The Crime of Huey Dunstan

by James Mcneish

  “I’m going bats,” I said, out loud.

  Still, I persevered. I went on with my memoirs, even though I knew they would be of little interest to anyone but myself and unlikely ever to be published.

  It was in April that the change occurred. Shift, I suppose, is a better word. I am referring now to Lisbeth. She too went into a forward gear.

  She came into the study. I was singing a little ditty to myself, “Pharaoh had a daughter with a most bewitching smile—”

  “I’ve thought of something,” Lisbeth said.

  “So have I. You remember the Navy chaplain who taught us Bible stories, the one I told you about with the strange voice? I’ve remembered some of them. Listen.”

  And I sang:

  “Pharaoh had a daughter with a most bewitching smile

  She found the infant Moses in the rushes by the Nile

  She took him home to Papa and laid him on the floor

  But Pharaoh simply smiled and said ‘I’ve heard that one before.’”

  “Charlie. Please—”

  “Adam was the first man, or so we al believe

  He lived at ease till filletted and introduced to Eve…”

  “Char-l-iee!”

  “Sorry, pet.” I stopped.

  “I’ve thought of something. Can you listen for a minute? You told me the mother said Huey was protective of his sisters.”

  “Oh that. Yes. He was. Very protective, she said.”

  “But how? In what way? Do you remember what she said?”

  “I remember exactly what she said. That’s what she said. ‘He was very protective towards his sisters.’ He was like a father to them, she said.”

  “Did you take any notes? You usually do.”

  “Probably. But I remember exactly—”

  “Can you find them?”

  “What, now? Oh all right…It was when she said he was ‘a bit of a handful’.”

  It took a moment, scrolling back and forth. I found the file and the notes of my talk with the mother:

  Father away in bush, Huey sleeping out back with brother. Playing up, out of control. Father absent, mum frantic, couldn’t cope—“Bit of a handful. Boys, you know, they like to rumble”.

  “That’s not it,” Lisbeth said. “What’s this bit?”

  “She’s talking about the caravan. She said she doesn’t know anything about a caravan. I asked her if she understood the word ‘claustrophobia’.”

  “Can we listen, please.”

  Asked her if word “claustrophobia” means anything. Doesn’t understand the word. Small spaces? She said he insisted on sleeping under window, with window and doors wide open.

  “Keep going. Here—‘the daughter’.”

  “That’s Amy, the one who lost an eye. There’s nothing else.”

  “Keep going.”

  “That’s about it.”

  “Here. ‘He was protective.’ Can you go back? Back further. Here it is—‘Very protective towards his sisters’.”

  “We know that. It’s just repetition—”

  “No, there’s more, Charlie. Listen.”

  Very protective towards the sisters, she said. Would say to them, “Has anything happened to you?” Like he was being a father to them.

  “That’s it,” I said. “Finish.”

  “Don’t switch it off.”

  “I’m working, do you mind? Huey was just being protective, that’s all she says. Do you mind if I go back to what I was doing?” I reached across and switched the program over.

  “Charlie!”

  “What.”

  “You’re not thinking.”

  “Don’t shout.”

  “Gott im Himmel! You come to me with one of your hunches and blow hot like the Negev, then suddenly blow cold and drop it because, you say, there’s no outside evidence. I ask you. ‘Has anything happened to you?’ What more do you want?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I ignored her and went on with my memoirs.

  There are two sorts of memory. One is whole, the other fragmentary. Mine is the first sort. I remember a trial I attended in Wellington. It was my first appearance in court after I went blind. I was asked by the Crown to examine a senior civil servant accused of fiddling his expenses. I prepared a report, and was so nervous I memorised the thing whole, fourteen pages, and just presented it in court from memory. (I never did it again. A procedure was introduced whereby the judge, told of my disability, would allow someone else to read out my report for me.)

