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said Bones, pointing over Molloy’s shoulder. “It’s a big boarding house near the top of Richmond Road there.”

CHAPTER FIVE
    A black 1938 Chrysler Plymouth turned the corner into Princes Street and stopped in front of the Northern Club. The passenger got out. He was a solid man, in his fifties, face like a Belfast bricklayer, small mouth, black hair, thick eyebrows that curled up at the ends. He wore a brown double-breasted suit, the trousers belted high over his stomach, and a green tie.
    “I’ll be half an hour, Sunny,” he said, wiping his hatliner. “Wait here.”
    “Right-o, Mr Walsh,” said the driver, reaching into the glovebox for tobacco.
    Fintan Patrick Walsh put his handkerchief back in his pocket. He looked up at the elegant sandstone building, Union Jack hanging above the entrance, thick green carpet of Virginia creeper shining in the sun, dark recessed windows giving off “the wealthy yellow light” that Mark Twain had noticed when he stayed there in 1895.
    It was a long way from Patutahi in Poverty Bay, where Walsh had grown up. Not that he cared tuppence. He doubted there was a puffed-up member of this foolish piece of transplanted Englishness that he couldn’t buy or sell or put out of business or run out of town.
    The doorman, Barrett, thought about asking the driver to move his motorcar, and then, realising who the passenger was, thought again. Walsh was the most powerful union man in the country. Mostpowerful anything, a lot of people said, the uncrowned king, someone around whom violent rumour swirled, a union official in the sense that the American gangster Vito Corleone was an importer of olive oil.
    In 1912, aged eighteen, Walsh was one of a handful of armed men guarding the Miners & Workers Union Hall in Waihi from an assault by strikebreakers and police. During the mêlée, a scab was shot in the knee and a constable in the stomach “by a person or persons unknown”. Walsh was spirited out of Waihi that night, left New Zealand soon after on a four-master from Napier, wound up in California, worked on oilers in the Gulf of Mexico and freighters on the South American run, jumped ship in San Francisco, spent two years as an organiser and enforcer for the Wobblies in Idaho and Montana.
    He was a founding member, in 1921, of the Communist Party of New Zealand. He had bent the ears and twisted the arms of prime ministers from George Forbes to Sid Holland. He was the éminence grise of the Federation of Labour. He was said to own more land in the Wairarapa than the Riddifords. He was a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, holding a gun.
    Why cross him?
    Which is not to say that the doorman was windy, or lacked moral fibre. Far from it. Barrett had lost a leg at Gallipoli, shot out from under him during the charge up Rhododendron Ridge, the Auckland Battalion heading straight into the sun, Turkish bullets thick as bees, in the opening assault on Chunuk Bair. Three hundred boys were killed or wounded in less than twenty minutes.
    He had lain all day in the heat, no water, flies in his mouth, lads around him crying out for stretcher-bearers, for shade, for their mothers, to die.
    The CO of the Wellingtons, Colonel Malone, had refused to allow his men to follow in daylight. Now there was an officer and a gentleman, Barrett thought. Could have taught some of the newer members a thing or two.
    Malone was killed next day on the summit, careless rounds from a British destroyer. Or possibly the Turks. Barrett preferred to blame the Poms. What a cock-up. “When I think of Chunuk Bair,” a cobber of his had said once, in the RSC after an Anzac Day do, “I think of reddish-brown. And that was blood.”
    What was left of Barrett’s leg was amputated above the knee on the New Zealand hospital ship Maheno in Suvla Bay, and he returned home to a job at the club arranged by the Battalion 2IC, Major Campbell-Stevenson, whose father was on the committee.
    Barrett was used to opening the door for powerful men,