CHAPTER 14

Oliver Buchanan sits with his elbows on his polished dining-room table, staring into space. Papers are strewn around, his brief lies open before him.

‘So. Did it go any better today?’ His wife stands hovering with table mats in her hand, waiting to lay the places.

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘You don’t sound sure.’ She is a taller woman than he had expected to marry, slim and dark, half Italian. They met in London when he was travelling as a young man. She was, at that time, studying at the Royal School of Music; this was before the war. Although she still plays the piano, she stopped yearning to perform in concerts when the war came, or perhaps she never did: it was her mother’s idea that she be a famous pianist. She dreamed that her daughter would light up the world. Besides, they had small children at the outbreak of the war and Oliver said that there were safer places than London. Like New Zealand. It seems to Oliver that whatever she touches she makes beautiful and that she succeeds very well in lighting up his world. The room where he sits is gently illuminated, the walls hung with paintings from Italy, and also those bought in galleries in Auckland: Woollaston’s blue landscapes of the West Coast, one of Frank Gross’s moody inner cityscapes, a Frances Hodgkins that his wife loves of an artist sitting alone at a table. Outside, through the white French doors, lies the spring garden bursting with irises and cream-throated freesias. The house is filled with their scent.

‘Are the boys in for dinner?’ he asks, without moving to collect up his papers.

‘They are.’ She hesitates, her hand moving to the back of his neck and resting lightly there. ‘What is it, Oliver?’

‘I cross-examined the prosecution’s star witness today. Rita. One of the girls with name suppression.’

‘And?’

‘She’s just a kid. I gave her a hard time. I made her cry.’

His wife sits down. ‘I see. But you need to get to the truth.’

‘I’m not sure that I did.’

‘She’d been keeping bad company, yes? Is this the girl who climbed out the window to go to the party?’

The trial is so sensational that her friends tried wheedling details from her at their morning-coffee gathering earlier in the day. Oliver always says he doesn’t like to bring his work home with him, or not in the sense of burdening her with the details of what it entails. But the weight of this trial is making him withdraw from her and yet he needs her close to him.

‘She’d have been better staying at home that night, that’s for sure,’ he says. ‘Her parents’ hearts will be broken. She’s not stupid, she’s smart and pretty and sixteen and believes that nothing will touch her, that she’s right about everything.’

‘Oliver, does it matter? This man, Albert Black, he stabbed a man in cold blood. Surely there’s nothing more to be said?’

‘It’s what happened before he stabbed Jacques that interests me.’

‘So one thing led to another, you think?’

‘Something like that.’ As he speaks, their sons burst into the room, fencing helmets and swords in their hands, flushed and laughing at some joke between them. One is twenty-two, the other nineteen. They are taller than both Oliver and his wife, tousle-headed dark young men with caterpillar eyebrows like his own. Both of them joined the university fencing club when they began their studies.

‘Dinner in twenty minutes, boys,’ their mother calls when they finish greeting each other. They always kiss her lightly on the cheek, both sides, the European way.

Oliver begins collecting up his papers, leaving the table clear. ‘You see,’ he says, ‘you call them boys. Your children, bearing swords.’

She begins to put the place mats in order. ‘Albert Black is a boy with a mother, is that what you’re saying?’

‘Yes.’

‘So was Alan Jacques.’

‘Who abandoned him long ago.’

‘Poor boy,’ she says. ‘But there are sisters, aren’t there?’

‘So I believe.’

‘A father?’

‘He came back from the war and moved in with a bus conductress. There were a whole lot of children, so he put them all in a home. This boy and a couple of his sisters were shipped out here. I’ve heard that one of the ones back in England died just before Jacques was killed.’

‘It’s a terrible story,’ she says. ‘Did the girls go to their brother’s funeral?’

‘I don’t think so. Things aren’t working out well for them. Or so I’m told.’ Their sons are distracting Oliver. The older one does a mock feint towards his brother with his sword, even though it is sheathed. ‘En garde!’ he cries.

‘That’s enough!’ Oliver finds himself shouting. ‘Stop it this minute.’

His wife looks at him, startled. But she thinks she sees it all. ‘Perhaps that, all of that, has something to do with this whole mess,’ she says. ‘The dead boy had troubles of his own.’

It had taken several days for the police to identify the dead man. Everyone who was interviewed, including the accused, had provided the name of Johnny McBride, although the newspapers respectfully called him John McBride, as if his mother would have known better than to call him Johnny. Laurie Corrington, the cook at Ye Olde Barn cafe, was one of those who assured the police that this was his name, and repeated his claim to pretty well every reporter in town. Laurie had been bending over the grill at the front of the cafe when what he described as ‘the incident’ took place. He knew Johnny, he said. He often came in for a feed. Nice chap, he said, always said hullo to him. Bit of a rough diamond, but no worse than the others. Said he was hoping to go to sea and work his passage to England.

