The Crime of Huey Dunstan

by James Mcneish

  I don’t know if I want to write about this. This is the part of the dream that I try to put away. One morning I crept downstairs and took the book. I got up in the dark before anyone was awake and threw it in the canal. I came home and slammed doors and overturned chairs and ran into the street shouting “Thief! Thief!” (I pinched some other items as well and threw them in the canal) and made such a racket that my parents half-believed me. My father wanted to call the police but my mother begged him not to. Was she relieved? I never knew. Tom tumbled to it. He knew what I’d done, but we made a pact and I swore him to secrecy. Tom never split. That’s the painful part, because when it was discovered the book was missing Tom got the blame. My father gave him a hiding with his belt, it was terrible. Tom never split on me. That’s what I can’t bear about the dream, I never owned up.

  The dream keeps coming back to haunt me. Sometimes the book is falling into the canal and my mother is watching it fall, waiting for the splash, her face half-turned towards me with an expression of relief. At other times she is gazing up at me from her bed with a pleading expression in her eyes; there is a smell of ammonia in the air and the bed is the bed that she died in; I am trying to explain why I took Home Law and the Family from her, that I did it to save her from herself, but no words come and I wake up with a purple tinge behind my eyelids, and a sore throat. But I think I know my dreams well enough to know when they are trying to deceive me, playing tricks with my memory and distorting the rampages of a ten-year-old into nightmares of unreality and forgiveness. I was ten going on eleven, or eleven going on twelve. I don’t remember. Then the war came and I was evacuated.

  PART TWO

  SIX

  A FEW DAYS after Lawrence telephoned with the verdict, he rang again and asked me to meet him at Parliament House. He was coming down on business. Lawrence belonged to a government think-tank charged with reviewing the jury system, and he had some business in the House as well.

  We met in the Beehive, in the cafeteria.

  “You got the material I sent, Ches?”

  Lawrence had sent me a formal letter after the trial ended, thanking me for my participation and enclosing a résumé of the judge’s summation on the final day. Lawrence had listed three areas where in his view the judge had erred and from which I inferred there were grounds for an appeal. He also sent me a number of medical reports, including the transcripts of prison interviews with Huey made by prison staff and also the hospital psychiatrist, Dr Wilson. I had missed Toby Wilson’s testimony and cross-examination in court and had never met him, but I knew his reputation and, reading the reports, was impressed by his thoroughness and the way he had put Huey’s truthfulness and reliability to the test. Several times he had tried to trip Huey up. Huey claimed to have scored a try on the football field in the first half, playing in a match for his college, and Toby returned to the point later in a subsequent interview, saying to him, “That try you got in the second half—you must have been a popular guy.” “No, no,” Huey corrected him, “in the first half. It was the only try of the match.”

  I said to Lawrence, after thanking him for sending me the material, “Lisbeth says you’re going to appeal.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes. She worked out that you’d appeal almost before you thought of it.”

  “Tell Lisbeth I’m smiling.” Lawrence moved in his chair. I felt his gaze shift and sensed he was checking on the occupants of the next table, a habit I remembered from earlier days. Lawrence had the air of a panther, despite a flop of ginger hair in front which suggested, when he was young, a golden retriever. He was physically striking, with unusually wide, indolent shoulders. His manner in court, a quiet potency he exuded without noticeably raising his voice, lent credence to the idea of an alpha male, brimming with professionalism and self-confidence. Privately I read a man of strong, less settled emotions who masks and resists voicing his true thoughts. In reality he is extremely cautious.

  Lawrence had chosen a table against the wall.

  “Well, she’s wrong, Ches. You won’t like this but I’m not going to appeal. Oh, there are grounds for it. On provocation alone; the judge virtually directed the jury to convict. Huge bias. He also failed to point out to them that our expert evidence, yours and Toby Wilson’s, was uncontested—that the Crown failed to put up anyone against you. I could go on. So we appeal. All right. Let’s say—and the chances are not very bright—but let’s say we succeed. We win the appeal and a new trial is ordered. Then what? I’m not going to put the boy and his family through it all again, simply for another jury to return the same verdict. Because without new evidence, unless something seismic occurs, that’s what will happen. Believe me. You’re being very quiet, Ches.”

