I couldn’t wait that long to get to the bottom of my suspicions about Senior and Junior.
I had about five hours before my appointment at Samuel Griffiths’ grave, so I immediately drove to New Farm Park with my cache from X, parked, picked up a takeaway coffee from the snack wagon near the kids’ swings, returned to the van, pulled back the Kombi’s sliding door and in a cool breeze off the river settled into some serious reading.
‘Talk to me, Susan,’ I said, opening the X files, blowing the steam off my latte.
I immediately wondered if X, possible future daughter-in-law, had browsed any of the material. She probably had, little bookish minx. And she was probably surprised at what she read.
Susan Haag packed a lot into her twenty-one years. She’d had an unfortunate start to life. A bum of a father who’d scratched a living as a barman, trinket dealer and tannery workhorse before he discovered that getting his wife on the game and existing off the proceeds of her late-night work suited him to a tee. Susan’s mother had in fact become very successful at a very old profession and by 1967, when she’d died of a drug overdose, had shown her teenage daughter an irresistible, perhaps unavoidable, career. She had also passed on to her daughter something invaluable — account books that noted every cent of protection money she had paid to police both in New South Wales and Queensland, where her empire flourished.
Susan took over her mother’s business. She secreted the damning account books. But she kept on with her mother’s profitable system of kickbacks to cops. Just as before with her mother, nobody bothered Ms Haag. The cash fell into the right hands. The money flowed, unimpeded.
Then a new licensing branch officer, desperate for promotion, decided to charge Ms Haag with various offences. He could not be swayed. He was threatened, intimidated, shot at, and still he waved the flag for proper policing.
The charges, subsequently, quietly slipped into and through the justice system, irrespective of the mayhem they caused outside on the streets.
And that’s when Ms Haag made her fatal error. She would, in the name of her mother, spite the many dozens of officers, senior and junior, who had enjoyed the family’s largesse over many years. She would speak to the newspapers and allude to the account books.
Sometimes events gather a life of their own, and this is precisely what happened to Ms Haag and her public allegations. She had lit a fuse in New South Wales. Cops were diving left, right and centre. It went all the way to the top, to the commissioner’s desk, then jumped species and grew more heads in state parliament. A fuse was also lit in Queensland, a thousand kilometres north, but Ms Haag, in her youth, ignored the volatility of the northerners. They were laid-back cow cockies. They were small fry.
Which is why she accepted their invitation to fly north and disappear into the arms of their protection. They would look after her. Her mother was a Queenslander by birth, and they had an obligation to protect their own.
She went north, all right. They put her in a safe house. And six days later she was dead. Pills and booze. No suicide note.
And X, bless her cotton socks, had done my work for me.
Inside the file were papers relating to a string of other prostitute suicides dating back to 1955. All had died from pills and booze in south-east Queensland. All, presumably, had been paying off cops for protection; some in New South Wales as well.
In all the investigations, according to the police reports that X had dug up for me, two names kept appearing. One from Queensland. One from New South Wales. Throughout the dossier X had helpfully highlighted both names with a bright yellow marker.
Was I surprised to find that the New South Wales gentleman who had looked into the deaths of several of these women, including Ms Haag and her mother, over a period of more than twenty years, was none other than the officer I knew, in my gut, had killed my dear old friend Hubert Dunkle Senior on that grey day in the washroom of police headquarters? Was I shocked to discover, via these old documents, that a sinister thread which stretched across at least two generations of cops and crims had found its way to me here in the cabin of my Kombi nearly forty years later? And that it had drawn to the surface of my memory a myth I had first heard as a young detective — a myth of a book, a handwritten book on how to commit the perfect murder, that was so preposterous and so well known in the ranks that it may well have been true?
Well, yes. Enough for me to have left my coffee to go cold.
But I had a meeting to attend. At a gravestone.
~ * ~
7
So while we’re being honest with each other, I’ll come clean about something. I’m a taphophiliac.
A wha, I hear you say? I’m not a strict, letter-of-the-law taphophiliac. But there is a hint of taphophiliasm about me.
As the Greeks once said, tapho is grave, and phileo is to love. There. Now you know. I love cemeteries.
Pray, judge not. This, as far as I can tell, is not a morbid thing within me. I just like them. Full stop. They’re ordered. Often well organised. Quiet. Peaceful. They have trees and wildlife and occasionally fresh flowers. And they make great reading. All those words, chiselled in stone. The endless yarns. The cryptic messages. The joy. The tragedy. Cemeteries are the great books of human existence.
While you as a kid were thumbing through National Geographies, and mounting your stamps and playing with your new Mister Potato Head toy, I was skipping across the gravestones at the Rookwood Cemetery and Necropolis. Oh, a day at Rookwood for me was up there with the Easter Show.
So it was that I found Toowong a big thrill that afternoon. It was close to the city. Had good geography — hills and valleys. It was chock-a-block with history. And it had excellent mobile-phone coverage.
As I waited in the van on a dirt road not far from Samuel Griffith’s last resting place, I got a call from my detective mate down on the Gold Coast.
‘Firstly,’ he said, ‘if you could stay away from me for about the next fifty years I’d be really grateful.’
‘You’re not the first person to say that,’ I told him.
‘Secondly, there’s all sorts ot stuff going down here that I’m not sure I understand.’
‘Such as?’
‘I overheard a couple of hard heads in here saying you were a nuisance.’
‘That so?’
‘A big nuisance.’
‘Did they actually use the word “nuisance”?’
‘Not quite.’
‘I didn’t think so.’
‘Anyway, they’ve thrown a wall around the Dunkle case. Closed shop. All superfluous bodies have been told to go away. ‘
‘That’d be us.’
‘That’d be me. And word has it the Dunkle matter has gone to the big boss in Brisbane.’
‘That’d be the commissioner.’