Three in the afternoon. Osborne at last reached Russell, a small town tucked away on the Bay of Islands.
Located on the other side of the bay from Paihia, Russell, a former Maori fortification, stretched over the whole valley. The native chiefs had once joined forces here to bring down the hated British flag flying over their ancestral site, and had forced the British soldiers to fall back on the ships moored in the harbor. Orders were then given to fire on the village, which was almost razed to the ground.
Russell today was a haven of tranquility, barely disturbed by the holiday-makers strolling in its colonial streets. Osborne found Samuel Tukao’s widow drinking tea on the terrace of an old colonnaded house of kauri wood at the top of Flagstaff Hill. The view over the Bay of Islands was magnificent. The house itself, though, was starting to show its age, as was its owner, Martha Tukao, an excessively made-up pakeha languishing in an epically kitsch flowered dress.
Osborne refused the tea she offered him and started questioning her in a style that increasingly resembled Fitzgerald’s.
“Listen, Lieutenant,” the woman sighed after a while, sipping from a porcelain cup that matched her dress. “I’m not sure I want to keep going over this business. My poor husband died in terrible circumstances, and talking about it makes me extremely uncomfortable.”
“Don’t you think three months is enough to mourn a skirt chaser?” Osborne retorted.
“What do you mean?” she said, turning red.
“Did your husband have one mistress or several?”
“How dare you? I shan’t allow it!”
“No one’s asking your permission,” he growled. “Well?”
Martha’s hair was lacquered and bouffant, there was a touch of red on her lips, and her eyes were hidden behind smoked glasses.
“I don’t know anything about that,” she said curtly. “And I don’t like your manner.”
“Fair enough. Does the name Joanne Griffith mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“She worked for a construction company called Century,” Osborne insisted.
“I don’t know anything about any of that,” Martha said, with a scowl. She was alone in the house and didn’t feel safe anymore behind her smoked glasses.
“Was Joanne Griffith your husband’s mistress?”
“Certainly not!”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Sam . . . Sam was a big smoker. He had a . . . a problem with blood circulation and . . . well, I think you know what I mean . . . ”
“No,” replied Osborne. “Are you implying he couldn’t get an erection anymore?”
Martha’s hand was shaking in exasperation. “Well . . . not very much . . . But that’s our private concern!”
“Did you mention it to the police in Mangonui?”
“Yes! I mean, no! I didn’t think of it at the time. I was in a state of shock. It was only later that I mentioned it to them.” Her eyes had clouded over. “Anyway, I knew Sam’s disappearance was suspicious, right from the start!”
“So, your husband couldn’t have had a mistress,” he conceded. “How did the police from Mangonui react when you told them about his little circulation problem?”
“They told me they would tell the police in Auckland.”
“And did they?”
“Yes. As I told you over the phone, two officers came specially from Auckland to question me.”
“Just after the body had been identified?”
Martha nodded. “Yes.”
“But that’s nearly two months later,” Osborne insisted. “Don’t you find that a bit strange?”
“Yes, of course I do!” she cried. “But what could I do? I’m not a police officer!”
Osborne changed tack. “Sam was about to retire. What were the last things he’d been working on?
“I have no idea,” Martha said. “I don’t understand anything about all that and, anyway, my husband never talked about his work. We had our respective tasks. Mine was to deal with the house, the children, the expenses . . . ”
“No large amounts coming in lately?”
She shrugged. “Not especially.”
“Hmm . . . Your husband was a Maori, wasn’t he? From the Tainui tribe.” Osborne’s voice had softened slightly.
“That’s right,” Martha replied, stirring her Earl Grey. “On his mother’s side. But Sam didn’t speak the language. To be honest, he didn’t have any connections with the members of any tribe.”
She had said that as if talking about a shameful disease.
“So you don’t know what your husband was working on when he was killed?” Osborne said, stubbing out his cigarette in one of the small dishes that were part of the tea service.
