Marlborough Man

by Alan Carter

  24

  If I can just make enough friends to hold the enemies at bay, then I’ll probably scrape through. I don’t make pals easily, not a good start for an ex-undercover operative for the Serious and Organised Crime Agency. You need topnotch social skills for that kind of work: empathy, intuition, and such. That chameleon ability to turn on the charm and be all things to all people. I don’t have it, I rub people up the wrong way. For every Sammy Pritchard who takes a shine to me, there are five Martys sharpening their knives. Still, Latifa sees some redeeming features in me and Uncle Walter has decided I’m the first cop he’s prepared to trust in a generation. No pressure. And of course there’s Steve and Gary preparing to stand with me to face Marty and whatever he might bring this weekend.

  This morning there was a call from Latifa to tell me that Deborah Haruru had woken up. And now here we are at Nelson Hospital and I’m looking into the eyes of someone else who has decided to trust me.

  ‘You’re going to find the man that took my boy.’

  Not a question, a statement.

  Latifa looks at me: give her something back, she’s saying.

  ‘I’ll try, Deb.’

  Deborah believes me, and that will keep her in this world a while longer. There’s no CCTV at the hostel, it’s not that kind of place. And nobody recalls anybody suspicious hanging around. Deborah herself only remembers dropping off to sleep, naturally. And not waking up until a couple of days later.

  ‘Overdose? Suicide?’ She shakes her head. ‘Nah. Not this time.’ Is there anything she knows that she’s holding back? Something a killer might want to stop her telling me? ‘Yeah, I forgot to mention his name last time we talked.’

  Latifa smothers a smile.

  ‘Give us a yell if you do remember anything, the smallest thing, however stupid it seems.’ I leave my card with my home number written on the back. The DC has agreed to post an officer at the door and Marianne Keegan is c.c.’d in. We’ve also agreed with DI Keegan that Latifa and I should be the conduits to Deborah. The last thing we need is some goons trampling in the newly laid flower beds.

  It’s midweek market day in Nelson. I grab a venison burger and Latifa opts for a whitebait pattie. We hit the winding road back through the hills to Havelock.

  ‘Ready for Drop, Cover, Hold tomorrow?’ says Latifa, through a mouthful of white bread and fish.

  National Earthquake Drill Day. ‘Absolutely.’ I’m driving this time and she seems impatient, pushing her foot down on an imaginary accelerator around the sharp bends. ‘Have you ever been in one?’

  ‘Not a big one. Felt the odd shake here and there. You get used to it.’

  ‘I can’t imagine it.’ It’s only a few years since the centre of Christchurch was left looking like a war zone, and it seems inconceivable to me that people can get on with things and trust in life again. But of course they do: 9/11, Fukushima, you name it. I share my thoughts with Latifa.

  ‘Shit happens. You dust yourself off and start again. You don’t have much choice. Look at Deb.’ Her phone beeps and after a quick glance at the screen she squeals in a girlish un-Latifa-like way.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s Daniel!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The gorgeous guy I gave the speeding ticket to on Monday.’

  ‘He’s got your mobile number?’

  ‘I wrote it on the back of the ticket.’ She presses her lips to her phone. ‘Sure thing, honey,’ she purrs. Her fingers dance over the screen as she knocks off a reply while we’re still in mobile coverage.

  DI Keegan has sent through an email with a printout of Des Rogers’ telco records. In the time between my visit and his death there are no calls received or made on his mobile or landline. On his internet history there are visits to news and sports sites, an adult chat room, and a porn-streaming service. An email from his daughter in Christchurch saying she wouldn’t be able to visit this weekend after all because the kids had sports fixtures, one of them was through to the netball grand finals. He has replied: no worries, maybe he’ll try and get down there himself to watch the game. Nothing else. He’s not on the usual social media networks. If he made contact with his killer during that time it’s not evident here. DI Keegan adds in the covering email that there is no CCTV in the vicinity of the bach but they are looking at others from hotels and petrol stations in and around Kaikōura. A doorknock of his neighbours has also thrown up nothing apart from the astonishing revelation that he wasn’t well-liked.

  I send a query to Keegan asking if it is possible to access any of Rogers’ records from when he was still in the job: journals, logs, database entries, whatever.

