The Toe Tag Quintet

by Matthew Condon

  From the little I had learned, it seemed too, to me now, a city of deep allegiances. And the by-product of entrenched loyalty was the grudge. I could feel the thick reeds of grudge tangling at my ankles when I was in Brisbane. People were patient here, in the sun. They knew how to bide their time.

  For time was different in the river city. Time was different things to different people up here. And when you have a malleable clock, you have protons and neutrons firing in all sorts of directions. It gave the city a slovenly, haphazard appearance. Oh, it’s the humidity. It’s the sunshine, people would tell you. But there was genuine design beneath this, the country’s most laissez-faire and ‘liveable’ city.

  It was this surface unpredictability, this carefree relaxedness, which made Brisbane impossible to read. And also very dangerous when it wanted to be. Murders there had a purpose, a point to make, and a lot of them sank a deep bore into the past.

  I pondered this at the surf club, still nursing a tender head courtesy of Igor the Russian. I couldn’t get poor James Fenton Browne out of my aforementioned wounded head. I had a feeling Dexter Dupont was trying to tell me something but couldn’t, for reasons of his own survival.

  And an old Brisbane murder had left a welt in my pale ankle. On my way back from Bribie I’d stopped in at the offices of The Courier-Mail, and there, in front of a microfiche machine in the newspaper’s small, crypt-like library, after an eternity of spooling brittle rolls of film, I had added yet another befuddling piece to the jigsaw of this case. An old newspaper story, a copy of which I held on the deck of the surf club in the face of a stiff, briny onshore breeze.

  His name was Anton Johns, 37, an art appraiser formerly of Hamilton, Brisbane. He’d had a nice house on the river, the walls groaning with the pop art of minor Warhols and his namesake, Jasper Johns. Anton entertained all types at all hours, according to neighbours. He was a ‘bohemian’, with an Errol Flynn moustache, shoulder-length hair, and a penchant for wearing a cape — garb more commonly found in Viennese opera houses in the nineteenth century.

  Mr Johns had been found dead in the Brisbane River not far from the William Jolly Bridge late one afternoon in 1971. Two fingers had been cut clean from his left hand. All this had happened just days after the prostitute Legs was found dead of a drug overdose.

  And it had happened within a few hundred metres of the hotel room of a young police officer from Sydney’s 21 Division who, as the body was hooked out of the river, was packing his overnight bag and heading for the airport and home and possibly into the arms of his future wife.

  Anton Johns, the article revealed, was known around town and in art circles as the Priest.

  How, then, could he be living in an apartment building that I could see from my caravan park a full thirty-five years later?

  ~ * ~

  11

  Up here, people wait for more than ten minutes in traffic and they call it gridlock. They can have fresh seafood, steaks as big as hubcaps and delicious produce prepared by master chefs for a pittance, and they question the size of their bills. They can park in the CBD without having to put a second mortgage on the house, can enjoy some of the great natural beaches on earth and winter lasts for half an hour. It is one of the great mysteries to me, as a freshly-minted retiree to this part of the world, why Queenslanders quite simply take for granted the riches at their disposal.

  It’s staggering to have great, primordial rainforests reachable by car in the time it used to take me to travel the nine kilometres from my house in inner Sydney to the Parramatta office of regional police headquarters. And still they grizzle.

  After I’d gone through my case notes at the Main Beach Surf Club, I took Pig Pen out on to the Broadwater. I needed to clear my head. Not far past the Spit seaway I beached on South Stradbroke and threw in a lazy line. Looking south, I could see the Gold Coast metropolis, so close you could almost touch it, yet here I was with my bare feet in the sand waiting for the scream of my Alvey.

  If I had a spare hand, I would have pinched myself.

  Later, I pulled up some shade under a casuarina and read through the information my son, Jack, had sent me on Peel Island. I am a complete computer Luddite. My generation missed computers. Our brains don’t work that way. This is a source of great disappointment to my son. When I need something, I telephone him, then he goes on to the internet, retrieves it, prints it out and posts it to me.

  He calls mine a medieval way of retrieving information. I tell him — up yours. I enlighten him that it didn’t hurt the younger generation to know how to lick a stamp. He says, Dad, they’re self-adhesive these days. I tell him not to speak to his father like that.

  What was the connection between all these deaths in the art world going back to the seventies, Ian Fairweather, Peel Island and the creeping feeling that my presence in southeast Queensland was not particularly appreciated?

  Verne, the van park manager, informed me, on the quiet, that a stranger had been seen loitering about my annexe during my sojourn in Brisbane as houseguest of Igor the Terrible. Verne winked repeatedly when he told me this, indicating that whatever I was mixed up in was not his concern, though it was best I knew of these developments. It was a knowing wink between two old guys, without the nudge.

  ‘Just giving you the heads up,’ Verne said, with his annoying click of the tongue. I had heard Jack use this catchphrase — heads up — and wondered from whom Verne might have absorbed it. It sounded very odd coming out of this leathery, canvas-hatted Queenslander.

