Fallout

by Thomas, Paul

  ‘What the fuck did I just say?’

  ‘I don’t believe that woman. What the hell’s that all about?’

  ‘Are you saying she’s the liar?’

  Barton dropped his gaze. ‘No, I’m not saying that.’

  ‘Well, maybe she just thought it was about time someone in the family developed a conscience.’

  ‘That’ll be the day,’ said Barton darkly. ‘This is more about dropping me in the shit than cooperating with you, I can assure you of that.’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck either way. We’ve also got a witness who heard a couple fooling around upstairs. That was you and Tina, wasn’t it? You got together up there just as you’d planned.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you see Polly?’

  ‘No. Once I got to grips with Tina — or she got to grips with me would be a better way of putting it — I forgot all about Polly. We did the deed then went back downstairs — not together, obviously; me first. I went back outside and got sozzled with my mates. Next thing I remember is waking up to find Tim screaming at me to be in his study in two minutes or he’d be back with a bucket of cold water.

  ‘When I got up there, he went completely apeshit. What had happened was he’d been woken up, with a horrendous hangover which didn’t help matters, by a call from Roger Best who basically told him to stick their business deal up his arse. I got the whole nine yards: my sick relationship with a woman old enough to be my mother had ruined friendships and cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars; he’d tolerated my indiscretions in the past, but this was unforgiveable. I assumed it was all leading up to me being cut off without a brass razoo — never darken our door again — but in mid-rant he got this pained expression and said that his head was about to burst, he had to have a sauna. And off he went to almost literally stumble over Polly’s body. Suddenly there was more to worry about than shattered friendships and business deals going south. He made me swear not to tell the police or anyone else I’d been upstairs and I’m pretty sure he got Roger to drum that message into Tina. From then on it was a taboo subject. Sorry I misled you, but old habits die hard.’

  ‘Yeah, but you told Maddocks.’

  Barton nodded. ‘Which was bloody stupid of me, but I had to tell someone — keeping a real secret is a lot harder than you think. And by then the Bests had left town, so it wasn’t like I was dropping Tina in the shit.’

  ‘How soon after did they shoot through?’

  ‘Can’t have been much more than a month. Roger and Tina went to Sydney, James went farming down south and that was that. I’ve had nothing to do with them since.’

  ‘I need their contact details.’

  ‘I don’t have them.’

  ‘But you can get them, can’t you?’ said Ihaka. ‘The sooner you do that, the sooner you can get back to your macaroni cheese.’

  ‘I suppose my mother might know someone who’s got them.’

  ‘Well, let’s find out.’

  Ihaka made three phone calls when he got home. The first was to ask a Herald police reporter to search their electronic archive for the Muffin Man feature and email him the photo of Tom Murray in his power-to-the-people phase. The reporter kept her curiosity in check. She knew from experience that if Ihaka wanted to enlighten her, he would; if he didn’t, there was no point in asking. She also knew Ihaka never forgot a favour.

  Next he rang his former colleague and unofficial research assistant Beth Greendale to ask her to find out if Willie Smaile owned his Browns Bays residence and, if so, how much he’d paid for it.

  Then he rang Roger Best in Sydney.

  Best was predictably underwhelmed. Why? Why now? What could it possibly achieve?

  ‘We might catch the murderer,’ said Ihaka. ‘That wouldn’t be all bad.’

  ‘With respect, Sergeant Ihaka, that doesn’t seem very likely. As I recall, the original investigation went precisely nowhere. Now here we are, what, twenty-seven years later? What makes you think you can do any better now than your predecessors did then?’

  ‘We already have. We’ve identified people who were at the party but went to some trouble to hide the fact. We know why Polly went upstairs. We’ve identified individuals who were upstairs around the time of the murder. We call them suspects. They include your former wife. You don’t need me to tell you what she was doing up there, do you?’

  Best’s ‘No’ was a long time coming.

  ‘I don’t really blame you for not wanting that to come out,’ said Ihaka, ‘but, as you said, it’s twenty-seven years on. You’ve had plenty of time to get over it. So let’s hear it, from the beginning.’

