The Crime of Huey Dunstan (7 page)

I had thought of making a fish stew but the fish wasn’t fresh and the shallots in the supermarket felt spongy. I keep a number of recipes to hand in braille, and decided on chops done the Greek way with lemon, and asparagus tips on the side. I forget where Lisbeth was, it wasn’t one of her hospice days. She came in about an hour after me and disappeared into the study, then came out again.

“The asparagus looks nice.”

“I thought I’d try a parmesan sauce. I might need your help. The recipe says ‘parmesan and mimosa’ but I think the mimosa is hoo-ha.”

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “I’ve been reading some of the stuff on your computer. The transcripts.”

“When?”

“This morning after you went out. I hope it’s allowed.”

“Of course. The trial’s over.”

“I thought your evidence was very good.”

“Oh thank you.”

“No. I mean it. As for the prosecutor—”

“Sparrow, his name is. Yes?”

“I don’t know. I suppose they’re all like that. I couldn’t understand what the judge was saying to the jury at the end. Struck me as like robbing Peter to pay Paul. He
sounded
as if he was trying to be fair. I don’t understand the legal side. When you’ve finished making the sauce—the mimosa by the way is just the look of the thing, when you squeeze
the egg yolks through a sieve they’re supposed to come out looking like mimosa blossom. I can do it. But first, can we sit down together over a drink? There’s something I’d like to ask you.”

“Ask away,” I said when we were settled in the next room.

“Can you please explain to me why after two weeks, nearly three weeks now, this case is still getting to you?”

“How do you mean.”

“You’re not sleeping. You’re nervy. You fly off the handle for no reason. You get up in the night and go into the next room or you go out. Last night you were talking in your sleep. What
is
it about this boy?”

“I’ve told you.”

“You’ve told me he thought he was hitting ‘the other man’. That’s not a reason.”

“It’s a bloody great puzzle. Nobody knows why he did it.”

“So the ‘why’ is important? Look, you say you think he was abused. That’s what you were talking about in your sleep. So? Everyone’s being abused these days. It’s all the rage. It’s the latest form of calisthenics. What I’m getting at, Charlie. Does the case have a value of itself?”

“You mean is this journey really necessary? I’m not sure.”

“Well, you’d better be sure if it’s making you miserable.”

One of the dangers of being married to an intelligent
woman is that you have to justify yourself all the time. I hate that. Especially when she is right.

I said, “OK. I’ll try. It’s the only case I know of that involves both a flashback and a killing.”

“So it’s unique?”

“Unique. What’s unique? Every case is unique. I’m not a lawyer. But I think that if a jury
were
persuaded to accept flashback as a defence to murder—”

“What would that mean?”

“Well, it might make legal history for a start. I doubt if there’s ever been a case where a jury has accepted flashback and trauma as a defence of provocation to a charge of murder. But you’d have to ask Lawrence. Where’s all this leading?”

“Oh, I just wondered.”

Later that evening when we were eating she said, “What are they like? His parents.”

“I haven’t met them.”

“You must have some idea.”

“Not really. Well. Lawrence was impressed by the father’s hat. Smells like a knacker’s yard, he says. Dad works in the bush apparently, does farming jobs in between, crutching and so on.

“Nobody mentions the mother.”

“Great worker the father, according to Lawrence. He told Lawrence, ‘The harder I work, the better it is’. Stops him from brooding, I suppose. Almost a cleansing operation.”

“Well that speaks for him.”

“I suppose it does. Why?”

“Why what?”

“Dunno. I was thinking aloud. I think the father blames himself.”

“For the killing?”

“I mean for sending the boy away. I told you—the father doesn’t know. He has no idea, absolutely no idea what went on in the caravan.”

“Chops are nice, Charlie. You should cook more often.”

I said again, “Why the sudden interest?”

“Well, it is strange. You say he thought he was hitting ‘the other man’.”

“Yes. He switched them.”

“Meaning?”

