The Crime of Huey Dunstan

by James Mcneish

“Did he say anything else?”

  I shook my head.

  Silence.

  There was a knock at the door. Someone entered wheeling a trolley and gave us tea and biscuits, then went out. We sat sipping our tea and I cursed myself for being precipitate. Timing, Chesney.

  He was still in the trenches.

  He wasn’t going to go there.

  The door opened again, softly this time, and a faint odour of gas drifted in. Ammonia? It was the police officer, having a shufti. Huey mumbled something to the policeman about the time. He was restless again. The door closed. I took a gamble.

  “Huey. I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone before. I killed someone once, it was my mother. At least I think I did. I’m not sure but I think I was responsible for her death. Then, after she died, I went to the funeral. I wasn’t there when my mother died. When I arrived there was the bed on which she had died, with the smell of ammonia in the air. The undertaker had come for her the previous day. I was too late. She was buried not far from the East India Dock where we lived. I put flowers on the grave and my brother wept. I didn’t. I couldn’t. I felt a great emptiness as if I was on the outside, looking in. They were doing the weeping, not me. My father was there too. Poor soul, is what I felt for her, poor tormented soul. My mother never knew the joy of what it was to love life. I wanted to tell her that—that with all its falseness, with all its sham, its drudgery and its broken dreams, it was still a beautiful world. But I had never been able to tell her when she was alive, and now it was too late. She died at the end of the war. I still have nightmares about it.”

  “Me too,” he said.

  I shifted in my chair and listened. He was breathing normally.

  “What sort of nightmares, Huey?”

  “Monsters.”

  “Yes, your mother told me about your nightmares. I forgot to tell you that I went to the house and talked to your mother. Your father wasn’t there. My nightmares aren’t about monsters, they’re about a book of hers that I stole, and it needn’t concern you. But I’ve never been able to rid myself of the notion that because of the book, I was responsible for her death. I don’t like to talk about it. I’m not sure why I’m telling you now.

  “I need a walk,” I said. I stood up and reached for my stick.

  “Where is it, Huey?”

  “What.”

  “Where is it?” I snapped. The stick had gone.

  “Here prof. Hey. Don’t panic.” He put the cane into my hand. I had collapsed it and laid it on the bed when I arrived, and he had moved it without telling me.

  “Never do that again,” I said.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right. I feel better now I’ve told you.” In fact I felt a good deal worse. My stomach was churning.

  “Don’t go,” he said.

  I sat down again. Presently he said, “Leo’s OK but he’s a bit dumb. He tells porkies. Only sometimes—”

  His voice had changed. It was thicker somehow.

  “Only sometimes he doesn’t? Sometimes he tells it straight? Is that what you were going to say?”

  I waited for Huey to contradict me and when he didn’t, I plunged.

  “Huey. You’re sitting in front of the fire drinking coffee with the old man. It’s night. He’s sitting in a chair beside you rolling a cigarette and you’re crouched down in front of him by the fire stoking it. What happened? You’ve brought in the firewood and lit the fire and you’re stoking it with the poker waiting for him to finish his coffee and give you a lift home. Then, you said, he reached across in front of you to get the poker. I don’t think he did that.”

  “No, no.”

  “What happened?”

  “I mean—”

  I bit my lip. I bit my lip so hard I tasted blood. Don’t speak.

  “On the knee,” he said.

  “He touched you on the knee? Show me.”

  His breathing had coarsened. He was breathing through his nose. I caught the rasp of breath in his nostrils and the trace of vinegar that was his personal scent. It had become a rank biting smell, almost palpable. He spoke in a whisper. “On the knee.”

  “To steady himself. He reached across and touched your knee to steady himself? No, don’t tell me. Show me what he did.

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  It was a risky thing to do. Instinctively I had reached out for his hand. I realised my stupidity seconds later and had started to withdraw my hand when he grasped it and thrust it under the bed cover before I could stop him. Once again our faces were almost touching. His breath came in hot gusts. “That’s not your knee, Huey!” My hand was resting on the inside of his thigh. I felt the warmth of his flesh and the throb of his muscles through the sheet. He had thrown off the top covering. I don’t remember if he said anything. There was no need.

