Fallout E-Book

Paul Thomas

• Herausgeber: Bitter Lemon Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Tito Ihaka, the unkempt, overweight Maori cop, was demoted to Sergeant due to insubordination and pigheadedness. He investigates the unsolved killing of a seventeen-year-old girl at an election night party in a ritzy villa near Auckland. Ihaka is also embroiled in a very personal mystery. A freelance journalist has stumbled across information that Ihaka's father, Jimmy, a trade union firebrand and renegade Marxist, didn't die of natural causes. The stories weave themselves into an exciting climax in an atmosphere of political maneuvering and intrigue surrounding the United States' confrontation with New Zealand over its anti-nuclear stance.

Leseprobe

Paul Thomas, born in Yorkshire and living in Wellington, New Zealand, is a novelist, scriptwriter, journalist and sports biographer. He has written a bestselling series featuring maverick Maori cop Tito Ihaka, which includes Dirty Laundry (aka Old School Tie, 1994), Inside Dope (1995), Guerrilla Season (1996) and Death on Demand (2013). Inside Dope was the winner of the Ned Kelly Award for Best Novel, and Death on Demand won the 2013 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel.

BITTER LEMON PRESS

First published in the United Kingdom in 2015 by

Bitter Lemon Press, 47 Wilmington Square,

London WC1X 0ET

www.bitterlemonpress.com

First published in New Zealand by Upstart Press Ltd., 2014

© Paul Thomas, 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher.

The moral right of Paul Thomas has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

eBook ISBN 978–1–908524–50–8

Typeset by Tetragon

To the memory of my mother and father

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my sister Susan for her legal expertise and Ross Vintiner for sharing his insights into the nuclear ships issue.

Thanks also to the Christchurch Writers’ Festival for its support of New Zealand crime writing.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Epilogue

1

Since becoming Auckland District Commander and developing an appreciation for wine – the two were related – Finbar McGrail hadn’t been sleeping as well as he used to.

His late, grimly Presbyterian mother had been fond of saying ‘the sleep of the righteous is sweet’, a paraphrase of Proverbs 3:24. While McGrail was confident that promotion hadn’t disabled his moral compass, he had to acknowledge that he’d gone from having an occasional glass of wine to not needing an occasion to open a bottle, and from dutifully saying his prayers to no longer bothering to touch base with God before calling it a night.

First the formalities were dispensed with: the kneeling beside the bed, head bowed (because although heaven is commonly thought to be up there somewhere, presumably above airliners’ cruising altitude, believers know that God is everywhere, even under one’s bed), hands clasped, eyes shut, the constipated expression of rapture tempered by obeisance. Once he started saying his prayers after, rather than before, getting into bed, it was a short step to mouthing the words, as opposed to saying them out loud, and an even shorter step to thinking them. And once the process was internalised, it was difficult not to get distracted or deflected. It was almost as if his mind had a mind of its own.

Eventually McGrail gave up the struggle and fell into the habit of thinking about work for however long it took for his wife’s current book to make her eyelids droop. When she said goodnight and turned off the bedside light, he would roll onto his side and go to sleep, albeit not without a twinge of guilt, like someone who has let another day go by without ringing his aged parents.

As often as not these days, McGrail would wake up in the early hours. Rather than wait for the fog of sleep to roll back in or engage in that erratic, tangential mental activity that seems productive, even inspired, at 3 am but turns out to be inconsequential at best when retrieved in the morning, he’d slip out of bed. After making himself a cup of cocoa, he’d go into his study to chip away at his email backlog, which was seldom less than a hundred messages.

Before he went back to bed, McGrail would look at a photo that he still kept in his bottom drawer even though his children had left home. It was a head-and-shoulders shot of a teenage girl trying to put on an exasperated ‘Do I really have to do this?’ expression but unable to keep the smile off her face. McGrail knew a lot about this girl, whose name was Polly Stenson. For instance, he knew that she’d had her braces removed a fortnight before the photo was taken. The orthodontist had met the challenge he’d been set two years earlier: to have Polly’s teeth straight and unencumbered by her seventeenth birthday.

The date print-out, in orange lettering on the bottom right-hand corner of the photo, said 15.8.87. It was taken on the last afternoon of Polly Stenson’s short life.

McGrail had been in New Zealand a fortnight, having left Northern Ireland even though – in fact because – he was a rising star in the Royal Ulster Constabulary. The Stenson murder was the first case for Auckland Central’s new Detective Inspector, of whom much was expected.

