‘Carpenter suggested…’
But he wasn’t listening to me. He was gazing across the water of the dam, or what was left of it.
‘I worked on the Somerset Dam,’ he said, ‘before and after the war. I knew it’d never be enough for Brisbane and I told them so. Bloody war blew out the construction time. We’d ordered the gates and steelworks from England in the late thirties, and the rearmament program put that on hold. The evil ot Hitler, you see, even reached up the Brisbane River. We thought Somerset would see the city through to the eighties, but Brisbane boomed after forty-five. The city got real thirsty. So we had to start looking around again.’
‘Wivenhoe,’ I said.
‘Wivenhoe. It’d been on the drawing board as early as 1902. Not many people know that. They wanted something here for flood mitigation after the great 1883 deluge. But the wheels of government. They move slow.’
I wasn’t sure where Walt Whitman’s history lesson was leading. But he certainly knew his water.
‘In the late sixties, old Bjelke gave it the green light, so we had to start reclaiming land. You got to give people time when you take their land. Twenty years or so, to get used to the idea, to get prepared. Twenty or so years, that’s half a working lifetime. That’s what we did here. But one person didn’t want to leave. We had strife from the start. You’d think he’d found gold and didn’t want anyone else to know about it. Then we had a young surveyor from the university out here in the mid-seventies, doing a doctorate or something. Found him with a bullet wound to the chest. Died in hospital. It was covered up, of course. The papers were told it was a roo-hunting accident. Poor kid. We never could prove who did it, but I bet my bottom dollar it was that pest Collison.’
‘Collison?’
‘The old guy who didn’t want to give up his land. He did, in the end. He was hauled off by the cops, and his farm went under.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Never found out.’
‘There was another shooting out here recently, you know.’
‘Course I bloody well know. You think I’m an idiot? That was no suicide. That fellow was no farmer either. He was a caretaker, for the government, trying to get by as best he could.’
‘Don’t you find it coincidental? The young surveyor you just told me about, and the so-called farmer? Both shot dead?’
‘You been touched by the sun or something? Nothing is coincidental. Not when it involves the most precious resource on earth. When it starts to run out — water — you can forget about diamonds and gold and oil. People’ll be tearing each other’s hearts out for water.’
As we looked out on the dam, I could just see three men tearing about on jet skis. I didn’t know you were allowed to jet ski on Wivenhoe. But there they were, throwing up plumes and larking about.
‘Idiots,’ was all Walt Whitman said.
When he’d gone, I sat in the gathering dusk and thought long and hard about the old man’s history lesson. Just when I thought I’d made connections in the case — if indeed it was a case, for it had clues and evidence so disparate and across generations that any self-respecting law enforcer wouldn’t go near it — the whole thing fell apart in my head.
But the name — Collison. It bothered me. It scratched against the furthest recesses of my memory. Where had I heard that name? Collison.
Blast. I needed to get hold of Walt Whitman again. I needed to bounce Collison off him, but by now his old Fairlane would be barrelling towards Brisbane.
I stood to leave then, and on impulse walked to the edge of the water. It was a decent walk, trust me. The dried-out plates of mud cracked under my loafers all the way to the miserable, tepid shoreline of the shrunken lake. I could hear a motor in the distance. It got louder and louder. In a flash one of the jet-ski men emerged from the gloom, slowed not far from me, stood up in the saddle, then turned in a wide arc and disappeared.
On its tail was a clearly legible sticker.
SAVE NOOSA.
~ * ~
11
When I was first promoted to detective in the sixties, one of my superiors handed me a copy of Dale Carnegie’s enduring classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People. ‘Memorise it,’ my boss told me. ‘It might save your life one day.’
I couldn’t see how the persuasive techniques of Carnegie, a former Missouri farm boy who cut his teeth selling bacon and lard, could help me on the mean streets of Kings Cross, but I gather the boss’s intention was for me to learn how to talk my way out of tough scrapes, if need be.
Funnily, I used one of Carnegie’s techniques almost half a century later on the linen-clad multi-millionaire history-obsessed nut job who tried to freeze me to death in a storage freezer just outside Noosa. I utilised one of Dale’s methods on how to win people over to your way of thinking. Namely, and to paraphrase, Dramatise Your Ideas.
I found my Noosa friend on one of his early-morning beach walks, and with the help of a small handgun I had in my possession, I dramatised my idea of getting him to tell me what the hell was going on by placing the muzzle beneath his chin in the charming woodlands at the bottom of Hastings Street.
He appreciated this dramatisation quite readily, and promptly urinated in his knee-length designer shorts.
‘It wasn’t my idea,’ he said in a childlike voice.
‘What?’
‘The freezer.’
I think he’d started to cry, but I wasn’t sure if he was gurgling or if it was a nearby bush turkey sitting proudly on its monstrous nest in the dappled shade of the forest.
‘Is it true this used to be a caravan park, this delightful glade?’ I asked him.
‘I ... I think so.’
‘Before your time, I guess. Then again, you wouldn’t be seen dead in a caravan, would you? Though, strangely, I have seen many dead people in caravan parks. Caravan parks are places of inordinate violence. There was a particularly gruesome homicide in Windsor…’
‘Please don’t hurt me.’
‘Dale Carnegie recommended several ways to persuade people to like you,’ I said, staring at the nails on my trigger hand and picking at them with my free hand. ‘One of those ways was to encourage other people to talk about themselves. Let me put it politely. I am now encouraging you to talk about yourself.’
‘I have money.’
‘I know that, my friend. I just want you to tell me some stories. Historica, for example. Your business card, found on a dead man’s fridge.’
‘I told you. It’s a hobby. An interest in history. A small group of us.’
‘Like knitting. Or bridge.’
‘Sort of.’
I pushed the gun hard into that soft, flabby, self-indulged turkey neck of his. ‘Another Carnegie gem is to arouse in people an urgent want. I WANT you to start talking. Are you feeling it too?’
‘I don’t want to diiiiiiiiie,’ he sobbed.
Even the turkey raised its head and looked quizzical.
‘For crying out loud.’