The Crime of Huey Dunstan

by James Mcneish

“True?”

  “True.”

  “When?” I said.

  “What d’you mean, when?”

  “Silly question. Sorry.”

  “What’s the matter with you, Ches?”

  “Nothing. Excitement.”

  “What’s that squeaking noise?”

  “Lisbeth’s probably listening in on the other phone. She’s still in bed.”

  “Must be the bed.”

  “You’re not kidding me,” I said.

  “I’ve asked the registrar to post you a copy of the judgment.”

  “You don’t sound a bit excited, Lawrence.”

  “It should be in your box tomorrow morning. Silly bugger.”

  “What?”

  “I said you’re a silly bugger, Ches. I’m in court.”

  “This is a very strange conversation,” I said.

  “So is the judgment. Talk to you later.”

  I saw what he meant when the envelope came the next day. It took us half the morning to work out the logic of the reasoning. The judgment by the Court of Appeal was thirty pages long. Lisbeth read it out to me, page by page.

  “It says here, Charlie, ‘In his summing-up, the trial judge put the defence case fully and fairly’. They’re apologising for him.”

  “No, no. It’s just their way of buttering him up before they knock him down.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “They’ve thrown the book at him. That’s just one aspect. They say he ‘misdirected the jury’, full stop. Lawrence appealed on a point of law related to the defence of provocation, tick. He appealed on the grounds of expert evidence, tick. He appealed on character evidence, tick. They have found for him one, two, three. What they are really saying is that the trial was bungled by the stupidity of the judge.

  “You know, I may have said it before,” I said, “but in case not. This is the first time in my life I’ve felt proud to be a New Zealander.”

  “Stop skiting. You’ve said it hundreds of times. Anyway you’re a Pom. Now. Calm down. Have you remembered to take your Digoxin? Very slowly now. Tell me in words of one syllable what it all means.”

  “Certainly. It means what it says—‘In the Court of Appeal of New Zealand (blah blah)…The Queen v Dunstan…Judgment delivered by Smythe-Martin, CJ: The appeal is allowed, the conviction and sentence are quashed and we direct a new trial.’”

  “Yippee,” Lisbeth said.

  PART FOUR

  SIXTEEN

  LOOKING BACK FROM a distance of fifteen years, I find it hard to understand why we didn’t think of it earlier. Why were we so slow? Was it complacency? Why did we leave everything to the last minute? The Court of Appeal judgment ordering a new trial was early in October; the trial itself took place in March the following year. That gave us more than four months. Yet two months before the trial it had not occurred to me that a key witness, the mysterious Glen person, still had to be found—assuming he existed (we did not even know that); and when I mentioned it to Lawrence, he was reluctant to pursue the matter. I remember that his reaction threw me. But then I forgot about it. We both did. That was one thing. Then there was the question of bail. When the retrial was ordered Lawrence applied for and was granted bail on Huey’s behalf, but Huey said no. He opted to stay in prison fearing that if he didn’t, and the second trial went against him, he would have to begin serving his sentence over again from scratch. Lawrence travelled to Paremoremo and tried to reason with him, but to no avail. Huey’s mental state was precarious. It should have served to jog me out of my complacency, but I had no way then of knowing what was going on in his mind, any more than in Lawrence’s mind.

  Of course the summer holidays, that marathon of indulgence when Antipodean lawyers denude the planet by disappearing from it altogether, did not help. Probably I was most to blame. Only in late February, some ten days before the trial was due to open, did my own inadequacies begin to dawn on me. Lawrence rang me, worried about his line of defence, saying he still had no diagnosis to put before a jury.

  I was flabbergasted. I had assumed that the psychiatrist Toby Wilson had already supplied a diagnosis. No, Lawrence said. Al he had from Toby was a working hypothesis—several in fact—and they were entirely conjectural. I saw the problem. Once already, at the first trial, Lawrence had failed to convince a jury that his client had acted involuntarily, and this despite the fact that the Crown had not put up a single expert against us. The Crown was not likely to be so indulgent a second time. It was true that this time, armed with the disclosures I had provided, Lawrence had new evidence. But it was far from conclusive and, lacking a rigorous diagnosis, he did not have a new argument. Nor did I have a precise diagnosis to give him.

