The news spread from one shop to another, from laundry to greengrocery to market garden. There had been the shooting in Naseby the previous year, and then the murder of Ham Sing-tong in Tapanui only a few weeks before, but this was Haining Street. This was where Cousin Gok-nam lived, where Shun and his brother Yung went on Sundays for wontons and roast pig, for tea and gossip.
Joe Kum-yung was not a clansman, but with maybe three hundred in all of Wellington, every Chinese was a brother, especially one shot at point-blank range. Yung heard from Fong-man, who heard from Joe Toy, that Kum-yung had been walking home when a man came up behind him and shot him twice in the head. No one got a good look at the murderer. It was a Sunday evening. It was dark. Haining Street was almost deserted. The man with the revolver wore a long grey coat. He was tall. He was gweilo. When Joe Toy got there, his cousin was lying outside Number 13 in a dark pool of blood, a paper bag of peanuts scattered about him.
Shun wondered whether the locks on the doors were adequate. Kum-yung had been in New Zealand thirty years – a cripple from his gold-mining days on the West Coast. His clansmen had raised the money to return him to China, to return him to his wife, but instead the fool had gone up the coast to try his hand at market gardening. And lost everything! He’d only been back in Wellington a few weeks. Why hadn’t he gone home? When he’d had the chance . . .
Shun rubbed his gammy leg. He told his brother not to go out after dusk. Not to go out at all, not unless absolutely necessary.
But the murder had barely passed three hundred pairs of lips when stranger, even more compelling news broke. A man had turned himself in. The murderer was in custody.