The Soldier who Said No (40 page)

I’ll need to play well from here on if I want to win, he mused, but if Venus can do it from two games down, maybe I can too.

Venus gave him hope. He put in an extra effort to complete the dossier. By Sunday night it was ready, the title on its cover sheet somewhat more pretentious than the contents:
A dossier on the attempt on the PM’s life
.

A weekend well spent, he thought as he crawled into bed.

He reached the city just before nine, among the Monday-morning workers rushing to their posts. The heavy rain of the weekend had washed the city clean and there was not a scrap of rubbish to be seen all the way from the Ferry Building to the Auckland Central Police Headquarters. The brisk walk had invigorated De Villiers, and he stood at ease on the steps outside the main door, waiting for someone of predictable habits to make her appearance.

The Commissioner’s private secretary came out of the building, exactly as anticipated, cigarette already between her lips. De Villiers waited for her to take a deep draw before he stepped closer.

‘Good morning, Ma’am.’ He addressed her formally because she was an officer and outranked him by several notches.

Inspector Amigene Murra was a tall woman and she looked De Villiers in the eye. ‘What can I do for you, soldier?’ she asked.

‘Ma’am, I’m Detective Constable Pierre de Villiers and I need to get a confidential report to the Commissioner urgently and by secure means.’

‘Give it to me,’ she said, pointing with her cigarette at the envelope in De Villiers’s hand.

De Villiers handed the envelope over. ‘Please Ma’am, it’s for the Commissioner’s eyes only.’

‘No worries,’ she answered in the local vernacular. ‘He’ll have it before his first cup of coffee this morning. He’s on the early flight from Wellington and the driver has already left to fetch him from the airport.’

‘Thank you,’ De Villiers said and turned away.

There was still time for breakfast. He headed for the Borders bookstore.

The members of the panel had already taken their seats when De Villiers entered the conference room. There was no one at Detective Inspector Henderson and Detective Sergeant Kupenga’s table.

The chairman waited for De Villiers to settle down. Mason was unusually subdued, not the ebullient Laurence Mason
QC
of before the weekend.

‘The police officers most closely involved in the enquiry have been called to an urgent meeting with the Commissioner of Police. They will only be available at noon and the enquiry proper will stand adjourned to that time,’ he announced.

De Villiers stood up to leave.

‘Please wait!’

De Villiers turned around to see who had spoken. It was Sione Hotene, the man who worked for the Immigration Service.

‘Detective de Villiers, I’ve been subjected to racial abuse, and name calling, including being called a nigger, a pa Maori, and all sorts of other names.’

‘I don’t know the term pa Maori,’ De Villiers confessed and sat down.

Hotene smiled at De Villiers. ‘The definition of a pa Maori is one who is not yet settled into European society, a pa being a fortified Maori settlement. It is an extremely derogatory term, suggesting that such a person is unsophisticated and backward and doesn’t belong in a modern society.

‘It means someone from the deep rural areas who is too backward to cope with the urban environment and too unsophisticated to be allowed to mix with decent, educated, civilised people.’

‘I see,’ was all De Villiers could muster. ‘The same as japie, then,’ he said aloud without realising that he was doing so.

‘Exactly,’ Hotene said, looking sideways at the chairman. ‘The same as japie.’

Detective Inspector Henderson couldn’t remember how many times he and Kupenga had been put on the carpet before the Prime Minister, but here they were again. This time, though, they were accompanied by the Commissioner himself, not one of the Deputy Commissioners. Henderson had no doubt that they were in for a rough time.

She made them wait.

‘We have a strong lead, Ma’am,’ Henderson said immediately when they were called in. ‘There is a closed disciplinary enquiry underway and we hope to have some final answers later today.’

‘Hope isn’t good enough. I want certainty, something I can take to the public.’

So it’s about politics then, just as you expected, an inner voice told Henderson.

‘We are reasonably confident that we’ll know by this evening whether we have enough evidence to arrest our suspect and for you to make a press announcement,’ he said.

‘There will be no announcement to the media,’ the Prime Minister said immediately, the political animal within her smelling a kill. ‘I’ll make any announcements personally.’