Polly was murdered at an election-night party held at the spectacular Remuera home of merchant banker Tim Barton and his wife Nicky. Barton had called it a ‘Win-Win’ party because, as far as people like him were concerned, it made no difference who won the election. That was understandable: it seemed to McGrail that the only real economic disagreement between the two major parties was over which of them was the more laissez-faire.

McGrail was taken aback by the ostentatious displays of wealth and unashamed extravagance he encountered during the investigation. He and his wife had decided to emigrate to New Zealand after extensive research and the process of elimination led them to the conclusion that their people – the Protestants of Ulster – had more in common with New Zealanders than any other nationality.

McGrail was under the impression that New Zealanders were stoic, understated, laconic to the point of taciturnity, suspicious of self-promotion and public display, inclined to pessimism and quick to say ‘I told you so’ when their gloomy prognoses were borne out. The glaring difference was that New Zealanders didn’t seem to take religion anywhere near seriously enough to kill or maim their neighbours over denominational differences. (That was an aspect of life in Northern Ireland that McGrail was keen to put behind him: he had thought about emigrating for years, but the tipping point was finding out that his name was on a Provisional IRA hit-list. While hit-lists were a dime a dozen in Belfast – there were pub darts teams who had them – the Provos had already put a black line through some of the names on theirs.) If McGrail had wanted nouveau-riche vulgarity, he would have gone to America, or even Australia. Thankfully it didn’t last. After the Black Tuesday sharemarket crash later that year, New Zealanders reverted to type. For a while, anyway.

The investigation was a nightmare. Over the course of the evening at least three hundred people had passed through the Barton mansion, but that was a woolly estimate since there were no formal invitations or guest list: Barton had just put the word out to his friends, who passed it on to their various overlapping social circles. Barton’s twenty-one-year-old son Johnny and teenage daughter Lucy had hosted their own sub-parties.

There was no proper security and therefore no one with a sober recollection of comings and goings or who was likely to notice odd or jarring behaviour. Security, such as it was, was provided by Johnny’s rugby team, who were given the narrow brief of repelling any uncouth elements that might try to crash the party. Predictably, most of the rugby players got drunker and did so faster than the other attendees.

Polly and Lucy went to the same girls’ private school, although Polly was a bit of an outsider. Her father was middle management; she was a scholarship girl, bright and athletic. Although her friends had done their best to corrupt her, Polly stuck to her unfashionable principles relating to booze, drugs and what was a seemly level of sexual activity for a girl her age.

By midnight, most of the girls and their dates – Polly was one of the few in the group who didn’t have a boyfriend – were too tipsy or distracted to look out for their friends. But then why would they? If you weren’t safe in that grand house in one of Auckland’s most prestigious streets surrounded by hundreds of people, including MPs from both major parties and an array of Rich Listers and movers and shakers, where on earth would you be?

The Barton place was on three levels. The ground floor was the living and entertainment area. Downstairs was the kids’ domain: the only adults who ventured below were the cleaning ladies. Upstairs was the parents’ quarters, complete with his-and-hers studies, library, gymnasium and sauna. It was well understood that upstairs was a child-free no-go zone.

The adults had congregated on the ground floor. The younger generation had split into groups: despite the time of year the rugby players yahooed around the pool; Lucy and friends mainly stayed downstairs; the little band of dope smokers had made their furtive way to the tennis court.

Polly had arranged to sleep over at another friend’s house; a cab was booked for 2 am. Around 11.30 pm, without saying where she was going or why, she went upstairs. She had a brief exchange with Tim Barton, telling him she felt like getting some fresh air. He later said she seemed fine: she’d obviously had a few drinks but wasn’t drunk, disoriented or looking for trouble.

Outside she bumped into a friend’s boyfriend who’d been out on the tennis court where the joints were circulating. She told him she was taking time out from the tiresome boy-girl interaction downstairs. He advised her to get stoned, knowing there was zero chance of that happening. That was the last anyone saw of her.

Just before 2 am the girl she was going to stay with went looking for her. It wasn’t an exhaustive search. The friend was feeling woozy and aware that the sooner she got to sleep, the less awful she’d feel the next day. She quickly reached the convenient conclusion that Polly had got sick of being the only girl downstairs whose knickers weren’t under siege and cabbed it back to her own place. The friend went home and crashed; her parents hadn’t felt the need to wait up. It wasn’t until 10.30 the following morning when her mother Barbara rang to remind Polly of their deal – she could go to the party and sleep over at her friend’s on the condition she spent Sunday studying – that anyone realised she was missing.

