by Else, Chris
'It's okay, sweetheart,' I said. 'It's okay.' It wasn't, though. I knew what she was feeling because she made me feel it myself.
'Listen,' I said. 'Why don't we go up to the farm — soon? We've got to see Ma about your outfit for the show. Right?'
I felt her relax a bit.
'Maybe we could go tomorrow. Shut up shop a bit early.' I had been planning to take her at the weekend. The problem with weekdays was that she didn't like to be driving after dark. It's the one thing about the accident, along with not riding in the back seat, that affects her when it comes to cars.
'Would you like that?' I asked.
'Gith,' she said, and laid her cheek against the top of my head.
'Your turn to do the dishes.'
'Parg!' She twisted upright and jabbed me in the ribs with her elbow. It hurt.
'It bloody well is,' I told her.
'Worg. Nar, nar, nar, nar, nar.' Tapping me on the chest with her finger. Meaning I hadn't done any work today. Then she made little yapping moves with her fingers.
'I was talking to Hemi. That was official police business!'
'Poof!'
'Christ, you're a bloody tough boss!'
She laughed. 'Poor Ken.'
***
TE KOHUNA SITS at the edge of the Mangatiki Plain. To the east is pretty gentle country rolling away beyond the river to Basingstoke. There is a fair bit of dairying down that way; these days, that's where the money is. To the west is a range of hills. They rise up easy at first but then they get steeper and seriously rugged. It rains a lot up there and there's always seems to be cloud or mist hanging round the tops. From the township there are three roads or valleys running back into the rough stuff.
To the north, only a couple of hundred metres from the service station, is Pakenga Valley Road. Monty Praguer and the Vields had farms up that way, the one running beef, the other sheep, but beyond that the country gets rough and the road twists about like a corkscrew. There used to be another farm further up but it was abandoned years ago and the bush has taken over, like it does.
The second road west is Maungaiti. It runs through land that's too rugged for farming and there's not much use for the road except to get up to Lake Nihonui. Not many people go up there. Just a few sightseers and the trampers and hunters. There are ducks on the lake, and the country round it is good for deer and pigs. It's a spooky kind of place, though. The local Maori have a legend about Nihonui-te-toto, a taniwha that lives in the lake and eats people, especially on certain days of the year, when they say the water turns to blood.
The third road out of Te Kohuna, at the south end of the town, runs into Tacketts Valley. It rises in three big steps up towards the southern side of the lake, although it doesn't make it that far. Our family farm is in the middle stretch. It is around 450 hectares, running back from the Ukunui Stream to the hills in the south. Grandad McUrran bought it from the Tacketts in the mid thirties, a fact that the Tacketts wouldn't let go of. There had always been bad blood between the two families. 'History', as Ma called it. We had 5000 head of sheep, mostly Romneys, and by then my older brother, Bill, pretty much ran the place, even though the Old Man was still meant to be in charge. But he was sixty-four and slowing down, even if he pretended not.
He and Ma live in the house Grandad McUrran had built down by the road. It's twenty minutes' drive from Te Kohuna, and Gith and I used to go up there every week or so. Now and again we'd drive further up to Bill and Leece's place on the middle flat. They had three kids and Gith got on well with them. She was such a favourite with Ma, though, that it was hard to get past the old house.
It's a rambling weatherboard place made of heart totara and it was added to over the years with the growing family. It's warm and cosy enough, but the temperatures up the valley are lower than down on the flat, and even on a summer evening Ma likes to have a fire in the grate.
'How are you, Anna, love?' She always makes a point of using Gith's real name. They wrapped each other up in a big hug.
The Old Man was sitting in his armchair with his glass of whisky. He had his right foot up on a stool.
'What's wrong with you, then?' I asked.
'Twisted his ankle, didn't he?' Ma said. Silly old bugger, she might have added but she kept it to herself.
Gith bent over his chair and kissed him. He patted her back with his free hand and caught my eye. He could see what I was thinking.
'Don't you start!' he said.
