The Scene of the Crime

by Steve Braunias

  They could stand on the beach and look out to the waters of the Cook Strait, then turn, and look at the Foreshore Motor Lodge on the corner of The Esplanade and Nelson Street, where an escort arrived at Unit 10 on that cold night nearly 15 years ago. She gave evidence via videolink. She was shown sitting at a boardroom table. She wore a white blouse, as though she were playing the role of a secretary. Her sad, battered face indicated a hard life, suggesting the usual misery of men and methamphetamine. It wouldn’t be accurate to describe her behaviour as tense or anxious. It was more like she was showing signs of a fast-approaching panic attack. Each question nailed her to a cross.

  ‘Did you knock on the door?’

  She took a long drink of water, and whispered, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then?’

  She breathed in and out rapidly, and croaked, ‘I was let into the room.’

  ‘Did you have to get the paperwork out of the way?’

  She stared at the camera, and said in fright, ‘What?’

  ‘Did you ask for the money?’

  She took slower breaths, and said, ‘Oh. Yes.’

  She told the court she was in the room for about an hour.

  2

  She phoned for the driver to pick her up. He said he wasn’t far away, probably five minutes.

  ‘Any problems?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Okay. Bye.’

  She picked up her handbag, checked the $140 was inside. The client got off the bed and put on his green tracksuit pants. He said his name was Mark.

  She said, ‘So, what do you do, Mark?’

  He said, ‘Sell kitchen sinks and taps.’

  She said, ‘Really.’

  He said, ‘I fax the orders to my wife, and she does all the paperwork. It’s a very successful business — I’m the number-one salesman in the Lower North Island!’

  She said, ‘Uh-huh.’

  It was nearly 1am. He wanted her to leave. She wasn’t what you’d call beautiful, and already he couldn’t remember what name she gave. In any case, he’d got from her what he wanted. It was late; he had a busy morning ahead of him. He had people to see in Seaview, in Johnsonville, in Mt Cook. One customer owed him money, but he couldn’t remember the address. He’d ask Christine for it in the morning.

  The driver from the nearby Quarry Inn escort agency in Seaview finally arrived. ‘Well, good night,’ she said at the door.

  ‘Good night,’ he said.

  After she left, Mark went outside to his car. He’d left it on the street earlier that night, when he’d parked under a streetlight to read a novel by one of his favourite authors, Robert Ludlum, until it got too dark. He thought he’d better move the Fairmont into the motel carpark. He felt a bit boozed and couldn’t be bothered angling it directly in front of his room, Unit 10, so he left it in front of Unit 1.

  It was a cold, still night in late August. There wasn’t a moon out, and the sky and the water of Wellington harbour were as black as each other. He could see across from Petone to the city and the streetlights glowing high in the Hutt hills. To his left, a lighthouse flickered at the entrance to the Cook Strait. He shivered, and went inside.

  He got back into bed. The rum, the sex . . . He felt relaxed, content. Life was good. A new laminate product had arrived that week; orders were going to go through the roof. The wine venture wasn’t dead in the water yet, not by a long shot. In fact, he was going to call his designer first thing in the morning and get her to mock up an advertisement for a magazine aimed at retired police officers. He was bound to attract a few investors to back the land deal he had going in the Hawke’s Bay.

  But even if it fell through, no worries. They’d survive. You just had to work hard, and neither he nor Christine were afraid of that. They were a good team. He was away from their Palmerston North home a lot, on the road, selling the sinks from The Netherlands and the taps made in Taiwan; Christine stayed at home and did the books. Actually she was probably doing her brother’s GST that night. Glenn had come over that morning to see if she’d finished it. He was at the house yesterday morning, too, asking about it.

  Christine’s family were always at the house. Her mum came for lunch every Wednesday, and popped in most days for a cup of tea and to see Amber. He smiled in the darkness. Amber. He was crazy about Amber, loved her with all his heart. She’d phoned that afternoon to ask if it was all right to have McDonald’s for dinner. When he was away, Christine and Amber always ate takeaway. Christine probably only cooked twice a year anyway. Of course you can, he said. Thanks, Daddy, she said.

