This Mortal Boy

by Fiona Kidman

  In court, Gerald Timms, the lawyer, isn’t interested in any of these details. Timms has gone through Stan’s statement, marking the points he wants illuminated. It is a good statement, he told him beforehand.

  His voice wobbles when he says he is Stanley Cameron of Wellington. His father is in the packed gallery of the courtroom, waiting to take him home, back south, as soon as he can get him out of the place. ‘I know the accused,’ he says. ‘I knew him as Paddy. I’d known Johnny McBride for two days up to the time he was deceased. I knew Paddy a bit shorter than two days. On the morning of Monday the twenty-fifth of July, I was in the Albert Hotel. Later in the day Ray Hastie asked me to go to a party at 105 Wellesley Street. I got there at about half past six and I stayed there till about quarter past eleven. There had been some trouble at the party, though I didn’t see all of it. I went out for about twenty-five minutes.’

  ‘Where did you go?’ Timms interjects.

  Stan Cameron is ashamed of his answer because his father will hear it. He knows already, of course, but admitting the lie in front of all these people seems as bad as anything he has to say. ‘I knew there would be somebody on the night desk at my work. I went down to a phone box to try and make a toll call to say I wouldn’t be in on Tuesday but I’d be sure to be back on Wednesday. I was going to say I was crook but I couldn’t get through. When I got back to the party I saw that Paddy had been in a fight. He had abrasions round the eye and his shirt and trousers were ripped.’ he said in a well-rehearsed voice. ‘I also saw Johnny. There was no sign of injury or damage on him. Paddy asked me for something. He was lying on the bed and he called me over. He asked me for a knife.’

  ‘He asked you for a knife?’ Timms’s voice is soft and insistent.

  ‘He did. I did have one, it was the one my dad gave me for a Scout knife. It was a folding pocket knife. It had a bottle-opener attachment. I’d had it out earlier.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘I said no. I was afraid to lose it because my dad gave it to me. When I refused him he grabbed me by the coat and ripped it. There was a slight “altercation” but no blows, just a bit of a scuffle.’

  ‘So he got in a temper? Flew off the handle, you might say?’

  ‘Yes, something like that. Some of the men pulled us apart. I didn’t stay long after that struggle. I wasn’t very sober, so I can’t remember exactly what I did. I did go back to the boarding house where I was staying, and Johnny turned up later and stayed there too. I don’t think he slept too good, I’d say he thrashed around in the bed a bit, not like the first night. He was talking in his sleep as if he was mad with someone.’

  Stan looks sideways at the gallery. He sees the girl, Stella, sitting with Rita Zilich. Stella had seen him and winked as he entered the courtroom. She is wearing a black wide-brimmed picture hat trimmed with a rose over her curly auburn hair. It is clearly distracting to those sitting behind her, but she is oblivious. He knows she has already given her evidence. The night of the party she had touched him in a suggestive manner. ‘You’re new around here,’ she’d said. But then things had all gone amok.

  ‘The next day was Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of July,’ Stan continues. ‘Johnny and I went to a snooker room in the town. I spent time with him on and off all through that day. There were a couple of other blokes with us, one was Jeff Larsen but he wasn’t very friendly towards Johnny. I can’t remember the name of the other one. We went backwards and forwards between the snooker room, and for some lunch at a cafe, and the Albert Hotel. Johnny bought some new clothes and went back to the boarding house where we were staying to get changed, then he came back to the Albert. After six o’clock closing we walked up the street and went for a meal at Ye Olde Barn cafe.

  ‘Anyway, there were four of us who’d been drinking together sitting in a cubicle and a couple of people I didn’t know. We ordered our meals and the accused walked in and sat down in the first cubicle, facing towards the rear of the cafe. I went down to Paddy’s table to say hullo, to show there were no hard feelings on my part. There were some men I knew from the night before. I didn’t sit down with them. I talked to Ted Quintal and offered them cigarettes, but Paddy said he didn’t smoke. I thought he did, but he didn’t seem interested in anything. I went back to my friends and told them I was going outside to the public lavatory, which they told me was the next street up, on the corner. After I’d been there, I started back to the cafe but I found the door closed and a crowd gathered. I wasn’t able to get back into the cafe. I saw nothing more of what had happened inside.’

