the girls at one level. But he didn’t feel as though he had lost anything in those relationships. Even though he attacked them, it didn’t make a great deal of difference from his perspective.

‘When he was about 17, he was seen by a psychiatrist. He wrote in his report, “Dixon seems devoid of moral or social conscience.” I think that’s probably right.’

‘Will he have therapy in prison?’

‘No.’

‘Ought he?’

‘If he develops more symptoms, or remains psychotic, he’ll be treated. But in terms of actual therapy to change his view of the world, of trying to undo years of abuse and neglect, then, no, that’s not going to occur in prison.’

I said, ‘That’s an appropriately dismal way to end our interview.’

Dr Goodwin said, ‘It’s a dismal story. It’s sordid. It’s a sordid little affair.’

That morning, when Justice Potter sentenced him to life imprisonment, Dixon clapped his hands, and shouted: ‘Bring back the electric chair!’ He wore a smile on his smooth, gormless face. The grinning idiot left the courtroom, and was led down a narrow corridor. They really may as well have strapped him in then and there and released the volts.

Chapter 4

That spring: ‘Mr X’

1

For four weeks one spring, a sad-eyed, moustachioed Iranian apple-picker and a cheerful Maori woman who managed an escort agency were forced to sit together in the High Court of Auckland, jointly charged with conspiring to supply methamphetamine, a.k.a. P. It was pitiful and depressing and I couldn’t tear myself away.

The public gallery was empty, except for two detectives involved in the arrest and an occasional family member of the two accused. I sat in on the trial by chance. I turned up at the High Court one day to see if a case caught my fancy. I came across a friend who had previously worked in journalism. His appearance — he was a dapper, elegant figure, with silver hair and an ironic smile — beat all the odds by managing to equal his splendidly Victorian name: Hedley Mortlock. He had found work as a court registrar. Black gowns suited him. I asked him whether there was anything juicy marked down for the day. No, he said, it was business as usual. He was right. I did the rounds, walking in and out of trials, until I stopped in at Courtroom 7 for the trial of Gholemreza Nobakht and Gina Rye.

The two ‘conspirators’, according to the prosecution, intended to supply 768 grams of crystal meth. Police valued the haul at $750,000, at roughly $1000 a gram. ‘It was a good intercept,’ said the detective in charge. But I only became aware of that later.

I arrived mid-way through the trial. As soon as I took my seat in the public gallery, a prosecutor told the jury that he was going to play a film. You could describe it as secret footage. You could also describe it as very dull, but that would be a wild exaggeration — it was so entirely boring that I was glued to my seat, waiting for something, anything, to happen. Nothing happened.

The film was a 70-minute surveillance tape of Nobakht and another man at Auckland International Airport’s arrivals lounge. They, too, were waiting; they, too, experienced the agony of the viewer, because nothing happened. Nobakht ate a burger at McDonald’s. He was a fastidious diner. A strong man, slow in his movements, there was almost something dainty about the way he unpeeled the wrapper. His friend sat with him, rolled a couple of Park Royal cigarettes, left, came back. They both looked around, a lot. The friend used his mobile phone, a lot. They hardly talked to one another. On and on the 70-minute film continued, its grainy images projected onto a screen opposite the jury, its apparently meaningless narrative brightened by cameo appearances of other people at the arrivals lounge — a black man poring over a street map, a fat woman wolfing down a burger and fries without pause or napkins.

Hooked by the riddle of that private screening, I stayed on until the trial finished three weeks later, writing down the unimportant details of an unimportant trial, my feet up, sharpening pencils and allowing the shavings to fall on the carpet, sloping outside now and then to smoke a cigarette beneath the magnolia tree in the front courtyard, then sloping back inside into the warmth of the courtroom — yes, I was quite comfortable, thanks. When the trial ended, my troubles began.

I worked for the Sunday Star-Times. What sort of story could I write? I wasn’t providing the newspaper with any kind of scoop; it had no particular drama, no moral lesson; it fell far short of the standards required of sensationalism.

The opening sentence of my story read, ‘An Iranian living in Japan walks into a bar in Bangkok with another country on his mind: New Zealand.’ I was very taken with the racy tabloid flavour of that introduction — but it doomed the rest of the story to follow in its footsteps, as I set out to attempt a dramatic narrative of international connections and high intrigue. It was the worst story I wrote in five years employed at the newspaper, a jangling mess — like all racy tabloid prose, it read like bad fiction, an inexpert, constipated thriller (sample: ‘The mule was turned into a pigeon’), its eager revelations tugging at the reader’s sleeve to get their attention.

But what drew me to the trial, kept me pinned to my seat, was its sheer ordinariness. I was seduced by the flat, seedy New Zealandness of the crime, by the familiar misery of courtroom justice. It was so entirely average, because it was exactly the kind of trial that had moved in like a plague across the high courts of New Zealand. The war on P was hell on court staff.

In 2003, the government introduced legislation that promoted the drug from Class B to Class A; almost immediately, P trials began to overload the court system.

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