The rest was for Dan a daze. Things seemed to move in slow-motion, as if he was locked in a dream he knew he would eventually wake from, but for now he had to allow events to take their course.
The scientists returned with a stretcher and carried Rebecca’s lifeless body up to the laboratory. It was once more fulfilling its original role of hospital, when so many influenza sufferers were brought there at the end of the First World War and, like Rebecca, succumbed.
Biggart took charge through the night. The soldiers were wonky from Flett’s cosh. Dan helped the scientists get them into their bunks. Jono slumped on one of the chairs in the officers’ quarters, muttering to himself, compulsively cracking knuckles. Dan scarcely noticed. His mind was teeming with the traumatic events he had played such a large part in. He could not comprehend how he had killed two people, how quickly it had happened. He was vaguely aware of Biggart patting him on the back, telling him to get some rest, there was nothing they could do until morning. It was background noise, like Jono’s mutterings. His mind kept replaying the attack, Flett charging, running with the rifle, shooting and shooting again, Rebecca face down in the water. It was a grotesque, disjointed movie stuck on an endless repeat. Biggart got him to lie down on one of the empty bunks, where he lay staring at the slats of the bunk above.
He stayed awake for what seemed like hours, his mind unable to process the events of the night, his conscience calling him to account. If he had been more careful when he fired a second time, she would still be alive. He didn’t have to shoot, he should have ignored Biggart, let them get away, what did it matter if they got the scientists, was it worth her life?
Thou shalt not kill. Was that the Sixth Commandment, or the Fifth? Did it matter?
He was indifferent to the soldiers stirring and complaining about sore heads, Sergeant Briers telling them to get up and get over to the canteen on the double. He kept his eyes shut until they had gone, until Biggart shook him, said to get up and come to the mess and get some tea and toast into him, it was going to be a long day.
So it proved. The Janie Seddon arrived with soldiers and officers barking at them. It took hours to get the two bodies trussed and ready for transporting. Biggart, his head swathed in a field dressing, insisted there would be no questioning of Dan, for which he was grateful.
They travelled in the boat to Fort Dorset, where the scientists, the soldiers and the bodies disembarked, the boat taking the two detectives and a silent Superintendent Smith to the city. They walked from the wharf to Waring Taylor Street police station, where Smith was led away for questioning.
Biggart and Dan were ushered into a room, where a group of senior policemen were standing in a group. Even out of uniform, clad in a grey double-breasted suit, Dan could not fail to recognise the bushy moustache and authoritative figure of Commissioner Wohlmann. The Commissioner came forward and shook his hand, said Stanley had informed him of his heroic actions, which would not go unrecognised. He knew he had the right stuff for the job when he chose him for detective work. They would talk again later, there would be a debriefing, but now he was to take compassionate leave, and that was an order. Dan received a succession of handshakes and backslaps and his inspector walked him across to a fancy hotel. He had not known his first name until the Commissioner used it.
The debriefings went on for several days. Dan was interviewed by senior detectives, repeated the events as he recalled them, signed statements, was interviewed again, and again. Wohlmann did not appear for the promised talk, but he was told that the Commissioner had approved his elevation to Acting Detective. There could be no public recognition, due to this being ruled as a matter of national security. There would be no talking to the press now or at any time in the future, did he understand? Dan said he did, he had no desire to talk about it.
Inspector Biggart told him there was more good news, he had applied to have him seconded to Special Branch. It might take a few months. As the Commissioner had told him, he was to take compassionate leave, two weeks back home with his family, before his new assignment. Biggart handed him his ticket for the night train to Auckland. Dan asked about Superintendent Smith and was told that he would soon be on his way to the United Kingdom, not quite as public a deportation as Herr Haas received, but we are the safer for both being out of the country.
‘One question, sir? How did Haas find out we were taking Mr Penny on the train?’
‘Yes, sorry business that. It was the clerk Verry. He had gambling debts. It was one of the things those hardliners at the German Club made it their business to find out about, cops with cash problems. Once they had purchased his debts, it was not difficult to blackmail him.’
‘And Rebecca?’
‘Tricky one, that,’ Biggart said. ‘You might not have known that she was a communist. The other side of the coin from her half-brother Haas. Both fanatics. God protect us from extremists.’
Dan said he didn’t understand, he thought she was a Jewish refugee from the Nazis.
‘True to a point,’ Biggart conceded. ‘She volunteered to work for the British authorities, proved to have skills they could use, obviously. What we suspect is that she may also have been working for the communists. You know where Penny’s plans would have ended up.’
