Frank glanced over to see what he meant. The leader of the powhiri group had raised the taiaha, clutched in both hands, above Captain Porter’s exposed head, his eyes wild and bulging, a normal part of the ceremony. Frank was about to make a quiet joke, but it froze on his tongue. Anahera, the Avenging Angel, beardless but recognizable with his distinctive angel wings moko, was the man standing there, the taiaha raised, the expression on his face, one of almost insane hatred.
As Anahera moved towards Captain Porter with the taiaha, he screamed the words he had said to Frank behind the Royal Hotel when he attacked him: “Mo toku tuahine. Mo toku tuahine.”
Tuahine, not teina, not brother, but sister. That was who he was avenging. His sister and his nephews. Time slowed down and he felt his body moving in slow motion towards Anahera. Without a conscious decision, the childhood years of being forced to play rugby with his father’s employer’s sons came back to him, and he threw himself towards Anahera’s knees and brought him to the ground in a tackle. Rain had started to fall and he was face down on the ground, Anahera’s feet before his eyes, when the rest of the powhiri team jumped him, forming a scrum over his back, feet pressed firmly into his spine. He forced his face up from the mud to see what was happening to Anahera, and saw that Captain Porter and the Members of Parliament were on his arms and legs, holding him down as he writhed with rage. He lay there knowing he had stopped the murder of his old captain. But the words Anahera had screamed echoed in his ears. “For my sister,” he had said. “For my sister.”
To add to the chaos, Captain Porter blew hard on his whistle, in a perverted version of a referee.
The Armed Constabulary poured through the gates, rules forgotten, carbines trained on the melee. They were on Anahera in a minute, binding his arms and legs, dragging him from the Pa, shouting instructions to the powhiri men who still held Frank pressed to the ground. The released him reluctantly.
Captain Porter stood there calmly, dusting himself off. He had remained totally self-possessed the whole time.
“I shall be with you momentarily,” he called after the Constables. Take good care of him.”
He turned to Frank.
“Nice tackle,” he said, his eyes gleaming. “If I ever need a first five eights I shall know where to come. Well done, Hardy. I shall see that you get a commendation for this.”
Hakopa and Karira had arrived by now, Hakopa full of apologies.
“My wife,” he said. “My wife has brought shame on my hapu. She has allowed this serpent into our midst. I cannot tell you how sorry I am. I will send her back to her iwi in Poverty Bay.”
Captain Porter nodded at him and reached out a hand to shake.
“Why should my wife want you killed?” asked Hakopa as he grasped the captain’s hand.
“It was Anahera who wanted to see him dead,” said Frank.
“Something to do with a foolish incident during the pursuit of Titokowera,” said Captain Porter. “He has a grievance from those days. Insanity, I would say. He was in solitary confinement for eight years. Your wife must have misunderstood his intentions. We’ll keep an eye on her in Poverty Bay, but I can’t imagine she is much at fault.”
Captain Porter and Hakopa walked through the gate together, chatting amicably, acting like the friend of the wife of one had not just attempted to assassinate the other. Frank and Karira followed them silently.
Outside, the Armed Constabulary had the coach ready to leave, door open, coachman with his whip high. The two members of Parliament were hustled inside. Behind the coach two more Constables had arrived with a horse-drawn cart that carried a cage on the back. Anahera had been pushed into the cage and sat there, his knees up, with barely room to move.
About to mount the carriage steps, Captain Porter stopped and turned to Hakopa. “Thank-you for your cooperation in the other matter,” he said. “The sale will go through before the end of the year. And again, don’t worry about your woman. As I said, we’ll take good care of her in Poverty Bay.”
Frank felt his stomach turn at the inappropriateness of the words. He walked over to the cage where Anahera was confined. Anahera was staring darkly ahead. He would be in solitary confinement again, probably forever. Frank wondered how he would bear it.
