The Crime of Huey Dunstan Page 3

  “I was referring to the incident when Mr Dunstan was tied up in the caravan.”

  “Yes. The alleged incident. ‘Brutal and sadistic’, you said.”

  “‘Brutal and evidently sadistic’, I believe I said.”

  “‘Brutal and evidently sadistic’, yes. Thank you for correcting me. Why did you use that word, professor?”

  “I was trying—You mean the word evidently?”

  “No, I mean the word sadistic. But carry on, please.”

  “I was trying to help the jury see it through the eyes of a seven-year-old child, the anguish etched in a child’s memory. With trauma of this kind the victim doesn’t just run to the nearest person and unburden himself. Somehow he has to carry on living and learn to cope with the world around him. On the outside of the brain he learns to cope and so appears to behave normally but the memory—the trauma—is shut down inside. It’s frozen. Yesterday—a simple example I think we can all understand—yesterday we heard the mother describe what happened when a jug of boiling water fell on the defendant when he was a baby. He was kept in isolation for two months, I think she said, until the burns healed. But in his evidence Mr Dunstan exaggerated. He said it was longer. He said he was put inside a glass case for ‘two years’, not two months. But that doesn’t lessen the trauma of what he remembers, everything is exaggerated. The exaggeration has become the reality. Similarly with his memory of the incident in the caravan. Whatever punishment he endured was evidently severe. And it was recurring.”

  “But you said sadistic, professor.”

  The voice was gloating.

  “Do you have any evidence, professor, that the perpetrator, if indeed there was a perpetrator, was a sadist?”

  No, of course not, you twerp. If I knew that, the trial would be over and you’d be redundant. Either the man was being deliberately obtuse or was himself a closet sadist. Such men make good prosecutors.

  “None,” I said. “But the assumption seems obvious to me.”

  “Still, without independent confirmation, it’s a pretty big assumption, isn’t it?”

  So it went on.

  At one o’clock the judge adjourned for lunch. As I was stepping down for the Intermission, as Lawrence termed it, he said to me, “Did you notice what the judge called him?”

  “Who?”

  “The prosecutor. He made a mistake and called him Starling.”

  “Isn’t that his name?”

  “No. His name is Sparrow. The judge got confused.

  You know who Starling was? Lord Mayor of London in the 1600s, famous judge, notorious. Starling was the chap who presided at the trial of those two Quakers, William Penn and I forget the name of the other one, and when the jury refused to convict after being shut up for two nights without food and drink, Starling screamed at the foreman and threatened to cut off his nose.”

  I think Lawrence told me that to cheer me up. I was feeling a little bruised. I didn’t take kindly to being presented as callow and inexperienced by a finagling Sparrow little more than half my age. Beneath Lawrence’s sanguine demeanour I was beginning to detect a whiff of resignation, as if he already knew what the verdict would be. I didn’t know then about an incident that had occurred on the first day. Shortly after the trial began, police photographs showing what remained of the victim’s head were handed up. One of the jurors fainted and was taken to hospital.

  When I got back from lunch the prosecutor buttonholed me, saying, “Have you got your clinical notes?”

  I was defensive. “Not on me,” I said. The notes he was referring to were in a file among the papers on Lawrence’s table, I assumed, but couldn’t be certain. I had a moment of panic thinking I might have left them at the hotel.

  “No, I didn’t mean that, professor. I merely wondered if you had your notes to hand.”

  “It’s an old trick,” Lawrence said to me afterwards. “He does it to intimidate people.”

  I was simmering. The prosecutor was out of order. He had broken the convention of not speaking to a witness while the witness was still giving evidence. Lawrence found my notes on his table and I resolved that when we resumed I would say to the prosecutor, “Mr Sparrow, you questioned me during the lunch adjournment about my clinical notes. Here they are.” That would put him in the poo. But the prosecutor was too quick for me. He asked a question that I had to answer. The moment was lost.

  THREE

  FRIDAY WAS A short day. I half-expected Lawrence to re-examine me when the prosecutor sat down, but he didn’t. Only one more witness followed me in the box: the police surgeon who examined the body and had given evidence earlier. He was recalled. The court emptied by four o’clock. It was too late to return to Wellington that night. I rang Lisbeth and explained, then I remembered an old friend whom I had known in my Cornford days, Andrew Gort. I asked Lawrence if the magistrate was still alive.

