Rocking Horse Road (16 page)

'Did you see anything?' Jase wanted to know.

'Just Cox's white arse going up and down.'

They waited, shivering in the cold. Pete said that
he could smell the scent of Mary-Rose on the dress, as
though the printed flowers that covered it were giving
off a perfume. When Mary-Rose's half hour was
almost up they heard whispers coming from the shed
and the sound of things being moved around. Brent
Cox was clearly heard to say, 'Well, you better bloody
find them!' A few more minutes passed during which
the whispers became louder and more panicked.

Apparently Mary-Rose feared being discovered
missing by her father more than any embarrassment.
She finally appeared at the door in nothing but her bra,
knickers, shoes and socks. After a hurried look around,
she set off at a trot in the direction of her house. Brent
Cox could be heard hissing after her, telling her to bring
him back some clothes. But apparently he had no faith
that Mary-Rose would return with something for him
to wear. He also appeared at the door and set off after
her. Apart from his shoes and socks he was naked and
must have been freezing. His only covering was a child-sized
life-jacket, which he clutched to his groin with
both hands. Brent's parents' house was in the same
direction as the Templetons' but at least a couple of k's
further down the road. Maybe he figured he could steal
some pants from a clothesline on the way or that Mary-
Rose would pass him something from her window.

Needless to say this was better than even Grant
Webb had imagined. The three guys were killing
themselves up in the dunes as Brent took off after
Mary-Rose, clutching his orange life-jacket to his
groin, and running with the bent-over lope of someone
lower down the evolutionary scale.

That was the picture that the community patrol saw
as they pulled into the car-park: A girl, stripped to her
underwear, being chased by a naked guy, clutching
something to his groin. To a group of guys cruising the
neighbourhood looking for a sexual predator, you have
to admit Brent Cox more than fitted the description.

The car was being driven by Mr Erickson, a retired
stevedore. Old Erickson didn't hesitate. He gunned
the motor and drove right at Brent. Pete later swore
to us that he was sure Erickson was intending to run
the guy down. But Brent heard the surge of the engine
and saw the danger in time. He swerved away from
the middle of the car park towards the retaining wall
on the beach side. As he came to it he dropped the
life-jacket. He vaulted the low wall and hit the sand
running. Apart from his shoes and socks he was now
completely naked.

It sounds funny to tell it, like a scene out of
The
Benny Hill Show
, but Pete and Jase and Grant realised
the seriousness of the situation straight away. The
guys in Erickson's car thought they were after a child
molester and possibly a murderer. They weren't pissing
about. They were already spilling out even before the
car had come to a complete stop. One of them, turned
out to be Jim Turner's dad. He immediately gave
chase along the beach. The other two ran to the back
of the car where they hauled up the boot and snatched
up torches and a couple of softball bats, and then they
ran after Brent as well.

As Grant said later that evening, 'Cox is a bit of
a prick, but I didn't want him to be beaten to death.'
And he wasn't exaggerating the danger for once. After
Lucy's murder, and then the attack on the two young
girls, people down on the Spit were edgy. Men were
quicker to shout. Neighbours had begun arguing
about small things; autumn bonfires and barking dogs.
Our dads were drinking more beer in the evenings
and at the weekends. A few of our fathers had been
in fights lately, mostly about the Springbok tour. The
atmosphere was brittle. People were itching to take
action but they didn't know what to do. Erickson and
the other men in the car had probably been drinking
and if they caught Brent you could guarantee they'd
be using their fists and the bats, long before they
asked any questions. Looking back it's clear that the
community patrol was as much about the hope of
delivering Old Testament vengeance as it was about
keeping the streets safe.

Luckily, in all the confusion, Mary-Rose had
vanished into the darkness of the sand dunes in the
direction of the road. Mr Erickson had a bad knee. He
stayed with the car, keeping the engine running. He
was craning his neck and peering around as though
expecting more naked perverts to appear at any
minute. Grant, Pete and Jase skirted the back of the
surf club, keeping out of Erickson's sight. They walked
along the road in the direction Brent had gone and then
cut down a little-used track to the beach. They found
Mr Turner standing on the beach staring up into the
dunes, a torch in his hand. Shouts came from the two
other men and they could be heard thrashing through
the lupin. The beams of their torches darted here and
there. Apparently Brent Cox had gone to ground. The
three guys imagined him lying, naked, scared and
as cold as hell, in a hollow among the tussock plants
somewhere close by.

