by Thomas, Paul
A catalogue record for this e-book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.
ISBN: 978-1-978-927262-21-4
An Upstart Press Book
Published in 2014 by Upstart Press Ltd
B3, 72 Apollo Drive, Rosedale
Auckland, New Zealand
Text © Paul Thomas 2014
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
Design and format © Upstart Press Ltd 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form.
E-book produced by CVdesign Ltd
To the memory of my mother and father.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my sister Susan for her legal expertise and Ross Vintiner for sharing his insights into the nuclear ships issue.
Thanks also to the Christchurch Writers’ Festival for its support of New Zealand crime writing.
Contents
Imprint
Dedication
Acknowledgements
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty One
Twenty Two
Epilogue
About the author
One
Since becoming Auckland District Commander and developing an appreciation for wine — the two were related — Finbar McGrail hadn’t been sleeping as well as he used to.
His late, grimly Presbyterian mother was fond of saying ‘the sleep of the righteous is sweet’, a paraphrase of Proverbs 3:24. While McGrail was confident that promotion hadn’t disabled his moral compass, he had to acknowledge that he’d gone from having an occasional glass of wine to not needing an occasion to open a bottle, and from dutifully saying his prayers to no longer bothering to touch base with God before calling it a night.
First the formalities were dispensed with: the kneeling beside the bed, head bowed (because although heaven is commonly thought to be up there somewhere, presumably above airliners’ cruising altitude, believers know that God is everywhere, even under one’s bed), hands clasped, eyes shut, the constipated expression of rapture tempered by obeisance. Once he started saying his prayers after, rather than before, getting into bed, it was a short step to mouthing the words, as opposed to saying them out loud, and an even shorter step to thinking them. And once the process was internalised, it was difficult not to get distracted or deflected. It was almost as if his mind had a mind of its own.
Eventually McGrail gave up the struggle and fell into the habit of thinking about work for however long it took for his wife’s current book to make her eyelids droop. When she said good-night and turned off the bedside light, he would roll onto his side and go to sleep, albeit not without a twinge of guilt, like someone who has let another day go by without ringing his aged parents.
As often as not these days, McGrail would wake up in the early hours. Rather than wait for the fog of sleep to roll back in or engage in that erratic, tangential mental activity that seems productive, even inspired, at 3 am but turns out to be inconsequential at best when retrieved in the morning, he’d slip out of bed. After making himself a cup of cocoa, he’d go into his study to chip away at his email backlog, which was seldom less than a hundred messages.
Before he went back to bed, McGrail would look at a photo that he still kept in his bottom drawer even though his children had left home. It was a head-and-shoulders shot of a teenage girl trying to put on an exasperated ‘Do I really have to do this?’ expression but unable to keep the smile off her face. McGrail knew a lot about this girl, whose name was Polly Stenson. For instance, he knew that she’d had her braces removed a fortnight before the photo was taken. The orthodontist had met the challenge he’d been set two years earlier: to have Polly’s teeth straight and unencumbered by her seventeenth birthday.
The date print-out, in orange lettering, on the bottom right-hand corner of the photo said 15. 8. 87. It was taken on the last afternoon of Polly Stenson’s short life.
McGrail had been in New Zealand a fortnight, having left Northern Ireland even though — in fact because — he was a rising star in the Royal Ulster Constabulary. The Stenson murder was the first case for Auckland Central’s new Detective Inspector, of whom much was expected.
Polly was murdered at an election-night party held at the spectacular Remuera home of merchant banker Tim Barton and his wife Nicky. Barton had called it a ‘Win-Win’ party because, as far as people like him were concerned, it made no difference who won the election. That was understandable: it seemed to McGrail that the only real economic disagreement between the two major parties was over which of them was the more laissez-faire.
McGrail was taken aback by the ostentatious displays of wealth and unashamed extravagance he encountered during the investigation. He and his wife had decided to immigrate to New Zealand after extensive research and the process of elimination led them to the conclusion that their people — the Protestants of Ulster — had more in common with New Zealanders than any other nationality.
McGrail was under the impression that New Zealanders were stoic, understated, laconic to the point of taciturnity, suspicious of self-promotion and public display, inclined to pessimism and quick to say ‘I told you so’ when their gloomy prognoses were borne out. The glaring difference was that New Zealanders didn’t seem to take religion anywhere near seriously enough to kill or maim their neighbours over denominational differences. (That was an aspect of life in Northern Ireland that McGrail was keen to put behind him: he had thought about emigrating for years, but the tipping point was finding out that his name was on a Provisional IRA hit-list. While hit-lists were a dime a dozen in Belfast — there were pub darts teams who had them — the Provos had already put a black line through some of the names on theirs.) If McGrail had wanted nouveau-riche vulgarity, he would have gone to America, or even Australia. Thankfully it didn’t last. After the Black Tuesday sharemarket crash later that year, New Zealanders reverted to type. For a while, anyway.