Barbara rang Nicky Barton, who went straight downstairs. There were several girls sleeping it off down there, but Polly wasn’t one of them. At around 11.15 Tim Barton got out of bed and shuffled down the corridor and through the state-of-the-art gym to the sauna, where he hoped to sweat out his hellish hangover. He was so stupefied that his first thought on noticing that there was someone tucked in under the wooden seat was: how shit-faced would you have to be to crash under there?

Polly had been strangled. There was nothing to indicate a struggle: her clothes were intact, her torso and face unmarked. She hadn’t been sexually active or sexually assaulted.

Suspicion fell on the rugby players. They ticked a lot of boxes: aggression, inebriation and a reputation for Neanderthal behaviour towards women. The theory was that Polly, bored and curious, had decided to explore. (Her fingerprints were found in the master bedroom.) One or more of the rugby players had seen her go upstairs, followed her, put the hard word on her and reacted violently when rebuffed.

The players proclaimed their innocence. No one remembered seeing any of them go upstairs, but then no one remembered seeing Polly go upstairs either. Part of the problem was that the stairs were well away from the party’s epicentre. Secondly, even though there were three toilets on the ground floor, there were lots of people taking on lots of fluid, resulting in steady traffic up to the toilet at the top of the stairs.

The theory unravelled. Johnny Barton was the only member of the team whose fingerprints were found upstairs. Then there was the inconvenient fact that just before midnight the rugby team had chased the pot smokers off the tennis court so they could practise some moves. The practice session, which went on for over an hour with frequent beer breaks, was run by the team’s Samoan contingent, two deeply religious teetotallers. They were adamant that the entire team – bar Johnny, who’d been inside chatting to a High Court judge – had been present and correct, although their handling skills had left something to be desired. Even if there had been circumstantial evidence pointing to a player, it would have been difficult to make it stick given the time of death was between midnight and 1 am.

The first rule of police work is never overlook the obvious. McGrail accepted that ‘drunken rugby brute gone nuts’ was the obvious scenario, but never subscribed to it. The crime scene would have been messier, the victim would have been roughed up, the killer would probably have drawn attention to himself with his behaviour or demeanour.

It didn’t look or feel sexual to McGrail. It looked and felt as if murder had been the object of the exercise, rather than the by-product of attempted rape or a psychotic reaction to rejection.

It was conceivable that a burglar had infiltrated the party and was helping himself to Barton’s wife’s jewellery when Polly poked her nose into the master bedroom. He hid her body in the sauna to delay discovery and left empty-handed rather than advertise his presence by stealing anything.

Or Polly could have interrupted someone going through the filing cabinets in Barton’s study. He was renowned for playing hardball and there was commercially sensitive information in the cabinets, but nothing was missing and there were no unidentified fingerprints in the study. Barton scoffed at the notion that a guest might have tried to steal jewellery or information: he wasn’t in the habit of hosting his enemies or people who needed to steal.

In Northern Ireland McGrail had worked on many cases involving terrorism (or criminal activity disguised as terrorism) on the part of the IRA, its offshoots and the various Protestant paramilitaries, so he was no stranger to political pressure or outside interference. But he was to be amazed at the level of oversight exercised by his superiors all the way up to the Minister of Police. He was even more amazed by the brazen lack of cooperation from some guests, and his superiors’ preference for a softly-softly approach which only encouraged the non-cooperators to carry on being uncooperative. And once it became apparent that there wouldn’t be a swift resolution, the pressure, if anything, increased. Only now the pressure was on to downgrade the investigation.

Nine months after Polly’s murder, McGrail went to see her parents for the last time. They lived on the border of Meadowbank and Glen Innes, an area he’d heard described as ‘middle class but not by much’, in a house that was nice enough but a world removed from the Barton residence with its harbour views and palatial scale, its art collection and temperature-controlled wine cellar and abiding impression of having been created and furnished not on the basis of what was sensible or necessary or even desirable, but to ensure that all and sundry understood money was no object.

McGrail brought the Stensons up to date, outlining in his dispassionate, expressionless way the difficulties and frustrations arising from the circumstances of that night and having to deal with people who seemed to think their wealth and status freed them from legal and moral obligations. He admitted that after nine months’ intensive work, he and his team had no leads, no witnesses, no suspects, no credible theory and therefore no clear path forward. That didn’t mean they were giving up, but the investigation would be scaled down, which meant fewer resources.