  A week before the trial began I was still dithering.

  Perhaps it is always like this. Justice at best is convoluted. It does not come writ on tablets of stone, nor pure like moonlight nor solid as frozen fire. It has to be worked like potter’s clay and even then, when its parts are moulded and fused and it is placed in the oven to be fired, the result is not guaranteed. Justice, I often think, is what is left over if something by chance has happened to go right.

  Time collapses notoriously in the mind. Today is Monday 12 October 2009. I am sitting in my study thinking about Huey’s school report card when he was seven which was about the only thing that went right in those last days before the trial. I found the card by chance fourteen years ago, early in 1995—it was a break-through. But how did I find it? Until I found the report card, I was on tenterhooks. I don’t know how barristers cope but I know I lived through that time in a funk of anxiety, fear, bewilderment, frustration, animadversion, despondency, expectation, excitement, and boils. Today I still have the marks on my arms and upper body where the boils erupted. They remind me of those days where so much conspired in my mind to go wrong. Except the report card.

  But how, I keep asking myself, did I happen to light on it?

  In order to write this book I have had to go back and review a lot of evidence on my screen reader. Files and files of it. I have copies of everything Lawrence sent me stored on my computer. But Huey’s report card isn’t there. All I can find are some old diary references of mine related to Huey’s first two schools, the Brailsford Crescent Infant School in Cornford and the Cornford Central Primary School:

  Always polite and helpful

  Shy speaker

  And, Hard to handle, morose

  And, Can write a good sentence

  And, Introverted

  And, Burns on chest and under chin and arm. Must swim with top on and keep arm covered

  And, Tries hard but has difficulty with self control

  So I must have been hunting for the card then, tracking his school record. But none of these items fit—they’re either too early, when he was five and six, or too late when he was nine or ten.

  When Huey was eleven the father shifted the family to the country where he attended a Maori college, and there was a dramatic improvement in his classwork. My diary notes:

  Seems to be a good school (Parents are cordially invited to discuss with the Principal any matter concerning their child’s welfare or progress.)

  But none of this is what I am looking for now.

  I remember the card was the size of a postcard, ruled like the squares in a crossword puzzle, with tiny spaces for letters and numerals representing marks. It tracked the pupil’s entire school record from age five on—“reading, writing, music, nature study, dressmaking, cooking” and so on, everything entered meticulously in ink with a nib pen, the subject marks apportioned from 1 to 5. On this five-point scale “1” curiously enough was the top mark, and “5” was bottom.

  I have a dreadful feeling that I stole the card. Did I? Then why isn’t it here?

  I have found it. Eureka! Rather, Lisbeth found it. She found it half an hour ago. It was in a manila folder, together with copies of Huey’s letters and a poem he wrote in a telephone book aged twenty-one after spending the night in a tree, t
he night he tried to hang himself. Lawrence must have sent me the letters and the poem and I bunged them in a drawer with the card and forgot about it.

  Lisbeth says she remembers me bringing the report card home after I went to Cornford and met the father. I was cock-a-hoop when I came home with it, she says. And I didn’t steal it apparently. The father gave it to me, she claims. That isn’t correct either, although I remember now that I did speak to the father.

  I had gone to Cornford one afternoon in February at Lawrence’s request. I arrived at his chambers and by chance the father was there—also Huey’s uncle Jacob, the vanishing uncle. It must have been late afternoon for the father to be there, he had come from work. I sat in on Lawrence’s interview with the uncle for a few minutes. Lawrence wasn’t allowed to talk to the father who was still a witness for the Crown. He had asked him to wait in the corridor. Now that I think of it, I shouldn’t have talked to the father either. Yet I did. I remember Lawrence asking the uncle at one stage about the dead man, the victim—had he known him? And about the victim’s cottage—was it about the same size as the caravan? And the father waiting in the corridor overheard this and called out: “Well it would be inside, because he had as many cars on the inside as he did on the outside.”

