by Alan Carter
‘Steady on, marra,’ Marty says.
‘You watched me for nearly two years with Sammy but never made the move. No bottle.’
He strolls over and stamps at my head with his top-of-the-range boots. ‘And yet here I am, Nicky.’
That hurt. I can feel the other eye closing up.
‘Sammy knew he had nothing to fear from you. Not because you’re loyal. He just thought you were a bit … how did he put it?’ I search for the memory of that summer evening on the cliff top at Marsden. ‘Like a poodle, he said. And just as fucking vain.’
That earns another couple of stamps on the head and I feel like I’m going to pass out. But if I’m going to die then I may as well say my piece, get a few things out of my system. That rooster over the road is crowing and the hobby farmers will be up and about soon. The bloke goes off every day to Blenheim to run his website business while she potters around feeding the goats and the chickens. Marty needs to get a move on or they might get nosy and spoil his party. And I need to keep distracting him, because it’s all I can do.
‘You had your chance to take over when he went down. Why didn’t you?’
‘Loyalty,’ he says. ‘You still don’t get it. Sammy could teach you a thing or two about that. The number of times he stuck up for you when I told him you were a treacherous bastard.’ He snorts. ‘He was even putting money aside for that spastic bairn of yours. What a joke.’ Paulie’s rainy-day fund, boosted by drug smuggling and people trafficking profits. Nice. ‘So where are they? Vanessa and Paulie?’
‘Safe.’
He shrugs. ‘Sammy’s a patient man. We’ll find them.’
‘Sammy wouldn’t want Paulie harmed. Vanessa neither.’
‘That what you think?’ Marty tries looking pensive, it doesn’t suit him. ‘Aye, you’re right, he was torn, conflicted-like. But I convinced him of the bigger picture, the need to set a firm example.’
This is hopeless. They can and will come back for my family after I’m dead and buried. I’m hurting all over and feeling tired, nauseous, whether from blood loss or despair it’s hard to tell and makes no real difference.
Marty is behind me again. There’s rustling. Stuff being pulled out of a bag. He comes back around, holding a chainsaw in one hand and a phone in the other.
‘Sammy wants to see your head in a bag like that Alfredo Garcia bloke. I told him, “Sammy mate, that might be a problem at Customs.” ’ He chuckles. ‘So at least a photo anyway.’ He holds up his iPhone. ‘Pity there’s no signal here but I can probably send it from that place down the road, what’s it called?’
‘Havelock.’
‘Aye, like the monument in the park in Sunderland.’
‘Same bloke apparently. Some general or other.’ Anything to buy time. I’m struggling now, big-time. ‘Henry Havelock. Helped put down the Indian Mutiny, a military tactician. Hard as nails.’
‘That right?’
‘Aye. Kind of bloke Sammy would have loved except he was posh as fuck.’
He’s fiddling with the chainsaw mechanism. Not sure what to do with it, there wouldn’t have been much need to learn in Sunderland. And I know I’m not going to be rescued by the hobby farmers over the road. I’m finished.
‘Really?’ Marty flicks the cigarette in my direction but it lands short. He pulls the cord a few times and the chainsaw starts up. Bugger, it’s a SmartStart. ‘Well there you go.’
The noise is deafening. He steps forward: what’s he going to go for first, my head, my legs? I curl up as best I can, a hermit crab retreating into a non-existent shell. Marty is enjoying my terror. He unlocks the safety bar, revs and sets the chain whirring. Through half-shut eyes, as if in a dream, I see Steve running out of the bushes and burying an axe in Marty’s skull. Marty drops and the chainsaw skids across the gravel, whining and whipping close to me before the automatic cut-out kicks in. Sparks fly up from the gravel. A blue flame flares briefly on my trouser leg but doesn’t catch.
Steve turns the chainsaw off properly and moves it out of harm’s way. He digs around for the bike lock key in Marty’s pocket and releases me. He picks up Marty’s knife and uses it to cut through the cable ties on my hands.
‘Awesome,’ I say. ‘Truly awesome.’ I stand groggily upright and nod towards Gary. ‘I better go and call an ambulance.’