  Roger and Tina’s circle regarded them as Exhibit A for the proposition that opposites attract. He was low-key, stitched-up, not exactly anti-social but definitely unspontaneous. She, as she never tired of saying, was a ‘people person’, which covered a multitude of things, some of them sins. The view from inside their marriage was less sanguine: for the first fifteen or so years what they had in common outweighed their differences. Then the equation evened up. Then it tilted the other way: what little common ground that remained an island in a sea of divergence. She liked to stay up late; he liked to go to bed early with a book. At dinner parties his eyelids would droop before the cheese board appeared, and he’d slip off to bed when the ladies were washing up. When they went to someone else’s place, he’d go armed with a reason for bailing out early and would drive home — unlike her, he hardly drank — leaving her to get a cab or flop in the hosts’ spare bedroom.

  He assumed there was the odd fling. (Sometimes he even wondered if his own behaviour amounted to what these days they call ‘enabling’.) Confirmation came in the form of cryptic comments from male friends trying to walk the line between covering up for her and forcing him to face a potentially life-changing reality. A spike in their female friends’ solicitousness was another straw in the wind.

  He knew some of his friends thought he was a wimp for putting up with it; others thought he was a sap for not seeing what was going on under his nose. He rationalised it this way: he didn’t want to be alone and didn’t want to be with anyone else, therefore turning a blind eye was the most sensible, if not the only, strategy. As long as it was ships passing in the night; as long as she didn’t formalise it by becoming someone’s mistress, or get emotionally involved. In hindsight, it was uncharacteristically optimistic of him to think this precarious arrangement would hold up indefinitely.

  Until mid-1987 Tina’s behaviour was no guide to whether she was straying or thinking of straying: she didn’t disengage or alter her routine. So the sudden change was like violent chest pains: an ominous development that couldn’t be ignored or explained away or put in reassuring perspective. She’d always been demonstratively tactile and teased him for his sense of decorum but, almost overnight it seemed, she mothballed her repertoire of physical affection — the hugs and squeezes, the lingering touches and nuzzling embraces. When he went to kiss her hello or goodbye, she’d tilt her face, offering cheek rather than mouth. If he was away on business, his calls home went unanswered as often as not. If he asked, she’d invariably been to a film by herself, although she wasn’t a big movie fan and had never liked doing things on her own.

  He spiralled down to a place where the worst-case scenario (so he thought) was the obvious explanation. On the basis of flimsy circumstantial evidence, he decided her lover was someone who worked for him. That elevated it to an intolerable breach of trust and propriety which undermined him professionally and repaid his excellence as a provider with gross betrayal. For the first time he gave in to self-pity and the urge to repay humiliation in kind. He constructed a revenge fantasy: him as the ice-cold prosecutor letting her dig herself into a black hole, then burying her alive beneath a barrow-load of irrefutable evidence. He hired a private investigator.

  The investigator reported that the signs pointed to Johnny B
arton, the twenty-one-year-old son of his friend and business partner-to-be, and a pal of his son James. Best thought it was preposterous, but was persuaded to hear the man out. There were no incriminating photos or tape recordings, just an awkward reality. During the surveillance period, Best had spent two nights away from home; on both occasions Johnny had turned up at their place and stayed till well after midnight. Given that James was flatting, Johnny was obviously there to see Tina. What for? Why else would he be spending hours on end with Tina when her husband was out of town?

  Tim Barton’s election-night party was an opportunity for first-hand scrutiny. He positioned himself where he could watch Tina without her being aware of it. He observed her constant eye contact with Johnny. He saw them surreptitiously brush hands as they passed. He saw them in a corner, hiding in plain sight (so they thought), Tina with hooded eyes and parted lips, her face sagging with desire. He saw her check her watch — he checked his; it was 11.55 — back out of a four-way conversation, slip up the stairs unobserved (so she thought). He saw Johnny do likewise a couple of minutes later. He rushed outside and threw up in a rose garden, then drove home to a sleepless night in the spare room.