  Timms places his hands beneath the edge of his gown. ‘So, from the time you went into the cafe with McBride, up until the time you left, what were his movements? If any?’

  ‘While I was there he talked to people in the opposite cubicle and then returned to his seat. He stayed in his seat. I think. From the time he entered the cafe with me until I left, with the exception of talking to the people in the opposite cubicle, he remained in his seat.’

  A parade of young men emerge from the Crown witness room where they have been cloistered, their swagger gone, their expressions tight. Rainton Hastie gives bland evidence about the night of the party. It is evidence that distances himself from trouble. He wasn’t in the cafe on the night of the incident and it is easy to see how pleased he is about that.

  Ted Quintal gives his normal occupation as that of a presser, but right now he is serving a sentence of imprisonment for car conversion. Pooch, whose real name is revealed as Claude, is in Borstal in Invercargill for the same crime. The brothers had gone for a joy ride, as they termed it, in a car they had ‘borrowed’ the day after Johnny McBride’s death. The authorities have declined to send Pooch north for the trial, his evidence considered not significant enough to justify the arrangements needed to transport him to and fro between Invercargill and Auckland. So Ted is on his own. Pooch, Ted says, had been playing the guitar at the party. Johnny was in a strange mood. At some point he’d asked Pooch to play ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner’ and for a few minutes everyone had sung along, except Paddy, which was a shame because he was the only one in the room, apart from the girls, with a singing voice, one that soared above the rest, but he turned his back on them as if he wasn’t listening. It is true, Ted says, that Johnny and Paddy were fighting and it ended with Johnny kicking Paddy in the testicles. But then, Paddy had tried to rush Johnny with a broken beer glass in his hand, so it is not surprising someone got hurt. He doesn’t really know what it was about. Rita Zilich, he supposes. In the cafe, the next night, Paddy spoke to him, showing him his black eye. He’d said, ‘It’s a beaut.’ Nothing else but that. Just Paddy saying it was a beaut. He doesn’t remember Johnny McBride stopping to talk to them as he made his way to the jukebox.

  Ted is inclined to give smart answers when Buchanan cross-examines him. When Buchanan asks him if Johnny was standing in front of the jukebox in order to select a record, he says, ‘Yes, well, I don’t think he’d just be bending over inspecting the mechanism.’ He agrees that he saw Johnny fall.

  ‘Did he fall flat on his back?’ Buchanan asks.

  Ted hesitates then. ‘Actually,’ he says, ‘his seat hit the ground first. He did not then fall flat on the ground, his head hit the partition, and he didn’t bounce down onto the floor then. He stayed where he was with his head twisted. A tall chap and another man picked him up. I saw blood coming out of his mouth and nose. And then I left. I got right out of it. My anxiety was to be away.’

  Lloyd Sinclair, known as Cookie, takes the stand. He is, he says, seventeen years old, an apprentice armature winder. He was born in Glasgow and he’s been in the country for five years. He’d taken his girlfriend Miriam to the party at 105 Wellesley Street. He’d seen the fight between Paddy and Johnny, and heard Johnny say he’d be back the next day to continue the fight. Cookie describes the scene in the cafe the following night, the way Paddy had come in and sat down beside him, while Johnny went to talk to someone in another cubicle. ‘Padd
y’s condition,’ Cookie says, ‘was not quite drunk, I’d say, but not quite as sober as he could have been. Well, he wasn’t drunk. I saw Johnny McBride leaning over the jukebox. The next thing I saw was Black got up from beside me and took one or two steps towards Johnny, and then he put the knife through his neck.’

  ‘What movement did his arm make?’ Timms makes a theatrical gesture, imitating a stabbing gesture.