He wasn’t expecting them to protest: desolation had overtaken them, driving out all other emotions. It was even possible, he thought, that they feared catharsis might compromise the emptiness they now accepted as their destiny, or fretted over what might come to light in the event of a breakthrough. The victim’s family and friends always ask why, although the answer is usually mundane or sordid or just another example of the randomness of fate. There was no explanation for this poor child’s destruction that would make any sense to her parents.

Gordon Stenson was greyer and thinner, mild to the point of passivity, his eyes sunk in black, bony recesses. ‘So you don’t have a theory, Mr McGrail? I mean you personally?’

‘Not really,’ replied McGrail. ‘As I said, I don’t believe it was sexually motivated. I have an instinct that she was killed because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time rather than because she was Polly Stenson, if you follow me. But why that should have been the case, I’ve no idea.’

Barbara Stenson was five years younger than her husband. Now they looked the same age and he looked five years older than he actually was. ‘Would it be fair to say, Inspector,’ she said, ‘that you’ve stopped looking and are really just hoping for something to drop into your lap?’

‘That would be overstating it,’ said McGrail, ‘but there’s an element of truth to it. I’d just add that quite a lot of crimes are solved because something drops into our lap.’

She handed McGrail an envelope. ‘There’s a photo of Polly in there – perhaps you could look at it from time to time. She deserves to be remembered by more than just the two of us.’

McGrail examined himself in the mirror above the basins. Well, he thought, that could have been worse; I could’ve told the Minister what I really think of him.

He had just had dinner at the Northern Club with the Minister of Police, the Commissioner of Police and the Minister’s new best friend, a South African management consultant and self-styled ‘change engineer’ who had been brought in to conduct what his profession called a 360 review of the police service with the object of eliminating waste, increasing efficiency and delivering a better return on taxpayer investment. In other words, he’d been brought in to find the dead wood that McGrail and his fellow district commanders couldn’t or wouldn’t identify.

The report ran to 245 pages, most of which was padding. There was a review of the status quo that McGrail could have generated in an afternoon, if it had occurred to him to waste an afternoon telling people what they already knew. There were many statements of the obvious, blithe assertions and lofty sentiments, mostly relating to culture, accountability and empowerment, and incessant use of management jargon, presumably to obscure the lack of intellectual rigour. The bottom line for McGrail, who liked to think he was sharp-eyed when it came to spotting atrophy and decay, was that there was apparently a lot more dead wood in the Auckland district than he’d noticed.

When the Minister asked McGrail for his thoughts, he began by acknowledging that Mr Pienaar and his associates seemed to recognise that the people who would be restructured, reoriented, downgraded, taken out of their comfort zones or just plain sacked if the recommendations were implemented wouldn’t be happy about it.

The Minister nodded approvingly. ‘There’s no attempt to gild the lily,’ he said. ‘I like that. Some of my colleagues prefer these things sugar-coated, but no one could accuse me of that.’

‘But —’

The Commissioner interrupted. ‘Ah yes, the but. With Finbar, there’s always a but.’

The Commissioner, who had a deceptively genial demeanour, sounded even more peevish than usual. McGrail wondered if that was because he realised his life was about to take a turn for the worse as a result of Pienaar’s report, or because the alcohol component of the meal had been restricted to a single bottle of Pinot Gris, a beverage he was on record as dismissing as ‘a breakfast wine’. The Commissioner probably also suspected that the discussion was about to get prickly, requiring him to perform a delicate balancing act, and drag on for some time, thereby keeping him from his hotel room and the bottle of single malt scotch that he never left home without.

McGrail resumed, as if he hadn’t noticed the interruption: ‘But I believe they seriously underestimate the scale and intensity of the reaction. In my opinion, full-scale implementation would trigger industrial action.’

‘There’s no point in half-measures,’ said Pienaar crisply. ‘The report’s very clear on that.’

‘Indeed it is,’ said McGrail. ‘The Australians have a saying, “Crash through or crash”. That’s a pretty bold approach if there’s a decent chance you’ll come a cropper.’

The corners of the Minister’s mouth turned down. He glanced at the Commissioner, who raised his eyebrows as if to say ‘what did you expect?’

