Gith (3 page)

It was going to be hard, I knew. Gith wouldn't talk as
easily to the out-of-towners as she would to me or Hemi.
She sat there at the table, hunched up in her overalls, her
hands wrapped around the mug, leaving oily fingermarks on
the white china.

Jackson did the talking and he did a pretty good job. He
took it easy and he listened and it didn't take him long to get
the hang of asking Gith questions. They had a tape recorder
and Jones was taking notes as well.

For a while it was okay. They went through the stuff Gith
had told me before — the white van and the driver who'd
paid in cash. She told them she had seen Anneke getting into
the van, that the vehicle was a Mitsubishi and that it was four
or five years old. Then they got on to the driver.

Was he tall?

Maybe.

Short?

Maybe.

Fat?

Maybe.

Thin?

Maybe.

She was getting tense.

'Van,' she said, pointing, jabbing at the air with her finger.

'In, in, in, in, in.'

'He stayed in the van,' I said.

'Gith.' She let out a breath. I'd got it right.

'Did he say anything?' I asked.

'Narg. Thyow money.'

'He just showed you the forty bucks?'

'Gith.'

'Was he Pakeha?' Jackson asked. Gith's head flicked round.

She stared at him. I could see the tension in her neck.

'Gith.'

The buzzer rang. Somebody was in the shop. I went to get
up but Hemi lifted his hand, meaning I should stay where I
was. He went out there instead.

'Was his hair dark?' Jackson asked.

'Mebby.'

'Blond?'

'Mebby.'

'Grey?'

'Mebby.' Gith gave me a quick look. She was getting
upset.

'Could we stop for a minute or two?' I said.

Jackson leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. He
sighed. Jones gave me a tight little smile. Were they wasting
their time? They were both asking themselves that and maybe
coming up with a yes.

Hemi poked his head round the door.

'Sorry, bro,' he said, 'this machine of yours's got me beat.'

'It'll be locked,' I said. I usually lock it when there's no one
in the shop, just in case.

I stood up and went out there. Dolly McKenzie was
standing at the counter holding her credit card. She'd pumped
her own gas and was waiting to pay.

'Ken,' she said. 'Good morning.'

'Hi.'

'Something wrong?'

'Not really.' I unlocked the till and swiped the card.

'Hemi got himself a second job, has he? Moonlighting?'

I laughed and I figured what the hell — nobody told me
not to talk about what was going on.

'The cops are here,' I said. 'It's got to do with that hitchhiker
that's gone missing. Gith might've seen something.'

'I thought so,' she said. 'They're asking everybody. I just
talked to Patrick at the bookshop and he says they definitely
figure this is the last place she was seen. I mean, right here,
eh?' She pointed at the ground like Anneke had been standing
on just the spot where Dolly was now.

'Out there,' I told her. 'And, you know, maybe she'll turn
up safe and well.'

'Oh no. I don't think so. This is a murder inquiry. There's
police everywhere. I've counted four cars so far.' She leaned
towards me. 'And they've got their suspect, haven't they?'

'Who?'

'Billy Cleat, of course! It has to be him, surely? He did
eight years for what he did to that woman in Palmerston
North, that . . .' She gave a shudder like something nasty was
crawling up her back.

I pointed with my thumb over my shoulder. 'I better go.'

'Of course,' she said. 'Of course. They'll be using a profile, I
expect. That's what they do, isn't it?'

'Right.'

Inside it wasn't going well. They'd given Gith a pen and
a pad. She'd done an okay picture of the van and a weird-looking drawing of
the driver, with spiky hair and eyes round like a pair of goggles. Now she
was leaning over, all tense, trying to do the number plate. I sat down beside
her.

'This isn't a good idea,' I said.

Jones and Jackson looked at me like I was obstructing the
course of justice.

Gith gave a snarl and straightened up. Suddenly she threw
the pen across the room. Jackson ducked back and it missed his
head by a couple of inches. It crashed into the metal cabinet
against the far wall. Gith buried her face in her arms and
started to sob. I put my hand on her shoulder and she spun
round towards me, grabbing me round the neck, clinging on
tight. I looked at Hemi. He gave a shrug, saying sorry.

'She knows the number but she can't write it down?' Jackson
couldn't believe it.

'She thinks she knows the number,' I said. Gith's arms
tightened around my neck, choking me. 'I guess she does.'
She relaxed a bit.

'Look,' I said, 'I don't think you're going to get much more
here.'

'No.' Jones pulled a face.

