CHAPTER 40
I had hands holding both of mine by then, Tom reaching over to squeeze my shoulder, as another witness took the stand.

“Verity Hallam, doctor, St David’s hospital trauma team”

Once again, we were treated to a catalogue of horrors, including that little touch I had missed when I looked at my lover’s legs. ‘Fucked’ had been my thought, but how had I missed the tyre marks?

‘Verity’, my young doctor, broke down in the witness box, as she recounted what she had found and worked so hard to repair. They gave her a few minutes to recover, and then it was back to the nastier questions.

“Doctor Hallam, the paramedic who handed Ms Meads’ care over, Jennifer Medi Bradley: you remember her?”

“Oh god yes”

“In your professional view, how would you rate her standard of work in this case?”

“Seriously? You are trying to blame her for her lover’s death?”

“Please, Dr Hallam, your professional assessment”

“Right. Well, I have listed everything we were presented with, and the usual word is catastrophic, and that is an understatement. Angela’s legs alone were beyond saving, and her spine was also wrecked, and there were so many other injuries that, to be honest, she should have been DOA, dead on arrival. We were presented with a living person, just barely, but still alive, and that was entirely down to Jennifer’s care and dedication. We were the ones who failed, if anyone did. I don’t believe there was any failure, to be honest; we just had an impossible task. Even her handover was utterly professional, apart from one slip”

“Which was?”

“She had told me the next of kin had been informed, and I was stupid enough to ask where they were. She said something like, well, pardon my French, ‘Standing next to you in this fucking uniform’. I would suggest, given the circumstances, it was understandable, and I certainly took no offence”

There were a few more witnesses to come, including Barry and Bryn, who made a point of singing my praises, and a very tearful PCSO: “How she could be like that, just so calm, I could never do that”

The chairman, judge, coroner, whatever, finally closed the hearing and withdrew, and two days later, we got the verdict: death due to road traffic collision, further verdict reserved until the criminal trial was over. In essence, he had simply recognised that the only reason for her death was the uncontested fact that she had been hit by a car. Fault, blame, they were to be sorted later. The five bastards who were to blame remained on remand. I went back to work.

I wasn’t being callous, but simply needed that focus to my life again, something to lift me away from endless grieving. I also moved back into my flat, where I spent a couple of hours staring at a small collection of clothes and toiletries gathered from bathroom and bedside cabinets.

I got so drunk on the first night back that I fell asleep in an armchair.

Work started off as a series of ‘NHS Taxi’ shifts, obviously there to spare me from the risk of stress, and then we were into the trial proper.

I will give credit to the defence, at least for sheer brass neck. Their tactics consisted of a series of attempted trump cards, each one shot down cleanly by the prosecution man

There was no proof the defendants were driving the cars at the point of impact, only that they had been at the garage, and someone else could have stepped in at any point. Sergeant Humphries gave the timescale based on his camera finds, and showed it to be nonsense.

There was nothing to show who was driving the Golf, so they couldn’t be proved to have killed Angela. The judge himself closed that one down, reminding the shits that they were being tried on a basis of ‘joint enterprise’, and it was, after all, a bit difficult to race a single car.

It was clearly a case of medical incompetence on my part, which was when I realised what exactly the coroner had been doing when he had closed that one down in advance.

That was it, in essence. The jury took four hours to cover all the charges, which had expanded steadily over the investigation, and it was a clean sweep of guilty. The judge called me forward first for a Victim Impact Statement, but I got partway through before I folded, and Amina stepped forward to complete its reading. Tania read a composite VIS for her family, and I was even more broken than I had thought possible.

“Your honour, ladies and gentlemen, thank you. We have had to come a long way, but we take family seriously. Our daughter was Angela Hinemoa. I chose that middle name to remind her of her culture, and it was prophetic. Hinemoa was a heroine who crossed great waters to find her lover, and that is what our daughter did, for she found a lover, our new sister-daughter Jennifer, a woman of true heart and spirit that we have welcomed into our hearth and hearts, our family and hapu. That these should be separated purely because two complete failures decided to try and pretend that they were men is an offence to my soul.

