Osborne was still staring at him, his dead angel face silhouetted against the light. “What’s the connection between Murray and the others?
“He and Umaga were in the same detention center. That’s where they met.”
Osborne looked puzzled. “Any idea how they got hold of the weapons?”
“No, but the house where they were found was being used as their hideout. There were automatic weapons there, plus iron bars and crowbars. Drugs, too. Cannabis, heroin, and a powerful antidepressant called GHB, which in large doses can provoke amnesia. Very fashionable in the porn world, snuff movies, that kind of thing.”
GHB. The tests of Ann Brook’s hair had revealed the same substance. Osborne moved away from the window and approached Culhane’s computer.
“Are they Ann Brook’s killers?”
Culhane shrugged. “There’s a strong suspicion they might be. Three different sets of sperm in Ann’s body, three guys in the house, one of them a known rapist. It all depends on what Moore finds, and if the DNA matches, but these scumbags certainly sound like the kind who’d grab the opportunity of a good time with a supermodel. The poor girl must have run into them somewhere.”
Over his shoulder, Osborne was comparing the photographs in the electronic records with those taken after the attack on the house. The least you could say was that the three Maoris had really aged.
“How about the survivor? he asked. “Is he going to pull through?”
“Umaga? Well, he was still breathing when they took him to Park Road hospital. According to the doctors, we should be able to question him tomorrow. His accomplices, on the other hand, died before the ambulance arrived.”
That was the other method—Gallagher’s method.
“Does Umaga have any family?”
“A mother: Tania Umaga. 52 Khyber Pass Road, in South Auckland. A team’s gone to question her.” He waved his hand in a fan-like gesture: the cigarette smoke was getting to him. “What’s the connection with the Melrose burglary?” he asked. “They were all in prison when that happened.”
Osborne swallowed one of Amelia’s pills. “Yes, they were, but Zinzan Bee wasn’t.”
* * *
With Gallagher confined to bed, Osborne had his hands free. The situation wouldn’t last: he hurried to South Auckland.
He didn’t know the new gangs. At the rate at which these guys were ending up in prison, their leaders changed every six months. But something was wrong in this story. The three Maoris, barely out of prison, had let themselves be caught like greenhorns, and Umaga’s terrified face during the attack on the house had left a bitter taste in his mouth. How, in one week, had they been able to get hold of weapons, drugs, and a hideout? They must have had accomplices.
52 Khyber Pass Road. Umaga’s house was on the other side of the street. It was typical of social housing in this area, modest and unostentatious, only given a through cleaning when there was a change of tenant. Osborne checked there were no police cars around and rang at the door.
Tania Umaga opened almost immediately. About forty, sturdy, not ugly in spite of her drawn features, she wore a flowered dress that emphasized her breasts. She was halfway through a beer, and didn’t seem very surprised by what had happened to her son.
“I have two,” she told him. “Joey and Kenny. Joey spends his time hanging around the streets when he isn’t in prison. Kenny, the younger one, is still at school. For the moment I still have him. All my hopes rest on him. As for Joey,” she said, raising her eyes to heaven, “I gave up on him a long time ago.”
Her teeth were partly rotted, a tribute to malnutrition.
“Can I see the little prodigy?” Osborne asked.
“Kenny? He’s at his aunt’s. The police questioned him on his way out of school. The poor thing won’t be able to sleep tonight. Please don’t get him mixed up in this business, sir”—her voice grew softer at this point—“he’s only thirteen.”
“And Joey?”
Tania sighed in a mixture of helplessness and despair. The elder son’s life was depressingly familiar: a youth spent trying to find himself, a few petty crimes, a first stretch in prison that had set him up for others, and that abrupt end in a squat on the outskirts of town. The last time she had seen him was just before his arrest for car theft. He had dropped in unexpectedly, had said nothing about his future, had merely called her a big lump—her, his own mother—and left again with a few packs of beers and his everyday anger. Since then, Tania had been living life day by day, saying nothing, trying to forget.
“Not a bad boy, though,” she said, adjusting her neckline. “He always helped smaller boys. But he hasn’t listened to me for a long time.”
The sun was at its height, and Osborne was dying of the heat. “Did you visit him this last time he was in prison?”
“To be honest, that visiting room gets depressing after a while,” Tania said, leaning back in the doorway. “And anyway, like he said, all I ever do is lecture him.” There was no resentment in her voice, only weariness.
“So Joey didn’t come to see you when he got out of prison last week?”
“No,” she said, resigned to being forgotten. “I didn’t even know his sentence had been reduced.”
“How do you mean, you didn’t know?”
“Just like I say.”
Strange. He took out the photograph of the Maori he had taken in the Backstreet, showing the giant’s grimacing face and the mokos on his neck.
“Have you ever seen this man?”
She leaned over to look at the photograph. “No. Fortunately.”
“What about these tattoos?”
“Never seen them either.”
“Was Joey involved with the local gangs?”