‘Do we have any proof?’
‘Do we need it? We know what the communists intend to do, take over by violent means the entire civilised world. We don’t want the sort of police state Russia has, now do we?’
Dan was silent. Rebecca was fighting Nazis, thugs like her half-brother. He did not believe she wanted to move on to execute by violent means the overthrow of their society, this grandiose notion of world domination. He recognised the Nazi threat to Britain and probably Russia and America too, but Russia was not their enemy. His father believed in socialism, which was not too far from communism, aiming to take the nation’s wealth out of the hands of the few exploiting the many, and make a more equitable society. New Zealand needed a better society than the present one, where so many were out of work and on the breadline.
‘Look, Dan,’ Biggart said. ‘You did your job and into the bargain you probably saved all our lives. Do you think that dreadful fellow Flett was going to let us live? There was a lot at stake, the British were not pussyfooting about, they wanted Penny’s plans, they think it will give them the edge when we go into a second round with the damn Krauts. Surely you can see that? You protected and served, you fulfilled your oath. We can let the politicians worry about the big picture. It is our job to protect our country from the kind of subversion Smith was engaged in. He might think a few casualties worth it for the gain, but our job is to protect our citizens and uphold the laws promulgated by our democratic government. You know that. You know the Commissioner’s First Rule, that a good detective is just and loyal and fearless in the execution of his duty. You have been that and more and I will be proud to have you on our team as we enter this new era of conflict. And let me tell you one final thing that might just put your concerns to rest. We now know that Smith was a communist when he was at Cambridge. He claims he resigned from the Party and put that behind him. Can we be sure he is not still, like Rebecca Reisz was, working for two masters? Russia with the kind of weapon Penny is developing would be as dangerous as the Nazis for all democratic countries. You take a few weeks off and think over what I have said and then we get back on with our job, eh? What do you say?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Dan said, shaking his hand. He had not the faintest inkling Jono had been a communist, he seemed so British, rowing for Cambridge, playing rugby at a level good enough to make him an international. Surely he wouldn’t be betraying his own country? No, he didn’t believe that. Did he?
His father met him at Auckland Railway Station, embraced him and said his mother was killing the fatted calf, well, baking up a storm. He thought there was a tear in his eye. There certainly were tears when his mother took him in a tight embrace and would not let go. Granddad was in the spirit of it, capering about in his frayed dressing gown, as usual the buttons of his pyjama bottoms undone. Sean was all smiles and no teasing, said it was great they were both up a notch job-wise. Over the leg of lamb and every vegetable you can roast Sean talked about the conviction of Mareo for poisoning his wife, which Dan had not thought about for months. He was condemned to death by hanging. Strange that this whole saga started for him with meeting Freda Stark, Rebecca’s friend and Mrs Mareo’s very close friend. According to Sean, Freda had been critical to convicting Eric Mareo.
‘You met Freda Stark, didn’t you?’ Sean asked him.
‘A fleeting contact.’
‘Come on, boys,’ his mother said. ‘Let’s not dwell on such unpleasant matters. Daniel’s back for a few weeks and we should make the most of it, we’re not going to be seeing him much after this.’
Dan protested he was back at Auckland for months and there was no guarantee he would get the Wellington job.
‘We’re grateful to have you back,’ his father said. ‘And proud of your promotion. Aren’t we, mother?’
His mother patted Dan’s arm and excused herself, she had to check the apple dumplings.
Sean joined his father and Dan on the stroll up to the pub, his mother restraining her father-in-law, who wanted to know why he couldn’t come too.
As they passed the Three Lamps his father said that Mickey Savage would soon be speaking to a lot more people than he ever did here.
‘Nah,’ Sean said. ‘Nobody at the paper gives Labour a dog’s show.’
‘Wait and see,’ his father said, pausing to light his pipe. ‘It will be a landslide. The people are sick of these Tory politicians feathering their own nests and keeping down the working man.’
‘You sound like a commie, Dad,’ Sean said. ‘Let’s hope we don’t see them in the mix if you’re right.’
‘Mickey is going to give us all a fair go,’ Paddy Delaney said stoutly.
‘If he gets in,’ Sean said. ‘What do you think, Danny boy?’
‘I don’t know,’ Dan said. ‘We aren’t supposed to be partisan.’
‘Get off with you,’ his father objected. ‘We live in a democracy, lad. You are entitled as much as the next bloke to an opinion.’
