by Thomas, Paul
Ihaka decided this was one haka he really should participate in. He took his place beside Billy. ‘OK champ, let’s do it right.’
It wasn’t easy getting Billy into bed. He wanted to watch the post-match interviews and the replay of the match highlights. Ihaka suspected that if the All Blacks had lost, Billy would’ve claimed he was too upset to go to sleep and needed to be distracted with a game of Monopoly or allowed to stay up to watch whatever they watched. He was normally pretty good at charming or cajoling Denise into cutting him some slack, but not tonight. You’re wasting your breath, pal, thought Ihaka: as far as Mum’s concerned, two’s company, three’s a crowd. Not necessarily in a good way.
They put Billy to bed. Two, maybe three, seconds after they got back to the living room, Denise asked, ‘So who was that on the phone?’
Ihaka explained. It was the first time Denise had heard the name Miriam Lovell.
She sat at the far end of the sofa, legs tucked underneath her, arms folded, giving the distinct impression that Ihaka’s notion of the perfect end to the perfect day was already a lost cause. ‘Let me get this straight: you’re giving us the flick to go and meet your ex?’
He shook his head. ‘That’s as straight as a dog’s hind leg,’ he said. ‘She’s not my ex, and it’s not like I’ve got much choice. She said it’s important.’
‘And what are we, trivial? Of course she said it’s important; she wants to see you.’
‘Actually, I got the impression she’d really prefer not to see me. She’s come across something she thinks I should know about so —.’
‘Like what?’
‘That’s what I’m going to find out. I could’ve asked her to spell it out but then I could’ve been on the phone for another five or ten minutes and I didn’t want to spoil the evening.’
‘Really? Well, if that was the plan, I have to tell you, you came up short.’
‘What’s the big deal? I mean, a fucking two-minute phone call —.’
‘A fucking two-minute phone call to set up a date that means you won’t be coming to Devonport with us. Which, incidentally, was your idea — or have you already forgotten that? Just as you’ve obviously forgotten how much Billy’s looking forward to it.’
They’d had rows before, of course, but not because he was breaking an arrangement to meet an ex. Ex-what? Ex-acquaintance if the truth (or near enough to it) be told, but Denise wasn’t buying it. Ihaka could have kicked himself: he should have seen this coming and headed it off at the pass. Easier said than done, though, with Billy’s big, brown, anxious eyes on him.
Denise tended to heat up quickly and cool down almost as quickly. Experience had taught him that the best way of dealing with these flare-ups was to call a time-out: stop it getting out of hand, give her a chance to calm down. In twenty minutes she’d be acting as if they hadn’t exchanged a single cross word and, what’s more, she didn’t give a shit about the thing that twenty minutes earlier she was drawing a line in the sand over. That was the ticket: park it for a while, take the heat out of it, then quietly work out a compromise like grown-ups.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘this is silly. Why don’t we —?’
‘Silly?’ Now there was a dangerous glint in her eyes. ‘If you think it’s silly for me to be upset by this shit, then fuck you.’ She stood up and walked past him, looking straight ahead. ‘I’m going to bed.’
Just like that, said Ihaka to himself. Masterfully done.
He did the washing up. The bedroom was in darkness and Denise had her face turned to the wall. She didn’t stir or speak when he got into bed. It would be the first time they’d shared a bed without getting to the verge of sleep in each other’s arms.
Ihaka wasn’t a light sleeper. When he woke up, Denise and Billy were gone.
Imperial Lane was an architect-designed cave. Miriam Lovell was already there, dabbing at the crumbs on her plate and wishing she hadn’t bolted her trim latte. Her hair was shorter, blonder and tamer, but the overall look — Ihaka called it ‘lipstick vegetarian’ — was intact. He didn’t have to wonder what he ever saw in her.
‘Well, this is cosy,’ said Ihaka.
‘Cosiness is a suburban concept,’ she said. ‘In the city only the cool survive. But the coffee’s good, and I thoroughly recommend the raspberry friands.’
Ihaka carefully lowered himself onto a spindly metal chair. ‘I’m pretty sure friands are on my list.’