  Then there’s the other sort of memory, the recall of a phrase or fragment that has lain buried in the subconscious and returns unbidden when a deeper layer has been activated and you are doing something inconsequential like scratching your neck or tieing your shoelaces. That is the sort Lisbeth has.

  “Hunch,” she said, coming back to the study a few minutes after leaving it with, as I realised, her bifocals on and a copy of Webster’s encyclopedia in her hands. “In 1849—I know I’m interrupting again but it might just be relevant. Webster says, In 1849 the word ‘hunch’ was first used to mean a push or a nudge towards a solution. And—Got that? And by 1865, when the celebrated London detective Jonathan Whicher had his ‘magnificent hunch’ in connection with the Road Hill Murder mystery, the word was in common parlance. Are you listening?

  “Oh well—” She closed the encyclopedia with a sigh. “Just a thought, Charlie.”

  “Thank you. Very good,” I said. “Do you mind closing the door when you go out?”

  That was on Friday, the day before the seminar at the Friends’ Settlement. A day or so after I returned from Wanganui, I came into the living room to find Lisbeth on the telephone, laughing in the beguiling way that she has. “Shlom beit. Exactly,” I overheard her say, and guessed whom she was talking to. I went into the kitchen and put the jug on. After a few minutes she appeared.

  “Know what Miriam says about you? Charlie, please don’t walk away when I’m talking.”

  “What does Miriam say about me? I’ve made some tea. It’s there if you want a cup.”

  “No, thanks, not now. She says you’re a bolter. You’re like the man in the book by Julian Barnes who rings for a taxi, then, when it comes, says no thanks, you’ve changed your mind. ‘Tell him to follow his hunch,’ Miriam says. What I’ve been saying to you all along. Hunch. Hunch. Hunch.”

  “Water under the bridge, darling. I told you, I’ve moved on.”

  “You’re kidding. You don’t kid me. You were up again last night, walking about. You were. You went into the study and shut the door. You were listening to those transcripts.”

  “Darling, I am trying to put together my memoirs.”

  “So you say. When did you last have a proper night’s sleep? Charlie, you may be prepared to go on like this, I’m not. What’s important? Shlom beit. Miriam’s right. This thing impacts on me too. She’s thinking of my well-being, not just yours. Why are you so agitated? Are you frightened of being proved wrong? That’s what it is, you know. You can say I’m interfering if you like. But isn’t it time you went and talked to him? Nobody else will if you won’t. I don’t mean the father. The boy.”

  “Impossible. Lawrence would never—No. It’s quite unethical. That would be interfering.”

  “Anyone can visit him, surely? I don’t see anything unethical about it.”

  “Anyway it’s not on. You’re forgetting, he’s in Auckland.”

  “All the more reason for going to see him. I don’t imagine his social calendar is very full at the moment. I’ll drive you.”

  “You won’t.”

  “I’ve got a free week.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Yes. Really.”

  “But you hate driving long distances.”

  “Rabbits,” she said.

  TEN

  LISBETH AND I have a private code. When you have been married to someone for a long time you develop a kind of shorthand that seems to grow from the baffling intimacy of human behaviour, or misb
ehaviour, and it’s rather nice, though maddening to others who may feel left out. Not long ago we had some friends in to lunch. I was bringing in the crêpes from the kitchen (crêpes flambées, it’s my party piece) when Lisbeth suddenly called out, “Enchantress!” Like that. All conversation at the table stopped dead, but I knew immediately what she was saying. She had got the answer to a clue that had defeated us both in the Saturday crossword (“She is very good at spelling”). So there you go. Hence “rabbits”, another little number that came into being in the course of our marriage.

  This needs explaining.

  Years ago when we lived in one of the bays on the other side of the harbour we had a fire in a garden shed which spread to my adjoining study. I lost everything, al my knick-knacks, my brass monkeys, personal computer, audio tapes, reference material, dictaphones…These were the days before memory sticks and screen readers were invented and the expression “print-handicapped” meant to the sightless exactly what it said. Everything was destroyed. My loss was considerable. In effect I lost my memory. I didn’t realise how serious it was or how depressed I had become until I began seeing colours.