  I felt the bed move. Huey had let go my hand. He was weeping. He wept quietly at first, then in sobs, convulsively, the sobs coming from a mouth that seemed shut tight, the lips compressed against the teeth, then welling up at the back of the throat and pouring out, filling the room in a forward rush like a wave filling the mouth of a canyon. Like the waves on the beach in Tuvalu where I met a man looking for his daughter who had died in a fire. The man had been crying for her for fourteen days. Huey was like that, he was crying for all the lost years. He cried like a wounded animal.

  “It’s all right, nurse,” I said, when the door opened suddenly and someone rushed up to the bedside. “He’s just been telling me something.” Presently the nurse went away, and he told me. He told me everything.

  THIRTEEN

  I AM SUPERSTITIOUS by nature. And it is reinforced by my blindness. It’s something I have inherited from my parents. My mother always crossed herself when lightning struck; my father spat three times before answering a knock at the door. I still find myself turning a coin in my pocket, if I have one, when someone says there is a new moon; and I still count to myself “one, two, three”, while metaphorically stamping my foot to avert the evil eye, before answering the door bell or the telephone. So it was with Lawrence’s briefcase.

  About a week after I got back from Paremoremo we had lunch together at a small French café in Cuba Street. I had already sent Lawrence an account of my visit to Huey and we had spoken a couple of times by telephone.

  Lawrence arrived by taxi. He ordered onion tart and salad, with coffee to follow, refused a glass of wine, and said: “Now this will interest you. I think we’re on.” He had heard from the registrar of the Court of Appeal. We had been given a date for a notional appeal to be heard. Lawrence lifted his briefcase and rummaged about for the letter, then put it down again. “Can’t find the letter but it’s July some time. Is something wrong, Ches?”

  When he picked up the case I had caught a whiff of new leather, and made a face, wrinkling my nose.

  I said, “Where’s the old case?”

  “Oh that.”

  He laughed it off and said, “I think the hearing is down for the middle of July. Will you be here? I recall you saying something about a conference in Italy.”

  “No, that’s September.”

  I had booked a table by the window. When the food came, he said: “I don’t know how it will go. They might hear the appeal straight off, or they might listen to the merits first before granting leave to appeal at a later date.”

  “Or not,” I said.

  “Or not. But that’s unlikely. Strictly we’re months out of time, as you know, but that has little bearing. The Court has jurisdiction to grant an appeal on a paper application, however late it may be, provided there’s a strong argument. What they’ll want from me is a full account in support of the application which I will provide, and what I want from you is a sworn affidavit with as much detail as you think relevant. With any luck they will deal with it on the day.”

  “In one hit?”

  “Yes. No reason not to. ‘Do we grant Mr Goodenough leave to appeal?’ Something like that. Then, if they deci
de yes, ‘Let’s have it. Let’s hear the appeal.’ Off we go. They may want to question you on your affidavit. In any case I’d like you to be there. I’ll request permission for you to attend. Is that OK?”

  “OK by me. Who’s paying for the appeal?”

  “I am. Legal Aid won’t pay a cent. You’re not eating, Ches.”

  “No. I will. You haven’t answered my question yet, about the briefcase.”

  “It’s falling to bits.”

  “Have you ditched it?”

  “No. Well yes, in a way.”

  “You used to say it brought you luck.”

  “Didn’t help us much in November, did it. Actual y my daughter is using it. Sally wanted it for varsity.”

  “Can you get it back?”

  “You’re not serious, Ches.”

  “I’m quite serious. You’ve forgotten your property law. This is an item of personal property, inherited in special circumstances. It’s part of you, for god’s sake.” And I quoted the old Navy maxim, “Never be separated from your gear.”

  “Yes, yes. ‘And always do a piddle when you can.’”

  “I’ve told you that before, have I? Now I’m telling you again. Get it back, Lawrence.”

