The Scene of the Crime

by Steve Braunias

  What a hopeless reply. I said to him, ‘Instead of only saying “I am so sorry!”, you insist on saying all these other things. Why?’

  ‘Well, I am sorry. But you’re asking me how it all happened, and I’m explaining it. There was blame on both sides. He knows, if he’s honest with himself, that he shouldn’t have done what he did that day. I shouldn’t have done what I did. I reacted badly. But it takes two to make this thing.’

  I said, ‘But is it unwise for you to say so? Are you making the same mistake over and over?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe.’

  I said, ‘The whole thing between you and Kim that day at the lights — many people will say to themselves, “What would I have done?” It’s like a test, that you can never anticipate.’

  He said, ‘Yes. In the fraction of the second you have, you don’t know until you get there what’s going to happen. The path you take through life is a random walk, unfortunately.’

  ‘If it was a test, did you fail it?’

  He said, ‘Yeah. Yeah.’

  ‘Do you also think you failed your family?’

  He said, ‘Yes, probably.’

  I liked Hallwright. He lacked imagination, and empathy, and compassion, but he had a kind of poise, and there was a suspicion of wit. I remembered the speech he gave when he described how he saved Issie from stepping too close to the edge at Kings Canyon; on that occasion, he protected his family. He achieved the opposite when something inside him broke on Mt Eden Road five years ago. A moment in traffic, at one of Auckland’s busiest intersections — the French Café on one side of the street, Duchess Home Bakery on the other, a shoe store, a toyshop, something called Asia Works . . .

  I said, ‘It’d be dreadful if the scene on Mt Eden Road was the last thing that ever crossed your mind before you died.’

  He said, ‘It would. It would.’

  ‘Your whole life compressed to one stupid moment.’

  ‘Yes. Then again,’ he said, attempting a smile, ‘you wouldn’t be around to worry about it.’

  Chapter 6

  The lair of the white worm: Derek King

  1

  Monday night was art gallery night, and he’d always dress for the occasion. He favoured big aviator sunglasses. He wore cream pants and grey shoes. He’d spruce up his haircut of tight little blond ringlets, that ‘baffling perm’, as photographer Patrick Reynolds described it, that ‘mad hair’ as remembered by gallery owner Gary Langsford. His skin was very pale. He carried a damp flannel in his pocket.

  He’d walk. He lived in downtown Auckland, on the pretty green hump of Constitution Hill, in an ivy-covered Edwardian townhouse, bought when he was about 32, in 1978. He rented out the top floor. He kept his yellow Ferrari Dino and his burgundy Jaguar in the downstairs garage. He lived in-between. The front door was gated, and the windows were barred; visitors knew to come around the side.

  He attended Monday night openings at the Anna Bibby Gallery on the corner of Kitchener Street and Victoria Street, and the Gow Langsford Gallery in Lorne Street. ‘He used to show up to every bloody opening,’ said Langsford. ‘Just there for the free wine. Never bought anything. Even when we took him off the invite list, he turned up! Always in the same clothes. Crumpled linen jackets. And that mad hair.’

  The last time he saw Derek King, he thought, was at the exhibition opening of Karl Maughan’s vast, luscious botanical paintings in May 2011. The beautiful painted flowers, the excellent conversation — and King, who looked like no one else, looking on, observing, evidently deranged. Anna Bibby emailed from her home in France: ‘He was quite aloof and never spoke to me, actually come to think of it he never spoke with anyone but rather used the room as his private catwalk, did a few circuits, just to make sure that everyone was aware of him and left. Who was he?’

  He would sip, he claimed in the High Court, ‘only a little half-glass of wine’. It sent his blood pressure ‘through the roof’; his health was delicate, due to his coeliac disease, an extreme intolerance to gluten.

  He arrived alone and left alone. He’d walk back home, take off his clothes, and put on a robe. He owned three terry-towel robes. They were all he ever wore inside the townhouse. He was naked underneath. He continually wiped his hands with a flannel — he was afraid of germs from the outside world, but he lived in chaos and filth. A friend recalled the incredible layer of grease that had built up on the stove: ‘It was at least an inch thick. I mentioned it to Derek and he said it must never be cleaned, he wanted to keep it that way as he wanted to see what happened to dirt like that as time wore on.’ The house was a tip, ‘a hovel’, said Detective Sergeant Andrew Saunders of the Auckland police. He couldn’t believe the smell. ‘It stunk of, like, rotten vegetables,’ said Nikita Jones, a lively 30-year-old former street-kid.

