The Crime of Huey Dunstan by James Mcneish Page A

questions do sometimes have a point. Women are better at detail than men. In court it’s all in the detail.
     
    She said to me a couple of days later, “I think you should go and see the father.”
    “Why? Lawrence isn’t going to appeal.”
    “I know. You told me.”
    “Then why?”
    “You were talking in your sleep again last night. It’s very wearing.”
    “You just want me out of the house.”
    “Seriously. You might discover something.”
    “I’m not Perry Mason.”
    “Perry Mason was confined to a wheelchair. You’re mobile. It’s only a hop up the island on the bus. You love buses, you say. You can be back the next day.”
    “I’d rather talk to Mrs Abbott,” I said.
    “I can’t keep up with you. Who’s she?”
    “I wrote to one of his teachers. She gave evidence at the trial. She rang me. She’s coming to Wellington next week.”
    “I still think you should talk to the father,” Lisbeth said.
     
    Di Abbott was a special needs teacher. She was not one of Huey’s class teachers but had known him at his Maori college, the secondary school he attended about fifteen kilometres from Pikipiki. I pictured a woman in her forties wearing trainers and no makeup. In her evidence at the trial Mrs Abbott said she got to know Huey because of his chronic truancy. He would run away and leave a note on the school lawn. Once when he was missing for three days she had traced him to an aunty’s and driven him back to the parents. After that she kept an eye on him. She would pick him up walking to school sometimes when he had missed the bus.
    She told the court that she suspected something was worrying him, and once had nearly got him to the point of talking about it. “But he never did.”
    We met at a café on the Quay. I thanked Mrs Abbott for coming and said to her, “When you rang, you said you’d remembered something.”
    “Yes. It was something he wrote for me. When I got your letter, I was thinking about the parents. You know thathouse? OK. When you stand in that house, you know these are decent people. I only went there once. As I was leaving the mother took me aside and said, did I know that Huey wrote poetry? I don’t think she wanted the father to hear. I didn’t teach Huey myself, but a couple of times I had him when the class teacher was away. They’d been asked to do an essay about being an only child, something like that. Huey wrote—I’ve brought it. Can I read it to you? He wrote, He is ashamed of himself by the time he gets home. He is 14 and he is not allowed to cry. Mohi has not cried since he was seven. Amy cries a lot but she’s got a glass eye and is an invalid as well as a girl. ”
    “Huey wrote that?”
    “That’s the gist of it. I wrote it down as I remembered it after I got your letter. It impressed me at the time.”
    How interesting, I said.
    “Another thing I remembered. But again not in his exact words. We were having a discussion in class about the hereafter, what happens when you die sort-of-thing. It’s a Church of England school as you know but not exclusively Anglican. There’s Mormon and Catholic kids and some Ringatu families send their kids there from as far as the Ureweras. Quite a few boarders are Tuhoe and on this occasion it was the Tuhoe kids who spoke out. A couple of them talked about going to ‘the Twelfth’, when they were small. They were expected to fetch and carry for the elders—just gophers, little kids. It’s some sort of feast at the marae on the Saturday nearest the twelfth of each month. There’s fasting and prayers. I’d never heard of it, butwhat came out from these Tuhoe kids was a lot of biblical stuff about the immortality of the soul and the Lost Tribes of Israel. I suppose it’s taken from the prophet, Rua Kenana. The discussion got quite heated at one point. Then Huey stood up and said something in Maori. Everyone looked at him and shut up. He hadn’t said a word until then.
    “‘All right, Huey,’ I said, ‘tell us