Rickards gave his version of events. His face was held together with rage and hate. He said he had sex with Nicholas on two occasions. ‘There was laughing and giggling.’ He told the court five times, ‘It was a happy, jovial occasion.’ He said it without a trace of happiness or joviality. That same tone was heard when he said Nicholas was ‘lying’, was a ‘liar’, told ‘lies’, had ‘lied’; by my count, he said those words 29 times.
Rickards writes about having sex with Nicholas in his unpublished memoir. Again, he strips it of pleasure. The first time: ‘Apart from the fact that Brad came in and watched us, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the sexual act. If at any time she had indicated that she did not wish to continue, I would have stopped. She didn’t. After we finished, we spoke to Brad, and a short time later Brad and Nicholas had sex, and I watched them.’ The second time: ‘She had phoned Brad again and we drove to her place in the early evening. Brad had met her [flatmate], and she had phoned because the friend liked him, and wanted to get to know him better . . . Brad and the woman soon left the room, and Nicholas . . . gave me oral sex. Afterwards, we chatted away, and a short time later Brad and the flatmate returned. I got on well with her and ended up in a room with her, where we had sex. That’s it.’
In 1986, two police officers, aged 24 and 27, met up after work with an 18-year-old secretary at the Bank of New Zealand, and had sex with her. Their visit was brief, less than an hour. When Rickards and Shipton walked through the door that day, they never really left.
7
The wait for the verdict was long and unbearable. The jury deliberated for 74 hours and 55 minutes, three days and two nights, scoffing filled rolls from Pandoro bakery for lunch, and served two evening meals at the Hyatt — would it be the roasted whole prime rack of lamb with pistachio crust, or the beef and shiraz pie with confit shallots?
Co-prosecutor Mark Zarifeh broke out in a terrible red rash. His face looked bad, very bad. John Haigh could be found nursing a whiskey at the Hyatt’s bar. Louise Nicholas could be seen on the balcony of a hotel overlooking the High Court, fagging it up on her Holiday cigarettes, usually alongside journalist Phil Kitchin, who had got her to this point — it was Kitchin who got the whole thing rolling, when he found documents suggesting that a senior officer had covered up Nicholas’s original police complaint about Rickards, Shipton, and Schollum. He showed them to her at her house. She was shocked, and decided to go public with her accusation. Kitchin’s amazing story — unusually, he shared his exclusive with The Dominion-Post and TVNZ — remains one of the greatest and most far-reaching scoops in the history of New Zealand journalism. It led to police inquiry Operation Austin, as well as to the Commission of Inquiry into Police Conduct. It led to the Nicholas trial. It led to the two of them awaiting the verdict. Kitchin had long ago given up on boring codes of detachment and objectivity; he believed in Nicholas, and they’d become close friends. It was at Kitchin’s adobe house in a Hawke’s Bay valley where I’d interviewed Nicholas. That was an uncomfortable, stifling afternoon. Kitchin’s wife was there, and Nicholas brought a friend. The four of them were like some kind of cult — the cult of Nicholas, held together by faith in her story.
When the clouds of smoke parted, Kitchin and Nicholas looked anxious on the hotel balcony. In their book, Kitchin wrote that he doubted they’d get a guilty verdict for the Corlett Street charges, but was hopeful the jury would convict the three men for ‘the Rutland Street incident’.
Rickards, Shipton and Schollum waited it out downstairs in the cells. Shipton read the seventeenth-century poem by Richard Lovelace that famously and foolishly begins, ‘Stone walls do not a prison make, / Nor iron bars a cage.’ But that’s exactly what the walls and bars make. That’s the point of that particular architecture. Rickards swung between fear and loathing. His blackest rage was for the cop who alerted Kitchin to the story in the first place. Kitchin writes in the introduction of his book: ‘I’d like to pay tribute to my anonymous police sources.’ In his manuscript Rickards writes of ‘Kitchin’s spies, including a couple of jaundiced officers who had it in for me . . . [and were] willing to lie just to take me down’. He blames one particular officer. Rickards was his boss. He gave the cop a poor performance rating, and marked him with a score of two, meaning average. The officer insisted that Rickards give him a score of three, which would have qualified him for a pay rise. Rickards refused. His working title for his manuscript is ‘But For Three’.
The wives of the three defendants formed a tight bond of silence as they waited outside Courtroom 12. Tania Rickards walked with her head held high. Karen Schollum was small and contained. Sharon Shipton wore hooped ear-rings, and walked with her bouffant hair held high; you could imagine her, before the agony of the charges, as someone expressive and funny and big-hearted, the life of the party. The problem was that you also imagined her husband rooting someone at the party. Shipton was the numbers man. Shipton, always Shipton, at every threesome; Shipton, saying he watched while Rickards had sex with Nicholas in Corlett Street, saying he and Schollum had sex with her at another address, saying he never had sex with