‘Which list?’
‘The stuff you shouldn’t eat if you don’t want to be a fat shit list.’
She gave him the once-over, tilting her head. ‘Is it my imagination or have you lost a gram or two?’
‘I’ll take that to mean I’m a shadow of my former self. You don’t seem to have let yourself go.’
‘I’m reasonably disciplined when it comes to exercise and intake,’ she said. ‘Sadly, I can’t say the same about other aspects of my life. I’m referring to my work habits,’ she added hastily. ‘My thesis will soon be old enough to stay up later than me.’
She was writing a PhD thesis on communism in the trade union movement during the 1960s and 70s. She knew more about the working life of Ihaka’s late father Jimmy, a union firebrand and renegade Marxist, than he did.
‘So the boy who answered your phone —?’
‘Billy. Belongs to a friend of mine.’
‘Would he, by any chance, be the same boy whose game of cricket was so much more attractive a proposition than meeting me for brunch?’
It occurred to Ihaka that history was repeating itself, only in reverse: he’d put paid to his relationship with Miriam by going to watch Billy play cricket when he was meant to be meeting her in a Herne Bay café. (Getting Billy to invite him was Denise’s way of signalling that, while she might have told Ihaka to get the fuck out of her life, she didn’t mean it, like, literally.)
Ihaka nodded.
‘So is your attachment to this child something that should concern the authorities?’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Thank you for caring. His mother doesn’t seem to think so.’
‘Ah, cherchez la femme. We come to the nitty-gritty.’
Ihaka pushed his chair back. ‘This is it? This is what I rearranged my day off for?’
Miriam’s chin came up. ‘Oh, don’t be so pompous. I’m entitled to a bit of fun, aren’t I?’
‘Can I make a suggestion?’ he said. ‘Why don’t you tell me whatever it is you think I need to know? Once that’s out of the way, we can see how we’re going and either have a friendly catch-up or just go our separate ways.’
Miriam took a deep breath. ‘Spoilsport. Well, a couple of months ago, when I was having a moan to one of the old union guys I’ve got to know, he said, “I wonder what happened to Ethan’s diaries; there’d be some meaty stuff in there.” He was talking about Ethan Stern, an American who was a political studies lecturer at university and used to hang out with the comrades. He was one of those rather head-in-the-clouds left-wing intellectuals who believed that if the politically aware working class and the enlightened middle class linked arms, we’d have a people’s paradise in no time. Apparently, though, he was an assiduous diarist, and if they still existed, his diaries would be pure gold from my point of view: primary source material that hadn’t been cherry-picked by academics and churned up by a horde of post-grads. Stern died years ago, but I traced his widow who’s doing the old hippie thing down on the Coromandel. She told me that after Ethan’s death she’d packed up all his papers, including the diaries, and sent them off to the pol studs department.’ She eyed Ihaka suspiciously. ‘Am I boring you?’
‘Well, maybe a bit.’
‘Trust me, it gets better,’ she said. ‘I was very excited. If I could find those diaries, finishing the thesis would be a piece of cake, plus it would be infinitely better than it was looking like being. I got hold of the woman who’d been
the head of department’s secretary at the time and, wonder of wonders, she remembered the cartons arriving. As you’d expect, they got bunged in a corner awaiting a permanent home and promptly forgotten about.
‘It was a convoluted process — the department’s not in the same street these days, let alone the same building — but to cut a long story short I found the cartons in one of the main library’s storerooms. I’m sure you, being a detective, can appreciate what a thrill that was.’ She waited for Ihaka’s salute, one dogged sleuth to another.
‘It must have been very satisfying.’
‘Indeed. And I’m sure you can imagine how deflating it was to discover the diaries had been removed.’
‘Oh shit.’
