Red Herring

by Jonothan Cullinane

  He turned a page. “The industrial crisis in which New Zealand has been gripped has taken a dramatic and grave turn. A very determined and dramatic effort has been made to overthrow orderly government by force.”

  Oh this is good, he thought. This is rousing stuff.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  Through connections Caitlin was offered a position on the Birmingham Post. It wasn’t the Manchester Guardian, but it was getting there. She stood with a cluster of family and friends as all around her excited passengers walked awkwardly up the wooden gangway to the Rangitata, bound for London. Cranes swung bales of wool into the Rangitata’s hold. Soldiers and sailors, shirts off, loaded wool, butter and frozen mutton onto pallets. Caitlin kissed her mother and shook her father’s hand. He took an envelope from his inside pocket and gave it to her, ignoring her protestations.

  She picked up an overnight case, adjusted her scarf, looked around for Molloy one last time, and saw him, leaning against the wall of a cargo shed.

  She dropped her bag and ran to him.

  “I don’t want to go,” she said.

  “It’s where you belong,” he said. “The big wide world.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “You’re just saying that to make me leave.”

  “I’m saying it because it’s true,” he said, passing her a handkerchief. “If that boat leaves and you’re not on it, you’ll always regret it.”

  “I thought you didn’t go to the pictures,” she said, blowing her nose.

  “The USO had a projector at our embarkation camp in Venice,” he said. “And two flicks. A John Wayne and that one. There was nothing else to do.”

  “Italy,” said Caitlin. “Of course.”

  The Rangitata’s foghorn blew. A tugboat’s propeller churned the water. A cheer went up from the crowd on the wharf, followed by a ragged chorus of “Now is the Hour”.

  Eyes glistening, she turned and walked up the gangway. At the top she found room and leaned over the rail. She blew him a passionate kiss.

  He reached up and caught it in mid-air, closed his fist and brought it in, thumb facing out, hand angled towards his cheek, the salute of the Left Opposition.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

  Molloy spoke to Tom O’Driscoll, the Star’s police roundsman, about the situation with Tom’s younger brother Bruce, and their mother June, who was staying on Bruce’s farm just out of Morrinsville, and looking after his children following the death of his wife from polio. Bruce’s boys were a handful. Molloy told Tom that he knew someone who might be looking for work as a housekeeper and was used to big families. Tom spoke to Bruce, who said that that sounded good. June came up on the train and met Brigid Toomey at Farmers. They got along. Brigid was respectful, and June knew about men like Pat Toomey.

  They drove to Arch Hill. June waited in the car while Molloy and Brigid went inside. Brigid packed a suitcase. Molloy climbed up into the ceiling and had a poke round. He drove both women to the station and bought Brigid a ticket to Hamilton with a bus connection to Morrinsville. He gave her a hundred pounds in a sealed envelope, and a kiss on the cheek.

  Later that evening Molloy parked outside Toomey’s house. There were lights on inside. He approached the house and knocked.

  “Who is it?” said Toomey.

  “Johnny Molloy.”

  The door opened. Toomey was wearing braces over an unbuttoned white shirt, and holding a glass of beer. He brewed his own from a set-up under the house.

  “The man of the hour,” said Toomey, standing back. “Long time no see, as the Chinaman said. Come in. I’m just sampling a new brew.”

  Molloy held a glass at an angle as Toomey slowly poured. The policeman put the flagon on the bench. “Cheers.”

  “Good luck.”

  They drank. It was a lively brew with a good head and a hoppy flavour.

  “Not bad,” said Molloy, putting his glass down.

  “Tell me,” said Toomey. “And this is the beer talking, probably. Loose lips sink ships, sorta thing? But what’s it feel like to shoot a bloke? Never had the pleasure, myself.”

  Molloy put his glass on the kitchen table. “Depends on the bloke,” he said, looking Toomey in the eye. “Some ratbags I wouldn’t think twice about.”

  Toomey straightened slightly. “What’s on your mind, John?” he said.

  “I want to talk to you about Brigid.”

