‘You must be mistaken,’ she said. ‘There is nobody of that description here, nor has there ever been. And if you don’t leave quietly, I will have to call security.’
I sat in the Peugeot in the library car park, confused and disappointed. I kept hearing Peg in my head — Let it go, let it go.
So I let it go, reached for the ignition key, and that’s when I got belted across the back of the head with a waddy.
~ * ~
13
So here I am. Probably the first prisoner of the Old Windmill on Wickham Terrace since the nineteenth century. Though that would not be revealed to me immediately. At first, I didn’t know where I was. One minute I’d been sitting in the old Peugeot in the library car park, the next — oblivion.
When I came to, I was trussed up like a Christmas turkey with an eyeless hood over my sore and sorry head. I instinctively reverted to my training, tried to smell beyond the cloth that sucked in and out against my nostrils like a blacksmith’s bellows, and found nothing identifiable. Or did I? Wherever I was smelled very old, and beyond that? Was that the scent of rusted copper?
As for my life flashing before my eyes, it had come not as a pleasurable epic film in a cinema, suffused with the wonderful aroma of buttered popcorn, but as a scratchy sequence of old Kodak slides juggled out of sequence. Suddenly, there was my dad in his new Fairlane, both of them beaming and gleaming outside my childhood home. There was me on my graduation day from the police academy. There was Peg standing atop a set of stairs by the door of a TAA aircraft. There was my mother in her Sunday hat.
Then a padlock was sprung, a door was opened and shut, and heavy footsteps approached.
The hood was reefed off and I faced the disconcerting visage of a man who himself had his head hooded.
‘Well, that’s weird,’ I said.
My captor pulled up a wooden chair and slowly sat down opposite me. I could hear traffic outside. Pale light fell through a distant window. My new best friend in the Abu Ghraib hat was wearing overalls, work boots and what appeared to be gardening gloves.
‘You’re a nuisance,’ he said. He sounded like Chips Rafferty, if Chips had been raised in Windsor Castle in Old Blighty.
‘You’re not the first to tell me that,’ I said.
‘I’m sure I’m not.’
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, clouting innocent old pensioners over the head?’ It was all I could think of saying. Getting on the offensive. Dale Carnegie would not have approved.
‘You have become what my grandmother would have described as a nosey parker,’ he said.
‘And as my grandmother would have said, your grandmother didn’t know diddly-squat.’
‘It’s time you joined the animals in the mill work,’ he said in his lovely baritone voice, ‘despite any unexplained affections I might have towards you.’
The phrase jarred in my brain. I had read it just hours (or was it days?) before in the transcripts of Logan’s journal. ‘So you’re familiar with Captain Logan, then?’ I asked.
‘Indeed,’ he said, folding his arms. ‘And where better to quote him than in this, his cathedral.’
‘His cathedral?’
‘Oh yes, you don’t know where you are. Let’s keep it that way for the moment.’
‘And who might you be?’
‘That’s not important, for the time being.’
‘What sort of lunatic wanders about in the height of summer wearing a boiler suit, a hood and a pair of gardening gloves?’ I was trying to tease him into action, to make something happen. He was either going to kill me or he wasn’t. I’m the sort of person that doesn’t like to be kept guessing. He remained silent.
‘No talkies? Okay. I’ll do it for both of us. Let me take a wild guess at this. You’re some sort of madman, still living at home with your mother — a motel, perhaps, on the outskirts of town? — and who has a grudge against Wivenhoe simpletons and Noosa millionaires. When you were a schoolboy here in Brisbane you identified with the colonial tyrant Patrick Logan. Throughout your teenage years his life and work spoke to you, and gradually you embodied his cruel and sadistic person. You tortured cats and birds, and incinerated ants with a magnifying glass. Now, in between killing people, you like to go out to the Brisbane Valley and dress up in old penal colony outfits and play war games with your beautifully restored muskets. Am I warm?’
‘Not even close.’
‘Maybe I’ve met you before. In the John Oxley Library. Black bob. Beatles fan. Spent most of your life defending The White Album over Sergeant Pepper. Maybe you’re not Captain Patrick Logan at all, but Sergeant Pepper.’
‘Give me The White Album any day. But wrong again.’
‘Then what’s your name? Come on. Give me a hint.’
‘My real name? Or the name I go by?’
‘How about the real one?’
‘Collison.’
I was left with my mouth half open. I couldn’t quite believe what I’d heard.
‘Would you mind repeating that?’
‘Sure. Collison.’
‘Do you happen to know a very short man, patron of the John Oxley Library, by the name of Logan?’
‘Sure I do.’
I had to take stock and think. ‘You would obviously know that in the history of Queensland, Logan’s personal servant was one Private Collison, or so my research tells me, and there has been conjecture, courtesy of Logan’s journals and apocryphal anecdote, that Logan was in fact murdered by Collison. This is no coincidence, is it?’
‘No, it’s not.’
‘Please,’ I said. ‘Before you kill me, or torture me with your thoughts on Beatles albums, could you tell me what in the world has been going on?’
‘I don’t see why not.’ He shuffled in the chair. It barked on the floor and echoed. ‘As we both know, a government caretaker out near Esk recently came across a semi-mummified corpse on the edge of Lake Wivenhoe. The water levels have dropped. The drought. This is not news to anyone in Brisbane. He in turn believed he had made some sort of important historical find, and made several phone calls to young, time-poor, uninterested public servants and gatekeepers, who palmed him off to the John Oxley Library. With me so far?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s when you came in. The caretaker brought the picture of the body to the library, got his instructions wrong, and, voila, there you were in that little red room overlooking the river. Wrong place at the wrong time. It didn’t matter. Word was already out about the corpse. Historica. Are you familiar with them?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘The head of the Index is our friend Mr Logan. And yes, he is directly related to Captain Patrick Logan. It has been his role, as part of that long family line, to protect his forefather’s reputation as a frontiersman, a martyr of the Australian colonial experience.’