  “Andrew? You mean old Schultz? I’ve seen him about,” Lawrence said. “I think his wife died. He’s got a carer.”

  Almost forty years earlier when I had come from England, recruited by the New Zealand Department of Justice, I had been posted to Cornford as a probation officer. It was my first job in a new country. Andrew Gort was the district magistrate, my senior by about ten years. He had endeared himself to me when he acquitted a Maori youth charged with stealing a medal said to be worth thousands of dollars from the Cornford Memorial Museum. It was a rare New Zealand Cross that had been awarded to a British officer for an act of bravery in the Land Wars of the previous century. The officer had led a skirmish that resulted in the defendant’s grandparents and half his tribe being butchered. The young man had come upon the medal in its glass case by chance. At the sight he had been “blown away”. He had unscrewed the lid of the case and removed the medal intending, he said, to return it, to bury it in the soil where it belonged so that “everyone could be forgiven”. Andrew had been moved by the accused’s sincerity and declared him innocent, accepting he had taken it “with colour of right” which negated the intent to steal.

  He had been impressed, he told me afterwards, by the young man’s lack of pretence, although I suspect Andrew knew that his ruling, even if good justice, was bad law. At best it was a colour or claim of moral right, not legal right. Even so, I was surprised at the amount of ill feeling the acquittal generated in the legal hierarchy. It was said to be a reason Andrew remained a magistrate and was never preferred for the High Court.

  I found old Schultz’s telephone number and rang him up. “Andrew! This is Ches.” He remembered me straight off. He sounded pleased to hear my voice. “Come to dinner,” I said. “Seven o’clock?”

  Andrew arrived at the hotel at seven prompt. With minder. His minder, a young woman who smelled pleasantly of mint, explained that Andrew had a muscular condition and tired easily. She summoned a waiter to provide steerage and helped navigate us to the table. “He’s a bit down,” she said in my ear. “Don’t let him drink too much. Shall I come back at 8.30?”

  “That will be lovely,” I said.

  “Silly bitch,” Andrew said in a loud voice that carried. “Has she gone?”

  “Andrew. What’s wrong?”

  “Andrew? I was always Schultz to you. Know what she said to me after you rang? ‘One glass.’ ‘I’ll have you know,’ I said to her, ‘Professor Chesney and I go back nearly forty years, before you were even born. This is a celebration!’ One glass? Fucking little despot.”

  I was shocked by his language. I remembered Andrew Gort as one of the gentlest of men, a model of restraint when he was on the bench.

  “At home, Ches, she won’t let me drink at all.”

  “I’ve ordered a bottle,” I said.

  “Good. What’s the grub like?”

  “They’ve got bouillabaisse on the menu.”

  “Good. I’ll have that. I’ve only got two teeth but I can suck. How long have you been blind? Somebody told me you’d gone blind. D’you want to talk about it? No? Good. Tell me about this case you’re on.”<
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  “No, first you tell me how you’ve been,” I said to him when the waiter had taken our order.

  “Fucking terrible.” He let loose a string of obscenities. “Prost, Ches.” He clanged his glass against mine, burped and said in a voice so fierce I became alarmed, “I’m going to kill that woman.”

  I knew something about the loss of inhibitions and the uncharacteristic use of expletives that often accompanies senile dementia in old age—I remembered Peggy Ashcroft’s portrayal of Barbie in The Jewel in the Crown. But I had not met the phenomenon head-on before. What struck me was how Andrew’s swearing emerged in the accents of an afternoon tea-party with the Feilding aristocracy where his people, immigrants from Norfolk and Hamburg, had once farmed and he had grown up. I was trying desperately to find a way of deflecting the flow of coprolalia when it subsided of itself.

  “Felicity died,” he said, in German. “Felicity ist tod.” Now he was weeping. The table shook with his sobs. “We had some lovely times, didn’t we, Ches?” He reached across the table and took my hand. I nodded, smiling. Felicity was his wife, a lovely creature several years his junior, with raven tresses which she had worn long. I had fancied her myself once.

  “I didn’t know you spoke German, Andrew,” I said.

