by Alan Carter
‘Looking for sympathy?’
‘No. But usually it’s one of the younger ones that watches over me.’
I step closer to him. ‘Finished packing?’
‘It must be hard not being at the centre of things anymore.’ He zips up his bag. ‘I feel for you.’
By the time we get back to Havelock, it’s late afternoon and growing dim. They’ve taken Patrick to the lock-up thirty-odd ks away at Blenheim for questioning. Just before finishing for the day, I run my tenants Gary McCaw and Steve Lomu through the system and – guess what? – they don’t exist. So why did I let them move onto my property? Vanessa likes them and it seems I will do anything, any stupid thing, to keep her happy. I set off home for the eighteen-kilometre drive back up the Wakamarina Valley. There is a police house available in town but I choose not to use it and now it’s Latifa’s. If I do need to stay overnight for any reason, there’s a room at the motel or the camp bed and sleeping bag at the office. At the turn off at Canvastown, so named for the old gold rush mining camp, a few cars are parked outside the Trout Hotel. A For Sale banner has been hanging off the front for over a year now.
I pass Charlie Evans tending his alpacas and breaking up straw bales. We exchange a wave. The further you go, up past the hobby farms and weekenders, the more remote, beautiful and feral it gets. Finally, turning into the drive, I see the dark blue ute parked outside the cabin and wonder again whether it was such a good idea to invite Steve and Gary into our lives. They’re cooking something out the back on the barbecue and sinking a beer and they give me a nod. Inside, Paulie is watching a Spongebob cartoon on TV and Vanessa is humming to herself while she boils soup on the stove.
‘Nice smell.’ I slip my arm around her waist and she lets me.
‘Thanks. The soup should be good too.’
‘How’s it been around here today?’
‘Quiet. Paulie’s been hanging out with the guys. Gary’s going to show him how to trap eels tomorrow.’
‘Is that a good idea?’ Eels around here can be as thick as your arm and twice as long. Paulie gets squeamish and it bothers him and us for days afterwards.
‘Gary’s good with him. He’s got a brother the same.’
‘Okay.’ I study her. ‘You seem happy.’
‘It’s a bit of a worry, a tick on the calendar two days in a row.’ She’s right. It’s been nothing but crosses since we arrived. There they sit in the top left hand corner of each day square, two years’ worth of calendars, two years’ worth of crosses. ‘What about you? I heard it on the news: the little boy, those poor parents.’
‘Nasty. We’ve picked somebody up but I doubt it’s him.’
‘Who?’
‘A bloke out on the Sounds. He has a history back in Oz.’
‘Be good if it was him. It’d be over soon.’
‘That’d be nice.’
‘Why don’t you think he’s your man?’
‘Too much of a sad bastard. The bloke that’s done this, he’s a lot colder.’
She casts a warning glance Paulie’s way. ‘We need some wood chopped for the stove. Make yourself useful.’
Outside to split some logs. After I’ve chopped a wheelbarrow load there’s a crunch of gravel behind me. I whip round. It’s Steve. With a knife. My hand grips the wood axe tighter, I’m gauging distances, swing arcs.
‘Can I ask a favour?’ In the other hand he’s got a whetstone. He rubs the knife on it.
‘Go ahead.’
‘We’re out after a pig tonight. Wondering if it’s okay to gut and skin it out the back in that empty shed?’
I think of Paulie accidentally wandering in on the scene. ‘I don’t think so, mate. The boy.’
‘Your missus mentioned he’ll be at school tomorrow. We can padlock the door overnight. We’ll have it cleaned up, hosed out and away before he comes home.’ A pause. ‘She seemed okay with that.’
‘I’ll be out at work.’ I shrug and nod. ‘If Vanessa is happy, then I am.’ But I’m not, and he knows it. I don’t like being played off against my wife. Is it my imagination or does he seem to find this all a bit amusing?
‘Cheers, Nick,’ he says. ‘Appreciated. There’ll be a bit of pork in your fridge when you get home tomorrow night.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Bad business in town, I hear.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Catch the bastard soon, eh? We can set the dogs on him.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘These people keep on getting away with it.’ He strolls off, slapping the knife against his thigh. ‘That Latifa? She reckons you’re all right.’
