Utu, page 19
Osborne skimmed through the document, didn’t understand very much of it, and went straight to the last page. Several people had signed the bill of sale. The land had started out as several separate plots that had been brought together to form the totality of the site. Among the signatories, a representative of the state: Steve O’Brian.
The father of Phil O’Brian, currently the mayor of Auckland.
Martha was sobbing on the lace bedspread. Osborne pocketed the document and gave the widow a last glance.
“You disgust me.”
* * *
Every summer, the media made a big fuss about the latest record temperatures, inviting experts to pronounce on the greenhouse effect, the hole in the ozone layer, the increase in carbon emissions, the atomic tests in the Pacific, any of which might disturb the tropical climate of this country where nothing ever happened. But since the body of a young model had been found on a waste ground on the outskirts of Auckland, the summer heat had been forgotten, and special editions had been devoted to urban violence—with forty-six days to kill before the start of the America’s Cup.
Timu had held a press conference that morning, informing the journalists of how the investigation was progressing. For his part, the mayor was assuring everyone that everything would be done to catch and punish the criminals. These exceptional measures would not only be applied to this case but for the whole duration of his term in office—his next one, that is. The media passed on the information.
In her way, Ann Brook had become a star. The picture being drawn was of a young mixed-race girl from one of the poorer parts of Auckland who, through hard work, had become the icon of Michael Long’s famous agency, Kiwi, which encompassed modeling, advertising, and communications. In spite of being a prominent model, Ann Brook hadn’t denied her origins. She took care of her poor mother, who had brought her up alone and still lived on the outskirts of the city. This model of cultural adaptation had probably aroused the hatred and jealousy of petty criminals from her original environment, since the outrages the unfortunate girl had suffered bore all the hallmarks of a revenge killing, a revenge as blind as it was savage.
Osborne switched off the radio. After four hours’ driving in heavy rain, he was back in Auckland and its smells of asphalt.
He had stopped at Whangarei to have a coffee and read carefully through the bill of sale—two things that had made him nauseous. The lawyer’s jargon was mostly gibberish to him and the whole mechanism of the sale was almost incomprehensible—he would have to ask for help from a specialist. He had questioned the Tukao widow before leaving. Although she didn’t seem to know anything about her husband’s shady dealings, she had ended up by admitting to him that the two cops who had come from Auckland suspected Sam of being connected with a big deal and had told her that it was in her best interests—in fact, in everyone’s interests—to keep quiet until more was known about it.
He had finally arrived.
Night was falling over Khyber Pass Road by the time he parked the car. A grim avenue on the outskirts, a few modest signs, general stores and groceries closed at this hour, and graffiti scrawled on the posters. Osborne walked to the small house on the corner of the street.
Gallagher and his team must have questioned Ann Brook’s mother at length. Amanda—that was her first name, according to Culhane—must be a bit freer now. A small sedan was parked in the drive: the latest Ford. The little garden had only a handful of geraniums, and the shutters had been repainted green. A halo of light filtered through the curtains. Osborne knocked at the door—the bell wasn’t working.
Ann’s mother soon appeared, a solid Maori woman dressed in a threadbare bathrobe. The short nightdress she was wearing under it, on the other hand, was very chic.
“Sorry to disturb you,” he said, gravely. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about Ann. It won’t take long.”
Moths were fluttering under the flyblown lightbulb hanging at the entrance. Amanda sized up the man in black waiting at the foot of the steps.
“Are you a policeman?”
“Yes.” Osborne stepped forward into the light.
“I’ve already told your people everything I know,” Amanda said, her tired features softening a little, although she still didn’t let him in. “Only yesterday, they turned the house upside down. Don’t you think I’ve seen enough?”
There was no resentment in her voice, just fatigue and a veil of sadness over her fine brown eyes.
“I knew Ann a bit,” Osborne said, glancing over her shoulder. “Would it disturb you if I came in for a couple of minutes?”
She pulled her bathrobe more tightly around her and, with a contrite look on her face, invited him in. The living room was quite plain: a threadbare couch, two armchairs with old-fashioned patterns, a Formica table with an empty vase on it. Amanda offered him a coffee, which he accepted. Although the wallpaper dated from the previous century, the TV set was brand new, a flat screen TV with DVD and all the satellite crap that went with it.
“A present from Ann?” he asked.
The question brought tears to her eyes. She nodded and went to get the coffee. Amanda lived hand to mouth, working as a cleaning woman for wealthier people in adjoining neighborhoods. It was clear that as well as the TV and the Ford parked outside, the fitted kitchen and the nightdress were presents from her daughter.
“Ann spoiled you, I see,” he said.
Amanda agreed: she couldn’t have bought all these things with her meager wages and state welfare. They had lived together in this house and, as there wasn’t much of a future in this neighborhood, Amanda had saved what little she earned to pay for her daughter’s studies, so that Ann at least could escape.
“What about her father?” Osborne asked.
“Hah!” she said immediately. “He left when she was born.”
That was one thing they had in common.
“Did Ann come to see you often?” he went on.