Mr Turner was too worked up to question why
three friends of his son were down on the beach at
that hour.

'Have you boys seen anyone, a guy running?'

Pete looked down the beach towards the surf club.

'We just saw a naked guy. Back down that way. He ran
out of the dunes and went down the road.'

Mr Turner swore loudly and called to the other
men. They immediately returned sliding down the
face of the first dune. The three of them ran back up
the beach. Jase and Pete and Grant stood watching
until the men disappeared from sight. Over the sound
of the waves they heard Erickson's car reversing
quickly and driving away.

Jase put the bundle of clothes he was carrying,
including Mary-Rose's dress, down on the sand
and called out loudly, 'Hey, Cox! Your clothes are
here!' There was no response. Nothing moved in the
darkness. So the three of them simply walked away.
It was only when they were almost at the surf club
that they looked back and saw a furtive shadow come
down on to the beach, snatch up the clothes and then
dart away back to the relative safety of the dunes.

The community patrol drove up and down Marine
Parade as far as the shopping centre but saw nothing.
They eventually got around to calling the police. Jase
Harbidge's dad got the full story from his mates on the
force and we heard the police side of the story from
Jase. Two tracking dogs were brought in. The dogs got
really excited about a pile of life-jackets in the storage
area under the surf club, which had apparently been
broken into.

The dogs tracked the scent up the beach and into
the dunes where the police discovered the suspect
had hidden himself under a hastily made covering
of lupin branches. From there the dogs tracked him
back to the surf club but lost the scent. He appeared
to have left in some type of vehicle (Pete remembered
seeing Brent's bicycle chained up next to the outdoor
shower).

From the police's point of view, the real mystery
was the identity of the third victim. Mr Turner and the
other members of the community patrol hadn't been
able to identify the girl seen fleeing in her underwear.
After a couple of beers at the Empire Mr Erickson
would describe her as having 'the type of arse you
only dream about'. But luckily for Mary-Rose his
description was no more specific than that.

The front-page headline in the nest day's
Press
read NEW BRIGHTON ATTACKS CONTINUE. The
accompanying article explained that,

Experts claim it isn't unusual for victims of rape and
sexual violence not to come forward immediately. Victims
are often embarrassed and ashamed of what has happened
to them. Some victims blame themselves for the attack.

Police, however, are calling for the young woman
to contact them as soon as possible. A police spokesman
said: 'The sooner we talk to this young woman, the more
likely it is we will catch her attacker.'

(Exhibit F78, The Press, May 12)

The spokesman also praised the bravery of the four
men, who he described as 'driving the attacker away
from his intended victim. In all likelihood these men
prevented a much more serious crime.' In that day's
editorial
The Press
went even further: 'If not for the
men's brave intervention, New Brighton could have
seen another young girl dead at the hands of the
Christmas Killer.'

The week after Brent Cox's streak down the beach, we
heard that an arrest had been made in the abduction
case. The police in Nelson had questioned a man
seen acting suspiciously outside a primary school.
According to Bill Harbidge's contact up in Nelson, the
interviewing officers had been surprised when, with
hardly any prompting, the guy had confessed to the
attack on Tracy Templeton and Jenny Jones months
before.

He was in his early thirties, a Maori named Wiremu
Jones. He confessed with tears pouring down his face.
He still wore the dirty hat that Tracy remembered, as he
told the police that he had been raised 'a good Christian
boy' but that 'the devil has me by the throat'.

There was no need for Tracy or Jenny to sit through
a long trial. The guy had confessed and was eventually
sentenced to three years in prison. At fifteen we
thought three years was fair, a lifetime.

Since then we've kept track as Wiremu Jones has
been in and out of prison like a yo-yo. He got out in
late '83 and had only been out for six months when he
molested an eleven-year-old in Wellington and ended
up going back inside for another seven years. In '97
he was arrested for exposing himself to a busload of
school kids on their way back from a trip to Te Papa.
In 2000 he tried to entice seven-year-old twin girls
into his car in Dunedin. Apparently being locked up
together in a chocolate box of murderers, thieves and
other perverts has failed to show Wiremu the error of
his ways. Or maybe it is just that the devil still has a
firm grip on his throat.