  ‘He approached Johnny from behind, from the right, and the first I saw of the knife was as Paddy’s hand came down towards Johnny’s neck. After the knifing Johnny straightened up, turned to his right and collapsed on the floor on his back. I helped to move Johnny and saw the knife then. It was to the right centre of the neck and just about collar level. Paddy stepped back into the back section of the cafe, behind the archway. He said, “Go ahead and call the cops, I don’t care.” He walked out and Jeff Larsen went after him. I didn’t see Johnny speak to Paddy at any time that evening in the cafe’.

  All of these rivers of words, the same story told over and again, each with its own embroidery built into its narrative, as the men describe a shifting febrile world where their days and nights seem to merge, allegiances sliding swiftly from one point of view to another.

  Oliver Buchanan lifts his head and breathes deeply as if preparing for a race, or perhaps simply to rise above the fetid air that seems to emanate from this parade of youths with their grimy fingernails and tobacco-stained hands. He turns to face Cookie Sinclair and his expression is severe.

  ‘You finished work in the morning, then you went up to Albert Park with your girlfriend for the whole afternoon. After that you came down to Ye Olde Barn at five o’clock. Correct? Yes. But you can’t remember if you had a meal before Paddy came in?’

  ‘I can’t remember definitely whether we did have one or not.’

  ‘You can’t remember whether you spoke to Paddy other than a greeting?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You can’t remember whether Paddy spoke to anyone else in the cubicle?’

  ‘He spoke to Pooch. I don’t think he spoke to anyone else.’

  ‘But you’re not sure of it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you remember what he said to Pooch?’

  ‘Not now.’

  Cookie had walked backwards and forwards around the cafe, talking first to one person then another, then wandered outside for a time, he thought seven or eight minutes. Like the other young men who have given evidence, he is sure, then not sure, of Johnny McBride’s exact movements inside the cafe. Months have passed since the incident, as they all refer to it now, and it seems to Buchanan that alliances have been formed, stories hardened, that an impenetrable wall has arisen. It is as if they were afraid to acknowledge their friendship with the accused, lest it tarnish them and their own safety. He asks Cookie to describe what happened next.

  ‘Well, Johnny fell backwards. He sort of stood up, straightened up, turned to his right side, and he spun as he fell and landed on his back.’

  ‘Then, you said, it was you who turned him on his side?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘Did you help turn him on his side?’

  ‘We moved him. There was an assistant in the cafe, I don’t know his real name, it might have been Laurie. Anyway, we moved him. We tried to sit him up.’

  ‘It was then you saw the knife?’

  ‘I saw it previous to that when he stabbed him.’

  ‘When you put him down again, did you put him on his back or his side?’

  ‘I didn’t put him down.’ Sweat gleams on the young man’s forehead, collecting around his nostrils. Buchanan sees the acne on his face redden as if he had been put under a blow torch.

  ‘Who put him down?’ the lawyer asks.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know, he must have been put down by someone because I didn’t. I looked around, took my girlfriend outside, and when I came back Johnny was lying down. I don’t know if he was lying on his back or his side.’

  Buchanan thinks, he is afraid that he might be responsible for the death. And who is he to tell him that he is not? He is a boy who has literally had blood on his hands, trying to do the right thing, and now he is afraid. All of them, afraid. Cookie, Buchanan thinks, is asking himself, as perhaps he has every night since the killing, whether his actions caused the knife to plunge deeper into Johnny McBride’s neck and sever his vertebrae, and whether, had he been left sitting, he might yet have been saved. ‘Let’s go back a little,’ he says, more kindly. ‘You didn’t see Johnny coming down the passage towards the jukebox. Did you see anybody else during the time you were sitting there speaking to Paddy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you think it possible someone might have come to the cubicle and spoken to Paddy while you were there?’

  ‘Possible but improbable.’

  ‘Stan Cameron has given evidence today and said that he came from his cubicle and offered a cigarette to both Quintal and Paddy at your cubicle. Do you remember Cameron coming to your cubicle and offering cigarettes there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you see Cameron in the cafe that evening, before the fight?’

  ‘If I did I don’t recollect that.’ Tears are rolling down the witness’s face, his voice trembling. ‘I say I don’t remember him coming to my cubicle.’

  ‘Oh. So just remind me, what were you doing while you were in the cubicle?’

