The Crime of Huey Dunstan

by James Mcneish

  “You said it was a punishment.”

  “I mean it’s OK to farm a kid out to the extended family, it’s the Maori way. But this character Glen was not family.”

  “You mean the boy is Maori? You didn’t tell me he was Maori.”

  “Oh well. He is and he isn’t.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well, he looks Maori, I’m told. But he stands apart somehow, or the family does. Can’t put my finger on it.”

  “What do you mean by brought up properly?”

  “Politely.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Well, he cracked a joke when we were down in the cell, about my being blind. Quite smart, I thought. But then he was embarrassed, and apologised. He didn’t need to apologise. Little things like that. He’s somehow unformed. I think I mean undeveloped. He’s interesting.”

  “Why?”

  “The killing. It’s interesting. He’d never so much as hit anyone before.”

  “Did he say that or Lawrence?”

  “He did.”

  “Well he would, wouldn’t he?”

  “I mean there are episodes when he was at primary school when he seems to have gone berserk, throwing desks about the classroom. But this came after he was sent away to this Glen chap.”

  “You mean—?”

  “I told you. The parents still don’t know. He’s never told them why he killed the man. He was baited and teased at school, because of the burns. Terrible scar-marks. One of the teachers saw him thrown down by a group of boys and kicked, everyone kicked him. Huey got up and just walked away.

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s in the transcripts. Whatever happened to him, he found a way of hiding it. He seems to have mistrusted everyone, to have made a creed of mistrust. He couldn’t afford not to be liked so he went on taking it. Take whatever’s dished out, smile at everyone, trust no one. Somehow he coped. The human brain has a capacity to develop defence mechanisms. It never ceases to amaze me.”

  “I hope you’re not getting caught up in this case, Charlie.”

  “Eh. Why should I? It will be over in a couple of days.”

  Lisbeth said nothing for a moment. She has a way of responding, after assuming an air of concentrated immobility, brushing her hair back with one hand and staring into space, that I can see with blindsight. It’s quite debilitating.

  She said, “I don’t understand why you let a case like this get to you.”

  It became clear to me then, as it had not been before, that the gap between listening and hearing, comprehension and understanding, was even to an intelligent creature like Lisbeth very wide indeed. Lisbeth, I should explain, was born in Hungary. One has to make allowances for foreigners. Still, I wonder sometimes if she has heard a word I have said.

  “Anyway, Charlie. As you say, it will all be over next week.”

  The next few days were full of the usual excitements familiar to all decaying mammals who stray into God’s waiting room. Medical and dental appointments (mine) and volunteer work (hers). Lisbeth is rostered on to drive people who are needy to the Marsden Home on Mondays. Twice a week she goes to the Hospice. That week I had to give a paper at a two-day conference dealing with suicide prevention. During question time an old colleague from out of town stood up and asked a question which I answered by referring to Huey’s situation, without of course identifying the case. Afterwards over a cup of tea we compared notes and she chatted about her own field of interest, “country values”. She mentioned a family she knew, decent folk, farming, hard-working, dependable, but with a history of trauma. The eleven-year-old son had hanged himself in a wardrobe.

  “Nobody could understand it,” she said, “until the father, realising he’d contributed to the tragedy, confessed that he had beaten the boy badly when he was young.” I listened, bemused. I wasn’t sure where she was heading, until she said: “What he said was, the father—he said to me, ‘I thought that’s what everyone did. If they played up, you hit them.’”

  I doubt if her story coloured my thinking about Huey at the time, though it may have influenced Lawrence’s thinking when I mentioned it to him later. The conference began on Wednesday, the day before we got the verdict. It was as I had feared. Lawrence rang me from the courtroom on Thursday afternoon. The jury had rejected the defence of flashback and Lawrence’s plea for a verdict of manslaughter. It found Huey guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

  “How long were they out?” I said.