Although, God knows, he is guilty of a lot, the
police were sure that Wiremu Jones did not murder
Lucy Asher. He travelled around a fair bit and in late
December of 1980 when Lucy was killed Wiremu
was living with a cousin up on the east coast, near
Gisborne. He didn't travel down south until almost
a month later. As is often the case, our imaginations
had taken two similar events and assumed a common
cause. One of the things that our investigation has
taught us over the years is that life is almost never
that simple.

Two months after his diagnosis Pete had lost weight.
But the truth is that all of us could benefit by losing a bit
of weight. Twenty years' worth of beer and easy food
have washed up around our middles. By late August
last year the flesh had melted away from Pete's belly
and from the sag below his jaw. He actually started
to look younger, even healthier. To those of us who
had known him almost all his life he seemed to be
aging backwards. Pete began to look more as he had
done in his early thirties and then as the weeks shifted
underfoot he regained the taut looks he had possessed
during his twenties. By October he again had the wiry
frame of the teenage boy who had discovered Lucy
Asher's body on the beach.

He was often tired, but the full force of the cancer
hadn't yet hit him. That would come soon and when it
did it would be unremitting. Pete had taken to rising
with the sun as it cracked through the watery curve
of the eastern horizon, and going for slow walks that
took him all over the Spit. He often stopped and just
sat. Pete lived down by the reserve in the single-bedroom
unit he'd bought about ten years earlier,
with the money left over from his divorce. He and his
wife had no kids but between work and us he never
seemed to be short of company when he wanted it.
When he woke early there was no one to disturb
except the ginger tom he had adopted.

On one particular morning — it was the first week
in October — he was walking out on the mud-flats
of the estuary behind the Spit. 'Mud-flats' is actually
not a very accurate description although that's what
everyone's always called them. At low tide a lot of the
estuary is more sand than mud, coarse and black and
pitted with infinite numbers of small crab holes, and
graffitied by the swirling trails of cat's-eye shells. It is
only truly muddy in patches and it's easy to watch out
for those and walk around them. In all the kilometres
and kilometres of space the only real obstacles are the
braided channels, which are never the same from one
day to the next. Even the two or three main channels
winding down from the two river-mouths to the end
of the Spit where the estuary discharges into the sea,
even they shift from season to season. At low tide it's
easy to walk around for hours out there. All you really
have to remember is to wear a good pair of shoes and
to keep one eye on the tide, which can flood back in
quickly.

Later, when we were visiting him in the hospital,
Pete told us that the pain hit him suddenly. One
second he was feeling fine, lost in his thoughts (we
didn't have the nerve to ask him what those might
have been); the next he was engulfed — 'like hot
shrapnel had been shot into my gut'. It was as though
all the pain he had avoided since his diagnosis had
been stored up and then unleashed. As he spoke to
us, he moved his legs around under the heavy white
hospital sheets.

'The ambulance guy asked me how the pain was
on a scale of one to ten. I told him to stop asking me
stupid maths questions and to hurry up with the
painkillers.'

Some old woman who lived on the estuary side
of the Spit had apparently been watching, through
binoculars, Pete's progress across the mud-flats. When
she saw him clutch his stomach and go down she had
immediately called an ambulance. She had declined
to give her name. It just goes to show that sometimes
even nosy neighbours have their uses.

The ambulance guys had to come across the mudflats
on foot. It's a good thing they hurried because
the tide was coming in by the time they got to Pete.
He was lying in the foetal position and they lifted him
out of water that was lapping at his body. They hauled
him up moaning and dripping, on to the stretcher. He
couldn't move without pain erupting from his guts.
He hung between them curled like an ammonite,
listening to their voices grumble about their shoes
getting wet.

Despite the dramatic nature of his collapse, that
first time Pete was admitted to hospital he only
stayed in two nights; for observation. They gave him
morphine in the ambulance but after about twelve
hours the pain subsided of its own accord, although
after that it never completely went away and had to
be managed continually. Neither the doctors nor Pete
(nor even we) were fooled into thinking Pete would
go back to the way he had been before.

