Deaf to their chatter, Osborne was drinking Polish vodka and chewing slices of lemon. Sergeant Culhane had dropped him at the hotel, and Osborne had taken advantage of the fact that the stores on Queen Street were still open to buy a few black suits, which he had dropped in his room along with his overnight case before coming down to the bar. One eye on the cleavages around him, he finished his drink, paid, and took a bottle of rum upstairs with him.
The hotel was half empty. There weren’t many tourists around, even though it was summer. He found the chambermaid beside a pile of linen, slid some banknotes into her blouse with instructions not to touch his room, and settled in. The third-floor room was plainly furnished, and looked out on the backyard of a small Chinese restaurant. There was a kitchenette, a Formica coffee table with an empty vase on it, and a bedspread with a depressing pattern. But at least there was a well-stocked minibar.
All Osborne had in the world was a toilet bag, three dark suits, and his overnight case. He didn’t give a damn about official accommodation, or the perks of the job. He took a glass, drowned a ginger ale from the minibar in rum, and leaned out of the window. There was a smell of spring rolls and garbage pails from the yard below. Beyond the roofs, the skyscrapers of the Central Business District swaggered. Osborne was thinking about Jack Fitzgerald and Chief Medical Examiner McCleary. It was as if there had been some kind of chain reaction, striking down all those intent on tracking down Malcolm Kirk and Zinzan Bee.
A miaowing on his right made him turn his head. A black- and-white she-cat was moving in a curiously unsteady manner along the parapet, her belly hanging lethargically, as if she had had a whole series of false pregnancies. She moved as far as the window sill, stopped to look in, and miaowed again.
“I don’t have anything for you, girl,” Osborne said. “Get out of here.”
She pricked her ears up, stretched her back, eyes still fixed on the window sill, and landed on it as softly as a butterfly. As Osborne didn’t move, she shyly sniffed the glass he was holding, gave up the idea, smelled his fingers, and dropped that idea too.
She had big, round yellow eyes, and a constant expression of surprise that was quite comical. Osborne pushed her toward the open window, and she consented reluctantly to jump back onto the parapet. Clearly displeased, she gave him a whiskery grimace and shuffled off in search of other stamping grounds.
He finished his drink and went out into the night.
A metallic brown Chevrolet: that was what they had given him at the rental agency. The salesman had suggested a better model but Osborne didn’t like automatics, or cars in general. He took the road to Mission Bay, which was quite deserted at this hour.
Jack Fitzgerald had lived a bit farther along the hill, in a house on piles overlooking the Hauraki Gulf. He had bought it with his wife, who had been gone a quarter of a century now and, like their daughter, had never reappeared. Although every cop in Auckland knew the story, nobody dared so much as think about it when he was around. Like the others, Osborne had avoided the subject. And then one evening, he had been at Fitzgerald’s house with the rest of the team, working on a complicated case that was taking up all their time and energy. It was late, everyone was tired but, like Jack, they had grown accustomed to working until they dropped. It was while looking for the toilet that Osborne had opened the door of a room that had been transformed into a kind of field office. The walls were covered in survey maps, mainly of South Island, with areas carefully shaded in, as if Fitzgerald was combing the country in search of his family. Which was precisely what he was doing: there were dozens of police reports, notebooks filled with testimonies linked to their disappearance, as well as a whole lot of postmortem reports, sent to him regularly and privately by his old accomplice, Chief Medical Examiner McCleary.
That night, Osborne had realized that Fitzgerald hadn’t become head of the Auckland police to uphold the law, but to look for his wife and daughter. Obsessed by his inability to grieve, he had been looking for his wife and daughter among the dead, among identified and unidentified bodies, searching for a sign, a revelation, anything to free himself of the burden of not knowing what had happened to them. Osborne had said nothing at the time but, apart from McCleary, he had probably been the only person to know Fitzgerald’s secret. That dogged quest for his family had always been his one reason for living. That was why he couldn’t have killed himself before finding them. It was nothing to do with Malcolm Kirk. Something must have happened.
Osborne drove along the dirt path leading to the house and parked in the empty lean-to garage. He switched off the lights and quietly closed the car door behind him.