“Ta matou he koe,” Frank said. “We did you a great wrong.” Anahera turned and looked at Frank. Frank held his gaze for several minutes. It was impossible to know what Anahera was thinking. He knew he could not expect to be forgiven, but he tried to explain. “I patua toku teina…” My brother was murdered. Anahera made a sound. “Huh.”
Frank turned to leave, and heard Anahera say something. He stopped and looked back.
Anahera tilted his head backwards and said something again. “Awa.”
“What’s that…river, you said? Awa?”
“Awa,” said Anahera. “Turehu.” He touched the top of his head, then pointed towards the river, gesturing with his hand. “Turehu, awa.”
“I’m sorry,” said Frank. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”
Anahera shrugged, and withdrew into himself once more.
Captain Porter had been watching them. “He’s talking about a ghost,” he said to Frank. “Perhaps he’s telling you he intends to haunt you.”
Frank banged on the side of Anahera’s cage, and asked, “What do you mean? What ghost?” But Anahera had said all he intended to say.
“He’s not trying to tell you anything that matters,” said Captain Porter. He turned on his heel and mounted the coach. Wilson, the Irishman, who had been waiting at the back of the coach, winked at Frank, then leapt onto the steps of the coach as it thundered away, still guarding the men inside. As they left, Anahera looked up at Frank again. His look was not exactly friendly. But it was not hate either.
“What will happen to him?” asked Karira.
“He’ll disappear into a gaol in Wanganui and we won’t hear about him again,” said Frank. They have a special gaol for people like him, upriver from the town.”
“That is good,” said Hakopa. “Better we never see him again.”
“What was your business with Captain Porter?” asked Frank. “You said something about a sale.”
Hakopa waved his hand vaguely towards the Pa. “I have sold our land to the government,” he said. “This Paland. We will move into town.”
The waste lands, thought Frank. The waste lands of the Pathat Captain Porter had alluded to briefly. That was what had been bothering him.
Karira looked at his uncle, his face blank with shock.
“Is this true?” he asked. “You have sold the Pa? The land our family has owned for a thousand years?”
Hakopa looked defiant. “You have said to me many times, Wiremu, that our people must move forward. Now comes that opportunity. They will move to the town and find employment, or to the city. They will become modern New Zealanders.”
“You have sold our birthright,” said Karira, his voice rising. “For what? For nothing, for a mess of pottage. I cannot forgive you. My father would not forgive you.”
Hakopa looked back, his face calm.
“I will have a place in town,” he said in Māori. “I’ll build a large house and you may stay with me when you must leave the Pa.”
24
Finding the Boys
October came, and the river was warming as it made its slow journey from the ranges down through Palmerston and past Foxton to the Tasman Sea. Frank and Karira, still suffering from the loss of his ancestral lands, and the move of his hapu in to town, had been searching up and down the river in the waka tete, stopping to look under stands of overhanging willows or in the reeds that grew in some areas. Occasionally they found a log embedded in gravel, and climbed out of the canoe to look underneath, hoping for signs such as clothing or even skeletal remains. By now, the river would certainly have taken off some of the flesh, and the eels would have helped with that process.
At midday on October 3rd they arrived at Awapuni, not far fro
m the sawmill and the clearing where the Scandinavians lived and less than a mile from where the boys had last been seen. Frank noticed a small, well-constructed whare on a slope beside the river, in an area that had been cleared of all undergrowth and bush. A Maori man of about his own age was adzing a piece of wood, concentrating hard on what he was doing.
“That is Parateni Te Tupaki,” said Karira. “He’s creating carvings for the Wharenui, the new meeting house we built at the Pa. He refuses to believe the Pa is going to be sold.”
“Kia ora Mr. Te Tupaki,” Frank called.
The man looked up from the work, put his adze down carefully and came towards them.
“Good morning,” he said. “Constable Karira, I was about to come and get you.”
Frank pulled the dugout close to the shore and jumped out, pulling it into some reeds so it would stay in place. Karira followed him.
