‘Yeah.’
He gave me an address and the phone went dead.
Esk, he’d said. What the hell is an esk?
The following morning, under the pretext of once more climbing the family tree, I hit the road for Brisbane and Esk, an hour or so north-west of the city.
It’s a delightful drive, if you haven’t done it. And it’s my belief that everyone should see at least once their city’s water supply. Why? It’s the source of life. It says a lot about the community it serves. It can tell you things about your past, and your future.
I should have told Peg about my latest bout of mischief. But, I’ll be honest — it gave me a thrill to be back on the trail of a mystery. I had not anticipated the stupefying boredom of retirement. I hadn’t prepared for it. I hadn’t established a little safety net of hobbies and activities for myself. Granted, I didn’t expect to be plugged full of holes within months of leaving work. But those many months of rehabilitation brought home the reality of my position.
Peg said my subconscious had sought out danger and adventure during that near-fatal Fairweather farrago last year. I asked her if it was the habit of the subconscious to willingly get its backside shot up. I was being facetious, but I know there was some truth in what she said.
And here I was again, driving to a remote farmhouse outside Esk to meet a stranger who had a corpse on his property, most likely a gun in the rack beside the front door, and an expansive and lovingly tended Slim Dusty record collection.
I stopped in Esk itself and had a coffee and a sandwich. As I sat there, beside the main drag, I began thinking of Logan and his ill-fated expedition into the valley. He had convicts with him, supplies, horses, and when he set out from the Old Windmill, the soil around it infused with wheat husks and men’s blood, he couldn’t have known he was soon to meet his death. Or could he? Men like Logan believe they’re invincible. Yet history has shown, over and over, that invincible men usually suffer horrible and premature deaths. The frontier. It can be a hell of a dangerous place.
I tried to imagine the valley and the virgin river back in 1830. It must have been extraordinary. The forests untouched. The pristine river beginning its long, winding journey to Moreton Bay. And a hundred years later it was all gone, submerged beneath the Somerset and Wivenhoe dams.
Logan was fearless, I’ll give him that. It’s no picnic, the Australian bush. It’s claimed its share of lives, broken countless men and women, devoured innocent children. It was and is, as they say, unforgiving.
So Logan came in search of pastures and water, and was delivered into the great void. Had local Aboriginal tribes been responsible? That seemed to be accepted fact. But there would have been hundreds of men with a motive to end his miserable existence. A pack of them who had suffered at the end of his lash and been humiliated as beasts of burden at his beck and call. Logan was a murder waiting to happen.
If the corpse in the photograph was indeed the real Logan, whose body had been brought back to the settlement in 1830, dispatched to Sydney and buried with military honours? Why had the switch been made? And why had the body of the real Logan been buried with such determination that it avoided detection for almost two centuries?
I found the property a further twenty minutes out of town, drove over the cattle grid at the front gate and parked beside a dilapidated farmhouse. I could see a Toyota ute with shovels and mattocks poking out of its tray in a nearby shed.
I knocked on the door and waited. Nothing. The tin roof pinged and groaned in the sunshine.
‘Hello?’
Still nothing. I opened the door and peered into a long hallway that ran from the front to the back of the house. There was old, cracked linoleum on the floor.
‘Anybody home?’ I walked through to the kitchen at the back. I nosed about. There were photographs of the same man with various women and children pinned to the fridge. In each photo his grin was broad enough to reveal two missing front teeth, and in each picture he wore a large, battered straw hat.
Call it an old copper’s instinct, but I went down the back steps and climbed through a fence and took a stroll across the dry paddocks. The grass was brittle beneath my boots. Grasshoppers clung to my trouser legs. I could see in the distance the tip of one of the smaller arms of the Wivenhoe Dam. I needed to find that body in the picture. I needed to see it with my own eyes. In this digital age, no photograph can be trusted.
I went down to the edge of the water. You could clearly see the rings, like dirt in a bathtub, where the water level had been, and the layers of caked mud, dry and hard furthest from shore. There were bird, kangaroo and wallaby tracks stitched crazily across the surface. I walked across the hardened mud until I saw a dead tree just like the one in the photograph.
I found the corpse all right.
But it wasn’t Captain Logan. There, in a dried-out mud bog and positioned in exactly the same way as our historic corpse, was the body of my toothless friend in the pictures on the fridge in the farmhouse. His straw hat was tilted sideways on his head.
And he had a perfectly neat, ruby-red bullet hole slap-bang in the centre of his forehead.
~ * ~
6
There are many, many people in the world who never leave even the barest trace of a footprint. Nothing — not a scintilla nor skerrick — to mark their time on Earth.
I’m not talking about this carbon-footprint nonsense we hear so much about these days. This great global push to make all of us even smaller, less offensive, less significant. This urgency to turn us into soft-stepping sheep lest we actually show we exist. Trust me, when I’m ready to buy the farm, so to speak, I want to leave one big, rude, noticeable divot behind.
Still, as a former homicide detective, I’ve known the cheapness of life. I’ve seen the waste. The slaughter of innocents. With each one, it never gets any easier.
This is how the job gets to you. It scratches at the essence of your being, bit by bit. It can throw you into a philosophical cast of mind if you’re not careful.
In my early days, as a young cop, I didn’t handle it well. I was perfectly ordered and stoic on the outside, but I’d go home at the end of a shift, just as bankers and street cleaners and trawler fishermen clock off, and I’d sit alone in the lounge room into the early hours, leaden with the sights and sounds of the day, strangely uncomforted by the feather snores of my wife coming from the bedroom. We all have our crosses to bear. But I’m not putting down accountants, say, when you compare a day busy with figures and book balancing and one where you come upon a teenager who has decided to end it all by blowing off half her face with Daddy’s hunting rifle, or the mummified remains of an elderly lady in an outer suburb, dead of a heart attack for a year without entering the thoughts of anybody living, a plastic shopping bag still gripped in her right hand. Put side by side, the columns don’t exactly equate.
Once, during my apprenticeship years, my education on the force, a question presented itself to me — how many people have ever lived on Earth since time began? (These sort of maddening conundrums slip in under the door when you work with violent death.) I read and spoke with people and could never get a satisfactory answer.