The Commissioner looked hard at Henderson. He’d been given no warning that Henderson might be closing in on a suspect.

The Prime Minister broke the silence, locking eyes with Henderson. ‘I’ll hold you to your undertaking. You may go now,’ she said, threatening and dismissing them in a low baritone.

She waited for Henderson and Kupenga to close the door behind them before she offered the Commissioner a chair. He was one of the party faithful and she could talk plainly and confidentially to him.

‘How is their investigation really going?’ she asked, not looking up.

The Commissioner didn’t have an answer. He knew no more than what Henderson had reported to the Prime Minister minutes earlier.

‘Do we have a suspect we can name, or a group we could expose in Parliament?’ the Prime Minister asked. ‘That surely would make a splash.’

‘I’m afraid not,’ the Commissioner answered, unaware that a dossier in the hands of his personal assistant at the Auckland Central Police Headquarters provided the answers to both questions.

‘You asked to meet about the Ureweras matter,’ she said.

The Commissioner nodded. All matters involving Maori were by their nature politically sensitive. ‘We have a major operation in progress and will be making several arrests in the course of the day.’

‘Good news at last,’ she said.

‘You have no idea, Prime Minister. Especially after the mess last year when we had no evidence.’

‘So we’ll know enough to make an announcement later in the day, will we?’

‘I should think so.’

‘Good. Are we on the same flight back to Wellington?’

‘I’m on the one o’clock flight,’ the Commissioner said.

‘So am I,’ she said. She checked her watch. ‘We’d better go. Come with me. The driver is waiting.’

Inspector Amigene Murra caught up with them when they were already in the car. ‘I have a dossier for you, Commissioner.’ She handed him the sealed envelope through the window. ‘I haven’t opened it.’

They left directly for Auckland Airport just as Pierre de Villiers’s disciplinary hearing was about to resume.

On the way to the airport the Commissioner asked, ‘What’s with these immigrants, do you think, Prime Minister? We never had kidnappings and ransom notes until we allowed them to come and settle here.’

‘We need them. They bring investments and replace our skills losses to Australia,’ she said. ‘Otherwise we would have stopped them coming a long time ago.’

The Commissioner remembered the envelope on his lap and opened it. He started reading but quickly turned to the last page to read the conclusion.

‘Sweet Jesus, they’ve done it!’ he said. ‘I can’t believe it!’

‘What’s wrong?’ the Prime Minister asked.

The Commissioner waved the dossier at her. ‘They’ve solved the case.’

‘Who? What case?’ she asked.

The Commissioner leaned forward and shut the partition between the driver and the passenger compartment. ‘Those two you saw this morning, Henderson and Kupenga. The case of the arrow. ‘I’m going to have to stay here,’ the Commissioner said. ‘I need to see them immediately for a full briefing.’

‘Shouldn’t I stay too?’ the Prime Minister asked. ‘There may be enough for an announcement, just in time for the six o’clock news.’

She motioned to the driver to turn around.

At twelve o’clock De Villiers took his seat and waited. The members of the panel were in deep discussion, those on the outside having turned their chairs inwards so that they formed a semicircle with Laurence Mason
QC
in the centre. From De Villiers’s position it looked as if Mason was reading them the riot act, but he was relieved to see that Hotene and Guttenbeil were shaking their heads, disagreeing with something Mason had said. Mrs Tan was as inscrutable as ever and Smith gave nothing away.

When they turned their attention back to him, De Villiers dealt in detail with the remaining charges against him. He refused to answer questions about his health or his treatment. The members of the panel looked bored.

‘That completes my submissions,’ he said and closed his file.

‘You haven’t dealt with the immigration issue,’ Mason reminded him.

De Villiers opened his file and closed it again when he remembered that he had not prepared for this angle. It was not included in the charges and he had never planned a response. He berated himself for having lost sight of it and wondered whether the time spent at the Hotel du Vin could not have been spent more productively looking into this aspect of the matter. The composition of the panel gave him little confort. Mason and Hotene were native New Zealanders and Smith, by virtue of his Australian citizenship, was entitled as of right to work and live in New Zealand. Only Guttenbeil and Tan would understand the anxiety and frustrations suffered by an immigrant, De Villiers thought, the sense of not being wanted, the feeling of inadequacy when standing before an unsympathetic Immigration Officer in a hall filled with other immigrants, waiting for the officer to make a decision and to put the life-changing visa in your passport.