  She first visited him when she was 13. Her best friend took her. They were both runaways, sleeping in the gazebo in Albert Park, and ‘the hole in the wall’ in Myers Park.

  The what?

  ‘You know, the hole in the wall,’ said Nikita. ‘It’s like a hole in the wall, and you can lie down in it.’

  We met at her flat on a treeless street in Onehunga. It was the middle of the day in the middle of the week, and there were three other adults smoking on the deck, and four kids, aged between one and 10, playing on the trampoline. It was welfare and wagging, the usual hopeless cycle — ‘I’ve missed 18 days of school,’ said a pretty seven-year-old with something like pride. But love fell in a light, steady rain on the kids, who were hugged, stroked, kissed; it was a happy home. Nikita remembered back to 1997, and said, ‘Me and my mate knew one or two people whose houses we would go and stay at. Older street bums that had a flat in town. My mate said, “I’ll introduce you to Derek.”’

  Air-raid tunnels were dug beneath Constitution Hill in 1941. They connected to Albert Park, and provided sanctuary for an estimated 24,000 people, in case Auckland was attacked. The entrances were filled in after the war. King’s townhouse on the hill was another kind of subterranean escape.

  ‘I hesitate to describe Mr King’s living quarters as “underground”,’ a police officer told the High Court at King’s trial, but that’s exactly what it was: an underworld, created and maintained by King, swanning around in his robes and his slippers, pale, diseased, a social outcast, once an important Auckland architect, clever and successful, with peculiar interests in punk rock and obvious interests in young girls, now paying desperate Maori street-kids — Nikita, her mate, runaways beyond number — to fuck him in exchange for money, shelter, and cheese on toast.

  It carried on for nearly 30 years. All the Monday nights, snubbed at Gow Langsford; the plane trees on Constitution Hill dropped their leaves in autumn, sweet fruit fell from the Moreton Bay fig trees in summer; underground, in King’s grotto, six generations (‘waves’, as King put it) of street-kids came and went. All girls, under 18, some as young as 12. They crashed the night, tagged the walls, smoked his pot; one girl lived with him for five years; another miscarried his baby. ‘I’m trying to help a whole bunch of people,’ he told the court. He looked after them, he said. Fed them, gave them ‘allowances’, formed relationships. They were, he said, ‘The Family’.

  As head of the household, King was a paedophile. He was found guilty of 16 charges of sex offending — mostly, ‘receiving commercial sexual services from persons under 18’. Who was this creature? ‘Oh God,’ he told the court, ‘I had a charmed life.’

  2

  He’d brushed out the corkscrew curls, and wore his white hair long and straight in court. At the verdict, he dressed in moccasins, baggy olive trousers, and a wool jacket with a button missing at the stomach; he had a faded elegance about him, a sense of style, although the fashion belonged to the 1980s. He contemplated the jury coming in, and yawned. He looked medicated.

  His lawyer, Nick Wintour, passed on to him my request for an interview. King was eager, but the Corrections Department refused. Prison guidelines state: ‘The department has a policy to f
acilitate media access when the resulting exposure will provide a positive focus on rehabilitation.’ King wasn’t interested in rehab, remorse, and all the rest of it; he’d had his day in court, when he took the stand in his own defence, and seized the opportunity to rave.

  He was like some sort of Humbert Humbert, the cultured paedophile from Nabokov’s Lolita, with his courtly manner and archaic little pleasantries: ‘Oh boy! Goodness gracious me!’ It was a manic performance. The judge later complimented Wintour for the way he handled his ‘difficult client’. No one believed much of what King said, but a lot of it was factual.

  He told people who knew him in the 1980s that he came from a privileged background in Christchurch. They believed that, but were dubious when he claimed he designed the School of Architecture building at the University of Auckland. It was hard to reconcile — King had already gone to seed.