A tick of approval from my junior. I’m blessed. ‘Glad to hear it. How do you know her?’
‘Latifa knows everybody.’
In the middle of the night I hear the ute pull up out by the shed. Low murmurings and grunts as a weight is lifted. A curse and a chuckle. The clink of chain against roof beam. I hear, or I imagine, a tear and a wet slop as the pig guts fall to the floor. The hosepipe. The shed door padlocked against idle inquiry by Paulie. I spoon into Vanessa and she presses back into me, clutches my hand to her breast. When I close my eyes again, I see blood dripping from the pig’s torn throat.
4
About a hundred million years ago, New Zealand broke off from Gondwanaland and drifted away on its own scrap of geological flotsam. It lodged itself in a cold corner of the South Pacific, unmolested by the predatory mammals that evolved back on the super continent. Birds never learned to fly because they didn’t need to. Tuatara skittered around the undergrowth unaware that their fellow dinosaurs perished millions of years earlier under that rogue meteorite. Snails and beetles grew as big as your fist. New Zealand was a Noah’s Ark of weird critters long before Noah. Then, about eight hundred years ago, man arrived and things went downhill. As a destructive and relentless predator, we take a lot of beating. I reflect upon this, driving back down the valley past the cleared hills softened by the drizzling rain. I reflect upon it as I imagine that pig hanging up in my shed with blood seeping into the soil below. And I reflect upon it coming back into mobile range and my phone beeps with a missed call from Marianne Keegan who’s been up all night grilling Patrick Smith.
‘Nothing?’ I say, returning her call.
‘Nothing. Clean house. Clean computer. And, so far, no traces linking him to the scene. Some dodgy stains on the bedsheets but I could say the same about my fourteen-year-old.’
‘And he can account for himself in the timeframe?’ We have drive-by witnesses who can narrow the dumping of the body down to a couple of hours before dawn yesterday, and others who saw Jamie Riley up until around four thirty that fateful Monday afternoon at swim squad at Richmond Pool.
‘No, but he doesn’t really have to, does he? It’s up to us to put him in that frame.’
Why is she telling me, the hick cop from Havelock?
‘Are you releasing him?’ I ask.
‘Not yet. We’ve still got some science to run. And maybe a witness will come forward to answer our dreams.’ She sniffs. ‘According to the post-mortem, there was enough Rohypnol in the boy to stun an elephant. Hopefully he was sedated for those last few dreadful days of his life.’
Small mercies. I can’t hold it any longer. ‘Why are you telling me?’
A pause. ‘You knew straight away, didn’t you? You knew it wasn’t Smith.’
‘It’s not rocket science.’
‘I looked you up, got a colleague to do it in Wellington.’
‘And?’
‘Nothing. You don’t have any history. But you walk from nowhere into a two-bit shitsville station and command a sergeant’s salary.’
‘You can’t put a price on quality.’
‘Are you a test?’
‘What?’
‘Are you testing me?’
You get that when you work in a big office in a place like Wellington: an inflated notion of self. I want to tell her the world doesn’t revolve around her, that
she should leave the paranoia and sociopathy to the crims. ‘Like I said, it’s not rocket science. Just a lucky guess on my part.’
‘I’m going to find out who you are.’
The phone goes dead, the rain stops, and the sun comes out.
Two of Marianne’s Wellington minions are waiting for me at the station, prematurely balding and podgy. They introduce themselves: Benson and Hodgson. They lodge in my brain as Benson and Hedges and I know I’ll never get rid of that thought. Marianne wants me to go with them to check out the sad bastards and busybodies on the list I gave her. She wants me busy and under her proxy supervision. I’d do the same if I was poisoned by office politics and thinking her dark thoughts. So it’s back out onto the highways and byways of western Marlborough. I can’t decide who I don’t want to talk to first – a saddie or a busy – but Benson has decided for me. There’s a woman who lives up behind the school in Havelock and works part-time at the information centre. Good place for her too.
‘Christine, got a moment?’
