Better the Blood

by Michael Bennett, Richard Te Are

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Crime Fiction; Mystery; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

PRE-ORDER RETURN TO BLOOD, THE RIVETING FOLLOW-UP TO THE ACCLAIMED CRIME DEBUT BETTER THE BLOOD, COMING SPRING 2024 

'A compelling, atmospheric page turner with an authentic insight into Māori culture' Val McDermid

A DETECTIVE IN SEARCH OF THE TRUTH.
A KILLER IN SEARCH OF RETRIBUTION.
A CLASH BETWEEN CULTURE AND DUTY.
THE PAST NEVER TRULY STAYS BURIED.
WELCOME TO THE DARK SIDE OF PARADISE. 

Detective Senior Sergeant Hanna Westerman is a tenacious Māori detective juggling single motherhood and the pressures of her career in Auckland’s Central Investigation Branch. When she’s led to a crime scene by a mysterious video, she discovers a man hanging in a hidden room. With little to go on, Hana knows one thing: the killer is sending her a message.

As a Māori officer, there has always been a clash between duty and culture for Hana, but it is something that she’s found a way to live with. Until now. When more murders follow, Hana realises that her heritage and past are the keys to finding the perpetrator.

Especially when the killer's agenda of revenge may include Hana – and her family . . . 
 

 ‘As page-turning as it is eye-opening’ Ambrose Parry

‘A remarkable new detective’ Daily Mail

‘[A] highly addictive read’ My Weekly
 
‘So chilling’ Crime Monthly

‘Opens a unique window onto a fascinating Antipodean society as only world-class crime fiction can’ Deon Meyer

Shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, Ockham New Zealand Book Awards
Finalist for Best First Novel and Best Novel at the 2023 Ngaio Marsh Awards
Longlisted for the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger
Shortlisted for Audio Book of the Year at the Capital Crime Fingerprint Awards

Release date: August 18, 2022

Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

Print pages: 400

Sample

1 A SMUDGE ON THE PAGE OF HISTORY

5 October 1863.

His hands move quickly as he polishes the sheet of silver-plated copper to a perfect mirror finish. He is well practised at this. On a good day, say on a day where he has been engaged to create portraits of a number of members of a wealthy London merchant family, he could easily craft thirty daguerreotypes, perhaps more. In this godforsaken place on the other side of the world, though, it is far more difficult. Engaged by the Queen’s army to make permanent records of the colonial campaign, he finds himself again and again practising his art in the field where he has no permanent studio, no light-safe room where he can prepare the materials.

It is a challenge. To say the least. But he prides himself on his professionalism.

Under cover of a black cloth, the daguerreotypist places the highly polished plate in a sensitizing box containing iodine crystals. He waits patiently for the fumes to react with the silver.

Others there are not so patient.

‘We haven’t got all day for this,’ says the captain of the troop. ‘Hurry up, man.’

The captain is quite drunk and has been so for hours, ever since his men successfully apprehended the captive. If truth be told, he is inebriated far more often than he is sober, a fact his men know well, attested to by the ongoing lack of rum in their evening rations, and while none would dare make a complaint about the situation, the captain’s appetite for the bottle has made him no friends amongst his subordinates.

Under the black cloth, the daguerreotypist quietly counts the seconds for the chemical reaction to take hold sufficiently. Twenty-five elderflower, twenty-six elderflower …

‘What are you up to under that damn sheet?’ the captain demands, impatient to get back to his tent. His bottle is only half finished and there’s little left of the day.

In the darkness under the sheet, the daguerreotypist sighs. Thirty-five elderflower, thirty-six elderflower … For a while, he entertained grander plans for his life. He once had dreams of studying at the Royal Academy Schools, imagining a life as a painter who might reinvigorate and modernize the Flemish style for an adoring British art world. But as the son of a long line of blacksmiths, there was scant hope of either being accepted into the Academy Schools, or being able to afford the extraordinary tuition fees. Faced with the horror of carrying on the family trade of horseshoes and iron gates, he settled instead on this new art form, the imprinting of the light spectrum onto silver plates. Preserving frozen images of life not in oil or watercolour but in copper and mercury and silver. A way for him to make a shilling while using his considerable skills in the play of light on the landscape or on the human form.