‘I turned round just at that moment when it happened. Johnny got up and sauntered over to the jukebox. I saw a man get up from one of the cubicles and stand behind Johnny. Yes, it was Paddy all right. Suddenly Johnny staggered and fell back. At first I thought Paddy had hit Johnny and I hopped along the counter to put a stop to things. We don’t like violence in the cafe. Then I saw the blood. I had a white apron on. It was splattered with blood.’

Laurie had dashed to the door and run down the street, his blood-stained white apron flapping around his knees. He ran as far as Victoria Street, yelling for a policeman. There he found two constables. They had dashed with Laurie back to the cafe, one losing his helmet on the way, not stopping to pick it up.

The ambulance came. ‘Mr McBride was still conscious at that time,’ Laurie said. ‘The knife was still sticking out of his neck where he’d been stabbed. The boys rolled him over from where he fell, but you know his pulse was very weak, you could tell that he was going. Poor devil,’ he said, ‘he’d just had to move out of his digs. He had a suitcase with him, everything he owned. Somebody said there’d been a fight over one of the girls, well, you never know, do you? Anyway, it was me that called the ambulance, yes sir, you do what you can.’

In the suitcases the police found information at odds with who Johnny McBride was supposed to be. Instead of identification for McBride, they found papers belonging to a person called Alan Jacques, just nineteen years of age, not twenty-four, a child migrant who had arrived two years earlier. He’d almost grown up when he left England, hardly a child, barely a man, but when his two sisters were shipped off to New Zealand he’d been sent along with them. In one of the suitcases the police found a number of banned books by the American crime writer, Mickey Spillane. One of them was called The Long Wait. The central character was called Johnny McBride.

After several days a farmer from the south was tracked down and called on to travel north and identify the dead youth. Yes, he said, when he saw him at the mortuary, that’s him, Alan Jacques.

The farmer told police he had employed the boy when he first came to New Zealand. He’d been gone about a year. The kid didn’t much like being in the country, and complained about the work. ‘Anyone would think he’d appreciate the country life and the opportunities here,’ the farmer told reporters who had waited outside while he made the identification. ‘I don’t know, he kept saying he wanted to go home, didn’t like milking cows.’

‘What about the sisters?’ he was asked.

‘I had those girls at the farm the first summer to give them a bit of a holiday. The younger one was pretty useful at haymaking time. I reckon she’d be about thirteen then. The other one was older.’

‘Was the boy violent when he was working on the farm?’ a reporter asked.

‘Not that I saw. Well, he used to read those books, you know the ones Mazengarb banned. Quite right too, I should have taken them off him, we’re a decent family. Don’t ask me where he got them. He knocked around with a rough crowd in his days off, perhaps they gave them to him. I did hear he got into some scraps when he was in town.’

‘Did you ever give him a hiding?’ the reporter asked.

‘That’s enough of that. He did all right at my place, he had a bunk in the lean-to. I didn’t take any lip from him. Anyway, he went into the army after he turned eighteen.’

Perhaps it was the army where he’d learned to fight, the farmer reflected. But how would he know, he hadn’t offered to give him a job on the farm when he came out of the military, and he hadn’t come looking for one. There were plenty more where he came from. All he knew was that the boy lying on the slab in there was Alan Jacques and he had nothing more to say.

It had been Oliver’s duty to inform Albert Black of his victim’s identity. (It was hard to know what to call him, or either of them. Paddy or Albert? Alan or Johnny? Formal or informal? He felt that he should keep his professional distance, but Paddy seemed to fit best.) He watched the stunned look on Paddy’s face, the growing bewilderment. ‘Why didn’t he tell me?’

‘What difference would it have made?’ Oliver asked, trying to conceal a hint of sarcasm.

‘Perhaps I could have been a friend to him. He wanted to go home, just like me.’

‘It doesn’t seem as if Johnny wanted friends,’ Oliver said, softening a little.

‘He was just a lad. Younger than me. I should have known.’

‘Known better than to kill him? We could agree on that.’

Paddy put his head down almost to his knees and wept. ‘I didn’t mean to,’ he said. ‘I meant to frighten him. I thought — oh well, it doesn’t matter.’

‘You thought what?’

‘I thought that I would scare him off, give him a bit of a nick, and maybe I’d serve time and get deported back home. Well, something like that, I wasn’t thinking very clearly. I’m so sorry. Oh, the stupid little shite.’

Oliver asks his sons if they read Mickey Spillane’s novels. They smile, shrug and tell him it’s kids’ stuff. The older one is doing a degree in English literature. At the moment he is reading the works of Thomas Hardy. Oliver recalls a phrase of Hardy’s. Wasn’t it he who said that For every bad there is a worse?