'Bill was down here earlier.' Ma didn't need to say any more. There would have been one of those talks about the Old Man 'not getting any younger'. I figured I was best out of it.
'He said he and Leece might drop by later,' Ma added.
'We can't stay that long,' I said. 'We . . .'
'I know, I know, I know.' She held up her hand to stop me. 'But I've told you before. There's plenty of room. You can always stay the night. Here. Or up the road.'
'We have a business to run,' I said. We often went over this stuff. There were reasons why we couldn't stay the night. I tried to tell her Gith wasn't happy sleeping anywhere other than our place, which was part of the truth, but Ma wouldn't listen. Once you are in the house she never wants you to leave. I can never figure out if it's because she really likes us being there or if she just needs us to smooth the rough edges off the Old Man's company.
'You are staying to dinner though,' she said.
'Sure we are.'
We settled down then: Ma and the Old Man in their usual chairs, Gith and I on the sofa. He let me have a glass of the single malt. I guess he was feeling got at after his talk with Bill and needed me on his side. Gith and Ma had a cup of tea.
The story of Anneke Hesse had already got this far. Dolly McKenzie had been on the phone to Ma with the news that Hemi had been asking round town. I told them what we knew, about the red Holden Commodore and the white van. I could feel Gith getting tense.
'Just like that other time,' Ma said. 'Those poor girls. Dolly says it's a serial killer.'
'They can't know that yet.'
'But two. It can't be a coincidence, can it?'
Gith twisted up a bit.
'Could be,' I said.
'You think so? Dolly said that Queenie in the Tearooms asked Hemi if it was the same person and he was quite evasive.'
Another twist. I reached out and put my hand on Gith's arm to settle her down. Ma saw then.
'Anna,' she said, putting her tea on the table beside her chair. 'You and I have something to do, eh?'
Gith looked at her.
'We've got to sort out that dress for Sunday week. What do you reckon?'
'Gith,' she said.
'Come on then.'
The two of them went off together, leaving me and the Old Man with our whisky. We were quiet for a while. I thought about how much better we were getting on these days, since I came back to Te Kohuna. Time was, when I was a kid, I sometimes thought he hated me and I was scared shitless of him. I guess he'd mellowed a bit over the years, and I was now big enough to stand up for myself.
'Bloody performance,' he said, after a while.
'What? Them dressing up for the show?'
'No, no, no. The cops. They'll be here. They'll be all over us like fly strike.'
'Well,' I said, 'if the girl's dead, somebody did it and they have to try and find out who it was.'
'You're one for the "killer in our midst" theory, then, are you?'
'Don't know what to think. But he's got to be in somebody's midst.'
'Hmmph. A white van, you reckon?' he said.
'That's what Gith says.'
'Next thing is, they'll be rounding up half the bloody vehicles in the district, like they did last time. And then the finger-pointing'll start. I guess they'll have a go at Moss Vield again.'
'Why him?'
'They had him down on their list last time, eh. Took away his bloody wagon for damn near a week and there were cops up there poking around. Looking for graves or some bloody thing.'
&nb
sp; 'And has he got a white van?'
'Wouldn't have thought so. Not much bloody use on a farm, those things. He's probably still driving the same wagon.
Moss doesn't throw things away.'
'He is a weird bugger though,' I said.
'If they arrested all the weird buggers, there'd be more people in jail than out.'
'Fair enough,' I said.
Moss wasn't a friend but the Old Man thought he was a good bloke because he was hard and he ran a good farm. That was the way with the Old Man. If you toughed things out and you were good at your job, you were a good bloke; and if you were a good bloke, you could do no wrong. It gave him an odd picture of the world. Like the way he never had much time for Monty Praguer. 'Too soft on his dogs,' was what the Old Man said, and that seemed to be a sign of being sloppy every which way.