  ‘Why?’ She’s on the phone now, businesslike, cutting to the chase.

  ‘I heard a rumour that he was possibly covering up for somebody back then. I’m interested in the company he kept, inside and outside work.’

  ‘You don’t think you’re overstepping your mark here?’

  ‘Your call,’ I say and let the silence hang.

  ‘I’ll see what I can dig up.’ She tries the meaningful pause too but I’ve had lots more practice and don’t jump in to fill it. ‘Don’t make me regret this,’ she says before hanging up.

  There’s not much else to do for the rest of the afternoon. I put together a goody bag of stickers, badges, certificates, and fluffy toys. I’m due out at Canvastown School in the morning to supervise National Earthquake Drill Day and give out prizes for the best Drop, Cover and Holders in each class. Latifa is doing Havelock School and she’s putting together her own goody bag. The sun drops behind one of those many hills and the wind is taking a rest. It’s a beautiful and calm evening.

  25

  Qadim Reza’s father, Muhammad, arrived in New Zealand in 2001. An Afghan Hazara fleeing the murderous Taliban, he was on an asylum-seeker boat that foundered in the Indian Ocean near Christmas Island and was rescued by the Norwegian freighter Tampa. His timing wasn’t good. The Australian government was struggling in the polls and determined to make a vote-winning example of people like Muhammad. After a tense maritime stand-off involving masked and armed SAS troops, weakened and water-deprived refugees, and a stubborn ship’s captain – all witnessed by the world’s media – a solution was found. The Pacific Solution. It involved Australia offloading its human rights responsibilities onto its mostly poorer neighbours. New Zealand, to its immense credit, was among the first to put up its hand and share the load. Not out of a sense of begrudging obligation but, it seemed to many at the time, more out of a solid sense of right and wrong. And that is where Muhammad’s luck began to change. Instead of being caged on a desert island for the next few years, he was able to get on with a new life of peace, security and freedom in the Land of the Long White Cloud. He was a gifted motor mechanic and within six years had saved enough to start his own business in Blenheim. Now the proud holder of a Kiwi passport, he travelled to Quetta in Pakistan where he found himself a wife and, eight years after the Tampa rescue, they had a son, Qadim, the first of three.

  If any man deserves a break it would have to be Muhammad Reza. But he hasn’t seen his six-year-old son for nearly twenty-four hours and we all fear the worst.

  The media are all over it and I don’t envy DI Marianne Keegan for one second. She looks exhausted. National Earthquake Drill Day got blown out of the water in Marlborough. The call had come in late the previous evening from Qadim’s distraught parents. By early next morning, police and Search and Rescue volunteers were out combing the surrounding area. The Rezas live not far from the Wither Hills south of Blenheim and there’s a lot of difficult ground to cover. It’s now midafternoon and the family and DI Keegan have just done a TV appeal in time for the evening news. Muhammad Reza has this haunted, damned look about him, as if once again he’s part of a horrific spectacle way beyond his control.

  All morning Latifa and I have been driving up and down SH6 and along the side roads, doorknocking, looking, hoping. If Prince Haruru and Jamie Riley are any guide, then little Q
adim has only a few more terrible days to live. Maybe we’re jumping to conclusions? Maybe he’s just lost somewhere and he’ll show up some time soon. Maybe he’s fallen in a river or pond and drowned. Maybe something terrible happened in the family home and all this is an elaborate dark hoax to divert attention – but I look at Muhammad Reza’s devastation on TV and think: no, somebody else has done this. Studying the photo of Qadim, there’s something about him, and Jamie, and Prince. A light that we all see, a light that somebody out there feels compelled to extinguish.

  We’re obliged now, even while keeping the inquiries separate, to make the links. Too much scrutiny and DI Keegan feels the pressure. What could have been a career-defining case might end up destroying her. I’ve been there: Sammy P was meant to be my ticket to the top. So the usual suspects have once again been rounded up – the nonces and saddos – and we all know it’s a waste of time and resources. The DC and Keegan are in a huddle in the corner of the re-established Blenheim incident room. They summon me over.

  ‘Marianne tells me you’ve got thoughts on Des Rogers protecting somebody?’

  ‘Just a rumour, sir.’

