Nicholas’s earliest memory of Schollum, who had been a family friend: ‘You couldn’t ask for a better bloke. Just a hell of a nice guy.’ And now? ‘The difficulty I have with Schollum is that even though he did a couple of bad things, he didn’t do bad, bad things. He was the one who made it stop. He said, “That’s enough, guys.” In some ways I’m thankful for that. I know that sounds really weird …’
Was Shipton more straightforward? ‘Yeah. You could almost say that Schollum was two people; Shipton was an evil monster from start to finish.’
Rickards? ‘Same as Shipton. Evil monster.’
Nicholas looks healthier now than at the trial. She spoke in a flat, slightly honking voice, crouching and smoking by the fire, not keen to make eye contact – but I was nervous, too, to finally meet her. When I covered her trial, I thought of her as someone miserable and damaged, someone feral and furtive.
Who was she really? ‘I’m big-time average,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing special about me at all.’ But this was the woman who refused name suppression to make her accusations all the more real, who put herself through a traumatic trial (‘It was beyond that’) to seek justice.
She said, ‘Oh, it’s quite simple actually, Steve. I was pissed off. I put all this trust and faith into a cop [Dewar] who looked as though he was helping me. He never hurt me physically, not like the others. To then find out that he screwed us big-time to cover his own skin and that of his mates – I got angry. It took over my life.’
What was her life like before Kitchin? ‘Happily married with three daughters, living on a couple of acres, milking cows and enjoying life.’ Still happily married, now with a baby boy – ‘My little mistake’ – but still enjoying life? ‘I’m getting back there now.’
In the 1990s, Nicholas went to court to allege that she was raped by a policeman in Murapara when she was thirteen. The jury – with the help of Dewar’s meddling – delivered a verdict of not guilty. I asked her about the Murapara sex crimes, and she talked about a shattered childhood, a terrible secret, the awful half-life of the abused. It reminded me of a remark made by John Haigh, Rickards’s lawyer, at her trial. He said that during the time of the alleged rapes in Rotorua, Nicholas was eighteen, old enough to resist. ‘She wasn’t,’ he said, ‘a child.’
I always thought that was heinous. Nicholas said of her abuse in Rotorua, ‘When the bad things were happening, I was that frightened little girl at the age of thirteen. I always went back to that.’
The ‘bad things’ – she clung to that understatement a lot, twelve times to be exact, during our afternoon in Hawke’s Bay. It was so childish. I suppose it was the authentic voice of trauma. She said, ‘I’m like a dog with a bone; you don’t want to give it up, until you can’t chew it anymore and you’ve got to bury it. But this bone will never be buried. This will never be settled.’
[September 30]
18 Bob Parker
Celebrity Mayor Island
Strange times in Christchurch. Very bad people have very amusingly defaced the billboards of mayoral candidate Bob Parker to make him look like Simpsons character Sideshow Bob. But he is not amused. ‘It’s a smear campaign,’ he says. ‘Join the dots,’ he says. ‘The dots would lead to the key opponent I have in this campaign … My opponents wrote me off on day one of their campaign as an MC and a TV quiz-show host, whereas they had an intellectual.’
You might remember Parker from such shows as Skellerup Young Farmer of the Year, Miss Universe New Zealand, and This Is Your Life. As a presenter, he was genial, beaming, popular, quite absurd. He is now fifty-four. A tall charming man, honey-voiced and intense, he moved with a kind of lascivious grace; he gave the impression of a voluptuary, feeding on sensual pleasures.
We met at the downtown apartment he shares with his slender, dark-eyed wife Joanna, thirty-seven. Nor’-wester winds had stripped the city’s cherry blossoms to pink shreds, but it was a warm spring afternoon and the Port Hills were a lovely pale lime. Parker’s balcony gave a magnificent view of his city – and it really could be all his on election day. Parker is standing for mayor as an independent; he is top of the polls by a comfortable margin, eighteen percent ahead of his ‘key opponent … an intellectual’, Megan Woods of the Progressive Party. ‘It would be,’ he said, ‘the ultimate job in my life.’
His childhood was outside his apartment window – the Heathcote Valley. He talked for a long time about his earliest memories. ‘Down the end of our street was the malt works. The whistle would go at four-thirty, it may have been four, and …’ He talked for a long time about his grandfather Jack, a plumber who handed down the trade to Parker’s father. He talked for a long time about his parents. He talked for a long time about everything. He was such an emotional character. He had sudden little furies. ‘Am I boring you?’ he said, when I interrupted one epic tale. No, I lied.
But he also told good stories. One in particular was like a moving episode of This Is Your Life, starring Bob Parker. I had asked him about another TV programme. With luck, you might not remember Parker from