Oliver has read The Long Wait and is repelled. It startles him now that someone could identify so closely with the amnesiac anti-hero of Spillane’s novel. He marks a paragraph in the book: One was going to die. One was going to get both arms broken … one was going to get a beating that would leave the marks of the lash striped across the skin for all the years left to live. Was it possible that, like the character at the book’s centre, Alan Jacques had so lost his own sense of identity that he believed in the new one?

He stays up late re-reading the book with a mounting feeling of self-disgust. In spite of himself, he is compelled to read on. His family lie sleeping as he reads. When he finishes, he steps outside. It is a clear night in the beautiful garden. The stars sparkle with a sharp, edgy brilliance. Stars have always fascinated him, and now at close to midnight he sees the Milky Way trailing its pale radiance across the sky. In the northern hemisphere, summer will have moved into autumn. Oliver cannot imagine wanting to live anywhere else but here in Auckland. He has tried living abroad and it didn’t suit him. But the young men in this tragedy — neither of them wanted to be where they were, and one has already died. His sympathy for Alan Jacques has been aroused, but he sees that it’s possible that what Albert Black has been saying might well be true too, that he was terrified of Alan Jacques, the boy who called himself Johnny McBride.

If Black saw himself as an outsider, Jacques’ feelings went further than that. The outcast. Someone was going to die and, as it so happened, it was him.

Horace Haywood knows he should be at home with his wife. Since they transferred north to Mount Eden prison, she has few friends. Instead, she comes to the prison and visits the inmates. She brings them treats, sweets and home baking, and sits talking to them when they are down, as if she were their mother. Their children, because he is in charge of them, the father figure. The circumstances are unusual, he knows that, and the surprised prisoners know it too. Sometimes, when one of the men is particularly unhappy, Ettie will put her arms around him and comfort him. She has tried this comforting approach with Albert Black, but he seems, in some respects, his own man. Black never discusses his crime with other prisoners, nor with the superintendent, and certainly not with the superintendent’s wife. There are days when he sits in his cell and sings to himself, and this is disconcerting in itself. Although Black laughs and exchanges cigarettes with men in the exercise yard, Haywood sees him as standing aloof from what took place on the day Alan Jacques died, almost as if he didn’t believe it happened. It troubles the superintendent. If the man is found guilty and sentenced to death, it will be his duty to supervise his welfare from the time sentence is passed until the execution takes place. And, after that, there is still the family with whom he must communicate and relay the final words, the last moments of a man’s life.

Neither he nor Ettie enjoy a life beyond the prison walls. Once the killing of a man is done, it’s so easy to encounter his friends and relatives who live in the city. This is unspoken between them, but both he and Ettie know. At least the family of Black, if he is found guilty, live far away where the superintendent won’t have to see them. It is impossible for him to forget the mother of the Englishman, Frederick Foster, who has so recently been in New Zealand to plead for her son’s life, and remained in the city after his death. Not that he blames her, she was a fighter; it angers him that Black is not fighting more, because he can’t fight for him.

‘How do you think the case is going?’ he asks Des Ball, pushing the whisky bottle towards him. They will have one more, he thinks, and then he really will be away home. It won’t do for him to stay here another night. That is how chaos and riots begin, the warders slacking on their duty, the men taking advantage.

‘The girl was a bit at sixes and sevens on the stand,’ Des says.

‘Too early to tell what the jury’s thinking.’

‘Buchanan’s going for manslaughter?’

‘That’s right.’

‘On the grounds of provocation? That’s stretching it a bit, isn’t it? It was going on twenty-four hours since he got a hiding from Jacques. Was he still hankering after the girl?’

‘Who knows? He didn’t look at her when she was on the stand, just looked straight ahead.’

‘It’s as if he doesn’t understand he could die too. What’s with him, does he want to die? Doesn’t he understand that death is forever? None of us are immortal.’ Haywood’s voice is angry. ‘I’ve watched too many men swing since I’ve been here. You know, I worked in the Paparua prison quarry down south. I worked alongside the men for seventeen years. I never thought I’d be selected for a job like this. I thought the world was as rock solid as the stone in the quarry. I believed God took care of things. Do you believe in God, Ball?’

‘Sort of. I was brought up a Catholic, sir.’

‘I might have guessed. I watch the priest when we execute men in this prison. He’s a good man, Father Downey, a good man. He makes the sign of the cross and I see how he’s suffering. But I wonder if he really believes God is lifting up this poor sod we’re just cutting down from the gallows, and putting him in some better place. Perhaps you can tell me, Ball? I hope it’s just darkness when my time comes. Perhaps that’s what Black wants too.’

After a while, broken only by the echoing shouts of men in their cells, Des says, slowly, ‘Black doesn’t want to die. I think he still hopes he’ll be deported.’