Steve pats me weakly on the shoulder. ‘Good idea, mate. Better make it two.’
Then he shows me the gaping wound in his chest, the blood that still runs freely there as his face turns grey.
28
His real name was Stephen Hemopo and his tangi should really have been a grander affair. There was a short dispute between his daughter and some cousins and uncles who claimed him as theirs, but nobody really wanted to press the matter. Perhaps the row over custody of the body is a way of showing respect. Nor was he ever going to be returned to his own marae on the North Island because there is still some very bad blood there.
Blood. Steve wouldn’t stop bleeding and he died five minutes before the air ambulance landed in the paddock over the road. Gary sits beside me now, eyes raw with grief. On the other side of him is Steve’s daughter, Lydia, and the three grandchildren. She has been given special compassionate leave from her zero-hours contract at the DIY place so she’s not in breach by attending her father’s funeral. The traditional three days of lying in state was however curtailed to just one sad and lonely night in the funeral parlour in Blenheim.
Gary has limped to the front of the chapel beside the closed coffin and is speaking in Maori. On my other side Latifa sits, explaining a bit of what’s going on, but her heart isn’t really in it. Gary is encouraging Steve to return to the ancestral homeland by way of te rerenga wairua, the spirits’ journey. Then Lydia takes her turn, and after some tearful words in memory and honour of her usually absent father, she belts out this old Maori song that her dad used to like and the power of it freezes my insides.
Steve has been buried in Deep Creek Cemetery just down the road from our house, in the company of the miners and settlers who have tried to eke a living in this valley the last hundred and fifty years. The hākari is back at our place. About thirty people are in the front yard, picking at the meat and salads on the table, sharing some jokes and stories about Steve, and lifting their faces to the weak sunshine. I’m nervous about having so many strangers on my property but Latifa says it is important, and it was the very least I could do. After all he’d still be here if it wasn’t for me. After the burial, the home of the deceased and the place where he died are ritually cleansed and then desanctified with food and drink, in a ceremony called takahi whare, trampling the house. I like the sound of that: trampling the house. Maybe they can trample out the touch of evil that kills those who come near me.
‘Is it really over now?’ Vanessa is by my side, she takes my hand and squeezes it for the answer she needs. Just ten minutes ago the DC asked pretty much the same thing but without the hand squeeze.
‘Yes.’
It has to be.
Surely.
The last week has involved a whole bunch of questions, answers, suppositions, evasions and downright lies. Marty had a passport in the pocket of his Gore-Tex jacket. An Australian one held by his younger brother now living in Bali. They look alike. Marty no doubt intended to swap it back for his own on the journey home. He’d left Steve for dead in the hut but underestimated him. Gary was next on the list: tied up and hacked and stabbed over a prolonged period for the drawn-out pleasure of it, while I lay unconscious by the fence. Survival seemingly a lottery. The dog slept through it all. Marty had been on the premises earlier in the day and drugged the bowl of food while everybody was out. That accounted for Richie’s sluggishness and loss of appetite. The ambulance crew and first attending uniformed police have questions about the state of Marty’s body – the axe in the head is a bit too Game of Thrones for them. They don’t know the half of it, and it’s best they never do.
Paulie sidles up, plate piled high with triangul
ar sandwiches that he swears taste much better than rectangular ones. ‘Are we coming home now?’ he says through a mouthful of ham salad.
‘I’d like that,’ I say.
Vanessa looks at me with a mixture of, what? I see hope in there, determination too, but still something held back.
‘Okay,’ she says finally.
It’s a week since Steve’s funeral. Qadim Reza was found yesterday, in the middle of one of those massive vineyards in the Wairau Valley on the way to Blenheim. He must have endured unspeakable torment before he was released from this world. All I know or imagine is from the news reports, as I’m still suspended. Latifa has tried to fill in a few of the gaps for me but she is on the far fringes of the investigation.
‘They have nothing.’ The phone beeps, there’s another call waiting at her end. ‘They’re getting so desperate I reckon they might even have you back soon.’
‘Thanks. How’s it going with Beth and her dreams?’
