The Toe Tag Quintet

by Matthew Condon

  I pocketed the photographs, washed up my tea cup and put it on the sink rack. As I wiped my hands with a tea towel I stood in front of the fridge and perused the white door, covered in family photos, and little pictures of bonsai trees torn out of gardening magazines, and telephone and power bills fastened with magnets advertising farm machinery and advice on how to spot a terrorist. It was rudimentary stuff, the sort of fridge detritus to be found in kitchens across Australia.

  But there was one thing out of place: a white, laminated business card held firmly to the fridge with a John Deere magnet.

  In raised black letters it read — Historica. On the flipside were a phone number and a post office box address in Noosa, Sunshine Coast, Queensland.

  I wiped my prints off everything I’d touched. If I’d wanted to be fastidious, I could have returned to the corpse on the shores of Wivenhoe and swept out any footprints there too. But in a drought, footprints rarely hold. A single hot breath of wind can send them into eternity. All the way to the Milky Way.

  It was midday and hot when I left the property. Time for a dip. Time to savour the sensory delights of Noosa.

  I patted the white business card in my pocket, and headed out of the valley.

  ~ * ~

  7

  Answer me this. In what sort of job could you be standing over the flyblown corpse of a dead Esk farmer one moment, and a few hours later be taking a mint julep on the deck of a mansion overlooking Noosa with a toupee-wearing multimillionaire?

  You see what happens when you begin mucking about inside the dark, secret chambers of the human heart? You don’t know where you might end up. As for the complications of the soul, well, don’t even start me on that — we could be here for months, years.

  But back to the mint julep.

  I had left the farmer by the Wivenhoe — he wasn’t going anywhere and besides, the police were presumably on their way after my little tip to Crimestoppers — and taken a leisurely drive to Noosa. All my life I had heard of this fabled place. A paradise, they say. The Riviera of Queensland. In my mind it was a fairytale land surrounded by tall walls and moats, and to enter you either had to be extremely wealthy or decked out in white linen from shoe to hat, or preferably both.

  So as the Peugeot rolled down from Noosaville to Hastings Street I felt I was entering unfamiliar territory.

  At Aroma’s café, as children ran amok in the little adjoining square and splashed each other with fountain water, I rang the Historica number on the white business card.

  ‘Yes?’ said a voice.

  ‘Historica?’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘This is a representative of the Esk Bonsai Corporation.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘In light of my employer’s sudden death, I was wondering if you’re still interested in that pallet of Hokidachi or broom-style elms you ordered. ‘

  ‘Who the hell is this?’

  ‘I could ask the same thing. In fact, I will ask the same thing. Who the hell are you? And what was your lustrous business card doing on a refrigerator door belonging to a fresh corpse?’

  Funny, the power of persuasion. Within thirty minutes I had an ice cold mint julep in hand and was sitting opposite a very tall, thin man dressed all in white, from his Italian leather loafers and ankle-tight socks to his eyebrows. On his head was a pitch-black wig. He looked like a burned match.

  I sipped the horrid drink — mint, sugar, ice and bourbon whiskey. I was a VB man myself He hadn’t touched his.

  ‘Historica. What is that?’ I asked him. ‘The name of some fancy new Lexus or Maybach?’

  He snorted softly. ‘A Maybach is a Maybach. Differentiated by numbers only, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You learn something every day.’

  ‘Historica,’ he said, ‘is a little group of men and women interested in history. And its proper keeping.’

  ‘So you’re all ex-public-school librarians. Am I getting warm?’

  ‘It’s a hobby, that’s all. For lovers of accurate history.’

  We were not alone. He had a substantial phalanx of bodyguards sprinkled throughout the property, and two in the lounge room not far from the deck where we chatted. The bodyguards, like all caricatures, wore black suits. The two in the lounge had blond hair. Of course they did. The Die Hard films had a lot to answer for in the world of bodyguards. They were the exact opposite to my rich history nut of a new friend.

  ‘Accuracy. Proper keeping. These words and phrases puzzle me,’ I said, hiding my disgust at the julep. Mint was for children or people with bad breath.

  ‘We at Historica believe in accountability and correct, documented sources. It’s that simple.’

  ‘Like, did Captain Cook’s Endeavour have four masts or five? That sort of thing.’

  ‘It had three — foremast, mainmast and mizzenmast. Yes, that sort of thing.’

  ‘So you could tell me,’ I said, pulling a crumpled photograph of the ancient Wivenhoe corpse — not the poor toothless farmer — from my back pocket, ‘whether this chap here was some sort of important person from the early days of Brisbane settlement or just a peculiar, history-obsessed git who liked dressing up in old soldier’s jackets and ran head-first, literally, into an errant musketball during a mock skirmish with his mates?’

  I flicked the picture towards him and it came to rest near his untouched julep. He removed a pair of spectacles from his top pocket and looked down at the picture.