“He switched the two men. When I was interviewing Huey down in the cell and he was describing the killing. He said ‘Glen’ when he was talking about the deceased. He kept saying ‘Glen’. He didn’t realise he was saying it. He was talking very quietly. He was very tense. He was reliving the experience. After fourteen years.”

“And you are quite sure there was no premeditation?”

“Absolutely not. When the police interviewed him on video, they asked him, ‘Did you mean to kill the man?’ Huey said ‘Yes’, without hesitation. But he was already in the flashback, he was on auto-pilot. It isn’t automatism, by the way. He had complete recall of what he did. But then
look at what he did. He drove in circles, smashed a phone box, climbed a tree and tried to hang himself. He went from pillar to post like a ball on a billiard table looking for a hole. He was lost. Nothing premeditated about it.”

LISBETH WENT ON asking questions. We both like discussing ideas, but, unlike me, Lisbeth doesn’t demand something new to learn every day. Facts, which I hate to run short of, don’t trouble her in the least. If they’re absent, she ignores them or makes them up. On the other hand, she has the annoying habit of scratching away to get to the bottom of things, just like me. I find this infuriating.

“You didn’t tell me he was Maori,” she said at some point.

“But I
did
,” I replied.

“No, no. I mean, does he speak Maori?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What about the father?”

“Pass,” I said.

She persisted. “Don’t you know? What about the mother? Does
she
speak Maori?” And so on.

I said to her, “Does it matter?”

“Well, it might,” Lisbeth said. “Doesn’t it strike you as odd for a Maori family to pack the oldest child off to live with a white man? Who is this Pakeha chap anyway? He wasn’t a close friend, you say.”

“I said it’s odd, didn’t I? I keep telling you that.”

“It isn’t odd, it’s
peculiar
, Charlie. If he really is Maori. The father, I mean. It’s like abandoning your tribe.”

I don’t remember what I said to that. It didn’t seem relevant, although I admit that Lisbeth’s questions do sometimes have a point. Women are better at detail than men. In court it’s all in the detail.

She said to me a couple of days later, “I think you should go and see the father.”

“Why? Lawrence isn’t going to appeal.”

“I know. You told me.”

“Then why?”

“You were talking in your sleep again last night. It’s very wearing.”

“You just want me out of the house.”

“Seriously. You might discover something.”

“I’m not Perry Mason.”

“Perry Mason was confined to a wheelchair. You’re mobile. It’s only a hop up the island on the bus. You love buses, you say. You can be back the next day.”

“I’d rather talk to Mrs Abbott,” I said.

“I can’t keep up with you. Who’s she?”

“I wrote to one of his teachers. She gave evidence at the trial. She rang me. She’s coming to Wellington next week.”

“I still think you should talk to the father,” Lisbeth said.

Di Abbott was a special needs teacher. She was not one of Huey’s class teachers but had known him at his Maori college, the secondary school he attended about fifteen kilometres from Pikipiki. I pictured a woman in her forties wearing trainers and no makeup. In her evidence at the trial Mrs Abbott said she got to know Huey because of his chronic truancy. He would run away and leave a note on the school lawn. Once when he was missing for three days she had traced him to an aunty’s and driven him back to the parents. After that she kept an eye on him. She would pick him up walking to school sometimes when he had missed the bus.

She told the court that she suspected something was worrying him, and once had nearly got him to the point of talking about it. “But he never did.”

We met at a café on the Quay. I thanked Mrs Abbott for coming and said to her, “When you rang, you said you’d remembered something.”

“Yes. It was something he wrote for me. When I got your letter, I was thinking about the parents. You know that
house? OK. When you stand in that house, you know these are decent people. I only went there once. As I was leaving the mother took me aside and said, did I know that Huey wrote poetry? I don’t think she wanted the father to hear. I didn’t teach Huey myself, but a couple of times I had him when the class teacher was away. They’d been asked to do an essay about being an only child, something like that. Huey wrote—I’ve brought it. Can I read it to you? He wrote,
He
is ashamed of himself by the time he gets home. He is 14 and he is not
allowed to cry. Mohi has not cried since he was seven. Amy cries a lot
but she’s got a glass eye and is an invalid as well as a girl.
”

“Huey wrote that?”

