The Crime of Huey Dunstan Read Online Free Page A

however brutal and evidently sadistic, was to him part of the medicine. He had to take it like a man. KIA KAHA , KIA TOA . He had to take it then and today, fourteen years later, he is still taking it.”
    The judge was writing with a fountain pen. It was either the judge or the registrar. I could hear a nib scratching in the silence. Somebody coughed. I caught a whiff of perfume from across the room where the jury sat. Lawrence told me afterwards there was a women juror seated in the front row who made a lot of notes. I had sensed that one of the jurors was looking at me intently from the moment I entered the stand. The cough came again and the judge said:
    “In your view he wants to protect his family?”
    “From further disgrace—in my view, yes. They are all here, I understand. His father, his mother, his sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts. The family is everything to him.”
    The prosecutor said, “But when the police interviewed Mr Dunstan on video, professor, he did not mention any of this. Why didn’t it come up then?”
    “Perhaps,” I said, “because the police are not psychologists.”
    I realised my mistake as soon as I spoke. It was a cheap jibe. My answer even if correct was self-serving. I heard the woman juror in the front row laugh. But no one else did.
    “It’s a different interview,” I said, trying to repair the gaffe. “I wouldn’t expect it to come up in that situation. The police are authority figures.”
    “So are psychologists, professor.”
     
    Worse was to follow. The prosecutor—I had it right the first time—was not very big but compact, and deeply suited to his vocation. He had little sympathy with psychological motivation but a gift for detail. His attention to detail—he wanted to know how many meat pies Huey had eaten on the day of the killing and what was the design on the ring his girlfriend had given him before she jilted him—was irritating, I thought, and pedantic, until I realised how cleverly he was exploiting points of detail to confuse the jury and trivialise what had happened to Huey. But there was little I could do about it, as there was little I could do about the sticky resonance of his voice which floated into every corner of the courtroom. My own voice seemed thin by comparison.
    “Just remind us, professor: you are a clinical psychologist?”
    “Yes.”
    “Not a forensic psychologist.”
    “No. But I have appeared in court before.
    “As an expert witness?”
    “Yes.”
    “For the defence?”
    “That is correct.”
    “When did you last give evidence for the Crown?”
    “About six years ago.”
    “And before that?…Perhaps I can help you, professor. According to my records, the only other occasion was twenty years previously, when you appeared for the Crown in a case of arson.”
    Was he right? The arsonist, I remembered with a pang, was some sort of healer with a wide following in Australia and New Zealand. He had burned down an abortion clinic. After the case I had a letter from one of his followers saying that I wasn’t the first evil, ignorant and bigoted fool “hiding in the jaundiced bowels of academia”.
    The prosecutor was saying, “I’m not talking about court reports , I am talking about you standing up and being cross-examined in court on your opinion. Twice in twenty-five years? That’s about the sum of it. Is it not?”
    I had to admire the effectiveness of the attack. He had seen an opening, and pounced. Sitting there in the stand, I took a grip of my cane which I had folded up and was holding on my lap out of sight. The air in the courtroom was chilly for November. Even so my fingers holding the cane were bathed in sweat.
    “Correct,” I said.
    “ Sadistic , professor. Earlier you used the word ‘sadistic’.” He said the word in a certain way, resting his tongue on the “ess” sound, then sliding it across like a bow drawn over a violin string.
    “I was referring to the incident when Mr Dunstanwas tied up in the