Sweet as Honey (The Seven Sisters) (6 page)

The woman cleared her throat. “Not guilty.”
She glanced at the judge, then looked away.

 The judge nodded and began to explain the
jury selection process. He outlined how they should walk into the courtroom if
their names were called and pass the two lawyers sitting at tables in the
middle of the room. If one of the lawyers called out “challenge,” they were to
turn around and walk back to their seat. If they weren’t challenged, they were
to walk to the jury box and take their place. They would be sworn in once all
twelve jurors had been chosen.

The registrar had a wooden box on a stand
in front of her, and she began turning it as if she were going to call out
Lotto numbers. Then she pulled a number out and checked it against her list.
“Shatner, William,” she announced.

Honey blinked, a bizarre image flitting
through her head of Captain Kirk walking toward the jury box as he asked Scotty
to beam him up. It was a young man who came forward, though, smartly dressed, a
look of irritation sweeping briefly across his face as he entered the
courtroom. He walked past the lawyers, who looked him up and down.

“Challenge,” said the defending lawyer.

The young man stopped, turned and walked
back, rolling his eyes. Why had the lawyer challenged him? Presumably because
he thought the guy may be overly sympathetic toward the prosecution.
Interesting.

She watched the next names come out of the
barrel. Another man, slightly older, this time allowed to pass. A young woman,
younger than herself, challenged by the prosecuting lawyer. An older woman,
unchallenged, who took her place on the stand. A very old man, white-haired,
unchallenged. Then another younger man followed by a younger woman, both
challenged.

Honey’s heart began to sink. The more
challenges, the more likely it was she’d be called.

And sure enough, with only three places
left to fill, the registrar said, “Summers, Honeysuckle.”

 She got to her feet and squeezed awkwardly
past the others in her row, clamped her handbag underneath her arm and walked
into the main courtroom. She fixed her gaze on the floor, saying in her head
over and over again
Please challenge! Please challenge!
She felt the
lawyers’ eyes on her, but her feet kept walking and nothing was said, and then
she was at the jury box, and the woman standing there asked her whether she
wanted to swear on the Bible or take an oath. She took the Bible, climbed the
steps into the jury box and took her seat.

Crap.

Why hadn’t she been challenged? All the
other young women—anyone who looked remotely like they might sympathise for the
defendant—had been. Her head ached and she felt sick. Why hadn’t she returned
her form saying she was getting married at the weekend?

Two middle-aged men filled the final two
places in the box and that was it—they were done. The judge told them they were
to make their way to the jury room and choose a foreperson, and that they
should inform the registrar if they knew the defendant or were aware of the
case in any way.

They all shuffled out of the box and
followed the registrar out the courtroom, down a carpeted hallway and into a
room at the end. The room had a long table with twelve seats around it, a
coffee machine, a water cooler, a door to a tiny garden and a bathroom off one
end.

The registrar gave them all a note pad and
a pen, and told them to take a seat and choose a foreperson to speak for them
in court. Then she left the room, shutting the door behind her.

“God damn it,” said one of the men. “I
really didn’t want to do this today. I’m right in the middle of an important
project.”

“Me neither.” An older woman sat in one of
the chairs with a long sigh. “I was going to Auckland to visit my daughter if I
wasn’t chosen.”

The elderly man with white hair also sat,
and gradually they all took their places.

“Where do we start?” someone asked.

“Why don’t we go around and introduce
ourselves,” suggested the elderly man. “I’m Tom. I’m retired, but I used to be
a gardener.”

They went around the table, each saying
their name and their occupation. When her turn came, Honey said, “I make sweet
pastries in a café—I guess that’s why I’m called Honey.” She’d meant it as a
joke. Nobody laughed. Everyone looked nervous. She bit her lip, wishing she
hadn’t bothered.

When the introductions were finished, one
of the men said, “Okay, so how do we choose a foreperson?”

The impatient man who’d been the first to
speak—who’d told them his name was Matt and that he worked in investment—snorted.
“It used to be fore
man
. Bloody political correctness.” He tapped his pen
on the paper in front of him. “I’ll do it.”

The woman next to him gave a wry laugh. “I
don’t think so. With an attitude like that?”

“What attitude?”

“Somebody else might like to do it too,” one
of the men said resentfully.

Matt glared around the table. “Okay, who
else wants to do it?”

“Not me,” said one of the women. “I hate
that sort of thing.”

Nobody else said anything. Most looked at
the table.

Shit
, though
Honey. If the misogynistic idiot did it, they might as well lock up the
defendant and throw away the key now.

“There,” Matt said triumphantly.

Could she bring herself to do it? She
swallowed, the words teetering on the edge of her lips. She wanted to say it
badly, but then Matt looked at her and the words faded. She didn’t have the
strength to do something like this, to argue with others who would no doubt be
vehement in their opinions. Shame flooded her, and she looked away.

“I’ll put myself forward.” Tom spoke.

Matt frowned, but Honey felt a surge of
relief.

“Okay,” said one of the men, “let’s take a
vote.”

Six of the women and one man voted for Tom.
The other two men voted for Matt, and so did the youngest woman there—who was
already making eyes at the moderately handsome banker.
How frickin’
predictable.

“Right,” Tom said. “Let’s tell the court we
can get started.”

Constable Dex had a busy Monday morning.
First up, he did some paperwork in the station, and then helped out with a call
in town from a woman complaining that the guy she’d taken a restraining order
out on was bothering her. The woman didn’t want to press charges, so he gave
the guy a talking to and let him off with a warning, thinking as he watched the
man slouch away how difficult it was sometimes to let someone go, how hard it
was to move on.