“That’s the gist of it. I wrote it down as I remembered it after I got your letter. It impressed me at the time.”

How
interesting, I said.

“Another thing I remembered. But again not in his exact words. We were having a discussion in class about the hereafter, what happens when you die sort-of-thing. It’s a Church of England school as you know but not exclusively Anglican. There’s Mormon and Catholic kids and some Ringatu families send their kids there from as far as the Ureweras. Quite a few boarders are Tuhoe and on this occasion it was the Tuhoe kids who spoke out. A couple of them talked about going to ‘the Twelfth’, when they were small. They were expected to fetch and carry for the elders—just gophers, little kids. It’s some sort of feast at the marae on the Saturday nearest the twelfth of each month. There’s fasting and prayers. I’d never heard of it, but
what came out from these Tuhoe kids was a lot of biblical stuff about the immortality of the soul and the Lost Tribes of Israel. I suppose it’s taken from the prophet, Rua Kenana. The discussion got quite heated at one point. Then Huey stood up and said something in Maori. Everyone looked at him and shut up. He hadn’t said a word until then.

“‘All right, Huey,’ I said, ‘tell us what you think. What do you think happens when we die?’ He said,
We are born
astride a grave—
I swear he used the word astride. That’s Beckett, isn’t it? God knows where he got it from but that’s what he said.
We are born astride a grave. The light gleams for a
second. Then it’s night again.
It was like a poem. Then he sat down.

“Is something wrong, professor?”

I must have turned away. Tears had formed behind my eyelids. I pushed my cup away and got up from the table and stood a moment gathering myself. I was conscious of an amorphous field of yellow light and a roaring in my head like seas washing over me, blotting out everything around me. Perhaps I knocked into something or stumbled, because she had taken my arm and was steadying me. “It’s all right,” I said, sitting down again.

Mrs Abbott had just described to me, in Huey Dunstan’s words, the moment at which I knew I was going to be permanently blind.

Lisbeth said to me afterwards, “How did you get on?”

“With the teacher? Oh fine. I don’t think it’s resolved
anything, but she gave me some information to go on.”

As Christmas approached Lisbeth was preoccupied with the house and other things. Our younger daughter, Sarah, came from Kuala Lumpur to stay over Christmas and in the new year Lisbeth’s cousin, Bubi, was due to arrive from Melbourne. I thought she would grow weary of the subject but as soon as Sarah had left Lisbeth returned to the attack. She said to me one day:

“I don’t suppose, Charlie, you’ve thought any more about the father.

“No. Should I?”

“I was just thinking. You said the father was away in the bush and the boy was ‘a bit of a handful’. There were four children at home you said and the father couldn’t cope. But maybe it was the mother who couldn’t cope.”

“I don’t think it matters why Huey was sent away. The point is he was, and whatever happened after that he construed it in his mind as part of the punishment.”

“So you say. I can’t make up my mind if it is the boy or the father you identify with.”

“What sort of question is that?”

I thought for a moment. “The boy, I suppose. Huey. We both come from a speaking culture. Similar background—I was brought up dirt poor. Similar work ethic. My father was a disciplinarian like Huey’s dad. I stole something once when I was about ten, got punished for it.”

“You’ve never told me that.”

“It’s not something I like to dwell on. Another thing—well, you’ve never asked. Another thing Huey and I have in common: we were both taken away from home at an early age. I was brought up by my maternal grandparents.”

“Huey wasn’t brought up by his grandparents, was he?”

“No. But he was taken away and put with this Glen person. The break from home was the same. Worse, in his case.”

Next day Lisbeth thought of something else. I have to hand it to her. She was very persistent.

Lisbeth said:

“Who’s Amy?”

“Amy’s the sister, I think his little sister. She’s the one he nearly blinded.”

