At least someone had left a small security light on. Where was I? At a fish market? At the back of a restaurant? The rhythmic thundering continued, getting louder and louder. I checked out the freezer. No exits. No interior emergency handles or hatches.
One other thing about freezing to death. If you’re carrying a bit of lard, you take longer to die.
Thus I sat on a few boxes of frozen scallops, rubbed my arms and considered my predicament. Grace under pressure, I told myself. Don’t panic. Conserve energy.
That’s when I grabbed the tail of a nice long flathead and banged it crazily against the freezer wall, shouting my head off for help.
Just a few moments later there was a boom loud enough to shake the entire freezer itself, and the single light, weak and dull as a firefly, went out. Great. Now I was going to freeze to death in the dark. I scrambled back to the scallops on my hands and knees and ended up wrestling with the mud-caked, cling-wrapped corpse. It wasn’t one of my finer moments.
Then, blow me down, if it didn’t start to feel warmer in that tomb of mine. I thought — here it is, the fire on the skin prior to death. They would find me naked and twisted in agony in a mess of seafood. It would, so it seemed, be an undignified death for me.
But it actually did get warmer, and as time marched on I could hear the fish creak and crack with the thaw and then, suddenly, scaring the living daylights out of both of us, a small goateed man in jeans and a checked shirt opened the door to the freezer and shone a torch straight into my face. I instinctively raised the flathead. Beware the man in fear for his life and armed with a frozen fish.
After our mutual screams had stopped echoing, I said, ‘Broken? The freezer?’
And he said, ‘Big storm. Lightning. Direct hit on the generator. ‘
‘So,’ I said, ‘big fish sale now.’
‘You bet,’ he said.
‘Where am I?’
‘Seafood storage facility for “Noosa Fresh and Fishy.’”
“‘Fresh and Fishy?”‘
‘We distribute seafood to restaurants in Noosa and on the Sunshine Coast. You?’
‘Retired detective.’
‘On a case?’
‘Sort of. Had a drink with your boss. Wears white? A roadkill toupe?’
‘Heard of him. Never met him. Only started work for this mob a week ago. Today’s me day off, but I came in to check on the generators when the storm hit.’
‘You might need a new one.’
‘Looks like it,’ he said.
‘Your boss make it a habit of storing old corpses in here with the fresh seafood?’
‘Dunno. I just been told to keep an eye on the fish. Nothin’ else. No matter what turns up here.’
‘If you no looky, you keep worky.’
‘Exactly. ‘
‘At “Noosa Fresh and Fishy.’”
‘That’s it. Hey, you need a jumper or something?’
I could have hugged him.
I also needed to regroup. My mint julep friend could wait. I had a long memory.
~ * ~
Back on the Gold Coast, I studied the facts I had at hand. I had two bodies, one from another century, the other from a farm in Esk. The local papers were reporting the latter as another ‘rural suicide’. I found this curious. My toothless friend had suffered the ‘long-term impact of the drought’, some senior sergeant was quoted as saying. His family farm had become untenable. They had reduced him to just another statistic. Full stop. Yeah, right. Like the giant full stop in the middle of his sorry forehead.
I had a library patron who had warned me off some innocuous snippet of Brisbane history that was evolving into something not so innocuous after all. I believed, too, that I had accidentally intercepted a bonsai tree and some vital information while sitting innocently in the State Library’s meditation room innocently seeking information about my innocent family tree.
Then there was Captain Logan. Dear Patrick. I had never heard of him and all of a sudden he was trying to get me killed. Was the corpse in the freezer that of Logan himself, the Tyrant of Brisbane Town? The very same in the crinkled photograph I had taken from the gold envelope? If so, what of the official reports of his murder by Aboriginal tribes near the site of the ever-dwindling Wivenhoe Dam in 1830? Who was trying to alter history here, and why?
As far as I could ascertain, the Scottish-born Logan, the Moreton Bay penal settlement’s third commandant, was notorious for his cruelty in a country that, in its early days of colonisation, had its fair share of British-born tyrants and sadists. He was not averse to ordering 150 lashes for individual convicts. He built cells specifically for solitary confinement, then a flour mill for further mental and physical torture. He also fancied himself as something of an explorer. He was obsessed with rivers. He charted the Logan River, named after him.
Then, in October of 1830, with his commission in Brisbane almost at an end, he made one last journey to the Brisbane Valley. He was accompanied by his servant, Private Collison, and five convicts. Near Pine Mountain they were threatened by Aboriginals, who only let them pass after Collison discharged his firearm. Heading back to the settlement a week later on 17 October, Logan noticed some horse tracks. He had lost a horse in the area on a previous expedition so he decided to follow them, hoping to retrieve the animal. He told his party he would meet them later that day.
When Logan didn’t show, his men, unable to locate him, walked on to Ipswich, where they thought Logan might be. Further search parties were sent out. According to a published account, Logan’s bloodied waistcoat was discovered, ‘as well as some leaves of his notebook’. A day later, they came upon Logan’s horse, ‘dead in the bottom of a shallow creek, covered with boughs’. Then, a few metres from the horse, ‘Logan’s body was found ... the back of the head much beaten with waddies ... in a grave about two feet deep where the blacks had buried him with his face downwards. The body was then take[n] up, and put in blankets and by stages brought to the Limestone Station and afterwards by water to the settlement.’
His death was not exactly mourned in Brisbane. They had a song about him, celebrating the ‘mortal stroke’ handed out by the local Aboriginals. ‘My fellow prisoners, be exhilarated / that all such monsters such a death may find.’ Hardly a fond remembrance.
Logan’s body was then transported to Sydney on a government schooner.
Or was it? Who on earth had anything to gain from falsifying the details of Logan’s death, almost two centuries later? And why, if this indeed was a case of tampered history, had the ruse been perpetrated for so long? It obviously meant a great deal to somebody. Already, an innocent man had been killed, and I had had my own life threatened. For what?
Also, if the corpse that had kept me company in the freezer was actually the legendary Logan himself, he had not been bludgeoned to death with a waddy, that’s for sure. He’d been cleanly and efficiently murdered.
There were a thousand convicts in that early penal settlement, and each and every one had a decent motive. But why would anyone care so much all this time later? It didn’t make sense.