  Strictly speaking it was a satchel rather than a briefcase, a beaten-up leather satchel smelling of beeswax, of a kind not used any more. It had once belonged to the Chief Justice of New Zealand, Sir Harold Barrowclough, and had come to Lawrence through a great-aunt on his mother’s side. She had married a Barrowclough, although the initials on the flap were not those of Lawrence’s great-uncle. I had noticed the letters “V. R.” when Lawrence first came to my psychology classes. The initials were embossed on a flap above a sort of armorial shield on which were picked out a number of signs or symbols, almost unrecognisable, except for what might have once been a crown or coronet, with a crest. One day he told me the story.

  The initials “V. R.” stood for Major-General Johann von Ravenstein, who had commanded 21st Panzer Division under Rommel and was the first German general taken by the Allies in the Second World War. Von Ravenstein had been captured during a battle in the Western Desert in 1941 when, returning from a tactical meeting at Rommel’s Headquarters, he had inadvertently driven slap into the middle of the New Zealand Division. It was shortly after first light. A New Zealand patrol belonging to 6th Brigade had observed a speeding car in the distance, given chase and, recognising from the flat caps of the occupants that they were German officers—or (accounts vary) finding it strange they were not being sworn at—opened fire. Three men jumped from the staff car and were taken prisoner and one of them, a lean self-composed man, much decorated, who identified himself as Colonel Schmidt, aroused the suspicions of the New Zealand brigade commander, Barrowclough. The latter examined a map found in the staff car, noted that Colonel Schmidt wore an Iron Cross around his neck, and had him hurried on to General Freyberg at divisional headquarters.

  Brought before the New Zealand Commander-in-Chief for interrogation, Colonel Schmidt clicked his heels, bowed to Freyberg, and in the instinctive manner of his class and before he could stop himself blurted out, “Von Ravenstein, General!”

  Meanwhile, back at 6th Brigade, Harold Barrowclough was poking about inside the captured staff car. Brigadier Barrowclough was a lawyer in civilian life, a quiet reserved man who had learned when articled to a firm of solicitors in Auckland to burrow assiduously in formal documents, before engrossing them with a quill pen; and he was doing that now, in a manner of speaking, burrowing about inside the staff car with a swagger stick, turning over this and that, when he came upon an empty satchel lying on the floor of the back seat. Whether it was the heraldic design that drew the brigadier’s attention or that his great-uncle was acquisitive by nature, Lawrence didn’t know, but having picked up the case and examined it, Harold Barrowclough kept it and at the end of the war brought it back to New Zealand. Then when he was made Chief Justice and was living in Wellington, he used it to hold his papers, carrying the satchel every day walking to the Supreme Court in Whitmore Street from his house in Kelburn. The satchel had passed to a daughter and eventually, after he qualified for the Bar, to Barrowclough’s great-nephew, Lawrence.

  “I don’t know if you value my advice,” I said to Lawrence as we were leaving the café, “but if I wanted to win this appeal, I’d go to my lovely daughter and say, ‘Compliments of that curmudgeon Chesney, but can we please have the bloody thing back?’” And I added for good measure another saying of my mentor, Hubert Fox, the fighting Quaker: Tam martii quam mercurii (As much for the god of war as for the god of eloquence).

  In due course I filed an affidavit, as requested. It went in with a submission from Lawrence, fully particularised, and a request for me to be present at the hearing. It was then late April, going on May. We got on with our lives, and waited.

  From time to time items of news arrived from the prison. Huey had been placed in isolation in D Block. Huey had not been placed in isolation. The arm was slow to mend. The arm had mended quickly and he was back on his computer course learning about tree care and teaching his right hand to use the keyboard again. Best of all, his father had been to see him—father, mother, brother, his sisters, an aunty or two, also his Gran. They had driven up and back in a rental van the father had organised, although I suspect Lawrence paid for it.

  May came and went. June passed and with it my sixty-eighth birthday. I also got a mention in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. July 15th arrived, the day of the hearing, a Friday. I remember because the day before, the 14th, supposedly my lucky number (two times seven), it snowed from the north, the Desert Road was closed, there was snow as far south as Plimmerton and I had a premonition that the hearing would be called off. But it wasn’t.