‘I don’t know what the problem is,’ he began cautiously.

‘You’ve been trained as sniper,’ Mason said. ‘The Immigration Service has advised that you withheld that information in your applications for residency and citizenship.’

De Villiers became defensive. ‘I was a soldier and I received the standard basic training and also special training for a number of tasks soldiers have to perform. I do recall dealing in some detail with that in my application.’ De Villiers could not recall what he had said in the application nearly ten years before.

‘It’s the sniper angle that troubles Mr Mason,’ Hotene said.

‘I have a sharpshooter’s badge,’ De Villiers admitted, ‘but that is just one of many.’

‘Question is,’ Mason said with slow deliberation, ‘did you shoot anybody?’ He sat back with his arms folded across his chest.

‘Sir,’ De Villiers said and spoke softly and slowly. ‘I was a soldier. I gave full details of my training, the units I served in, and where I served …’

‘But no details of the operations, I see,’ Hotene said. He flicked through a file. ‘No details at all.’

‘We were at war, Sir. How could I divulge what happened there? No soldier can do that.’

De Villiers kept his eyes on Hotene. The thought crossed his mind that he had more in common with the Maori than with the chairman. He also remembered that he must have concealed far more from the Immigration Service than he had disclosed to them.

‘I don’t need to pursue this part of the enquiry further,’ Hotene said and closed his file.

The chairman looked at his watch and turned to look at Henderson and Kupenga’s empty table. ‘We might as well break for lunch now. We’ll resume as soon as DI Henderson and DS Kupenga have arrived.’

De Villiers met Emma and Zoë in the foyer. They had more than an hour and walked a full round of the food court on the floor below the hotel before they decided what to eat. The food court was buzzing with activity and De Villiers marvelled, not for the first time, at the variety of races and nationalities represented by the patrons and the food styles. They had started at the Dragon Boat, which was Chinese, and had stopped in front of each of the other outlets, Thai Cuisine, Banana Leaf Malaysian Cuisine, Spice of India, Mexicana, Vietnamese Delight, Wonder Wok, Umi Sushi, Yoon’s Korean Cuisine, Atrium Kebabs, Italiano and finally, Hollywood Bakery. But Zoë wanted a Wendy’s children’s meal and they were forced to walk to Queen Street to find the nearest franchise. Her meal came with a plastic whistle. They stopped at Starbucks for coffee and walked up to Albert Park and sat on one of the benches. The park was nearly deserted. The tranquillity of the park belied the fact that it was in the heart of the city with business district on three sides and Auckland University on the other.

De Villiers waited at the door until he was sure the panellists had entered. The constable stood aside and allowed De Villiers to lead Emma and Zoë into the room. Henderson and Kupenga were at their table.

The procession made its way slowly towards De Villiers’s table. When they were opposite Henderson and Kupenga, Henderson half rose and nodded an acknowledgement to Emma.

She responded with a terse, ‘Afternoon.’

Zoë broke ranks and rushed to Kupenga’s side of the table. ‘Hello Uncle. When are you coming to visit so that I can make tea for you again? We can have cup cakes.’

Emma stopped to retrieve Zoë, but De Villiers squeezed her hand twice and firmly steered her to his table. When he looked back, Zoë had clambered onto Kupenga’s lap and was showing him the Wendy’s whistle. De Villiers walked back slowly to fetch Zoë. Without a word, Kupenga stood up and handed the girl to De Villiers across the table. De Villiers set Zoë on her feet and extended his hand to Kupenga. Their handshake was neither perfunctory, nor extended. They didn’t speak, but their eyes affirmed the message in their handshake.

De Villiers sat down with Emma and Zoë on either side of him and faced the panel.

The members of the panel stared at Emma in open surprise.

Emma de Villiers was unmistakably brown with the delicate features and dark hair and eyes of a native Indonesian. Zoë was a shade or so lighter in skin tone than her mother, but not quite as fair as her father.