Death on Demand (18 page)

She offered him a cup of tea. He said he was fine, but she made him one anyway. They sat out on the veranda, him in a wicker chair that was more comfortable than it looked, her in a swing seat. Ihaka suspected she was going to spend a lot of time out there, swinging to and fro, tracking the disintegration of her simple dream of home and family.

“I've been crying for Eve,” she said, resolutely dry-eyed, “but not for her brother. I've had plenty of time to get used to the fact he was never coming back.”

“Why do you think he took off like that, Mrs Duckmanton? I know a lot of kids can't wait to leave home, but they don't just disappear.”

“Why overlook the obvious? He didn't care. We didn't mean a thing to him. I kept telling Eve that, but she wouldn't accept it. And look where that got her.”

“How do you mean?”

“Why do you think she was in Auckland? She was looking for him. I think she found him and got caught up in some dirty work he was up to his neck in.”

“By the time she got to Auckland, he was already dead.”

“You're the detective; I'm just a widow trying to make ends meet by letting strangers stay in my house. All I know is if she'd washed her hands of him, she'd still be alive.”

“Why couldn't she let it go? From what I've heard, they weren't all that close.”

She got the swing seat moving. “I don't know who you've been talking to. She doted on him, right from when they were toddlers. When I lost my husband three years ago, Eve got it into her head that finding her brother would somehow make up for that, make us a family again. I told her not to bother. Even if you find him, I said, he won't want to have anything to do with us. He said as much that one time he rang, right at the beginning. Don't look for me, he said. After that he never got in touch, not once. What does that tell you? But when Eve got a bee in her bonnet, she didn't take much notice of what anyone said. And now she's gone too.”

“What made her think he was in Auckland?”

“She bumped into an old school friend who'd seen him in Sydney.”

Ihaka waited for elaboration, but none came. He took it as the first sign of the disorientation he'd half-expected.

“You mean Auckland,” he said gently. “The friend saw him in Auckland?”

“If I'd meant Auckland,” she said with a snap, “I would've said so. I've still got my marbles, thank you very much.” She talked over Ihaka's apologetic murmur: “He was with that Vanessa Kelly. She lives in Auckland, so that was good enough for Eve.”

“You mean the Vanessa Kelly who's on TV?”

“Who did you think I meant?”

Vanessa Kelly had been on television as long as Ihaka could remember. She'd started out as one of those weather girls who make an anticyclone over the Tasman sound like “Your place or mine?” She became a reporter on the network news before finding her natural home on an infotainment current-affairs show. She could do it all: leak fat tears while brushing flies out of a starving African child's eyes, grill a Solomon Islands warlord with a yen for decapitation, and
generate such chemistry with male celebrities that you wanted to tell them to get a room.

Her glamour and volatile private life made her a women's magazine fixture. She'd been through three marriages and, if the gossip was to be believed, there weren't many hale, male heterosexual New Zealanders of any note she hadn't pinned to a mattress. Like many celebrities, she sought to neutralize time by reinventing herself at regular intervals. Her latest stunt, according to a magazine article Ihaka had skimmed in a café, was claiming to have discovered the joys of celibacy.

“She'd be a bit old for him, wouldn't she?”

“She's famous,” said Mrs Duckmanton, making it sound like a crime.

“When this friend said Warren was with her, did that mean…?”

“She said they were all over each other like a rash. That's clear enough, isn't it?”

“It'll do for now. Going by what you said earlier, Eve hadn't actually told you that she'd seen Warren?”

“No. She hadn't been up here for a month or so, which was unlike her, but she rang every few days. I could tell something was going on from the tone of her voice, but all she'd say was that she was getting warm. I knew what she had in mind. I knew my Eve better than she knew herself sometimes. She wanted it to be a surprise. She wanted to bring him back and for us all to live happily ever after. But that's the thing about life, Sergeant: there aren't enough happy endings to go round, so some families miss out.”

