A Sailor's Honour Read Free

Pierre de Villiers.
    Until the phone rang.
    Auckland 2009 did not look like Auckland 2008. Not at all. The National Party had won the elections the previous November, as predicted by the polls, and John Key was the new prime minister. Helen Clark was all but forgotten and the man she had once called insipid was now at the helm of Labour. Labour’s sins while in power were being exposed one after the other, often by Labourites who were not only dissatisfied with the new order, but also with the new regime within their party. Failure to manage the economy, proliferating and overlapping government agencies staffed by party apparatchiks, MPS living high on the hog while admonishing their constituents to tighten their belts, some even renting porn videos for the public account while on government business.
    Pierre de Villiers 2009 was also not the Pierre de Villiers of 2008. Not at all. His cancer had been cured, as far as cancer can ever be completely cured, by the combination of the surgery in Auckland and the radiation therapy in Durban. The last blood test had failed to detect any PSA – prostatic specific antigen. All he now needed was treatment for the side effects of treatment he wouldn’t have required if the original treatment – the surgery – had been carried out competently. But the fact that there was no detectable PSA did not mean that the cancer had been defeated.
    The successful resolution of the prime minister’s case and the arrest and conviction of the Urewera plotters had resulted in De Villiers’s rapid promotion to Detective Inspector. He now headed the International Crimes Unit where – after working there for nearly ten years – he had previously felt unwanted and an outsider. But after tracing the Bushman arrow which had been used in the attempted assassination – that’s how the papers still referred to it – of the prime minister and connecting it to a man in Auckland, the very man engaged in training the Tuhoe tribe for an uprising, De Villiers had become the golden boy of the New Zealand Police and had been promoted to his current rank. In the process, he had leapfrogged several colleagues who now worked, without any grudge, under his command. De Villiers commanded with a light hand, preferring to let his men and women use their own judgment, to follow their instincts. What use was a team of twelve if only one did the thinking? He was content to leave the footslogging and stalking to them too, directing operations from his desk. His days of running after criminals were all but over; the side effects of his treatment made it difficult in any event.
    Yet, on this occasion, De Villiers was in the field, watching a house on the golf estate in Beachlands, east of metropolitan Auckland. It was not the kind of place one would expect a long-haired and tattooed gangster riding a Harley-Davidson to live, but there he was on the sixteenth green, taking his time over a three-foot putt. The New Zealand market for the product of the local criminals was too small to generate the kind of profits necessary to sustain the lifestyle the biker enjoyed. The other three members of the foursome, now watching in silence as the biker lined up the putt, gave the game away. De Villiers knew their details, courtesy of the Immigration Service. They were Chinese who had arrived from Hong Kong via Mexico. That meant drugs, and that meant international trafficking and money laundering. Work for the International Crimes Unit which ended on De Villiers’s desk.
    When he had seen enough, De Villiers started his unmarked Holden and drove home. It was too late to drive all the way back to his office only to have to drive home again when he arrived, so he went home early. The rain arrived before he did, a sudden downpour. Auckland weather: clear one moment, foul the next.
    He found his wife in the kitchen. She had her back to him and was busy stacking plates in the dishwasher.
    â€˜Where