It’s not painting. But it will do. Forty-five elderflower.

He emerges from the black cloth. ‘About fucking time,’ says the captain.

The daguerreotypist goes amongst the soldiers, carefully moving and repositioning each of them to most advantageously address the stark New Zealand light as it falls through the branches of the towering tree they stand beneath. ‘This is modern-day alchemy,’ he enthuses, aware that for those unfamiliar with this new technology, the process of creating a daguerreotype can be disarming. ‘A little piece of magic. Your images are captured for all time; this moment will remain long after your bones are dust.’

‘Get a move on,’ slurs the captain. ‘I need a shit.’

‘Rum does that to a man’s bowels,’ one of the soldiers says, being sure it is not loud enough for the captain to hear.

The daguerreotypist returns to his box apparatus, irritated by the captain’s drunken disregard for his art. ‘This is called the lens,’ he explains, indicating the small protrusion that emerges from the middle of the wooden box. ‘When I remove the cap, you must stay perfectly still. Perfectly still. The slightest movement and you will be but a smudge on the page of history.’

Apart from the captain’s rum breath and flushed face, the soldiers have approached this process with gravity, polishing their uniform buttons, cleaning their tall dress boots to a shine.

‘How are we meant to look?’ one of them asks. ‘Do we smile?’

‘Was Christ smiling in The Last Supper?’ snaps the daguerreotypist.

‘He was about to have bloody great nails hammered through his hands,’ the youngest soldier points out. ‘No wonder he wasn’t bloody smiling.’

Ignoring the laughter, the daguerreotypist perseveres. ‘Did Michelangelo carve a fool’s grin onto David’s face? Smiling makes a man an idiot,’ he insists. ‘Smiling is for simpletons. Don’t smile.’

He positions himself by the lens.

‘Ready,’ he warns. ‘Quite still, please. And … hold.’ He removes the cap.

Instantly the exposed image ricochets between a series of mirrors within the body of the wooden box, the light finally falling upside down against the polished silver plate. The photochemical reaction begins to capture the moment.

The six members of the troop, the inebriated captain and his five men, are gathered under a towering pūriri tree on the crest of a volcanic cone overlooking Auckland harbour. As the reaction develops, it is plain that, despite not attending the Royal Academy Schools, the daguerreotypist has an instinctive grasp of the rule of thirds. The image has a sense of proportion that is almost classical.

Below the tree, the six soldiers face the lens in an aesthetically pleasing curving semicircle. Suspended above them, a few yards over their heads, secured to one of the lower branches of the great tree by a length of twelve-strand British Army rope noosed tight around his throat, a seventh person forms the apex of this carefully considered composition.

The dead man is naked, the captive stripped and humiliated before he was executed, retribution for having evaded the pursuing troop for a quite embarrassingly long period. As well as the rope around his neck, his hands are tied in front of his torso, his feet bound at the ankle. The man is Māori, and the tā moko^a tattooed on his face and body show the markings of a high-born leader. He is silver-haired, in his fifties, and the swirls and lines gouged deep into his skin tell a tale of his lineage, his status, the knowledge he carries, the whakapapa^bpassed down to him across generations.

A rangatira, a chief of great stature.

‘How much longer?’ the captain slurs.

‘Do not speak,’ the daguerreotypist barks. ‘You will be a smudge on the page of history!’

After the necessary sixty seconds, the cap goes back on the lens.

2 HANA

One hundred and sixty years later.

Hana’s hands are in the earth. Where she likes them to be. The soil in her garden is ridiculously fertile. Auckland is the first major city built on an active volcanic field since Pompeii, and millennia of violent eruptions have left the gardens of the central suburbs productive and lush. The downside is that a new fissure may form any day without warning; whole neighbourhoods could disappear in hours under an onslaught of lava and ash. Hasn’t happened for a thousand years, but for a pessimist that’s more a reason for worry than assurance. The upside is that inner-city Auckland is a really good place to grow things.