  He raved in the High Court: ‘I graduated with design honours and they asked if I would design the School of Architecture, I know it sounds like some sort of fantasy that any young architect would love to get involved, but that’s amazing how that came about but I don’t think we’ve got time to go into all that sort of thing but anyway I ended up designing it, and suddenly it’s published around the world and I’m a famous architect . . .’

  Auckland University has no record of King graduating with honours. And, although there is no record that his design was published anywhere in the world, it’s true that King was responsible for the impressive and ambitious School of Architecture conference centre, in 1978, when he joined top Auckland firm Kingston Reynolds Thom and Allardice (KRTA) as a staff architect.

  KRTA were at the height of their fame. They’d designed Selwyn Village in Pt Chevalier, the Pakuranga town centre, and the Holy Family Catholic Church in Te Atatu out of massive precast concrete panels, a torture chamber which continues to freeze the congregation to death in winter, and boil them like lobsters in summer.

  Professor Mike Austin, who taught King at the architecture school, was surprised that KRTA offered him a job. ‘He was a difficult, noisy and hopeless student. Voluble. Full of bullshit.’

  He laughed, and said, ‘We were extra surprised when he got to design the school! We felt it was a mean and cruel trick that the profession played on us. It was like KRTA’s way of saying, “Well, if you’re going to pass buggers like this, then you can put up with the result.”’

  How did he regard the building that King designed?

  ‘You’d have to say it was competent. There’s something quite good about it, but . . .’ We’d met in Austin’s home on the King Edward Parade waterfront in Devonport. I loathed him on sight. A small, intense sort of rooster, he writhed and grimaced as he conceded that the conference centre had qualities. ‘The lighting’s good. There’s a big staircase, which is quite interesting.’ He relaxed as he arrived at a patronising thought: ‘It’s a little folksy building.’

  Around the corner, at his pretty home on the edge of mangroves, retired KRTA architect Denys Oldham, 80, had kinder words about his former colleague. He said of King, ‘A lively lad. He had curly hair and a genial expression. He was vivacious. Attractive, one could say. You warmed to him. There’s plenty of architects you don’t remember a thing about. But I do remember Derek. He had a strong personality, aligned with considerable design ability.’

  His review of King’s design for the conference centre? As he remembered, the project architect had left, ‘and Derek stepped into the breach. And really, apart from being a little contrived, he did a very good job. He designed the whole of that conference centre, which involved two lecture rooms, the admin block, the library, two major conference rooms — it was quite a tricky design. And it’s a fine piece of work.’

  King, in court: ‘I only had three months to put that together and it was the third design attempt and, oh boy, it was a tricky one but we got it, I got it sorted, and I got a bonus, enough to put a deposit on my house.’ A property search confirmed that King was listed as the owner. The blinds were pulled up on one window in Courtroom 15 at King’s trial; it allowed the jury an intimate view of the lovely exotic trees across the road on Constitution Hill.

  3

  The good job, the house on the hill — the late 1970s were King’s halcyon years. He bought a yellow Ferrari Dino, so low that you practically had to lie down to drive it. ‘He was anal about that car,’ said radio announcer Bryan Staff, who used to see King around town. ‘I remember him screaming at a gas station attendant for daring to touch the windscreen — “Do you realise how much this fucking thing is worth, you moron?”, that sort of thing.’

  A friend said, ‘When I first met Derek and got talking, he told me he had two ambitions and he had fulfilled them before his mother died. One was to design the School of Architecture and the other was to own a Ferrari.’ He told her that he couldn’t afford to insure it, and stored it in the garage like a prized jewel. Once, though, he took another woman for a drive in it to Hamilton; King floored it, drove at insane speeds, until the woman begged him to stop at Mercer. She got out, and never spoke to him again.

  He liked danger, excitement. King, soft and cuddly in his denim jumpsuits, became an unlikely player in the cultural explosion of punk rock. In fact, he was an impressario of punk. He put on concerts, and famously hired a bus to take six bands, including the Suburban Reptiles and The Scavengers, to play the New Wave Special concert in Wellington. A 1979 Eyewitness documentary on punk rock — it’s online at NZ On Screen — includes startling footage of King sitting at the front of the bus, giving a long-winded philosophical treatise on the meaning of punk. ‘Any extreme movement in society is generally misunderstood,’ he instructs. The passengers are spotty youth, 19, 20, cool in their leathers and mohair. There’s Johnny Volume, there’s Zero. And there’s King, ‘the famous young architect’, a groover in his light beard and ringleted haircut.