  I left them talking and persuaded the father to come out with me for a coffee. We found a café near the railway station. At first the father was reluctant to enter. I put this down to shyness and the state of his clothes and his hat which stank. He was a strong-flavoured man, infected with the sweeter and sourer smells of the sheep yard, although it transpired that on this day he had come from the slaughter-line in a pet food processing plant.

  Something I said to the father made him laugh. Then suddenly and with very little prompting he began to recount what happened on the night he learned that Huey had killed a man.

  He spoke with a fierce energy. It was not at all what I wanted to talk about, but once started he wouldn’t stop. I was wearing a light jacket and was perspiring. It was hot. I wanted to take the jacket off but was afraid to interrupt the words that tumbled out of him in spasms. He spoke in short clipped sentences, in jabs, like lights jabbing in a tropical storm:

  We stopped to fill up [the father said, after describing how he had collected Huey from an aunt’s and driven to a petrol station]. “Do you want a drink, son?” I said. He wouldn’t speak. He was all flushed in the face. Driving along, he told me. He said, “I’ve killed a man.” I pulled over. I couldn’t see out. One of the lights wasn’t working. I sat there looking at the blackness where the headlight wasn’t working and waited till I calmed down. I asked him to explain. When he told me who the man was I said, “But that’s—” I felt that I’d been murdered. I was the one who’d died. I said “We must go to the police.” He was crying. I took him to the Cornford Police Station. Then I left. It was about three o’clock in the morning. I stopped and thought, What have I done? I’ve abandoned him. How can a father do that to his son? I’ve betrayed him. I’ve sent him to jail. Three months later he said to me, “Thank you for doing what you did.” And I thought, hang on, does he mean he’s thanking me for doing him a good turn, or is he thanking me for turning him in and calling me a wanker?

  I may be wrong but I had a sense that the father had not told anyone this before, nor, I felt, did he want to say more than that. He drank his coffee and after a few moments got up from the table and left, saying he had to meet Christina (Huey’s mother). I found the report card the next day.

  I spent the night at Lawrence’s place. We stayed up discussing the case after dinner. We talked late. I probably drank too much. I awoke in the morning vaguely troubled. There was still a credibility gap in Huey’s story. Over breakfast Lawrence’s wife, Belinda, said to me:

  “Have you spoken to any of his primary school teachers?”

  I said I hadn’t.

  “Come on,” she said. “There’s time. I’ll run you over.”

  She drove me first to Brailsford Crescent, the infant school he had attended, then to the Cornford primary school. Belinda was a teacher. There was plenty of time. My bus didn’t leave until eleven. I spoke to several of the teachers, one of whom at the infant school thought she remembered Huey. Brailsford Crescent was his first school. “Oh yes, nice kid,” the first said. But this teacher had known him for only a term. Then at the primary school we met an older teacher, the deputy-head, who remembered him.

  “We couldn’t understand it,” she said. “He was such a bubbly little boy. It was like he was born on the sunny side of the wall. Then suddenly he went bad, began throwing things. Overturning things. Shouting and throwing desks around the room. We couldn’t understand it.”

  “When was this?” I said.

  She couldn’t remember the year but said, “Hang on”, and went away. Presently she returned with a pile of manila folders. Huey’s record was in one of them. “I don’t know how this got here,” she said. “This is his card and it goes right up to secondary level. It shouldn’t be here.” I asked her to tell me what it said for 1981 when he was seven and also for the previous year, 1980. She did so.

  Well blow me down, I thought.

  I said, “May I borrow this card and have it copied?”

  “Keep it,” she said. “Take the folder if you want.”

  What the card demonstrated was an abrupt drop in performance. It showed that in the period when Huey was sent away to live with the man in the caravan, his school work plunged. At no other time in his primary school career was this the case. His reading and writing hit rock bottom. He scored two 5’s, the lowest possible mark. This was marked on 3 February 1981 when he was nearly eight. At the end of the previous year, under “spelling”, there was no entry at all, so it must have been lower than bottom. And it was the same for the other subjects, also for Hobbies, Special Abilities, Stability, and so forth.

