The Crime of Huey Dunstan Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 whopinched 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 intothe 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,