At that point I did not feel any pain. Adrenalin lifted me out of the mud and onto dry land. Dead in the foliage — for a second time in his life — was the long, insect-like Anton Johns, his white hair askew and decorated with spots of his own blood. Not far away was the prostrate body of his little bodyguard, Robert, who was responsible for the hole through my person. I would have kicked him, hard, if it hadn’t disrespected the dear departed.
My legs crumpled and I dropped to the sand and spinifex. I could hear Manya’s ghostly wail from the dinghy.
I was trying to work out an exit strategy when I heard the gun click at my right ear. I was burning up, and when the muzzle touched my neck it was so cold it felt the opposite, like the branding iron from hell.
‘Daniel?’ I said.
‘How nice that we could meet again. I am having a profound feeling of déjà vu.’
‘Wanda Beach. 1969.’
‘Oh yes. When we were in our prime. Now look at us. Two old men at twilight.’
I could smell his expensive aftershave behind the mud and the brine of the bay. He had taste, I’ll give him that.
‘Your boyfriend, Anton. That’s no way to treat the ones you love, Daniel.’
‘He was just a fair-weather friend.’
‘Is that a joke?’
‘You like it? He served his purpose. I’d been planning this little project for thirty years. I’ve always had patience, you know.’
‘They call it delayed gratification.’
‘Do they? Delayed or not, Mr Fairweather will now underwrite my retirement.’
‘And poor James Fenton Browne? Fenton’s from Shakespeare, you know.’
‘Of course I know. What do you take me for, a philistine? The Merry Wives of Windsor. And you, my dear fellow, have become Falstaff since our days cavorting at Wanda Beach.’
‘Fenton could not resist the high life, could he?’
‘No, he couldn’t. And Fairweather is all the merry wives I could dream of. Are we finished with the gratuitous literary references? I told you I was patient. It’s now time to finish the Wanda job, albeit almost forty years later ...’
What had I expected to happen? In the movies, Manya may have quietly snuck out of the dinghy and clubbed the Boltcutter with the anchor. She may have been an ex-KGB agent and killed him with a sudden blow to the neck. But this was not a Hollywood flick.
I could feel the muzzle on my neck, then pressed against my forehead. I could hear crickets and the faint slap of water and the shift of crab claws in the primordial mud, or so I thought.
When the world went white it did not register to me that I was dead at all. This isn’t so bad, I remember thinking. White is nicer than black, isn’t it?
When I opened my eyes I was lying on my side, holding my thigh. The world was tilted sideways. Lying next to me was the inimitable head of Dapper Dan the Antiques Man, a.k.a. the Boltcutter, his eyes wide open, his mouth agape. How small he looked with the top of his head blown off above the eyebrows.
I recall a lamp being lit and placed amongst the strands of sea grass. And seeing the youngish man sit on the sand, grasp his knees, and drop his revolver.
He didn’t even look at me. He was staring, bemused I supposed, at the old woman howling in the dinghy anchored in the shallows. ‘EEEE-GORRRR,’ she wailed to the gathering storm clouds, her arms raised in the air.
~ * ~
Three days after I was admitted to hospital, a gentleman matching the description of that young man, my saviour of Peel Island, visited my bedside. Turns out this kid had as much patience as the dead Dapper, and for more than two decades — or from a specific day when he was just twelve years old — he had been hunting a very special person, namely his mother’s murderer. And all that research and observation and playing private detective had come to its explosive conclusion on Peel Island. I just happened to be a piece of collateral damage.
He gently placed a small piece of rolled parchment, tied with a red piece of ribbon, on my food table. The ribbon looked familiar. I had received a gift from this stranger before — a polished bullet.
He stood until I unwrapped the roll of mildewed canvas. It was a soiled painting. A head. The mouth wide and forming an ‘O’. The skin scabrous. The eyes dull and dead. It was signed ‘Fairweather, 1959’.
‘A memento,’ the man said. ‘Of our adventure.’
‘How very kind of you.’
‘You’re welcome.’
‘So I meet my doppelganger, at last. The man who has been my shadow for the past few weeks. The man who ruined my retirement.’
‘I needed you,’ he said. ‘To bring me in. You completed the puzzle. You led me to…’
‘The Boltcutter.’
‘Correct.’
‘The retired gangster and art lover.’
‘The one and only.’
‘And why would that piece of human ebola virus interest a young man such as you?’
‘He killed my mother.’
‘He did, did he? And who was your mother?’
‘They called her Legs. But to me, she was just Mum.’
Later in the week I read in The Courier-Mail that the Queensland Art Gallery had been left an anonymous bequest ot several previously unknown masterpieces by the late, great painter Ian Fairweather. There was a photograph of my friend Dexter Dupont smiling beside one of the pictures. He had teeth after all, did Dexter.
~ * ~
I stayed in hospital for a month. In that time Peg arrived on the Gold Coast, found us a house, moved the furniture in and redecorated the place. She even took a few tips from Nurse Reginald, apparently an interior decorator in his spare time.
That first night in my new home, having pushed myself around the house (and almost into the canal out the back) in my wheelchair and inspected the walls heavy with effigies of plaster seahorses and starfish and paintings of pelicans sleeping on wharf pylons and schools of dolphins passing through sun-dappled water, I asked, ‘And my retirement painting? From the hospital?’
‘That ratty old thing?’ she said. ‘Turfed it, my love. It was so not the Gold Coast.’
After dinner I sat alone on the back balcony looking down at Pig Pen, lashed to a jetty big enough to accommodate a cruise ship.
Peg put a VB in my hand. ‘Why don’t you take the boat out tomorrow? Throw in a line? You’re retired, for goodness sake. How’s the weather looking?’
‘The weather?’ I said, after a long time. ‘Fair.’
~ * ~
TWO
THE MURDER TREE
~ * ~
1
It has often been said that prior to the moment of death, your life flashes before your eyes.