  ‘I was talking to Pooch. He was on the right side of me.’

  ‘So that, talking to him, you’d be turned away from anyone who came to the end of the cubicle?’

  ‘That’s right. I was. Turned away, that is.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Sinclair,’ Buchanan says. ‘I have no further questions.’

  After that, a pathologist is called. He had examined the body of the deceased at the time of the fatality. The single blow that severed Jacques’ vertebrae had killed him. A very neat cut and, perhaps, something of an unlucky accident. The pathologist says he couldn’t have made such a cut with any certainty himself.

  A policeman, a detective sergeant called Bob Walton, takes the stand. He describes how he had been on duty at the Criminal Investigation Branch at the Auckland police station on the night of the twenty-sixth of July. Shortly after seven o’clock, the accused, Albert Black, was interviewed in the presence of himself and the Superintendent. Black was warned, as was the custom, Bob Walton told the court, that he was not obliged to say anything regarding what had happened that night, that anything he might say would be taken down and might be used in evidence. The accused had said, ‘Is he dead?’, meaning the victim. And he was told that it was understood so. He said, ‘Are you sure he is dead?’ And Mr Boston told him that he was.

  Black had asked to see a solicitor then, and from the list shown him he had chosen, at random, Oliver Buchanan.

  CHAPTER 16

  ‘They’re ganging up on Black,’ Ken McKenzie says to nobody in particular, although all of them are huddled in the jury room, taking a tea break. There is strong tea from an urn, and gingernuts. ‘His mates, or what used to be.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’ the accountant asks.

  ‘I reckon they’ve talked to each other. They’ve got a story and they’re all sticking to it,’ Ken says, indicating the young men who have given evidence. He is thinking about Ohaka, the place where he comes from in the north, and his family of vigorous siblings who play rugby and drink more beer than they can hold. It occurs to him that, although he’s probably never played a game of rugby, Albert Black is not so different from his brothers, a young man with good looks, an easy charm and a way with girls. ‘He’s different from them. He comes from another country. They’re Kiwi blokes.’

  ‘So what’s wrong with that?’ Wayne, the gasfitter, asks. ‘The sooner Black’s called to the stand the better. You’ll see him for what he is, a crock of Irish shit.’ It is as clear as the nose on their faces, he elaborates, that the defendant is a guilty man. They can reach a verdi
ct and all get on with it.

  ‘Nothing wrong with being a bit different,’ James Taylor says, appearing thoughtful and reflective.

  His friend Neville Johns, the company director, tamps tobacco in his pipe. He has a full lower lip with a small dent in it where the pipe habitually sits when he is not in the courtroom. Its odour makes Ken’s head ache. ‘He probably comes from a poor background,’ Neville says. ‘Not like young New Zealand men.’

  ‘It’s like the Yanks during the war,’ Wayne says.

  ‘But he’s from the UK,’ the night watchman says, speaking up for the first time.

  ‘He’s an Irishman. Taking our girls. It’s all the same.’

  ‘That’s bullshit.’ Jack Cuttance speaks up, his face suddenly flushed and angry.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Taylor’s voice is shocked.

  ‘Young Ken’s right. If someone’s not like you, you don’t want to know. I see it in this room. There’s you and your mates —’ and here he gestures towards Taylor, and Johns, and Leonard the accountant — ‘wanting to run the show. The bosses. Have a drink. Oh, Mr Cuttance, it’s a beer for you, you working fellow who gets his hands dirty. Oh, over in the corner, is it, Mr Cuttance? You don’t want to sit too near a butcher. I might stink of raw flesh. As for you lot,’ he says, waving in the direction of the night watchman and men’s wear salesman, and other of the Queen Street workers, ‘you’ve got slack jobs. You don’t know what it’s like to make do with what you’ve got. What do you know about Albert Black? You’ve been listening to what a bunch of low-life kids have to say. Who’s to know what really happened that night? You lot don’t know nothing.’

  ‘Temper,’ says Frank, the woodwork teacher. ‘Well, you’re used to knives, Mr Cuttance. You’re saying the knife just slipped into Alan Jacques’ neck by accident?’