‘I think you must be mistaken,’ I said. ‘I Googled him by accident, if you must know. I meant to type in Johnny Cash look-alikes, and up he came. Simple slip of the typing fingers. Though it does fascinate me, your Logan fetish. I wouldn’t know the bloke if I fell over him, to be honest. May I politely ask something?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Who the hell are you and why the hell are you wasting my time with this?’
He sat on the corner of a desk with some difficulty, a short left leg dangling above the carpet, and cradled his square chin with his right hand.
‘To understand Brisbane, you must understand Captain Logan,’ he said.
‘I don’t have to understand diddly-squat.’
‘I’m afraid you do. Especially people like you.’
‘Meaning?’
‘You ignore history at your peril. If you’d ever read a book, you might see that.’
‘Oh, thank you for that, sir. I apologise. Do I get detention now? I might make life hell for you and come here every day and study your Captain Logan. What do you say to that?’
I was losing patience with this annoying little man. It was dark outside and the peak-hour traffic was at a standstill on the riverside expressway.
‘Can I go home now?’ I said, turning to leave.
‘Patrick Logan was the most notorious sadist of any penal settlement in this country,’ he went on. ‘The Old Windmill, up on Wickham Terrace. People view that as a quaint reminder of our humble origins. To anyone who knows, it is in fact a citadel to cruelty and murder. What happened there shaped Queensland society. Made us who we are. We owe it all to Logan.’
‘Owe it? Murder, rape, pillage? Nice chap.’
‘History never ends. You can shape it, prune it, tend to it, like your little fig tree there, but it keeps on flowing through like a subterranean river. Logan’s work. It’s not done with yet.’
And there it was — the loony factor. I had waited for it, anticipated it, and it had arrived.
‘I’m sorry, who are you again? Curator of manuscripts, sadist and fetish section?’
‘You could call me a patron of the library.’
‘A patron. Aren’t patrons people with too much money who want to be a member of clubs that without the moolah wouldn’t have them in a pink fit?’
‘I am a custodian, of sorts.’
‘Now you’re a custodian. Of what?’
‘Why, history, of course.’
‘It’s almost six o’clock. Time for you to take your tablets, and for me to get home to dinner. ‘
‘Be careful around Captain Logan,’ he said, smirking again. ‘History has a habit of repeating itself.’
‘For a patron, or custodian, you’re fantastically unoriginal.’
He turned his back on me and surveyed the city through the wide glass windows.
I took the bonsai and returned to the Peugeot in the car park under the library. Hopping into the driver’s seat, I felt a crinkling in my trousers and retrieved the gold envelope.
In the gloom of the cabin I once again studied the photograph of the corpse. For the first time I noticed a strange, dead tree in the distance, a hundred metres from the body, and around the body itself a patina of cracked and dried mud. It was a riverbed. Or possibly the floor of a country property’s dam.
At that instant I heard the shriek of tyres in the underground car park, and just caught the sight of an old Toyota ute heading for the exit. The driver, from the rear, looked to be wearing a large farmer’s hat, and there were shovels and rakes poking out the back of the ute tray.
On my new mobile Peg had left me a text message: Stay out of mischief.
How I wish I’d taken her advice.
~ * ~
5
IF you’d told me when I first decided to retire to Queensland that just over a year later I might be squatting beside a 177-year-old corpse at Wivenhoe Dam, north-west of Brisbane, I’d have had you committed. Or committed myself. Indeed, if I’d done that when the little voice in my head told me to back away, I wouldn’t be in another damn pickle.
But did I listen to the voice of reason? Of course I didn’t.
And while I was aware of the severity of south-east Queensland’s water crisis, and had watched with mild amusement the political buck-passing, and even taken to using an egg timer in the shower to play my part in solving the wider problem, I could not have imagined in my wildest dreams that the drought would produce not just community angst and a boom in water-tank sales, but a body that just might rewrite the state’s history.
For this was not just any corpse photographed halfburied in the cracked surface of one of Wivenhoe’s recently exposed flanks as the dam levels dropped, but the earthly remains — I was convinced — of one Captain Patrick Logan. At least that’s what my instinct told me.
But let me explain how I got to this point.
Reference books have Logan murdered in 1830 by an Aboriginal tribe during one of the brutal captain’s many explorations in and about the Brisbane valley. Cracked across the back of the head, stripped naked and partially hidden beneath tree branches in the vicinity of the modern-day Wivenhoe. Even his horse was slaughtered. History says Logan’s body was then taken back to the settlement and forwarded to Sydney, where he was buried.
My advice to budding scholars? Don’t believe everything you read. History can reveal. But it can also conceal.
On the drive back to the Gold Coast the day I got collared by Ringo Starr in the John Oxley Library, something nagged at me. And when I get nagged by something, I can’t rest until I’ve satiated the itch. It made me a good cop. But it has made me a somewhat reckless and unpredictable civilian.
Quite simply, the object of my agitation was Ringo’s coat. It was eerily similar to the design of the coat on the unidentified corpse in the photograph that some stranger had left for me in the library’s meditation cube. Or had it been left for me? Was it intended for somebody else? Had I accidentally stumbled into a little mystery that might have gone unnoticed if I hadn’t decided to awaken my inner Buddhist in the red box by the Brisbane River? Perhaps the bonsai and gold envelope were meant for my friend in the John Oxley upstairs. He’d been waiting for them. I’d inadvertently got in first. Now I had the photograph of a very dead man, though I had only a supposition of who that man might be. I also had a pretty little bonsai, which I gifted to Peg who, astonished by my generosity, popped it on the kitchen windowsill and looked at me curiously throughout the evening. Can’t I buy my wife a dwarfed fig tree if I feel like it? said I, incredulous at her incredulity. Then seeing Logan’s portrait on the computer, there was the coat again. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
Late that night, I rang the phone number on the back of the photograph.
A man answered. ‘Yeah,’ he said. He sounded sleepy. Or drunk. Or drugged. Or both.
‘Thanks for the bonsai,’ I said, after several seconds of silence.
‘Yeah.’
‘Why don’t I come and see you?’