Death in the afternoon

BY SALLY KIDSON

The sheer violence of the gunshot is what I remember best.

The noise, which came from behind a stand of tall trees, sounded so close, so loud, so real. But it was also confusing.

"It has to be a gunshot," raced through my mind, before I reasoned  it couldn't be. That kind of stuff doesn't happen here; not in the Maitai Valley in the middle of the afternoon. Not ever. It's Nelson.

I caught the eye of the only other people in the Branford Park carpark, a mother and her daughter who were adjusting their dog's lead.

"Crackers," the woman said.

She said it only half-convincingly, but it was the reassurance I needed.

Yeah, firecrackers, I thought, getting back on my bike.

I'd just ridden down from the Centre of New Zealand, and had stopped to adjust my bike seat.

Before the shot, I'd heard yelling. One male voice in particular sounded really angry. He was swearing and screaming something. Unnerved, I almost headed home.

Instead, telling myself it was Branford Park, so it would be drunk bogans or boy racers, I naively cycled into the scene of an alleged murder minutes after it happened.

It was chaos. A guy was yelling that someone had shot his mate.

To my left, a few metres from the road, a man wearing jeans and a T-shirt was lying on his back on the grass, his head turned away from me.

He wasn't moving, and friends were beside him, helplessly calling his name. Another guy, naked from the waist up, was pacing up and down. He kept walking over to his mate on the ground. He had a raised cut above one eye and blood all over his face.

Another man kept getting right in my face, repeating that someone had shot his mate and that if the cops didn't come soon, something bad would happen. Nobody seemed to have a cellphone, so other passersby and I waved down a number of motorists, none of whom had phones either.

I waved another car down  it was the woman from the carpark with her daughter and the dog.

She parked a few metres down the road and brought over a small first aid kit. It seemed so inadequate for the scale of what was going on, but at least it was something. A woman, whom I later found out is a doctor, confirmed what we all had been dreading  the guy lying motionless had no pulse.

The cops still weren't there but the raving guy was talking on a phone to the emergency services, yelling and repeating himself. I was scared he was not being taken seriously, so I offered to verify what he was saying.

He handed me the phone. On the other end, a woman's voice was calm and in control. It was instantly grounding in the confusion around me.

"Has anyone got the registration of the white ute that left?" she asked me. I asked the aggro guy, and the guy with blood on his face and their other friends. They didn't know. None of the other bystanders could tell me.

"It's all right, Sally," the operator said, "you are doing a good job.

"Can anyone tell me where the guys that left live?"

I asked again and got the same negative response, except this time the angry guy called me a four-eyed whore and told me to shut up. His mates told him to settle down.

Someone took the phone back, and after what seemed an eternity the cops arrived.

The ambulance arrived a few minutes later, but left again, slowly, no lights, siren unneeded.

The body still lay in the grass. The woman with the dog was still sitting with him.

A baseball bat lay on the road, and what looked like windscreen glass glistened on the roadside. Armed police stood either side of the cordon.

I can still hear the sound of the gunshot, and suddenly the Maitai Valley – a place where I've run, walked and swum since I was a kid – seems an alien place.

- © Fairfax NZ News