I retrieved the envelope and opened it, and inside was a single photograph.
It was a mistake, of course. To sit beside that beautiful tree, and to open the gold envelope. I knew it as I slid out the photograph. I could hear the 10 x 15 cm sheet chafe against the envelope as loud as the rumble of thunder in that peaceful room.
In the picture was a corpse, the likes of which I had never before seen. Partially mummified, the skin around the teeth stretched back, the eye sockets black as eternity, the body dressed in some sort of military uniform, the feet still shod in heavy boots, and in the exact centre of the forehead was a hole as big as a fifty-cent piece.
On the back of the picture was a mobile-phone number written in pencil. And one word, in capitals: LOGAN.
The room was a frenzy of reflected light. I thought only one thing — here we go again.
~ * ~
3
A long time ago, when I was a young firebrand cop in Sydney’s notorious 21 Division, I saw a man killed by my partner, Greaves, during an ambush in the basement of a Kings Cross nightclub.
I didn’t know, at the time, that Greaves had killed him. The victim was just a dark shape on the other side of his own blue muzzle flash, and I had closed my eyes and fired into the roof while Greaves’ gun discharged with more accuracy. In that dank, mouldy space below the street, my partner had put a bullet through a stranger’s heart.
Eventually, in the silence that followed, with the cordite burning the backs of our throats, we found a light and cautiously made our way over to the body. He was still breathing (gurgling, to be accurate), and Greaves applied what first aid he knew, but the man died right there before our eyes.
There was no question of taking time off work, just because you’d executed your duty. The deceased’s own bullet had grazed my temple and carved a neat divot above my left ear, but I was at the station the next morning. Greaves, too, punched the clock for his regular shift.
We were both ordered to visit someone who was then new to the force — a police psychologist — and we twiddled our thumbs and grunted a few answers to satisfy the young man on the other side of the desk. He looked barely out of high school. He did, ultimately, become my friend, and years later he offered some analysis of my proclivity for finding trouble. Or mischief, in Peg’s words.
‘To put it very simply, it’s your face and manner,’ the psychologist told me. ‘You have the sort of demeanour that encourages people to tell you their stories. They don’t need to, they’re compelled to.’
‘I have a compelling face,’ I said.
‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’
‘Tell me something I don’t already know,’ I told him.
This all came back to me as I carried the bonsai tree and the mysterious gold envelope into the family-history area of the State Library. I felt a right goose with the tree, and I attracted some strange looks. But libraries are places where peculiar things happen, for some reason, and where the whole gamut of human eccentricity is on display. If you’re at a party and you want to hear some curly stories about human nature, and there’s a librarian present, stick to them like glue. They’ll entertain you all night.
So my tree was at the low level of strange that day, as I secured a computer terminal and popped the little bonsai at my feet. I was, of course, tempted to telephone the number on the card. It was that old craving, the need to know. But I resisted, for all of a few hours.
I made no headway finding the family bushranger. Genealogy was a complex art, and I had no idea how to enter the labyrinth. I typed names and dates I thought I’d remembered from the tales that had been handed down through generations of my family, but nothing seemed to compute.
A kindly librarian remained patient with me and did all she could to put a little foot ladder at the base of my family tree, but for the life of me I could secure no solid footing.
The elderly Martian next to me with the whistling hearing aids smiled the smile of someone who feels superior in the vicinity of a novice. That smug smirk creased the whole right side of his wrinkly face. He shook his head and winked at me. I noticed that the black hairs on his ears were as long as the antennae poking from his ear pieces.
‘You right there?’ I finally said, miffed.
‘Bit of trouble?’
‘You could say that.’
‘You got your ships right?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Got to make sure you get your ships right. The names of your ships. You get the ships wrong and you could be hunting down the wrong trail for years. It’s all about the ships.’
I wanted to tell him he was giving me the absolute ships, but I desisted. He was right about one thing. One slip on the genealogical treasure hunt and you’re off the track – gone, lost in the thickets of history.
I knew my relatives had come off a ship in Sydney, then made the long overland trek north to Brisbane and on to Gympie and Dalby. It may have been the lure of gold in the former, and of cattle in the latter. These, I guess, were the major currencies in the early to mid-1800s. I simply couldn’t remember the name of the ship. I checked birth and death records for Dalby and still nothing.
I had one of those existential moments when I wondered if these relatives had ever lived at all; if the stories on which I’d constructed my life were in fact fairytales. Who knows, maybe there was no big, burly bushranger firing guns through my proud heritage, but instead a latrine cleaner or dried-cow-pat merchant flogging his wares and trailing the permanent scent of animal effluent. A true nobody who did nothing and died forgotten. It wasn’t something you bragged about at the pub, and Lord knows I’d been crowing about the bushranger for close to fifty years.
I sat facing a blank computer terminal in the library, unsure of where to go next with this project, when I impulsively Googled the name on the back of the envelope. Logan + history + Brisbane.
And there it was, first cab off the rank — Captain Patrick Logan.
I quietly opened the gold envelope and slipped the picture out. The Martian to my left was leaning right in close to his screen and the white light of it smeared his thick spectacles. I had an empty seat to my right. I snatched glances at the corpse in the picture, and the rust-brown jacket in which it was swathed, and the wrap-across flap of the coat secured with a line of elaborate gold buttons, and the clods at each shoulder that once could have been epaulettes.
I went straight to the ‘images’ search engine, and typed in Logan again, and what I saw sent goosebumps down to the base of my spine. There he was. Captain Logan. Hard as flint. Eyes dark and cold. I had seen many pairs of such eyes. They belonged to men who were not only not afraid to kill at the slightest opportunity, but who enjoyed the act. He had a long, narrow, aquiline nose. Back straight. The evil of the world swirling about him.
I returned to the State Library website’s archives page. I couldn’t type properly, such was my haste, and I kept having to go back to the search boxes. I finally managed to tap in Logan’s name correctly, along with ‘death’, and I was directed to several items that hinted at a very, very old murder — namely, Logan’s.