Death of an Agent: The Dan Delaney Mysteries, #4

By David McGill

Easter 1965 and radical Wellington students are threatening President Johnson's envoy, here to urge New Zealand to commit troops to its Vietnam campaign. American 'advisers' warn security services of violent action by a disaffected anarchist. Former detective and spy-catcher Dan Delaney is first on the scene of a woman dead in a hot tub and his good friend Ru Patterson unconscious beside her. The deceased is a security agent attempting to infiltrate Patterson's left-wing circle, which includes radical students such as the anarchist and Ru's headstrong daughter Hine, Dan's goddaughter. The authorities demand Dan's help.

Delaney is caught up in gang and police threats to Hine, a police raid on a suspected marijuana dealer, an SIS interrogation, the planting of an incendiary device, an unexpected encounter with Prime Minister Keith Holyoake, student confrontation at the envoy's airport motel, response to a Parliamentary intrusion with Special Task Force marksmen surrounding the building as Dan pursues the anarchist booby-trapping the building while trying to dodge the police sharpshooters.

 

'The mysterious "Control" ... comes across like a voice-over in a Raymond Chandler movie ... The star of the book ... gets the girl, loses the girl and then for good measure he's drugged and abducted ... A 1960s Wellington, at once naive and cultured, is lovingly portrayed.' Linda Niccol

 

'Some very thrilling moments, and the politics are fascinating -- especially considering recent events ... when we are once again realising sections of our community are being dangerously swayed by myths of imminent threat. Another great New Zealand read.' Alyson Baker

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Silver Owl Press
• Release date: Jun 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781991189516

David McGill

David McGill is a New Zealand social historian and fiction writer who has published 60 books. Born in Auckland, educated in the Bay of Plenty and at a Christchurch seminary, he trained as a teacher and did a BA at Victoria University of Wellington. He worked as a feature writer for The Listener, Sydney’s The Bulletin, London’s TVTimes, wrote columns for the Evening Post in Wellington and edited a local lifestyle magazine before becoming a full-time writer in 1984. His book subjects include Ghost Towns of New Zealand and the country’s first bushranger, local and national heritage buildings, Kiwi prisoners of war, the history of the NZ Customs Department, a biography of a criminal lawyer, a personal history of rock music, a rail journey around the country, historical and comic novels, several thrillers and six collections of Kiwi slang and recently seven Dan Delaney Mysteries. He collects owl figurines and reads thrillers. His website www.davidmcgill.co.nz includes blogs related to his books and synopses and reviews by clicking on covers.

Book preview

Introduction

fellow traveller

(US) One who sympathizes with the aims beliefs of an organization, without belonging to it; most often applied to a Communist sympathizer.

Wiktionary

The Cold War was unique in the way films, books, television shows, colleges and universities, and practices of everyday life were enlisted to create American political consensus. This coercion fostered a seemingly hegemonic, nationally unified perspective devoted to spreading a capitalist, socially conservative notion of freedom throughout the world to fight Communism … writers and artists … offered alternatives to the false dichotomy between capitalist freedom and totalitarian tyranny.

University Press of Mississippi

Preface

Publisher Preamble

The death of an ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation) agent at a Wellington party on Maundy Thursday, April 1965, was not made public. The embargo was deemed to be in the national interest. It was not made clear to the New Zealand Prime Minister by the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service whether this was exclusively in this country’s national security interest, or also included the security interests of Australia and perhaps too the United States, for the CIA was aware of the deceased agent’s clandestine presence in New Zealand. This hidden aspect of the ANZUS Treaty on collective security was at the heart of the events that unfold in what is, we must emphasise, a story told partly from the perspective of a former detective and New Zealand security agent, partly by a student the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service had cause to regret employing, although it would argue that needs must.

The manner in which the New Zealand agency behaved at the time is we contend of concern to those who wish to uphold the country’s democratic right of free speech. This story needs to be aired so that our present gate-keepers can be reminded that such behaviour undermines our most cherished freedoms.

This preamble presents the context in which this situation unfolded. It covers the viewpoint of those the intelligence authorities regarded as communists or, at the very least, communist stooges who posed a threat to both the country’s national interest and to the ANZUS alliance. This account recreates the security service’s dubious attempt to infiltrate the protest plans of alleged communists and sympathisers. Broadly then this preamble puts the argument against New Zealand allying itself with the American military operations in Vietnam and the argument for such an alliance by those employed by our government to protect our security interests.

