The Crime of Huey Dunstan by James Mcneish

yourself all the time. I hate that. Especially when she is right.
    I said, “OK. I’ll try. It’s the only case I know of that involves both a flashback and a killing.”
    “So it’s unique?”
    “Unique. What’s unique? Every case is unique. I’m not a lawyer. But I think that if a jury were persuaded to accept flashback as a defence to murder—”
    “What would that mean?”
    “Well, it might make legal history for a start. I doubt if there’s ever been a case where a jury has accepted flashback and trauma as a defence of provocation to a charge of murder. But you’d have to ask Lawrence. Where’s all this leading?”
    “Oh, I just wondered.”
     
    Later that evening when we were eating she said, “What are they like? His parents.”
    “I haven’t met them.”
    “You must have some idea.”
    “Not really. Well. Lawrence was impressed by the father’s hat. Smells like a knacker’s yard, he says. Dad works in the bush apparently, does farming jobs in between, crutching and so on.
    “Nobody mentions the mother.”
    “Great worker the father, according to Lawrence. He told Lawrence, ‘The harder I work, the better it is’. Stops him from brooding, I suppose. Almost a cleansing operation.”
    “Well that speaks for him.”
    “I suppose it does. Why?”
    “Why what?”
    “Dunno. I was thinking aloud. I think the father blames himself.”
    “For the killing?”
    “I mean for sending the boy away. I told you—the father doesn’t know. He has no idea, absolutely no idea what went on in the caravan.”
    “Chops are nice, Charlie. You should cook more often.”
    I said again, “Why the sudden interest?”
    “Well, it is strange. You say he thought he was hitting ‘the other man’.”
    “Yes. He switched them.”
    “Meaning?”
    “He switched the two men. When I was interviewing Huey down in the cell and he was describing the killing. He said ‘Glen’ when he was talking about the deceased. He kept saying ‘Glen’. He didn’t realise he was saying it. He was talking very quietly. He was very tense. He was reliving the experience. After fourteen years.”
    “And you are quite sure there was no premeditation?”
    “Absolutely not. When the police interviewed him on video, they asked him, ‘Did you mean to kill the man?’ Huey said ‘Yes’, without hesitation. But he was already in the flashback, he was on auto-pilot. It isn’t automatism, by the way. He had complete recall of what he did. But thenlook at what he did. He drove in circles, smashed a phone box, climbed a tree and tried to hang himself. He went from pillar to post like a ball on a billiard table looking for a hole. He was lost. Nothing premeditated about it.”

SEVEN
    LISBETH WENT ON asking questions. We both like discussing ideas, but, unlike me, Lisbeth doesn’t demand something new to learn every day. Facts, which I hate to run short of, don’t trouble her in the least. If they’re absent, she ignores them or makes them up. On the other hand, she has the annoying habit of scratching away to get to the bottom of things, just like me. I find this infuriating.
    “You didn’t tell me he was Maori,” she said at some point.
    “But I did ,” I replied.
    “No, no. I mean, does he speak Maori?”
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    “What about the father?”
    “Pass,” I said.
    She persisted. “Don’t you know? What about the mother? Does she speak Maori?” And so on.
    I said to her, “Does it matter?”
    “Well, it might,” Lisbeth said. “Doesn’t it strike you as odd for a Maori family to pack the oldest child off to live with a white man? Who is this Pakeha chap anyway? He wasn’t a close friend, you say.”
    “I said it’s odd, didn’t I? I keep telling you that.”
    “It isn’t odd, it’s peculiar , Charlie. If he really is Maori. The father, I mean. It’s like abandoning your tribe.”
    I don’t remember what I said to that. It didn’t seem relevant, although I admit that Lisbeth’s