“No,” he said. “No, I don’t.”
Osborne waited for her to close the door, then vomited bile in the geraniums.
* * *
36 York Street, Parnell. Ann’s house looked out on the commercial port, whose metal trapezoids loomed in the distance and the darkness. Gallagher’s team had given the place a thorough going over, but Osborne still had hopes of finding something, a clue, anything to back up his suspicions.
He left the Chevrolet beneath a streetlamp and walked toward the garden. It was a small pale-yellow house with a garage and closed shutters. A wisteria with mauve flowers was hanging at the entrance, there was Virginia creeper on the front wall, but he couldn’t see any alarm system. Without much difficulty, he forced the French window and slipped into the living room. The neighbors were asleep at this late hour. He lit his torch.
Ann Brook had lived alone in a pretty three-room house. The walls were covered in objects brought back from journeys to Fiji and Tahiti and fifty-year-old advertising posters, and there were shelves filled with knickknacks. As a typical girl of her time, Ann had owned a lot of clothes but not many books. The refrigerator was empty, and there was a chest filled with shoes in the bedroom. Nothing out of the ordinary. He looked carefully through the desk, but Ann didn’t seem to have corresponded with anyone. There wasn’t so much as a postcard from her friends.
It was midnight by the alarm clock on the night table.
Osborne sat down on the bed, and breathed in the scent on the pillow, which he didn’t recognize. All he had kept of Ann was the taste of a chemical kiss and a powerful smell of sex.
He suddenly noticed a curious Chinese box on the chest of drawers. It was a puzzle box, with a number of compartments, each of which had to be opened separately. Although the first two were easy to open, there was another one at the back of the box that was less accessible. Osborne knew the mechanism—his mother had loved Chinese ornaments. In less than a minute, he had it open.
In the compartment, wedged between a sachet of grass and another of cocaine, was a ring.
This was no cheap bauble but a gold ring encrusted with diamonds. No inscription inside, just a hallmark. Strange. What was a girl like Ann doing with something like this?
Osborne took the ring and the grass—datura, to judge by the smell—but left the cocaine: a long sniff on the chest of drawers confirmed that it was of poor quality.
The crickets were creating a din in the garden as Osborne walked back to his car. The air was heavy with humidity, he with powder. He remembered Ann in her fairy costume, Hana’s ghost dancing around her, and himself disguised as a clown, trying to catch both of them. No, he couldn’t have killed Ann, even if he had been high as a kite. The reason he had gone back to Ponsonby with a gun was because he had sensed that Ann was in danger. He had seen something that night. Something he wasn’t supposed to see.
The killers.
7.
Things were starting to fall into place. On the one hand, a lawyer who, thanks to a generous backhander and with the consent of Steve O’Brian, had sold an ancient Maori site to Nick Melrose’s property company Century, whose accountant had been poisoned and dumped in the sea. On the other, Ann Brook, a star model employed by the advertising agency owned by Michael Long, the communications advisor given the task of promoting the principle of zero tolerance so dear to Phil O’Brian’s heart.
During the eighties, Steve O’Brian, father of the current mayor of Auckland, had joined the small but influential group of top civil servants, intellectuals, and politicians gathered around Rob Allen, the Labour Party leader who was to bring about the fall of the government of Muldoon, a conservative paradoxically hooked on the myth of New Zealand’s Keynesian economy. When Allen was elected, in 1984, Steve O’Brian had become his Minister of Finance and the strategist of the reforms that would turn the country upside down: dismantling of the welfare state, mass privatization—telecommunications, railroads, banks, insurance, airlines, even the forests had been sold to foreign companies. After which, O’Brian’s team had abandoned exclusive control of monetary policy to the Central Bank and left government in 1989, just before the collapse of the economy—and incidentally of the party.
Steve O’Brian was now finishing his political career in the Regional Development Board, and it was in this capacity that he had given his backing to Nick Melrose’s project to build a vast tourist complex in Karikari Bay and thus provide a stimulus to an unproductive region. O’Brian was retiring next year but, as a good father, was using his name to support his son’s political career.
Osborne was sitting at his computer at headquarters, and he was in a quandary.
He had only slept a couple of hours, and not very well. So far he had nothing concrete, only ghosts. As for the possibility of questioning Steve O’Brian about the land at Karikari Bay, or checking his bank account in search of a few dubious transfers, such a move was only possible with the cooperation of Timu and the prosecutor. But, apart from a document stolen from the safe of the widow Tukao, he had nothing that could justify the case being reopened.
Culhane came into the smoky office, wearing a Peter Blake T-shirt across his broad shoulders. “You’re an early bird today!” he said, in an attempt at humor.
Osborne grunted a good morning so unfriendly that Culhane sat down without another word.
The complicity established at the “barbecue party” hadn’t lasted long. Tom had never had any other friends besides Rosemary, apart from a few classmates at school. He felt torn. His private problems monopolized most of his thoughts. To their parents, it was inconceivable that a married couple could live without children, not to mention that they weren’t the only ones to think that. He was aware of the way other people looked at them, thought them abnormal. And it was as if those looks were crushing them, even killing his sperm. Dr. Boorman had in fact ordered a new battery of tests, which they would look at tomorrow. But Tom had nobody to talk to about any of this.
He went and got two steaming-hot coffees from the machine in the corridor. Osborne was still tapping away at his computer when he got back. He put the paper cups down on a corner of the desk.
“What are you looking for?”
“Something linking Zinzan Bee and Pita Witkaire,” Osborne replied. “Witkaire isn’t practicing anymore and I can’t seem to get my hands on him.”
“Maybe he’s retired?” Culhane ventured.
“Maybe.”
Osborne drank a gulp from the machine coffee and threw the rest in the waste basket.
“How about you?” he said. “Do you have anything new on the Tainui who were at Bastion Point?”
Culhane nodded and opened his notebook. “So far, I’ve only been able to track down three of them,” he said. “Benny Shapple and Rob Tafonea, the two pensioners I told you about. Nothing out of the ordinary there. One lives in Moerewa, the other in Te Tii, a village on the Bay of Islands. They haven’t been politically active for a long time and haven’t kept in touch with the other protestors. I spoke to the third one on the phone, Tana Marshall, who’s now a cabinetmaker. He doesn’t have any connections with the current activists either, but he does remember Zinzan Bee. ‘A hothead’ was what he called him. That’s all I was able to get out of him. As for the other three Tainui, one of them is dead: Mike Neri, a car accident in ’95. Compared with Zinzan Bee, none of these men comes across as a likely criminal. Maybe Bastion Point was a false lead.”
“What about the other two?”
“Jeremy Taffu, living in Waiare. I spoke to his wife on the phone. He’s away on a hunting trip until the end of the week. The other one is named Nepia. I’ve tried to call him, but there’s never any answer.”
A light breeze passed through the office, which was smoky in spite of the open windows. Osborne massaged his sinuses. “And what about Ann Brook’s postmortem?”
Culhane plunged back into his notebook. “We’ll have the first results tomorrow. In the meantime, Julian Long has sent us his list of the people who were at his party. More than fifty names. Gallagher has started questioning them. Long himself is above suspicion, and says he can vouch for most of his guests. Though there may have been a few gate-crashers, it seems more likely the attackers grabbed Ann out on the street, or even on her way home.”
“Why do you say that?” Osborne asked, frowning.
“Her car was found on Blockhouse Bay Road. In other words, not very far from New Lynn and the disused sawmill. A Mercedes coupé.”
A Mercedes coupé full of his prints.