‘There was a camera in the pub at the time but any discs have long since been erased. DI Keegan is wondering if a hypnotist might help.’ Yep, things are desperate. Latifa says bye-bye and takes the other call.
Gary is resting up in his room, watching TV shows and movies endlessly on his computer. He’s barely spoken since the funeral. Sometimes he’ll go for a drive in the ute and let Richie off for a run in somebody’s pine plantation. He takes his gun in case there’s a pig but always returns empty-handed and, it seems, relieved. We’re settling back into a domestic routine here, with Paulie at his old school and Vanessa doing the running around. She thinks I need to stay out of the public eye until Marty’s boot marks have gone from my face. We’re having a midmorning cuppa on the back balcony. It’s windy and overcast so the sandfly count is slightly lower than usual. We’re still lathered in repellent anyway, just in case. As we edge closer to summer the river below is diminishing without regular rain, and I’ve instilled a new mantra in Paulie to help save the water in the tank: ‘If it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down.’ He delights in it, chanting it all day until we yell at him, good-naturedly, to stop.
Vanessa is hanging some washing on the balcony clothes line. ‘I want to go home, Nick.’
I put the phone down and hand her some pegs. I’ve been half-expecting this. ‘For good?’
She shrugs. ‘I don’t know. But I want to see me mam. She’s had the chemo, her hair’s grown back, she’s been through hell and I wasn’t there for her.’
And I think about my dad’s shoulders shaking during that last hug. I want to see them in their new home, the one they fled to after the previous one was vandalised by Sammy’s thugs. There’s nothing stopping us now. Marty is dead. Sammy knows because I sent him a photo on Marty’s phone.
Look what I did, I texted, all by myself.
Not exactly true but there was a point to be made. Will Sammy take his chances if I turn up on his territory? Maybe, but maybe it’s also time to seize the initiative.
Looking at Vanessa I can see that this is one of those pivotal moments. She wants to believe in us again, wants this to work, and she wants something in return. Framed against the trees and the hills, a river mist drifting up the valley behind her, it’s like she floats and needs anchoring. Somewhere to call home.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Let’s go.’
29
Durham, England. Now.
As a uni student I always loved travelling back home from Manchester by train and pulling into Durham over the viaduct high above the city. Just one more stop to Newcastle on that East Coast main line and then home. Durham is a very old city with steep, densely wooded riverbanks and a cathedral dominating the skyline. It’s about twenty kilometres south-west of Sunderland. The same River Wear that joins the sea at Sunderland meanders through Durham, enclosing the centre on three sides to form a peninsula that made for good defences in the wars and skirmishes that raged through the ages. Geographically and strategically, there are similarities with my little red-roofed house perched above the meandering Wakamarina River.
The road signs designate Durham as the Land of the Prince Bishops. It all goes back to the early Middle Ages. As the north-east was so far from Westminster, the bishops of Durham enjoyed extraordinary powers such as the ability to hold their own parliament, raise their own armies, appoint their own sheriffs and justices, administer their own laws, levy their own taxes. You name it. They were a fiefdom unto themselves and that was never going to last. In the 1600s, Oliver Cromwell put the boot in to punish Durham for choosing the wrong side in the civil war and it was all downhill from there. Within another couple of hundred years the prince bishops were an officially spent force, even if they did found the esteemed University of Durham on their way out
So, on the one hand you have prince bishops and hallowed academia, but on the other you have the surrounding coalmines (all closed now), the trade unions, and the other assorted riffraff that give Durham its grit and help prevent it being another staid English university city. On any Friday night down its winding and crowded cobbled streets the pubs will be bursting with academics and ASBOs drinking shoulder to shoulder. But I’m headed to the outskirts to HM Prison Frankland, Category A, population just over eight hundred. It looks like any old correctional centre on a bleak moor – concrete, barbed wire, et cetera – and it’s late October, northern autumn, so of course it’s raining. The roll call of Frankland’s current and former inmates is a who’s who of nastydom: Harold Shipman – or Dr Death as the tabloids called him – the Yorkshire Ripper, a former Liberian warlord, and a Loyalist paramilitary who threw hand grenades at a Catholic funeral in Ulster. And, of course, Sammy Pritchard.