  Toomey looked at him. “What about Brigid?”

  “About that shiner you gave her.”

  “The effrontery,” said Toomey, putting down his glass. “It’s none of your blasted business. What goes on between a married couple in the—”

  Molloy spun off his right leg, sending a hook smashing into Toomey’s ribcage, the false ribs at the bottom, the ones easiest to break.

  The policeman doubled over, gasping, one hand on the bench for support, the other wrapped around his middle. Molloy stepped in and hit him again.

  “The first one was for Brigid. The second was for setting me up with Sunny Day outside the RSC that night, you gutless bastard.”

  “Are you mad?” Toomey said eventually, his eyes watering, face contorted. “Battery on a member of the police? You’ll swing for this, you fucking Communist.”

  “Brigid’s gone away,” said Molloy. “She won’t be back. I’ve stashed four hundred quid in a paper bag somewhere round this section. Bloodhounds couldn’t find it. But if I hear Brigid’s so much as stubbed a toe you’re for the high jump, Pat. I’ve got mates on Truth. They won’t ignore open corruption, even in the gaming squad.” He washed his glass and put it upside down on the bench by the sink. “Thanks for the beer.”

  Molloy drove to the Municipal Baths and stood under a hot shower for a long time. He was hungry. He drove to Greys Avenue and parked outside the Golden Dragon. The dining room was empty apart from a waiter making notes with a pencil on a copy of Best Bets, and a woman sitting alone in the corner, smoking. He sat down by the door. The waiter padded over with a plate of bread and butter. Molloy asked for chow mein and a pot of tea. There was a brief outburst of shouting between the waiter and the kitchen, which Molloy assumed had something to do with the lateness of the hour. A pot crashed onto a stovetop. The woman, who had red lipstick and a tight dress, gave the private detective what Sister Colleen would have described as a brazen look. But Molloy didn’t feel like it. He shook his head and the woman went back to her cigarette. He ate dinner, and went home.

  THE END

  to

  MAURICE CULLINANE

  and

  REX LAWRENCE

  with love and respect

  Everything that was good from that small, remote country had gone into them — sunshine and strength, good sense, patience, the versatility of practical men.

  —John Mulgan, Report on Experience

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Red Herring is fiction, “pure bunkum from end to end”, as Jock Barnes might have said, with historical events reordered to suit the demands of the plot. I’ve read a number of books and articles written during and about the period, not so much for their factual content as for their colour. “Pure bunkum from end to end”, for example, is a quote from Barry Gustafson’s history of the National Party, The First 50 Years (with its ominous implication that there will be 50 more), as was Sid Holland’s response to the suggestion that he get some flunky to shine his shoes. Bones Harrington’s line to Molloy, “get that down your rotten guts”, is from the late Gordon Slatter’s account of the Italian Campaign, One More River. “You pansies never knew what a real war was” is from Slatter’s wonderful novel, A Gun In My Hand.

  The material about F.P. Walsh was suggested by Dean Parker’s 1988 Metro article, “The Black Prince”, and Graeme Hunt’s 2004 Walsh biography, Black Prince: The Story of Fintan Patrick Walsh. V.G. Parker is a salute to Dean’s legendary uncle, Uncle Vic, “the Dzerzhinsky of Grafton Gully.”

  Material about the Maori Battalion is based on Monty Souter’s magnificent and moving Nga Tama Toa,
the reading of which has been one of the delights of this whole exercise. The Thomas Cook heist was suggested by a passing remark in Peter Winter’s vivid account of the Crete Campaign, Expendable.

  I came across the line, “His last radio message was ‘Japanese coming. Regards to all’” in Michael Field’s memoir, Swimming with Sharks. The message was sent by Coastwatcher Arthur Heenan, a farmer’s son from Middlemarch, executed by the Japanese in October 1942, on Tarawa in what is now Kiribat.

  The description of the colour of the earth on Chunuk Bair — “I would say it was a dull, browny red. And that was blood” — was recounted by Vic Nicholson, a veteran of the Wellington Battalion, in the 1984 TVNZ documentary, Gallipoli: The New Zealand Story.

