The gentleman inside the suit had the facial bone structure of a flyweight boxer — striking cheekbones, heavy around the eye sockets, small of ear — and the sartorial splendour of an old-fashioned dandy. Like the Dapper, too, he had a physique that juxtaposed rudely with such delicate cloth.
The goons were nowhere to be seen.
I studied him for several uncomfortable moments. It was one of my old tricks of the trade. I had patience. I was, more often than not, impervious to embarrassment. I could stare and stare with impunity. This talent had elicited many confessions in my career with 21 Division.
I barely blinked at the pretty, gift-wrapped boxer standing a foot from me in the Fairweather room.
‘Tell me one thing,’ I finally said. ‘Is it Suit Day in Brisbane? I didn’t think anyone wore them up here.’
‘What did you think we wore? Pith helmets and linen?’
‘It takes a lot of guts to wear a pith helmet, you know.’
‘Oh, I know.’
‘Good, just as long as you know.’ I smiled.
‘You’re positive there’s nothing I can help you with.’
‘A gin and tonic would be nice, actually.’
His mouth, as small and neat and lipless and clean as if it had been quickly made by the slash of a Stanley knife, did not move.
‘I am Dexter Dupont. The gallery director. And you’re looking for the tradesman’s entrance?’
‘Now, Dexter, don’t be rude. I want nothing to do with your tradesmen’s entrance. And remember, I too have a capacity for cruelty, particularly with words.’
‘Is that so?’
‘That is so.’
‘Give me an example.’
‘I would, if only you could get to Dupont. Do you get it?’
‘Congratulations. I have a small gift for you. You are the one millionth person to make that joke.’
I tucked my notes into my shirt pocket. ‘Why don’t you give me an early birthday present and get out of my personal space? I am a private citizen. A Fairweather fan, you might say. And I’d like to be left to contemplate his works, in particular his religious period, in peace. Thank you, Dexter.’
He didn’t move.
‘We have a mutual friend who is very distressed.’
‘I am a retiree soaking up some culture. I am submerged in art, Dexter. Go away.’
‘A gentleman friend of yours on the Gold Coast. You have made him most agitated. Most aggrieved.’
‘Big country town up here, isn’t it? Can’t break wind without it turning up in the newspaper. Our mutual friend should know to keep his trap shut. Loose lips and all that. Words sometimes have a way of biting their owners, turning up in court, magically transforming into evidence. Your worship.’
‘I am aware of that. It is why I was waiting for you.’
‘Popular, ain’t I?’
‘And it is why I’d like you to come up to my office.’
‘Is that so?’
‘It is.’
‘What for? You want me to explain Fairweather’s mystic symbolism to you?’
‘I need your help.’
‘With regard to?’
‘With regard to murder.’
~ * ~
7
The Peugeot started to smoke by the time I got over the bridge to Bribie Island. As I puttered above Pumicestone Passage I was half-hanging out of the driver’s side window, it was so bad in the cabin. It did not smell like French tobacco. It smelled like burning human hair and dust.
I was tired and emotional and so was the car. We repaired to a patch of shade just off the bridge. Looking out at the grey water and gun-metal clouds, I had an existential moment. What was I doing here? I asked myself. I imagine the car asked it also.
It had been a long, restless night in Brisbane. I had stayed at a cheap motel not far from the Gallery of Modern Art, near the spritely little spans of the William Jolly Bridge. In my head I went over and over my meeting with Dexter Dupont, the gallery director. I awoke at six in the morning. I had been haunted, some time in the night, by an image of the departed art appraiser James Fenton Browne lying on his back, crucifix-style, with spears of mangrove growing through his corpse. Small crabs ferried in and out of his eye sockets, and bluebottles were tangled in his hair.
I had always thought this part of the country a happy-go-lucky place. Bridges were called Jolly. There were suburbs called Sunshine. Yet the brighter the light, the darker the shadow, and I had somehow fallen into south-east Queensland’s malevolent alter ego. And this wasn’t the drug world. This was the art world, for crying out loud.
A friend of a friend at the Homicide Squad had agreed to see me at the Roma Street headquarters and share a few scant facts about Fenton Browne’s demise. He was one of those slick young coppers, highly educated, with an ironed crease down the sleeves of his shirt. I was shambolic, weary, and wearing stained leather scuffs. He gave me a cursory five minutes.
‘And your interest in this case?’ he said, leading me out, almost by the arm.
‘Curiosity,’ I said.
‘And we all know what curiosity did, don’t we?’ he said, smiling patronisingly. I had become, in his eyes, some ex-cop who could not let go of his police pedigree, and now bumbled about bothering working officers with this hobby, much as older men may take up orchid-growing or whittling. It mattered nought that I had taken down some of the most notorious men in Australian criminal history. Smelled their breaths, quite literally, in a couple of situations.
This perfumed, crew-cut desk jockey steered me through the foyer and on to the street.
‘Well,’ he said, in the sing-song voice of a kindergarten teacher. ‘Good luck with it.’
‘Up yours,’ I mumbled to myself.
The day remained gloomy and overcast, much like my internal demeanour. I struck out for Bribie Island. It was further from Brisbane than I expected. Like most men, I like a good drive. Indeed, I’d solved many problems on the highway. I find, when I’m in motion, the rushing Australian bush — its endless mundane walls of gum and wattle, its sheer excruciating drabness — is extremely conducive to concentrated thought. I imagine our early explorers experienced the same thing atop horses and camels. The bush, in its monotony, throws the consciousness back on itself. Makes an external journey an internal one. This can be illuminating, or dangerous. Ask Burke and Wills.
On my expedition to Bribie I tried to hover above the information I had, as an early mapmaker might have done. I have been fascinated by maps since I was a boy, and remain in awe of the first cartographers’ art — how they layered gossamer lines, coordinates, geology one on the other and eventually came up with a picture of the whole.
It was a practice applicable to Fairweather’s paintings. What Dexter Dupont did not know the day he conversed with me in the gallery, and then spun me a cock and bull story about the departed James Fenton Browne, was that I had seen something in Fairweather’s Epiphany, and again in his Glasshouse Mountains, that had given my slowly emerging picture of this case a defining contour.