‘I hesitate to describe Mr King’s living quarters as “underground”,’ a police officer told the High Court at King’s trial, but that’s exactly what it was: an underworld, created and maintained by King, swanning around in his robes and his slippers, pale, diseased, a social outcast, once an important Auckland architect, clever and successful, with peculiar interests in punk rock and obvious interests in young girls, now paying desperate Maori street-kids — Nikita, her mate, runaways beyond number — to fuck him in exchange for money, shelter, and cheese on toast.
It carried on for nearly 30 years. All the Monday nights, snubbed at Gow Langsford; the plane trees on Constitution Hill dropped their leaves in autumn, sweet fruit fell from the Moreton Bay fig trees in summer; underground, in King’s grotto, six generations (‘waves’, as King put it) of street-kids came and went. All girls, under 18, some as young as 12. They crashed the night, tagged the walls, smoked his pot; one girl lived with him for five years; another miscarried his baby. ‘I’m trying to help a whole bunch of people,’ he told the court. He looked after them, he said. Fed them, gave them ‘allowances’, formed relationships. They were, he said, ‘The Family’.
As head of the household, King was a paedophile. He was found guilty of 16 charges of sex offending — mostly, ‘receiving commercial sexual services from persons under 18’. Who was this creature? ‘Oh God,’ he told the court, ‘I had a charmed life.’
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He’d brushed out the corkscrew curls, and wore his white hair long and straight in court. At the verdict, he dressed in moccasins, baggy olive trousers, and a wool jacket with a button missing at the stomach; he had a faded elegance about him, a sense of style, although the fashion belonged to the 1980s. He contemplated the jury coming in, and yawned. He looked medicated.
His lawyer, Nick Wintour, passed on to him my request for an interview. King was eager, but the Corrections Department refused. Prison guidelines state: ‘The department has a policy to facilitate media access when the resulting exposure will provide a positive focus on rehabilitation.’ King wasn’t interested in rehab, remorse, and all the rest of it; he’d had his day in court, when he took the stand in his own defence, and seized the opportunity to rave.
He was like some sort of Humbert Humbert, the cultured paedophile from Nabokov’s Lolita, with his courtly manner and archaic little pleasantries: ‘Oh boy! Goodness gracious me!’ It was a manic performance. The judge later complimented Wintour for the way he handled his ‘difficult client’. No one believed much of what King said, but a lot of it was factual.
He told people who knew him in the 1980s that he came from a privileged background in Christchurch. They believed that, but were dubious when he claimed he designed the School of Architecture building at the University of Auckland. It was hard to reconcile — King had already gone to seed.
He raved in the High Court: ‘I graduated with design honours and they asked if I would design the School of Architecture, I know it sounds like some sort of fantasy that any young architect would love to get involved, but that’s amazing how that came about but I don’t think we’ve got time to go into all that sort of thing but anyway I ended up designing it, and suddenly it’s published around the world and I’m a famous architect . . .’
Auckland University has no record of King graduating with honours. And, although there is no record that his design was published anywhere in the world, it’s true that King was responsible for the impressive and ambitious School of Architecture conference centre, in 1978, when he joined top Auckland firm Kingston Reynolds Thom and Allardice (KRTA) as a staff architect.
KRTA were at the height of their fame. They’d designed Selwyn Village in Pt Chevalier, the Pakuranga town centre, and the Holy Family Catholic Church in Te Atatu out of massive precast concrete panels, a torture chamber which continues to freeze the congregation to death in winter, and boil them like lobsters in summer.
Professor Mike Austin, who taught King at the architecture school, was surprised that KRTA offered him a job. ‘He was a difficult, noisy and hopeless student. Voluble. Full of bullshit.’
He laughed, and said, ‘We were extra surprised when he got to design the school! We felt it was a mean and cruel trick that the profession played on us. It was like KRTA’s way of saying, “Well, if you’re going to pass buggers like this, then you can put up with the result.”’
How did he regard the building that King designed?
‘You’d have to say it was competent. There’s something quite good about it, but . . .’ We’d met in Austin’s home on the King Edward Parade waterfront in Devonport. I loathed him on sight. A small, intense sort of rooster, he writhed and grimaced as he conceded that the conference centre had qualities. ‘The lighting’s good. There’s a big staircase, which is quite interesting.’ He relaxed as he arrived at a patronising thought: ‘It’s a little folksy building.’
Around the corner, at his pretty home on the edge of mangroves, retired KRTA architect Denys Oldham, 80, had kinder words about his former colleague. He said of King, ‘A lively lad. He had curly hair and a genial expression. He was vivacious. Attractive, one could say. You warmed to him. There’s plenty of architects you don’t remember a thing about. But I do remember Derek. He had a strong personality, aligned with considerable design ability.’
His review of King’s design for the conference centre? As he remembered, the project architect had left, ‘and Derek stepped into the breach. And really, apart from being a little contrived, he did a very good job. He designed the whole of that