  Both Michael Bassett and R.C.J. Stone have written about the Kelly Gang, described by the pre-war American Consul-General in Auckland, Walter Boyle, as “dissatisfied conservatives naively endeavouring to run affairs of state from their deep leather armchairs in Princes Street.” Conrad Bollinger, in Grog’s Own Country, says that the gang got its name “not because it shared any of the Robin Hood qualities of Ned Kelly’s cohorts but merely because of the similarity of their business methods to those of bushrangers”. Grog’s Own Country is also the source of Sid Holland’s remark about the complexity of the Emergency Regulations, “It would take a Philadelphia lawyer to understand them.”

  The term “stonking” — described by The Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War as “the terrifying concentration of the fire of all the divisional artillery upon a single crucial point” — is from Haddon Donald’s In Peace and War: A Civilian Soldier’s Story. Donald was CO of the 22nd Battalion and the epitome of the long-service soldier — “22 right through” — from Greece to Trieste.

  “The New Zealand Division’s first combined exercise was a battle and they did pretty well” is a reworking of a line from The Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War. The original is, “Instead of being a training run, our first combined exercise was to become a battle.” Material on the Greek Campaign is from Christopher Pugsley’s utterly engaging A Bloody Road Home and Monty Souter’s Nga Tama Toa. My version would not stand a historian’s scrutiny but I think the tone is true.

  I read or was told or overheard somewhere the description of a young and pregnant woman waiting with her mother for the Limited at Taihape while her father remained in the car, but have been unable to find the source. My apologies. The original is very moving and much better.

  “He was a strange bugger, old Peter. Loved funerals.” This line was suggested by material in Gavin McLean’s biography of Peter Fraser on the nzhistory.net.nz site. I have spent many happy hours on both nzhistory.net.nz and TeAra.govt.nz, both of which took me down endless and thoroughly enjoyable rabbit holes of diversion and speculation.

  “Landed as Pat Tuohy, left as Pat Walsh.” One of the few unquestionably true things in this book is the fact that why Walsh changed his name and the circumstances of his stay in Ireland has never been satisfactorily explained. There is a caption beneath a photograph of Walsh on page 123 of Redmer Yska’s history, Truth: The Rise and Fall of the People’s Paper, that reads, “In 1959 feared union strongman F.P. Walsh threatened to hire a Sydney hitman to shoot Truth’s leading lights Cliff Plimmer and J.H. Dunn.” And on the following page, “In a legendary exchange in Wellington’s supreme court Dunn [Truth’s publisher] got Walsh to provide his real name and to confess to having once been a communist.”

  “Paul Jeffrey, a seagull and part-time music teacher at Seddon Tech, who occasionally sat in for Crombie Murdoch with Ted Croad’s big band at the Orange Ballroom on a Saturday night . . .” This over-egged detail is an opportunity to salute Chris Bourke’s Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918–1964 about which Gordon Campbell wrote in Metro, “If there is any justice Blue Smoke will become the Edmonds Cookbook of New Zealand popular culture — because truly, every home in the country should own a copy of this impeccably researched, spectacularly illustrated history of how popular music evolved here.” I picked it up initially in the hope of finding where you might get a good cup of coffee in Auckland in 1951.

  “The bomber who leaned his armed bicycle against the wall . . .” In trying to work out why O’Flynn might have left Ireland I read about the IRA and came across a number of references to the Mainland Campaign. In a site called Historic Coventry run by Robert Orland I read an article on the Broadgate bombing — the low point of the campaign — written by Simon Shaw. The article included this line: “The unknown bomb maker completed his task the following morning.” Unknown bomb maker, eh? I wrote to Simon who said he had got that detail from Tim Pat Coogan’s rollicking history of the IRA (called, prosaically, The IRA), which I read for details about the Broadgate bombing and the wider campaign. The bomber’s identity is still unconfirmed although in 1969 a Cork man named Joby O’Sullivan told a journalist with Ireland’s RTÉ, Mike Burns, that he was the perpetrator but that the carnage was accidental. “The intention was to bomb the Broadgate police station but the bicycle wheels kept getting stuck in the tram tracks so O’Sullivan abandoned it and took off.” My nephew, Ed White, told me about the “Twelve Apostles”, Michael Connelly’s squad of IRA assassins.