During his stay in the hospital we all came to visit,
although not all together at once; the room was too
small. It seemed wrong to turn up empty-handed.
Chocolates didn't seem right as a gift. Pete had never
had much of a sweet tooth, and he had been off his
food for weeks. Flowers were girly. In the end Pete
got enough grapes to have his own vintage. He ended
up giving most of them away to the three old blokes
he shared a room with.

On the evening of that first day in hospital Jase
Harbidge found himself alone with Pete. It was long
after visiting hours had finished, and dark outside.
The three other guys in the room had their curtains
pulled around their beds and seemed to be asleep,
although you could never really tell. All day we
had observed them doze for a while and then their
eyelids would suddenly flutter open and they would
start forward from their pillows. They would look
around as if to reassure themselves that they were still
alive. After a few seconds they would lie back with
ambivalence — a mixture of relief at being alive and
disappointment at the circumstances in which they
rediscovered themselves.

The oncology ward is on the top floor of the
hospital with views out over the botanical gardens,
which at night are just a dark pool surrounded by
the city lights. Jase said that the chemical smell of the
place seemed to have collected over the day and risen
up to where he and Pete were. Pete was still on the
morphine then, his voice blurring around the edges of
his words. Jase had just got up off his seat to open the
window, when Pete spoke.

'I thought I saw her. Out on the flats.'

Jase didn't have to ask who. There was a pause
filled only by the sound of the air conditioning and
the rattling breath of the dying man in the far corner.

'I thought I saw her walking towards me with the
incoming tide. She was walking on the water. But she
couldn't get to me before the ambulance guys.' Pete
laughed quietly. 'When they picked me up I was so
pissed off. I wanted to tell them to leave me for her.'

That was all he said before he fell asleep. Jase sat
and watched him sleep for a while and when he was
sure that Pete was not going to wake up again he
stood, careful not to scrape the foot of his chair on the
lino, and left quietly.

During visiting hours the next morning the old
man who had slept in the corner bed was gone and
Pete had no memory of most of the day before. When
we talked about it later we all agreed that it was
probably just the morphine talking. It was best not to
mention it to Pete again.

In 1981 South Brighton High School ran a system
where senior students were given responsibility for
various duties around the school. In the second term
we sometimes found ourselves rostered to police the
queue of refractory third and fourth formers at the
canteen. Twice a month, we were expected to stand
by the iron gates in front of the school for ten minutes
before the first bell and ten minutes after and to
write down the names of all latecomers. We enforced
silence in the library, and patrolled distant corners
of the school grounds where occasionally we would
see puffs of white smoke rising up from behind the
clumps of ragged hebes like Indian signals.

Another of the duties we had was working in Lost
and Found. Stray jackets and bags, books and pencil
cases — named and unnamed — were all deposited
in a room little bigger than a large wardrobe between
the boys' lockers and the library. For everyone who
had lost something over the week, Lost and Found
was their first port of call. Every Wednesday, whoever
was on duty was excused from the last morning
lesson five minutes early so that they could get the
key from its hook inside the door of the staff room.
We were supposed to have Lost and Found open by
the time the lunch bell rang.

It wasn't quite as mindless as it sounds because
the job involved handling money. To reclaim an item
cost twenty cents. Whoever was rostered on had to
collect the float from the teacher on duty and record
how much was paid in (some kids reclaimed more
than one item), who it came from, and what it was
they had collected. The small float was so you could
give change. The theory was that having to pay to
get your stuff back (and only being able to get it
back once a week) would discourage carelessness.
In practice, losing stuff was habitual. The same kids
turned up each week looking for their things. Often
the same bag or pencil case moved between its owner
and Lost and Found with the instincts of a homing
pigeon. Some items had been known to be retrieved
by their owner at lunchtime, and go back to Lost and
Found before school finished that same day.