The investigation was a nightmare. Over the course of the evening at least three hundred people had passed through the Barton mansion, but that was a woolly estimate since there were no formal invitations or guest list: Barton had just put the word out to his friends who passed it on to their various overlapping social circles. Barton’s twenty-one-year-old son Johnny and teenage daughter Lucy had hosted their own sub-parties.
There was no proper security and therefore no one with a sober recollection of comings and goings or who was likely to notice odd or jarring behaviour. Security, such as it was, was provided by Johnny’s rugby team who were given the narrow brief of repelling any uncouth elements that might try to crash the party. Predictably, most of the rugby players got drunker and did so faster than the other attendees.
Polly and Lucy went to the same girls’ private school, although Polly was a bit of an outsider. Her father was middle management; she was a scholarship girl, bright and athletic. Although her friends had done their best to corrupt her, Polly stuck to her unfashionable principles relating to booze, drugs and what was a seemly level of sexual activity for a girl her age.
By midnight, most of the girls and their dates — Polly was one of the few in the group who didn’t have a boyfriend — were too tipsy or distracted to look out for their friends. But then why would they? If you weren’t safe in that grand house in one of Auckland’s most prestigious streets surrounded by hundreds of people, including MPs from both major parties and an array of Rich Listers and movers and shakers, where on earth would you be?
The Barton place was on three levels. The ground floor was the living and entertainment area. Downstairs was the kids’ domain: the only adults who ventured below were the cleaning ladies. Upstairs was the parents’ quarters, complete with his-and-hers studies, library, gymnasium and sauna. It was well understood that upstairs was a child-free no-go zone.
The adults had congregated on the ground floor. The younger generation had split into groups: despite the time of year the rugby players yahooed around the pool; Lucy and friends mainly stayed downstairs; the little band of dope smokers had made their furtive way to the tennis court.
Polly had arranged to sleep over at another friend’s house; a cab was booked for 2 am. Around 11.30 pm, without saying where she was going or why, she went upstairs. She had a brief exchange with Tim Barton, telling him she felt like getting some fresh air. He later said she seemed fine: she’d obviously had a few drinks but wasn’t drunk, disoriented or looking for trouble.
Outside she bumped into a friend’s boyfriend who’d been out on the tennis court where the joints were circulating. She told him she was taking time out from the tiresome boy-girl interaction downstairs. He advised her to get stoned, knowing there was zero chance of that happening. That was the last anyone saw of her.
Just before 2 am the girl she was going to stay with went looking for her. It wasn’t an exhaustive search. The friend was feeling woozy and aware that the sooner she got to sleep, the less awful she’d feel the next day. She quickly reached the convenient conclusion that Polly had got sick of being the only girl downstairs whose knickers weren’t under siege and cabbed it back to her own place. The friend went home and crashed; her parents hadn’t felt the need to wait up. It wasn’t until 10.30 the following morning when her mother Barbara rang to remind Polly of their deal — she could go to the party and sleep over at her friend’s on the condition she spent Sunday studying — that anyone realised she was missing.
Barbara rang Nicky Barton who went straight downstairs. There were several girls sleeping it off down there, but Polly wasn’t one of them. At around 11.15 Tim Barton got out of bed and shuffled down the corridor and through the state-of-the-art gym to the sauna where he hoped to sweat out his hellish hangover. He was so stupefied that his first thought on noticing that there was someone tucked in under the wooden seat was: how shit-faced would you have to be to crash under there?
Polly had been strangled. There was nothing to indicate a struggle: her clothes were intact, her torso and face unmarked. She hadn’t been sexually active or sexually assaulted.
Suspicion fell on the rugby players. They ticked a lot of boxes: aggression, inebriation and a reputation for Neanderthal behaviour towards women. The theory was that Polly, bored and curious, had decided to explore. (Her fingerprints were found in the master bedroom.) One or more of the rugby players had seen her go upstairs, followed her, put the hard word on her and reacted violently when rebuffed.
The players proclaimed their innocence. No one remembered seeing any of them go upstairs, but then no one remembered seeing Polly go upstairs either. Part of the problem was that the stairs were well away from the party’s epicentre. Secondly, even though there were three toilets on the ground floor, there were lots of people taking on lots of fluid resulting in steady traffic up to the toilet at the top of the stairs.