  “I don’t. My mother did. When are you going to tell me about this case?”

  “All right,” I said, and talked for fifteen minutes non-stop. The waiter refilled our glasses. Andrew didn’t interrupt. At one point he grabbed my wrist, saying, “Go on. Go on.”

  “You know what riles me,” he said at length. “That woman. She wants to paint my toenails blue.” He hadn’t heard a word.

  “Do you remember the medal,” I said. “That boy you acquitted?”

  “What? No. Sutherland, was it? Some Scottish name?”

  Presently I excused myself and went to find the lavatory. Returning to the table, I was intercepted by the waiter.

  “Your mate, sir. The old gentleman’s fallen asleep. He’s broken a glass. He’s also ordered another bottle.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “Hey, Andrew! Schultz!”—I tapped the table-top with my cane. “Wake up. Court’s in session.”

  “Was I asleep?” He woke abruptly. “Funny thing, Ches. I could have sworn it was a Maori name. Chap in your case.”

  “My case? D’you mean my case or your case?”

  “No, no, your case. Duncan, was it?”

  “Dunstan. Huey Dunstan.”

  “Dunstan, that’s right. Told you. The chap I acquitted had a Scottish name.” He had muddled the two cases in his mind.

  “Coffee, Andrew?”

  “I’d like some more pud. Waiter,” he shouted. “I hope you don’t mind, Ches. I’ve ordered another bottle. Please tell that young woman,” he said to the waiter when the bottle arrived, “her name’s Emily by the way. Please tell my bleeding drill sergeant Emily, when she returns at 8.30, that I am enjoying myself. She is to go away and come back at 9.30. Got that? Good. Now Ches—” He had grabbed my wrist again. “Let’s be serious.” I heard his chair scrape. He was sitting forward.

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing,” he said, and lapsed into silence.

  Suddenly he said, “Why didn’t you tell me you were in the paper?”

  “What paper?”

  “This morning’s paper, of course. Front page. Boy in caravan, unusual case. I’ve been following it. Now don’t tell me you weren’t there yesterday giving evidence!”

  “I wasn’t. It was today,” I said. But he took no notice.

  “Provocation, eh. The smile on the face of the Mona Deceased?” Andrew gave a hoot of laughter. “Listen—” He let go my arm and grabbed it again. “Sadistic? Whatever made you say that? Not like you to be so unprofessional. I hope you’re not losing it, Ches.”

  I realised that subconsciously he must have taken in what I had told him and conflated it with something he had read earlier in the newspaper.

  “Good reasoning, Ches. Bad form. The judge was quite right to pull you up. It might cost you.”

  “It wasn’t the judge, it was the prosecutor,” I said.

  “Don’t argue. He had to take it ‘like a man’, you said? How does it go? Kia kaha, kia toa. Bloody good motto. All Blacks could learn from it instead of whingeing every time they lose. You’ll lose too of course.”

  “You think so?”

  “Oh yes. Boy will go down. Judge Trubody is quite right. Takes a judge to know one. Case was lost on the first day when that juror fainted. Were you there? No. Lawrence should have stopped it. If it had been me, I’d have stopped it. Judge let the police show the jury those photographs of the victim with his head stove in. Not a pretty sight, I’ll bet. One of the jurors went very quiet, then keeled over. ‘I think the moment has come for an adjournment,’ Trubody said. Bloody oath. I heard the ambulance siren from my house. Juror hospitalised, case adjourned till next day. It’s an old ploy by the police to work the jury. Works every time. Oh, he’ll go down.”

  Andrew burped. He seemed to shake himself, his mind becoming alert and moving quickly.

  “Headline—AXE MURDERER GETS LIFE. Oh yes. I’ll tell you something else, Charlie. Has that bloody woman come yet? I told her 8.30. She’s late. You know, I haven’t enjoyed myself so much in years. When we get home, Emily and I are going to sit down and have a hot toddy together. Grand little number is Emily. Where was I? That bastard Trubody. Yes. This is strictly between you and me, understand. I had a young Maori before me once who pinched a medal. It had belonged to a Brit who bayoneted half his iwi in the Land Wars. Bloody shame what we did to the Maori back then. I thought to myself, I’ll show the buggers. So I acquitted him. Justice with compassion, eh. Know what Trubody did? He was President of the Law Society. He wrote to the Prime Minister about me, that’s why I never made the High Court. It was that bastard Judge Trubody who shafted me. That’s why I say, you’ll go down.”