They were at the pub. Dan said he would get the round. He didn’t really know which party he would vote for. It would be his first time. He did know he wanted to work to protect their democracy.
When he returned to work, Dan was wary of his colleagues. They welcomed him with open arms. No more put-downs from Milton and Marriott, he was ranked now. If he had not been promoted, he could imagine snide joking about his working with Biggart: Dan and Stan/Boy and Man. They wanted him to come to the pub after work and tell them all about these rumours he was involved in shooting Nazi agents, including a woman. He told them he was not permitted to discuss the details, it was a matter of national security. They lost interest quickly, reverting to debate about the role of the detectives in the successful prosecution and conviction of Eric Mareo as his wife’s murderer.
Later Dan walked back to Ponsonby via the Civic Theatre, enjoying the clanging of trams and the bustle of evening crowds after the stillness of Somes Island. And no wind.
The Civic was screening Rider Haggard’s She, billed as ‘The strangest romance ever written’. Not for him. Maybe Mum would like to go? In his weeks on leave he had taken her to Naughty Marietta, which she loved. He’d much rather see The 39 Steps at the Strand, which Sean was raving about.
Inside he moved head down past the long queue, ignoring the exclamations from those who thought he was jumping ahead. He avoided the eye of the woman in the ticket boot, veering down the carpeted crescent to the dance studio where he met Rebecca once face-to-face. The room was locked. He tried to recall what she looked like. Tall, statuesque, blonde, like the poster of the star of The 39 Steps. No. What had Eric Mareo said? Some German name. Yes, she was like Marlene Dietrich. Curious, really, she did not have the swarthy looks and hook nose Jewish people were supposed to have. Haas looked more like that caricature, as indeed Dan thought Hitler did. There was a rumour Hitler had a Jewish mother. He recalled reading about Jews defined by their mother, Germans by their father. So Haas and Rebecca shared a mother. That was all he knew.
A policeman took his arm firmly. ‘You can’t loiter here, sir,’ he said. ‘If you’ll come with me. Hey, ruddy Delaney again. Crikey dick, mate.’
‘Hello, Tom,’ Dan said wearily.
‘We had a complaint. You here on some sort of detective work?’
Dan pulled his arm free. O’Connor always somehow managed to insinuate you were up to no good.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll be on my way.’
‘Take it easy, Delaney,’ O’Connor called after him.
Dan walked up Wellesley Street in a bad mood. To distract himself he resorted to an old trick of recalling what he had read in the paper. The League of Nations was warning Italy it would not be permitted to gain territory in Abyssinia by military aggression and wipe out a primitive people. Germany and Japan were also on notice that they could not make land grabs to get raw materials and places to colonise. As far as he could tell, these three countries were already taking and the League was making empty threats after the horse had bolted.
On the home front, Labour was claiming it was putting up candidates from every walk of life: seven clergymen, 12 farmers, one doctor, three lawyers, seven mayors and deputy mayors, 22 members of local bodies, one county clerk, two schoolteachers, eight miners. It didn’t sound a whole lot different from the others, those already in positions of power, except for schoolteachers and miners, and he would have expected more of each in the Labour standings.
Minister of Finance Coates was in Auckland. The Bay of Plenty Labour candidate allegedly said Coates and Forbes had arranged for the price of butter to rise and prices would fall again after the election. Another Auckland visitor was the Wellington mayor Hislop, leader of the Democrat Party. Dan recalled the headline in Wellington regarding unemployed workers protesting outside the mayoral office, greeting the incumbent as ‘Heil Hislop’. Nazi references were everywhere.
There was a burglary at Clevedon, way outside their area somewhere in the wopwops east of Papakura. It didn’t seem much of a haul, £40 of women’s clothes pilfered in a stolen car.
Jean Batten was testing a Gipsy Gull at Gravesend to fly solo West Africa to Brazil, with an extra tank to give her a range of 2000 miles. There was a connection with Freda in the back of his mind. Miss Batten had attended a Remuera boarding school for girls and learned ballet and piano. That’s it, both were ballet pupils at the Valeska School of Dance and they walked home after dancing lessons. Jean lived with her mother in nearby Symonds Street. Was she in Freda’s bohemian Auckland set? Perhaps not, she was a loner, called ‘the Garbo of the skies’. Freda had told the detectives she felt sorry for Jean, who was a few months older than her, but smothered by her obsessive mother. Well, she certainly escaped her mother’s grasp. Eric Mareo told him there was a touch of the Garbos about Rebecca.