“You were coming to see me?” he prompted.
“Yes. I found something you will want to see.”
“What did you find?” asked Frank. He thought he might know what it was, and his heart felt heavy.
“Some clothing, down there in the reeds where your waka is resting. Pakeha clothing. I did not want to touch it before you looked at it.”
Te Tupaki came down to the edge of the river and pointed towards a spot close to where the dugout rested. Frank could see it now as well: the back of a plaid shirt, spread flat, just under the surface of the water, floating in the reeds. It sat between two branches that were caught under the bank. They could not have seen it from the waka tete.
He stepped back into the water, not minding his wet boots, and waded over close to where the shirt was visible. Then, he grasped one of the branches and pulled it slowly closer. The shirt rose to the surface of the water, bobbing a little. Above it, Frank could see something pale, reflecting the sun that filtered through the trees. Hair maybe, he thought. He waded in further, until the water came up to his waist. Leaning forward, he could just manage to reach the shirt. He took a handful of material and pulled it closer. The shirt started to move in the water, then, ever so slowly, rolled over.
Frank felt his stomach turn.
The two Maori men had been watching from the bank of the river saying nothing. When the object turned over and they could see what it was, Karira said softly, “Kua kitea e matou ki a ratou. We have found the one we looked for.”
It was impossible to tell which of the boys it was. The plaid shirt without a collar, the moleskin trousers, and the fair hair indicated that it was one of the boys, but the face had all but disappeared under swollen flesh. The body was bloated so that the shirt was tight across what had been the chest, and what was left of the face was purple and swollen, the eyes covered in flesh, with strips of skin falling away from the cheeks. An eel had been eating at one side of the head and bone showed through.
“I will find Constable Price,” said Te Tupaki. “But someone must stay with the body. You will not want to lose him now. After I will find the Tohunga. If someone dies in the river, then the river is Tapu and the Tohunga must pray to the Taniwha to restore it.”
“You stay,” said Karira to Frank. “I’ll go to the sawmill and find the brother. What should I tell him?”
“Tell him we’ve found one of the boys,” said Frank. “But don’t give him any details. Not yet. Just make sure he understands that you’re talking about a body.”
Karira nodded and strode off up the hill. There was no pathway to the mill from here, but he would find his way easily through the bush.
Frank sat on the edge of the river and watched the body as it lay there in the water. Paul, he thought, although he did not know why. He wished he had a cigarette right now. He was in the calm before the storm, and he dreaded speaking with Nissen and Sorensen, let alone with Mette. If she had loved this boy, even as a friend, she would be upset, and he couldn’t stand the idea of her being unhappy.
Eventually, Constable Price arrived, crashing through the bush beside the river. He had left a bullock cart with a wooden coffin some distance back along the riverside, where the track ended.
“I think it’s Paul Nissen,” Frank said, pointing to the body.
“Holy Mother of God,” said Price, crossing himself. “We’ll have to put him into your waka and take him back down the river to the cart. Can you help me lift him in to it?”
He and Frank entered the water carrying a large flax mat that Te Tupaki had provided, threw it over the body, and between them managed to wrap it into a cocoon. The stench was terrible, but Frank had seen bodies like this before, even bodies of people he knew. Together they carried the boy ashore, water and other fluids draining from their burden back into the river.
“He isn’t in as bad a shape as I would have expected,” said Constable Price. “Not for just over two months in the water.”
“Could he have been put into the water sometime after he disappeared?” asked Frank.
Constable Price shook his head.
“More likely the cold. If he was down deep, the water would have kept him preserved, to some extent. Then as the spring came and the river warmed, he would have risen to the surface and started to deteriorate. I expect we’ll find the other boy soon as well.”
As the three men were lowering the body into the waka Frank saw Nissen and Sorensen, accompanied by Constable Karira, hurrying from the bush.
“I have to stop him,” he said to Price. “He can’t see the body.”