  “Nearly five hours.” The jury had retired shortly after 11 a.m. It was then 4.30 in the afternoon. Lawrence said that one of the women, the young juror in the front row, had wept when the judge pronounced sentence. Before he rang off, I asked Lawrence to send me the local newspaper report and the judge’s summing up.

  “I’m glad,” Lisbeth said, when I gave her the news. “I’m sorry you’ve lost but I’m glad it’s over.”

  “I think it’s bloody awful,” I said.

  A moment later she said, “Is Lawrence going to appeal?”

  “Don’t know, darling,” I said, and went into the kitchen. I didn’t feel like talking just then. Nor did I feel like cooking the celebratory meal I’d been planning—artichoke hearts with broad beans and an egg-lemon sauce—just in case we won. I wasn’t surprised at the verdict but I was depressed, and that surprised me even though old Andrew had predicted it.

  “I can just see it,” I muttered out loud. I had remembered his prediction: “AXE MURDERER”. Now they would demonise him. (Andrew was right. Axe Murderer Gets Life would span the front page of the local paper the next day.)

  “What’s that?” Lisbeth had followed me into the kitchen.

  “Nothing. Just something Andrew Gort said to me about the axe he used. I told you I had dinner with Andrew in Cornford. What’s the matter?”

  “You didn’t tell me he used an axe.”

  “Kindling axe. It was lying there in front of the fire. He picked up the kindling axe.”

  “My God. How can you justify appealing on behalf of a monster like that!” She went out and came in again. “Of course he’ll appeal. That’s what Lawrence is good at, getting people off. You always say that.”

  “You mean Miriam’s husband says that.” Miriam was Lisbeth’s Jewish friend. Her husband was a National MP.

  Lawrence was known as “the red-headed lawyer” or “the red-headed folklorist” for his ability to sway juries. In Cornford that was a compliment.

  I had without thinking taken the artichoke hearts out of the fridge. I put them back again.

  “You’d better do the brussel sprouts. They need eating,” she said.

  “I hate brussel sprouts.”

  I considered making pasta with a mushroom and ricotta sauce, but the ricotta smelled sour. I thought of heating a curry but was so fed up I did sausages and mash. I took out a couple of bottles of wine, threw some vegies in the whizzer with pieces of leftover sausage and fried it up with lashings of soy sauce. Lisbeth hates soy sauce. I cut some slices of dark bread and that was our meal. It was a dreadful evening. We both drank too much. Lisbeth began in the kitchen while I was still cooking. She berated Lawrence while I tried to put away angry thoughts and said nothing.

  “I wish you’d say something,” she said. “When you do that to your mouth, you look like a prune. Of course Lawrence invents stories to get his clients off! The fact that you won’t say anything is an admission in itself. Or do you know something I don’t? What do you want soy sauce for? I know you don’t like to talk when you’re cooking.”

  “Neither do you.”

  “That makes two of us. Of course he’s going to appeal. All right, good luck to him. But Lawrence is not to involve you again. Just because we’re retired, people think we’ve nothing to do. I mean it. Last time you were on a case that went to appeal you ended up in bed, you looked like a ghost. And you lost. Charlie, we’re not getting any younger.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ll be se
venty soon. Sixty-eight next month.”

  “No. Sixty-seven.”

  “You’ve been invited to Florence next year. I’ve been looking forward to that. You said wives were welcome. What I want to say is this. I can tell what you’re thinking from here. It’s pathetic. It will be months out of your life, months, if it’s a day.”

  “But Lawrence hasn’t said a word about appealing!”

  “He will. Trust me. If he does, and you get involved, that’s it as far as I’m concerned. I’m leaving.”

  It would have been fatal to put up my hand and attempt a defence. Marriages far more benign than ours have foundered on less. So I opened another bottle while Lisbeth cleared away, and went to bed in a pickle.

