If I was a detective at the time of Logan’s death, there was something I would need to see. The ‘leaves of his notebook’. Yes, I would very much have liked to see them.
Still, I had to be content with his jacket, which I’d souvenired off the body in the freezer. I held it, thawed now and limp, and tried to will some truth from it. All I got was the smell of mud and copper. And blood.
~ * ~
9
Peg and I had breakfast on the back deck overlooking the canal at home on the Gold Coast. Just as I began scooping out my grapefruit, a huge tourist boat chugged past. Several people on the top deck took photographs of us. I found it peculiar that a distant shot of me and Peg having breakfast would be archived in someone’s holiday album on the other side of the world.
My wife was unusually sullen. She rarely gets sullen. Cruelty to animals and starving children make her that way. And me, of course. Usually me.
‘How’s the tree going?’ she said, looking at me over the rim of her tea cup.
‘The tree?’
‘Family tree.’
‘Oh, the family tree. Very interesting. Fascinating, actually.’ I feigned a hearty laugh. ‘Oh, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree in my family, Peg.’
‘You found the bushranger, then?’
‘Not exactly.’ I avoided eye contact.
‘How’s that mobile phone I gave you?’
‘It’s good, Peg. Yes. Very clear reception.’
‘Do you have it with you?’
‘At all times. See?’ By chance and luck, I had slipped it into my shorts pocket that morning. I produced it, as proof.
‘Did you get my messages?’
‘Messages? It keeps messages?’
‘You don’t have a clue how to use it, do you?’
‘I have never even turned it off since you gave it to me. Look.’ The screen was blank. I fumbled with the on/off button. Nothing. ‘It’s broken,’ I said.
‘It’s out of battery power.’
‘It is?’
‘How could one of the most intelligent and highly decorated detectives in the history of the New South Wales police force not be able to operate a mobile phone? Once you charge it up, you’ll find several messages from me, and another half dozen from your friend, Mr Carpenter.’
‘Mr Carpenter?’
‘An old friend of yours, he says. Knew you when he worked for the Sydney City Council. Then he migrated north, and worked for the Brisbane City Council. Ring a bell?’
‘Water infrastructure.’ I toyed with the empty half-bladder of the grapefruit skin.
‘Water?’
‘I had a case, in the seventies. Extortion. Some lunatic threatened to contaminate the Sydney water supply. Carpenter was a minor public servant, specialised in water.’
‘Well, he wants to talk to you.’
‘He told me once there were bodies all over the world sealed up in dam walls. A dam wall is quite possibly the most perfect place to conceal a murder victim. He believed there were criminals who licked their lips every time a government proposed a new dam, and through their contacts, or courtesy of a wad of cash, or a gun to the back of a head, bodies, some of them new, some years old and exhumed, were slipped into dam walls. He reckoned you just had to check with the cops, or read the newspapers, to see the statistical rise in killings prior to the concrete pouring of a dam wall. Through the roof. ‘
‘Ah,’ said Peg. ‘Another one of your conspiracy theorists. You collect them, like some people collect stamps.’
‘It’s such a crazy theory it might be true.’
‘Why do you think he might want to talk to you, after all these years?’ She was sullen again, and suspicious.
‘Well, he’d be retired, like me,’ I said. ‘Maybe he wants to go fishing. Reminisce on old times.’
It was a Brisbane phone number. We spoke briefly. Carpenter certainly didn’t want to go fishing.
An hour and a half later, I was walking with him through the Brisbane Botanic Gardens at Mount Coot-tha.
‘How’d you track me down?’ I asked him.
We strolled slowly, with our hands behind our backs, just two retired gentlemen enjoying the gardenias.
‘How’d I track you down? For a private citizen living out a quiet retirement, you certainly make a large public target. Last year. The Fairweather escapade. You couldn’t have made yourself more conspicuous if you’d stripped off and ridden an elephant through the Queen Street Mall.’
‘The press. They made a big deal out of it, that’s all.’
‘Now you’re causing all sorts of waves behind the scenes, let me tell you. Serious waves. I felt obligated to warn you.’ He looked around furtively, like there might be electronic surveillance equipment in the herb garden, a sniper behind the bamboo.
He was, I knew from past experience, secretly enjoying all this cloak and dagger stuff.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘There’s a lot of noise about you and the government’s water infrastructure, which is being put in place as we speak.’
‘Water infrastructure? I was researching my family’s ancestry in a little booth in the library, for crying out loud. And what would you know about government business these days anyway? How long you been retired? Ten years?’
He flicked his nose with his forefinger.
‘Either you’re allergic to pollen or you know more than you’re letting on,’ I said. Carpenter didn’t smile. Public servants whose whole lives have been the past, present and future of water infrastructure don’t seem to have a huge sense of humour.
‘Let me just say that you are being discussed in the highest of circles.’
The highest of circles? Who was he kidding?
‘Would you care to illuminate me on the circles? And the talk?’
We had entered a mini-rainforest, and Carpenter became more jittery in the humid shadows. We re-emerged at the far side of the gardens. There were, down behind some gums, huge mountains of mulch. They looked, from this distance, as big as the pyramids in Egypt.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I might be retired, but there is a little group of us who meet regularly, once a month, to discuss water-related matters.’
‘Fascinating,’ I said. ‘Not your own waters, I assume, but the public sort.’
‘This is deadly serious.’
‘I apologise.’
‘We are — and I’m sure this will surprise you — called upon now and again as “consultants” to council and government projects regarding water. And even you would know that water, at this very moment in time, is a major issue in the community, and to governments. This is the worst drought in a century. We are under the most severe water restrictions in this city’s history. There is a very real concern we will be the first city in the twenty-first century to run out of water, unless the infrastructure is up and running in time.’