‘The great wheel,’ he said. I assumed he was talking to me as I was the only other person in the room. ‘Sixty metres high. Forty-two climate-controlled capsules. Thirteen minutes for a full rotation.’
‘Wheely?’ I said. ‘The wheel of life. The wheel thing.’ Pain always brought out the humour in me.
He was dressed in grey slacks and a perfectly ironed white short-sleeved shirt. His hair was steel-grey.
‘I needed to speak with you,’ he said.
‘And here I am. There are more civilised ways to arrange a meeting, you know. Like knocking on my front door, or picking up the phone. Fracturing my skull seems a bit, how would you say, heavy-handed.’
‘I’m sorry about that.’ He still watched the wheel with the fascination of a child.
It was then I noticed a little sprig of hair at the back of his head. That’s when he turned towards me. After more than forty years, I recognised him instantly.
‘Hubert Dunkle Junior,’ I said.
He had large eyes, and the wrinkles that splayed from their corners gave him a kindly demeanour. It could have been Obe standing before me.
‘Nice to see you again,’ he said. His arms were still crossed. He resembled a gentle English literature professor.
‘Likewise, Junior,’ I said. ‘Been a long time since we buried your daddy.’
‘Indeed.’
‘So that wasn’t your blood at that abattoir of a flat in Surfers.’
‘It had once belonged to a Bangalow pig.’
‘Tell me, Junior. Why set up a fake murder scene for yourself, steal one of my diaries, draw me in, get me roughed up, get me shot at, and abduct me after more than four decades? I’m just curious, is all.’
He walked over and sat in a chair opposite me. He rested his elbows on his knees.
‘I’m sorry about your nose,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have seen that coming. As for the blow to your temple, I’ll apologise for that too. My son can get a little overexcited.’
‘Your son?’
‘That’s right. Detective. Sydney HQ.’
‘A detective, just like his grandpa.’
‘In the blood, I suppose. So to speak.’
I was back in a hall of mirrors.
‘Junior, as we used to say in the trade, why don’t we start at the beginning?’
He smiled. And we were back at Obe’s grave together, two mourners, in the cemetery by the sea.
‘My father was a good man,’ he said quietly.
‘Yes, he was.’
‘His death was inexplicable to me. From the day I learned he had killed himself I made a vow that I would discover the truth about his death. My father would not, and did not, take his own life in a toilet cubicle in Sydney police headquarters in 1972.’
‘I could have told you that over the phone forty years ago.’
‘I began my own investigation,’ Junior went on. ‘I would be as scrupulous as my father. When I left school I decided I would join the police force as a way of working my inquiry from the inside. I would be a double agent. Pull files. Listen and observe. It was an adolescent notion. Besides, I didn’t meet their requirements.’
‘Eyesight?’
‘Eyesight. I’m worse than my father ever was. But I stayed sharp, made some contacts, went to police reunions, befriended the children of serving officers. I was, to a degree, embedded enough to pick up the scent and run with it.’
‘Why didn’t you come to me? I had theories of my own.’
‘My father trusted you,’ Junior said. ‘But that didn’t mean I had to.’
‘You’re a chip off the old man’s block.’
‘I spent years checking you out. And the others. I established the identity of every single human being who was in that building the hour before and after my father’s death. In that group was my father’s killer. I drew up a wall-sized diagram. I had every name, every credential and function of each person in the building. Then I methodically worked that group from the outside in. Checked every background. Every link to my father. I collated more than a hundred thousand pages of files. Many thousands of photographs and documents. I worked my way towards that singular cubicle in which my father had lost his life. If I eliminated everybody by the time I metaphorically got downstairs and into that washroom between a quarter to seven and seven that evening, I’d have just a couple of suspects left, and one of them would have to be the killer. You, of course, were in that select group.’
‘Because I found his body.’
‘Correct. And as it turned out, it took me until four weeks ago on the Gold Coast — four decades after I’d started — to find my father’s killer.’
‘Your son, the detective. He helped you from the inside?’
‘Just for the last few years. It’s the only reason he joined the police. And he will resign when our job is done.’
‘The single-minded Dunkles.’
‘That’s us.’
‘I always figured it was Deputy Commissioner Meekin.’
‘Sorry. You were wrong.’
‘You say your job is done?
‘Almost.’
‘Then why bring me in? Why the staged murder scene at the exact location of Susan Haag’s death? Who was trying to kill us in Toowong cemetery?’
‘I’m not sure you’re ready for what I’ve found.’
‘Junior, after all this, nothing will surprise me.’
‘My father had a great affection for you. He was grooming you as his successor. But in his fastidiousness he came across something that cost him his life. In honour of his memory, and your friendship, I couldn’t let the same thing happen to you. I brought you in to save your life.’
‘What? That was forty years ago — a generation.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. ‘There is something you don’t understand.’
‘Now is as good a time as any, Junior.’
‘I suppose it is.’
He left the room and returned with a large shopping bag. From it he retrieved a huge old ledger with a green frayed cover and marbled paper ends. He lowered it onto the coffee table in front of the couch, then quietly resumed his position in front of the sliding doors. He watched the great wheel turn and turn.
I looked at him for a long time. Then I opened the cover.
Written in archaic lettering, the floral flourishes clearly rendered with a black fountain pen, was the title.
The Good Murder Guide.
~ * ~
9
Of course I’d heard of the book — The Good Murder Guide — even when I was a fresher in the police academy. It was mythical. It was what a few wags called The Dead Scrolls. Forget the sea.
It was, as rumour had it, an old text that originated in Sydney in the twenties in the bad old days of razor gangs and street slayings, when prostitution got organised and police graft equally so. The book, as legend had it, was started by a few hard-head detectives who wanted to keep track of those early corrupt monies, and who was connected to whom, and who was protecting which lady of the night, and who had guns, who didn’t, who owed favours, who collected on bad debts. It was a fledgling blueprint of the Sydney underworld.