‘I obviously have more faith in your policemen and -women than our friend here,’ said Pienaar, addressing the Minister, ‘because I can’t see them going on strike. But if they did —’ He shrugged. ‘That would be a strategic confrontation you couldn’t afford to lose, even if it meant deploying the army.’

McGrail’s chuckle was devoid of any trace of amusement. ‘This country doesn’t really have a tradition of sending the army into the streets. Besides, our army doesn’t have your army’s experience in, shall we say, crowd control.’

‘You’re behind the times, Superintendent,’ snapped Pienaar, ‘in more ways than one.’ He turned back to the Minister. ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Sure, there’s going to be opposition, but if you back off, in ten years another minister will be sitting here having this exact same conversation. Look what happened in Britain: for years they caved in to the unions and the place went to the dogs. Finally Maggie Thatcher had the balls to say “Enough is enough”. She faced down the miners and the printers and turned the country around.’

‘I’m not sure what history’s verdict on Mrs Thatcher will be,’ said McGrail. ‘What I do know is that the police’s role was crucial to the outcomes of both those disputes. Which I suppose is my point: you’re going out of your way to pick a fight – and a bitter fight, let there be no doubt about that – with an organisation that symbolises and ensures the rule of law. I wouldn’t presume to give the Minister political advice, but I fail to see how that’s either good government or smart politics.’

It was all downhill from there. Oh well, thought McGrail as he dried his hands, only a year till retirement. If I can’t survive that long, I’m not as clever as people think I am.

He exited the toilets. A man was standing in the corridor, as if he was waiting for McGrail. ‘Superintendent McGrail?’ He had most of the distinguishing features of a typical Northern Club member: Pakeha, well-fed appearance, no longer young, expensive suit, midwinter tan.

‘Yes.’

‘I was pretty sure it was you, but not a hundred per cent. It’s been quite a while.’

McGrail couldn’t place him, despite his memory for faces. ‘You have the advantage of me.’

‘Nineteen eighty-seven, to be precise.’

‘That is a while ago. The year I arrived here, in fact.’

‘Yeah, I remember someone saying it was your first case. I was there the night Polly Stenson was murdered.’ He extended his hand. ‘Andy Maddocks.’

They shook hands. ‘You were a friend of the Barton lad.’ Maddocks nodded. ‘You must excuse me – I conducted or sat in on a lot of interviews.’

Maddocks shook his head, smiling. ‘I would’ve been amazed if you’d remembered me.’ He paused, the prelude to an awkward change of gears. ‘Look, could I get you a drink?’

‘That’s very kind,’ said McGrail, ‘but it’s been a long and rather trying day. And I wouldn’t want you to take this personally, but I don’t have fond memories of that case.’

Maddocks reddened. ‘Superintendent, there’s something I have to tell you – for my own good. I’ve been sitting on it all these years, and I need to get it off my chest. I’d really appreciate it.’

‘Is it to do with Polly?’

‘Yes. It’s not that big a deal, but it might clear up a couple of things.’

‘In that case, lead on, Mr Maddocks.’

They found a quiet corner. McGrail had a port, Maddocks a glass of Pinot Noir.

‘I didn’t lie or withhold information when I spoke to you,’ said Maddocks. ‘At that stage I didn’t know what I’m about to tell you. Johnny Barton told me a couple of months later – after swearing me to secrecy. He had a bit of a soft spot for Polly. He liked the fact she wasn’t a follower, like most of his sister’s friends. She said to me once, “What Johnny doesn’t seem to get is that I can’t afford to be.” Anyway, Johnny being Johnny, his way of showing it was to tease her – mostly good fun, but sometimes it got a bit mean. Like that night. You remember Tina Best? She and her husband Roger were at the party.’

‘Vaguely.’

‘She was the mother of a mate of ours. I guess these days you’d call her a cougar.’ Maddocks peered at McGrail, wondering if he needed to elaborate.

‘She fancied younger men?’