'I can tell you a few things though,' I said. 'I saw Anneke
myself. She was wearing a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled
up.'

Jones was quickly to her feet, retrieving the pen.

I waited till she was settled. 'And there were other people
there. Monty Praguer and Mavis Blake. And there was a red
Holden Commodore. Anneke got out of that.'

'Who was driving?' Jackson asked.

'Not sure. I think it was a city dude. Neat plaid shirt and
khaki pants with lots of pockets. Dark hair? Yes, I guess so.

Tall. Maybe a metre ninety.'

'Anything else?'

'No. But there would've been at least six cars out there. I
don't remember. Oh, except there was a blue-grey wagon with
a dog in the back seat.'

'What sort of wagon?'

'Don't know.' I felt Gith tense. 'Camry, maybe?' She relaxed.
'Yes, a Camry.'

Gith suddenly started to kiss me on the cheek, five, six,
seven times, then she bit me on the ear.

'Ouch!' I tried to push her away but she was hanging on
hard. I let go and she clung in close again. I could feel her
laughing. Jackson and Jones weren't that impressed.

'Thank you, Mr McUrran, you've been very helpful,'
Jackson said. 'One thing we'd find very useful: can we get a
look at your online transactions for that day and a day or two
following?'

'Yes, sure. No problem. A lot of people round here pay cash
though.'

'Of course. We understand.' Jackson gave a tight little smile.

'And do you have closed-circuit TV by any chance?'

'No,' I said. 'We've been thinking about it, but no.'

I'M NOT SURE how much I need to say if I'm going to get
this story straight. I was born in Tacketts Valley, on the farm,
in the same bed where Bill and Joanne had come into the
world. That's just about where the likeness stops. I was always
the odd one out in the family. All the others — and that
includes Ma and the Old Man — are skinny and energetic
and smart. They're into sport and stuff like that and they were
good at school. I'm the opposite. I've been wearing glasses
since I was nine and I've always been . . . well, not real fat . . .
but heavy enough to get the Fat Boy tag. I think if the Old
Man hadn't known from managing his flock that even the
best breeding programme throws out a dud now and again, he
would have asked himself seriously where I came from.

But seeing me as a fact of life didn't mean he had to put
up with me. Pretty early on he made up his mind that, useless
as I was, he was going to get some good out of me. For the
most part this meant beating it into me. I guess I got the flat
of his belt on average about once a month. It didn't make any
difference — I still took twice as long to do any job as the
others and I still did it half as well. This was partly because I
was slow and a bit thick about most things, but also because
I was a dreamy kind of kid. I liked watching the clouds go
by a lot more than I liked the sight of a pile of well-chopped
firewood. The Old Man used to give Bill a hiding too every
now and again, but he never touched Joanne. Being the girl
kept her safe, although it might have been one of the reasons
she turned into a spoilt brat. Bill never suffered as much as
me. He was smarter and he was quicker. He knew how to
keep the Old Man sweet and he liked doing it. The two of
them got on like a house on fire. With me, it was always love–hate.
On both sides. Sometimes I felt he just couldn't stand
the sight of me and belted me because of that.

I can't say I hated farming but I always knew it wasn't for
me. I guess this was mostly because I knew I could never
live up to the Old Man's standards. The only thing I cared
about was cars and machinery. At first this was just watching
and dreaming, looking at books and magazines, spotting
different kinds of vehicle when we went into town. We had
an old Austin A40 up on blocks in one of the sheds. It had
something wrong with it that the Old Man had always been
going to get fixed but had never got round to. I used to spend
hours in it, pretending I was driving, even though my feet
couldn't reach the pedals and I could hardly see through the
windscreen. Sometimes I'd just look at it, seeing how the gear
lever was connected in, poking about with a torch in the mess
of wiring behind the dashboard. After a while I figured out
how to open the bonnet and lift it up so I could get a look
at the engine and all the other bits in there. Working along
from my reading and what I could see, I started to figure
out which was the distributor and which the sparkplugs, how
the cables connected things to the battery, where the fuel line
and the carburettor were. By the time I was ten years old I
was unscrewing bits and going over the insides before putting
them all back again.

One day — I guess I was about twelve — I got a wild idea.
What if the Austin's engine was still in working order? If so,
there were three things it needed: petrol in the tank, a battery
that wasn't flat and an ignition key. Petrol was easy. We had
our own tank and pump for the farm vehicles. The battery
wasn't a problem either. I got the one out of the Old Man's
ute. It was a different size to the Austin's and the contacts
weren't right but I managed to get it connected, sort of. The
ignition key was more of a problem, but I figured out that all
the key did was turn a switch in an electric circuit. If I took
the switch out and connected up the two ends of the wire I
wouldn't need a key. It took a while but I managed it — the
first and only time I ever hot-wired a car.