‘Oh shit, indeed. Seeing I’d gone to all that trouble, I thought I might as well go through what was there. It was mostly lecture notes — all I can say is thank God I didn’t have to sit through the lectures — but I did come across this long article he’d written for some academic journal. They’d sent it back with a note saying he needed to do this, that and the next thing before they’d publish it, but he’d taken umbrage and told them to get stuffed. He’d written on the back of it, basically used it as notepaper. After I’d read a couple of pages, it occurred to me that maybe this was stuff he’d decided not to put in his diary for whatever reason: there were some pretty forthright comments about his departmental colleagues and certain well-known trade unionists.’ She took a folded A4 page from her handbag. ‘Have a look at this.’
It was a photo copy; half the page had been blacked out.
‘What happened to the rest of it?’
‘A little nugget for my thesis,’ said Lovell. ‘Of interest only to academics.’
It took Ihaka a few seconds to get the hang of Stern’s hand-writing:
6. 13. 87.
Jimmy Ihaka never ceases to amaze me. An extraordinary combination of idealism, bloody-mindedness, and mischief-making. Impossible to dislike, impossible not to admire, but he really can be a pain in the ass. You’d think on this of all issues he wouldn’t rock the boat, but oh no. The leadership of the Moscow faction hates him with a passion. Sometimes they forget I’m not a card-carrier; I guess they’re just venting their frustration, but after some of the stuff I’ve overheard I really wouldn’t be that surprised if Jimmy met with an ‘accident’ one of these days.
‘You’ll note the date,’ said Lovell.
Ihaka nodded slowly. ‘Just days before the old man died.’
‘Quite a coincidence, wouldn’t you say? He had a heart attack, right?’
‘So I’ve always understood.’
‘Was there a post-mortem?’
‘Wouldn’t know. I guess it was kind of taken for granted — he’d had a couple of scares and heart problems ran in the family.’
‘Well, you might want to look into it because here’s another coincidence: a few days after your father died, Stern went jogging in the Waitakeres, as he did every Friday morning. Except this time he slipped down a bank, went head-first into a tree and that was the end of him.’
Three
The ex-policeman lived in a basement granny flat at the back of a professional couple’s house in the Wellington suburb of Wadestown.
Most nights their two-year-old woke up between 2 and 3 am and howled till he was blue in the face. An ugly little face in the ex-policeman’s opinion, although it would be fair to say he had a jaundiced view of the child’s appearance, personality and, indeed, existence. The bawling had the desired effect of waking the parents, and the side effect — also desired, in the ex-policeman’s agitated imagination — of waking him.
The lady of the house, a lawyer whom the ex-policeman suspected of frightening ambition, got up at six. He would lie awake wondering why she made such a production of getting ready for work, having a Clayton’s breakfast (yoghurt and a cup of hot water embellished with a handful of fragrant leaves) and saying goodbye to her son and husband, a Cabinet Minister’s press secretary.
Every morning she went walkabout up there, high heels click-clacking on bare floorboards. Was it nervous energy? A workout while you get ready for work regime for incredibly busy people? Was she strategising on her smartphone with an equally up and at ’em colleague? (Probably not, given that virtually every other noise they made invaded his consciousness; he sometimes heard him fart and her complain.) Or was she one of those driven yet fluffy-minded individuals who can mislay their car keys while boiling a jug of water?
The granny flat was dark and pokey and cold. His children were quite matter-of-fact about their unwillingness to overnight there. He couldn’t really blame them: one had to sleep on the sofa, which wasn’t a great place to sit, let alone sleep. The other had the second bedroom which resembled a cell in the monastery of a ferociously austere order. And there was the sleep disruption: he had to put up with it, but there didn’t seem much point making them.
His kids weren’t particularly spoilt, at least compared to some of their friends, but it was a come-down from what they were used to. And given his sometimes problematic relationship with them — it was officially his fault the family was no longer together — it made no sense to squander his limited capacity for emotional blackmail on lost causes.
On the plus side, the flat was as cheap as accommodation gets in Wadestown, an agreeable suburb with harbour views for some less than ten minutes from downtown. And it was within walking distance of the rented house where the kids lived with their mother, his estranged wife. Most mornings he would go over there to walk their Labrador, the only living thing that was always pleased to see him.