I’ve only just caught him in time. After two years of good behaviour and glowing reports from the parole board he’s scheduled for a transfer to a lower category jail. I must be mad. Two years of cowering in my Antipodean bolthole fearing discovery and now here I am waltzing back into the lion’s den. But I am mad, crackers, and it feels good. Sammy’s waiting for me in a room they’ve set aside – the privilege of my former high-ranking job in the system. He’s put on some weight. A latter-day prince bishop fallen from grace.
‘Not taking advantage of the state-of-the-art gym facilities, Sammy?’
‘Fuck off, son.’ But he says it with a thin smile.
‘You got my SMS then?’
He gives the tiniest of nods. He’ll never admit to having access to a mobile in here.
‘I hear you’re on the path to redemption. Expecting to be out in what, four years?’
‘Three, if I’m lucky.’
‘The new lad that’s taken over your trade isn’t going to budge easily and most of your troops defected to him. You don’t need that grief at your time of life.’
‘New Zealand’s nice, I hear.’
‘Nah, you’d hate it. All that scenery, bitey flies up your nose, and blokes in socks and sandals that can’t talk about anything but fucken rugby.’ I slide him a printout of that same photo I SMSed him. Marty, post-mortem. ‘What say we bury the hatchet?’
‘You’re a riot, son.’
‘I’ve found new depths. I can thank you and Marty for that.’
‘Oh, I think you already had them, Nicky, just waiting to be explored.’ He leans forward. ‘I spent the best part of the first two years here looking over my shoulder. Given your job, I assumed you’d have me topped.’
‘I know the feeling. But that was the difference between you and me. I was never a vengeful bloke, I wasn’t the type to have a man killed.’
The past tense isn’t lost on him. ‘How’s Vanessa and the bairn?’
‘Good.’
‘I’d still like to look after him, he’s a fantastic lad.’
‘If he’s so fantastic why did you send Marty to kill him, and Vanessa, and me?’
A shrug. ‘Business, mate. I’ve an empire to keep together.’
‘Fuck you, you sentimental, hypocritical old prick.’ I prod the photo of Marty one more
time. ‘If you make it through the next few years, bugger off to Spain or somewhere, right? This is finished. No more.’
It elicits a murderous black glower which reminds me of Uncle Walter. ‘Who the fuck do you think you are and what makes you think I would listen to you?’
‘I’m the one who finally managed to get you put in here and nobody expected that, least of all you.’ I signal the guard that I’m ready to leave. ‘Give it up, Sammy. You can’t win them all.’
After a long moment he nods. ‘No hard feelings.’ He holds out a hand. I study it. Then I shake it. ‘Travel safe, Nicky,’ he says to my departing back.
I’m still not sure whether I should just be done with it and arrange for the bastard to be shivved in the showers.
What with the cranes, the bulldozers and the road diversions, Sunderland city centre reminds me of Christchurch after the earthquake – but without the same fighting spirit and zest for life. I’m meeting Vanessa and Paulie in a Costa Coffee in the Bridges Shopping Centre. Paulie is wondering if we can catch a game at the Stadium of Light this weekend, Sunderland versus West Brom. I dig deep for some enthusiasm. ‘Sure. Why not?’
Vanessa has done the rounds of family and friends over the last week. She’s reassured herself that her mum is on the mend. I’ve done likewise with my own folks and the odd mate. It’s like we’ve returned from the grave, they say, and maybe they’re not wrong. We’re due to fly back to NZ in another week. Or cancel the return and just have our stuff shipped over here. The centre sound system is broadcasting a shite radio station, two likely lads blathering on about nowt, and finding each other really funny then playing some crap music. The peace and quiet of the Wakamarina Valley seems a long way away.
‘That’s what I was thinking as well.’ Vanessa wipes some coffee froth from her lips.
‘What?
‘It’s all over your face,’ she laughs. ‘It’s like you’ve got a red hot poker up your arse and somebody’s shoved a lemon in your gob to keep you quiet.’