Disobeying orders, Ihaka took his cup and plate – he'd eaten only one of the two Tim Tams, which pleased him as much as it displeased his hostess – through to the kitchen.

On the way out, he asked if there was anyone who might have held a grudge against Eve or the family.

“Her ex-husband.” She spat the words out, as if trying to get rid of a bad taste in the mouth.

“Why?”

“She walked out on him; he swore he'd make her pay. He's just an animal.”

Ihaka had been here many times. “What did he do to her?”

Mrs Duckmanton wasn't quite all cried out. Tears flooded her faded blue eyes. “He beat her up. My sweet little girl, he beat her black and blue.”

Ihaka spent that afternoon and the following day, a Saturday, in Wellington interviewing Eve Diack's friends and neighbours and her colleagues at Land Information NZ, where she worked as an administrator.

Most of them were aware she had a brother but not even her close friends, the ones who thought of themselves as confidantes, knew the real story. In fact, the Eve who emerged from this process was, among other things, a prolific fabulist. She had a different version of where Warren was and what he was doing for every audience.

Some were under the impression he was an entrepreneur in Eastern Europe. Her best friend, who was sworn to secrecy, got the juicy details: he was in Budapest, running a porno mini-empire. She told the women in her social netball team that he managed an exclusive resort/detox facility in Hawaii, and was a personal friend of pretty much every fucked-up famous person you could think of. She told her book club he was earning big bucks working on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. When they asked how he'd fared in the oil spill, she said he'd quit not long beforehand – the implication being that he'd seen where things were heading – and was now in Cuba, living like a king on his stack of greenbacks.

She was less creative with her colleagues, telling them her brother was in Hamilton, married with kids and selling cars.
After that, none of them took any further interest in him. She told her most recent boyfriend a similar story, except in this version he was in Waipukurau selling farm equipment. She had as little as possible to do with him because he'd found Jesus, joined some batshit religious outfit, and become a total pain in the arse.

None of them knew about her trips to Auckland. They thought she'd been in Greytown, seeing her mother.

Her friends never got the Ray Diack thing. They picked him as a dropkick from day one and were gobsmacked when the wedding invitation arrived. Within weeks of saying “I do”, Eve started to come around to their way of thinking, and it was all downhill from there. As someone put it, it went from love-hate to tolerate-hate to hate-hate.

There were screaming matches and some violence, but it wasn't as clear-cut as her mother made out. Towards the end Eve sported a deep purple shiner which she wore as a badge of honour, telling people, “You should see the other guy.” One friend did just that, bumping into Ray in town. He had angry scratches on his face caused, he said, by going over the handlebars of his mountain bike up on the town belt. When the friend mentioned it to Eve, she said “Yeah, right,” and made claws with her hands.

They all said she'd walked out on him, not vice versa. In fact, even though the marriage had degenerated into an undeclared war, Ray took the break-up quite hard. No one remembered Eve saying he'd threatened her physically, but she did tell a couple of people that he'd vowed to post a sex video from their love-love period on the Internet. She claimed she'd called his bluff, warning it wouldn't do much for him but she'd be spoilt for choice.

She did tell a couple of guys she went out with that Ray had whacked her now and again. One of them wanted a piece of Ray but she talked him out of it. In the first place,
Ray was bigger than he was; secondly, she gave as good as she got; thirdly, she wouldn't go so far as to say she asked for it, but she did give him a lot of shit. “Put it this way,” she said, “I wouldn't want to be married to me.”

It wasn't as black and white as Sheila Duckmanton thought, or wanted Ihaka to think. In a way, thought Ihaka, the fact that Eve had treated Diack worse than he'd let on made him more of a suspect.

 

On the way to the airport to get the last flight to Auckland, Ihaka stopped off in town for a quick beer with Johan Van Roon.

They talked about the old days. Van Roon talked about life in Wellington and being a detective inspector and how well his kids were doing. When they'd got that out of the way, Ihaka asked about Blair Corvine.