  PART THREE

  FOURTEEN

  I HAD NEVER been inside the Court of Appeal in Wellington, although it had been described to me often enough as seen from the steps of Parliament House in Molesworth Street, or from the General Assembly Library next door. I pictured a modest angular pile with vertical windows and white columns and a pohutukawa tree growing in front.

  I arrived at 9.30 a.m. Lawrence met me and took me up to the smaller of two courtrooms on the first floor, situated at the end of a carpeted lobby that smelled faintly of sawdust. He left me for a moment, then came back and explained that another case, held over from the previous day, was just ending. We should be on by ten.

  “Bit of luck,” he said. “We’ve got Smythe-Martin.”

  The Rt. Hon. Sir Reginald Smythe-Martin was the Chief Justice. From the lobby Lawrence could peer in through glass squares set in the door and identify the panel before going in. The hearing was before three judges (Lawrence who intended arguing a rare point of law had feared there would be five judges): Smythe-Martin CJ, who was presiding, took the central position, with the two lesser judges flanking him like book-ends—Justice Lane on his right and a woman judge whose name I have forgotten on his left. They sat at separate tables, the outer two occasionally converging on the centre to compare notes. Lane was deceptive, Lawrence said, seemingly laid back but full of guile and with a short fuse; the chief justice had a penchant for the arts and literature which sometimes ran away with him. The woman judge, a recent appointment from Dunedin, he barely knew.

  Just before we went in, Lawrence put down his satchel—I was pleased to learn he had spoken to his daughter and recovered his great-uncle’s “loot”—and wiped his feet on the carpet. “For some reason,” he said, “this place always makes me want to say my prayers.” We went in. Sparrow the Crown prosecutor and his solicitor were already there, waiting.

  I sat on the public benches at the back. The seats were padded, the air smelled clean and filtered. The atmosphere was very different from that of its London counterpart where I had once been sent on an errand as a junior probation officer. Both appellate courts conveyed a sense of legal omnipotence, the difference being that in London the Court of Criminal Appeal, a long narrow room, recalled
the snuff boxes and faded leather of a club in St James as described by Evelyn Waugh in Officers and Gentlemen, whereas in Wellington the Court of Appeal, void of clutter and noise and where even grief one felt was muted, might have been designed by the secretary of Sport & Recreation or the Wadestown golf club.

  Lawrence had briefed me in advance. From the voices reaching me as I sat down and took stock, it wasn’t difficult to imagine the layout. Modern courtrooms follow a set pattern, like supermarkets. The three judges on high, intent on their laptops and references, the two flanking ones suddenly skidding on their casters to the centre for an impromptu conference on a point of law…Below them, the registrar. To the right (their right, my left) the witness stand and press box. Microphones. But no jury of course. Then four benches like refectory tables without trestles for the opposing counsel—counsel for the appellant on the right (my left), Crown prosecutor on the left (my right)—the benches aligned in pairs, as Lawrence explained, two-times-two, one behind the other, so that when a case was ending and positions vacated, the waiting counsel could slide forward pat into the line of fire, tickety boo, on the cab-rank principle. And finally at the back seating for the public, of whom I appeared to be the sole representative.

  “Don’t be surprised if they want you up almost straight away,” Lawrence said. He came back and spoke to me as the other case was ending.

  There was a short break, then a preamble from the president amid a shuffling of papers a bit like an orchestra tuning up in the pit. Then a question or two—I remember Lawrence being asked to clarify a point. Namely that he was not seeking an acquittal for his client.

  “I take it,” he was asked, “the appellant does not seek to be exonerated for his crime?”

  “Oh no,” Lawrence said. “Mr Dunstan accepts the need for punishment. He told the prison doctor before his trial that he was ready to consign himself to a lifetime in prison in order to atone. I am informed by experts that had he been acquitted at his trial, it would have been disastrous. He would have been plunged into deep depression. He might have hanged himself. No, what we are seeking in our submission for a retrial is a verdict of manslaughter, not an acquittal.”