  “What can I say?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t expect you to burst out cheering.”

  Fat chance, I thought.

  “I don’t have anything proper to go on, Ches.”

  “Or improper. You could try the obvious,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I think he’s been abused.”

  “Excuse me a moment…Glasses.” I heard a voice beside me. A messenger had evidently brought him a note. He put the reading glasses away. “Sorry, they’re just about to resume. I have to go in again.”

  Lawrence was giving evidence before a Select Committee. I nodded.

  “Would be neat, wouldn’t it,” he said, “if the boy had been molested. I thought that too at one stage. I put it to the headmaster of his primary school, if you remember. No, you hadn’t arrived. The headmaster said in court that when Huey began throwing desks around and became generally disruptive, he tried to get to the bottom of things. Called in the parents, had Huey psychologically assessed, had him sent to a health camp. More assessments. Nothing. Problem unsolved. By the way, Huey has been sent to maximum security, transferred to Auckland prison—transferred would you believe it, ‘to alleviate prison muster problems’. He’s in Paremoremo, Maximum Security, D Block. It’s pitiful. The judge tried to stop it. The father is distressed. How can they visit the boy up there? Anyway when I heard about the transfer, I went to see him with that very point in mind. The answer’s no, Ches.”

  “You went to see him?”

  “In Cornford.”

  “Before he was transferred?”

  “Yes.”

  “With that specifically in mind?”

  “Yes.”

  “You asked him outright?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see. You trotted up to Huey in Cornford jail and said, ‘Huey, old son. Correct me if I’m wrong, but when you were abandoned at the age of seven did someone fondle your bum?’”

  “I was a bit more circumspect than that.”

  “But you suggested it. You put the thought into his bosky little mind that he might have been sexually assaulted. Sweet Jesus. And I once gave you an alpha in my psychology class.”

  “Sorry, Ches. I had to know. I can’t appeal a life sentence on thin air.”

  “Yes. Well count your blessings I shall forget you told me that. Did Huey give you an answer? Of course he didn’t. Count your blessings. Just think what the Crown would make of that at a retrial!”

  If I had thought to shame Lawrence, I was mistaken.

  “There’s more, Ches. I talked to the psychiatrist again. I asked Toby Wilson to review his case notes. We went over them together, everything. There’s nothing. Toby spent six hours with the boy. You remember Toby was the first to be told about the elusive Mr Glen. Huey disclosed it in the second interview. He then placed an embargo on who Toby could tell. He didn’t want his legal adviser to be told. You know all that. So we went over everything again. Toby is adamant there’s no hint of anything sexual.”

  “How can he be sure?”

  “Sorry, Ches. I have to go. I didn’t say Toby was sure, I just said there’s nothing there.”

  “Did Toby advise you against appealing?”

  “It’s my decision. I didn’t ask him.”
>
  “Do you remember his exact words?”

  “He said—You’ve got Toby’s report. It’s very precise, very correct. Toby sticks by it. Said he liked the boy. Said he got quite close to the boy. There wasn’t any hint of sexual molestation.”

  “But that’s what the headmaster said. You’re quoting the headmaster.”

  “Exactly. Toby agrees with the headmaster.”

  “But did he say that to you? Did Toby Wilson actually say that? I don’t believe he would say anything of the sort, Lawrence.” But he had gone.

