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  Smaile: Sit yourself down, Comrade, and tell me exactly what happened.

  Murray: Well, I waited for him at that spot we chose, where it’s really slippery and there’s a hell of a drop. It was perfect — I could see him coming but he couldn’t see me. I timed it dead right, sent him flying. You should’ve heard the racket he made on the way down, bouncing off those bloody big branches. I scuffed up the ground to make a mess of the footprints, then doubled back and went looking for him on the lower trail.

  Smaile: Anyone else about?

  Murray: Hardly another soul, as we thought being a Friday morning. I heard voices at one point but didn’t see anyone. They must’ve been on a different trail; it’s amazing how voices carry in the bush. It took me a while to find him because he hadn’t gone all the way down; he got snagged on a branch. He was dead though. No doubt about it.

  Smaile: So you didn’t have to administer the coup de grâce? That must’ve been a relief.

  Murray: Christ, yes. I was a bit nervous by then anyway, thinking my luck’s going to run out and there’d be a bunch of schoolkids on a field trip round the next corner. I made my way to the pick-up point and stayed out of sight till Comrade Mowbray turned up. I got changed in the car so I assume he’s thrown my gear in the incinerator by now.

  Smaile: I think we can rely on him to perform that undemanding task. Excellent work, Comrade. Once again you’ve lived up to our high expectations.

  Smaile probably recorded the conversation to give them a hold over Murray if he tried to backslide on the sleeper operation, thought Ihaka. When Smaile started ratcheting up his extortion demands, it must have occurred to him that one day Murray might decide he’d had enough and do what Smaile himself would do if the boot was on the other foot.

  Ihaka’s first instinct was to head straight out to Ellerslie and watch Murray squirm. On the way down to the car park, he had second thoughts: let’s run it past Charlton; that’s what he’s always telling me to do. Besides, this would be the last thing he wants to land in his lap right now.

  Shortly before midnight on a mild early summer’s night four months after Tom Murray was charged with the murder of Ethan Stern, Tito Ihaka drove to the bottom floor of a virtually empty downtown underground car park, swung into a parking space and turned off the engine. As he waited for the meeting to convene, he sat stock-still, staring straight ahead, deep in thought.

  Shortly after midnight, a brand-new black Range Rover pulled up alongside. The man who got out of it and into Ihaka’s passenger seat was forty years old, round-faced and pink-complexioned with a ginger scalp stubble. His beer belly tended to distract attention from his powerful upper body, just as his permanent half-smile encouraged strangers to assume he was one of those cheerful fatsos who always look on the bright side and don’t have a bad word to say about anyone.

  His name was John Scholes, although the Auckland under-world knew him as Johnny B Bad. He ran a criminal gang called The Firm. The fact that it was named after the outfit headed by the infamous Kray twins which operated out of the East End of London in the 1950s and 60s said pretty much all there was to say about the gang and a fair bit about John Scholes.

  ‘Mr Ihaka,’ said Scholes, his accent as unmistakably Cockney as the day he jumped ship in Auckland, a seventeen-year-old tough who’d sailed around the world looking for a place to call home. ‘How’s it going. All right?’

  ‘Yeah, Johnny. Yourself?’

  ‘Can’t complain. Well, I could, but most people I come across have got more to worry about than me so it don’t seem right to bleat, you know what I mean?’

  ‘What can I do for you, Johnny?’

  ‘I’m going legit, Mr Ihaka. It won’t happen overnight, but eighteen months from now I aim to be out of the game completely.’

  ‘Jesus. What brought this on?’

  ‘My kids,’ said Scholes. ‘They’re growing up faster than I can keep up with. Of course, they know I’ve done bird but that was for giving a filthy raping piece of shit the seeing-to he richly deserved, as opposed to what you might call everyday professional villainy, so they think I was hard done by. My eldest, the girl, she’s sharp as a fucking tack. She knows her old man’s not your usual businessman, but she hasn’t joined the dots yet. Before she does, I want to be able to give her an honest answer when she asks, Dad, what do you really do?’

  ‘Well, good for you, Johnny.’

  ‘It’ll be a tricky business, mind, extricating myself from my current situation. It’ll have to be handled delicately and timed just right.’

  ‘Yeah, I can see that.’

  ‘You know what my worst nightmare is? I’m just about to leave the life behind and I get done on some technicality. Your colleagues in Waitemata are still spitting blood over that deal we did to get me out of the cage.’

  ‘You earned your way out, Johnny. The boys out west just have to wear it.’

  ‘Where do we stand now then?’ said Scholes. ‘Am I still in credit?’

  ‘You mean if you slip up, will McGrail tell Waitemata our arrangement still stands?’

  ‘I won’t slip up, but there are things I can’t control.’

  ‘If you walk a reasonably straight line, Johnny, we’ll be there for you. If they catch you with a bloodstained axe in one hand and the mayor’s head in the other, we probably can’t help you.’

  ‘Can’t say fairer than that. Thank you, Mr Ihaka, that’s a load off my mind. Now is there anything I can do for you?’

  ‘Actually, there could be something. A strange thing happened to me a few months ago: I found out my old man was murdered.’

  Scholes stared. ‘What the fuck?’

  ‘The family had always assumed he’d had a heart attack but it turns out he was poisoned. This was back in 1987, trade union bad blood.’

  ‘Fucking hell. Who did it?’

  ‘Well, the bloke who ordered it killed himself — around about the time I found out.’

  ‘Saw you coming, did he?’

  ‘Let’s say he joined the dots. And just last week the one who actually administered the poison pulled four years in Mt Eden for being party to causing GBH with intent. Fella by the name of Stu Boyle.’

  Scholes nodded thoughtfully. ‘Fond of your old man, were you?’

  ‘Shit, yeah. Sometimes it feels like my whole fucking life is about trying to fill the hole he left.’

  ‘I know what you mean, although my experience was somewhat different. My old man was a crim, of course, a hard nut and a nasty piece of work. When I was seven, he got himself in the shit, biffed my mum one last time and took off, never to be seen again. There was talk he joined the French Foreign Legion. If so, let’s hope some fiendishly cruel ragheads or big black lads with machetes got hold of him. On the other hand, I do have kids and if anyone so much as harmed a hair on their heads, I’d track them down, cut them into bite-sized pieces and feed them to my dogs. So while I’m coming at it from a different perspective, I can put myself in your shoes.’ Scholes’ half-smile disappeared altogether. ‘I have some influence in that institution you mentioned so put your mind at rest. It’ll be taken care of. If that fucking slag Boyle knew what was in store for him, he’d drown himself in the nearest bog.’

  About the author

  Novelist and columnist Paul Thomas has been described as ‘the Godfather of New Zealand crime writing’. His eight novels include five Tito Ihaka mysteries. The second, Inside Dope, won the Crime Writers’ Association of Australia’s Ned Kelly Award and the fourth, Death on Demand, won the Ngaio Marsh Award for New Zealand crime novel of the year.

  Paul Thomas is also the author of a short-story collection and a number of books on sport.

 

 

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