Maddocks nodded. ‘Well, she certainly fancied Johnny. A few weeks before the party, he’d gone round to their place to drop off something for Roger and Tina threw herself at him. According to him – and Johnny had his faults, but he didn’t bullshit about women; he didn’t need to – she was pretty much besotted with him. He’d ring her up, it didn’t matter what she was doing, she’d drop everything and go and meet him. He used to knock her off in car parks, in the back seat of her Merc. One time he went over there when they were having a dinner party; she came out and gave him a blowjob in the garage.’ Maddocks reddened again. ‘Sorry, it’s a bit bloody grubby.’ McGrail was unblinkingly non-judgemental. ‘Anyway, Johnny spent most of that night out at the pool with his rugby mates. About eleven thirty he went off to hook up with Tina – although we didn’t know that – and bumped into Polly, who was bored and thinking of going home. On the spur of the moment he decided to do a number on her. He told her to go upstairs, wait in the walk-in wardrobe in the main bedroom with the door slightly open, and in a few minutes she’d see something that would knock her socks off.

‘Off she went, but as Johnny was talking Tina into popping upstairs for a quickie, his parents appeared. Nicky, his mother, said to Tina, “Just the person I’m looking for; I need a second opinion on some curtains” or whatever, and more or less dragged her away. Tim told Johnny, who was doing law, that there was some judge he wanted him to meet. So he got hauled off to talk to the judge with his old man right there making sure he didn’t slide off. This went on for about half an hour, by which time all Johnny wanted to do was get back outside and get wasted. He didn’t even bother looking for Polly – he just assumed she’d think she’d been taken for a ride and be highly pissed off with him.’

‘Did Johnny take this to mean that his parents knew or suspected what he was up to with Mrs Best?’

‘Yeah, the next day Tim told him to stick to girls his own age. It turned out Tim and Roger had some big hush-hush deal on the go, and if it got derailed because of Johnny putting his dick where it didn’t belong, he could kiss his inheritance goodbye. That’s why Johnny swore me to secrecy.’

‘How did his father know?’

‘Didn’t say,’ said Maddocks. ‘Johnny asked, of course, but Tim gave him the old, “You’d be surprised what I know”.’

Within a couple of months it was all academic. The October sharemarket crash put paid to whatever was in the works, the Bests sold up and moved to Australia, and Johnny set out on his journey to rock bottom.

Maddocks knew the story because one of his mates had married Lucy Barton. With his parents’ encouragement, Johnny had taken a year off law to do a rich boy’s whirlwind overseas experience. In London, though, he fell hard for a girl who was out of his league. Part model, part muse, she had posed for society photographers and a fashionable painter, and rock stars, the likes of Bryan Ferry, had written songs about her. She ran off to Paris with a married novelist. When he came home with his tail between his legs, Johnny saw a window of opportunity and rushed over to France. She still wasn’t interested, but she did introduce him to the expat bohemian scene. He wasn’t artistic or intellectual or cultured or worldly or fizzing with anarchic vitality, but he had one thing that not many in that circle possessed, and that was money. He discovered that having lots of drugs on hand and being generous with them was a good way to make and keep friends. Thus began a slow descent into addiction.

A decade later, when his trust money had run out and the ‘just to tide me over’ remittances had dried up and after several unsuccessful interventions, his father hired a team of ex-US Army Special Forces guys who specialised in extracting people from cults. They kidnapped Johnny from a commune in Mexico, took him to England and left him in the care of the woman who unhooked Eric Clapton from heroin. When Johnny was clean, his parents brought him home.

‘Where is he now?’ asked McGrail.

‘Right here,’ said Maddocks. ‘Talk about going from one extreme to the other: he went back to varsity, finished his law degree and set himself up in a practice, with a little help from his parents. I bump into him now and again: he’s turned into Tim lite – smug, conservative, very much part of the eastern suburbs social scene, but without Tim’s business nous. Not that money’s an issue.’

‘Am I right in thinking the father died not so long ago?’

‘Yep, dropped dead on the seventeenth tee at Middlemore. His mother sold the family home, much to Johnny’s disgust. She’s got an apartment in the Viaduct. The Bests split up – surprise, surprise. I heard Tina’s back in town, but I don’t know whether that’s true.’

‘Could you find out?’

Maddocks stared. ‘Are you going to follow this up?’

‘I’ve waited twenty-seven years for a break on Polly Stenson’s murder,’ said McGrail. ‘It’s not much, but it’s something. You bet your bottom dollar I’m going to follow it up.’ He produced a slim notebook and a fountain pen from his jacket pocket. ‘Let’s go back to the beginning.’

2

All was in readiness. The highly decorated (and priced) bottle of Central Otago Pinot Noir had been breathing for a couple of hours. The fire, craftily tended and force-fed, had worked itself into a yellow-orange fury generating so much heat that the room had been opened up and outer layers discarded. The lamb shanks had been slow-cooked into submission. The panel of pundits had squeezed every last drop out of the bleeding obvious and hedged their bets. The players were about to take the field.

