29
Anyone who has ever visited a sprawling Queensland city knows that everyone knows everyone else. That feeling of belonging was what knitted the communities together, and so it was with the retired Police Inspector, and of course everyone knew of Owen Nash, who was a much-respected figure. Nash knew how the system worked, and now that cotton was grown in the district, there was plenty of money in circulation. The pulse of life was slow, and the monsoons threw a wet blanket over the city. His comfortable retirement was long settled, which had all been a question of doing the ground work, certainly no rushing around putting the heavies on people; that sort of thing was strictly for amateurs.
He was not the first policeman to ever have been on the take, and if over a long career he had a