It was dark, and the sound of sea on shingle drifted up on the warm wind. He looked at the front of the house. It was a simple but solid wooden construction, sitting isolated in the hills. Osborne climbed onto the terrace and, without too much difficulty, forced open the sliding door leading into the living room.
In the beam from his torch, he recognized the gray couch, the Maori statuettes on the shelves, the cocktail bar. At last he found the meter and activated the circuit breaker. The electricity hadn’t been cut off. Having become state property, the house would soon be sold. Osborne walked quickly to the office at the end of the corridor and opened the door that sheltered his former sponsor’s secrets.
It was an unpleasant sensation, seeing the baby cot there, and the soft toys covered in dust. There was a heaviness in the air as Osborne switched on the computer on the desk. He dismissed the childhood memories lingering in the corners of the room and concentrated on what he had come to do.
From what he’d been able to discover, four bodies had been pulled from the mass grave in Waikoukou Valley. Before dying, Chief Medical Examiner McCleary might have had time to send his first conclusions from the postmortems to his old friend. Osborne started clicking on the icons, but his heart soon fell. Opening file after file, he realized they were all empty.
Fitzgerald’s computer had been wiped clean.
2.
Five months. That was the time it had taken for the garden hedge to separate them. Five months was a long time and not long enough. A long time because Paul would see Hana every night through the bathroom window, and not long enough because they didn’t attend the same school.
The public school Hana went to was too common for a middle class pakeha like Paul Osborne. His mother had put him in the local private school, preferring to bleed herself white so that he could get a decent education and not waste his time in overcrowded classrooms where the most the teachers could hope to do was impose discipline.
Which they sometimes managed to do.
So Paul and Hana only ever met at the bus stop. There, surrounded by giggling girls and boys swaggering like roosters, they could do nothing but exchange glances. Hana was never alone, never went out without her little gang—local Maori girls who clearly looked up to her.
The suburb of Red Hill was the kind of place where you had to be careful. Groups of young thugs strutted along the dirtiest sidewalks in the country, and everyone else had to toe the line. With her tight-fitting pants, bare shoulders, and rebellious air, Hana was one of the few to brave the hostility of the gang leaders.
Some didn’t take kindly to such insubordination. Hana had come back from school one evening with a black eye. One punch—a warning.
Paul made enquiries about who had been responsible, and was eventually told, “It was Dooley’s gang.” Boys from the next neighborhood, tough kids, or thought they were. Dooley, the leader of the pack, was a young punk without a father. Nobody had been able to control him for a long time. Paul wasn’t afraid of the bastard—they had the same pedigree. He’d give him a thrashing he’d remember.
In the meantime, Hana was unapproachable. The hedge, school, the neighborhood, their backgrounds: everything kept them apart. The months passed, the school year was coming to an end, and nothing had happened.
Then one evening, as he was on his way home from school, Paul suddenly felt something hit his shoulder. He immediately turned with his fists clenched, as if expecting to find himself face to face with Dooley and his gang, but the street was empty. All he could see was a stone on the ground. A sharp stone, wrapped in a page torn from an exercise book and held on by an elastic band.
Paul opened the note and read: 11 P.M. opposite the insecticide.
The insecticide? What insecticide? He went up to his room to think about it: insecticide, deadly gas, insect killer, source of heat, light bulb, street lamp, Hana, eleven at night, tonight.
He’d be there.
He’d protect her.
He’d do anything.
His heart was seeing double. They were already a couple. A couple that was being kept apart. It was blindingly obvious. She was counting on him. You’d have to be really stupid not to see that!
Night came, and it was sticky.
Five to eleven. It was raining cats and dogs when Paul slipped out through the garden. The bluish light of the television lit his path as far as the hedge. Nothing to fear from his parents: ever since John had been born, Paul had become almost invisible. He advanced in the gloom, scanning the shadows of the street, passed the street lamp, made out a figure.
Hana was waiting a little bit father along the street, streaming wet. Drops of rain were growing at the ends of her hair, swelling until they burst and immediately reforming as if by magic.
“You took your time,” she said. There was something deeply moving about her face in the rain. He had never been so close to her.
“Five months.”
“Eight,” she corrected him, her eyes glistening.