  ‘We’ll be doing all the usual from here but maybe you and that colleague of yours … ’

  ‘Constable Rapata, sir.’

  ‘Yeah. The two of you focus on the Haruru link, use Rapata’s connections in the community.’ He lifts his head to see if anyone is listening in. ‘We haven’t got time to fuck about, Nick. We need results, not softly, softly.’

  Keegan is nodding along in time. I ask about Des Rogers’ work records and data entry logs. ‘You’ll get it by day’s end,’ she says.

  Latifa and I drive from Blenheim back to Havelock and I tell her what we have to do.

  ‘Yep.’ She seems flat, drained. But we can’t afford that right now, I tell her. We need to dig deep, find some energy and determination. ‘Sure,’ she says. ‘No worries.’

  The Des Rogers stuff is in our inboxes when we log back on. Reams of it: scanned printouts of his database entries for the two years preceding his retirement, case and incident reports, leave requests, training courses, expenses claims. I don’t know where to start.

  ‘How about we dump anything more than six months before Prince’s death and more than six months after?’ suggests Latifa.

  ‘Works for me.’ We reorganise the information accordingly.

  ‘And put aside the training courses, expenses and the leave requests?’

  ‘For now, anyway,’ I agree. ‘Meantime can you arrange meetings with Uncle Walter and anybody else for asap. Preferably starting tonight?’

  ‘Onto it.’ She picks up the phone.

  I glance at the camp bed folded up in the corner. It looks like another cricked neck in the morning.

  We spend the next couple of hours culling the incident and case reports. It’s lucky Des Rogers was a lazy bastard for at least the last two years of his career and didn’t generate as much of an electronic paper trail as he could have. Still, it’s like wading through Sounds mud at low tide and by sundown we’re happy to be grabbing a sausage roll at the supermarket on our way out to a cluster of houses near the local marae. I’m about to be introduced to the Haruru whanau – ‘Extended family,’ explains Latifa when she sees my blank look.

  It’s dark by the time we arrive and moths dance around the flames of a fire burning in a drum in someone’s backyard. It’s a cool evening but there’s less of a nip as spring edges into early summer.

  ‘Cuppa tea?’ says Uncle Walter.

  We both say yes and a younger woman is sent to make it. Uncle Walter is there, flanked by an older woman who looks in her sixties or seventies, another in her forties, and a man who might be her husband. I try to remember their names: Rose the older one, Beth the younger one, and her bloke Peter. The tea returns and the tea maker is dismissed.

  ‘Another one, eh?’ Walter shakes his head. ‘And now you’re ready to listen to us.’

  Latifa says something to him in Maori. Calming, placating tones but there is a firmness too. His eyes blaze at her: has she gone too far?

  I nod. ‘And maybe together we can stop him.’ A moth lands in my tea. ‘Eh, Walter?’

  The other oldie, Rose, turns out to be Walter’s sister. Uncle Walter, Auntie Rose to everyone else. She leans across and tips my tea out, moth and all. Hands me another one. ‘What do you want to know, sonny?’

  It’s been a while since I was called that. ‘At the time of the little boy’s death …’

  ‘Murder,’ three people say simultaneously.

  ‘Some people were saying that the police officer, Rogers, was covering up for someone. That he knew who’d done it.’ Latifa tips her head in the direction of the younger woman, Beth. I shift my gaze to her. ‘What was that about?’

  ‘Beth,’ says Walter. ‘Speak up, girl.’

  It’s clear nobody gets beyond sonny or girl around here until they’re collecting their old-age pension. Beth keeps quiet. It turns out she’s another of Walter’s offspring: sister to Prince’s mum, Deborah Haruru. Peter is there for moral support. He nudges her. ‘Tell him for fuck’s sake, the rugby’s on in twenty minutes.’

  ‘Isn’t the season finished?’ I say.

  He looks at me like I walked out of the swamp. ‘Replays.’

  Beth glares at Peter then straightens in her seat. ‘I saw Rogers in town about a couple of days after Princey was found.’

  ‘Blenheim?’

  ‘Well, Renwick, near enough. He was drinking in the Woodbourne Tavern with a bunch of pakeha.’ She sniffs angrily. ‘I was working there. They were all laughing and carrying on. Plenty of drink inside them. That was the same day we got the medical report on what had been done to Princey.’ She pauses, crosses her arms tight.