  Marching Through Georgia really did win the Irish Greyhound Derby in 1939. Has there ever been a more magnificent name for a dog?

  “Walsh, that Freemanite, I knew it!” A reference to Frederick Engels (yes!) Freeman, who trained at the Comintern’s Lenin School in Moscow and became General Secretary of the CPNZ in 1933. He was expelled from the Party in 1937 for coming down on the wrong side of the Popular Front line. He spent the rest of his working life in the Hutt Railway workshops, was active in the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, President of the Wellington branch of the NZUSSR Society, and an enthusiastic ballroom dancer and keen amateur photographer. He died of a heart attack after collapsing on the gangway of a Soviet research vessel in Wellington harbour in 1969. These details are from Maureen Birchfield’s Looking for Answers: A Life of Elsie Locke, and from Elsie’s son, Keith Locke.

  “The Black Death came to Sydney in January 1900 . . .” This description of the arrival of the bubonic plague in Sydney is based on material in the catalogue which accompanied Plague! Rats in the Realm, an exhibition held at the University of Sydney, Faculty of Medicine, in 2009.

  In Anna Green’s history British Capital, Antipodean Labour. Working the New Zealand Waterfront 1915–1951, “One member of the Auckland executive recalled that fostering social and cultural activities had been a deliberate union policy after the war to ‘combat a long, continuous, vicious media campaign against us’ and to build up the union into an organisation that would gain the respect of the community as a whole.” Wharfies had sports teams, boxing competitions, pipe bands and chess clubs. Their debating team won the Athenaeum Challenge Cup — the senior debating trophy of the Auckland Debating Association — in 1948 and 1950. So the existence of a Watersiders’ Chorale, like a lot of other stuff in this story, is not out of the question.

  I’d like to thank the following: Johnny Fay, all the Molloys, Geoff Walker, Sue Reidy, Finlay Macdonald, the late Gordon Slatter, Dean Parker, Andrew Maben, Graeme Hunt, Monty Souter, Christopher Pugsley, Stuart Hoar, John Newton, Christine Winter, Susan Butterworth, Gwion Thornley, Bill Rosenberg, Jim McAloon, Pat Booth, Barry Gustafson, Redmer Yska, Anna Green, David Tossman, Murray Horton, Keith Locke, Andrew Laben, Jane Elliott. Elliott, Mick Sinclair, Robert Orland, Simon Shaw, Tim Hunkin, Sara Vui-Talitu, Margie Thomson, Jim Welch, Julia Knapman, Dianne Blacklock, Sandra Noakes, Penguin Books for permission to use Michael King’s quote from The Penguin History of New Zealand, Victoria University Press for permission to use John Mulgan’s quote from Report on Experience, Frances and Pete, Nick and Kate.

  Errors, willful and otherwise, are my own.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JONOTHAN CULLINANE was born in Palmerston North in 1951. Having established his p
roletarian bona fides as a roughneck on oil rigs in Canada and the North Sea and as a proofreader and bartender in New York City during the 1970s, he began working in the New Zealand film industry in 1981. In 2007 he wrote and directed We’re Here to Help, about the Christchurch businessman Dave Henderson’s titanic run-in with the IRD. The unprecedented success of that film led to a job as a postie in Mt Roskill, Auckland, a position he still holds.

  Red Herring is his first novel.

  COPYRIGHT

  HarperCollinsPublishers

  First published in 2016

  by HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited

  Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand

  harpercollins.co.nz

  Copyright © Jonothan Cullinane 2016

  Jonothan Cullinane asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. This work is copyright. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  HarperCollinsPublishers

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  ISBN 978 1 7755 4098 4 (pbk)

  ISBN 978 1 7754 9136 1 (ebook)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

  Cover design by Darren Holt, HarperCollins Design Studio

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