It was 40 years after the killings, 30 years since Justice Taylor’s report – the case had become Des’s life’s work. ‘People say, “Oh, it’s wonderful you’re doing this for your brother.” It’s nothing to do with my brother. I’m talking about an unsolved double murder.’ Sir Bob Jones, who urged Muldoon to consider the Thomas case, attended the retrial and thought the charges were a travesty. His verdict on Arthur was, ‘A prize bunny.’
Des Thomas, though, was quick-witted and watchful. He had led a life on the edges of his obsession. He drank at the Last Post most Thursday nights. He delivered natural bore water from his property (‘I’ve just had a real busy three months because of the drought’) and sold firewood. He had a gorgeous girlfriend, whom he introduced as Blondie. She said, ‘I’ve had to live with it. It’s Des’s thing. My feeling is the killer is someone no one has ever thought of.’
Mercer was the love song of Caesar Roose. When Roose founded a shipping company he became the town’s chief employer and benevolent tsar. Everyone owed something to him. In 1921 he transported Princess Te Puea and her people from Mangatāwhiri to the new Tūrangawaewae Marae. A young Arthur Allan Thomas worked as a boilermaker in his shipyards.
Roose followed the river, building cargo vessels and luxury launches, and dredges to tickle treasure from the riverbed: the finest sand in New Zealand was Mercer sand. He bought trucks and trailers. He owned a timber mill, a quarry, a coal mine. For about 40 years Mercer was in its pomp. Roose sold the business – the new owners soon gave up on shipping – and died in 1967. His name lives on: the bridge from Mercer to Pukekawa is called the Caesar Roose.
‘Look what I’ve found,’ Caesar Roose’s daughter Jeanette Thomas said at her marvellous home in Pukekawa. She presented a pair of mounted silver scissors, their jaws wide open. She had snipped the ribbon with them to open the bridge in 1972. She said, ‘Te Puea’s second husband told me once, “Your father kept Mercer from slipping into the water.”’ At 76, Jeanette was the curator of her father’s achievements; she spoke of nothing else at ‘Rio Vista’, the house she shared with her husband Bill. Earlier that day Des Thomas had said, ‘Say hi to Uncle Bill and Auntie Jeanette when you see them.’
Bill sat in an armchair with a rug over his knees. A big, rangy man, he got up to give a guided tour of the house – the lovely cedar panelling, the balcony that looked over the river. Out the front was a giant cactus. We stood in darkness on the balcony and I asked about the terrible years when Arthur Thomas was in prison. He said that his brother, Arthur’s father, had never stopped fighting. ‘Strongest man I ever knew.’ Then he talked about breaking in the farm. ‘Two drums of 2,4,5-T every year to spray the gorse.’ There were gunshots in the dusk. Wise’s New Zealand Index, 1945 edition, said of Mercer, ‘Good duck and swan shooting.’ Jeanette on Mercer: ‘It was always known as the three Rs: river, railroad and Roose.’
A very jolly and beautifully spoken woman, she had driven from St Heliers in Auckland, where she was helping look after her grandchildren, for the interview. There was a vast oil painting of her family on the wall – Bill and Jeanette and their six healthy and wealthy children, posed on hay bales. The walls also included heroic photos of the Roose shipyards and the Roose fleet. She brought out a photo of the kauri house on Tuoro Island in Mercer, where her father was born. Willows and silt have since covered the channel, and the island is now part of the west bank of the Waikato River. The house was destroyed by fire in the 1960s.
The house in the picture bore a striking resemblance to one in a deceased estate advertised for sale opposite the Mercer Cheese Shop. Jeanette flung her hands up to her face in horror. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘The cheek of those people! It’s not the same house at all, of course, but they used a photo of Dad’s home to advertise it. I went straight down there to hear an apology. I thought, I can’t have this. The whole thing was that he was born on an island and needed to do everything by boat. That’s why he knew so much about the river. To have people think his house was in town! I was so furious I decided to buy it.’ She bought the house? ‘Well, you see, they’d started the auction when I got there.’
She made a vague reference to turning the house into a Caesar Roose museum. But two fabulous exhibits have been open to the public for the past 30 years: the old rusted and beached dredge and old rusted and beached launch on the banks of the river between Mercer and Meremere. Both had belonged to her father. Both are familiar to motorists and train passengers travelling beside the river. Both are reminders of that fond subject: What Mercer used to be.
Now, disassembled by the motorway and bullied by the service centre, the town was a vacuum. Inevitably something had rushed to fill it in the distinctive shape of Joe Heta. Joe lived on the former Mercer reserve beside the river. It looked as though he had set up a commune – there were three buildings on the bare unfenced property, including the old Mercer Town Hall, raised and trucked to this forlorn spot – but apart from several dogs, including two white bichon frisé, he
