The officers then happened to notice six other men beginning to walk towards them in a line. One wore a balaclava and had a pit bull straining on the end of a chain. They also noticed that Hutton had a wooden club tucked down the back of his gumboot.
Another detail that caught their attention was that people had gathered outside every surrounding house. The people stood there and watched. No one called the police.
Meanwhile, the officers’ car was stuck in the mud.
One of the officers said, ‘I thought if we made it home in an ambulance we’d be doing pretty well.’ The other said, ‘It was like something out of a bad western.’ He had been in threatening situations before but ‘this was the closest I thought I was to dying’.
The stand-off lasted about 30 minutes until the cops arrived, tempers calmed, and the people outside every surrounding house went back inside.
In court, Hutton pleaded not guilty to two charges of threatening to cause grievous bodily harm, and wittily remarked that the club was tucked down the back of his gumboot because he’d put it there after attending a kapa haka session.
The judge sentenced him to 200 hours’ community service and warned that the next time he threatened assault he’d send him to prison. He sent him to prison in 2011 for six months after Hutton admitted hitting his girlfriend in the face. Taranaki Daily News: ‘Judge Roberts noted Hutton’s early guilty plea but also noted his previous convictions for assault, assault on a female, rape, breach of parole, and threatening to kill.’
Hutton was bad news. Alan Gurden, the henchman of Blackball, was fucked up. But Kieran Grice of Tangimoana was the nicest vigilante you could ever meet.
Small, witty, impulsive, Kieran was a romantic, someone who felt moved by life. He was also bogan incarnate, with his tattoos of Angus Young (‘I’m mad on AC/DC. Favouritest band in the world’) and black T-shirt tucked into black jeans. He’d just come off working fourteen days straight, welding in the Wellington railyards, when I met him on Friday night at Tangimoana Boating Club. He needed a drink. He said he had to pace himself for his stepdaughter’s 21st the next night. He wasn’t pacing himself. It didn’t look as though anyone was. The club, a members-only bar around the corner from the campground, was enjoying a brisk trade, which is also to say that just about everyone was completely off their faces.
I arranged to meet Kieran at his house the next morning. I got there at about ten and met his partner Brenda, her daughter Nikita, and Nikita’s boyfriend, Michael McKay. They were in the kitchen cooking up strips of fresh venison. Michael said, ‘Go well with one of these.’ He opened the fridge and took out some beers. ‘Can’t hurt,’ said Kieran. We went outside and sat around a picnic table in a kind of garden grotto, fringed with native ferns he’d rescued from earthworks in the bush.
I was surprised he hadn’t suggested we drink in his shed. He loved his shed, which was as enormous as an aircraft. It was his second home, possibly his first. His house was just somewhere to crash, and cook up strips of venison. He said, ‘I lock the shed but I never lock the house.’ He’d set up a bar, and the shed also contained his motorbikes and chainsaws. He talked about his love of machinery and then he said, ‘I really wanted Brenda to buy me a bulldozer for Christmas. I found one that was nice and it was only $30,000, but nah.’
He was fervent about the bulldozer, crazy about Brenda. He said he met her in a pub when she was eighteen and he was eight. ‘She was playing pool and I fell in love with her. I said, “I’m going to marry her.”
‘Time went past, she got married and had two kids, and then I came along and said, “Brenda, you’re the one I want.” I was with someone else, but when I saw Brenda again I thought, oh, cool. I wanted her. I had my mind set. Now I just got to convince her to buy me a bulldozer.’
He talked about his welding work, how he set himself to the task and went for it. ‘I’m known as GC at work. The initials don’t stand for Jesus Christ. They stand for Grumpy Cunt.’ I’d met his mum at the Boating Club the previous night and she’d told me Kieran was dyslexic. He said, ‘I was held back in form two for a year, I was so hopeless at reading and writing. I went to high school for nine months. When I turned fifteen – boom, I was out of there and straight away got a job.’
Michael McKay poked his head around the corner and asked, ‘More beers, boys?’ He threw a couple of bottles our way. I said to Kieran, ‘So. The night in question.’
‘I suppose I was the ringleader,’ he said. ‘I was the one who rallied everyone together. I said, “I’ve had a gutsful. Let’s go grab the little bugger.”
‘Me and a mate next door had been working on cars in the shed – oil changes and servicing, that sort of thing. We went to the boat club for a couple of beers and that’s when I got the phone call from the fire chief saying, “You’re on standby.” He’d heard the little bugger was threatening to burn the shop down.
‘I went around to see Tracy, and Marcus and said, “Jump in the wagon.” I’d heard through the grapevine where the little bugger was hiding.
‘We grabbed him and he’s crying and pleading, “Let me go, let me go” and lashing about continuously. Wouldn’t sit still. I thought, how do we restrain him? And then I thought, shit, I know – cable ties.’
What gave him that idea?
‘You