It was all ready to go. I topped up the radiator, just in case,
and then I climbed into the driver's seat and pulled the starter.
There was an urr-urr-urr sound and then a graunch and a
cough. It kicked into life, making a noise like a concrete mixer
with rocks in it, but it was going. I was so excited I couldn't
help but take the next dumb step. I pressed my foot down on
the clutch and eased the gear lever into what I thought was
first. The noise was even worse this time — a high-pitched
screaming — and the whole car started to shake. I'd never
dealt with a hot-wired car so I couldn't figure out how to turn
the bloody thing off and I sat there in total panic. I was too
scared to get out and too stupid to do anything else. The good
news was that the engine stalled within ten or so seconds. The
bad news was that the Old Man had just got into the ute to
drive into town and found out he didn't have a battery. I got
belted that time too.

***

BY WEDNESDAY THE cops were on to the Anneke Hesse
case big time. Hemi came round that evening and told me
about it. I guess he felt he owed us after the way Jackson and
Jones upset Gith. We sat on the verandah in the warmth of
the setting sun. Gith was inside listening to her music and I
broke out a couple of bottles of Tui to toast the end of day.

'Cheers,' Hemi said, raising his beer. He was still in uniform
but that never seemed to bother him.

'Same.'

He drank, smacked his lips and put the bottle down on the
little table between us.

'They traced the owner of the red Holden, eh,' he said.

'Yeah?'

'Jack Prichard's nephew. From Palmy. He was driving north
and decided he'd stop off and see Jack and Shirley for half an
hour. Anneke figured she'd keep going.'

'And?'

'He didn't see her get into a white van.'

'But there was one.'

Hemi took another pull at his beer. 'Well . . . he isn't sure.
And neither's Monty. Mavis remembers another vehicle there.
She says it was white but she thinks it was a wagon.'

'How could you mistake a van for a wagon?' I asked.

He shrugged. 'Don't know, bro. They've got a name for
the Camry with the dog, too, but they haven't talked to him
yet.' He gave a little snort. 'They all remember that. They all
remember the bloody dogs barking.'

'But they don't remember Anneke?'

'Oh, they remember her. But not getting into anything.

Now, you'd think, with all those people, somebody would
have noticed.'

'No, they were all queuing at my till. Except for Gith. Gith
noticed.'

He didn't answer, just wriggled around in his seat a bit, like
he was settling his backside in more firmly.

'Something must've happened to her,' I said. 'She didn't
just vanish into thin air. I mean, if she walked off up the road,
somebody would've seen her for sure. She would've been
thumbing rides.'

'I don't know.' He thought about it for a bit. 'Suppose it
happened this way. She gets out of the red Holden and she
decides she needs a pee or something. Goes round to your
public loo, which is round the north end of the building,
right?'

'Right.'

'When she comes out, the forecourt's cleared. She walks
on up the road round the corner. Not much traffic now.
Somebody comes by and picks her up.'

'Is that the official idea?' I asked.

'Is it possible?'

'Yeah, it's possible.' I was a bit pissed off. I figured that if
Gith had been a normal-talking person, even one who was as
thick as pigshit, like Bobby Tackett, people would be believing
her. Mavis Blake was a bit of a worry though. A white wagon?
Gith would never make a mistake like that.

'I know she's not a hundred per cent,' I went on, 'but Gith's
not dumb. She notices things. And she knows motors.'

'Good kid,' he said.

'She's not a kid. She's twenty-three.' My voice lifted a notch
and he looked at me. I couldn't read him. Did he know more
than I thought he did?

'I believe her,' he said.

'But those city cops don't?'

He shrugged. 'Don't know, bro. They're sceptical, I guess.'

We sat in silence for a while. The music drifted out
from inside the house, an orchestra and a solo instrument,
something high and sweet.

'Mozart,' Hemi said. 'Nice.'

'Well.' I wanted to stick to what we were talking about. 'If
you find all those vehicles, we'll have a better picture.'

'It'll help,' he said. 'But people aren't always traceable
and they don't all come forward, eh. They might have other
reasons for not going to the cops. Plus, there's not much to
tie Anneke to any vehicle right now. She's only been in the
country a week. Stayed a few nights in Wellington and then
hit the road. We don't have reliable fingerprints. We don't
have DNA.'