I didn't remember the cops taking that much notice of Moss Vield but I could see why people might have talked about him. Moss lived with his old man and they were both loners. They had nothing to do with anybody outside the bare bones needed to get something done. I guess Moss was about fifty. He was tall and thin with a flat voice that had as much feeling as an idling engine. He never got angry, never smiled or laughed, never made a move he didn't have to. He was a bit like a robot, and it wasn't hard to see him killing somebody with no more thought than he'd cut the throat of a sick sheep. A picture of a knife and blood popped into my mind. Lots of blood. It'd have to be like that though. You wouldn't use a gun, would you? People might hear the shot and report it.
'Here,' the Old Man held out his glass. 'Get me another.' I took it from him. 'And have one yourself.'
'Thanks.'
The bottle of Islay malt was just about his only treat. He kept it in the bottom cupboard of the dresser. I poured us one each and fetched a jug of water to cut them.
We started to talk business then. He asked me how things were going for Gith and me and he was pleased enough by what I told him. Time was, he thought I was too dumb or too lazy to run any kind of business, and I think he was surprised that we'd made a fair fist of it. Pretty soon we were well into the sort of talk he likes best — doing over the government and the meat board, not to mention the regional council. Times were tough in Te Kohuna. There was next to no dairying this side of the highway, and the high dollar and the prices for meat and wool exports meant that the hill farmers were feeling the pinch. The Old Man was allowed his moan, I reckoned. He's not that much of a whinger but he is what you'd call critical. He has a lot of smarts and he makes good sense on a number of things. If he has a fault it's that he thinks he knows best on just about everything and it's usually safest to keep quiet, even if you think different.
We'd been at it for about half an hour when the door opened and Ma and Gith came in dressed up like a couple of Victorian dames. They were both wearing white blouses, with lots of lace at the cuff and collar, and long brown skirts. They had black shawls round their shoulders and little caps like drawstring bags on their heads. Gith looked happy as.
'Bloody hell!' the Old Man said. 'You two must be sisters!'
Ma gave a big grin and did a twirl. Gith followed her but she put too much into it, lost her balance and had to grab the arm of the sofa.
'Steady on,' he told her. 'You'll take off if you spin too hard.'
'What do you think?' Ma asked. 'Will we do?'
'You'll fleece everything that's got a wallet,' he said.
The idea was a charity collection on Sunday week at the Annual Show. It was being run by the local chapter of Rural Women New Zealand, something my sister Joanne was mad keen on. Joanne was the high-society branch of the family. She was married to Oliver Marsden, who had just taken over from his father at Totara Flat, down towards Basingstoke, the biggest spread in the district. The two of them getting together had been a bit of a surprise, especially to Oliver's family, but they seemed to be doing okay. Joanne had become a lady overnight but she still kept in touch with us, especially when she wanted something. Like help with one of her charities.
After dinner Bill and Leece dropped by and we spent half an hour with them. They didn't want to talk about Anneke Hesse. Leece was worried about her Uncle Len. He and her Aunt Kath lived near Gith and me in the house closest to the service station. Len had been fighting cancer for a couple of years and had taken a turn for the worse. I told Leece we would drop in and see how he was doing.
It was getting late when we left. There were big pools of shadow in the narrow parts of the valley, and the hills behind us were black against a red band of sky. I didn't turn the lights on because it's the headlights on the road that freak Gith out the most. I could feel her curling up in the seat beside me. She had her eyes closed tight. I didn't talk because I didn't want her looking and seeing how dark it was getting.
We got home around eight-thirty. The daylight was gone. I parked the car and we sat in silence for a few minutes. Gith didn't move.
'Sorry,' I said.
She twisted suddenly in her seat and grabbed me, clung on tight. I could feel her shaking.
'Tell you what,' I said, 'let's go for a little walk. Maybe we can see the stars.'
Our place was the last building on the main road at the northern end of town. Part of the ground, where the service station and the workshop are, had been dug out from the side of a knob of hill that was covered in bush. The house is up there on the western edge of the trees. There is bush on one side and a paddock on the other, where we ran a few sheep. If we walked to the northwest, we quickly got below a little ridge and away from both the road and the lights of the town.