“At least once a month,” she replied. “Always with a nice gift. She was generous, I’ll say that for her! I sacrificed myself for her, yes, but she paid me back a hundredfold.” Her eyes clouded over again.
“Do you know the people she saw?” he said gently.
“Oh, not at all,” Amanda said, without hesitation. “But they certainly weren’t people like me, or like anyone from around here. Advertising, that’s something quite different.”
The poor woman didn’t know the half of it.
“Do you have any idea what Ann earned?”
Amanda raised her eyes to heaven. “It must have been nearly two thousand dollars a week. She was starting to make a name for herself. I seem to remember she received bonuses as well.”
She was way off beam. The fitted kitchen, the car outside, the TV set, all that must have come to sixty thousand dollars at the very least, not to mention the coupé and the nighttime excursions . . .
“Did Ann talk to you about her boyfriends?” he asked, taking the cup of coffee she handed him.
“Good Lord, no.”
“Her friends?”
“To tell the truth, Ann mostly talked about her work. It’s such a different world to me.”
Her distress was really painful to witness. Osborne felt uncomfortable. Amanda told him a few anecdotes about when Ann was a child—to hear her, she had remained a child—anecdotes that seemed strangely out of place now. Amanda took her daughter for an angel. That wasn’t entirely false, but was still a long way from reality. Her contacts in the local jet set, her nighttime excursions, the weird club where she dragged her lovers: Amanda knew nothing about any of that, and basically didn’t want to know.
Osborne took his leave of her. It was late, he hadn’t eaten anything all day, and the coffee, the amphetamines, and this woman’s ravaged face were making his stomach churn.
Before he left, Amanda caught him by the sleeve. “Tell me, sir,” she said, pathetically, “do you know who could have hurt my little girl?”
“No,” he said. “No, I don’t.”
Osborne waited for her to close the door, then vomited bile in the geraniums.
* * *
36 York Street, Parnell. Ann’s house looked out on the commercial port, whose metal trapezoids loomed in the distance and the darkness. Gallagher’s team had given the place a thorough going over, but Osborne still had hopes of finding something, a clue, anything to back up his suspicions.
He left the Chevrolet beneath a streetlamp and walked toward the garden. It was a small pale-yellow house with a garage and closed shutters. A wisteria with mauve flowers was hanging at the entrance, there was Virginia creeper on the front wall, but he couldn’t see any alarm system. Without much difficulty, he forced the French window and slipped into the living room. The neighbors were asleep at this late hour. He lit his torch.
Ann Brook had lived alone in a pretty three-room house. The walls were covered in objects brought back from journeys to Fiji and Tahiti and fifty-year-old advertising posters, and there were shelves filled with knickknacks. As a typical girl of her time, Ann had owned a lot of clothes but not many books. The refrigerator was empty, and there was a chest filled with shoes in the bedroom. Nothing out of the ordinary. He looked carefully through the desk, but Ann didn’t seem to have corresponded with anyone. There wasn’t so much as a postcard from her friends.
It was midnight by the alarm clock on the night table.
Osborne sat down on the bed, and breathed in the scent on the pillow, which he didn’t recognize. All he had kept of Ann was the taste of a chemical kiss and a powerful smell of sex.
He suddenly noticed a curious Chinese box on the chest of drawers. It was a puzzle box, with a number of compartments, each of which had to be opened separately. Although the first two were easy to open, there was another one at the back of the box that was less accessible. Osborne knew the mechanism—his mother had loved Chinese ornaments. In less than a minute, he had it open.
In the compartment, wedged between a sachet of grass and another of cocaine, was a ring.
This was no cheap bauble but a gold ring encrusted with diamonds. No inscription inside, just a hallmark. Strange. What was a girl like Ann doing with something like this?
Osborne took the ring and the grass—datura, to judge by the smell—but left the cocaine: a long sniff on the chest of drawers confirmed that it was of poor quality.
The crickets were creating a din in the garden as Osborne walked back to his car. The air was heavy with humidity, he with powder. He remembered Ann in her fairy costume, Hana’s ghost dancing around her, and himself disguised as a clown, trying to catch both of them. No, he couldn’t have killed Ann, even if he had been high as a kite. The reason he had gone back to Ponsonby with a gun was because he had sensed that Ann was in danger. He had seen something that night. Something he wasn’t supposed to see.
The killers.
7.
Things were starting to fall into place. On the one hand, a lawyer who, thanks to a generous backhander and with the consent of Steve O’Brian, had sold an ancient Maori site to Nick Melrose’s property company Century, whose accountant had been poisoned and dumped in the sea. On the other, Ann Brook, a star model employed by the advertising agency owned by Michael Long, the communications advisor given the task of promoting the principle of zero tolerance so dear to Phil O’Brian’s heart.
During the eighties, Steve O’Brian, father of the current mayor of Auckland, had joined the small but influential group of top civil servants, intellectuals, and politicians gathered around Rob Allen, the Labour Party leader who was to bring about the fall of the government of Muldoon, a conservative paradoxically hooked on the myth of New Zealand’s Keynesian economy. When Allen was elected, in 1984, Steve O’Brian had become his Minister of Finance and the strategist of the reforms that would turn the country upside down: dismantling of the welfare state, mass privatization—telecommunications, railroads, banks, insurance, airlines, even the forests had been sold to foreign companies. After which, O’Brian’s team had abandoned exclusive control of monetary policy to the Central Bank and left government in 1989, just before the collapse of the economy—and incidentally of the party.