The back yard is an oasis, a retreat to a simpler world than the one Hana walks in every day. Not so much garden as mini rainforest. Cabbage trees, flax, a repurposed goldfish pond bursting with water lilies and cress. There’s a native palm, a towering seven-metre nikau near the edge of the property that the neighbours on that side periodically leave pissed-off messages about, notes that Hana reads, folds up and tosses in the wheelie bin. The nikau is eighty years old, probably more. It’s been resident longer than anyone in this suburb. No way is Hana trimming it or cutting it down just because the recently arrived accountants or architects or whoever they are want a better view.

There’s a buzzing from her phone, in the pocket of the old jeans she wears to garden. She ignores it, instead stands, stretches, wipes her hands on her jeans.

Hana’s eyes are dark, a shade so deep that in some lights it’s hard to know if they are brown or black. The smudges of soil left behind are almost as dark as her eyes. Almost. A creeper vine has tangled its way through the branches of a flourishing stand of kawakawa.^a She’ll need to deal with that. She breaks off a kawakawa leaf, one with lots of holes in it. She remembers in the village she grew up in, far from Auckland, an elder from her tribe taking a group of young kids into the bush, teaching them about the plants of the forest. ‘The caterpillars know which leaves have the most goodness,’ the elder said, in te reo Māori.^b

That was a long time ago.

A lifetime ago.

Hana bites the leaf she’s found, the one shot through with caterpillar holes. The leaf has a familiar peppery tang. It’s good. Really good. She chews as she reaches into her pocket and retrieves the phone. She opens the new text.

Have you found the papers?

She looks at the words. Hana is a problem-solver, someone who faces the most difficult issue head-on and without hesitation. But this question she doesn’t want to answer. She puts the phone back in her pocket.

At the back door, Hana kicks off her muddy shoes.

Her home is utilitarian. Stripped-back and minimalist, the opposite of her jungle-like garden, a place for a woman in her late thirties living happily alone, a woman who values space and order. Upstairs, the spare room is set up as a studio. It’s full of light, and it’s the one room in the house that’s full of stuff. Rolled-up canvases on the floor. Boxes of paints and pencils.

On the walls, pencil sketches. The drawings are accomplished. Careful, precise, skilled. A series of images of a girl, tracking her progress from very young child to a teenager. In the earlier pictures, when the girl is a baby, there are some group sketches – a woman, a man, the child. Then as she becomes a toddler and older, something changes. The images now are just of the girl, or the girl and her mother.

In her room downstairs, Hana retrieves a box from under the bed. She digs through a pile of bills and takes out a legal document from the bottom.

Application for Order Dissolving a Marriage or Civil Union.

She holds the document for a long moment. Then she puts it back under the electricity bills and slides the box back beneath her bed.

There’s a particular spot Hana tries to sit in during a trial. The defendant’s family and friends always take the seats closest to the defendant’s box. Not the most comfortable place for a cop, especially the arresting officer in charge of the investigation. But there’s a sweet place, a few metres distant from the supporters of the accused, where you can see the defendant’s face in profile – it’s surprising how much you can read from the angle of the jaw, the tilt of the head, whether the eyes rise or stay fixed to the floor – at the same time as being able to watch the defence lawyers and the judge.

‘Saved you the good seat, D Senior,’ Stan says, as Hana takes her place next to him. Hana has all the time in the world for the gangly and often awkward detective constable. Stan graduated top of his cohort, but Hana is far more impressed that he knows police college isn’t the real world and marks on a grade sheet are worth less than nothing. He’s smart, a fast learner who actually wants to learn.

