* * *
The poster on the back of the bus showed three Maoris standing stiffly by the coffin of a fourth:
If you drink and drive, it’s one more bro’ for the road.
What they called a targeted ad.
Culhane overtook the bus, which was crawling along the left-hand lane, and turned onto Nelson Street. Toby was wagging his tail in the back seat, as if crazy with happiness. Osborne was smoking in silence, one eye on the city of his birth. Auckland had always suffered from the comparison with Sydney. No huge rollers pinning you to the corals, no nets to keep the sharks away, no girls swaying their asses on the sidewalks, no beer cans opened at every opportunity, no gays parading once a year to proclaim their identity. Nothing but clear streets where the only traffic holdups were at red lights, a few soulless new skyscrapers—the same you’d find in Hong Kong or Singapore—a feeling of tranquil isolation and that vague sense of melancholy that hangs in the air of any port city. But there were also a few more homeless people begging on the sidewalks and an Asian community that had doubled in size.
Culhane turned off toward Mount Eden, the highest of the city’s fifty extinct volcanoes. Toby was going around in circles on the back seat, searching desperately for the source of some smell or other. They drove past the white residences of One Tree Hill. Topped by an obelisk dedicated to the Maoris, the place derived its name from the sacred tatora tree, a true native of New Zealand, although today a pine stood in for it, and a sick one at that since a Maori protester had attacked it with a chain saw. The place had become a swanky neighborhood, popular with tourists. Osborne stubbed out his cigarette on the car door.
“Does Melrose live here all year?”
“When he’s not away on a business trip, yes,” Culhane replied—he already knew the file by heart. “Melrose made his fortune in wood, then in fisheries. He’s a self-taught man, and also a specialist in the history of the country and Maori culture. Apparently, he even writes books on the subject.”
Osborne knew these books. In them, Melrose, writing under a pen name, depicted the struggles of the nineteenth-century pioneers to whom the nation owed its roads, its cities, its laws and its civilization, with the Maoris shown as savages more or less impervious to the idea of progress. Other books attacked the work of the Waitangi Tribunal and the ministry responsible for compensating the Maoris, who, realizing they were on to a good thing, were taking advantage of the situation to screw as much money as possible from the taxpayers. These self-published books had become best sellers.
As Culhane clearly hadn’t read them, Osborne fell silent. In any case, they had arrived at their destination.
Leaving Toby on the back seat, which was now covered in hair, they slammed the doors of the Ford and walked toward the gates.
Nick Melrose lived in a Victorian-style house barely visible behind tall, verdant hedges. A police car was parked outside the gate. Standing next to a uniformed officer, and screening those coming on, was the guard who should have been keeping the property safe, looking downcast. His name was Cooper, and he had been supplied on a temporary basis by a security company that had always been known for its reliability. Culhane questioned him briefly. An ex-soldier suffering from the lack of a war to fight in, Cooper had no idea what could have happened. He had been at his post all night and, as usual, had patrolled the grounds every half hour. Osborne didn’t insist—Cooper had the look of someone who had just lost his job.
A conversation with Percy, the inspector Gallagher had sent first to the scene, added nothing to what Timu had already told them. No broken windows, no forced locks, no prints, no clues. Even the alarm system hadn’t worked. And the neighbors hadn’t heard a thing either.
“A real mystery,” Culhane summed it up.
The noon sun blazed down on them as they walked up the long flower-lined drive. Bees swarmed, drunk on pollen. The garden was separated from the neighbors’ by a wooden fence covered with fragrant climbing plants imported from Asia. There was a circular sprinkler, like something out of a Hockney painting, clearly there not so much to maintain the lawn as to keep people off it.
Nick Melrose was waiting in the shade of the terrace, clearly keyed up. He was a tall man in his late fifties, looking sporty in a designer polo shirt, handsome if you went for the salt-and-pepper look, although the look was rather spoiled by a pair of eel-like eyes.
“So you’re the specialist, are you?” he said by way of greeting.
Osborne had never seen Melrose in the flesh but he lived up to the image he’d formed of him: tough, quick to take offense, a hard man to get along with. He barely glanced at Culhane, who briefly introduced himself.
“Do your neighbors have a security guard?” Osborne began by asking.
“No, just an alarm system. Why? Do you think the burglar got in there first to bypass Cooper?” Melrose was quick on the uptake.
“Well, he didn’t fly in.”
It was hot on the terrace, even in the shade. Melrose put his Coke down on the garden table.
“What about Cooper?” Osborne resumed. “Do you trust him?”
“How can you trust someone like that? I’ve fired him!” He seemed quite pleased with himself.
Osborne threw his cigarette butt in the half-full Coke bottle. “That doesn’t explain why the alarm system didn’t work.”
“No, it doesn’t. And that’s what I can’t understand. When you think of the money these lousy security systems cost . . . ”
“Was your family here when the burglary took place?”
“I’m a widower. My daughter was sleeping with me upstairs, in her room.”
An odd way of putting it.
“And does the stolen object have any commercial value?”
Melrose pulled a face. “Its value is more historical than anything else. It’s called Tu-Nui-a-Ranga, and once belonged to Chief Te Hoataewa.”
One of the leaders of native resistance to the English invaders.
“And nothing else was stolen?”
“No. Not as far as I know.”
Melrose rose to his full height. He was wearing beige linen pants and a big Rolex on his wrist. Continuing to ignore Culhane, he led Osborne inside. The house was a kind of manor, where everything was so spotless, even the ghosts must have smelled new. They crossed the living room, which, apart from an impressive series of handmade oriental carpets, was decorated in an eighties style that made the present day more bearable. There followed a gallery of paintings dating from the colonial period—the landing of the Endeavour, Cook in a canoe drawing up alongside a group of natives as scared as they were threatening—as well as a very fine lithograph of a war dance at Tauranga in 1865.
“Quite a collection,” Osborne commented.