The necessary prelude to this story is a debate which took place at a public meeting in the lecture hall of the Wellington Public Library on the eve of the American President’s envoy Henry Cabot Lodge arriving to discuss New Zealand’s support for the American military engagement in Vietnam. At this stage President Lyndon Baines Johnson was only months into bombing North Vietnam and already talking about the defeat of Viet Cong supply lines, whilst also noting that his generals were asking for more troops on the ground to finish the job of protecting democracy and freedom in South Vietnam. Six months was predicted by the generals to be the time it would take, provided they got enough troops. They didn’t specify how many were needed, but over the next few years kept on requesting more troops, until they had half a million American boots on the ground. By then the anti-Vietnam protesters were in full cry and could have adapted the old saying about the alcoholic, one was too many, half a million was not enough.

At the time of the debate there was no organised opposition in New Zealand to the government providing America with New Zealand troops. We help them, the government argued, they will help us when we need it, we scratch their back, they’ll save our bacon. Ru Patterson, the well-known broadcaster and seeker of the Labour nomination for Wellington Central in the next year’s election, did not agree. He could be characterised as an early-warning system, a prophet, a harbinger, a John the Baptist showing the way to protest, arguing against even one Kiwi soldier on the ground in Vietnam. He did not trust generals and politicians, having learned the hard way in the Second World War.

Patterson took the negative against New Zealand involvement or, put another way, the affirmative for the peace positive position. Taking the affirmative argument for a military alliance with the United States of America was RSA president Hamilton Mitchell. No detailed record was made of what was said at the meeting, which descended into abuse from the floor directed at Patterson. The most polite suggestions were that he was a traitor to his Queen and Country, a Commie bastard who disrespected the blood spilled by New Zealand soldiers, sailors and airmen in the cause of freedom and democracy, a Red cancer in our body politic who must be excised root and branch. A man dangerously red in the face growled it was a pity New Zealand had abolished hanging. Somebody else claimed hanging was still on the books for treason. ‘Too right’, the red-faced man responded.

Before Patterson finished his opening address, there were lynch-mob suggestions that expanded on the provision still in the statutes for a citizen who committed treason. The most restrained was that Patterson be taken to a place of execution and hanged by the neck until he was dead, the most popular that he be taken outside forthwith and strung up from the nearest lamp post. Those who sought to defend his right to free speech were shouted down, while some vowed to bring a case against him of malicious slander and libel of their president.

The police were called by a nervous librarian and a contingent from the nearby Taranaki Street Police Station closed the meeting and moved rowdy elements along. Remarkably there were no arrests given the boozy belligerence of a number of the older men sporting military uniforms and a comprehensive display of medals and ribbons. It was a tame conclusion to this uncharacteristically noisy and confrontational meeting in what was usually a quiet early evening venue for visiting speakers on such harmless subjects as making better compost or alternative interpretations of the Apocalypse section of the Bible. There was no court follow-up after legal advice indicated there was no proof of malicious slander or libel, only sharply divided views on what was said. Thus the solitary surviving record is the speech notes Patterson scrawled on the back of his New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation time sheets.

The distribution of cyclostyled copies of this speech prompted renewed threats of legal action. These too came to naught. By now the protesters had organised themselves into a broad coalition called the Committee on Vietnam. The government friendly media had in the main denied the Committee the oxygen of publicity. The government led by Prime Minister Keith Holyoake had plenty of coverage to drive home their message that New Zealand went where America went in defending freedom and democracy from the spectre of an expansionist Chinese communism, which allegedly intended Vietnam to be the first of the dominoes that would fall throughout Southeast Asia.

New Zealanders were told by their leaders that they must support the fight for freedom led by America, or face the inevitable consequence of their cowardice, that Australia and New Zealand would fall to this communist menace. If they did not support America, they could not expect America to once more come to their aid when they were under threat, as had been the case in World War Two when the Battle of the Coral Sea marked the turning point in defeating the Japanese nation’s expansionist ambitions. There was in April 1965 one prominent fly in the government ointment, broadcaster Ru Patterson.