Price nodded. “No, he can’t. Stop him before he gets here. Go ahead, we can handle the rest.”
Frank went up the hill to intercept the two Scandinavians. He could see expressions, both fearful and hopeful, on their faces. As he reached them, his hands forward to indicate that they should stop, Nissen tried to push around him. Frank stopped him, grabbing hold of both his arms and putting his body between Nissen and the men busy down at the river’s edge.
“I think it’s Paul,” he said. “But definitely one of the boys.”
“I would like to see him,” said Hans Christian, attempting to push Frank’s hands away. “I need to be sure that it is my brother.”
Frank held firm. “I don’t think you should. He’s been in the water a long time. It’s not something that you want to remember. Best to remember him how he was.”
“But how can I be sure in my heart that it is him? How can I tell our mother that I was too afraid to look at him?”
“I’ll go down there and bring back something that will help you identify him,” said Frank. “Is there anything I can look for?”
Hans Christian looked down towards the waka, where Constable Price was still in the process of lowering the body into the waka for transportation. He was in a state of shock now, of unnatural calm, his arms by his sides, his hands shaking.
“He has a watch,” he said. “In his pocket. Jens too. But they are not quite the same, and I would recognize Paul’s watch.”
After giving Pieter Sorensen instructions not to let Hans Christian come down the hill on any account, Frank went down himself and waded out to the waka. In the left hand pocket of the trousers of the corpse he found an old watch. It had stopped at 5:00 o’clock. The shirt had come out of the waist of the trousers as the body had collapsed, and he pulled it free and cut a piece off with his Barlow knife.
“If he can confirm who it is from the watch and the shirt, we can safely assume the identity,” commented Constable Price.
Frank walked back to Nissen with the objects in hand. He said nothing, holding them out wordlessly towards the man. Nissen stared at them for several minutes, then reached forward and gently took the watch. He held it in one hand and stroked it softly with the other.
“This is Paul’s watch,” he said. “My father gave it to him, just before he left Schleswig. It was the first watch he had ever owned, and he was, he was…”
His face crumpled and he sank to the ground very slowly, almost as if he were a puppet on strings. As Sorensen and Frank stood watching, h
e started to cry, with loud rasping gasps, his arms across his stomach, rolling back and forward in agony.
Mette took the news much more stoically.
“It’s good to know at last that he is found,” she said sadly. “I always knew he would be dead, but I was not sure if he had been killed by the Hauhau, or drowned, and now I know he drowned. What about Jens? You will find my cousin as well?”
“I’ll keep looking,” said Frank. “I promise you…”
But Jens’ body did not surface. Frank and Karira eventually had to concede that they were not going to find him. They could only assume that eels had disposed of his body, or that he was trapped in a place that was not going to give him up. Frank saw that Hans Christian had accepted the loss of his cousin, even though the body had not been recovered and knew that the sorrow would abate to some extent, helped by his family, his neighbors and his faith.
25
At the Royal Hotel Once More
Captain Porter returned to Palmerston a few weeks after he had arranged the purchase of the Pa land, this time to oversee the land transfer and sign more documents that would bind the iwi forever. He sought Frank out at the Royal Hotel to reassure him that Anahera had been safely conveyed to a secret prison and would not be coming back to attack anyone in Palmerston.
“He escaped before,” said Frank. “You don’t think…?”
“Not from this prison,” said Captain Porter. “No one escapes from this one. We’ve got the worst of the worst detained there and they’re well contained and guarded.”
Frank could imagine the kind of prison he was talking about. In the middle of dense bush somewhere, probably, far away from the nearest town or city so that anyone who escaped would never find his way back to civilization.
A lone man was plodding across the Square in their direction. “Here comes Nissen,” he said. This was how it had all started, with Nissen and Sorensen wading through the mud towards him to beg him to find Paul Nissen and Jens Lund. “I hope he doesn’t have another missing brother…”
Not the Faintest Trace Page 20