What else in the paper? The price of lamb was down, numbers at the Westfield yards half what they were a year ago, only 600 carcases on the first shipment of the season to London. Prohibition led to loss of respect for the law. Marist Brothers were celebrating their jubilee in New Zealand with a drill exhibition at Vermont Street School, Solemn High Mass at St Pat’s, an evening concert at the Civic, down below near the room where he saw Rebecca so briefly.
Ah, Rebecca. Did she aspire to be a dancer? She certainly was athletic, but he would have thought too tall. Did she have a relationship with Freda? Or perhaps Freda and her bohemian friends offered her relief from the stress of her dangerous charade? They might have reminded her of the Berlin she had fled. He realised he knew nothing about her life, only her death, at his hands. A detective should be mentally and physically fearless, the Commissioner advised. Always ready to sacrifice his comfort and pleasure to the demands of duty. Dan was praised for doing his duty, but there was no comfort or pleasure in taking a life, even if she was shooting at him at the time. It was scarcely an even contest, firing a pistol at night from a sinking dinghy at a target well beyond its range.
Dan made a hurried Sign of the Cross. Should he go to confession at St Pat’s? He could creep into the chill, dark church, at this hour there would only be old women on their knees praying for forgiveness for sins petty by comparison with his, lighting halfpenny candles and placing them before the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. There was always at least one confessional booth light on. It was an anonymous way to be shriven. He could not guess what penance would be imposed, but however many decades of the Rosary the priest prescribed, it was nothing to the anguish and guilt he felt. No, he could not go back to thinking a few muttered prayers would be absolution. He forced himself back to recalling what he had noticed in the paper.
The cricket season was about to get underway. He doubted he would be participating. If you can raise £100 cash, you get assistance to build a home, provided you can pay 26 shillings a week thereafter. A Dodge car could be bought for anywhere from £25 to £295. Cricket, house and car were not on his list.
Labour Day was coming up. Was that an omen for the party in the election? Mindful of the holiday, the newspaper had been giving advice on the one indispensable item of a camper’s equipment, not a tent, not a sleeping bag, but a swag, a converted sugar bag. All you needed, according to an old swagger, a veteran of the highway, was the bag, two one-inch pebbles, a yard of stout cord or fishing line, and a bath towel. Mother can help you construct this bag for all possessions. Yes, Dan thought, romanticise the misery of the men of the open road, carrying their meagre possessions in a sugar bag, not knowing where their next meal was coming from.
His mind strayed back to Rebecca, what life she should have had. He had assurances from Inspector Biggart and indeed the Commissioner that he had done the right thing, firing in order to save lives, done his duty to a courageous degree. He did not feel courageous about snuffing out her life. Flett he did not care a fig about, he was a thug. And presumably he acted on Jono’s orders, which made him no better. He felt embarrassed that he had fallen for his smarmy charm. Whether he was a communist or not was of no interest, but he resented how comprehensively Jono had manipulated him, how naively he had trusted and admired the former rugby star. He supposed that Jono was merely practised at what was part of the job. Didn’t the Commissioner’s Rules say you should be able to conceal your identity where necessary and suit your manner and conversation to those you were dealing with? Superintendent Smith had certainly done just that. But there had to be a point where you did not sacrifice the very democratic values you were charged with upholding, when you did not resort to thuggery.
He was home, to a hot meal and a warm bed, a job the next day. He was far from the gentlemen of the open road with their swags, the people Uncle Scrim reached out to, perhaps the people the country would bring in from the cold in a month’s time. Those poor wretches experienced physical discomfort, but they did not carry the burden of taking another’s life.
He had a physical appetite for his mother’s Irish stew, but none for a stroll with his father up to Ponsonby Road and the pub. He feared he might blurt out his murderous actions on the island. He wanted to talk about them, but not to his father any more than to an anonymous father confessor. He wished there was somebody he could talk to. One day perhaps he could tell his father that his repeated advice to drop and kick had saved his life. Right now he could not face explaining, he could not bear to articulate the events, to say out loud he had killed Rebecca. His excuse to his father was that he had to write up his notes, which was true, if not compulsory.