The theory unravelled. Johnny Barton was the only member of the team whose fingerprints were found upstairs. Then there was the inconvenient fact that just before midnight the rugby team had chased the pot smokers off the tennis court so they could practise some moves. The practice session, which went on for over an hour with frequent beer breaks, was run by the team’s Samoan contingent, two deeply religious teetotallers. They were adamant that the entire team, bar Johnny who was inside chatting to a High Court judge, was present and correct, although their handling skills left something to be desired. Even if there had been circumstantial evidence pointing to a player, it would have been difficult to make it stick given the time of death was between midnight and 1 am.
The first rule of police work is never overlook the obvious. McGrail accepted that ‘drunken rugby brute gone nuts’ was the obvious scenario, but never subscribed to it. The crime scene would have been messier, the victim would have been roughed up, the killer would probably have drawn attention to himself with his behaviour or demeanour.
It didn’t look or feel sexual to McGrail. It looked and felt as if murder had been the object of the exercise, rather than the by-product of attempted rape or a psychotic reaction to rejection.
It was conceivable that a burglar had infiltrated the party and was helping himself to Barton’s wife’s jewellery when Polly poked her nose into the master bedroom. He hid her body in the sauna to delay discovery and left empty-handed rather than advertise his presence by stealing anything.
Or Polly could have interrupted someone going through the filing cabinets in Barton’s study. He was renowned for playing hardball and there was commercially sensitive information in the cabinets, but nothing was missing and there were no unidentified fingerprints in the study. Barton scoffed at the notion that a guest might have tried to steal jewellery or information: he wasn’t in the habit of hosting his enemies or people who needed to steal.
In Northern Ireland McGrail had worked on many cases involving terrorism (or criminal activity disguised as terrorism) on the part of the IRA, its offshoots and the various Protestant paramilitaries, so he was no stranger to political pressure or outside interference. But he was to be amazed at the level of oversight exercised by his superiors all the way up to the Minister of Police. He was even more amazed by the brazen lack of cooperation from some guests, and his superiors’ preference for a softly-softly approach which only encouraged the non-cooperators to carry on being uncooperative. And once it became apparent that there wouldn’t be a swift resolution, the pressure, if anything, increased. Only now the pressure was on to downgrade the investigation.
Nine months after Polly’s murder, McGrail went to see her parents for the last time. They lived on the border of Meadowbank and Glen Innes, an area he’d heard described as ‘middle class but not by much’, in a house that was nice enough but a world removed from the Barton residence with its harbour views and palatial scale, its art collection and temperature-controlled wine cellar and abiding impression of having been created and furnished not on the basis of what was sensible or necessary or even desirable, but to ensure that all and sundry understood money was no object.
McGrail brought the Stensons up to date, outlining in his dispassionate, expressionless way the difficulties and frustrations arising from the circumstances of that night and having to deal with people who seemed to think their wealth and status freed them from legal and moral obligations. He admitted that after nine months’ intensive work, he and his team had no leads, no witnesses, no suspects, no credible theory and therefore no clear path forward. That didn’t mean they were giving up, but the investigation would be scaled down which meant fewer resources.
He wasn’t expecting them to protest: desolation had overtaken them, driving out all other emotions. It was even possible, he thought, that they feared catharsis might compromise the emptiness they now accepted as their destiny, or fretted over what might come to light in the event of a breakthrough. The victim’s family and friends always ask why although the answer is usually mundane or sordid or just another example of the randomness of fate. There was no explanation for this poor child’s destruction that would make any sense to her paren
ts.
Gordon Stenson was greyer and thinner, mild to the point of passivity, his eyes sunk in black, bony recesses. ‘So you don’t have a theory, Mr McGrail? I mean you personally?’
‘Not really,’ replied McGrail. ‘As I said, I don’t believe it was sexually motivated. I have an instinct that she was killed because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time rather than because she was Polly Stenson, if you follow me. But why that should have been the case, I’ve no idea.’
Barbara Stenson was five years younger than her husband. Now they looked the same age and he looked five years older than he actually was. ‘Would it be fair to say, Inspector,’ she said, ‘that you’ve stopped looking and are really just hoping for something to drop into your lap?’
‘That would be overstating it,’ said McGrail, ‘but there’s an element of truth to it. I’d just add that quite a lot of crimes are solved because something drops into our lap.’
She handed McGrail an envelope. ‘There’s a photo of Polly in there — perhaps you could look at it from time to time. She deserves to be remembered by more than just the two of us.’
McGrail examined himself in the mirror above the basins. Well, he thought, that could have been worse; I could’ve told the Minister what I really think of him.
He had just had dinner at the Northern Club with the Minister of Police, the Commissioner of Police and the Minister’s new best friend, a South African management consultant and self-styled ‘change engineer’ who had been brought in to conduct what his profession called a three-sixty review of the police service with the object of eliminating waste, increasing efficiency and delivering a better return on taxpayer investment. In other words, he’d been brought in to find the dead wood that McGrail and his fellow district commanders couldn’t or wouldn’t identify.