“How do you know?”

“Lawrence must have told me. Huey and his brother were playing cricket in the backyard and little Amy was peering through the glass, watching from behind the ranch doors. Huey was about twelve. The father yelled at them to stop. “One more ball!” Huey cried. “Just one more ball.” That was it. Crack. He hit the ball and it went through a pane above Amy’s head. She looked up and a tiny glass splinter got lodged in the eye, tiny shard. She was crying all the time but they didn’t know what it was for years until she began walking into things, disoriented. I suppose they
couldn’t afford to have it looked at by a specialist. Huge delays in getting proper treatment for her eye. I don’t know. But she lost the eye.”

“My God. Is there anything else this family has had to cope with?”

Lisbeth said:

“What makes you so certain you are right?”

“What about?”

“Everything. You say you think he was abused when he was seven. Do you have any evidence?

“None.”

“Then it’s just a hunch.”

Lisbeth said:

“It isn’t enough, you know, to go out on a limb on the basis of a hunch.”

“I told you. I’m not going anywhere.”

“It’s silly.”

“It’s not silly.”

“Irrational then. It is silly, if you got nothing to back it up.”

“Psychology is all about hunches based on observation and experience.”

“That sounds like one of your sweeping generalisations.”

“It can be a tool, a diagnostic tool.”

“Not in this case, obviously.”

“You’re being frivolous,” I said.

“Do you remember what you said to me when we first met in London?”

“Yes. You’d just got a job and were dithering about what to do with your hair. You couldn’t decide whether to grow it long or cut it. I said, ‘When in doubt, wash.’”

“Now
you
are being frivolous. I bet that’s one of your Navy sayings.”

“No, Scouts. Actually,” I said, “it was my Baptist landlady in Torquay.”

“Charlie, be serious for a moment. What is wrong with talking to the father?”

“I thought that was coming.”

“I think you’re frightened of the father. Either that or you don’t want your hunch to be wrong. You’re frightened of being proved wrong.”

Lisbeth said:

“What do you mean, it’s ‘a diagnostic tool’?”

“Well. Think of Archimedes crying Eureka! when he discovered the principle of upthrust on a floating body. That began with a hunch or notional argument, as a guide for getting results before he had any sort of rigorous proof. It is a tool. Forensic psychology wouldn’t have got very far without it.”

“But you’re not a forensic psychologist. You’re a clinical psychologist.”

“Same thing. The principle’s the same. A lot of it is
based on observation. That may not be a popular view but I remember when I arrived in New Zealand and began going in and out of penal institutions and hospitals. I developed a theory based purely on observation—I could do a psychological profile simply by walking behind a person down a corridor. I could tell a psychopath from a schizo. I could tell if someone was a schizophrenic or an epileptic or a malingerer just from the way they walked. The doctors laughed at me but after a while, when they’d done their sums, they admitted I was usually right.”

“Ah, but it had to be validated. You needed that confirmation?”

“Oh absolutely. There has to be some independent corroboration or you’re whistling to the wind.”

“Exactly.”

Lisbeth said:

“How do you know he isn’t doing the same thing?”

“Who?”

“The father.”

“Say again.”

“Eating himself up with worry. You said the father blames himself. You said he’s working day and night to kill the pain. You said he can’t afford the train fare to visit his son in prison in Auckland. He must be in a state, just like you are.”

“I doubt if he would want to see me.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“I know the name of the town. It’s just a village.”

“Ring him up.”

“Can’t. The number is disconnected.”

“Have you tried? Have you asked Lawrence? There must be a post office or a shop of some sort.”

“There’s a shop but they won’t give out the number. They say write to him care of Rural Delivery.”

“And he can’t read or write, you say? Oh dear. You’ll just have to go there.”

I said, “Are you offering to drive me?”

“You’ve forgotten. Marsden Home next week—I’m rostered on twice. What’s wrong with the bus?”

“Nothing. It’s only five hours.”

“Good boy. Off you go.”