  He confronted her the next morning. She erupted in furious denial, trying to make his lack of trust and low opinion the issue. How could he believe she’d do such a thing? So this was what he really thought of her? But she cracked when he threw in the private investigator and announced that he was off to share the evidence — and that of his own eyes — with Tim Barton. A cooler head might have demanded to see the evidence, pointed out it wasn’t definitive and improvised an explanation that, while hard to believe, was also hard to disprove. But not being calculating by nature and slightly unhinged at the prospect of being abandoned by both husband and lover, Tina wasn’t up to that.

  Roger rang the Bartons and got Nicky in grande-dame mode: she wouldn’t wake Tim because he’d be like a bear with a sore head, but it was nice of Roger to call and she’d pass the message on. He told her he wasn’t ringing to compliment them on their ability to throw a party; something had come up that Tim needed to know about immediately.

  Tim Barton’s really bad day began with him being woken up at least two hours too soon and with a hangover that exceeded his worst fears. He didn’t even try to talk Best out of junking their deal. A bit later he rang back to say there was a dead body in his sauna — yes, you heard right — and urge Best to give Tina the same instruction he’d given Johnny: keep your fucking mouth shut.

  For months Roger and Tina had been toying with the idea of shifting to Sydney where they had friends and he had business interests and opportunities. For much of that time James had been trying to break down their resistance to the idea of him dropping out of law school to work on his uncle’s South Island sheep station. Under the circumstances, both moves had a lot to recommend them.

  But the notion that they could rescue their marriage by making a fresh start in new surroundings was a delusion. Tina bordered on schizophrenic, half the time unable to forgive herself, the other half resenting him for not being able to move on. That proved impossible. When you can’t trust your wife with your son’s friends, there is no respite: no able-bodied male who enters your orbit can be disregarded. And when it gets to that, there’s simply not enough solid ground left on which to rebuild.

  Within eighteen months of settling in Sydney, it was over. Tina remarried on the rebound, a disaster that triggered her mental decline. She convinced herself that it was all Sydney’s fault and returned to Auckland. Two years ago, after various alarms and embarrassments, she accepted that she wasn’t making a very good fist of looking after herself and went into a retirement home. Thankfully things hadn’t deteriorated to the point where she needed to be in the secure unit. He spoke to her every couple of weeks, although it was increasingly depressing. Sometimes he got the feeling that she didn’t really know who she was talking to and didn’t really care.

  Eighteen

  Next morning Ihaka’s inbox contained a portrait of the Muffin Man as a young militant, Tom Murray front and centre at a No Nukes demo. Before forwarding it to Jeanine Stern, Ihaka mulled over the wording of the accompanying message. Eventually he settled for, ‘Recognise anyone here?’

  The retirement home was in Kohimarama, not nearly close enough to the sea to justify the promise of ‘harbourside location’ in its marketing material. Ihaka watched the comings and goings as he waited for a supervisor. The staff, mainly Filipino he guessed, seemed pleased to be there; the residents were either still making up their minds or past caring.

  The supervisor was a large, middle-aged Samoan woman, Beatrice according to her nametag, whose air of no-nonsense efficiency bordered on impatience. She and Ihaka eyed one another warily, each sensing the other might require careful handling.

  ‘I need to talk to Tina Best, if that’s what she still calls herself.’

  An unforced smile spread across Beatrice’s face. ‘Tina? Oh, she’s a sweetheart.’

  ‘What sort of shape is she in?’

  ‘Health-wise, good as gold — but I guess you mean her state of mind?’ Ihaka nodded. ‘Well, that depends on who you ask. Some of the staff would tell you she’s lost it; some would say she comes and goes; and some have a sneaky suspicion she likes to give people the impression she’s lost it when she hasn’t.’

  ‘OK, so she’s either pretty much a vegetable, taking the piss, or somewhere in between?’

  ‘That’s not a term we use,’ said Beatrice, ‘or like to hear.’

