He was ill at ease. He could sense his wife looking at him behind his back, the television was blaring in the background, and Osborne’s voice on the telephone was cavernous and distant. The two men hung up after an informal good night.
“Are you doing overtime now?” Rosemary said, surprised, from the couch.
The bile rose to his throat. “That was Osborne,” was all he said in reply.
His wife tried to control her emotion but red patches appeared on her neck. “What did he want?” she hissed.
“Some information on a case.”
“Really?” she said, with a sardonic little laugh. “Well, all you have to do is invite him to dinner!”
The patches had reached the neck of her bathrobe.
“Why do you say that?” Culhane asked, sadly.
“Why?” Rosemary echoed. “Why don’t you ask him?”
He frowned in confusion. She was glaring at him.
“I don’t understand,” he said, approaching the couch.
“Obviously,” Rosemary scoffed. “You never understand anything.”
He bowed his head and sighed. It was for her that he had agreed to everything, it was for her that he had gotten himself into deep shit, and now he was in it up to his neck and didn’t know how to get out of it. The battery of tests they had undergone since they arrived in Auckland had only made matters worse. Their marriage was now totally dependent on the efforts of doctors. He told himself they would have done better to drop the whole idea rather than persevere so stubbornly. It wasn’t a child his wife was hoping for, but a miracle.
6.
There were two routes across the Northland. Osborne opted for the shorter of the two: to drive up as far as Whangarei then keep straight on toward Whangaroa on the east coast, some four hours of slow and difficult road, before reaching the Karikari Peninsula, which was fortunately entirely asphalted.
Century had a major project there, a so-called riviera, from what Culhane had been able to gather. It was what Joanne Griffith had been working on as an accountant. He didn’t know why she had been poisoned before being thrown to the sharks, or why Moore and Gallagher hadn’t made the fact known, but it was worth taking a look at the project site.
Osborne set off at dawn. The landscapes succeeded one another, verdant at first, with hosts of pongas lining the highway, then once he passed Whangaroa Bay and its little seaside resorts, increasingly prized by the inhabitants of Auckland in search of nature—an impressive number of opulent-looking mansions had been built there in the past year—human habitation became scarcer. After Mangonui, the Karikari Peninsula housed nothing but a handful of badly maintained camping sites and isolated farms whose owners still used horses to get around.
A few miles from the construction site, Osborne noticed a converted golf course near the shore, and a few four-by-fours parked outside some new-looking buildings. He left the blacktop and set off along a dirt road leading through the undergrowth. He passed a dump truck filled with loose stones, sounding its horn like crazy and forcing him to swerve onto the shoulder. The road snaked between the pines and the birches. Suddenly, the view cleared. The seashore had been deforested to make way for a vast construction site that now presented itself to his tired eyes.
There was a white sandy inlet, surrounded by hills that must once have been some kind of earthly paradise. Men, trucks and bulldozers were swarming there now like flies, transporting monsters of earth and stones at the foot of the hill.
Osborne parked the Chevrolet near the prefabricated huts. A dust-covered four-by-four was parked in front of the main hut. His lower back ached from the journey, and he stretched in the muddy field that bordered the first foundations. Some workers were returning to the huts, carrying shovels, pickaxes, and wooden crates. Farther on, near the verdant hill that towered over the site, some experts in hard hats were giving orders.
Osborne knocked at the main office, a kind of chalet reminiscent of one of Melrose’s kit houses.
“What is it now?”
There was a smell of sweat and cold tobacco inside. A flat-faced man was sitting behind a desk, clicking on a grimy computer. About forty, with thick eyebrows over malicious eyes, Greg Wheaton barely looked up from the keyboard. Osborne would have hated working under him.
“Are you the site supervisor?”
“What do you want?” Wheaton said, looking him up and down. “The site’s off-limits to the public.”
The desk was sagging under the weight of papers. The calendar on the wall was an excuse to display a bevy of naked women.
“Lieutenant Osborne,” he said, without holding out his hand—the man wouldn’t have shaken it anyway. “I’m investigating the death of a woman found on a beach.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Wheaton was suspicious: this guy didn’t look like a cop.
“What are they building here?”
“A riviera,” he muttered. “What’s it to you?”
Osborne lit a cigarette—it was either that or make him swallow the calendar. “Did you know Joanne Griffith?”
Wheaton brushed the smoke screen away from his smarting eyes. “I already told the police, when the poor woman drowned. She worked in accounting, we saw each other from time to time, though not very often to be honest, and then only at the start of the project. After that, she didn’t have anything else to do here, and anyway I don’t have anything more to say to you. Now get out of here, I have work to do.”
“So do I. Does the name Samuel Tukao mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“A lawyer practicing in Mangonui. Also dead. Did you ever see him around here?”
“I don’t know anything about him!” Wheaton said, waving his big hands. “Now I have better things to do with my time than talk to you!”
“A riviera—what is that? A resort?”
“That’s right, a resort.”
