The Crime of Huey Dunstan (14 page)

THE TRIAL OF Hugh Thomas Fraser Dunstan, that is Huey’s second trial, began on a Tuesday. The setting was once again the high court in Cornford. The date was 14 March 1995. Was it 14th? I remember thinking as I left the hotel and walked down to the courthouse on the opening day, I hope it’s not the Ides of March—and not being able to recall which day of the month it was that the soothsayer called out his warning to Caesar on his way to the Senate-house in Rome.

There had been both good and bad news in the previous week. Lisbeth and I had been away in the South Island for a short break at Hanmer Springs. On the Thursday or Friday after we returned to Wellington, Lawrence phoned me in a state of some excitement to say the
police had found Huey’s abuser.

“Sparrow rang me and said he had some news. They’ve got him, Ches,” Lawrence said. “
And
,” he added, “he’s admitted it.”

“Can you subpoena him?” I said.

“I don’t know yet. The man’s in custody up north.”

“That means he’s their witness, doesn’t it? If the police have him.”

“Sparrow only rang me yesterday. They’ve interviewed him on video and I’ve asked for a copy of the interview to be sent down.

“I’m trying,” Lawrence said.

He told me the man’s other name was Constable. Glen Constable. How appropriate, I thought. Apparently the police had charged him in a Northland court with an offence which had nothing to do with Huey’s case. It didn’t look particularly ominous or sinister from our point of view, but nor did it appear open and shut. It seemed to me that the police, having traced and found the man quite quickly, as I gathered—in fact two weeks earlier—had delayed until the last possible moment before advising Lawrence. Yet I could tell from Lawrence’s voice that he was elated.

That was the good news. The bad news was that Huey was depressed. Having been sent back from Paremoremo to the Cornford prison to await his retrial, he had retreated into himself and become uncommunicative. According to Lawrence, he wasn’t sleeping and had refused medication
when it was offered. Whether Huey was overwrought because of nerves or because of family pressure, Lawrence didn’t know. Was it likely, he asked me, that Huey was still torturing himself because of the shame he imagined would descend on his family once the abuse was disclosed and became public knowledge? It crossed my mind that it might be drugs, but Lisbeth thought it was probably a recurrence of his childhood nightmares. (In the event—but we were not to know this until later—we were all wrong. It turned out to be something quite minor and unrelated to the trial.)

Both these things were on my mind that morning as I walked down to the courthouse. There was a chill in the air. I could hear ducks and children playing by the river. Something, a ball or a stick, whooshed by me and a dog ran past, almost tripping me. It was only a few hundred metres to the courthouse complex but I had to keep stopping as if disoriented. I thought I had remembered an avenue of prunus trees where the main road came down to the riverbank. But the road wasn’t there any more. Perhaps the intersection was higher up? Yet the air was filled with a remembered scent of flowering trees. When I had first come to Cornford to work in the probation service, wild boar were still hunted in the outskirts and it was not unusual to find pukeko scratching about in the public gardens and the occasional horse tied up outside the railway station. Yet for all this, the town with its pillar-box mentality had struck me as profoundly English, its social underpinning as familiar and unpredictable as the moves in a game of Monopoly.
Now nothing seemed the same.

I walked past the lights by the corner where the Returned Servicemen’s Association used to be (it was now a casino, I learned) and was about to cross the road to the court when a stranger came up to me and said, “You’ve passed it.” He seemed to know where I was heading. He was going there too. “I’m on jury service,” he said. “You’ve passed it, you’ve come too far.” We walked back together.

“I hate jury service,” he said to me. “Anyway they won’t pick me, I’ve made sure of that.” How was that? I wondered. Had he donned a mini skirt? But the man didn’t elaborate. Instead he began to talk about someone he knew who had been on the jury in the first trial and I had to cut in with: “I don’t think you should say any more. I’m a witness in the case.”

“I know,” he said, and gave a neighing laugh. I discovered later he was the city engineer. We parted in the lobby.

It was about twenty minutes to ten. I sat down with my back to the river, then crossed to the other side of the foyer and took a seat diagonally opposite a second entrance from the direction of the public library where Lawrence would see me as soon as he walked in. I needed a word. It was about the man Glen. Something had occurred to me walking down from the hotel, something important. The last time I had spoken to Lawrence I had asked him if he intended to subpoena this Glen. The prospect of putting an abuser on the stand and confronting him with the adult-child whose life he had ruined was compelling,
but Lawrence had fobbed me off saying he hadn’t made up his mind. This was two days ago. We had spoken by phone. I said, “It’s getting a bit late, isn’t it?” “No,” he said flatly, and changed the subject.

Although I would never accuse Lawrence of doing anything underhand, his brusqueness had left me uneasy. Now I was still uneasy. Nor after I had been waiting for several minutes in the lobby could I remember what it was I had to tell him that was so important. The encounter with the engineer had wiped it from my mind.

