‘Why don’t you take your aforementioned allegations and shove them up your oft-mentioned aft region,’ I said.
‘My client is still suffering from his injuries and I request that comment not be used against him in any future proceedings,’ Tapas interjected.
They said I would be released on bail and that a court order to be lodged later in the morning would prevent me from coming within a 100-metre radius of the murder scene and communicating with any officers involved in the aforementioned murder investigation.
‘Oi,’ I said. ‘Whatever.’
Tapas merely checked his manicured fingernails. ‘Wait outside,’ he said to me.
Later, in his air-conditioned, imported black Maybach, the cabin gaggingly rich with Tapas’s sticky, icky, sweet aftershave, he asked me why I had such an intense interest in the death of Hubert Dunkle Junior.
‘Long story, Tapas. It would require an attention span to digest it.’ I was staring at the little mirror ball dangling from his rear-vision mirror.
‘Try me.’ We had stopped at a set of red lights.
‘I can hear your meter running, Tapas, and I’m not buying. It’s history.’
‘Then you won’t need this,’ he said. He reached into the back seat and retrieved a large brown envelope. He dropped it in my lap.
It was a full photocopy of my 1972 diary. From when I’d gone nigh-nigh courtesy of a garden spade to slipping into the whoofy Maybach, someone had copied the old diary, bundled it up and slipped it into the hands of the coast’s most fashion-challenged legal mind.
‘You cheeky dog, Tapas, how did you get it?’
‘Johnny K. Tapas got history, too, my friend,’ he said. ‘Old friends. Old favours.’
Old Spice more like it, I wanted to say.
‘I owe you,’ I said, holding the diary copy.
‘Maybe,’ he said.
At home, Peg ignored me. Which was good, because it gave me a chance to properly examine my old handiwork.
I had arrived at the supposition that the discovery of my diary at the murder scene was no accident. It had been planted there to lure me. But why had I been reeled in? And by whom?
I repaired to my study, sadly neglected since my Russian-assassin fiasco last year, and flicked on my trusty and reliable super-bright desk lamp. I made myself comfy, brought out my jumbo-sized magnifying glass, and started on page 1, 1 January 1972.
I had an almost out-of-body experience going through those old entries. It was a flickering slideshow of my past, and long forgotten scenes and people’s faces and snatches of conversation whirled about me in that quiet room that afternoon.
Trust me, I am not a melancholy man. But it’s a strange thing, to meet your younger self once again. He is the stranger that lives within you, and if you don’t like him, there’s very little you can do about it.
I remained open-minded about the young stranger of me.
Around the month of March in the diary, I noticed something peculiar. Between two sentences in an innocuous entry — something about a break and enter — was the world’s smallest number. It was tiny. The footprint of an ant. Written in pencil. But it was definitely a number. The number seven.
A week later in the diary I found another, a three. By the time I got to 21 July — the date of Obe’s death — I had discovered nine different numbers.
I wrote them in sequence. I had a hunch. I went back to the entries between January and April. Sure enough, my miniature calligrapher had secreted a zero in a note on an informant I was cultivating.
I sat back and stared at the numerical sequence. It didn’t take Einstein to work it out.
It was a telephone number. In Brisbane.
I got on the phone, and after three rings someone picked up at the other end.
‘Well, well, well,’ a male voice said. ‘About time.’
~ * ~
6
I was due to meet my mystery diary calligrapher at Samuel Griffith’s grave on the top of the hill that presided over Brisbane’s Toowong Cemetery.
Just what I needed. An informant with a dramatic sense of occasion.
This guy had thus far entangled me in a murder investigation by breaking into my storage cage at Nerang, pillaged my private papers, indirectly given me a broken nose, left a microscopic phone number secreted within my old police diary and now wanted to rendezvous at the grave of a Queensland pillar of justice.
The last thing I needed, with a shattered proboscis, was a meeting with some dipstick who’d seen too many Humphrey Bogart movies.
Still, with Peg not speaking to me and the Dunkle murder gnawing away at my aching brain, I headed to Brisbane in my old Kombi. And yes, I still have her, despite my near-fatal run-in with the villains from the Marx Brothers Kombi Auto Shoppe a couple of years back, and a few minor mechanical niggles such as snapped accelerator cables, oil leaks, failed brakes and — oh yes — the motor blowing up and requiring a total recondition. But what’s new in the world of the Kombinationskraftwagen?
Before my little assignation in the land of the dead, however, I needed to pay a visit to Queensland’s state archives, south of the CBD.
I had been thinking about a woman, you see. A lot. I had been thinking about the young, blonde Susan Haag who had taken her own life in a small bedroom in the Ace Royale apartments on the Gold Coast in 1971. Why, nearly four decades later, had Junior died in a modern apartment in the air space above the old Ace Royale? Was there a connection?
I had been vaguely familiar with the Haag case as a young detective. I’d been close to the late Obe Dunkle, who’d also apparently suicided. And I’d last met Junior at his daddy’s graveside. There were dots here, and I needed to join them.
It was time to call in some favours. This time, I tapped my son on the shoulder. In between his incessant tweeting he had actually found the time to establish a relationship with a lovely girl, who I’ll simply call X.
X was an attractive, bookish young lady who had seen something in my boy and, I’ll be honest, performed the impossible. She’d got him into reading books.
To see my son with a book is like going big-game hunting in East Africa and stumbling across a hippopotamus who’s making martinis with a silver shaker at sunset. And that is an exercise in only slight improbability.
So X had earned my unswerving admiration. She had expressed to me an interest in criminal cases, and in particular the monolithic Fitzgerald Inquiry, which had been the best show in Brisbane town for two years in the late eighties.
There was one minor problem. Whenever we met, she looked at me with that ever-so-slight, yet unmistakable revulsion that a young girlfriend or boyfriend registers when looking at the parents of partners, and thinking, my God, is that what I’m getting into in forty years’ time?
This is completely understandable, and I empathised with dear X. I often looked at myself in the same way.
Nevertheless, on this morning I arrived at the slightly shed-like state archives and met her for a coffee, and she slipped me copies of some vital documents concerning the life and death of the late Susan Haag. All had non-publication court orders on them, prohibiting their public perusal for between sixty-five and one hundred years.