CHAPTER 2
Tamehana Tito
For as long as the twelve year old triplets could remember, it had been said that Tamehana Tito had been murdered. The old man had chosen to live up the Waitai Valley after he got back from the Second World War in 1945, mainly because he had no job and nowhere to call home. But his desire for isolation could also have resulted from the horrific and traumatic experiences he had endured overseas, fighting in Crete, Africa, Italy and then Germany. He probably wanted time-out while trying to come to terms with it all and so had turned his back on society and gone ‘bush’.
He chose the goat shelter for his home. This simple rock shelter had originally provided a refuge for wild goats, hence its name. Protected by the overhanging rock it was deep enough to keep out most of the rain and wind and so remained warm and dry through the seasons. It was located deep into the bush and seldom visited by locals, and after living here peacefully for many years Tamehana had decided to improve things by building a wooden wall across the front of his shallow cave.
The cave was about a kilometre up the valley and it took him several years to bring up the timber a plank at a time. The enclosed area he made had been about two metres wide, almost five metres long and with enough head space for the average sized man to easily stand up. In really wet weather, the water cascaded down the rock face and fell as a veil over the opening but once he built the outside wall, this water would never have splashed into the enclosure.
The timber addition was now well gone with only shallow depressions revealing where the studs had been set in the floor of the cave. It looked as if these upright timbers had been jammed under the overhanging rock acting as a frame for the cladding. The only other sign of Tamehana’s occupation was the ring of hearth stones around the firepit and the blackened rock wall caked with soot where a natural chimney had allowed the smoke to escape. Apparently, according to local stories, the old man had taken pride in cleaning the rough stone shelter he called home and swept the floor every day, but now the dusty floor was covered in goat droppings.
To survive, Tamehana had hunted wild pigs and goats. He’d also had a small clearing for his vegetable plot close to the cave. He was an opportunist and on his infrequent trips to town he would collect odds and ends from rubbish dumps and empty sections and so would be seen with his wheelbarrow piled high with old furniture and wood for his shelter.
But people were wary of the old man. Things were going missing from their sheds and garages, they said. He was pilfering where ever he went, and, it was claimed, he was even coming down at night and stealing clothes from clothes lines and taking tools and items of value from open sheds, collecting a treasure trove that he stored up in his den. Because people were reluctant to venture that far up the valley no one had actually seen his makeshift dwelling, let alone been inside to see his supposed cache of contraband.
All this happened years before the triplets were born, yet even after the old man had been gone for quite sometime the offences attributed to this lonely old man had multiplied. The three brothers had heard them all and their sympathy for Tamehana had grown. When accusations flew around their neighbourhood and even though they were very young, the boys had spoken out in defence of this man they’d never met, for they respected and admired his self reliance and independence. And they still did the same whenever some unfounded criticism was levelled against the long dead man.
He had lived in their neck-of-the-woods, and from their own camping-out experiences, they felt he was more a kindred spirit than an old vagabond, although the stories about his ghost wandering the valley made them a little uneasy.
The boys wanted to help get to the truth of the matter but now, here in his shelter, they struggled to find anything of relevance. A possible breakthrough was the pictograph they had found – they were still trying to make sense of that. They were quite sure Tamehana was a victim of prejudice and that he was only a tragic and sad old man living close to nature.
Tamehana’s existence was a tragedy waiting to happen. According to local gossip, a neighbour had decided to take the law into his own hands and one night he’d walked the kilometre into the bush to Tamehana’s home and shot the old tramp dead. Nobody raised the alarm and it was only by chance that, months later, someone had commented to the local policeman that Tamehana hadn’t been seen for some time. Once word got out that he was missing, the rumour started that he had been murdered. It became impossible for the police to ignore all the talk so two months after he had last been seen, the local constable, Tom Mayor, tramped through the bush to Tamehana’s encampment.
For the first time someone other than Tamehana – and the killer if there was any truth to the rumour of murder – entered the shelter. In his notebook, the policeman described his findings: the gloomy light, a rustic yet tidy dwelling where everything was laid out in an orderly manner, clothes and towels folded neatly in one corner and the simple single bed with its top sheet neatly folded back. The fire was set, ready to light with clean but blackened pots close by. Lanterns hung from the front wall and from rope that criss-crossed the room, just above head height. Old furniture, wheel-barrowed in by Tamehana had been cleaned up and polished. The place was immaculate. So much so that the constable could barely believe his eyes. The place had definitely not been lived in for a while for the hearth was cold and there was a fine net of cobwebs in all corners of the room. There was an empty feeling about the shelter that Constable Tom Mayor read as a sign of abandonment.
After the surprise of finding the dwelling so tidy, he began to look for the stolen goods that were supposedly stashed in this bush hideaway but more importantly, he was looking for Tamehana. After searching as best he could a fifty metre perimeter from the shelter, he found no trace of Tamehana.
A search party was organised in case Tamehana had come to grief while collecting firewood. A team of a dozen searchers had fanned out and covered a wide area around the hut but there was no sign of the missing man. There were, however, some items collected by the police and bagged as possible evidence. They found a cigarette butt close to the hut and as they didn’t know if the missing person smoked or not, this butt was bagged as possible evidence should the investigation turn out to be a homicide.
The thorough search also came up with a spent cartridge of an army issue .303 shell. Lots of pig hunters used the area and the cartridge could have belonged to anyone. The cartridge was a significant find but with no smell of cordite the round could have been fired at anytime. Its general condition suggested it had been fired recently, possibly only a couple of months ago, around the time it was thought Tamehana went missing.
The police needed to know which hunters were in the area in the last two months and what type of rifles they were using. Messages went out to all the hunting clubs for members to report their activities over the last few months to the police – whether or not they had been in the valley, whether or not they had seen something to help the police with their investigation.
Years passed and stories continued to circulate. Some people openly accused Bill Smith of murdering Tamehana as it was well known that Bill was one of the main offenders when it came to pointing the finger at the hermit, and he’d been heard threatening to put a stop to the theft once and for all. It was also common knowledge that he had a Lee Enfield WW1 fully wooded rifle that he used for pig and deer hunting. Bill didn’t belong to any pig or deer stalkers’ club claiming they were a waste of time as far as he was concerned and he wasn’t at all interested in the social side either.
It seemed to be a strange coincidence that, when asked by the police to produce his rifle for examination, this cantankerous old farmer reported that his rifle had been stolen two months previously and he had not bothered to mention this to the police at
the time. Nobody but Bill could say when he last had his rifle – there were no witnesses for the police to follow up on. It may have been a tricky case for the police to solve as all they had was a spent cartridge and one cigarette butt,
but there were plenty of strong opinions out there as to who did away with Tamehana Tito.