As the book grew, though, it organically developed a parallel, and infinitely more dangerous, narrative. While it maintained a primitive spreadsheet on the bad crooks, it also yielded a map of the bad cops.
The men who knew of, featured in or helped to create and maintain The Good Murder Guide were, I was to learn from Junior, a very tight group of police officers. The mere existence of the ledger was either a life-insurance policy or a potential death sentence for these men. The ledger, then, gave birth to the first real embedded cabal of corrupt officers in the New South Wales force.
And the myth grew. The word amongst the criminal elite was that the guide was a secret dossier on all their activities, their monetary transactions, the assaults and murders they’d committed and got off by chance or through bribing police.
When the cops raised their protection fees, the hikes could hardly be protested. Behind everything and everyone was the guide.
Junior explained all this to me in the hotel room with a view of the Wheel of Brisbane. It was obvious, I know, but in the hours it took for Junior to lay out forty years of his brilliant detective work on the death of his father, I’d glance at that wheel and couldn’t help but think that it was, indeed, a metaphor for life, and Junior’s investigations, and the many thousands of rotations that he had patiently endured as he moved closer and closer to his father’s killer.
‘So as the years went by,’ I asked him, ‘what happened to the guide?’
‘It kept going. It has never stopped.’
‘But what happened to that original group of policemen? The first authors of the guide? How many were there? Six, seven?’
‘Five.’
‘What happened when they left the force? Or died?’
Junior paused and looked away. Did he have tears in his big round eyes?
‘Fathers have sons,’ he said quietly.
At that moment, his own son emerged from a bedroom in boxer shorts and a singlet. He wore a holster and he checked the balcony.
‘We change hotels at five this afternoon,’ he reminded his father, then went back to the bedroom.
‘Let me get this straight,’ I said, rubbing my eyes. ‘Those old coppers from the twenties kept this book going until they eventually retired, and in turn they had sons who joined the force and took over custodianship of the guide.’
‘Correct.’
‘A family affair. ‘
‘Precisely.’
‘The guide has never seen the light of day outside those families.’
‘The sons of two of those original custodians, as you put it, decided to start a new life in Queensland in the early fifties. As expected, they joined the force up here. Thus began a new facet of the guide. They started a guide, then, just for Queensland. Two sets, in Brisbane and Sydney.’
‘If I didn’t know your father, I’d say you were making this up,’ I said.
‘Another son of one of the originals, upon retirement in Sydney in the late seventies, moved up here for the weather. He left behind a boy in the Sydney force who contributed to maintaining the guide, and now has a grandson in the Queensland force. He too could be considered one of the generational co-authors.’
‘Three generations of corruption.’
‘And murder,’ said Junior.
The guide sat fat and heavy in front of me. I had noticed on the spine a large IV.
‘Volume four?’ I asked Junior.
He nodded.
‘Where are the others?’
‘No idea.’
‘Where did you get this?’
He didn’t answer.
I played at the frayed edges of the heavy cover. I hadn’t opened it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Even touching it gave me a bad feeling. The litany of instructions Obe had given me in the noodle house in Chinatown all those years ago came back to me. All the whispers I’d trained myself not to hear. The things I deliberately chose not to see. This book was a trove of everything I had avoided. I had never been party to The Good Murder Guide, and it was probably why I was still alive.
‘Is Susan Haag in one of the volumes?’
Junior nodded.
‘They killed her, back in seventy-one?’
He nodded again.
‘She was threatening to go to the press,’ said Junior. ‘By accident she’d laid eyes on the guide in one of the coppers’ flats. She was shifted up here for her own protection, so she thought. But the book, you see, had long tentacles. And suddenly she was dead of an overdose.’
‘You faked your death there, at the same address on the Gold Coast, as a message. To the whole guide fraternity.’
‘Call it a dark gesture of humour. A bloody warning. That after ninety years of fun and games, the jig was up.’
‘Only your old man would use a word like “jig”.’
‘I am my father’s son,’ he said.
It took me a long time to ask my next question. I sat back and stared at the book. I had grown uncomfortable just being in the same room with it.
‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Am I in it?’
Junior looked at me straight in the eyes and after a moment’s hesitation he nodded.
‘A recent entry?’
‘Yes,’ he said eventually.
‘Marked for death?’
Junior said nothing. He had answered the question.
‘So you brought me in,’ I said quietly, ‘to protect me.’
‘I needed to bring you in, firstly, to verify something about the day Dad died. I couldn’t risk a call or a visit. I could have undone a lifetime of work. This was the grand finale I’d played over in my mind, one way or the other, since the day we buried my father. That’s why I planted the phone number in your diary. I thought it’d be simple. You reclaim your old diary. The men investigating my murder see you as a nuisance and move you on. You’d find the phone number and we’d meet. But they were more suspicious and paranoid than I thought. It’s infinitely worse, here in Queensland, than in New South Wales. The paranoia. Clearly someone did a little reading, back in volume three of the guide that covered 1969, and they discovered who you were, and how close you were to the epicentre of my father’s murder.’
‘What did you need to verify with me?’
‘Your partner. In the downstairs bureau, with my father.’
‘Greaves.’
‘Greaves,’ Junior said. Now his eyes were the coldest and darkest I’d seen them.
Greaves. The blockheaded journeyman I sat next to in that dreary office. A barely competent detective. Drinker. Smoker. Philanderer. I couldn’t wait to see the back of him and the stink of his Craven As. Greaves. He was gone a month or so after Obe’s death. Disappeared into the great police maw. I only saw him one more time. At the farewell function for Deputy Commissioner Meekin, who I was convinced had killed Obe.