Then I discovered a foreword the science-fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke wrote to his famous novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey. I wrote it out on one of my five- by three-inch index cards and kept it in my wallet, and when the card got dog-eared and fragile I copied it out again, and again.
Clarke wrote: ‘Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this universe, there shines a star.’
For the umpteenth time in my life I thought of these words as I sat beside the body of the straw-hatted farmer by the feeble waters of the Wivenhoe Dam.
The blood around the bullet wound in his head had crusted and turned rust-brown. His hands were folded in his lap. His head was turned slightly to the side, his eyes were half-open and drowsy-looking, as if he’d been woken from a deep sleep. One eyebrow was lifted a little higher than the other, giving him a visage of dumb surprise. He had not, I reasoned, expected to be turned into a Milky Way star quite so soon.
I tried to close those eyes but they didn’t hold. I left him staring into space. As I walked back to his farmhouse I could hear the flies making their ghastly music about him.
I didn’t immediately call the police. There was some real work to do before the blue shirts stormed in and turned the place upside down, and decided, considering I’d found the body, that I might make a decent suspect and even contribute to alleviating their murder clear-up statistics as the New Year approached.
My toothless farmer friend in the straw hat, he kept what must have once been a decent spread. His fences were all intact, though the pastures were ankle-high and dry as a bone and hadn’t seen cattle in some time. The whole place had the feel of something on the point of collapse. Of desperation. Despite this simple man’s incessant labour, fate and nature had conspired against him, and it all felt tired. The drought. It had hollowed him out.
Not far from the old Queenslander he’d called home, I noticed a shed that seemed different from the rest. It had crude, homemade skylights built into the corrugated-iron roof sheeting, and there were new water pumps and a crazy maze of plastic pipes tangled down one side.
I peered through the open doorway. It was hot in there, humid and oven-like. The shed was dominated by two long hand-made trestle tables. A rudimentary watering system had been rigged up above the tables. Right at the end of one of the tables was a cluster of small potted plants. There were boxes and boxes of unopened glazed pots, made in China, and a side-table on which was a selection of small, delicate pruning tools. They were bonsai implements.
I sighed for the poor man. He was starting a new business for himself. Diversifying, in the face of the great drought. At some point he had lit upon the idea of growing and selling bonsai trees. It was doomed from the start. He was a farmer. He worked with living things. It was all he knew. Yet he saw a future in plants, and water. He could not step out of this small, dry square of his. He would have had a better shot at things selling hand-squeezed lemonade out by his front gate, poor man.
I went up into the house and started looking around in the kitchen. In the country, the kitchen is the focal point of business, of family, of life. In one of the drawers of an ancient hutch I found the farmer’s paperwork. I tipped it onto the kitchen table. There, near the top of the pile, were more photographs of the corpse I had been abruptly introduced to in the meditation room at the State Library.
I put the kettle on and made a cup of tea, then I sat at the table and carefully studied the pictures for almost an hour.
The dozens of photos, taken from several angles, gave me a greater appreciation of the victim. I had no trained eye for historical apparel, but the jacket that adorned the body looked, to my schoolboy knowledge of Australian history, to be from the 1800s. It was also richly decorated with braid and buttons. Whoever it was had rank of some sort. There were what appeared to be spurs on his rotting boots.
It was the close-up of the skull, though, that fascinated me. There was a huge, shattered entrance wound to the flat forehead. And the photographer, presumably the farmer himself, had rested what could only have been a lead ball nearby, presumably found inside the old skull, rattling about like a marble for an aeon. This was, without hesitation, a most heinous murder. Though I had no concrete evidence, I had no doubt it was Logan.
I pocketed the photographs, washed up my tea cup and put it on the sink rack. As I wiped my hands with a tea towel I stood in front of the fridge and perused the white door, covered in family photos, and little pictures of bonsai trees torn out of gardening magazines, and telephone and power bills fastened with magnets advertising farm machinery and advice on how to spot a terrorist. It was rudimentary stuff, the sort of fridge detritus to be found in kitchens across Australia.
But there was one thing out of place: a white, laminated business card held firmly to the fridge with a John Deere magnet.
In raised black letters it read — Historica. On the flipside were a phone number and a post office box address in Noosa, Sunshine Coast, Queensland.
I wiped my prints off everything I’d touched. If I’d wanted to be fastidious, I could have returned to the corpse on the shores of Wivenhoe and swept out any footprints there too. But in a drought, footprints rarely hold. A single hot breath of wind can send them into eternity. All the way to the Milky Way.
It was midday and hot when I left the property. Time for a dip. Time to savour the sensory delights of Noosa.
I patted the white business card in my pocket, and headed out of the valley.
~ * ~
7
Answer me this. In what sort of job could you be standing over the flyblown corpse of a dead Esk farmer one moment, and a few hours later be taking a mint julep on the deck of a mansion overlooking Noosa with a toupee-wearing multimillionaire?
You see what happens when you begin mucking about inside the dark, secret chambers of the human heart? You don’t know where you might end up. As for the complications of the soul, well, don’t even start me on that — we could be here for months, years.
But back to the mint julep.
I had left the farmer by the Wivenhoe — he wasn’t going anywhere and besides, the police were presumably on their way after my little tip to Crimestoppers — and taken a leisurely drive to Noosa. All my life I had heard of this fabled place. A paradise, they say. The Riviera of Queensland. In my mind it was a fairytale land surrounded by tall walls and moats, and to enter you either had to be extremely wealthy or decked out in white linen from shoe to hat, or preferably both.
So as the Peugeot rolled down from Noosaville to Hastings Street I felt I was entering unfamiliar territory.
At Aroma’s café, as children ran amok in the little adjoining square and splashed each other with fountain water, I rang the Historica number on the white business card.
‘Yes?’ said a voice.
‘Historica?’