  FIVE

  I MUST HAVE dreamed. I got up about midnight and went to the loo and came back to bed without disturbing Lisbeth, and slept again. I awoke about four and lay there next to her feeling uneasy, not knowing if I had been dreaming, but knowing that if I lay still and didn’t turn over or switch on the lamp the dream might return to me; and it did. A stranger with a strong smell of humankind came up to me in a crowd and took my hand. But immediately this was superseded by a scene in which my mother appeared looking at me with a pleading expression in her eyes, and which I put away by turning on to my right side and switching my reading light on. The dream of my mother is a recurring one. It is accompanied by the odours of the small soot-blackened kitchen in the house where I grew up, smells of cooking and smells of damp and laundry soap from a bucket in the scullery where my father used to wash his socks, and medicinal odours from the bedroom where my mother died, tinctures of lavender and smelling salts mingled with the sharp pungency of ammonia. I don’t like any of this, so I put the dream away.

  The man who offered me his hand was tiny, a little leaf-hopper man but strong and wiry. He wore a hat shaped like an abandoned rissole. It smelled dreadful. He had pale flickering eyes, full of interest, and he put his palm into mine in a tentative way like a paw, rubbing with his fingers and exploring the skin, chafing and pawing it the way monkeys do, before taking a sudden grip and holding my wrist hard as if willing me to trust him.

  It wasn’t Huey, I’m certain of that.

  The same dream came again the next night, and the night after that, but always the scene with my mother intervened. The two fused. When I woke up the man was gone. What remained like a dull headache or a pebble in the shoe that won’t go away was the fleeting medicinal odour from my mother’s bedroom.

  I don’t know what other blind people see when they dream. It is one of the questions that people ask me, people who are genuinely interested or know me well enough not to mind if I change the subject. “Do you dream in colour?” they say. Or, “When you dream, what do you see?” Or they might say, “When you eat, how do you know what’s on your plate?” (That’s easy. “How do I know what’s on my plate?” I say to them. “I can smell it.” But sometimes if I’m feeling mean I will say, “I don’t know what’s on my plate until I see it.” They don’t know what to make of that.) I don’t think my dreams are any different from anyone else’s, except the one about my mother which by an odd coincidence has to do with buried memory or, rather (I hate this) with repressed memory.

  Childhood is less clear to me than to many people. My childhood ended at thirteen when I joined the Scouts. This was during the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 when I was evacuated to the country. I can’t remember if my mother was ill then or not. My father was in the Home Guard. When the bombs began falling on London my brother Tom, who was five years older than me, joined the Air Force and was sent to Canada for training and I was evacuated to Devon. Everything seemed to happen at once, I was thirteen and still in short pants, and after that I turned my face away from home.

  In Devon I was billetted with two other London boys, young tearaways like myself. We lived with an elderly widow who ran a boarding house in Torquay—lovely little lady but a strict and particular Baptist. She was highly evangelical, she knew the Devil in all his works, and that meant us. We ran wild on the clifftops over the Defence installations and refused to eat her suet pudding. But she was fully understanding of us, you might say, because that was the Devil at work. She had a young niece called Deirdre whom I later smuggled into my digs at Plymouth when I was in the Navy.

  I remember going to a Scout camp near Torquay and being put in charge of a borstal boy named Wanstead. He had pinched something. “Chesney, you’re in charge of Wanstead. He’s on probation,” the Scoutmaster said to me. I said to the Scoutmaster, “What’s probation?” Wanstead was younger than me but quick as temptation. He showed me how to eat snails. We cooked them in a billy. He taught me to play dice and two-up. He knew about the sex factor and told me how to negotiate a girl’s skirts without getting her in the family way. One night we crept into a defence camp—an engineers’ section was bivouacked nearby—and stole a bicycle and a gas mask. (We returned them the next night without being caught.) Wanstead had bottle. Wanstead was exciting. I suppose my interest in probation work and the psycho-pathology of candidates for disaster began then.