  I went into the study when I got home and switched on the computer. I wanted to check the headmaster’s testimony. But first I reviewed what the psychiatrist had said:

  I interviewed Mr Dunstan three times at the prison in the course of a fortnight [Toby Wilson reported to Lawrence]. I was impressed by the young man’s honesty. I attach my clinical notes about a possible defence of dissociative trance. Automatism is another possibility. But I stress that in the absence of our knowledge of the underlying cause, any diagnosis must remain tentative. A defence of flashback alone, as I have said in my preliminary reports, is open to question and, however valid, fails as an official diagnosis. On more than one occasion the young man became tearful when I suggested he was keeping something back, and seemed on the point of telling me what he was concealing. But nothing came of it. On each occasion he fell silent. He is upset at the trouble he has brought upon his family. The prison staff describe him as an easy-going person who walks away from violence…

  The headmaster’s name was Parfitt. He had given his evidence on the fourth day. He said he remembered Huey from primary school when he was seven or eight. “Huey was very protective of his sister Amy,” the principal said, “otherwise he was sullen and quiet. He would burst into tears for no obvious reason. At other times he became verbally violent.”

  PRINCIPAL: We couldn’t understand his behaviour. He became so disruptive we referred him to the psychological service and with the parents’ permission we sent him to a health camp for six weeks.

  QUESTION: Did you know he had been badly burned when he was small?

  PRINCIPAL: Yes, he was teased because of the scarring.

  QUESTION: Taunted?

  PRINCIPAL: Yes. I tried to help him. There was a lot of scarring on his arms and the upper part of his body. I discussed it with some of the other teachers. I think every child deserves every possible help one can give them.

  QUESTION: But you couldn’t understand his behaviour?

  PRINCIPAL: No one could.

  QUESTION: Did it occur to you, headmaster, to wonder if he was being abused out of school?

  PRINCIPAL: You mean…? Oh no, nothing like that! His family was very supportive. I believe that I got quite close to the boy, very close. Oh no. If it had been anything of that nature, he would have told me.

  “Pompous git,” I muttered. I shut down the computer and went into the next room. Lisbeth was ironing.

  “Unreconstructed pedantic pompous little git!”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Sorry, love. Something burning? I hope it’s not my best shirt.”

  “Iron’s a bit hot, that’s all. Who are you being rude about?”

  “I’ve just been listening to what Huey’s headmaster said in court. Lawrence reminded me. The man was asked if there might be something sexual at the root of it. Was it possible the boy had been molested? Know what the headmaster said. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘if it’d been anything like that, he would have told me.’ Bloody hell he would. I think I’ll go for a walk.”

  “Good idea. But take a coat. They’re predicting gales.”

  I found a coat and got my cane from the hall stand. I said going out, “By the way, he isn’t going to appeal. Lawrence has changed his mind.”

  I closed the door and climbed up the steps leading from the house to the road, then down the zigzag path that gives on to the waterfront and the bay below. Mugglestone Way is cut into the hillside in one of those bad-tempered engineering feats that give Wellington its character; there is a handrail and eighty-six steps, two of them broken, and I am forbidden by Lisbeth to use the path in bad weather. Naturally I ignored this stricture—I needed a challenge to rid my mind of irritants like the headmasters’s comment. Anyway the path is a short cut. It gets me on to the Parade in eight minutes. I don’t use the handrail. I use the cane. I count the steps. I know every bend, every dip, every corner. It’s automatic. Everything is laid out in my mind. On the way down I passed Bill Cornish, one of our neighbours, coming up. “It’s about Force Seven down there,” he said, and laughed. “You’ll love it.” He’s right. Bad weather is food and drink to the sightless. A ruffian wind is bliss, the blind man’s comfort station. When I get tired of walking around it, I can always lean against it.