  Two of my semi-permanent neighbours at Main Beach had also spotted the mysterious shadow-play of an intruder on the candy-striped annexe that extended off my caravan. There had been ‘a little jiggle’ at my front door. And then the stranger was gone.

  My immediate suspect was the Boltcutter, coming to finish the job he had started all those years ago in the dunes of Wanda Beach when I’d felt the cold muzzle of his gun at my left temple. My thoughts, that night amongst the seagrass, had not, curiously enough, been of my wife Peg tucked up at home. Nor did my life spool before my eyes. They were concerned with the frosty touch of the gun at my head, and my conviction that the doorway to oblivion was round, black and infinite.

  It was too hot and glary to read on Straddy. I stretched out in the lattice shade of the casuarina and fell asleep. Two and a half hours later I woke, not knowing where I was. It can be very discombobulating when the first thing you see after a deep nap is a large motorised fibreglass banana gliding past in the boat channel.

  I was as red as a rash on a baby’s backside. It hurt to move. I didn’t need to be reminded in this way that I was still a novice Queenslander.

  Back at the caravan my sunburn deepened and by late afternoon I was as hot as a sliver of radioactive waste. Verne, hearing my whimpering, poked his big, sun-spotted melon through the flap of my annexe and asked if he could help.

  ‘Yeah,’ I told him. ‘Cover me head to foot in cold T-bones. Dunk me in chilled yak’s milk. Anything.’

  I ended up being nursed that evening by Verne’s wife, Abigail, who permitted me use of their tiny bathtub, which she filled with tepid water and pungent smatterings of tea-tree oil. Whilst Verne did the van park’s rubbish run, she popped her head into the bathroom several times to check on my welfare. She was, in fact, a little too interested in my welfare. She lingered at the door and shook her head in pity. She looked like a chef waiting impatiently to remove a lobster from the pot.

  Back in the van Verne had left me several messages from my estate agent telling me he had many ‘delicious’ prospects for me to view in the morning. There was another from Peg, who said the packing up in Sydney was almost done and she’d be on the road in a couple of days. And what did I want to do with the broken karaoke machine in the garage?

  I ignored the messages, and instead rang Jack to ask him to saddle up on the internet and find me even remote references to a woman, first name ‘Rosemary’, who might have been a nurse on Peel Island in the fifties.

 
; Within the hour Verne slipped a sheaf of faxes beneath my van door. Jack had tracked down three Rosemary’s on the internet, who may or may not have been my Peel Island nurse. He had found two Brisbane area phone numbers for two of the Rosemary’s who may or may not have been stationed on Peel Island when Ian Fairweather may or may not have made his pilgrimage to Peel Island, that outpost of suffering and misery and loneliness, where poor James Fenton Browne took his last breath.

  I was hesitant to ring the numbers. I was battered and bruised. It was a hall of mirrors. Alice’s wonderland. Every known cliche for a confusing passage to hell. I’d had enough warnings to bolt the van door shut and pull the sheet over my head. Would one of these calls simply trigger another train of events? A train that could end, quite frankly, in disaster?

  The first phone number for the woman who may or may not be Rosemary, the Peel Island nurse, rang out.

  The second was answered on the fifth ring.

  ‘Is this Rosemary?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ the woman said. She sounded old but spritely.

  I explained who I was, though it may have sounded ludicrous to her. Then I asked, ‘Were you ever a nurse at the leprosarium on Peel Island in the nineteen fifties?’

  ‘Why, yes,’ she said.

  Before I’d realised it, I’d turned into the eager young constable of the sixties.

  ‘Rosemary, did you or did you not ever meet a painter by the name of Ian Fairweather on Peel Island in the nineteen fifties?’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to meet for morning tea?’ she said sweetly.

  ~ * ~

  12

  It was the novelist William Faulkner who said, ‘The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.’ And it’s a quote that tumbled into my sunburned head as I read about the notorious Peel Island before my meeting with Rosemary, who quite possibly held a secret about the painter Ian Fairweather and indeed the clues to a string of murders dating back more than thirty years.

  Life’s strange, isn’t it, when a gentle elderly lady living quietly in an old Queenslander in bayside Manly could unwittingly possess information from the past that may solve a bloody puzzle in the present.

  Dear old Rosemary Pentimento, taking her morning walk on the path above the rust-red shoreline of Moreton Bay, the rubber nib of her cane gripping the concrete pathway, the salted gusts riffling her dress, while out in the bay, ancient Peel Island sees the sunsets and dawns come and go, century after century. And a ragged, overweight old ex-cop in the middle of this mess tries to draw longitude and latitude and invisible isobars together, grasping at earth and sky, to form a picture of the past that will solve a riddle of the moment.

  Faulkner and Peel and the Boltcutter and the missing eyes of James Fenton Browne. It was all getting too much for me.

  I needed a beer. I repaired to my usual table at the surf club for the comfort of the singing poker machines, the voices of excited children drifting in and out, the mutter of gulls. I needed to be tethered to real life to face the historical horrors of Peel Island.

