I sighed like a set of old leather bellows. No one could go for a walk these days without listening to something on headphones. Or talking on the phone. Or texting. Or tweeting. Good lord, don’t talk to me about tweeting after last year’s fiasco. It wasn’t that nobody stopped to think any more. People’s lives were so full of static, and movement and distraction, they had no time to think. And thinking is like exercise. Do it, or lose it.
‘Could you, as my Great-Aunt Petunia used to say, close your cakehole for a moment?’ I asked my detective friend.
‘Oi,’ the copper by the door snorted.
He was a regular porcine doorbell.
‘And could you get Porky over there to vacate the sty for a few minutes?’ I asked.
My haughtiness was out of line. I was long retired, had no official role in the investigation and hadn’t even been invited as a casual observer. My opinions meant nothing.
But this was Obe’s boy, Junior. And it was my old police diary sitting slap-bang in the middle of his blood-spattered bachelor pad.
Splattered was an understatement. Someone had decided to completely redecorate Junior’s walls. There were great tendrils of crimson spray criss-crossing both lounge-room walls, blood spots across the ceiling, the plasma television, the spectacularly bad oil painting of pelicans at feeding time. There were pools of the stuff on the carpet, continents of it on the pastel cloth-covered couches and a great wheel of it across the open granite kitchen bench. Some flecks had even made it to the fridge at the back of the kitchen, and onto Junior’s handwritten shopping list magnetised to the door. A perfect pinpoint of blood had alighted between ‘cabbage’ and ‘bread’.
I stood there for a long time, and another feeling passed through my weary frame. Something wasn’t right. There was blood here, but I couldn’t feel death. I don’t know how to explain it. You can add up the facts, Obe used to say, but they don’t always equal the truth.
I went into the kitchen and opened the fridge.
I heard a distant ‘Oi’ again from beyond the front door.
I poked my head into junior’s impossibly neat bedroom, stepped in, looked through his closets. The whole place felt unlived in. I joined the other detectives in Junior’s study. It had a pleasant view of the beach. I scanned the bookshelves.
Finally, I stood in front of his desk and stared down at my open police diary from the wonderful and tragic year of 1972. It was mine all right, and had aged as I had. It was weathered, discoloured and creaky at the spine.
21 July, 6.47 pm.
I looked up suddenly and the glare hurt my eyes. That’s when I remembered when I’d been here before.
~ * ~
3
IT WAS AFTER nine in the evening when the coppers pulled up stumps at poor Junior’s bachelor pad. My detective mate called me immediately and I dropped back to the scene for some quiet contemplation.
‘Keep your grubby mitts off everything,’ he told me as he left, ‘or it’s my job. And lock up on your way out.’
‘You’re a good man,’ I said to him. i’ll have you stuffed and mounted for this.’
‘Whatever,’ he said.
It was a different apartment at night. All soft and moody. The lights of the Surfers metropolis twinkled through the glass. Glass everywhere you looked. It was a monument to transparency. It was the Gold Coast. So much glass, for a place with so many secrets.
Of course, I had come back to the flat for the police diary. Naturally I planned to take it. I had to. It was mine, and it had something to do with Junior’s death.
Or did it?
Against all protocol, I had kept a few of my diaries from my years as a detective in Sydney, and secreted them into retirement. Who would miss them?
If caught with this worthless police property, I would claim they were important to me for a potential future autobiography. I can hear my imaginary interrogator groan at the thought — what, another cop-on-the-inside-big-belly-under-the-belly book about the bloody seventies, full of flares and bad hair and officers that all looked and sounded like Bill Hunter?
But there was another very good reason the diaries were under my wing, and it was all because of Obe. One of the first things he taught me was how to write a police diary.
‘I know how to write,’ I said, upstart of a young thing that I was.
‘Not like this,’ Obe said.
Every diary, he told me, had to contain brief daily summaries of police duties, no matter how mundane, right? But in every police force there is a parallel narrative going on. The things you see but don’t see. The conversations you hear but can’t repeat. The friendships you notice, the connections you see forming, even the very language police use with each other. A threat can be an invitation. A kindly phrase a threat. An innocuous query a test.
So Obe taught me, with an ingenious code of his own devising, how to embed a truthful observation of police life beneath the record of phone calls made and paperwork completed and interviews typed. For a period before and after Obe’s death, my diaries were halls of mirrors.
At the time, they could have meant the difference between life and death. Mine, that is. Decades later, I took them. Better safe than sorry.
And there was a name in one of those diaries, too, that had come back to me just a few hours earlier. The name of a young woman who had lived at the precise address as Hubert Dunkle Junior, albeit forty years earlier.
She was Susan Haag, and she had once resided in an orange-brick block of flats called the Ace Royale apartments, which had stood where Junior’s swish high-rise now towered. At police headquarters in Sydney around 1971 I had seen photographs of the street, and the flats, and inside Susan’s specific flat, and then inside Susan’s bedroom. And I had seen photographs of Susan’s naked body on her bed, and a bottle of Scotch and empty pill bottles on her bedside table.
Susan Haag’s death was, you see, a very big deal for a time in Sydney. Various combinations of detectives flew back and forth from the Gold Coast, investigating her suicide. Dozens of witnesses were questioned. An inquest was held. She was deemed to have taken her own life.
But that’s not how I remembered it. And it’s not what I wrote, in code, in my 1972 diary.
Funny thing, memory, I thought as I sat back in Junior’s accommodating desk chair, and contemplated the coincidence.
A young woman, supposedly a prostitute, had died at this address almost forty years ago. I had made a few notes about it from what I’d heard and seen in Sydney. Now, as an older man and standing at the border of that strange country where you wear giant diapers and eat runny food and sit all day in your pyjamas amongst strangers trying to remember what the devil your name is, I was back in the same spot, trying to work out who would kill my mentor’s son.
Did Susan Haag have anything to do with Junior? He would have been eleven years old when she popped those pills in her mouth and chug-a-lugged half a bottle of Scotch on her way to eternity.