‘Ah, comrade, it’s nothing ...’
And after a few more beers — he could never hold his booze, Father Dill — he told me about how he’d gone from chaplain at Long Bay to Brisbane’s Boggo Road, then, when that place had shut its doors, to a little parish in South Brisbane, where he thought he’d see out his career, until just a few months ago, when he was abruptly ordered to Marilyn Monroe Drive. That’s when he told me about the little rusted tin box that had been brought to him by a concerned Christian who feared for its safety. That’s when he told me about Alan Beechnut, and the funeral of his mother, Mirabelle Beechnut.
It was the first time I’d heard of the Beechnuts. And I couldn’t know that dear, kind, gentle Father Dill would be brutally murdered and lowered into the earth at his own funeral just a week later. That I would be standing by the grave. That I would look up and catch the malevolent, psychotic grin of Alan Beechnut. That I would, in the not-too-distant future, lock ferocious horns with this nut, on a beach.
Life works in mysterious ways. I wish I’d patented that little cluster of words too.
~ * ~
3
‘HOW DID HE DIE?’
I was sitting in a small office at the Roma Street police headquarters, learning the fate of poor Father Dill. A little birdie in homicide had given me a tip-off and I’d headed directly to Brisbane in the old Kombi.
I’d had plenty of time to contemplate my dear friend’s untimely death. I was due in the city at nine that morning, but limped into Roma Street close to ten-thirty.
Brisbane traffic. I thought Sydney was bad. In just the few years I’d lived in south-east Queensland, its roads had gone haywire. Why? Where had everyone come from? Brisbane was the new Sydney, with one small twist. Brisbane people weren’t used to this sort of congestive mayhem. They didn’t know how to merge lanes at peak hour, because they’d never had to before. They weren’t au fait with the ‘thank you’ wave. They waved, more often than not, with their middle finger. They leaned on the horn and tailgated and cut in and out and screamed and spat and wailed and punched the air and brandished screwdrivers. And that was just the women drivers.
If this city was a person, it was suffering serious, almost hospital-worthy indigestion. Brisbane, the ten-minute town where everything was just ten minutes away? Whoever kept saying that was blowing hot exhaust out of that place where the sun don’t shine.
But the tunnels were coming. The Clem7. Australia’s longest tunnel, being burrowed through that unique granite known as Brisbane Tuff. Talk about tuff. Brisbane traffic was tuff. It made driving across Sydney look like a trip in the kiddies’ train at a shopping plaza.
I’d unwittingly dashed into a space in the conga line of cars passing through Mount Gravatt, and the dopey teenager I’d inconvenienced had followed me all the way into the city and as I parked had pulled up beside me, given me the two-handed centre finger, then curled his right hand into a fist, slapped his left hand against his right forearm, raising the said fist, and screamed a very short sentence at me. The first word rhymed with ‘truck’, and the second was ‘orf. Then he sped away in a puff of carbon monoxide. Nice way to start the day.
Anyway, I had learned, speaking with my police contact at Roma Street, that during that morning’s drive I had unwittingly passed the site where Father Dill’s body, or bits of it, had been found.
‘Gibbon Street shaft, the Gabba,’ he said.
‘What’s that, the name of a gang or something?’
‘Gibbon Street shaft. The giant vent. For the Clem7 tunnel. They found him in there. In six pieces. We have no idea how he got in there. Or why he was dumped there. Drained of blood. No prints. It’s a strange one.’
‘Six pieces of him?’
‘Head, arms, legs, all severed from the torso. Neatly stacked. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘Chainsaw?’
‘No. We don’t know what was used.’
‘How can you not know? This is the homicide squad isn’t it? Haven’t you seen it all?’
‘The cuts weren’t clean. Whatever the killer used, it was blunt. And I mean blunt.’
‘Good Lord,’ I said. Not only was Father Dill’s manner of death shocking, but so was the creeping infiltration of religious references in my day-to-day speech.
It had started after my belated confession in Marilyn Monroe Drive. That night, after a few beers with poor Father Dill, I’d gone home and asked Peg where the television remote was. The cleaners had been. But the ensuing debate didn’t unfold as it usually did. I said to Peg. ‘Thou shalt ask those cleaners where the ruddy thing is and why they keep moving it.’ And she said, after a short pause. ‘Did you just say “thou shalt”?’ And I said. ‘Are you daft? Who in their right mind would use the words “thou shalt”?’ And she said, ‘You did. You just said “thou shalt”.’ I thought using the word ‘ruddy’ was more peculiar. (Could that have been our ex-prime minister’s nickname at school? Did they shout ‘Rudd-y, Rudd-y’ at him through the pineapple fields?)
Anyway, I went and sulked on my camp stretcher in the garage.
‘We’ve seen similar cuts to the body,’ my police contact said, ‘on train suicides. The train wheels.’
‘So he was thrown under a train?’
‘That’s the thing,’ he said. ‘There was no bruising, no cuts and abrasions, anywhere else on the body. And what train could dexterously carve off a man’s legs, arms and head in a single motion? Physically impossible.’ He scratched his head.
‘Good Lord,’ I repeated, scratching my own head.
I gave my friend some background details on Father Dill. He didn’t really need them. But I needed to talk. I needed to vent, and that was not a pun on Gibbon Street.
What I didn’t tell him was the discussion Dill and I had had in the tavern on James Dean Boulevard. About the mysterious tin box that had been entrusted to Dill. The confession he had taken, his last in Brisbane before being shafted (again, no pun intended) to the Gold Coast, which had chilled him to the bone.
‘What was it about?’ I’d asked Dill.
‘I’m sorry, comrade. I can’t reveal that.’
‘Who was it?’
‘That’s sacred, brother.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Dill,’ I’d said. ‘How serious is it?’
‘It’s life and death, comrade,’ he’d said, tears welling in his eyes as he lifted his beer. ‘As serious as it gets.’
Who had sought Dill for absolution? Who had slipped into the confessional and said something that made this saintly priest fear for his life? It didn’t take blind Freddy to conclude that the sinner would be worth questioning in light of Father Dill’s blunt and bloodless dismemberment.
A few days after the tavern, I had telephoned him and his voice was thin down the line. The last thing he said to me was, and I’m paraphrasing: ‘Hezekiah stopped the upper watercourse of Gihon and brought it down to the city of David. And Hezekiah prospered in all his works. There’s fire in the tunnels this time, comrade. Fire in the tunnels.’