Melrose’s company, the one that Joanne Griffith worked for. One more coincidence. As the site was off-limits until further orders, Osborne avoided the officer on duty outside the gate and walked around to the back. It didn’t take him long to find a way in. The alley was empty, apart from a dog searching through an overturned garbage pail. Osborne climbed the fence, almost tearing his jacket in the process, and jumped down on the other side.
Wild grass sagged in the breeze. The ground, which had been gone over by the various police departments, looked ghostly, with its two-colored tapes flapping in the wind. Stooping, Osborne proceeded to the spot where Ann Brook’s body had been discovered. A bunch of brambles, stony ground strewn with bottles, plastic bags, litter, and cans: there was a bit of everything, but not the hint of a ditch. He looked hard at the ground, but it didn’t remind him of anything.
Anything at all.
Ponsonby Road. Restaurants, bars, boutiques, people: everything here was as chic and British as could be.
Ann Brook had mentioned a friend who lived in the neighborhood and was throwing a party. Osborne vaguely recalled a swimming pool, but nothing more after that. That must have been around four in the morning. From Ponsonby to the Debrett Hotel was barely half an hour’s walk. Assuming he had returned to the hotel to get his revolver and car keys, he could have been back in the Ponsonby area around five. To do what?
His visit to the sawmill in New Lynn had left him cold. It was as if he had never set foot there.
Osborne drove around the neighborhood for a while before stopping the Chevrolet outside the fence of a construction site. O’Neill Street, a street at right angles to Ponsonby Road. Not a worker in sight—it was Saturday, a day off. He didn’t have to climb over this time: the site was wide-open.
There were a few foundations, prefabricated huts, pieces of scrap iron, a stock of breeze blocks, cement poured on the ground. There was a strange tightness in his chest as he kneeled and felt the ground. He first saw the water pipes, then the trench that had been dug the length of the foundations: a deep ditch running some sixty feet. Osborne studied it for a long time, then stood up. Still not the slightest trace of blood or anything to prove that the corpse might have been thrown there. It was as he was walking along the trench that he discovered what he was looking for: a cartridge case among the loose stones.
A .38 cartridge case.
He hadn’t recognized the ditch, but the fear was as strong as ever.
* * *
The wallpaper in the room was worth just about its weight in paper. Lying on the bed, Osborne was sticking back the pieces that had come away from his head. Night was falling and the questions were flooding in, oppressively. If Ann had indeed been killed at Ponsonby and not New Lynn, why had he retraced his steps with a gun? Had he seen something he shouldn’t? What exactly was he afraid of?
He leaned his elbows on the window and smoked a cigarette. Outside everything was quiet, so quiet it was almost too good to be true—one of those lovely summer evenings, with a gentle breeze and birds strutting on the roofs. He remembered Ann in the park, her tall figure in the moonlight, her laughing eyes, her lovely muscular legs and that Dionysian air of hers when she asked him to follow her. He didn’t care that others had treated her as a mere object of pleasure. Hana’s double had died, her skull split open, on waste ground, and he had no way of knowing if he was involved in the murder.
The situation was bad enough now, but it would soon be untenable. They would find his sperm in Ann’s stomach and his prints in the coupé, and there were several witnesses who had seen them together during the night. It wouldn’t take long for the police to make the connection. He had two, maybe three days to play with.
Osborne threw his cigarette butt down into the yard, and was unable to hold back a shudder—Globule’s paw marks were still on the windowsill. He ran to the toilet and took a shit, his head down, watching his knees tremble.
3.
Hana had come back from Europe on a Friday. Her scholarship had taken her to England, but she kept in touch with the antipodes by telephone. “A degree from Cambridge, that’s going to open doors for you!” her mother would tell her.
With her ethnology degree under her belt, Hana had preferred to travel rather than come back straight back to “the land of the long white cloud.”21 She had set off to see the world.