Mark Murray didn't mind when it was his turn
in Lost and Found. It was the second Wednesday in
May. He had collected two dollars and forty cents by
a quarter to one, and was thinking of closing up early
so that he could get a pie from the canteen, when a
fourth form girl turned up. We don't have a record
of her name but Mark described her as being pale
and scrawny with long black hair parted down the
middle. 'She was like that girl from
The Munsters
,' he
said (although that was a bit rich coming from a guy
whose own hair had earned him the nickname Afro
Man). The girl informed Mark that she was looking
for a jacket lost around October the previous year.
When he asked her why she hadn't come to look for
it earlier, she eyed him like he was an idiot. 'It was
summer and I didn't need it, did I? Now it's cold.'

Items were tossed into Lost and Found without
reference to any system. The most recent finds tended
to be at the front. Looking further back turned you
into an archaeologist: you had to dig back through
layers laid down over weeks and months. The only
clean-out was done when Lost and Found provided
stock for the school fair's white elephant stall, last
held in '78. Mark didn't know where to start. Some
jackets and umbrellas hung from a hook behind the
door but some had fallen on the floor. The girl had
described her jacket as being black. With her peering
over his shoulder, Mark picked up the top jacket on
the floor and then another and another. There were
three unclaimed bags under there as well; these he
pushed aside. Lying next to them, half covered by
a fallen raincoat, was a canvas duffel bag that Mark
recognised straight away. It was army-green with two
strings through which Lucy used to hook her arm so
that the bag dangled from her shoulder. Lucy had
scribbled over the canvas in pen and there was a large
red peace symbol sewn on the front.

Mark told the girl to wait outside and when she
sullenly moved away he opened the bag. Inside was
a can of Coke, a small box of tampons (which made
Mark uncomfortable), two French textbooks and a
book on photography long overdue from the public
library, with a naked black woman on the front. At the
very bottom of the bag was a small blue notebook with
a cardboard cover. It was held together by a yellow
ribbon. On the cover it said,
LUCY A. PRIVATE!
The
letters had been so deeply overwritten in black pen that
you could read the words with just your fingertips.

'So is it there or not?'

'What?'

'My jacket.'

'No. Sorry.'

The girl gave him a curious look. 'You okay?'

'Sure. Yeah. Fine.'

She shook her head. 'Mum's going to bloody kill
me.' Mark didn't bother replying and she turned and
walked away.

Lucy Asher's diary lay on the pool table, lit only by
the beam of Jim Turner's torch. The circle of light
surrounding it shook slightly. Whether Jim's hand
was unsteady from excitement or from the strain of
keeping the torch still was impossible to tell. It was
nine o'clock at night and dark outside. A gentle rain
began to fall on the tar-seal of Rocking Horse Road.
As we stood in the garage we could hear the low
waves mutter against the beach on the other side of
the Spit. Aslan, the black Alsatian across at number
sixty-seven, had barked himself hoarse earlier than
usual that night and was sending rasping coughs into
the world outside his gate.

We had waited until everyone could get there.
Several of us were wearing our pyjamas under our
clothes. Al Penny wore tartan slippers belonging to
his father. Tug Gardiner had on a sweatshirt with a
hood that, for some reason, he had pulled up over his
head, but we were in too serious a mood to question
him. The news of Mark's find had travelled from one
of us to another; from house to house like a moth in the
night. Jim had had to wait until after rugby training
and then a late dinner, during which his mother had
tried to talk to him. We had feigned sleepiness and
gone to our rooms early, only to slip away through
back doors and open windows. The moon was
unaccounted for as we slipped through the darkness.
We were the furtive noises in the night.

It was Pete Marshall who broke the spell. He
carefully lifted the book off the green felt. Perhaps,
because he had been the one who found Lucy's body,
Pete felt he had a special right, or possibly an obligation.
The ribbon resisted him but at last succumbed to his
fumbling and he opened the cover to view the first
page of the diary of Lucy Asher. Jim held the torch
higher so that the narrow beam of light spilled over
Pete's shoulder and on to the first page.

Although we have all handled the book and read its
contents more than once in the years since then, only
Pete has ever read it aloud. By being the first to intone
Lucy's words he became, in a sense, her voice. He
read well, right from that first night. Pete instinctively
knew not to try to imitate a young woman's voice
nor to attempt dramatic emphasis. He kept his voice
neutral, clear and slow, which allowed us to hear
within it Lucy's own. All the drama we needed was
there in the words.