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’

  I could see, in the distance, a fantastic storm building on the horizon. A great bank of black cloud had eclipsed the afternoon sun and birds were wheeling crazily above the white sandy spine of Noosa’s beach. Sunbathers continued to lie on their towels, oblivious to the impending apocalypse.

  ‘I could only hazard a guess, but it certainly resembles a colonial military uniform,’ he went on.

  ‘You can’t be any more accurate than that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve never seen this gentleman before?’

  ‘Under what possible circumstances would I have seen this man before?’

  ‘Didn’t your mummy ever tell you never to answer a question with a question?’

  I could see his goons become agitated in the lounge room.

  He smiled. Not a normal smile. A rich person’s smile. No. Let me be more precise. It was the smile of the very, very rich, who know that nothing in the mere mortal way of things can touch them. It was a smile both condescending and infantile. The condescension, often, is in their genes. And the childishness stems from never having had to worry about the raft of normal things grown adults have to worry about. Simple things, such as how to exist day to day.

  My new white-linen friend also had a coldness, as essential to his make-up as breathing in and out, which probably had its source in the crib in which his mummy had left him, in the care of his nannies and butlers and footmen.

  Still, I wasn’t here to sympathise with some spoiled adult-infant.

  ‘Listen to me very carefully,’ I said to him. ‘Tell me why your business card was found on a dead farmer’s fridge in the middle of nowhere.’

  He paused and glanced up at the coming storm. You could smell the distant rain hitting the hot earth. I knew what he was thinking. He’d have to get inside soon. The winds would come up. And for a man with a very bad toupee, a sudden wind, any wind, was a natural enemy.

  ‘Now you listen to me very carefully,’ he said, pointing at me with a long forefinger. He showed his teeth for the first time. They were very small and snaggly, like a child’s milk teeth. But they were yellow against his obscene whiteness. ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, you know. Except in the minds of those who do not know history.’

  ‘Confucius?’

  ‘Kahlil Gibran, actually.’

  ‘Let me give you one.’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  ‘Rich plonkers with bad hair and poor dress sense do not tell me what to do.’r />
  I turned away from him to watch the storm. It was going to be a hell of a drive back to the Gold Coast in the leaky Peugeot. And that’s what I was thinking about when a suited arm closed like a vice around my neck.

  I assume I passed out. For three hours had gone by before I woke to find myself lying on the floor of a dark, industrial-sized freezer with the icy corpse of a nineteenth-century military officer keeping me company.

  ~ * ~

  8

  Freezing to death is a fascinating process. Hypothermia affects different people in different ways. Men are more prone to death by freezing than women. People have had their limbs turned into popsicles and survived, while others have perished after sustained exposure to winds that have not even reached freezing temperatures.

  The metabolism slows. The muscles contract to try to generate heat. In many cases, freezing victims have been known to rip off all their clothes prior to falling into unconsciousness and, ultimately, death, such is the sensation of extreme heat they feel on their skin.

  I thought of all these things as I lay next to my dead colonial officer in a giant freezer somewhere, I presumed, in the vicinity of Noosa. As I woke back into the world, the antique corpse wrapped in clear plastic and leaning on my shoulder, I remembered the sickly sweetness of the mint julep, and yellow jagged teeth, and Peg’s mobile phone sitting in the glove compartment of the Peugeot when it should have been in my pocket.

  It was cold all right, but I wasn’t going to panic. Not just yet. I could hear a tremendous booming outside the freezer, which I shared with shelf after shelf of beautiful frozen red emperor and snapper, barramundi and sea perch. I could have been trapped in the belly of a whale.

  At least someone had left a small security light on. Where was I? At a fish market? At the back of a restaurant? The rhythmic thundering continued, getting louder and louder. I checked out the freezer. No exits. No interior emergency handles or hatches.

  One other thing about freezing to death. If you’re carrying a bit of lard, you take longer to die.

  Thus I sat on a few boxes of frozen scallops, rubbed my arms and considered my predicament. Grace under pressure, I told myself. Don’t panic. Conserve energy.

  That’s when I grabbed the tail of a nice long flathead and banged it crazily against the freezer wall, shouting my head off for help.

  Just a few moments later there was a boom loud enough to shake the entire freezer itself, and the single light, weak and dull as a firefly, went out. Great. Now I was going to freeze to death in the dark. I scrambled back to the scallops on my hands and knees and ended up wrestling with the mud-caked, cling-wrapped corpse. It wasn’t one of my finer moments.

  Then, blow me down, if it didn’t start to feel warmer in that tomb of mine. I thought — here it is, the fire on the skin prior to death. They would find me naked and twisted in agony in a mess of seafood. It would, so it seemed, be an undignified death for me.

  But it actually did get warmer, and as time marched on I could hear the fish creak and crack with the thaw and then, suddenly, scaring the living daylights out of both of us, a small goateed man in jeans and a checked shirt opened the door to the freezer and shone a torch straight into my face. I instinctively raised the flathead. Beware the man in fear for his life and armed with a frozen fish.