The defendant hasn’t been called to the dock yet, but his family are already seated. Like Hana, they’re waiting, the ridiculously expensive QC they’ve employed talking with them quietly. The door of the public gallery opens and a large group enters, quiet and respectful. A young woman, Ria, accompanied by her parents, a middle-aged man and woman, all of them Māori. A dozen or so members of their extended family are there in support. Hana smiles warmly at Ria and her parents as they sit on the opposite side to the defendant’s family. For these three, the complainant and her mother and father, the worst is over and Hana is glad. At the trial, the mother and father watched their daughter give evidence, the young woman bravely refusing the chance to testify by video link, determined that the defendant should see her face as she told the court what he did to her.

Hana assured the parents that it would be hard. It would be awful for Ria. ‘But it will make a difference.’ And it did.

On the stand, Ria was composed. Strong. She told the jury how she responded to the young man’s profile on a dating site, having a good feeling with the back-and-forth messages. He was final year at law school, a representative rugby player, but he didn’t seem arrogant or a dick; he could laugh at himself. She met him at the bar in a fancy hotel, what seemed a safe meeting place. Straight away, she knew she’d made a mistake. The greeting air kiss on the cheek that became an unwelcome real kiss on the lips. He sat beside her, right by her, leg to leg. No sense of personal space. A certain smile on his face that felt less like warmth, more like entitlement. The young woman told the jury she felt like because she swiped right, in his mind there was no question sex was going to happen. But no matter how uncomfortable she felt, and she felt uncomfortable, she has a rule: even if there’s zero chemistry, you have a polite drink. Etiquette. ‘Guys have feelings too,’ she told the court. ‘Least you can do is have one drink. Just a drink.’

One drink was enough. The blood tests later showed the presence of a fast-acting sedative that had made its way into her mojito. It was like an out-of-body experience, she said, it came on fast; she tried to go to the bathroom, but she was struggling to stand. The law student helped her to the elevator, promising he’d take her down to the lobby, order her an Uber, get her to hospital. But when the elevator doors closed, he didn’t hit the down button. He hit up. Up to the room he’d booked in readiness. By the time the elevator door opened again, she couldn’t talk. She could barely walk. He was a good thirty kilograms heavier than her, the big-boned muscles of a blindside flanker; he didn’t break a sweat as he carried her from the elevator to his room. If she’d been able to scratch or punch, it would have made no difference. By the time they reached the door of the room, and he swiped his access card with that same smile on his face, she couldn’t even lift her arm to try …

Hana had watched Ria’s mother and father listening in silence during the trial. Restrained, dignified. The only glimpse of what they were feeling in the tightness with which they clasped each other’s hands. She wondered, if she had been in the same position – if it was her daughter on the stand, if it was Addison giving evidence, telling a room of strangers about how she had been drugged, humiliated, raped – would she be as calm? As dignified as these two? Could she each morning come to a courtroom and nod politely to the blood kin of the man who had done these things, as Ria’s mother and father did, every day of the trial?

That was two months before. It took the jury three quarters of an hour to return a guilty verdict. For Ria and her whānau,^c the worst of it is done. Now it’s the formality, the full stop. The vindication of formal sentencing.

A stirring in the courtroom; various court officials ready themselves, the QC representing the law student takes his position, the crown prosecutor acknowledges Hana. Hana feels a buzzing in her pocket, an incoming email. There’s still no sign of the judge, so she takes the opportunity to check her phone. She opens the email, noticing that the sent-by address is just a series of numbers, an anonymous address. And there’s no message in the body of the email. But there’s a video attached.

She toggles her phone volume to silent. She opens the video.

On her phone screen, video footage plays. It’s hand-held, unprofessional, shot at night, one continuous shot of a derelict apartment building that Hana is familiar with, long-since condemned, taken over in recent years by the homeless and addicted. The locals ironically refer to the place as the Palace. She watches as the image zooms in slowly on the decaying building, finally settling on one particular flat, the last flat on the second level.

‘All rise,’ the court registrar suddenly says. Hana pauses the video.