She’s got the kettle on like she’s been expecting us. I introduce her to Benson and Hedges. She gives us a cuppa and an Anzac and some tittle-tattle about who’s selling drugs and who’s hunting illegally on McCormack’s forestry company land.
‘But you already know all about that, don’t you?’ she says to me, pointedly.
Steve and Gary. She’s got their number already.
‘No strangers in town who’ve been asking weird questions at the info centre?’
‘Sadly, no. We get weird questions every day but nothing that’s made me shudder lately.’
‘No rumours or theories from your network of informants?’
‘If anything comes to mind I’ll call you.’
So, apart from letting me know that she doesn’t approve of my new tenants, Christine from the information centre proves useless to the inquiry. After that, we drive west past Pelorus Bridge and out towards the Rai Valley. Tourists are taking happy snaps of each other at the spectacular gorge.
I decide to be sociable. ‘You know that scene in The Hobbit 2 where the dwarves float down the rushing river in barrels? That was shot here at Pelorus Bridge.’
Hedges looks at me in the rear-view. ‘Where’s that accent from? I didn’t understand anything there apart from “Hobbit” and “Pelorus”. ’
‘Dudn’t you? Sorry.’
We drive on in silence.
Perilously close to the school lives Rai Valley’s own little Gollum. Michael Flower. His name only adds to the creep factor. Michael has form for photographing up the skirts of schoolgirls on public transport in Nelson and Christchurch. He has a neat disinfected house and a computer screen saver of the little girl from ET touching fingers with her alien friend. He also has alibis for the timeframe: visiting Mum in the aged-care home in Christchurch when Jamie Riley was taken, and sailing on the Bluebridge ferry back from Wellington when Jamie was found.
‘Haemorrhoids,’ he says, shifting in his seat. ‘The doctor’s going to sort them out next week. Round ’em up, brand ’em, and herd them back into the paddock.’
‘Surely they can do that locally?’ says Benson. ‘Don’t need to get on a boat to have your grapes harvested.’
‘Long waiting list. I’m going private. Mum’s paying.’
And the day goes on like that. Saddies ticked off, busybodies probed, petrol consumed. Last on the list for the day is a volunteer who works at the nature reserve out on the Sounds, trying to keep some flightless bird from the brink of extinction. And we strike gold.
‘Yep, I was camped overnight waiting for an egg to hatch. It didn’t. But I did see lights and boat movement over at Paddy Smith’s jetty.’
‘What time?’
‘Around four in the morning. He’s not normally an early riser.’
‘You take that much notice of him?’
‘I’ve been waiting six weeks for that fucking egg to pop. Not much else to look at, is there?’
Marianne Keegan is pleased with our work – it adds to another little breakthrough she’s had today – and she sets about Patrick Smith with renewed gusto. She might be right after all, and I might be wrong. How good can it get? She’s brisk, alert and pert, and I find myself admiring her posture – this dangerous woman who has declared her intention to dig up my secrets. As a special treat she even allows us to watch on the video link in the next room. Benson and Hedges decline, they’ve got stuff to be getting on with. I unwrap a sandwich from the canteen and make myself comfortable in the TV room. By now Patrick has a lawyer beside him, a young woman from the community legal centre – a nice-enough sort. The recording equipment is on and there’s a minion taking notes. Marianne glances one last time at her file before closing it.
‘Mr Smith, the night before last, about four in the morning, there was a boat at your jetty. Tell me about it.’
He shrugs. ‘I haven’t a clue. I was fast asleep.’
‘There were lights. People moving about. Your bach is less than fifty metres from the jetty.’
‘I’m a deep sleeper.’
‘The noise and activity were noticed by someone over five hundred metres away.’
‘Like I said.’
She slaps a printout on the table. ‘This is the boat that was seen departing from your jetty at around four a.m. Can you read the name and registration number?’
‘Caravaggio.’ He reads the number. ‘That’s my boat.’
The lawyer frowns. ‘Remarkable eyesight your witness has, seeing the boat number from five hundred metres, in the dark.’
‘He’s a bird watcher. He has binoculars. And there were lights on the boat.’ Marianne turns back to Patrick. ‘Where is it now?’
