My search did throw up one interesting fact, however. Usually, Auckland was grand crime central which, considering a third of the country’s population lived up there, was to be expected. That, and the fact it was a claustrophobic, jarring and manic sort of a place where the entire population seemed to be obsessed with getting into their cars at exactly the same time and then spending the next few hours in impatient gridlock. I didn’t do cities. Dunedin with its hundred and twenty thousand was at the upper limit of my tolerances. The best thing about Auckland was the departure lounge at the airport, and even that was pretty crummy. But for once, it wasn’t leading the points on murder cases; the South Island had that dubious honour, which surprised me. There were only two recent unsolveds in Auckland, another in Hamilton, and a couple of cases they were near enough making arrests for to tick them off. The rest of the cases, four in all, were in the South Island. One was in Christchurch, which didn’t really surprise me as Christchurch had just nudged Auckland for the highest crime rate per capita. The others were in smaller towns, Timaru, Ashburton, and Oamaru. None of them even remotely resembled the case of Rose-Marie Bateman, other than the fact that someone was prematurely and unnecessarily dead. They were a mix of male and female victims, varying ages, weapons and causes of death. In fact, a couple of them were most likely accidental. I could quite safely say DI Johns had succeeded, yet again, in wasting my day. Hooray.

9

The figure on the screen seemed diminished by the room. His entire body transmitted his grief, the story amplified by the raw emotion on his face. This was not the face of a killer. This was the face of utter disbelief. Rose-Marie Bateman was not murdered by her boyfriend, of that I was certain.

The interview room was spartan – it was not designed with comfort in mind. Quite the contrary. On one side of the table came the barrage of questions from Detective Reihana; on the other side, weathering the brunt, was James Collingwood, aged twenty-three and about to break down into tears again. I reached forward and hit the rewind button as I didn’t catch the question the first time.

‘Did you and Miss Bateman have a sexual relationship?’

The young man’s shoulders shook as he tried to keep the sobs at bay. ‘Yes, well, no, not exactly,’ he said, through rasping breaths. ‘Rosie and I are Christians. We don’t believe in sex before marriage, so we didn’t have intercourse as such, but we messed around a bit.’

‘What exactly do you mean by messed around a bit?’ the detective asked.

‘You know, kissing, fondling, that kind of stuff?’