The judge enters. The defendant is called; he takes his seat, acknowledging the supportive smiles of his family. For a moment he turns and looks straight at Hana. There’s a coldness in his eyes she has seen before. The same coldness as when she came to his family home to arrest him. It’s not pleasant. But Hana is well used to not pleasant, and she’s certainly not letting this guy intimidate her.

Finally the law student turns back towards the judge.

Hana glances again at the strange, stilled image on the video. The Palace. She pockets her phone. She’ll deal with whatever it is later.

‘Patrick Jonathan Thompson, the jury found you guilty of sexual assault,’ says the judge. ‘Stupefaction. Your actions are a cowardly and heinous betrayal of a young woman and her right to engage in a simple social interaction without fear.’

As the judge speaks, Hana notices again how so many of the occupants of a courtroom seem pressed from the same cookie cutter. With police, it’s different. All shades and sizes make their way into the cops, for their own reasons, washing up from all kinds of backgrounds. Like Hana and Stan, sitting here on this bench – Hana, Māori, late thirties, originally from ten kilometres south of nowhere, who came to the big city when her small town started to feel just too small. Stan, mid twenties, freckled blonde and blue-eyed, from a determinedly middle-class big-city family. But the QC and the judge are mirror images, both silver-haired, both cut from the same cloth. From legal dynasties, carrying on the family tradition, looking like they not only went to the same law school, they probably went to the same kindergarten.

‘This court condemns your actions, Mr Thompson,’ says the judge, ‘in the strongest possible terms. However …’

Hana stiffens. However? Until that word, this was an entirely expected preamble. ‘However’ shifts things in a way she can’t fathom. It’s an open-and-shut case, date rape where the offender used a powerful drug to subdue the victim before he sexually violated her – how is there a ‘however’?

‘However,’ the judge continues, ‘in sentencing you, this court takes into account various submissions presented by your counsel. We note the compelling commendations from your law school professors. The great promise for your future career in the legal fraternity. Your considerable prospects as a national representative rugby player.’

Hana can feel to one side the victim’s mother and father, their bewilderment, where is this going? To the other side, a confident smile growing on the law student’s face. ‘You’re fucking kidding me,’ Stan says under his breath.

‘I am persuaded it would be manifestly unjust to impose a period of incarceration that would most certainly destroy both your legal and your sporting careers,’ the judge says. ‘You are sentenced to twelve months home detention, with permanent name suppression in all forms of media.’

Hana watches as the student’s family celebrate. Thompson’s father takes his son in his arms, a bear hug. And she sees something else.

For a moment, Thompson’s mother looks towards the victim and her family; her eyes meet Ria’s eyes, registering the younger woman’s confusion, her bewilderment, the sentencing a whole new pain and trauma to add to what has gone before. She looks at Ria for a long moment, with what seems to be something like an apology in her eyes.

Then she turns away and embraces her son.

The crown prosecutor comes to Hana in the gallery. ‘This isn’t happening.’

But it is. It has.

Afterwards, the crown prosecutor and Hana take Ria and her family to a conference room within the court building, the prosecutor doing her best to console them, telling them she will appeal the ridiculous leniency of the sentence, she won’t let this go. As they have throughout a legal process they can take no active part in, but which has had such a profound effect on their lives, the mother and father sit in silence, Ria’s mother holding her daughter’s hand, some of the family around them crying quietly. The muffins and takeaway coffees that Stan had fetched sit untouched on the table.

Hana says, quietly, ‘It’s wrong. So wrong. I can’t believe it.’

Looks pass between the family members. Ria’s mother turns to Hana. ‘If it was the other way around,’ she says. ‘If it was a Māori man who did this, not some privileged rich white kid. If the victim was a Pākehā^d girl. You think that scumbag would be going home? Ibelieve it. My daughter, she’s been raped a second time.’

Hana stays silent. There are no words that can help this family deal with the injustice of what just happened. Ria’s mother stands, her family gathering around her. ‘People like us, we get through.’ She straightens her cardigan. Holding her dignity. She takes her daughter by the arm, leading her from the room.

At the door, Ria turns to look at Hana.

‘You said it would make a difference,’ she says.