Patterson’s speech notes marked the beginning of the opposition to this domino theory, and it made the broadcaster a marked man. Already there were plans by elements in the governments and the security intelligence services of New Zealand and Australia to destroy Patterson’s credibility and, if that did not work, to destroy him. They understood the power wielded by a fearless orator, how dangerous that power could be to inspire those it was aimed at and to threaten those it was used against. Hitler and Churchill proved the power of oratory, for evil and for good. Fresh in memory from the Depression were the broadcasts of Uncle Scrim, the Reverend Colin Graham Scrimgeour, a peace-mongering and poor-people-champion Methodist minister. His radio broadsides against those in power upset both the conservative government and the Labour government that he played a big part in getting elected.

Patterson was getting the populist following on national radio once enjoyed by Uncle Scrim and latterly Aunt Daisy, who of course only ever attracted controversy among those with alternative scone recipes or ways of removing stains from whites. Patterson got people going, judging by the letters to the editor and calls received by the recently renamed National Programme that replaced the YA identification. There was a rumour that Patterson was about to be given one of these talk-back radio shows that had begun across the Ditch. That of course was dependent on him not receiving the nod for the Labour ticket in next year’s election, and then on him not unseating the sitting National member. Or indeed on Patterson not falling foul of his Broadcasting bosses, as Uncle Scrim eventually did, was fired and plied his radio message across the Tasman.

Patterson had a simple message: if New Zealand participated in the American military adventure in Vietnam, we were on the side of evil, not good. He did not get the opportunity to deliver his full speech, made redundant by a dire and deadly variation on the threats made against him. Those interested, can read the full version of Ru’s speech, known mischievously as The Fellow Travellers’ Apologia, in an appendix at the end of this story.

Some of the younger members of our editorial staff lobbied to use Ru’s war cry No Way with LBJ as the title of this book. As publisher I vetoed this as giving undue prominence to what was simply a street chant, and one overtaken by the protesters the following year lining LBJ’s route on the way to Wellington airport chanting:

Hey, Hey, LBJ: How many kids did you kill today?

More importantly, I take the view that there should be acknowledgement of the tragic death of the secret agent. The security services involved take the view that their role must remain hidden from the public at all costs. I believe that the death of this rash and unfortunate young woman should be shouted from the rooftops. It should never have happened. We hope that by drawing attention to her tragic demise, this story can puncture the bullshit bubble in which security agencies shelter and give those planning to inflate more such bubbles pause for thought that the cost of one human life is too much to further interests that are often in the light of a new day quite absurd. Think of the Wall across Berlin and the tragedies it generated, now forgotten by all but bereaved relatives and loved ones. A better society is one that does not allow young people to be sacrificed on the altar of alleged national interest, officiated over by an anonymous few not answerable to those they allegedly serve.

Part One

Shadow Boxing

Chapter One

Oriental Bay, Maundy Thursday evening, 15 April 1965

The swart little middle-aged man fighting to keep open the glass side-door with one hand and holding down his kilt with the other was not the first unsettling experience of Dan Delaney’s wretched day. He wished he’d never left Auckland.

‘Hey, great you both made it!’ Marty Webber yelled. ‘You’re not too late. Come in, come in.’

Ru Patterson used his stick to lever himself on to the raw new expanse of deck. Dan followed, shivering in his threadbare suit as another vicious gust scythed into him. God spare me days, his father would have said. What possessed anybody to live in this godforsaken city?

Their host was close to losing his hold on the door. He abandoned his kilt to get both hands on the handle, his kilt flying up and revealing he was wearing nothing underneath. He was obviously taking his Scottish get-up seriously. Did anybody else give credence to a German Jewish refugee in a kilt? Dan was sure there was no Scottish ancestry in this black marketeer, which is what he was when Dan last saw him two decades ago. They got inside and Marty slammed the door behind them. There was a round of clapping and shouts of ‘Good on ya, Ru’ and ‘Power to the peace’. Somebody bellowed ‘Cursed are the warmongers!’

Marty took no notice, crowding up to Dan.

‘Daniel, long time no see.’

He grabbed Dan in a bear hug, momentarily adding to his concerns until he realised it was the sporran pressing into him. Over Marty’s bald, sweating and liver-spotted giant black olive of a head Dan could see people in groups talking loudly, lots of unrestrained laughter no doubt fuelled by the active quaffing of whatever the stuff was in the big crystal bowl in the centre of the long banquet table. He was still somewhat dazed, discombobulated Ru had suggested. He hated flying, more specifically approaching Wellington airport akin to a drunken seagull swooping and veering away and towards a thin, mazy strip of wind-walloped runway. Some passengers clapped when they landed.