  Apart from the hours I spent mucking about the docks after school and pinching rides on the barges—I can still smell the tar coming off the Thames and the aromatic tannins and flakes of resin crumbling from the planking on Blackwall Pier where the barges tied up—it wasn’t a particularly happy childhood. There was a lot of drudgery. There were no family holidays. My mother left school at ten, my father at eleven, my grandfather would sign his cross because as I say he couldn’t read or write. But that was good because I grew up talking and listening, and I kept my eyes open. I was told that at one time there were eleven of us living in the house, my parents, my brother Tom and me, my mother’s parents and an uncle and aunt and three of their children because they were out of work. If anyone lost anything, a piece of string, a tobacco tin, a scullery knife, I was always the one who found it. My nose may have come into the world a bit bent (people think it’s broken but it isn’t), but I was always a good looker.

  One of my sharpest memories is of my grandfather’s pocket watch which he brought home from the pawnshop every Friday. It had a silver case with a spring escapement and a second hand, and a lever under the edge of the dial at the one o’clock position. I was allowed to set it and wind it before it went back into pawn on Monday morning.

  The other memory is of my brother Tom shouting at me one night when the sirens sounded and I refused to go down to the air-raid shelter, “What’s ’t matter? Are yer deaf?” “Not ’arf as deaf as you. Na listen,” I said, “what’s worse. Not hearin’? Or not seein’?” Tom said, “I’d rather go blind than deaf.” “I wouldn’t,” I said. “If you can’t see, you might as well be dead.”

  Looking back now, I can see myself coming home on winter afternoons, running from street lamp to street lamp with a book in my hands, straining to read the print on the page; I can see myself coming indoors from the street and screwing up my hands to make tunnels against the light and making fists of my hands and rubbing the eyelids up and down and from side to side, wondering what was obscuring my vision, and trying to get the kitchen table and chairs into focus, and standing there listening to my heart beating until the outlines of the table and chairs and the scullery door became solid and clear once more. Yet try as I might, I cannot identify a single moment or incident that prompted me to think anything was wrong. Coming indoors out of the sun and struggling to adjust my eyes to the changing light, I thought this was what everyone did. I thought it was normal, just part of growing up.

  One day I came home from school and found my mother standing in the kitchen with a bemused expression on her face. “Look what’s come,” she said. On the table was a small parcel. It had brown wrapping paper and was stamped “HM Royal Mail”.

  “It’s come, son,” she said. “The postman brought it.”

  My mother gave a little skip and one shoe fell off, showing her ankle. “Open it,” she beamed. “Go on.” It was
a book she had ordered by post. I undid the string and the wrapping and watched her take off her apron and sit down at the table in front of the book. Slowly she turned the pages. She wrinkled her lips and her eyes grew big with wonder. The book was entitled Home Law and the Family. She had saved up the tea coupons. It was probably the first book ever to come into our house, after the Bible.

  Thereafter Home Law and the Family became her bible. It had a blue cover made of calico and a stiff binding. She went through it section by section, poring over it, her finger pressed to the page. At night I would hear her discussing it with my father, after I had gone to bed. My father was in work just then.

  “Have you got your ruler there?” she said to me one day. She had reached the section in the book that dealt with overcrowding. I opened my satchel and took out my twelve-inch wooden ruler. She snatched it from me and began measuring the kitchen. I thought she’d gone off her rocker.

  “What are you doing?” I said. I followed her into the next room. Same thing. She was on her knees in the front room, measuring the floor. She went upstairs. “Oh son,” she said, coming down again. “It says here…”

  She put down the ruler and leaned on the table with her arms extended and her head turned towards the scullery with a quick nodding and shaking movement. Her lips were working.

  “Son. I think we’re overcrowded.”

  We were not overcrowded. In addition to the kitchen and scullery, there were two bedrooms upstairs and a front room on to the street (with aspidistra) which we never used except on Sunday afternoons if we had company. Compared to other houses in the road, we were far from overcrowded. But my mother, poor honest soul that she was, thought we had broken the law. Because it was written. She became withdrawn and anxious. She lived in fear of being prosecuted. She no longer went to the market in the morning but sat in the front room with the door shut behind her staring out from behind the lace curtains on to the street waiting for the authorities to come. This went on for days. I said to Tom, “We have to do something.” But what could we do?