I brought her home and washed her in the bath. Her skin took on a mottled colour. I washed and combed out her hair, careful not to let her head fall below the waterline. When she was clean and dry, I dressed her in her favourite clothes, a green cotton skirt, rubber-soled boots and a soft blue sweater. I wrapped her carefully into the sheepskin rug from the barn. Before I could put her in the car again, I had to clean it out with disinfectant.
It was about 2 a.m. when I drove to Lake Rotorua and parked in the deserted car park. It was a particularly chilly autumn evening. I carried her to the part of the lake that was closest to the forest trail where I’d first seen her, a brave little girl climbing a tree. I unfurled her stiffened body from the rug and gently folded her into the water. It must have been deep in that part, or maybe it was because it was dark, but she disappeared from view almost immediately.
49
Peter, 2019
When Lindy died in 2012, I was distraught. She was the person I was living for. I took extended leave from work. I had plenty of colleagues who had never turned into friends and, even if they had, how could I tell them that the love of my life, my only love, had died. I could not explain this to a bereavement counsellor; the intensity and length of our relationship, the co-dependency. Who would understand it, even if I told the truth? And I could not tell the truth.
I saw no reason to shower or change my clothes. Twice, I went to the lake with the intention of drowning myself, but when I hit the bottom of the lake, Rangi was there, pushing me back up. ‘It’s not your time, e hoa,’ he said, or I think he did. Three deaths on my conscience, Dad, Rangi and Lindy, kēhua, and all three of them came out to play, both in my nightmares and in my waking hours. All of them pleading with me to save them, and I could have saved them all.
I dismantled the barn bit by bit. I took the pieces of furniture and left them on the side of the road in remote areas all over the North Island. I was left with a pile of sheetrock and corrugated iron. I couldn’t be bothered to have it taken away. At least it no longer looked like her home. In the house, though, her presence remained.
The mystery of the unidentified woman found at Lake Rotorua three weeks after she died was a big story. The media reported that she had not drowned, that she had died of appendicitis, that she was fully clothed, that she had been in the water for less than a month. They made much of her missing front tooth. It would be a significant identifying factor, according to the police. Reports commented on the fact that the body of this woman was discovered at the same lake where a young girl had gone missing almost thirty years earlier.
I needed to get away from Rotorua. I had turned down job offers in Wellington and Auckland before but when I eventually went back to work after five months, I put myself forward for those jobs. There was nothing to tie me to Rotorua. Maybe a fresh start was what I needed. Another reinvention. I was appointed Head of Cyber Security at the Aotearoa National Bank in January 2013 in Wellington. The pay and conditions were excellent.
In preparation for the move, I removed what remained of the barn, and scrubbed the house clean with bleach from top to bottom. I kept very little of my father’s belongings, apart from his old fake identification documents. I had lived under a false name for so long, but I needed some back-up in case anybody ever questioned it.
I had promised Lindy that I would never read her notebooks. I tore them up and scattered them on long journeys in the middle of the night.
I sold up in Rotorua and rented a waterfront apartment in Wellington Harbour and tried to settle in, but I could hear people in other apartments, talking, laughing, watching TV together. I could smell their family meals. I bumped into so many people on a daily basis that I felt ill. After just a month, I moved out and bought a small detached house on South Karori Road. I had no neighbours that I could see. My commute to work was a thirty-minute drive.
Work kept me occupied. As usual, I kept my distance from my workmates, and refused their invitations to parties and after-work drinks. I did not join in the water-cooler conversations.
I was desperately lonely. I did some internet dating but I never forged a relationship. I slept with some of the women anyway, if they wanted it. Sex was hasty, physically satisfying but emotionally empty. The need for connection could never be satisfied by strangers.
Almost a year after her death, in January 2013, DNA tests definitively linked Lindy to her surviving brothers, Paul and Gary Weston. Both of her parents had gone to their graves never knowing what had happened to their daughter. Her brothers were left with the burning question of where she had been for twenty-nine years.
I thought about my mother and my sister in Ireland. I googled them regularly. There was a lot of information. True crime websites compared my father to Lord Lucan but my father had not killed anybody. Not directly. Denise Norton had died in a psychiatric hospital a year or so after she was freed from my father’s house. My sister, Mary Norton, had been adopted in England. Conor Geary had gone on the run. I looked everywhere for mention of Conor Geary’s son. Had Denise not told them about me? Had she forgotten about me? Was she mad? Or just terrified? How brainwashed I had been. My father was evil. And I was half evil, at least. I had to live with that. It became my habit to check on updates to the Denise Norton story at least once a month.
In December 2017, a story broke in Ireland. Mary Norton, my sister, had tried to cremate her dead adoptive father. I saw a photograph of her. Tall and strong in a black coat with a jaunty red hat, at Thomas Diamond’s funeral. She looked like me, her nose, the shape of her eyes. Thomas had been my mother’s psychiatrist and he had secretly adopted my sister after Denise’s death. I knew where Mary was, her village, her new name.
A spark lit inside me. I had a chance to do something good. To right a wrong. I remembered tearing that teddy bear from her tiny fingers. I could return it to her. I packaged it carefully in an old shoebox and sent it anonymously with a short note.
Six months later, my father’s real name started popping up in internet searches, and then on the pages of the New Zealand Herald. A very old photo of my father, clean-shaven and without spectacles, taken back in Ireland. An artist’s impression alongside it of what he might look like now in his early eighties. Why were they looking for him now? How had they tied the missing paedophile Conor Geary to New Zealand? Who told them he had been here?
And then I realized – it was me. Sending Toby had alerted them to a Kiwi connection. How stupid of me. I was a cyber security expert. I had always been able to hide my Google search history by setting up privacy software and I wasn’t dumb enough to have any social media presence, but I was the person who had alerted the Irish authorities to New Zealand. Now the police were looking for him. A retired Irish dentist. No mention of a son.
But in August 2018, I got a phone call from the New Zealand police. They wanted to interview me about my father, James Armstrong. They came to my home. It wasn’t hard to pretend to be upset about the circumstances of his death in 1985 in a burning car. They asked me where I’d been born and where he had been born. My story was so well rehearsed after thirty-eight years, they hardly pressed me on any issues. They asked if the name Denise Norton meant anything to me. Had my father ever used any other name? Where had he studied dentistry? Where had I lived in Ireland? Had my father taken any special interest in other children? Why had my father homeschooled me?