The clapping now was for Ru, who was surrounded by people congratulating him and shaking his hand, a marked contrast to the gathering they had left. At the ex-POW 20 th anniversary lunch Ru attracted ripe abuse for calling RSA President Hamilton Mitchell a warmonger. Ru was unrepentant and dismissed them as a bunch of fascists. On the taxi here Ru promised a cordial reception. Dan expected no less from Marty Webber, who had a head-start on returned soldiers, thanks to his lucrative dealings with the departing Yanks.

Dan extricated himself from his host’s overly prolonged grip, murmuring he had obviously come up in the world. Marty thought that funny, delivering a roar of laughter and a belt into Dan’s back that would be entirely approving.

‘Hey, you oughta see the whole shebang!’ he shouted, waving his arms extravagantly at the long frontage of glass windows shimmering and vibrating from the antic wind. The windows threw back distorted fragments of guests, bathed in faux candlelight from chandeliers and the real wax from several seven-stemmed silver candelabra sitting on the mantel above a fireplace big enough to barbecue an entire beast. Just as well there was no fire and the candles were mostly electric, for if the wind gained entry to a scene lit by real fire then there’d be only darkness and mayhem and the smell of extinguished wax rather than sparks flying.

The sparks, Dan judged from the attention many of the guests paid them, came from the two gorgeous young waitresses in tartan vests over skimpy bits of creamy silk blouse, very short tartan skirts over black tights, set up on very high heels. There was also a tall and matchstick-thin male model of a waiter in tartan vest, black shirt, tight black satin trousers and chunky black heels. He had a haughty, distant look, as if this absurd occasion was beneath him in attitude as much as height. Give him a cape and the oblong hat and he could play the matador in The Sun Also Rises.

The dark-haired waitress was thrusting a tray of drinks into Marty’s hands. Dan got a second hug, more a bare hug this time, and Marty protesting he paid her to serve people drinks, not seduce them.

‘Uncle Daniel,’ she said, releasing him. ‘Okay if I still call you uncle?’

‘Hine?’

‘Crikey, Dan,’ Ru said, turning from his audience. ‘Get a grip.’

‘Sorry,’ Dan said. ‘I didn’t quite recognise you. You’ve, um, grown up.’

‘It happens,’ she said, smiling the wide, crooked smile he remembered from her tomboy days. ‘Old man,’ she added. God, he had only recently hit 50, was that old to her? She tossed her pony tail to one side, giving him a grinning once-over, signalling she was not serious about the age remark. Her large opalescent eyes danced, reflecting green and blue like a piece of paua shell jewellery. Presumably it was refracted light off the chandelier clusters of candle-shaped bulbs, and perhaps picking up the diamante butterfly glasses of a severe looking woman arguing with somebody across the table, her glasses jerking up and down and her bouffant bobbing.

‘Go on,’ Marty said, mock severe. ‘Make yourself useful and introduce our other honoured guest. Ru and I have a little business, won’t take long.’

Marty opened a door for Ru and another kilted figure. He looked familiar. Dan only got a glimpse behind the untamed bush of red hair and the even redder face fungus. Wild man of Borneo, huge fellow towering over Marty, looked like caber tossing would be no problem. Mc-something. McGlinchey, that was it. The hippie drop-out who saved his son Matt’s life a decade ago, now made Mira’s life a little more bearable with regular cannabis deliveries. At least that was what Matt thought.

Without thinking Dan took off after them, wanting to get another look. They were disappearing through the door at the end of the passageway. He bumped against a heavy wooden frame, causing it to rattle. He glanced left and jerked back from the glare of a fierce old tattooed face.

‘Careful,’ Hine said next to him, steadying the heavy ornate gold frame. ‘It’s a Goldie, I think. Or a Lindauer. Not sure which, but Marty reckons it’s worth a fortune.’

A discreet brass shade curving overhead on a thin brass arm illuminated most of the heavy oil painting.

‘Sorry,’ Dan muttered, stepping back.

Hine laughed. ‘It’s nowhere near his most valuable. Can I have a quick word before the meet and greet?’ She shut the door on the noisy party.

A door was closing at the end of the long white hall. The Goldie or Lindauer shared the space on both sides with what must be a dozen or so works of art similarly lit, but none of the others were in dark wooden frames.

