The Crime of Huey Dunstan (6 page)

A FEW DAYS after Lawrence telephoned with the verdict, he rang again and asked me to meet him at Parliament House. He was coming down on business. Lawrence belonged to a government think-tank charged with reviewing the jury system, and he had some business in the House as well.

We met in the Beehive, in the cafeteria.

“You got the material I sent, Ches?”

Lawrence had sent me a formal letter after the trial ended, thanking me for my participation and enclosing a résumé of the judge’s summation on the final day. Lawrence had listed three areas where in his view the judge had erred and from which I inferred there were grounds for an appeal. He also sent me a number of medical reports, including the
transcripts of prison interviews with Huey made by prison staff and also the hospital psychiatrist, Dr Wilson. I had missed Toby Wilson’s testimony and cross-examination in court and had never met him, but I knew his reputation and, reading the reports, was impressed by his thoroughness and the way he had put Huey’s truthfulness and reliability to the test. Several times he had tried to trip Huey up. Huey claimed to have scored a try on the football field in the first half, playing in a match for his college, and Toby returned to the point later in a subsequent interview, saying to him, “That try you got in the second half—you must have been a popular guy.” “No, no,” Huey corrected him, “in the first half. It was the only try of the match.”

I said to Lawrence, after thanking him for sending me the material, “Lisbeth says you’re going to appeal.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. She worked out that you’d appeal almost before you thought of it.”

“Tell Lisbeth I’m smiling.” Lawrence moved in his chair. I felt his gaze shift and sensed he was checking on the occupants of the next table, a habit I remembered from earlier days. Lawrence had the air of a panther, despite a flop of ginger hair in front which suggested, when he was young, a golden retriever. He was physically striking, with unusually wide, indolent shoulders. His manner in court, a quiet potency he exuded without noticeably raising his voice, lent credence to the idea of an alpha male, brimming with professionalism and self-confidence. Privately I read
a man of strong, less settled emotions who masks and resists voicing his true thoughts. In reality he is extremely cautious.

Lawrence had chosen a table against the wall.

“Well, she’s wrong, Ches. You won’t like this but I’m not going to appeal. Oh, there are grounds for it. On provocation alone; the judge virtually directed the jury to convict. Huge bias. He also failed to point out to them that our expert evidence, yours and Toby Wilson’s, was uncontested—that the Crown failed to put up anyone against you. I could go on. So we appeal. All right. Let’s say—and the chances are not very bright—but let’s say we succeed. We win the appeal and a new trial is ordered. Then what? I’m not going to put the boy and his family through it all again, simply for another jury to return the same verdict. Because without new evidence, unless something seismic occurs, that’s what will happen. Believe me. You’re being very quiet, Ches.”

“What can I say?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t expect you to burst out cheering.”

Fat chance, I thought.

“I don’t have anything proper to go on, Ches.”

“Or improper. You could try the obvious,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“I think he’s been abused.”

“Excuse me a moment…Glasses.” I heard a voice beside me. A messenger had evidently brought him a note. He put the reading glasses away. “Sorry, they’re just about
to resume. I have to go in again.”

Lawrence was giving evidence before a Select Committee. I nodded.

“Would be neat, wouldn’t it,” he said, “if the boy had been molested. I thought that too at one stage. I put it to the headmaster of his primary school, if you remember. No, you hadn’t arrived. The headmaster said in court that when Huey began throwing desks around and became generally disruptive, he tried to get to the bottom of things. Called in the parents, had Huey psychologically assessed, had him sent to a health camp. More assessments. Nothing. Problem unsolved. By the way, Huey has been sent to maximum security, transferred to Auckland prison—transferred would you believe it, ‘to alleviate prison muster problems’. He’s in Paremoremo, Maximum Security, D Block. It’s pitiful. The judge tried to stop it. The father is distressed. How can they visit the boy up there? Anyway when I heard about the transfer, I went to see him with that very point in mind. The answer’s no, Ches.”

“You went to see him?”

“In Cornford.”

“Before he was transferred?”

“Yes.”

“With that specifically in mind?”

“Yes.”

“You asked him outright?”

“Yes.”

“I see. You trotted up to Huey in Cornford jail and
said, ‘Huey, old son. Correct me if I’m wrong, but when you were abandoned at the age of seven did someone fondle your bum?’”

“I was a bit more circumspect than that.”

“But you
suggested
it. You put the thought into his bosky little mind that he might have been sexually assaulted. Sweet Jesus. And I once gave you an alpha in my psychology class.”

“Sorry, Ches. I had to know. I can’t appeal a life sentence on thin air.”

“Yes. Well count your blessings I shall forget you told me that. Did Huey give you an answer? Of course he didn’t. Count your blessings. Just think what the Crown would make of that at a retrial!”

If I had thought to shame Lawrence, I was mistaken.

“There’s more, Ches. I talked to the psychiatrist again. I asked Toby Wilson to review his case notes. We went over them together, everything. There’s nothing. Toby spent six hours with the boy. You remember Toby was the first to be told about the elusive Mr Glen. Huey disclosed it in the second interview. He then placed an embargo on who Toby could tell. He didn’t want his legal adviser to be told. You know all that. So we went over everything again. Toby is adamant there’s no hint of anything sexual.”

“How can he be sure?”

“Sorry, Ches. I have to go. I didn’t say Toby was sure, I just said there’s nothing there.”

“Did Toby advise you against appealing?”

“It’s my decision. I didn’t ask him.”

“Do you remember his exact words?”