  Halfway down, I could already sense a change of tone in the atmosphere. Leaves whizzing about. My toes started to squirm. I could feel it behind the eyelids, in the pores of the skin, in the tip of the cane vibrating as it responded to the changing landscape. Contrary to popular belief, a cane is not a walking stick, nor the ears to the sightless mere receptors of sound. I once read a book, before I lost my sight, about a man named Holman. James Holman was known as the Blind Traveller. Not a lot was known about blindness then. Holman lived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He was an English naval officer who went blind at twenty-five and then, with little money and quite alone, explored half the world from Siberia to the Australian outback. He did it, so the author of the book claimed, by teaching his senses “to read the landscape”. It was a smashing adventure tale, and I didn’t believe a word of it. But I do now. Today it is received wisdom that going blind renders your remaining senses more acute. Nonsense. My hearing is no better because I can’t see. Familiar sounds take on a different meaning, that’s all. One listens for the half-notes. Nor has my sense of touch improved. It has merely learned to play on other instruments. Its repertoire has increased, that’s all. It’s hard to explain.

  I was offered a seeing-eye dog once, and said no. I don’t like props. I find that the best way of being blind is being invisible. I use a long cane like a shepherd’s crook. It’s long and thin and discoloured. You can barely see it in a crowd.

  At the bottom of the path I crossed the main road and turned right. The afternoon traffic from town was already dense, the wind and wet arriving in scuds from the northwest. I imagined a few brave souls out pushing prams, and even swimming. After a few steps I got a buffet on the chest and thought, wow. All the sounds that are normally there for navigating had gone, swept away by the wind. The cane was no longer vibrating and sending me messages as I flicked it casually from side to side. Casually? I had to grip it very tight and use my whole arm as if it was part of the cane. The wind had spun me round. Deliberately, using deliberate strong movements of the arm and cane, I got my balance and began to breathe in as the sounds returned. I could feel my chest filling as I breathed in. You know that lovely creaking sound of the thwarts when you’re at sea? The sound you get lying in your bunk below the waterline when the ship rolls? That’s what a blind man feels when he enters into the windiness of the day with his pores pricked. I stood a moment on the Parade reading the music of the waves, the shouts of bathers coming over the parapet from the beach below. I walked on.

  Lawrence is wrong, I told myself. The headmaster’s wrong. They’re all wrong. If I had thought to ease my mind by taking a stroll in the wind, I was mistaken. By the time I reached Evans Bay forty minutes later, it was raining hard. I caught the bus home.

  The following week I came back from the university with a bag of shopping in my hand and went into the kitchen. Although I am officialy retired, I keep a room at the university and use it every week. I like to keep the contact with young people. It was a Friday, shabbat, and even though Lisbeth doesn’t keep shabbat in the religious sense I like to do something special for her at the end of the week. Lisbeth is Jewish by the way. Well, half-Jewish. Friday is
one of my cooking days.

  I had thought of making a fish stew but the fish wasn’t fresh and the shallots in the supermarket felt spongy. I keep a number of recipes to hand in braille, and decided on chops done the Greek way with lemon, and asparagus tips on the side. I forget where Lisbeth was, it wasn’t one of her hospice days. She came in about an hour after me and disappeared into the study, then came out again.

  “The asparagus looks nice.”

  “I thought I’d try a parmesan sauce. I might need your help. The recipe says ‘parmesan and mimosa’ but I think the mimosa is hoo-ha.”

  “I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “I’ve been reading some of the stuff on your computer. The transcripts.”

  “When?”

  “This morning after you went out. I hope it’s allowed.”

  “Of course. The trial’s over.”

  “I thought your evidence was very good.”

  “Oh thank you.”

  “No. I mean it. As for the prosecutor—”

  “Sparrow, his name is. Yes?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose they’re all like that. I couldn’t understand what the judge was saying to the jury at the end. Struck me as like robbing Peter to pay Paul. He sounded as if he was trying to be fair. I don’t understand the legal side. When you’ve finished making the sauce—the mimosa by the way is just the look of the thing, when you squeeze the egg yolks through a sieve they’re supposed to come out looking like mimosa blossom. I can do it. But first, can we sit down together over a drink? There’s something I’d like to ask you.”

  “Ask away,” I said when we were settled in the next room.

  “Can you please explain to me why after two weeks, nearly three weeks now, this case is still getting to you?”