Another of his books, The Beat to the Beehive, was reviewed thus by historian Michael King: ‘Outstandingly bad … Laughable … Sinister.’ King concluded: ‘Keep your eye out for an ex-policeman with near psychopathic inclinations. And avoid him.’
Know thy ghoul. But who was this strange rooster who now talked gravely of a ‘constitutional crisis’ at a garden centre in Remuera, where crazy old dames creaked out of their Mercs? He spoke of himself as ‘the new Ross Meurant’. He was Lazarus among the gardenias. But I suspected he was doing what he’d always done: scaremongering, spuriously.
‘All of a sudden,’ he said, ‘the police have the power, through this anti-terrorist legislation, to take away our rights before our very eyes. If they can get away with that, where to next? I mean, maybe they won’t like who you vote for. Maybe they won’t like who I vote for. Who knows?’
Meurant now lives in Prague. He said he works in corporate and agricultural trade: ‘Everything’s up for sale in eastern Europe. There are always enormous opportunities where there is deregulation and privatisation.’ At least his economic principles remained consistent: ‘I think Roger Douglas saved the planet.’
Similarly, his reason for selling his infamous aluminium PR24 police baton from the 1981 tour on Trade Me: ‘I’m a capitalist.’ He said he got $20,000 for the ‘stick’, which is now in a museum in South Africa.
This was a Meurant you could recognise. Still, it seemed entirely reasonable when he said, ‘I’m pleased with me that I grow and evolve and change my opinion. I’d hate to be thinking as I did when I was a detective on the drug squad.’ And you could very easily say it was brave of Meurant to speak out against the cops. ‘They’ve always been the same,’ he said, ‘always stretching information to their own ends.’
He gave an example when I asked him about his role on June 23, 1970. He knew instantly what that date meant: as a constable on his first homicide, Meurant searched the garden outside Harvey and Jeanette Crewe’s house. He said, ‘I’m the guy who raked that bit of dirt where subsequently the partial bullet was found.’ This was the cartridge that had led to the conviction of Arthur Allan Thomas, who was later pardoned for the Crewe murders and the cartridge ‘discovery’ discredited.
Meurant continued, ‘I gave evidence in court to say I sieve-searched that garden methodically, exactly as the manual said, and there was no bullet there. Pressure came on me, from the highest authority, to say that I’d actually been careless and that’s why the bullet was subsequently found. I remember saying to one very senior officer that you can’t seriously be expecting me to go and say, “Well, maybe I did cock up and missed it.” There’s no doubt the bullet in its cartridge case was planted.’
As for the ‘data’ collected by police to obtain warrants for the seventeen people arrested in the anti-terrorist raids – he doubted that it amounted to anything more than loose talk, perhaps a few unlawful firearms offences.
Meurant has long experience of the culture he now wants to damn. You might describe him as a credible witness. But I doubted his claims that he had been exorcised of his demons by attending university. It was as though he was saying he had been raised by wolves, but education brought him into civilised thought. If he really had changed his views, then something else, something more intimate, was the agent.
Meurant told a story. It began as the reason he left New Zealand for Europe. He said, ‘What I noticed most when I finished parliament was the phone stopped ringing. It took five years for me to hit the bottom. I went out and bought a farm, taught kids how to ride horses, and kind of atrophied. I didn’t realise at the time it was taking a toll on my self-esteem.
‘I was on a contract in Australia in 2003, and all of a sudden I started to cry. And I thought that was just bloody stupid. Ross Meurant doesn’t cry. But I cried, and I couldn’t stop crying. I got off the plane back over here and spent some time with my kids, and they encouraged me to go see a shrink. Which I did. Three sessions, at three hundred dollars a pop.
‘He was able to explain to me where I was at. He said, “You were a hotshot in the police, a hotshot as an MP, and all of a sudden you’re nothing, you’re nobody, and it’s taken you a little while to work out that you’re not in control of things as you were before.” And I’d just lost the farm through a second matrimonial cock-up …
‘So that’s the human side of why I left. I am human. I did cry a lot. And then I thought, well, I’ve got to do what I know I’m best at, what I’ve got experience at, so that’s how I ended up, on my own initiative, flying into Russia. I made contact with somebody I knew from the days when I was a director of the Russian bank Prok down here. And all of a sudden the mists cleared for me in respect of my own personal problems.’
I asked him whether he had been describing depression. ‘Oh yeah. I mean, I couldn’t drink a glass of water without feeling like I was going to drown. I was going nowhere, and nothing was happening.’ Was he happy now? ‘Never been happier. I enjoy where I’m living, I’ve got an entrepreneurial career. I look at some of my peers who retired from police, and I get the feeling they’re just hanging around waiting to die.’ A sense of purpose was important to him, wasn’t it? ‘Yes. And that’s probably why I ended up a crying mess.’ And then