Then at ten, as the schools’ liaison
officer, he had a training session with a bunch of kids from the local primary
school who’d volunteered as road crossing patrol before and after school. He
spent a while showing them how to fit the pole of the metal safety barrier into
the slot—which proved a more difficult task than he’d expected—then walked them
through the process of looking both ways and waiting for an empty road before
saying, “Signs out, check, walk now!” As usual, the girls were a lot more
switched on than the boys, who only wanted to do the practice so they could get
out of their science lessons.

He found himself wondering as the kids
marched back and forth across the road if his and Honey’s first child would be
a boy or a girl. What would he rather have? Of course the correct answer was
that it didn’t matter as long as the child was healthy, but in truth he longed
for a son. It may have been incredibly old fashioned, but he wanted an heir, a
child to carry on his name, a boy he could show how to play rugby, take
fishing, teach how to dive.

Then again, boys were hard work when they
became teenagers, he thought as he walked across the road to the high school,
the training complete. He’d seen so many cases of fathers and sons butting
heads once the hormones kicked in, when the boys’ natural urge to challenge and
declare themselves the alpha male took over. How would he deal with that?

He checked in at reception and made his way
down to the careers block. The careers advisor had invited him in to give a
talk to senior students interested in joining the police force. He smiled as
the woman came out of the classroom to welcome him. They talked for five
minutes while the students filtered in, around two dozen in all, and then he
joined her at the front of the class while she introduced him.

“This is Constable Concannon,” she said.
“He’s going to chat to you about how he joined the force, and then you can ask
him questions.” She smiled and gestured for him to start.

Dex cleared his throat and perched on one
of the tables as he began speaking. There were more boys than girls, and over
half the boys were Maori. He knew the ratio of white students in the school to
Maori students was around five to one, and although the school had implemented
special initiatives to raise Maori achievement, generally he would have named
Maori boys as the demographic least likely to want to enter the force. In fact
to his surprise he recognised several of the boys from previous encounters—two
had been brought in for theft and one for suspected marijuana dealing, although
they hadn’t been able to pin anything on him.

He spoke for a while about training
programmes and salaries and possibilities for promotion, but it was warm
outside and the class fidgeted, and he sensed he wasn’t saying the right things.
He stopped talking, unbuttoned his police jacket and took off his hat.

“Why are you here?” he asked the nearest
boy, the one who’d been suspected of marijuana dealing.

The boy glared at him. “I’ve as much right
to be here as anyone else.”

“I wasn’t suggesting otherwise,” Dex said
wryly. “What I meant is, why are you interested in joining the force?”

The boy glanced across at his mate, who
smirked.

Dex’s heart sank, but he made himself
smile. “I see. Missing science are we?”

“Phys Ed,” said one of the boys. “Too hot
to run around.”

Dex glanced at the others.

“English,” a couple said guiltily.
“Geography,” said another. A few others insisted they really were interested in
joining, but he suspected it was more out of politeness than anything.

“Okay,” he said. “So let me ask you
something else. Why
aren’t
you interested in joining?”

The boy nearest him shrugged. “They won’t
want me. They just want white fellas.”

“Well that’s rubbish for a start,” Dex said.
“We run special programmes to encourage young Maori men and women like
yourselves to join, and I know half a dozen great Maori officers.”

The boy shrugged again. “They won’t want
me. I’ve been in trouble.”

Dex hesitated. He didn’t talk much about
his past. He’d had to declare it when he applied to the Force, of course, and
without the support of his mentor, he didn’t think he’d have made it through
the interviews. And of course Honey knew, and therefore probably did most of
her family, although they’d never mentioned it. But he never spoke about it to
his friends, maybe because he was worried of their reaction—that they’d treat
him differently if they knew.

But he was here to reach out to these young
men and women. And how could he do that if he didn’t tell it like it was?

“You want to know why I joined?” he asked.

The boy shrugged, but a flicker of interest
crossed his features.

Dex tried not to look at the teacher
listening intently to one side of the classroom. “I got into trouble when I was
sixteen.”

They all stared at him.

“What kind of trouble?” asked the boy in
front of him.

“Theft.” Dex cleared his throat. Then he
sighed. What did it matter? It was all in the past. “I come from Wellington. My
parents separated when I was eight and my mum moved back to England, where she
was born. My two brothers and I lived with my dad. All he wanted was for us to
be quiet around the house and help out with his painting business at the
weekend. He didn’t really care how we did at school—he never came to parents’
evenings or read our reports or anything.”

A couple of the boys nodded, clearly
associating with that image.

“I didn’t do well at school,” he continued.
“I was fairly bright, but I couldn’t see the point in bothering. I was never
going to go to university—we didn’t have the money and, well, there was no
encouragement. I knew I’d never be a lawyer or a doctor. I knew I’d probably
end up working for my dad, maybe one day run the business with him.”

“Yeah,” said one of the boys, “teachers are
always going on about university but my folks aren’t never gonna have that kind
of money, so why bother?”

“That’s what I thought,” Dex said, hoping
the teacher wasn’t sending him daggers. “So I never did homework, and I hung
around with other kids who didn’t work either. Mostly friends of my
brothers—older boys. Did graffiti. Got into fights. Drank. Smoked a lot of
weed.” He could almost feel the teacher’s eyes on his back, but he ignored her.
For the first time, all the kids in the room were engaged.