  You would have heard of it, Peel Island — an idyllic little 400-hectare jewel of an island in Moreton Bay that, if you study a map of it as closely as I have, resembles a strange, upside down marine creature of mythic quality or, if you want to be more pedestrian about it, a side of beef hanging off a hook in a butcher’s cold room.

  It sits off Dunwich on North Stradbroke Island, a forgotten fragment, still with the mantle of death about it, even though the leprosarium and quarantine stations have been shut down for almost half a century.

  Studying local historian Peter Ludlow’s extensive writings on the island, the whole place and its history disturbed me. If Queensland was fresh and positive and physically beautiful — which it was — here was its black spot, its own backyard heart of darkness.

  I’ll spare you the most harrowing details, though Peel Island and human suffering are indivisible. In the late eighteen hundreds it became a quarantine station when diseases like typhoid and cholera arrived by ship along with their European hosts. The infected, within sight of the Australian mainland, were lodged in draughty houses, huts and even tents. Their chest-loads of possessions were aired on the beach or on the grass in front of their rustic huts. Clothes and blankets were scoured.

  It would later become the Inebriate Asylum. A postage stamp of earth, surrounded by shark-infested waters, where alcoholics dried out. I couldn’t imagine the daily horror, the scything duties and work in the mattress factory amidst the tremors and delirium and nightmares of withdrawing from an addiction. According to Ludlow’s history, one patient wrote that Peel Island was ‘this most awful degraded Hell I can imagine darkening God’s earth’.

  (In another time, would Peg have sent me to this place? At one stage in my life, after I was transferred from 21 Division citing ‘mental exhaustion’, it may not have been out of the realms of possibility.)

  As is the way of human nature, it too became a place where those souls amongst us who did not fit in to what we like to call ‘polite society’ were dumped by their families and forgotten. A place just a quick tinny ride from Cleveland, which may as well have been the edge of the world. A place from which you didn’t return.

  Then came the lepers at the beginning of the twentieth century. Another chapter of horror.

  I began to understand what had been so attractive about Peel to Fairweather, the hermit genius. Here was a community that exactly mirrored his inner isolation and turmoil. The feelings of abandonment he’d suffered since early childhood, when he was loaned out to ageing aunts and other relatives while his parents continued their gala lives in India, before reuniting with him when he was ten. His knowledge that he did not fit into the strictures and structures of functioning society. Peel Island was his inner psyche. He was Peel Island.

  It took me a couple of days to ingest the material. Then I hauled the old Peugeot up to Manly, and took tea with Mrs Rosemary Pentimento.

  She was exactly as I imagined. A small-framed woman with a wistful little blue-grey cloud of loosely curled hair, and eyes to match. I shook her hand at the front door to her immaculately neat timber cottage and her skin felt as soft and fragile as rice paper.

  ‘It’s nice to have company,’ she said, ushering me towards a chair on her sunny front balcony. It was completely enclosed on two sides by glass louvers, and for a moment I felt I was floating underwater.

  On a small table sat a teapot and two cups and saucers, all with matching red roses embossed in the glaze, and a plate of golden-topped scones. I felt I had entered another decade.

  She sat in the chair opposite me and folded her hands.

  ‘Thank you for seeing me.’

  ‘Oh, it’s nice to see a face other than my doctor’s,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘I may be wasting your time, Mrs Pentimento. I am acting only on hunches.’

  ‘You wanted to know about Fairweather?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I am amazed at the sudden interest in him.’

  ‘Sudden?’

  ‘In the past few months you are the fourth person who has sat in that chair wanting to know about Fairweather.’

  ‘I am?’

  ‘One was someone who, once upon a time, we might have referred to as a “spiv”. Are you familiar with the term?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘An objectionable man, he was. I have for many years been involved with the local school of arts, and he was — how may I put it? Not the sort of gentleman I would have expected to be interested in the finer arts.’

  She seemed to blush at this.

  ‘And the other person?’

  ‘A young man. Agitated, as the young tend to be these days. But most knowledgeable not so much about Fair-weather but about Peel Island and its inmates over the years.’

  ‘And the third?’

  ‘You may have seen him in the paper. The director of the gallery.’

  ‘Dexter Dupont.�
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  ‘Yes. Mr Dupont. He was most surprised at my knowledge of French. Not what he expected from a little old biddy by the bay.’

  I couldn’t help thinking there was a song in that — ‘The Little Old Biddy by the Bay’.

  She told me of her extraordinary life, writing for many years for local newspapers under a male pseudonym; drawing the inmates at the hospital on Peel Island where she worked as a nurse; travels throughout Europe and the United States.

  But I needed to know about Fairweather.

  ‘I met him, yes,’ she said, smiling and looking down at her hands. ‘There was talk for years that we had become ... Well, romantically attached. But we all know Mr Fairweather was not inclined towards the fairer sex. Nor the other, in fact. It is my belief he was the only completely sexless man I have ever met. Excuse my language.’