  She was such a good little girl. There were never any problems with Amber. She had her routines: she’d go to bed at 7.30, read, and have lights out by 8.30, nine at the latest. Christine made Amber’s nighties. She’d be wearing one tonight — probably with socks. She often forgot to take them off when she got into bed.

  Christine always slept naked. She’d have heated up her side of the waterbed. She might even still be awake; she was a real night owl, reading her mother’s subscription to Mills & Boon, playing Solitaire and Patience on the computer, watching TV. He felt a twinge of guilt about the escort. She wasn’t the only one he’d gone to. But a man had his needs. Sex just wasn’t a thing with him and Christine any more, but he still loved her. In fact, he couldn’t wait to see her again. He was in love with her, always would be.

  He nodded off. He got up once in the night to go to the bathroom, but otherwise slept soundly. He was up just after seven and went over to the motel office to see if the manager had batteries for his electric razor. The guy didn’t have any. They talked about nothing in particular. Mark went back to his room, dressed, and checked out. He drove along The Esplanade to his favourite tuck shop, and bought a bacon and egg sandwich for breakfast. He also bought batteries. He shaved in the car, and ate his scoff, parked on the foreshore looking out to the harbour.

  He went about his rounds, and phoned Christine for the address of the client who owed them money. She didn’t pick up, and didn’t return his calls. He continued to phone. He started to get worried. Then a friend phoned and said get your arse home now, there’s police tape outside your house. He set off. It came on the radio that there had been a death in Palmerston North and police were treating it as suspicious. He drove, fast, and howled.

  Chapter 10

  Made in Australia: Rolf Harris

  1

  Every New Zealander overseas is aware of the phenomenon of the letter Z, the way it reaches out from newspaper reports or even the casual literature of menus and shop signs — we immediately think it’s a reference to New Zealand. Z, that last and loveliest letter of the alphabet, is our trademark. Z is charged with the voltage of home; Z waves out from our obscure archipelago tucked away at the end of the Earth. Once you leave New Zealand, New Zealand disappears. It has no place in the world. No one mentions it, no one cares about it. Good. It’s almost a reason to leave New Zealand — finally, an end to that shrill, obsessive conversation we have about ourselves and our ‘national identity’. Wandering some foreign turf, we become stateless, free. But then the Z zings into view, and zaps us back. It’s always shocking to see it; strange and unsettling, too, to overhear our island nation spoken out loud. It feels like you’re the keeper of a secret. I know that place. I know its ways. Something similar extends to mentions of Australia. It’s as though they’ve brought up the name of an old friend. Oh, I know Australia. They live next door. And you sit there in whatever foreign territory and listen to the names — New Zealand, Australia — like a spy.

  Spy, tourist, unable to think of anywhere I’d rather be during a few days to kill in London, I got the last vacant seat in the public gallery at Southwark Crown Court where I attended the trial of Rolf Harris. It was a media sensation. But there was something else going on, something with a deeper resonance — a narrative about Australia and the colonies. England had given Australia its convicts; now Australia was returning the favour.

  I pondered such shifts of history
as I legged it from London Bridge Underground station towards the courthouse. I expected something with an Old Bailey vibe, but Southwark was modern and large, a tremendously ugly fortress. Inside, the place was a dump. There were torn vinyl chairs, notices drooping on boards because they’d run out of drawing pins, holes in the carpet.

  Harris’s jury trial was upstairs. I took my seat, looked around, and felt at home. The layout of the courtroom was identical to the lower order of criminal courts in New Zealand. There were the rows of tables for counsel, and there were the press benches. I smiled at the sight of the British press — they looked just like Kiwi journos, nicely dressed young men and women with narrow eyes and thin lips, dying to do away with the word ‘alleged’ whenever they wrote of Harris as a paedophile.