The lobby had grown noisy. The foyer was circular in shape and had a bare floor, marble or tile. It was like an echo chamber. No doubt there were a few homely touches to redeem the bareness, signs indicating “Gents” or “Parking Fines”, but to me it had the air of a frozen potato field and felt twice as sterile. The space was filled with the voices of people coming in from the street and going upstairs to the courts and assembly rooms. Several people came up and introduced themselves, saying we had met at the first trial. Among them was the prison doctor, the man who had recognised the distress calls when Huey was first incarcerated. A couple of nights earlier at Lawrence’s instigation there had been a long telephone conference at which we—the doctor, Lawrence, myself and the psychiatrist Toby Wilson—had finally agreed on a diagnosis that we would put to the court.

Lawrence arrived in a rush at five minutes to ten, saying he was due in the robing room, and we would meet
at the end of the day. One of those who came up to me in the lobby was a stranger who grabbed my hand in a fist of iron and shook it, sending shooting pains to the back of my eyes in sunbursts of pale orange. I was reminded of a smithy I had seen as a child, striking sparks from a horse’s shoe. For a moment I thought it might be Huey’s father, but the smell was wrong—this man reeked of aftershave and his fingernails were unbroken. To this day I have no idea who he was.

The jury selection took forty minutes. When the case was about to start one of the jurors begged to be excused, saying he was the supervisor at a rope factory where Huey was working shortly before the crime took place. The man was stood down. Then a woman juror asked to be excused saying Huey had baby-sat for her on a number of occasions, but the judge dissented. She remained. The jury was weighted in favour of women—eight women to four men—unlike the first trial where the jury that convicted Huey was divided fifty-fifty, six men and six women. I wondered about that.

I had cleared my desk in Wellington and come intending to stay for the duration, at Lawrence’s request, although here once again I felt there was something hidden, something he was not telling me. As it was, except once when we went across the road for a drink, there was little chance to talk while the trial was in progress. He had over thirty witnesses to handle, two of whom failed to appear and one, a teacher, who opted to change sides and went
over to the prosecution. But Lawrence’s junior kept me informed.

I had memorised the names of most of the witnesses. I understood the physical layout, form and substance, and the general procedure; I was well positioned (the judge allowed me to sit at a table near counsel). I could hear what was being said. A trial on a charge of murder has a certain melody. You will not see it but you will feel it. There is a tune to the words, in their expression, or lack of expression (as there is in the gestures, which I was denied). But otherwise, I was not particularly disadvantaged by my inability to see.

The first day was mere scene-setting and predictably repetitious. Yet I learned something new. This was when the detective-sergeant in charge of the inquiry described how the police, rushing to the scene after realising they had a corpse on their hands, broke into the cottage and found a tramp who had taken up residence in one of the back rooms. The man had gained entry through an open window and fallen asleep, oblivious to the body in the next room. On the second day, I felt a cold coming on and about noon went back to the hotel. I took some panadol and slept for two hours. I woke feeling wretched, slept again, then sat up in bed refreshed. I had remembered what it was I had to tell Lawrence. It was ten past four. I dressed and hurried back to the court, only to discover that the judge had risen early. There was nobody there.

In my experience there always comes a moment when the game is won or lost. I once sat through a trial at the Old Bailey in London where a twelve-year-old boy, a West Indian, was acquitted of murdering a fellow pupil in the classroom. The victim had been stabbed with a knife. The case turned on the evidence of some thirty-five schoolchildren all of whom had witnessed the stabbing at close hand, but it was the testimony of one of them, a girl who had had a crush on the deceased, that decided the jury. She spoke angrily at first, then for a split second fell silent, or almost silent, her voice dropping to a whisper. It had been the whisper that was remembered afterwards in the jury room.

I believe there is always a moment like this that is remembered later in the jury room. Of course none of us at Huey’s trial could have foreseen what that moment might be.

Huey was seated behind me in the dock, almost beside my right ear. He was raised up like an exhibit in a cage. I suppose forensic architects create these focal points by instinct, but I wonder sometimes if it isn’t a mistake, detracting from the real business and inflating egos. I have known judges turn the colour of vomit when the accused gets all the limelight, leaving the Queen’s representative on his throne as redundant as the British Empire in Hong Kong. Still, now that we have abolished wigs and ermine robes, that is perhaps less bizarre than it once was.

As to Huey’s state of mind, and Lawrence’s fear of him choking on the witness stand, I was puzzled. Only
once, leaning backwards, did I catch a smell of anxiety. I have to explain that if I tilted my chair back, my head almost collided with the rails of the dock. This happened on a number of occasions but the one I remember most was when Huey’s father was giving his evidence-in-chief for the Crown on the second or third day. The father was suddenly called up to the stand a day early, and he was quite unprepared. He was wearing his work clothes, smelly old hat and holey pullover, and according to Lawrence was dreadfully embarrassed. (But the sweat of anxiety that I got emanating from Huey in the dock told me that the son was even more embarrassed; he was ashamed for his father, almost distraught.)

Of course, as Lawrence said later, this may actually have helped.

I was also puzzled that Lawrence had not allowed me to visit Huey in the holding cell. I made surreptitious contact, however, in the breaks. Getting up from my chair I would make a play with my cane, unfolding it and pretending to stumble so I could lean against the dock and steady myself with my hand outstretched on the top rail. Huey would touch my hand for a second before being taken down. Sometimes at the end of the day I would get up and stand facing him in the dock without moving before he was taken back to prison, though what I hoped to achieve by this I am not sure, unless it was to communicate that mythical quality the blind are said to possess that enables them to make sympathy with the halt and the lame and so help
them through the night. Darkness, I knew, was the enemy.