  “But surely, Andrew, you’re talking about the father. Trubody senior?”

  “I suppose so. Am I?”

  “We’ve got the son.”

  “Oh well. In that case you may be all right.”

  Huey Dunstan’s parents lived in a small town outside Cornford across the mountains called Pikipiki. Piki in modern Maori means fig. Number 12 Brook Street, Pikipiki. But the number had disappeared from the letterbox, I was told, and I don’t suppose it mattered much since the father couldn’t read or write (though I remember Huey telling me his father was good at figures). They probably didn’t get a lot of mail.

  On the bus next day returning to Wellington I must have passed quite close to the turnoff for Pikipiki, though of course I couldn’t see anything. But I remembered what the countryside looked like from my days as a probation officer. I doubted if it had changed much since I went into the hidden landscape of the Ureweras with Isaac and he showed me how to catch my first trout. I travelled all over the back country in those days. My sight was still as good as when I was in the Navy (midshipman on a cruiser) and I was in training up the flying topmast to count the enemy planes coming in. This was when our ships were being battered by Japanese kamikaze pilots following them back into port. I was nineteen. Luckily for me the war in the Pacific ended before I got sent out there.

  I was twenty-seven when I came to Cornford. The district was split in two distinct zones, Maori and European, Maori and Pakeha, although it wasn’t until I met Isaac that I began to sit up and notice. At first everything seemed to merge in a pleasant variegated landscape, in places so remindingly English that I wrote in amazement to my brother Tom back home. I described the gardens, the wild rivers, the farmsteads and orchards and tall king willows, the slashes of macrocarpa against the maples and claret ash staining the sky. It was autumn when I arrived.

  “This is a land of wonders,” I wrote in my diary (me, who had never seen the sea or a mountain until the war when I was evacuated to Devon). To Tom I wrote about a hinterland filled with the resinous smell of trees and the c
rackling sound of the wings of strange birds with hatched markings. I described fields of maize in the valleys and vistas of white pine cheek by jowl with wooden houses painted in many colours. “If you ever come out here,” I told my brother, “you will wonder why our Pommie forebears planted oaks in straight lines, now trimmed to shoulder height like bare-legged soldiers in kilts, and God help your nuts if you get chased over a barbed-wire fence by a Maori pig.”

  These were the days when I fancied myself as a writer. I saw mirrored around me what I had learned growing up at school in England, a model state of race relations between white man and brown man, conqueror and conquered; I knew nothing of the creeping confiscations in the Ureweras and the scorched earth policy adopted by my compatriots in the Land Wars. Since my new home was said to be a paradise without aliens or borders except for the surrounding sea and the fish in it, I accepted these truisms at face value.

  One day I drove out from Cornford to interview the parents of one of my charges, a young delinquent who had assaulted a warder and then tried to injure himself with a bicycle chain. I entered a valley I had not known existed and came to what passed for a township. I drove by a rugby field with, I swear, rising above menacing hills, the highest goalposts in the world. Wild horses skittered across the road in my path. I crossed a railway line, parked and walked up to a house once painted yellow but now overgrown by wind-shorn pines and guarded by a collection of hens and pigs and a lone calf, tethered, with an ugly gash matted with blood on its neck. Dogs barked. A girl came to the door when I knocked—she was perhaps nine or ten. But instead of the usual “Kia ora” or “I’ll get my Mum”, she turned and fled inside calling out, “Man coming!”

  Eventually a huge fellow with a baleful stare emerged on the step. He wore socks, one bright red, the other pale green, and a football jersey. He stood on the verandah, chest out, arms folded and stared past me into the hills while I explained my business. Apart from a few words tossed to someone inside, spoken in Maori, he said nothing. Finally I told him in plain English that unless he put on his shoes, pronto, and came back into town with me, his son Jack, or John, was likely to be placed in an institution. I probably said “looney bin” to make sure he understood. (We used words like that then, also wog, mick, nigger, darkie, fuzzy-top. Happy days!)