‘That’d be him.’
I’d heard all this before. I had a call coming through.
‘Call you back,’ I said.
‘Please don’t,’ he said, and hung up.
I could smell pine needles outside the cabin of the Kombi. There was a gentle whoosh of breeze through the trees. I felt like a nap.
I took the other call.
‘Fire away,’ I said into the phone, ‘but not literally.’
‘Tapas here.’
‘Ah, Mr Tapas. I hear your name and it makes me feel peckish. Why do you think that is?’
‘Congratulations,’ Tapas said. ‘You are the five millionth person to make that joke.’
I’d heard this numerical gag before.
‘Get on with it, Disco Boy.’
‘The police want to bring more serious charges against you over the Dunkle diary business.’
‘What are they proposing? Manslaughter? That Dunkle Junior read my diary and I bored him to death?’
‘They’ve got a witness.’
‘To what?’
‘Says she saw you hanging around the high-rise three weeks before the murder. Says she was in Junior’s apartment one night for dinner and Junior brought out an old photograph album and, bingo, there you were.’
Dolly Varden, the leathery stickybeak from down the hall.
‘Did you just say “bingo”? Who says “bingo” in the twenty-first century, Tapas, except people actually playing bingo?’
‘I’m telling you what I heard.’
‘You’re telling me diddly, and you’re telling me squat,’ I said. ‘Get off the line, Tapas. The line’s probably Tapas’ed.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Do you get it? The phone line. It’s probably Tapas’ed.’
‘Congratulations. You’re the six millionth person to make that joke.’
‘Anyway, all will be revealed in about ten minutes. I’m here in Brisbane to meet your special client. The one who employed you as my lawyer.’
He was silent for a moment. I could still smell his Old Spice down the line.
‘You’re mistaken,’ Tapas said quietly.
‘Afraid not, Johnny old boy. You’re behind on this one, and you’ve been lagging all the way.’
‘You’re wrong, because I just saw our special client five minutes ago. Here on the Gold Coast.’
‘You did?’
It was then I saw the car in my rear-vision mirror, creeping past the graves.
‘Gotta go,’ I said.
I stepped out of the Kombi, walked the short distance to Samuel’s broken gravestone, and waited. I scoped the surrounding laneways. The trees. The headstones that might provide me with some cover.
I had no weapon.
The car stopped behind the Kombi, and the driver waited. He kept his motor running for a full minute, then cut it.
‘If there’s any justice in this world,’ I whispered to Samuel out of the corner of my mouth, ‘you won’t let me die here. Be a good boy, Sammy.’
A tall young man stepped out of the car. He was wearing a suit and tie. He looked around, adjusted his belt, then his tie, and walked towards me.
Gravel crunched beneath his highly polished black shoes.
‘Samuel Pepys, I presume,’ I said to him.
He was clean-cut and did not seem to have the face of a murderer. Then again, killers came in all shapes and sizes these days.
‘You’ve gotta come with me,’ he said. He had a firm stare. But I had stared down the best of them. He looked strangely familiar. It was something about the eyes.
‘Have we met before?’
‘Let’s go.’
‘I don’t gotta go nowhere,’ I said. ‘Waddya want from me?’
‘Just come with me.’
‘You draw me into a murder investigation by stealing my property, get my face flattened by a garden implement, hide a phone number in a thirty-eight-year-old diary, and now you want to abduct me. Would it be rude to ask what’s going on?’
And at that precise moment I heard a short, sharp crack that my DNA told me instantly was a gunshot, and saw in the corner of my eye a bullet ricochet off Sir Samuel’s ninety-year-old marble monument. I was pretty sure it was the first time in our history that a chief justice of the High Court of Australia had been shot at.
‘Get down!’ the suited stranger said.
He didn’t need to tell me.
Together, we duck-waddled behind the shelter of plaques erected in the memory of pastoralists and public servants and little-old-lady church organists from yesteryear, as bullets whistled around us.
I heard a dull, metallic thud, and knew the Kombi had been hit. I had no idea how I was going to explain this to my long-suffering mechanic.
Then all of a sudden I was in the stranger’s sedan and we were hurtling through Toowong cemetery towards Birdwood Terrace.
‘Do you think,’ I said, breathing heavily, ‘that it might be a good time to call the police?’
‘Waddya mean,’ my driver said, feverishly checking the rear-vision mirror, the car screaming and squealing towards the city. ‘I am the police.’
~ * ~
8
As our silver sedan sped towards the city, taking a circuitous route through the back streets, I remained quiet, waiting for more shots from our cemetery attackers. But nobody seemed to have followed us. My driver and abductor stayed cool and collected.
‘Put this on,’ he said. He took a blindfold out of the centre console.
‘You always carry these around, do you?’
‘Just put it on.’
‘I’m an eyes-wide-open sort of guy.’
He quietly pulled a handgun from the pocket in the driver’s door, swivelled it and presented its solid butt.
‘And I’m a shut-your-mouth and do-what-you’re-told sort of guy.’
I put the blindfold on.
Despite my darkened world, I could tell he was turning right over the new Go Between Bridge.
‘Hope you’ve registered online for the toll,’ I said. ‘Because if you haven’t registered online ...’
An hour later, a day later — it could have been a year — I woke up on a couch in a strange hotel room with a large bump on my right temple. My driver was obviously not one for meaningless conversation. So be it. Let him get a Go Between fine. I’d warned him.
At least someone — while I’d been in oblivion — had dressed the temple wound, and applied a fresh dressing to my mashed bugle. It was refreshing to know violent people who paid care and attention to medical niceties.
My headache was terrible, but I wasn’t sure if it stemmed from the handgun butt or the fantastically bad art on the hotel room walls.
At the far end of the room I saw a tall man standing beside a sliding glass door, and beyond it the slow-moving Wheel of Brisbane on the river’s edge at South Bank. The man had his arms crossed.