“Come on, Tito,” sighed Van Roon. “You've heard the story from people who were much closer to it than me.”

“Yeah, but you'll tell me the truth.”

Van Roon laughed. “I'd almost forgotten what an insidious bastard you can be.”

“I keep hearing Blair was doing too many drugs,” said Ihaka. “Christ, they were saying that ten years ago.”

“Well, exactly,” said Van Roon. “It's a cumulative process. You keep putting that crap in your system, it's going to catch up with you. The fact that people were saying ‘Fucking Corvine, if he doesn't ease off, he's going to come unstuck' for a while before it actually happened doesn't mean their analysis was wrong. It just means they underestimated his capacity. As I heard it, he was taking too many drugs and too many risks and telling too many lies. Something had to give. I guess you could say the fact he got away with it for so long shows how good he was.”

“So you don't believe there was a leak?”

“Mate, I'm saying you could see it coming,” said Van Roon. “Shit, I can remember telling McGrail it was time to pull him out.”

“What'd he say?”

“‘Don't think I haven't tried.'”

“So basically he'd gone rogue?”

“Look, you know Corvine wasn't a team player. Okay, not many of those guys are, but the longer he was in, the less inclined he was to follow procedure. He pissed a lot of people off. Not to the point they were going to drop him in the shit or anything, but you know when it happened people just shrugged their shoulders.”

As Ihaka's taxi pulled up, Van Roon grabbed his arm. “Mate, watch your step, all right? I know you think you can trust McGrail, but he's a different animal these days. And I know what you think of Charlton, but don't underestimate the bloke.”

“Firkitt was on the plane coming down,” said Ihaka. “He was almost civil. They want me to give them a hand.”

Van Roon shrugged. “They've got something going on, Tito. Whatever they tell you it is, work on the assumption it's really something else.”

 

Ihaka attached a fair amount of significance to a suspect's reaction to his unheralded appearance. They didn't have to shit themselves, but blithe unconcern was a downer.

Thus it was gratifying that Ray Diack, who answered the doorbell in a dressing gown even though the sun was squatting over the western ranges, gawked for a few seconds, then went red in the face, then started talking very fast.

“This is an incredibly inconvenient time,” he babbled. “Besides, I've already told you what little I know. I really can't help you.” He began to close the door. “So if you don't mind…”

Ihaka took a quick step and slammed the flat of his hand against the door, pushing back. “A word of advice, Mr Diack: if you're going to say bugger all, make sure it's true.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

With his other hand, Ihaka pulled the search warrant from his hip pocket and waved it in front of Diack, the signal to the search team in the unmarked van parked across the road. Diack's eyes bulged as the van door slid open and Detective Constable Joel Pringle and a couple of constables in plain clothes emerged.

“We're coming through,” said Ihaka. “Just think of it as an open home. If we use the dunny, promise we won't do number twos.”

Diack's face was a mask of nausea. He came out of the house, yanking the door shut behind him. “Listen, you can't do that.”

Ihaka frowned at the warrant. “Really? That's not what the magistrate said.”

“Jesus Christ, look, just hang on a minute.” Diack's flush had drained away, taking his tan with it. “I've got someone here. She's married. To a mate of mine. They've got three little kids.” He was jabbering like a racing commentator calling a photo finish. “This could cause no end of strife. Couldn't you just come back in half an hour? Please?”

“I'm afraid that would defeat the whole purpose of the exercise,” said Ihaka urbanely. There was a murmur of assent from the search team, now poised at their boss's elbow and champing at the bit after hearing Diack's confession.

Having had his fun, Ihaka shifted gears. “Now are you going to get out of the way or do we have to go through you?”

“What's the basis for this?” demanded Diack, his tone veering from supplication to bluster. “I haven't done anything wrong. What the fuck gives you the right to barge into my house? I've got a right to privacy.”