  Eventually, I realised that the old man with white hair, sitting by himself in a glass cage in front of the public gallery, was Rolf Harris. He was dressed in a blue suit. He stood up. He wore his pants high around his waist; he was trim, dapper, with pink skin and a thin mouth. He walked to the door. He tried the door handle. It was locked. He bowed his head, and stood there, trapped, nowhere to go, an exhibit for everyone to look upon and question their childhood. People loved him when they were children. How could they have been so deceived? And now they knew, what ruin did his crimes visit on their innocence? Harris was found guilty, sentenced to five years and nine months’ jail. He was stripped of his CBE, his name ‘erased from the Register’. In his Trews commentary ‘Rolf Harris: What should we think?’, Russell Brand mused, ‘You have to revise your own childhood. You have to go, “Oh, right, so what was going on then when I was enjoying that stuff?”’

  As an Australian, Harris’s success and genius as a children’s entertainer was received with a special kind of enthusiasm in New Zealand. He wasn’t an exotic, like he was thought of in Britain; he was just an Aussie joker, our familiar neighbour. We spoke the same not-Queen’s-English language. We knew him. We knew his ways . . . We didn’t know anything.

  The usual crackle of celebrity that snaps around the silhouette of the famous had a different, weirder feel to it when I watched Harris in his glass cage that Wednesday in May. It was a damp summer’s morning, five to 10. He tried the door handle again. It was locked. Eventually, he walked back to his seat, and sat down. The glass cage; the eyes watching his hopeless little journey to the door and back; the small, blonde prosecutor Sasha Wass QC (‘Cool as ice’, The Times) all set to stab him and stab him and stab him with her latest accusations — Rolf Harris, 84, in hell, in public.

  The spectators wore raincoats, corduroy, big woolly jumpers. One old character changed into a pair of slippers. The two men next to me struck up a conversation.

  ‘Never smoked or drank in my life,’ said the older man, about 70, who was in superb physical shape.

  ‘A drink’s all right,’ said his neighbour, who rested his hands on his large stomach.

  They fell silent.

  ‘What’s in there, then?’ asked the younger man, pointing at the plastic bag that the teetotaler had taken out of his raincoat pocket.

  ‘A hat.’

  ‘A hat?’

  ‘A wet hat.’

  ‘This rain.’

  ‘Terrible.’

  ‘All stand,’ said the court clerk. The judge entered. Harris was released from his glass cage, and led to the witness box. It was his second day on the stand. He was accused of 12 counts of indecently assaulting four underage girls in the UK between 1968 and 1986 — there were also similar allegations involving two girls in New Zealand. The court would hear about that, in particular about a day in Hamilton; it would also hear about a day at the beach in Australia.

  New Zealand and Australia, like remote, bright backdrops to the miserable business of Harris in court. Across town, at King’s College on The Strand, was the first Australia and New Zealand Festival of Literature and Arts ever staged in London. I was a guest speaker at three events, and also got roped in at the last minute by Witi Ihimaera to play a role in an excerpt from his play set in World War I. It was performed in a beautiful chapel. There was a haka. I enjoyed myself tremendously, but it was such small beer. The forlorn hope was that New Zealand and Australian writers might attract a new market of English readers; in fact, the three-day festival mostly played to small gatherings of expatriates. I asked the audience at one event if anyone was English. There was a show of hand. Only one! The truly spectacular — and more popular — festival of antipodean culture was at the packed upstairs courtroom, near the splashing Thames.

  Harris, the Australian made good in England; Harris, a national treasure with his paintbrushes and his extra leg; Harris, harmless and asexual, chortling and whimsical, the light entertainer who had actually operated in darkness. Now, in court, was his Rick Rubin moment. Rubin produced the last, great records by Johnny Cash, turning his songs into high gothic. He had done the same with Neil Diamond. Harris, though, went further. His life was turned into high gothic, and the producer was Sasha Wass. Rubin made Cash and Diamond sound like their voices came from somewhere deep beneath the earth; Wass made Harris talk in frightened whispers.

