The Crime of Huey Dunstan by James Mcneish

Author:James Mcneish [James McNeish]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781869793159
Publisher: Random House New Zealand
Published: 2010-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

THE NEXT MORNING when I came to the ward, they were moving Huey into a private room. I had telephoned Lawrence the night before and explained the situation. Somehow in the interim Lawrence had pulled some strings and arranged the move.

The policeman was still there with his crossword. I asked him if he would mind going out into the corridor while I talked to Huey. “Before I do,” he said, “what’s ‘confinement’ in six, and it doesn’t begin with ‘P’?” (But I think he made that up.)

I asked Huey how the arm was.

He said something non-committal about being fitted with a front-end loader. Apparently he had been taken back for some further cladding. The forearm was now encased in a layer of gauze.

“Huey,” I said. “I’m going to ask you something personal. Were you brought up in a religious way?” There was no answer and I knew at once that he was on his guard.

“You said to someone, I think it was one of your cousins, before you gave yourself up to the police—You said, ‘I have committed a sin, the first sin.’”

“My cousin, yeah. That was my cousin, Nat. He was the first one I told.”

“Before you rang your father? Yes. And your father took you to the police. I think your actual words were, ‘I have committed the first sin, a mortal sin.’”

“Yeah. I think so.”

“It’s just, Huey—just that if I was going to tell one of my friends I’d killed someone, I don’t think I would put it quite like that. That’s why I asked you if you were brought up religious.”

“Sort of, yeah. Shucks.”

It was a long time since I had heard such an old-fashioned term as shucks. I smiled.

“Some question. Yeah, we was all brought up that way. My uncles, my aunties, not my Dad. He was brought up not to speak Maori, he told me. It was forbidden. My old man’s Presbyterian. We followed the Prophet Rua—Rua Kenana. Rua got it from Te Kooti. Ringatu, it’s the Ringatu religion. I was brought up like that. I’m one of the People of the Book, I was told. That’s on my Mum’s side.”

“But not your father?”

He paused.

“My Dad’s from Gissy. He’s Scotch, half-Scotch. My Dad grew up to follow Uncle Ben. Ben’s Gissy too.”

“Gissy?”

“Gisborne. No, Wairoa. Ben was from Wairoa. Hey, bro. What’s this about?”

“I’m interested, Huey.”

“Are you religious?” he said to me.

“I’m a Quaker.”

“What’s that?” he said.

I was picking up mixed signals. Huey was suspicious of my questions yet at the same time I sensed excitement and curiosity. He wanted to know where I was leading him. He was curious but not, I felt, desperate—or not desperate enough for me to risk bringing up what his Uncle Jacob had said. I calculated that I had about twenty minutes, half an hour at most, before he would be discharged and sent back to Paremoremo. I could not afford to wait and I could not afford a direct question or he might choke altogether. Instead I talked

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