  ‘Understood. Which camp are you in?’

  ‘I’d say she comes and goes. Like a lot of the residents, she has good days and not so good days and the occasional shocker. No question her short-term memory is failing, and longer-term isn’t the best either. But it’s that classic thing: she’ll tell you about something that happened fifty years ago, in detail — what she was wearing, who said what to who. Then next day she’ll tell you again, practically word for word. So her recollection of whatever it was fifty years ago is crystal-clear, but she can’t remember the conversation she had yesterday. Where it gets a bit tricky is if you ask her about, say, living in Sydney. She’ll go all vague, but it’s hard to tell if that’s because she doesn’t remember or doesn’t want to talk about it. Older folks can be ultra-sensitive and craftier than you’d think. We get it a lot with hearing issues: they’ll make out they’re quite deaf — “Sorry, dear, you’ll have to speak up, I can’t hear a word you say” — then out of the blue they’ll go, “I heard that Mrs Bloggs down the hall talking about me behind my back.” Sometimes it’s just their little game; other times they’re trying to catch you out saying what you really think of them because you’ve assumed they can’t hear you. A couple of my co-workers think Tina puts on the dementia so people will talk about her like she’s not there.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’ said Ihaka. ‘From what I’ve heard, she never gave much of a stuff what people thought of her.’

  ‘Yes, but when was that? We see people get old on the outside — the wrinkles, the white hair, impaired mobility.’ She tapped the side of her head. ‘Something similar’s going on in here.’

  ‘Does she have many visitors?’

  ‘A reasonable number, allowing for the fact she hasn’t got immediate family in Auckland. Her son farms down in the Waikato; we don’t see much of him. He tends to put in an appearance when his dad comes over from Sydney, but that’s about it.’

  ‘What’s the atmosphere like at the family reunions?’

  ‘Don’t know. We don’t intrude on family time.’

  ‘But her ex, Roger, rings pretty regularly?’

  ‘Yeah, which is nice.’

  ‘He told me it sometimes feels like she doesn’t really know who she’s talking to.’

  Beatrice shrugged. ‘There you go. If she says she’s had a call from him, I might ask, you know, “What’s the weather like i
n Sydney?” And she’ll go, “Oh, they’re having a terrible heatwave” or “I forgot to ask” or whatever. So she knew it was him, she has some recollection of the conversation, but she’s given him the impression she wasn’t really there. Maybe she was just having an off day. Or maybe she didn’t particularly feel like talking to him. They did get divorced, after all.’

  Beatrice offered to sit in on the conversation as a reassuring presence but Ihaka pointed out it could work the other way, Tina fearing her dirty laundry might get hung out for everyone at the home to see. He promised to go easy.

  Tina Best looked robust enough, but there was a fatalistic undertone to her dreamy lassitude, as if night was falling and she was drawing the curtains on the outside world. She responded to Ihaka’s introduction with a brief, polite smile, the sort air travellers give the stranger in the next seat the first time they try to strike up a conversation. If she was surprised that a detective had come to see her, she didn’t show it.

  ‘I want to ask you about a party,’ he began.

  ‘Oh, there were lots of parties,’ she said. ‘They all just rolled into one. Same old people, same silly games.’

  ‘What sort of games?’

  ‘Party games. The games people play at parties. I thought everyone knew what they are.’

  ‘You’ll remember this party. Tim and Nicky Barton’s place, election night 1987. It was quite an occasion.’

  ‘I’m sure it was. There were no half-measures with those two. They had an image to live up to, you see. The best of everything.’

  ‘Their son Johnny was there. You remember Johnny?’ She looked away. ‘You and Johnny were pretty close, weren’t you?’ No response. ‘When was the last time you saw him?’ She took a peek at Ihaka out of the corner of her eye. He couldn’t tell if it was anxious or furtive. ‘Would you like me to ask Johnny to come and see you?’

  That generated a spark. ‘I’m perfectly all right, thank you. If people want to visit, that’s fine, but I don’t want them here under sufferance.’