The Crime of Huey Dunstan by James Mcneish Read Free Book Online Page A

buy books for the first time in my adult life.
    After Cornford I came to Wellington and enrolled at university part-time while I worked in the Prisons Department. I started my degree in education and switched to psychology. Later I got an honours bursary and worked as a prison psychologist. Later still I became a lecturer in abnormal psychology at the university, and then professor. And so on. Incidentally the chap in New Zealand who influenced me to go back to university was a social scientist,Ralph Travis. Lovely man (he introduced me to Joyce Carey and Robert Tressell’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists ). Ralph was another Quaker. He’s the one who told me the Chinese lyric.
     
    During the long bus ride back to Wellington on Saturday, after dining with Andrew who must be over a hundred now if he is reading this, I tried not to speculate on the outcome of the trial. But Andrew’s prognosis bothered me. I knew a little about juries, how flighty and irrational they could be, yet I could well believe that if one juror had fainted on being shown a photograph of Huey’s victim, the rest of the jury had probably made up its mind already. The man’s head according to the police surgeon had all but disappeared, and according to a scientist called in to attest to the ferocity of the attack the blood was spattered halfway up the chimney piece. Lawrence had tried to stop the photographs going up, he told me, but the judge overruled him. Had Andrew been on the case, I might have felt differently. He had fought alongside the Maori Battalion in the Second World War; he understood concepts of Maori custom and tangatawhenua that were quite foreign to other judges. He not only understood an act committed with animus furandi , the state of mind which converts mere “removal” of an object into “theft”, but he could conceive of a lack of animus furandi , which was why he had been able to acquit with a clear conscience the young man who came before him charged with stealing a war medal. Andrew had instinctivelyunderstood that when the accused began to remove the medal from its glass case, he was powerless to stop himself because he had been overcome by a feeling he had never experienced in his life. I suppose the reason the incident came back to me with such force was that the young Maori who committed the crime had been born Pakeha but then adopted out at the age of three months, Maori style, to an uncle in one of the Taranaki tribes. In a perverse way, he reminded me of Huey.
    My use of the word “sadistic” still bothered me. As an old pro, I prided myself on being able to convert the most foul language into proper testimony for the benefit of the bench. I once had to introduce a client described as “a f------git” and “a belly-aching bastard” to the magistrate. I presented the man, a ship’s waiter accused of pilfering, as “a somewhat colourful individual” who “exhibited a tendency to complain too much”. Easy, when you know how. So why had I abandoned the training of a lifetime and let myself go so irresponsibly? I wasn’t ancient. I was sixty-six. (I’m eighty-two now.) Was I losing it?
    Next thing, I told myself, I shall be spouting obscenities in public like Andrew.
    Lawrence, being Lawrence, made light of it. “A peccadillo, Ches.” Lawrence had pronounced himself delighted with my evidence-in-chief. But I was aware that, having asked me for a diagnosis, he was generous enough not to remind me that I had failed to provide one.
    On the bus I fell into a half-dream. I may have slept.Waking, I saw the courtroom in uproar and Huey in the dock struggling with two guards. He was trying to vault the railing. The guards overpowered him and he was taken down below. Then Lawrence appeared and said to me, “Huey says you don’t believe him any more. Is it true?”
    I woke sweating, holding my cane collapsed in half across my knees (I must have seized it in my sleep without realising). Was it true? Or was it