  I lost my central vision and became permanently blind in 1976, some eight years after Lisbeth and I were married, when I was nearly fifty. It happened after a bout of pneumonia. At the start of the week I could read and at the end of the week I couldn’t. The degeneration of the retina had reached the macula, which is the central signpost for visual discrimination. Before the pneumonia, I had managed more or less normally with binocular vision; after it, my central vision disappeared. It happened in a week. I could still get a few blurry outlines but gradually in the succeeding months any discriminatory vision I had left over from the pneumonia faded, and my sight vanished completely. Normally I don’t see colours, nor do I see black. What I see is roughly what you see if you are in an aircraft looking out of the window into cloud. If there is bright sunshine the cloud lightens, and if it is dark it darkens. I don’t see black but instead a multitude of pinpoints of flickering lights which keep changing like a kaleidoscope. I may get a colour texture, if I am, say, jet-lagged. It may go from lettuce green to lime green to blue or dark red, even purple. Similarly with fatigue, if I am tired or anxious. Or depressed. When I’m depressed, I get colours of purple. I don’t like purple hues and I put them aside. That’s the thing. I can bring in colours and usher them out again. I can engender lime greens or the colour yellow, and play tricks with them like Mondrian. I can do this sitting down or if I’m holding a conversation with someone or playing the piano. But I don’t like visual distortions of this kind, so I put them aside. Only on this occasion, when my study burned down, the distortions persisted. They refused to go away.

  The colours went from blue to red to magenta to cyanide blue, like a blue dye, then purple, a highly saturated purple, almost black, and it stayed that way. The purple persisted. I became irritable and short-tempered. I threw tantrums. I smashed things. I smashed my favourite drinking mug with the willow tree pattern. I threw it out of the window. Couldn’t work, couldn’t sleep. I was consumed by self-pity, and I took it out on Lisbeth.

  One day I received a phone call from Dr Astor, the Director of Psychological Services at the Department of Health. Bill Astor was an old mate from my days in the Prison Service. “Ches, we need someone to go to Fiji,” he said. There had been a hurricane; hundreds of people left homeless and eight dead; they needed someone to set up a trauma counselling service. He said, “Can you go?”

  Of course I could. I dropped what I was doing and was on a plane to Suva within thirty-six hours. In the ensuing weeks I returned to Fiji twice more. I don’t know how much I was able to help the Fijians but I made a lot of friends and at a kava ceremony when I was leaving I was presented with a garland containing a tabua, a whale’s tooth—a great honour for a foreigner, I am told. After that, the dark hues in my field of non-vision went away and my depression lifted. Only later did I learn that the Fiji assignment had been laid on at Lisbeth’s instigation.

  I said to her, “You mean you rang up Bill Astor and suggested it? You engineered it?”

  “I had to do something,” she said. “It was an emergency. You were in trouble. I was frightened you might do something silly. Bill said it was a bit unusual, a bit dire, but he’d see what he could do. And he did. Well, I had to do something to get you down the hole.”

  “What hole? I was already in a hole, if you remember, a very purple hole.”

  “Not that hole, the rabbit hole. You’ve forgotten your Lewis Carroll. I mean the hole Alice fell down when she was chasing the White Rabbit. Remember? That’s how her adventures began.”

  Ever since that time if I get into a corner or start to lose it she has only to say the word “rabbits”, and I spring to attention. It sounds silly. We have this little private joke between us. Shlom beit, by the way, means “peace in the home”.

  I still had my doubts about the wisdom of going to see Huey without Lawrence’s blessing. I hesitated to suggest it, fearing a rejection. As it happened, the next night he telephoned.

  “Ches,” he said. “An odd thing has happened. Do you remember Huey’s uncle at the trial? Uncle Jacob. Huey calls him his little uncle. He’s not much older than Huey. Never mind. A couple of days ago he walked into my chambers and said, ‘It happened to me too’.”