Looking back, I wonder now if Lawrence was not exaggerating Huey’s state of mind to mask his own anxieties. These were far greater than my fears and made worse by a silent witness who was planted by the Crown to intimidate Lawrence. This man was Australian, a psychiatrist. He sat beside the prosecutor and said not a word, except once when he stood up to be introduced to the court and it became plain to everyone present that he was a world authority on buried memory. He came to the court every day. His sole purpose in being there was to intimidate the defence. The effect, I believe, was cumulative, though Lawrence said nothing to me and I knew nothing about it until the trial was almost over.

THE TRIAL LASTED ten days. Again the case was overlooked by the national media, although I was surprised when I arrived on the third day, the day Huey gave his evidence, to find the courtroom crowded and alive with anticipation. I suppose the experience of walking into a room like this is similar to what a sighted person feels when he draws the curtains in the morning and beholds the world outside.

Huey was questioned for more than three hours. Lawrence took him through everything that had happened from the age of three on. For the first time I heard Huey describe his attacker—tall, skinny, with watered-down hair and a straggly beard—and I waited half-expecting Lawrence to say that the man himself would be produced later in
court. But he didn’t. The witness stand was in the far corner on the judge’s left and directly opposite the jury. The jury was on my left. I had to strain to hear what Huey was saying. He broke down more than once. Describing the abuse he had suffered, his words were halting and barely audible, just as in the hospital when he had cried and told me what had been done to him and what he had been made to do. I was glad that he wept again and hoped it didn’t seem feigned. It was only the second time in fourteen years he had spoken of the abuse and to do so now in public in front of his family required a great deal of courage. But I had no way of knowing how it appeared to the jurors. I needed to see their faces.

Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, once wrote: “The accused had the eyes of a wild faun. He stood in the dock self-consciously, like an actor propelled on to the stage through a trapdoor.” I would have given a lot to see Huey’s face and the expression in his eyes. He had a nervous twitch above one eye, a result of the scalding when he was three. He had told me it no longer bothered him except when he was afraid. Again and again as Lawrence took him through the episodes in the caravan I heard him say, “I felt afraid and sick.”

And, “I was afraid to run away.”

And, “I felt afraid of everybody.”

I noticed that the judge seldom interrupted him. Once he said:

“And this man tied you by the ankles, you say, and
threatened you if you told anybody what was happening?”

And again:

“And you say you still don’t trust anybody?”

When the judge said this, Huey seemed to perk up—“I’m getting better,” he said, and one of the jurors chuckled, then laughed like a horse. I recognised the laugh. The town engineer’s gambit to avoid serving, whatever it was, had failed. He had been chosen as a juror after all.

Huey’s testimony occupies the equivalent of about seventy pages on my computer and I am surprised, hearing it now, how even-tempered he is. The transcripts of evidence are invariably false, distorting the sound and pitch of the music of the court. I am fairly clear in my own mind that Huey made little effort to ingratiate himself with the jury, as I am equally certain Lawrence made no attempt to coach him, relying on his terrible honesty to protect him from the onslaughts of the prosecutor. One or two exchanges have stayed with me: 

Huey gave his evidence on Thursday. I was to give mine on Friday. On the Thursday when the court rose I went for a drink with Lawrence and told him I would be returning to Wellington on Friday night and was he sure he wanted me to be back again on Monday? “Oh, you must,” he said, and he told me that he had subpoenaed the man Glen for Monday.

“Now you tell me,” I said, surprised. I realised he must have known all along, without saying anything. “I wish you’d tell me what’s going on, Lawrence.”

“Another drink?” he said, and went up to the bar. We were drinking whisky. When Lawrence brought the drinks, I asked him how he thought the case was going. “I think the jury is listening,” he said. “But I thought that at the first trial too. What about you?” I said I was finding
it hard to read the judge.

Lawrence said, “I was watching you, Ches, when Huey asked the prosecutor if he’d ever been molested. You didn’t like him saying that, did you?”

“No. Bit cheeky. I thought he sounded cocky.”

“Don’t worry about it. Trouble with you, Ches, you care too much. Justice, what we like to think of as justice, is a fickle thing. It’s like art, I sometimes think. It happens. And usually by the back door. Everything has a back door.”

“Who said that?”

“I did. I just thought of it.”

I thought Lawrence was being frivolous.

“I have remembered something,” I said.

“So have I. It’s Tuesday, not Monday, Ches. Sorry, I made a mistake. I’ve subpoenaed him for Tuesday. Eleven o’clock Tuesday.”

“OK. I’ll be there. That’s what I wanted to tell you. When this bloke Glen comes, make sure you keep him apart from the others. From the family, I mean. For God’s sake, don’t let on to Huey’s family he’s coming or there’ll be hell to pay. It’s important.”

“Of course,” Lawrence said. “Of course. Stop worrying.” I felt a fool for mentioning it.