‘What did you say you did again, before you retired?’
‘Alpaca breeder.’
‘Fair enough.’ Verne nudged the mail in my direction.
If ever I wanted to effectively disappear from the world, I’d head straight for a caravan park. They’re deliciously anonymous, egalitarian, private. Everybody wants to know your business but no one would be rude enough not to take you on your word. They’re remote islands unto themselves. Refuges. Little Petri dishes of lives, lost dreams, spoiled marriages, family conflicts, flight and homecoming. They are places open to the world, exposed to the elements, vulnerable, yet they discourage prying and invasion of personal space.
You are a sheet of canvas or a slice of aluminium away from the elements, from the great unpredictable force of nature and — permit me to be dramatic — a skein stands between life and death; between you and a deadly storm, or a predator. Yet you feel safe. We are like members of an exclusive club with a secret handshake, we van-park dwellers. We are all accidental families.
Peg had puzzled about why I had not taken a motel during my solo sabbatical on the Gold Coast. But how could I explain to her the peccadilloes of men of a certain age? Would she understand the yearning for simplicity? The desire to replicate an unbridled happiness that the busyness of life had somehow buried under layers of responsibility, menial tasks, useless diversions, triviality and the junkyard of material possessions, ambitions, one-upmanship, fake friendships and webs of behaviour so foreign to our actual selves that even the smallest critical distance would induce horror at what we’d become?
Would you get it, Peg? A lifetime of thinking you’re important, only to be dropped into a civilian life where your epaulettes, literally and figuratively, no longer matter, are even a source of amusement? To one day be young and strong of limb and doing something that matters, and the next, emerge into some strange, uncharted place where your back permanently aches, hair grows from your ears, your belly keeps getting bigger but your legs become thin, your arms have no strength, and it takes an hour a day after rising for the twinges to disappear? To see a thick shock of black hair in the mirror, only to wipe away the steam on the glass and see a stranger with grey tufts and an ashen pallor looking back at you?
Oh, it hits us men hard, dear Peg. It’s a low blow. It explained, at least to me, why I had become involved in this crazy case.
A young constable once asked me what it was like to spend your days head to head with heartless killers and standover men and street toughs who would extinguish a life as unthinkingly as cracking their morning egg with a teaspoon. I told him not to be hypnotised by the myth of death. Death is not always delivered at the end of a gun or the blade of a knife or at the hands of a giant. I told him a story an old copper told me when I was a young constable. The lion can always chase down and slaughter the nimble-footed impala. But never forget that an impala can accidentally break one of its delicate legs, and be killed by ants. Death can come in many ways, I told him. And often in the most benign fashion.
He was dead himself seven months later, impaled on a cast-iron fence in pursuit, while off-duty, of a smack-addicted bag-snatcher in one of Sydney’s most salubrious suburbs. I have often thought of that fresh-faced officer and, strangely, the fence, waiting there for more than a century, painted and repainted over time, almost made for its unforeseen victim from the future. Watch for the lion, I’ve always said, but also keep an eye out for the ants.
I went straight across to the surf club with my mail. I had come to view the club, with its lovely vista of the Pacific Ocean out front and the sounds of squealing children and the crash of surf and the sad music of the poker machines out the back, as my own proxy office. It beat my old HQ in Parramatta.
There, at a table buffeted by sea gusts, I could peruse my mail, inspect my little system cards and puzzle over the case. I could do this nibbling on salt-and-pepper calamari and a bitterly cold bitter.
On this day, though, I was beginning to feel a familiar malaise. It had happened many times before, but not for a long while. It was a cloying feeling, a palpable discomfort when I found myself deep inside something I didn’t fully understand.
I used to believe that you could learn a lot about a place by the types of murders it had hosted. I have never been fond of Adelaide, for example, with all its church spires and pretty boulevards, because I know from its history of deeply perverse killings that the city has a disturbing undercurrent, another dark Adelaide that operates concurrently with the pious, floral, prettily dressed one.
Melbourne. European in architecture and attitude, and European in its way of murder. Trench coats. Hand guns in alleys. Mafioso. And Sydney. All rude and loud and bluff and bluster. Impatient and cruel. A magnet for glamour, which also made it a magnet for grit.
Then there was Queensland. The Gold Coast was to my eyes Las Vegas on trainer wheels. A single, glowing strip of cash and bad perfume. Of vice and teenage angst. Of ceaseless deals on and under the table. The Gold Coast was a twenty-four-hour crap shoot, and its deaths reflected that too.
But what of Brisbane? It was fresh. In transition. On the make. The shadows it cast were hardly black. They were grey. Opaque. They were the type of shadows caught at twilight. This was a twilight city. A part of it held on to the past, and another moved inexorably into a future. Brisbane was a flux metropolis.
From the little I had learned, it seemed too, to me now, a city of deep allegiances. And the by-product of entrenched loyalty was the grudge. I could feel the thick reeds of grudge tangling at my ankles when I was in Brisbane. People were patient here, in the sun. They knew how to bide their time.
For time was different in the river city. Time was different things to different people up here. And when you have a malleable clock, you have protons and neutrons firing in all sorts of directions. It gave the city a slovenly, haphazard appearance. Oh, it’s the humidity. It’s the sunshine, people would tell you. But there was genuine design beneath this, the country’s most laissez-faire and ‘liveable’ city.
It was this surface unpredictability, this carefree relaxedness, which made Brisbane impossible to read. And also very dangerous when it wanted to be. Murders there had a purpose, a point to make, and a lot of them sank a deep bore into the past.
I pondered this at the surf club, still nursing a tender head courtesy of Igor the Russian. I couldn’t get poor James Fenton Browne out of my aforementioned wounded head. I had a feeling Dexter Dupont was trying to tell me something but couldn’t, for reasons of his own survival.
And an old Brisbane murder had left a welt in my pale ankle. On my way back from Bribie I’d stopped in at the offices of The Courier-Mail, and there, in front of a microfiche machine in the newspaper’s small, crypt-like library, after an eternity of spooling brittle rolls of film, I had added yet another befuddling piece to the jigsaw of this case. An old newspaper story, a copy of which I held on the deck of the surf club in the face of a stiff, briny onshore breeze.
His name was Anton Johns, 37, an art appraiser formerly of Hamilton, Brisbane. He’d had a nice house on the river, the walls groaning with the pop art of minor Warhols and his namesake, Jasper Johns. Anton entertained all types at all hours, according to neighbours. He was a ‘bohemian’, with an Errol Flynn moustache, shoulder-length hair, and a penchant for wearing a cape — garb more commonly found in Viennese opera houses in the nineteenth century.