‘Of course,’ Dan said, looking down the hall, wondering what business involving Ru and McGlinchey was so urgent their host had to abandon his guests. In his peripheral vision light flashed off a plain white cross on a black background.

‘That I’m pretty certain is a McCahon,’ Hine said and placed a hand on his arm. ‘I’m worried about dad.’

Dan stopped. She was blinking a lot, pushing at the bangs hanging over her forehead. There was enough light to see her eyes were red-rimmed.

‘Contact lens,’ she said. ‘I’m still getting used to them. Dad’s been acting funny. First he was against me flatting, suddenly he is all for it. He thinks I don’t know he’s smoking pot. God, the house reeks of it. And that woman is all over him. When we went to the Scottish outfitters, she made sure she got a size too small. Hard to miss, eh?’

It was a rhetorical question and maybe a pun on ‘miss’. The tall blonde in the same tartan outfit as Hine was indeed impossible to miss. She was spectacularly attractive and he would guess supremely fit judging by the easy, fluid way she moved. She reminded him of Jas when she was still in the police and running competitively, before they started a family. He understood Hine’s reaction but he said nothing. It was none of his business who Ru was seeing and he could hardly blame him after Ginny took off with a sociology lecturer.

‘She’s in Broadcasting,’ Hine said indignantly. ‘Something in PR. She wants to work with dad on the talk-back show he’s setting up. You’re in it, aren’t you?’

Dan nodded, but doubted if he would make the final edit. After the POW fiasco, Ru suggested they could rescue something from that shower. He was planning to get people talking about verboten subjects, like the shame POWs felt about those years in Italian and German and Japanese camps and how they were judged disgracefully for being captured. As Dan was the only ex-POW still talking to him, Ru said he would have to do.

Ru got him in a Broadcasting suite but it had not gone well. Dan did not like to talk about those grim, wasted, incredibly boring years. Ru said it was getting the ball rolling. Another verboten subject he planned to broach was marijuana, which might explain why he was experimenting with it. Why he did not tell Hine, Dan had no idea.

‘Come through here,’ Hine said, opening a discreet door the same white as the wall on the other side of the hall. ‘Quick,’ she said, pulling him through on to a deck and shutting the door behind them. He could make out shrubs weaving about beyond the deck, offering shelter from the wind. The bubbling sound was puzzling. It was coming from the middle of the deck. The only lighting was a weak glow from within the bubbles and from several opaque light saucers directed towards the Perspex roof canopy. He peered at what was some kind of round bath set into the deck.

‘Marty’s latest,’ she said. ‘He calls it a hot tub. If anybody comes in I can say I was showing you his new toy. See, towels on the table there.’

Dan could make out a bench with white towels stacked on it, next to half a sherry cask hosting some kind of spiky tropical plant. Marty’s own little Rotorua hot pool, thankfully there was no stench of sulphur. It seemed like the kind of facility you would find in that Hay Street brothel a few streets over which serviced randy Marines during the war. It wouldn’t surprise him if Marty had branched out in that direction. And that led on to thinking that Ru was right now setting up a dope deal with McGlinchey and Webber.

‘I know pot is illegal,’ Dan said. ‘But it’s probably helping with his leg.’

Hine put her hands around his arm. ‘He’s had these gang members at the house. He says it’s just work, interviewing them, but I think there’s more going on.’

‘What makes you think that?’

She took a deep breath, her grip tightening. ‘He let me go flatting. Gets me out of the way. He’s obsessing about this talk-back thing. You know about his debate with the RSA president? When he called him a warmonger?’

Dan laughed. ‘Too right I do. We copped a fair bit of abuse today over that. At the anniversary lunch.’

Hine let go her grip, wheeling around.

‘Whadya want, Linda?’ she snarled.

‘We’re busy, busy,’ the blonde said. ‘You could maybe help. That’s what Marty pays us for. Anyway, who’s your sexy sugar daddy?’

‘Come on,’ Hine said, pulling him past her. There was not much space. Linda shifted slightly to close the gap, pressing against him.

‘Any friend of Mister Patterson,’ she said, ascending into a high-pitched, girly, breathy voice, Marilyn Monroe Down Under. ‘Why, he’s a friend of mine.’

‘Danny boy!’ said a hearty voice from the hall. ‘Rob McGlinchey. How’s the family? Mira, Matt, your groovy wife and kids?’

Dan had his hand vigorously shaken while Marty was complaining that staff