  ‘Go on,’ says Latifa gently.

  ‘Rogers grabs me when I’m going by. Puts his hand on my arse. I’m ready to smash a bottle over his head. This other pakeha tells him to take it easy. She’s grieving, he says.’

  I wait for more but she’s finished. ‘That’s it?’

  She looks affronted. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What’d he look like?’ Latifa leans in. ‘This other pakeha?’

  ‘Tall, pasty, skinny.’

  ‘Don’t they all,’ says Peter. ‘Except the short, fat ones.’ Auntie Rose shushes him.

  ‘Would you know him if you saw him again?’ I ask.

  She shrugs. ‘Doubt it. It was five years ago and I never saw him in there again. I only got to thinking about it months later and wondering if I was imagining things. Looking for something, anything, you know?’

  ‘Imagining what? What makes you think it was anything more than just Rogers being reined in by a pal?’

  She’s embarrassed. ‘Matakite. A feeling, that’s all. I get dreams about that bloke, still. Not him as a memory, but the memory of how I felt when he looked at me.’

  I wait.

  ‘Pōuri.’

  Latifa translates for me. ‘Darkness.’

  I leave Latifa out at the community. She’ll stay overnight, maybe try and press Beth for more of a description of the pakeha who exuded darkness. I head back to the office, set up the camp bed, and trawl through more of the Rogers records. A catalogue of incident reports, often sloppy, of drug busts, thefts, assaults, vandalism, domestics. The minutiae of volume crime. Nothing jumps out screaming at me, this is it, this is the key! My eyes glaze and droop, and by just after midnight I crawl onto the creaky camp bed. My last thought before falling asleep is for little Qadim Reza whose time is running out.

  26

  I’ve been awake since before five and going through the Des Rogers stuff again. Most of his clients are pathetic low-lifes, dumb-ass recidivists who’d really struggle to exude dark charisma of the type that invades Beth’s dreams. I can’t see any of them sitting in the Woodbourne Tavern that night with Rogers.

  The cafe over the road is the first to open and I treat myself to a takeaway coffee and a bacon and egg toastie. Back at my c
omputer the overnight log reveals the search for Qadim Reza has advanced very little. People have been dragged in and eliminated from inquiries, that’s it. Latifa is in by a little after seven looking similarly sleep-deprived.

  ‘Dogs,’ she says. ‘Yapping all night.’

  ‘Any more from Beth?’

  ‘Nothing. She says it’s like his face has deliberately erased itself from her memory. Like a file being trashed, she put it.’ Latifa flicks on the kettle. ‘That’s what you get when you mix Beth’s special brand of Maori voodoo and IT know-how. Complete nonsense.’ She offers me a tea but I show her my takeaway cup. ‘You?’

  ‘I can’t see anything in his incident and case reports that excites me.’ Latifa is looking over my shoulder at the computer screen. ‘Mainly ratbags who find it hard to survive from one fix to the next.’

  ‘I watched the rugby with Beth and her bloke. Slept in their spare room. Beth dropped off to sleep on the couch beside me during the game.’ Latifa is rummaging in her backpack. ‘Beth said something before she crashed. Tangaroa.’

  ‘What?’

  She chucks a heavy hardback tome onto my desk. It’s a Maori dictionary from the library. ‘Look it up.’

  I do as I’m told. ‘Tangaroa. God of the sea?’

  A finger prod. ‘Over the page. Alternative meaning. First line.’

  ‘You have a single word that means “endless wealth personified”?’

  She nods proudly. ‘Ours is a sophisticated and eloquent culture. Only I don’t think Beth meant it in a positive sense.’

  ‘So this faceless pakeha smelt of money.’

  ‘That should impress Detective Inspector Cheekbones and Bobcut.’ Latifa plonks herself at her desk. ‘Now let’s see if we can get a name.’

  It’s as we’re going through Rogers’ expenses claims and leave requests that something begins to take shape. At this time he’s at an address in Renwick, north of Blenheim, hence the session in the Woodbourne Tavern, which would have been his local. Two months before Prince Haruru was murdered, Des Rogers puts in a claim for a meal for two plus sundry cash expenses to the value of four hundred dollars.