It was a clear, still night, the warmth of the day draining slowly from the air. We walked with our arms round each other, Gith with her face to the sky. She really likes the stars. I figure she knows a lot more about them than I do. From time to time she would stop, dragging on me and pointing up with her free arm, and she'd come out with words — names, I guess. I could only translate a few, like Southern Cross or Orion's Belt. Her face was pale in the starlight, her cheeks hollowed by a brush of shadow. I thought she was just about the best-looking woman I had ever seen.
'Good, eh?' I said, not necessarily meaning the sky.
'Gith,' she said and smiled at me.
***
BY SUNDAY NIGHT Anneke Hesse was on the six o'clock news and early the next morning the cops were in town in force. They came up from Palmy in a fleet of cars. Hemi brought a couple of them over. There was a bloke and a sheila, the one in plain clothes, the other in uniform — Detective Sergeant Jackson and Constable Jones. I called Gith out of the workshop and we sat down in the back room. I made them all a cup of tea.
It was going to be hard, I knew. Gith wouldn't talk as easily to the out-of-towners as she would to me or Hemi. She sat there at the table, hunched up in her overalls, her hands wrapped around the mug, leaving oily fingermarks on the white china.
Jackson did the talking and he did a pretty good job. He took it easy and he listened and it didn't take him long to get the hang of asking Gith questions. They had a tape recorder and Jones was taking notes as well.
For a while it was okay. They went through the stuff Gith had told me before — the white van and the driver who'd paid in cash. She told them she had seen Anneke getting into the van, that the vehicle was a Mitsubishi and that it was four or five years old. Then they got on to the driver.
Was he tall?
Maybe.
Short?
Maybe.
Fat?
Maybe.
Thin?
Maybe.
She was getting tense.
'Van,' she said, pointing, jabbing at the air with her finger.
'In, in, in, in, in.'
'He stayed in the van,' I said.
'Gith.' She let out a breath. I'd got it right.
'Did he say anything?' I asked.
'Narg. Thyow money.'
'He just showed you the forty bucks?'
'Gith.'
'Was he Pakeha?'
Jackson asked. Gith's head flicked round.
She stared at him. I could see the tension in her neck.
'Gith.'
The buzzer rang. Somebody was in the shop. I went to get up but Hemi lifted his hand, meaning I should stay where I was. He went out there instead.
'Was his hair dark?' Jackson asked.
'Mebby.'
'Blond?'
'Mebby.'
'Grey?'
'Mebby.' Gith gave me a quick look. She was getting upset.
'Could we stop for a minute or two?' I said.
Jackson leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. He sighed. Jones gave me a tight little smile. Were they wasting their time? They were both asking themselves that and maybe coming up with a yes.
Hemi poked his head round the door.
'Sorry, bro,' he said, 'this machine of yours's got me beat.'
'It'll be locked,' I said. I usually lock it when there's no one in the shop, just in case.
I stood up and went out there. Dolly McKenzie was standing at the counter holding her credit card. She'd pumped her own gas and was waiting to pay.
'Ken,' she said. 'Good morning.'
'Hi.'
'Something wrong?'
'Not really.' I unlocked the till and swiped the card.
'Hemi got himself a second job, has he? Moonlighting?'
I laughed and I figured what the hell — nobody told me not to talk about what was going on.
'The cops are here,' I said. 'It's got to do with that hitchhiker that's gone missing. Gith might've seen something.'
'I thought so,' she said. 'They're asking everybody. I just talked to Patrick at the bookshop and he says they definitely figure this is the last place she was seen. I mean, right here, eh?' She pointed at the ground like Anneke had been standing on just the spot where Dolly was now.
'Out there,' I told her. 'And, you know, maybe she'll turn up safe and well.'
'Oh no. I don't think so. This is a murder inquiry. There's police everywhere. I've counted four cars so far.' She leaned towards me. 'And they've got their suspect, haven't they?'
'Who?'
'Billy Cleat, of course! It has to be him, surely? He did eight years for what he did to that woman in Palmerston North, that . . .' She gave a shudder like something nasty was crawling up her back.