  After our mutual screams had stopped echoing, I said, ‘Broken? The freezer?’

  And he said, ‘Big storm. Lightning. Direct hit on the generator. ‘

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘big fish sale now.’

  ‘You bet,’ he said.

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘Seafood storage facility for “Noosa Fresh and Fishy.’”

  “‘Fresh and Fishy?”‘

  ‘We distribute seafood to restaurants in Noosa and on the Sunshine Coast. You?’

  ‘Retired detective.’

  ‘On a case?’

  ‘Sort of. Had a drink with your boss. Wears white? A roadkill toupe?’

  ‘Heard of him. Never met him. Only started work for this mob a week ago. Today’s me day off, but I came in to check on the generators when the storm hit.’

  ‘You might need a new one.’

  ‘Looks like it,’ he said.

  ‘Your boss make it a habit of storing old corpses in here with the fresh seafood?’

  ‘Dunno. I just been told to keep an eye on the fish. Nothin’ else. No matter what turns up here.’

  ‘If you no looky, you keep worky.’

  ‘Exactly. ‘

  ‘At “Noosa Fresh and Fishy.’”

  ‘That’s it. Hey, you need a jumper or something?’

  I could have hugged him.

  I also needed to regroup. My mint julep friend could wait. I had a long memory.

  ~ * ~

  Back on the Gold Coast, I studied the facts I had at hand. I had two bodies, one from another century, the other from a farm in Esk. The local papers were reporting the latter as another ‘rural suicide’. I found this curious. My toothless friend had suffered the ‘long-term impact of the drought’, some senior sergeant was quoted as saying. His family farm had become untenable. They had reduced him to just another statistic. Full stop. Yeah, right. Like the giant full stop in the middle of his sorry forehead.

  I had a library patron who had warned me off some innocuous snippet of Brisbane history that was evolving into something not so innocuous after all. I believed, too, that I had accidentally intercepted a bonsai tree and some vital information while sitting innocently in the State Library’s meditation room innocently seeking information about my innocent family tree.

  Then there was Captain Logan. Dear Patrick. I had never heard of him and all of a sudden he was trying to get me killed. Was the corpse in the freezer that of Logan himself, the Tyrant of Brisbane Town? The very same in the crinkled photograph I had taken from the gold envelope? If so, what of the official reports of his murder by Aboriginal tribes near the site of the ever-dwindling Wivenhoe Dam in 1830? Who was trying to alter history here, and why?

  As far as I could ascertain, the Scottish-born Logan, the Moreton Bay penal settlement’s third commandant, was notorious for his cruelty in a country that, in its early days of colonisation, had its fair share of British-born tyrants and sadists. He was not averse to ordering 150 lashes for individual convicts. He built cells specifically for solitary confinement, then a flour mill for further mental and physical torture. He also fancied himself as something of an explorer. He was obsessed with rivers. He charted the Logan River, named after him.

  Then, in October of 1830, with his commission in Brisbane almost at an end, he made one last journey to the Brisbane Valley. He was accompanied by his servant, Private Collison, and five convicts. Near Pine Mountain they were threatened by Aboriginals, who only let them pass after Collison discharged his firearm. Heading back to the settlement a week later on 17 October, Logan noticed some horse tracks. He had lost a horse in the area on a previous expedition so he decided to follow them, hoping to retrieve the animal. He told his party he would meet them later that day.

  When Logan didn’t show, his men, unable to locate him, walked on to Ipswich, where they thought Logan might be. Further search parties were sent out. According to a published account, Logan’s bloodied waistcoat was discovered, ‘as well as some leaves of his notebook’. A day later, they came upon Logan’s horse, ‘dead in the bottom of a shallow creek, covered with boughs’. Then, a few metres from the horse, ‘Logan’s body was found ... the back of the head much beaten with waddies ... in a grave about two feet deep where the blacks had buried him with his face downwards. The body was then take[n] up, and put in blankets and by stages brought to the Limestone Station and afterwards by water to the settlement.’

  His death was not exactly mourned in Brisbane. They had a song about him, celebrating the ‘mortal stroke’ handed out by the local Aboriginals. ‘My fellow prisoners, be exhilarated / that all such monsters such a death may find.’ Hardly a fond remembrance.

  Logan’s
body was then transported to Sydney on a government schooner.

  Or was it? Who on earth had anything to gain from falsifying the details of Logan’s death, almost two centuries later? And why, if this indeed was a case of tampered history, had the ruse been perpetrated for so long? It obviously meant a great deal to somebody. Already, an innocent man had been killed, and I had had my own life threatened. For what?

  Also, if the corpse that had kept me company in the freezer was actually the legendary Logan himself, he had not been bludgeoned to death with a waddy, that’s for sure. He’d been cleanly and efficiently murdered.