“He said—You’ve got Toby’s report. It’s very precise, very correct. Toby sticks by it. Said he liked the boy. Said he got quite close to the boy. There wasn’t any hint of sexual molestation.”

“But that’s what the headmaster said. You’re quoting the headmaster.”

“Exactly. Toby agrees with the headmaster.”

“But did he say that to you? Did Toby Wilson actually say that? I don’t believe he would say anything of the sort, Lawrence.” But he had gone.

I went into the study when I got home and switched on the computer. I wanted to check the headmaster’s testimony. But first I reviewed what the psychiatrist had said:

The headmaster’s name was Parfitt. He had given his evidence on the fourth day. He said he remembered Huey from primary school when he was seven or eight. “Huey was very protective of his sister Amy,” the principal said, “otherwise he was sullen and quiet. He would burst into tears for no obvious reason. At other times he became verbally violent.” 

“Pompous git,” I muttered. I shut down the computer and went into the next room. Lisbeth was ironing.

“Unreconstructed pedantic pompous little git!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sorry, love. Something burning? I hope it’s not my best shirt.”

“Iron’s a bit hot, that’s all. Who are you being rude about?”

“I’ve just been listening to what Huey’s headmaster said in court. Lawrence reminded me. The man was asked if there might be something sexual at the root of it. Was it possible the boy had been molested? Know what the headmaster said. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘if it’d been anything like that, he would have told me.’ Bloody hell he would. I think I’ll go for a walk.”

“Good idea. But take a coat. They’re predicting gales.”

I found a coat and got my cane from the hall stand.
I said going out, “By the way, he isn’t going to appeal. Lawrence has changed his mind.”

I closed the door and climbed up the steps leading from the house to the road, then down the zigzag path that gives on to the waterfront and the bay below. Mugglestone Way is cut into the hillside in one of those bad-tempered engineering feats that give Wellington its character; there is a handrail and eighty-six steps, two of them broken, and I am forbidden by Lisbeth to use the path in bad weather. Naturally I ignored this stricture—I needed a challenge to rid my mind of irritants like the headmasters’s comment. Anyway the path is a short cut. It gets me on to the Parade in eight minutes. I don’t use the handrail. I use the cane. I count the steps. I know every bend, every dip, every corner. It’s automatic. Everything is laid out in my mind. On the way down I passed Bill Cornish, one of our neighbours, coming up. “It’s about Force Seven down there,” he said, and laughed. “You’ll love it.” He’s right. Bad weather is food and drink to the sightless. A ruffian wind is bliss, the blind man’s comfort station. When I get tired of walking around it, I can always lean against it.

Halfway down, I could already sense a change of tone in the atmosphere. Leaves whizzing about. My toes started to squirm. I could feel it behind the eyelids, in the pores of the skin, in the tip of the cane vibrating as it responded to the changing landscape. Contrary to popular belief, a cane is not a walking stick, nor the ears to the sightless
mere receptors of sound. I once read a book, before I lost my sight, about a man named Holman. James Holman was known as the Blind Traveller. Not a lot was known about blindness then. Holman lived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He was an English naval officer who went blind at twenty-five and then, with little money and quite alone, explored half the world from Siberia to the Australian outback. He did it, so the author of the book claimed, by teaching his senses “to read the landscape”. It was a smashing adventure tale, and I didn’t believe a word of it. But I do now. Today it is received wisdom that going blind renders your remaining senses more acute. Nonsense. My hearing is no better because I can’t see. Familiar sounds take on a different meaning, that’s all. One listens for the half-notes. Nor has my sense of touch improved. It has merely learned to play on other instruments. Its repertoire has increased, that’s all. It’s hard to explain.

I was offered a seeing-eye dog once, and said no. I don’t like props. I find that the best way of being blind is being invisible. I use a long cane like a shepherd’s crook. It’s long and thin and discoloured. You can barely see it in a crowd.

At the bottom of the path I crossed the main road and turned right. The afternoon traffic from town was already dense, the wind and wet arriving in scuds from the northwest. I imagined a few brave souls out pushing prams, and even swimming. After a few steps I got a buffet on the chest and thought, wow. All the sounds that are normally
there for navigating had gone, swept away by the wind. The cane was no longer vibrating and sending me messages as I flicked it casually from side to side.
Casually?
I had to grip it very tight and use my whole arm as if it was part of the cane. The wind had spun me round. Deliberately, using deliberate strong movements of the arm and cane, I got my balance and began to breathe in as the sounds returned. I could feel my chest filling as I breathed in. You know that lovely creaking sound of the thwarts when you’re at sea? The sound you get lying in your bunk below the waterline when the ship rolls? That’s what a blind man feels when he enters into the windiness of the day with his pores pricked. I stood a moment on the Parade reading the music of the waves, the shouts of bathers coming over the parapet from the beach below. I walked on.

Lawrence is
wrong
, I told myself. The headmaster’s
wrong.
They’re all
wrong
. If I had thought to ease my mind by taking a stroll in the wind, I was mistaken. By the time I reached Evans Bay forty minutes later, it was raining hard. I caught the bus home.

The following week I came back from the university with a bag of shopping in my hand and went into the kitchen. Although I am officialy retired, I keep a room at the university and use it every week. I like to keep the contact with young people. It was a Friday, shabbat, and even though Lisbeth doesn’t keep shabbat in the religious sense I like to do something special for her at the end of the week. Lisbeth
is Jewish by the way. Well, half-Jewish. Friday is one of my cooking days.