'What about the Commodore? Her prints must be in
that.'

'Yeah but the driver's had other people in the car since
then, including a couple more hitch-hikers. He's a fan of
them, apparently. No, the best bet for an identity benchmark
is probably Austria. They're waiting on that.'

'Maybe she'll turn up,' I said.

'Maybe. They don't think so though. Last seen at your
place.'

Just like Dolly said. It was a scary thought.

'How old is she?' I asked.

'Twenty-nine.'

'By herself?'

'Seems so.'

'Guess she's got people back home worrying about her.'

'Yes,' he said. 'It's always tough on the whanau, eh?'

'Who the hell would do a thing like this?' I asked.

'Weeell . . .' He thought about it. 'Could be anybody. Any
bloody ratbag who's capable. It's what they call a crime of
opportunity. Not planned or anything. A guy, on his own,
acting on impulse.'

'The same guy as with Mattie Barnes?'

'That we don't know.'

Not if it was Billy Cleat, I thought. Billy had got sixteen
years for cutting and raping a prostitute in Palmy. He was out
on parole after eight and since then had been living with his
mother, Pansy, in an old house up Maungaiti Road. When
Mattie Barnes went missing, Billy was still inside.

***

AFTER HEMI HAD gone, Gith and I had tea and then
we popped next door to see Leece's uncle and auntie. There
were two empty sections between the service station and their
place so it was maybe sixty metres door to door. I took a big
bar of chocolate from the shop because I knew Len had a
sweet tooth. Their house was a little old four-room cottage
with a bathroom tacked on the back. The front garden was
full of flowers and, in the evening air, we felt swallowed up by
the scent as we walked up the path.

Kath opened the door and led us through into the little
living room, where Len was sitting hunched up in a chair. I
hadn't seen him for a while and I was shocked by the way he
looked — thin and old. I guess he was around sixty but he
seemed like he was way more than that. Most of his hair was
gone and what was left was pure white. His skin was a kind of
orange colour and his eyes had a glittery look to them.

'Gidday,' he said, and lifted his hand. It was icy cold.

I gave him the chocolate and he said thanks. He didn't do
anything with it though. Just let it lie in his lap.

Kath made Gith and me a cup of tea, which we didn't need,
and then we sat on the sofa and talked to her, mostly about
the family. She wanted to know how Leece and Bill were and
how the kids were getting on. Now and again Len would say
something but for the most part he just sat there. He had
been a fencing contractor most of his working life, a tough
old sod who had ignored the skin cancer when it first showed
up. I guess he'd never been the cheerful sort but to see him the
way he was now upset me a lot.

We left after maybe an hour and walked back home. It was
dark by then. Gith put her arm through mine and squeezed
it. We stopped in the light over the front door while I felt in
my pocket for the keys.

'You okay?' I asked.

'Gith.' There were tears in her eyes.

***

AROUND ELEVEN THE next morning a battered red
Honda Accord pulled up to the pumps. I left the workshop
and went out to see if the customer needed help. She was
short and plump and wearing a shapeless thing that looked
a bit like a worn-out car-seat cover. Straight brownish hair,
watery blue eyes, a narrow face and pointed chin, a mouth
that was caving in. It took me a few seconds to remember her
name. Pansy Cleat.

'How's it going?' I said, walking up to her.

She waved a twenty dollar bill at me and pulled a sour
face. I got the pump started and stood beside it. She was on
the other side of the car and was looking around like she was
searching for something.

The car itself was in bad shape. There were several dents
in the panels and a mess of rust bubbles along the drainage
channel. The top of the door pillar was rusty, too.

'You need to get that fixed,' I said.

'How much?' She stared at me.

'Don't know. A few hundred, I guess.'

She gave a snort of laughter. 'Blow that,' she said.

'You won't get a warrant with rust like that.'

'Then that's the end of the bloody warrant, isn't it?'

The pump stopped. I hung up the nozzle and we went
inside. I moved round to the back of the counter and unlocked
the till. Took her money.

'How's Billy?'

'Billy?' She stared at me like I'd said something odd. 'Well,
he's all right, thank you very much.' Her thin lips wriggled
around like she was chewing something real small. 'You're
the first bugger in years to ask that question. Everybody else
round this place acts like he don't exist.'

'Well . . .' I wasn't sure what to say.

'Billy did a bad thing,' she went on. 'You know he did a bad
thing. I know he did a bad thing.
Billy
knows he did a bad
thing. Somebody, sometime gotta say he done his time so let's
forget all that.'