  I sat down with Belinda in a coffee shop, before the bus left, and transferred the gist straight into my PAC Mate. It was my first independent confirmation that Huey had been speaking the truth.

  I rang Lawrence from Wellington that night after I got in. He was at home. “Lawrence, I’m not a betting man. But this would seem to reflect the trouble.”

  “Yes. Belinda mentioned something—”

  “It’s all here on his card—‘Good’…‘Good’… ‘Good’…Then, bang—‘Bad’. It’s starting to hang together, to give us the answer we need.”

  “Terrific,” Lawrence said. “Terrific, Ches. Congratulations.”

  “And,” I said—

  “Sorry about the noise. We’ve got some people in.”

  “And,” I said, “we can test it.”

  “What.”

  “I said we can test it.”

  “How?”

  “Find the man.”

  “I’ll go to another phone. Just a minute.” Lawrence came back on the line. “That’s better, I can hear you now… How d’you mean, Ches—find the man? You mean this Glen character? I’m doubtful.”

  “I don’t see why. He must be alive.”

  “I mean, I don’t know how far we can go with this.”

  “He can’t be that hard to trace. It was only fourteen years ago.”

  “No, you misunderstand, Ches. What if we find him and he denies it?”

  “Say again.”

  “It may not be to my client’s advantage.”

  I was aghast. It wasn’t the first time Lawrence had thrown me, advising caution on the basis of a legal quibble. But he had never slapped me down in this way before. Presently he excused himself and went back to his guests. I hung up.

  What was I trying to do—revive the dead? It was what my conscience told me to do. I once read somewhere that a library is a kind of magic cavern that is full of dead men and women who can be reborn and brought to life when you open the pages. So it was for me with Huey’s case. There can be no other reason for me now in the year 2009 trying to resurrect his case from the archives and bring him back from oblivion, back f
rom the dead.

  Conscience is a strange thing. Perhaps I mean compassion. A friend said to me once, his name is immaterial, he said: “Where do you get your compassion?” I said, “I don’t know” (though I did have an aunt who was a missionary in Africa). Compassion is not a birthmark. There’s no compassion in my family. Concern for themselves, yes, but not always for others.

  There’s precious little altruism where I come from.

  I went to Israel once. I met a man on a kibbutz, a Canadian Jew. He said to me, “We’re supposed to be an example of Christian communism in action.” “Well, aren’t you?” I said. “Oh sure,” he said. “Only the rest of the world doesn’t want to know about us.” This man was one of the founders of the kibbutz. “I hate to say it,” he went on, “but people don’t just wake up in the morning and say to themselves, ‘Look, the sun is shining. Now who can I go out and help today?’” “Not even here?” I said to him. “Not even here.”

  Altruism, he reckoned, was against nature. Altruism was anathema to ninety-nine per cent of the human race.

  What I am getting at is Lawrence’s timidity, his quibbles and cautions. Caution of course may be an attribute. It is not a crime. But it seemed to me in someone like Lawrence almost a sin, a betrayal of trust—in professional terms a betrayal of himself. Legal minds baffle me. Doctors swear an oath, don’t they, the Hippocratic Oath, to protect their patients. Or they used to. Lawyers too are supposed to have an ethical code—Fiat iustitia et ruant coeli. (Let justice be done though the heavens fall.) That at any rate was Lawrence’s code. The words were displayed on a wall in his chambers. He seemed to have forgotten them. But it wasn’t only that that upset me.

  I’m a little uneasy saying this, because it’s personal. I’ll say it anyway. Lawrence, I had imagined as a brave spirit. In spite of the age difference—he was twenty-five years my junior—he was someone I had come to look up to in my adopted land. There was an openness and a lively look in the eyes that I found refreshing. I remember writing to my brother Tom, not long after I arrived in New