  The silver Newmans bus is filmed coming into Wellington down Ngauranga Gorge on a cold, drab winter’s morning. Eyewitness presenter Neil Roberts says in the voice-over, ‘Auckland is the centre of punk in New Zealand, and a young Auckland promoter decided to spread the good word south. Derek King gathered about him the crème de la crème of Auckland punkdom, hired a bus, and set off for the Wellington Town Hall. His mission — to bring the punk experience to the capital, a sort of 1978 punk odyssey.’

  The show went off, and Wellington took to punk with flair and energy. Strange that it’s thanks in large part to King, whose name also features in the credits of another landmark moment in New Zealand punk — the Ripper Records album AK 79, then received with awe and as a kind of manifesto of punk, with classic tracks such as ‘I Am A Rabbit’ by Proud Scum and Toy Love’s ‘Squeeze’. King was right in the middle of that ‘extreme movement’, making things happen. Respect or some kind of acknowledgement was surely due from survivors of the punk wars. None was forthcoming.

  Paul Rose, who managed punk bands including The Newmatics, remembered King at venues such as the Windsor Castle in Parnell, and the Rhumba Bar on Victoria Street. ‘He’d bring his camera and stand at the back and just watch. He was always observing. He was a crowd watcher, not a band watcher. Always on the outside.’

  ‘Always on the outside looking in,’ echoed the great society queen Judith Baragwanath, who was also on the punk scene. ‘A bit shady. Secretive. Furtive.’

  ‘We used to call him Fish Fingers for the way he chased young girls,’ said a former bootboy made good, too respectable for his name to be used in King’s company. ‘An odious character. His demeanour was just sleazy. He was always your best friend! It was a mix of all that plus his fast-growing reputation as predator. Girls knew to keep away.’

  The last time he saw him was a couple of years ago, at the Auckland Film Festival: ‘He made my skin crawl. I disliked him intensely.’

  Paul Rose said the last time he saw King was at the 2011 Laneways concert in Aotea Square. ‘There he was with his camera again. By himself. Watching the crowd. Same o
ld dirty Derek.’

  4

  After designing the conference centre, King lived in Singapore for three years, as an architectural consultant. He returned to his home on the hill in 1982, and set himself up as a photographer — he approached pretty young girls, and offered to shoot their modelling portfolios.

  One such sweet thing was novelist Charlotte Grimshaw. ‘He got me into his house once and took Polaroids,’ she said. ‘I was 15 or 16. He spoke of modelling jobs, then suggested we adjourn to the bedroom. I fought him off, and fled, laughing.’ She thinks she may have stolen something on her way out. ‘Could it have been a Walkman? Surely not a toaster.’

  How many other girls did he try it on with? How many submitted? The answer to both idle speculations might be any number, including zero. Maybe he just liked to watch. Bruce Jarvis, who managed the film-processing lab Prism, developed King’s photos throughout that decade. ‘They were only ever of young girls,’ he said.

  Jarvis found an envelope containing negatives of one of King’s shoots in 1990. They were head-and-shoulder photos of a teenager who had taken her shirt off. She’s gorgeous, but the power of the photos isn’t her beauty: it’s her apprehensiveness, her look of fear. What was going on with the creature behind the camera? Who was she looking at?

  ‘He was funny, also very intelligent,’ said a woman who knew him in the 1990s, ‘and completely mad.’ She tolerated his eccentricities — the grimy stove, the robes — and was amused by his rabid way of talking. ‘He always banged on about discovering all the models who did well in the ’80s. According to Derek, it was him who discovered Rachel Hunter. I was sure he wasn’t lying as he told everyone.’

  Rachel Hunter’s agent, Andy Haden, rejected the claim. On holiday in Fiji, he emailed, ‘We have a letter and a series of photos that Rachel has authenticated as the first shots taken of her as a model, and the photographer wasn’t Derek King . . . I’ve never heard of the guy.’