  Something clicked inside my brain. I heard Lawrence say, “Hello. Are you still there?”

  “Yes. I’m listening.”

  “Ches, I was thinking. You could be right after all.”

  “Lawrence. Excuse me. Would you say that again very slowly. A man walked into your rooms—”

  “Uncle Jacob. Not a very prepossessing sort of bloke. He was a witness for the Crown, he didn’t say very much. Afterwards, as he was stepping down, Huey spoke to me and said, ‘Talk to him. He knows something.’ But the guy vanished and I forgot about it.”

  “I see. Until yesterday.”

  “Yes. I was busy with a client. By the time I’d finished, the uncle was leaving. He wouldn’t wait. All he said was, ‘I came to say it happened to me too.’”

  “Like that?”

  “Like that.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Ches, it’s obvious. What else can it mean?”

  “Tell me again, Lawrence.”

  “Aren’t you excited? I thought you’d be excited.”

  I asked Lawrence to repeat the words Huey spoke to him in court at the trial. My ears were tingling.

  “…It must have been the day the juror fainted. Ches, are you there?”

  “What were you saying?”

  “I said I remembered about it afterwards in the robing room, but by then Uncle Jacob had gone. Hello?”

  “I’m here.”

  “You’re not saying very much.”

  “I’m thinking. I’m thinking that now you have remembered, Lawrence. You have remembered to tell me that four months ago Huey said to you, ‘Talk to this chap, he knows something.’ And you forgot.”

  “I’m sorry. You sound a bit pissed off. Ches, I wanted to ask you something. Are you very busy just now?”

  “I’m always busy. I’m writing my memoirs. My gums are swollen. I have to get a new hearing aid. Now Lisbeth wants to go off in the car somewhere, only I don’t see the point really if the appeal is off. Actually I have a question for you.”

  “Who said the appeal is off?”

  “You did. The last time we met you said—”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that.”

  “I thought there was some statutory time limit on these things. You mean it isn’t too late?” Lawrence made a sucking sound with his lips.

  “It’s never too late. You had a question, Ches.”

  “Yes. We were thinking of driving up north to Auckland. If we did, would it be in order for me to go and see him? Huey, I mean.”

  “I knew you’d ask,” Lawrence said.

  ELEVEN

  HALF WAY UP the North Island, driving
to Paremoremo, Lisbeth said, “I hope this isn’t going to be another wild goose chase.” I mumbled something in reply. I was lost in thought, trying to recall a dream. A man had come up to me and taken my hand. His hand was damp. I was sitting on a wooden bench inside a tent or marquee, on a marae or some other meeting ground. People were milling about, calling to one another. I could say that the man came out of nowhere but when you are blind and a voice suddenly addresses you, a hand suddenly grabs you, nowhere is everywhere, everyone is temporal, people are in motion, they come and go, nothing stands still, and you could be anywhere, or everywhere, and the only reason for knowing where you are is past experience. It must have been raining because the ground underfoot was soggy and his hand, as I say, was damp. The man had a strong odour. He greeted me but when I turned to say, “Who are you?” and strike up a conversation, he was no longer there.

  We had been driving for about three hours and were entering a small town, I think Hunterville. “It’s funny,” I said. Lisbeth slowed down, and accelerated again. She is a good driver, a little anxious perhaps as late learners often are. She had learned to drive in her forties.

  “It’s funny.”

  “What is?”

  “The power of dreams. I was thinking about what Lawrence said. I swear I dreamed it.”

  “What? When?”

  “A couple of months ago. A man came up to me in a crowd and said something and then vanished. I can’t remember his words, but they were powerful. I mean, the suggestion they left behind. I’m thinking, there’s a kind of energy about dreams and half-remembered thoughts you wake up with that turn out to be premonitions of things to come. They’re more powerful than any facts could ever be. You probably wouldn’t believe it in a novel. In a modern novel.”