“Our culture is one of responsibility, of facing adversity as a warrior should, of self-reliance as well as comradeship. It is not about trying to make up for obvious physical deficiencies by using a wreck of a car as a substitute for real manhood. Our Angela Hinemoa, our daughter-woman, was someone of courage, someone who ran at danger rather than running away and hiding. Jennifer, our other daughter-woman, our new sister-daughter, she is another like that, a healer of great courage. They have both lost each other by the actions of two boys who hide behind their mothers.

“We will take our daughter Angela Hinemoa, and we will see her on her way with songs and stories, and we will never forget her, but we will still grieve. We have our traditions, our ways, but people are people, and a child should never go before their parents. Finally, I will explain something to the defendants if I may”

The judge looked intrigued.

“Please do”

“Monroe, you laughed at this, because you are uneducated, unmanly. This gesture”

She suddenly bent slightly forward, eyes open wide, tongue out, one arm up and the other down, holding the pose for a few seconds.

“Think on this, Monroe. Think of who we are, of our history, and that means ‘I will kill you, and then eat you’ Laugh now, pakeha paoka roa”

That was it for us, for our judge adjourned ‘for reports’ rather than sentence, and when Dai caught up with us outside, he simply said, “They keep digging up more charges, Jen, so His Honour is hedging. Inquest verdict will be out tomorrow. The amended one, aye?”

So it was, and it now read ‘unlawfully killed’. We started the final arrangements for the funeral, during which I had a sudden memory prompt.

“Tania?”

“Yes, love?”

“What you said to that shit in court? What did it mean?”

“White-skinned long pig, love. You know what long pig is; my grandpa said it was good eating… or so he’d heard from his grandpa”

How the hell she had avoided a charge of ‘threat to kill’, god alone knew.

We gathered at the Methodist place on Crwys Road in Cathays, Paul having some sort of inside link to the vicar or whatever he was called, and had a sort of Christian service, before gathering round an open grave in Cathays cemetery. Half the Smugglers clientele seemed to be there, including a couple of young men with Sergeant Gould, Lil, Ox, Marlene, Hira and Amina, most of Heidi’s staff, our young visa man, so many coppers, including Sammy Patel, Debbie Wells and about eight of her girls, my own colleagues, and then, just as the clock counted down, there was a rumble of large bikes, and Elf came walking in with Wildcat and another woman Elf introduced as Rockrose. She was carrying a long, slim package. Behind the women, a group of men spread out around the boundary of the cemetery.

Wildcat walked directly to Tania and Rae, where Wildcat said something too quiet to hear, before taking the package and handing it to the woman she clearly saw as the elder, the matriarch.

“When we go to the halls of the brave, we go armed, as I know Elf told you. We take an axe with us on that journey. One of my old man’s club is a Maori, and he sends his best, but that this is a day for sister-women, not men. He also sent you this, which he carved himself several years ago. You may wish to pass it to your daughter; I make no conditions, because this is your family, your ways, not mine. If I am intruding, I will go”

Tania pursed her mouth, shaking her head.

“No. Your sister there, that Elf, she honoured our daughter. Be welcome”

She unwrapped the object, which was like a flat-bladed spear about five feet long, covered in carving.

“Ah! A taiaha. This is a good thing, and your brother has clearly put a lot of his spirit into it. Please thank him for us”

“It is yours, grandmother, either for you or for your daughter to take with her”

“Then we will use it now, and she can have it later for her journey. This has mana. LISTEN TO ME!”

The three kiwis suddenly moved into line, and began a sort of haka, the spear thing going through complex motions in Tania’s hands, transforming from an interesting piece of carving to an obviously lethal weapon in seconds.

The haka finished, and Tania began to chant loudly, alternating English and Maori.

“These are the generations of Angela Hinemoa Meads!”

There were also songs from Tihani and Rae, before people were invited to speak of Angela, and to my surprise, it wasn’t just what could be called the inner circle, but anyone who wanted to add an anecdote, or just a comment, and the poor gravediggers went off for lunch before we were anywhere near done. Eventually, though, we were through, and Tania actually climbed down on top of the coffin to lay the spear thing there, ready for Angela’s use, Wildcat nodding in approval. Barry and Dai Gould hauled the suddenly elderly woman out of the grave before Rae nodded to the cemetery workers, and four of us threw that token handful of dirt onto my lover.