Their Saturdays revolved around ten-year-old Billy’s rugby, which had become Tito Ihaka’s rugby since he’d been roped in to help with the coaching. After a post-game McDonald’s they would shop for dinner, usually one of the wine-soaked casseroles that Denise Hadlow, Billy’s mother and Ihaka’s girlfriend, considered her speciality. ‘One-pot cooking,’ she called it whenever Ihaka wondered out loud if it was about time they had a roast with all the trimmings. ‘Think about that when you’re doing the dishes.’

They would browse in the DVD hire shop, where the challenge was to find something that was suitable for Billy and which Ihaka was prepared to sit through in stoic silence. (As long as it passed the appropriateness test, Denise didn’t mind what Billy chose, no matter how dumb or noisy it was.) They divided their time, as the Sunday supplements say, between her Point Chevalier townhouse and his Sandringham bungalow, but All Black test nights were always spent at Ihaka’s place because it had a fireplace. Ihaka wasn’t a great one for rules, either his own or other people’s, but he was adamant that a roaring fire was part of the ritual. You simply couldn’t watch the All Blacks without one.

Billy had scored three tries that morning and been so clearly the best player on the field that the parents had abandoned their usual practice of giving the player of the day award to the boy with the bloodiest nose or whose roughneck enthusiasm had more or less made up for his brain explosions. If the Blacks nail it, thought Ihaka, it would be the perfect end to a perfect day. Correction: it would be the perfect prelude to the perfect end to a perfect day.

Billy was practising the haka, muttering the words to himself. Ihaka had taught him the words and actions, not realising that Billy would see it as their patriotic duty to accompany the All Blacks. Denise told them to take their places on the sofa, she was about to serve up.

‘Just ducking to the loo,’ said Ihaka, and left the room.

His mobile, which was on the arm of the sofa, started ringing. Being a modern parent, Denise encouraged Billy to answer her phone if she wasn’t around; he had no reason to think Ihaka, who was pretty easy-going about that sort of thing, had a different policy. ‘Hello. This is Billy speaking.’

There was a short silence. A woman said, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got the wrong number.’

‘Um, it’s not my phone,’ said Billy.

‘Oh, I see. Well, I was trying to get hold of Tito Ihaka.’

Ihaka reappeared. ‘He’s here,’ said Billy. He held out the phone. ‘It’s for you.’

There were a few things Ihaka could have said, but he restricted himself to ‘Funny that’ because he didn’t want Billy to think he was pissed off with him for answering his phone and it would be easy to give the kid that impression. Secondly, Billy probably couldn’t answer the burning question, ‘Who the fuck would ring at this time?’ Third, he was making a conscious effort not to swear in front of Billy and, by and large and somewhat to his surprise, succeeding. He’d expected that, deprived of the F word and its variations, he would struggle to communicate, express an opinion, pass comment on the daily round and let off steam over minor misadventures like splashing water on himself when doing the dishes. It actually wasn’t that hard.

He took the phone. ‘Ihaka.’

‘Hi, it’s Miriam Lovell.’

She was a freelance journalist in whom Ihaka had, briefly, taken an interest. His affair with Denise had taken off in a storm and quickly encountered turbulence. Under the impression that it had in fact crashed and burned, he’d entered into negotiations with Miriam over the ground rules for what they agreed would be a low-key, one-step-at-a-time relationship. Then Denise had second thoughts. By the time Ihaka got around to informing Miriam that their relationship wouldn’t be progressing beyond the hypothetical stage, she’d worked it out for herself.

Ihaka couldn’t help flicking a wary glance at Denise, who was bringing in his dinner. She mouthed, ‘Who is it?’ He put on a dumb show to indicate that he’d walked into an ambush.

‘Oh hi,’ he said leadenly. ‘How are you?’

‘Is this a bad time?’

‘Well, yeah, as a matter of fact. The test match is about to start.’

Ihaka heard Denise ask Billy, ‘Who is it, sweetie?’

‘A lady.’

Ihaka kept his eyes on the TV screen: the All Blacks were coming out onto the field. He sensed Denise’s narrow-eyed scrutiny and Billy’s rising anxiety. He thought of leaving the room, but that would guarantee an interrogation.

‘So not exactly life and death, then?’ said Miriam.

‘We’ll have to agree to disagree on that.’