It was her grandparents she missed most. Pita, of course, who had initiated her into the dances of the haka, but also his wife, Wira. Coming from a reputed and respected tribe, the kua22 had taught her everything, given her everything—her mana, her strength, and her prestige—when she had come to her at the age of eighteen, soiled and humiliated. It was she who had built Hana up again, piece by piece, she who had expelled the violence from her body and made it tapu, sacred, she who had taught her the mauri, the basic principle in the life of human beings, and her genealogy, the whakapapa, so that she could at last come back among them, people of the earth.
And she had succeeded. In the company of her grandmother, Hana had regained her balance, her strength. And as she did so, the world grew magical again. Her grandmother had overcome her demons. She had left for Europe full of her teachings, her broken body still in the process of being rebuilt. It was a continuing process, but Hana would soon be completely cured. It was only a matter of time.
Wira’s death made everything happen a lot faster . . .
Hana got back from Europe on a Friday, the day before the funeral, stunned.
Her parents were waiting for her in the airport arrivals lounge, older but the same, a mixture of generalized affection from her mother and prickly reserve from her father. Susan burst into tears in her daughter’s arms. Glenn, who still hadn’t found a new job after the privatization of the railroads, remained in the background, silent. The loss of his mother had been the last straw.
They exchanged a few banalities about the twenty-six-hour plane journey Hana had just made, but the atmosphere was grim as they climbed in the family Toyota. They had dreamed of a different kind of homecoming for her.
It was as they left the airport parking lot that Hana spotted her old Dodge, easily recognizable from its faded paint and chipped door, following them onto the expressway.
“Who did you sell the Dodge to?
“The Dodge?” Glenn said. “Oh, it’s been in storage in Carter’s garage. Why?”
“No reason.”
Hana kept one eye on the rearview mirror. The Dodge was still following them at a distance, occasionally disappearing as the traffic built up then suddenly reappearing again. They didn’t talk much during the journey back to Red Hill. The tangihanga23 was due to take place at ten o’clock the following morning at the marae on West Coast Road.
New buildings may have given the center of Auckland a face-lift, but the Red Hill neighborhood hadn’t changed, apart from the brand names on the teenagers’ T-shirts. Her childhood house was just a little grayer, the shrubbery a little thicker, the memories a little more concrete. A discount store had been built on the waste ground behind the bus stop where, ten years earlier, Glenn had found her in tears, covered in spittle and mud.
Hana glanced down the street. Two little boys were rolling a wretched toy car along the sidewalk but, in the fading light of evening, she didn’t see any sign of the Dodge. Strange . . .
They had dinner in the kitchen, just like in the old days. Susan did what she could to enliven the meal but her heart wasn’t in it. Glenn didn’t drink a drop at table, although he stank of alcohol. Hana was tired, and went to bed early. Tomorrow was going to be a long day.
She didn’t feel any sense of nostalgia on rediscovering the room she’d had as a teenager. The shelf of figurines depicting Indian dancers, the white wooden floor where she would write in lead pencil—her tiny handwriting had withstood time and cleaning and still snaked across the floorboards beside the bed—the window where she would imagine herself taller: everything seemed to her at once familiar and antiquated. There still lingered the memory of her neighbor Paul Osborne, the man she had loved in secret for so many years, the man who had awakened her body, Paul whom she had tried to get to leave Red Hill by urging him to join the kohanga reo, and who had betrayed her . . .
Hana raised the venetian blinds and looked down at the garden below. The evening was clinging to the satellite dishes, the jacaranda was visible, and so was the roof of the neighbors’ house, new neighbors, apparently. The untrimmed hedge hid the bathroom window opposite.
When you came down to it, nothing had changed.
Hana undressed and drew the sheets up over her. The jetlag had knocked her out, but she wouldn’t fall asleep so easily. There was this weight on her chest, the spirit of her grandmother hovering around her, drifting. Ka aha ra koe? Ka aha ra koe? What’s to become of you, what’s to become of you?