  She said, ‘You’re pretty good, Mr. Harris, aren’t you, at disguising the dark side of your character.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. His voice was quiet and hoarse.

  Wass said, ‘This case is about whether, under your friendly and loveable exterior, there is a dark side lurking. You know that, don’t you?’

  The old, thin voice gasped, ‘I suppose so.’

  2

  It was his standard response: ‘I suppose so.’ It aimed for diffidence, but it didn’t quite get there; it was weak, lacking. I sat in court for two days and heard it over and over.

  Much was made of a holiday to Australia in the 1970s. Harris travelled with his wife, Alwen, their daughter, Bindi, and Bindi’s best friend. The girls were 13. They went to the beach. Bindi’s friend had a swim, and came out of the water. She was wearing a flesh-coloured bikini. Harris came towards her with a towel. He put it around her. Also, according to Wass, he molested her.

  A photo of the girl wearing the bikini was produced in court. Harris studied it. Wass said he had complimented the girl on the holiday, told her that she looked ‘lovely’.

  ‘Do you accept that when a man tells a woman or a girl they look lovely in a bikini, they are not actually admiring the clothing, they are admiring the person’s body?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘You weren’t talking about the bikini,’ Wass said. ‘You didn’t mean the fabric. There’s not much of it. What you were saying was, “You have a great body.”’

  The low gasp: ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You suppose so.’

  ‘I suppose so, yes.’

  ‘To a 13-year-old. “You have a great body.” That’s what you were telling a 13-year-old.’

  ‘I suppose so . . .’

  He denied there was any touching. Wass kept at it. She held out her hand, palm up. She said, ‘You digitally penetrated her.’

  ‘That didn’t happen.’

  Her hand stayed where it was. ‘She says you put your hand inside her bikini pants, and digitally penetrated her.’

  ‘No.’

  She continued to hold out her hand as she confronted Harris a third time, but this time she moved her middle fingers, thrust them forward, and said, ‘You fingered her.’

  ‘No.’

  The obscene hand stayed where it was. Harris looked away. He started talking about how he wouldn’t have gone to her with a towel, that he didn’t spend much time at the beach, that he didn’t even like the beach. Photos were produced of the beach. You could see bright blue skies, golden sand, a jetty stretching out to sea — you could see all the beauty of Australia, the lucky country, its sun and surf and glowing light.

  Another wildly successful expatriate, Clive James, talked about that light when he spoke at the Australia–New Zealand festival. James was giving what was billed as his farewell performance. He had
leukaemia. He was dying, on the way out. He played to a full crowd who cheered and wept for the great prose stylist in his final hour of memoir, gags, and poetry. He said he was too unwell to return to Australia. It was a profound regret. He longed to see it one more time, to ‘bask in the light I never left behind’.

  But Harris didn’t want to know about the light. He was a creature of shadows. ‘I hate sunbathing . . . I hate the sea . . . I don’t like the beach.’ His great distaste for spending any time there, he said, ruled out any possibility of molesting schoolgirls.

  Wass ignored the logic of his argument, and said to the jury, ‘He would do this whether or not there were family members nearby. You will hear other instances in this case where Mr Harris touched children and women alike in quite brazen circumstances. Maybe that was part of the excitement for him, knowing that he could get away with it.’

  Harris, said Wass, was ‘a sinister pervert’. How the old man with white hair would have envied James, his compatriot and near contemporary, not only because he was playing on the other side of the river to an audience who loved him. James was merely dying. Harris had it worse. He was being shamed in full view of the media.

  The press sat in rows behind his wife and daughter. I approached Alwen Harris during an adjournment. The old dear was led to a ripped orange vinyl couch in a kind of lounge outside the courtroom. She was left by herself. It was a heartbreaking sight. I thought she could do with a friendly voice. I figured: we have a bond. Alwen was British, but her long marriage to Harris gave her an insight into the special relationship between New Zealand and Australia. She was in on the shared secret of life in the beautiful light of the Antipodes. I went over to her, and said, ‘I’m from New Zealand. Just wanted to say hi. Hang in there.’