ‘Waddya want from me?’

  ‘Just come with me.’

  ‘You draw me into a murder investigation by stealing my property, get my face flattened by a garden implement, hide a phone number in a thirty-eight-year-old diary, and now you want to abduct me. Would it be rude to ask what’s going on?’

  And at that precise moment I heard a short, sharp crack that my DNA told me instantly was a gunshot, and saw in the corner of my eye a bullet ricochet off Sir Samuel’s ninety-year-old marble monument. I was pretty sure it was the first time in our history that a chief justice of the High Court of Australia had been shot at.

  ‘Get down!’ the suited stranger said.

  He didn’t need to tell me.

  Together, we duck-waddled behind the shelter of plaques erected in the memory of pastoralists and public servants and little-old-lady church organists from yesteryear, as bullets whistled around us.

  I heard a dull, metallic thud, and knew the Kombi had been hit. I had no idea how I was going to explain this to my long-suffering mechanic.

  Then all of a sudden I was in the stranger’s sedan and we were hurtling through Toowong cemetery towards Birdwood Terrace.

  ‘Do you think,’ I said, breathing heavily, ‘that it might be a good time to call the police?’

  ‘Waddya mean,’ my driver said, feverishly checking the rear-vision mirror, the car screaming and squealing towards the city. ‘I am the police.’

  ~ * ~

  8

  As our silver sedan sped towards the city, taking a circuitous route through the back streets, I remained quiet, waiting for more shots from our cemetery attackers. But nobody seemed to have followed us. My driver and abductor stayed cool and collected.

  ‘Put this on,’ he said. He took a blindfold out of the centre console.

  ‘You always carry these around, do you?’

  ‘Just put it on.’

  ‘I’m an eyes-wide-open sort of guy.’

  He quietly pulled a handgun from the pocket in the driver’s door, swivelled it and presented its solid butt.

  ‘And I’m a shut-your-mouth and do-what-you’re-told sort of guy.’

  I put the blindfold on.

  Despite my darkened world, I could tell he was turning right over the new Go Between Bridge.

  ‘Hope you’ve registered online for the toll,’ I said. ‘Because if you haven’t registered online ...’

  An hour later, a day later — it could have been a year — I woke up on a couch in a strange hotel room with a large bump on my right temple. My driver was obviously not one for meaningless conversation. So be it. Let him get a Go Between fine. I’d warned him.

  At least someone — while I’d been in oblivion — had dressed the temple wound, and applied a fresh dressing to my mashed bugle. It was refreshing to know violent people who paid care and attention to medical niceties.

  My headache was terrible, but I wasn’t sure if it stemmed from the handgun butt or the fantastically bad art on the hotel room walls.

  At the far end of the room I saw a tall man standing beside a sliding glass door, and beyond it the slow-moving Wheel of Brisbane on the river’s edge at South Bank. The man had his arms crossed.

  ‘The great wheel,’ he said. I assumed he was talking to me as I was the only other person in the room. ‘Sixty metres high. Forty-two climate-controlled capsules. Thirteen minutes for a full rotation.’

  ‘Wheely?’ I said. ‘The wheel of life. The wheel thing.’ Pain always brought out the humour in me.

  He was dressed in grey slacks and a perfectly ironed white short-sleeved shirt. His hair was steel-grey.

  ‘I needed to speak with you,’ he said.

  ‘And here I am. There are more civilised ways to arrange a meeting, you know. Like knocking on my front door, or picking up the phone. Fracturing my skull seems a bit, how would you say, heavy-handed.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that.’ He still watched the wheel with the fascination of a child.

  It was then I noticed a little sprig of hair at the back of his head. That’s when he turned towards me. After more than forty years, I recognised him instantly.

  ‘Hubert Dunkle Junior,’ I said.

  He had large eyes, and the wrinkles that splayed from their corners gave him a kindly demeanour. It could have been Obe standing before me.

  ‘Nice to see you again,’ he said. His arms were still crossed. He resembled a gentle English literature professor.

  ‘Likewise, Junior,’ I said. ‘Been a long time since we buried your daddy.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘So that wasn’t your blood at that abattoir of a flat in Surfers.’

  ‘It had once belonged to a Bangalow pig.’

  ‘Tell me, Junior. Why set up a fake murder scene for yourself, steal one of my diaries, draw me in, get me roughed up, get me shot at, and abduct me after more than four decades? I’m just curious, is all.’

  He walked over and sat in a chair opposite me. He rested his elbows on his knees.

  ‘I’m sorry about your nose,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have seen that coming. As for the blow to your temple, I’ll apologise for that too. My son can get a little overexcited.’

  ‘Your son?’

  ‘That’s right. Detective. Sydney HQ.’

  ‘A detective, just like his grandpa.’

  ‘In the blood, I suppose. So to speak.’

  I was back in a hall of mirrors.

  ‘Junior, as we used to say in the trade, why don’t we start at the beginning?’

  He smiled. And we were back at Obe’s grave together, two mourners, in the cemetery by the sea.

  ‘My father was a good man,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Yes, he was.’

  ‘His death was inexplicable to me. From the day I learned he had killed himself I made a vow that I would discover the truth about his death. My father would not, and did not, take his own life in a toilet cubicle in Sydney police headquarters in 1972.’

  ‘I could have told you that over the phone forty years ago.’

  ‘I began my own investigation,’ Junior went on. ‘I would be as scrupulous as my father. When I left school I decided I would join the police force
as a way of working my inquiry from the inside. I would be a double agent. Pull files. Listen and observe. It was an adolescent notion. Besides, I didn’t meet their requirements.’

  ‘Eyesight?’