‘I don’t know. People borrow it from time to time. We’re like that out on the Sounds. We help each other.’
‘Anybody regularly borrow your boat?’
Patrick throws her a couple of names. The minion writes them down.
The lawyer stifles a yawn. ‘Is that it? Only, you’ve been holding my client for nearly thirty hours and he’s fully cooperated and answered all your questions.’
Marianne smiles. ‘Bear with me a while longer.’ She flicks through the file again and draws out a sheet of paper. ‘Mr Smith, do you know a boy by the name of Denzel Haruru?’
‘Boy? He’s fifteen. He shaves. He’s built like a prop forward. And …’
‘He’s underage.’
‘And, as I was about to say, he’s exploring his sexuality.’
‘Like all those boys at that fancy school of yours, hmmm? If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard someone like you say something like that.’
The lawyer shakes her head. ‘This is an ambush. I’m advising my client to say nothing further.’
Patrick pats her arm and nods at the file. ‘What about him? What is he saying?’
‘He says you sexually assaulted him and threatened him with further violence if he told anyone. He says you told him you’d done it before and would do it again.’
Patrick barks out a laugh. ‘The boy can take care of himself. If I tried to touch him uninvited he’d break my neck. How absurd.’
‘He said, you said.’ The lawyer gathers her things and stands to leave. ‘This is ridiculous. We’re out of here.’
Patrick shrugs and smiles. ‘As advised.’
‘Sit down, both of you. I’m not finished.’
They sit. The lawyer has her coat and briefcase on her knee. She’s making no attempt to take any more notes.
Patrick still seems amused. ‘Just so you know, I’ll be a “No comment” from here on in.’ He nods at his lawyer. ‘Again, as advised.’
Marianne squints at the clock on the wall. She’s run out of steam. I’m disappointed. I was expecting a bit of Wellington wizardry. ‘You’re free to go for now, Mr Smith.’ She turns to the brief. ‘We will be talking to your client again, very soon.’
‘I’ll watch this space,’ says the lawyer.
By the time I’m on
the way home, it’s dark. Moths and other insects flit in the headlights. The rain has stopped but there’s still a strong wind shaking the trees. Frogs hop on the road and a couple of branches have blown down. Rounding the last bend, I hear the river below. The lights are on at home and in the rented hut. When I stamp my boots on the mat and slide the door open I hear Paulie crying.
‘What is it?’
Vanessa is crouching in front of him, comforting him. She turns. ‘They caught an eel today in the river. Paulie saw Gary getting it ready for dinner. Bit of a shock, wasn’t it, love?’
Paulie nods and heaves a couple of brave shaky breaths.
‘I knew this wouldn’t work.’
‘What?’
I thumb over my shoulder. ‘The guys. We don’t need this.’
Vanessa looks at me like I’m an idiot. ‘Steady on, love. Worse things happen at sea.’
‘Yeah,’ says Paulie, looking at me like I’m that same idiot. ‘Steady on, Dad.’
There’s a rap on the screen door behind me. It’s Gary, looking worried. ‘Paulie, you okay, mate?’
‘Fine, bro,’ says Paulie.
Gary grins. ‘That’s good. Give us a yell or a knock next time before you come in the hut, yeah? No surprises then.’
Paulie gives him the thumbs up. ‘Sweet as.’
I step out the back with Gary. ‘You caught your pig then? I heard you come back last night.’
‘Yep, and all cleared up, like it never happened. Wanna check?’
‘I believe you.’
‘The butcher is turning it into patties. You’ll have a boxful in a few days.’
‘Great.’ I nod back towards the house. ‘Paulie’s taken a shine to you.’ Vanessa too, I’m thinking.
‘He’s a great kid.’
‘He’s very trusting.’
Gary smiles. ‘Doesn’t get it from his dad, does he?’
‘No, he doesn’t. But you’re still here and we’re still talking, so that’s good, isn’t it?’
‘One day at a time, eh?’
He goes back into the hut and there’s a muffled conversation with Steve. A short harsh laugh at the end. What’s so fucking funny all the time?