The Crime of Huey Dunstan Read Online Free PDF Page 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 theprosecutor, “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. “Cometo 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