The ex-policeman tried to avoid self-pity. It was like vertigo: an impulse to do what your rational self knew was pointless and self-destructive. But when he contemplated what he’d become, the distance from his children, the wreckage of his marriage and career, and the scant if not non-existent prospects of redemption, it was impossible not to succumb now and again.
Whenever that happened, he’d remind himself of Tito Ihaka’s parting words. Ihaka, his best friend in the police and the agent of his downfall, had ended their final conversation thus: ‘Look on the bright side, Johan: you’ve got away with murder.’
Shortly after Johan Van Roon arrived at Auckland Central straight from Police College, a shy, pale, lanky, first-generation Kiwi, the son of Dutch immigrants, Detective Sergeant Ihaka took him under his wing. Van Roon repaid Ihaka’s gruff, erratic patronage with loyalty bordering on devotion.
But Van Roon was too capable to remain a Detective Constable. Once he and Ihaka were on the same level, they could be mates; Ihaka was, nominally, godfather to Van Roon’s fourteen-year-old daughter. When Ihaka was denied promotion and subsequently banished to the Wairarapa, Van Roon was outraged: his friend and mentor, the best cop he knew, had been cut down and marginalised by a cabal of small minds and big egos for refusing to bend the knee and play their petty political games. Consumed with bitterness, blinded by disillusionment, Van Roon lost his way.
An information swap arrangement with Doug ‘Prof’ Yallop, a clever and manipulative underworld grey eminence, evolved into a hijacking operation. Van Roon rationalised it as separating thieves from their ill-gotten gains. When Blair Corvine, an undercover policeman and mate of Ihaka’s, picked up a whisper that one of the rip-off crew was a cop, Van Roon bailed out. Shortly afterwards he was promoted to Detective Inspector and posted to Wellington. He was out of Auckland and going straight, but he’d set uncontrollable forces in motion: Corvine was shot and left for dead; the shooter and third member of the hijacking crew, a bikie gangster named Jerry Spragg, lost his mind as a result of a savage prison beating.
Then the previous summer, out of the blue, Superintendent Finbar McGrail had asked him to pass on the message that Ihaka’s presence was required in Auckland.
An alarm bell went off. Corvine’s intelligence and his interactions with his handler
s at Auckland Central had been investigated; no evidence was found to support the rumour of police involvement in the hijacking operation or to suggest that a breach of security had blown Corvine’s cover. But McGrail was acute and subtle: he would know that Ihaka would assume the investigators’ first and overriding priority had been to protect the organisation; he’d also know that, once back in Auckland, Ihaka would poke around in the undergrowth to see what crawled out. That was just the way he was.
So when Ihaka rang wanting the address of Corvine’s safe house, a highly classified piece of information known only to a handful of senior officers, Van Roon knew it was game on. He dispersed his criminal proceeds, about $200,000 in cash. Some was in safety deposit boxes; some was buried in Otari-Wilton’s bush where he walked the dog. He went out at night in a car he kept in a lock-up garage in Lower Hutt, burying the money in $20,000 batches at remote locations in the Wairarapa.
But Yallop was his real vulnerability. If the squeeze went on, Yallop had the perfect get-out-of-jail card: he could finger a corrupt cop. And if the need arose, he would play that card in a heartbeat. That was just the way he was.
Then Yallop got in touch to say Ihaka had been around asking questions about Corvine and Spragg. Just out of curiosity so he said but, as they both knew, Ihaka didn’t do idle curiosity. Yallop’s point was that if Ihaka was half as good as Van Roon had made him out to be, he might have to be dealt with. As in taken out; as in put in the ground.
Even as Van Roon was stuffing his pockets with stolen cash, he would have sworn that he simply didn’t have it in him to kill another human being in cold blood. After that conversation with Yallop he had an epiphany: what had been unthinkable was now unavoidable. As long as Yallop lived to tell tales, Van Roon was exposed; if Yallop was silenced, he was untouchable. They could search his house and property, go through his financial records, follow the paper trail, scrutinise every transaction, run down every number in his phone records and turn the Auckland underworld inside out without finding a scrap of incriminating evidence. And now here was Yallop talking about putting out a contract on Ihaka. Two irresistible imperatives: save himself, save his mate.