Steve O’Brian was now finishing his political career in the Regional Development Board, and it was in this capacity that he had given his backing to Nick Melrose’s project to build a vast tourist complex in Karikari Bay and thus provide a stimulus to an unproductive region. O’Brian was retiring next year but, as a good father, was using his name to support his son’s political career.
Osborne was sitting at his computer at headquarters, and he was in a quandary.
He had only slept a couple of hours, and not very well. So far he had nothing concrete, only ghosts. As for the possibility of questioning Steve O’Brian about the land at Karikari Bay, or checking his bank account in search of a few dubious transfers, such a move was only possible with the cooperation of Timu and the prosecutor. But, apart from a document stolen from the safe of the widow Tukao, he had nothing that could justify the case being reopened.
Culhane came into the smoky office, wearing a Peter Blake T-shirt across his broad shoulders. “You’re an early bird today!” he said, in an attempt at humor.
Osborne grunted a good morning so unfriendly that Culhane sat down without another word.
The complicity established at the “barbecue party” hadn’t lasted long. Tom had never had any other friends besides Rosemary, apart from a few classmates at school. He felt torn. His private problems monopolized most of his thoughts. To their parents, it was inconceivable that a married couple could live without children, not to mention that they weren’t the only ones to think that. He was aware of the way other people looked at them, thought them abnormal. And it was as if those looks were crushing them, even killing his sperm. Dr. Boorman had in fact ordered a new battery of tests, which they would look at tomorrow. But Tom had nobody to talk to about any of this.
He went and got two steaming-hot coffees from the machine in the corridor. Osborne was still tapping away at his computer when he got back. He put the paper cups down on a corner of the desk.
“What are you looking for?”
“Something linking Zinzan Bee and Pita Witkaire,” Osborne replied. “Witkaire isn’t practicing anymore and I can’t seem to get my hands on him.”
“Maybe he’s retired?” Culhane ventured.
“Maybe.”
Osborne drank a gulp from the machine coffee and threw the rest in the waste basket.
“How about you?” he said. “Do you have anything new on the Tainui who were at Bastion Point?”
Culhane nodded and opened his notebook. “So far, I’ve only been able to track down three of them,” he said. “Benny Shapple and Rob Tafonea, the two pensioners I told you about. Nothing out of the ordinary there. One lives in Moerewa, the other in Te Tii, a village on the Bay of Islands. They haven’t been politically active for a long time and haven’t kept in touch with the other protestors. I spoke to the third one on the phone, Tana Marshall, who’s now a cabinetmaker. He doesn’t have any connections with the current activists either, but he does remember Zinzan Bee. ‘A hothead’ was what he called him. That’s all I was able to get out of him. As for the other three Tainui, one of them is dead: Mike Neri, a car accident in ’95. Compared with Zinzan Bee, none of these men comes across as a likely criminal. Maybe Bastion Point was a false lead.”
“What about the other two?”
“Jeremy Taffu, living in Waiare. I spoke to his wife on the phone. He’s away on a hunting trip until the end of the week. The other one is named Nepia. I’ve tried to call him, but there’s never any answer.”
A light breeze passed through the office, which was smoky in spite of the open windows. Osborne massaged his sinuses. “And what about Ann Brook’s postmortem?”
Culhane plunged back into his notebook. “We’ll have the first results tomorrow. In the meantime, Julian Long has sent us his list of the people who were at his party. More than fifty names. Gallagher has started questioning them. Long himself is above suspicion, and says he can vouch for most of his guests. Though there may have been a few gate-crashers, it seems more likely the attackers grabbed Ann out on the street, or even on her way home.”
“Why do you say that?” Osborne asked, frowning.
“Her car was found on Blockhouse Bay Road. In other words, not very far from New Lynn and the disused sawmill. A Mercedes coupé.”
A Mercedes coupé full of his prints.
Osborne looked at the list on the computer. Among the dozens of guests, he didn’t see a single Maori name.
He printed the page. Culhane watched him, intrigued.
“Where are you going?” he asked, seeing him putting his jacket on.
“To question Toby.”
* * *
Julian Long lived in an opulent-looking house some way back from the bustle of Ponsonby Road. Flowering frangipani peeped over gates. Osborne had no memory of their scent, or anything else. All he remembered was the swimming pool.
There was no security camera or guard at the entrance, but there were gates, and they were closed. Osborne had just parked at the curb outside when the gates swung open and a silver-gray sedan came roaring out. He didn’t recognize the driver, but he did recognize the man sitting in the back seat: Michael Long, the mayor’s communications advisor. He must have just paid a little visit to his good-for-nothing son to tell him how the investigation was going. Osborne took advantage of the gates being open to slip into the garden.
The bees were gathering pollen along the drive. He thought he recognized the front of the house, then decided he didn’t. Two girls in bikinis were bustling around the swimming pool.