He sat on his bed with pen in hand. He wrote nothing. He wished Sean still occupied the crudely partitioned other half of the bedroom. He couldn’t talk to him about what happened, but he would be some sort of comfort, even if it was about one of Sean’s pet subjects, abolition of the death penalty. Dan did not agree Mareo should be hanged, but there were people like Flett and Haas who showed no mercy and Dan didn’t think any should be shown to them. But who was he to say when he had killed, hadn’t he? Dan sat, staring at his notebook. Finally he turned off the light and lay gazing at the ceiling, waiting for sleep, just as he had on the bunk bed on Somes Island.
His father sensed something was wrong, asked him the next evening if he wanted to talk about it. Dan thanked him, said it just took a bit of getting used to, this undercover work. His father nodded, assured him he was there to listen, if he changed his mind. Dan said he would be fine.
On the Saturday morning he took the bus out to Glendowie and walked to the Sandspit. He passed a park where youngsters were starting a cricket match, windmilling bats as they walked out to the middle and the fielding team chattering and calling out, poking the borax. He had teetered on the edge of the Somes Island cliff, his arms windmilling, until Price had saved him from toppling.
Dan finally reached the crescent of sand that curved around towards the other side of the channel. It was low tide and vast mud flats stretched halfway to Howick, but there were not the huge quantities of seabirds he had expected. He did enjoy the keen breeze in his face, though it was nothing compared to Wellington’s wind. He deviated into the overgrown bush, climbed over low sand hummocks to the lagoon, where he saw ducks and pukeko and small gulls he could not put a name to. Price would have known. He was a loner, like Jean Batten. Dan did not want to be like that. He didn’t have the inclination to sit there waiting for birds to come home to roost. All those shades of pearly grey depressed him, the high sky and the morose mud flats reminded him of that poem inflicted on them in fourth form English, something about the lonely sea and the sky. He preferred the clamour of trams and people and pubs that was Ponsonby.
Labour won the election in a landslide. Dan wished he’d had a bet with Sean, he would have cleaned up, Biggart need never have known. Their father was jubilant. The country was at last going to have a government that was for everybody, from which each would get his share. It sounded a tad like the Communist Manifesto, but the gentle, saintly figure of Labour leader Michael Joseph Savage, the country’s new Prime Minister, could not be further from the harsh policies emanating out of Russia. Dan was glad for his father, sad that Rebecca Reisz had supported a more extreme form of socialism. He understood why she would want to fight Nazism, and it looked from the newspapers that soon all democracies would be joining in battle with Britain against this evil. It couldn’t be left to the League of Nations, which was a toothless tiger.
Soon after and despite a change of government, Dan received written notification that he would be joining Special Branch in February. There would be no surveillance surrounding the scientists Penny and Spears, the new Labour government had dismissed them.
The Honourable Peter Fraser, Minister of Police, told the House he had interviewed Penny and come to the conclusion he was just a crank who had stumbled across something he didn’t understand, and was soon exposed by the Government’s scientists:
‘Penny had been claiming he was the discoverer of a death ray. We found him still under guard and still searching for his mythical death ray at a cost to the country of £1000. When we questioned the poor fellow, a child could have seen there was nothing in it. It was as good as a bed-time story on the radio.’
Outgoing Commissioner of Police George Wohlmann joined in the fun when interviewed about the Penny experiments. ‘We have all heard of the Loch Ness monster,’ he was reported in the paper saying. ‘But many presumably well-balanced people venture to doubt its existence. It is possible that the “Nosey Parker” police, who, of course, hate mysteries, “smell a rat”, and in the words of the immortal Sir Boyle Roche, “see it floating in the air” and are trying to “nip it in the bud”.’
Sean took some satisfaction in bringing home an early copy of the Star. The article he directed Dan’s attention to was that Penny’s experiments were known only to a few members of the previous Government and the Ministers in charge of Police and Defence. Penny, it went on, was like some European inventors hoping to prove possible the transmission of powerful electrical currents in the form of invisible rays without wires, with the possibility of stopping aeroplanes in flight and paralysing transport.
Dan said he had no comment. In the new year he was off to his new job.
On the eve of his departure for Wellington he received two communications. Inspector Biggart rang him at Princes Street to tell him that his first job would be to tidy up loose ends with those three soldiers and the missing money. When he got home there was a letter for him, sent by air mail from England, postmarked ‘Twickenham’. He opened it up to a photograph of a rugby match. The crowds were bigger even than those for an Eden Park test. The players were miniscule stick figures, one side white, the other side black. The back of the photograph had a simple message: ‘We won.’ Dan went into the kitchen, moved aside the bubbling pot of potatoes, used the poker to open the top of the coal range, and dropped the envelope and photograph into the flames.