‘Sent back to Ireland? Well, I hope it stays fine for him.’ Haywood stands, unsteady on his feet again. ‘Got to go home,’ he says. ‘Have to go home to Ettie. Time for an early night.’

‘The dinner in the oven. Yeah, I know, tell me about it.

’ Haywood looks at his warder with sudden sharpness. ‘You go home too, Des. Go home. Marge all right?’

‘Not bad, sir.’

‘Children all right?’

‘So far as I know, sir. Don’t see them so much. They’re growing fast.’

‘You’re a fortunate man, Des, you know that? Fortunate.’

After the second day of Rita Zilich’s testimony, the jury gathers again at the Station Hotel for drinks in the upstairs lounge bar. James Taylor has a knack for remembering what everyone drinks. Ken McKenzie wants to escape to his room; he still hasn’t accustomed himself to the closeness of the space he and the eleven other jurors occupy. The small room at the courthouse where they take recesses, drink tea, eat lunch together is claustrophobic. The window is a push-up one. The Classics lecturer, whose name is Arthur, has claimed its ledge for himself, perching on its sill, so that he sits slightly above them, and for the most part feigns indifference to the conversations around him, moodily smoking Camels while leaning his head on his fingertips with his free hand. At the hotel, he orders a whisky sour straight up, drinks it quickly, eyeing the door.

‘What did we make of the evidence today?’ Taylor says.

‘Still say she’s a lovely girl,’ Jack Cuttance says. ‘Smart too, if you ask me, but I wouldn’t trust her.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Neville Johns says, puffing away on his pipe. ‘A bear with a moderately-sized brain, I’d say.’

Two or three of the men nod in agreement.

‘A good typist if what she says is true,’ the accountant offers. ‘I’d probably hire her.’

‘So what do you think, young Kenneth?’

Ken blushes, wishing he’d been passed over.

The lecturer says, with weary impatience, ‘Mr McKenzie reddens. I’m sure he admires Miss Zilich for attributes beside her typing skills.’

Ken sits up straight. ‘I think she’s missing some things out of her evidence. That’s what I think.’

‘Really? What makes you say that?’ Taylor leans forward, balancing his gin and tonic on one knee.

‘I don’t know exactly. It was just the way her eyes looked over to her friends when she was being cross-examined.’

‘But surely she was just seeking reassurance? It’s a huge thing for a young lass like that to take the stand,’ Taylor says.

‘I think she liked Paddy, Albert Black that is, and now she doesn’t want her boyfriend to know. I don’t think she told the truth about everything, the way it all happened. She made it sound like she was forced to stay with the defendant, but then she told him she couldn’t stay the whole night with him. She had to get back home before her parents found out she was missing.’

Arthur, despite his languid appearance, has begun to pay attention. ‘But he couldn’t get it up, he had a limp penis. Wouldn’t that be enough to make her want to go home?’

‘No, I don’t think it was like that,’ Ken says. As he speaks, he finds himself wanting to piss, just like when he was in school and the teacher wouldn’t stop asking him questions he couldn’t answer. ‘She said she couldn’t stay the night before Paddy couldn’t get an erection. She didn’t know he couldn’t.’ He stops then, sure now he is going to piss himself.

Jack Cuttance, coming to his rescue, says, ‘Poke her. She didn’t know he couldn’t poke her.’

Taylor is nodding, looking wise. ‘We’ll have to see what the next witnesses have to say. Well, they hung that chap Foster. It’s a big decision.’

‘Hanged,’ the lecturer says. ‘They hanged Frederick Foster. Pictures get hung, people get hanged.’

Taylor turns away in anger.

The lecturer has changed his mind about leaving. He goes to the bar and orders himself a second whisky sour. ‘Perhaps you’ve got a point,’ he mutters out of the side of his mouth as he passes Ken. ‘Work in progress. Not that it changes much. I mean, what does it matter who she wanted to fuck? She’s of age, she can fuck who she likes. Or, young Kenneth, are you a good moral boy at heart, a true blue conservative farm boy on the lookout for a virgin? Good luck with that. A knife in the back’s still just that. A severed spinal cord and a whole lot of blood.’

‘Black got beaten up.’

‘Aha. So you really are sympathetic to the accused?’

‘I might have done it myself. If I’d been him.’ He didn’t mean to say this, it just slips out.

Arthur looks at him in surprise, with a glimmer of dawning respect. ‘Well. That’s big talk. I wouldn’t have thought it.’

‘I know how to use a knife. As farm boys do. We learn how to slit an animal’s throat when we have to. Sir.’

‘The meaning of life is that it stops then?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Ask Kafka’s pardon. Oh, never mind. We’re all animals. When we’re dead, son, we’re dead. I tend to agree with you. Albert Black shouldn’t swing. Up to us really, isn’t it?’