PI in pursuit of the truth

Former top cop Bryan Rowe says many police officers may regard him as a turncoat, but his heart is still very much with them. Picture / Brett Phibbs

Bryan Rowe, private investigator, is not sure if his agency, Double 8, is in the phone book. It's not. There is no sign either outside his Albany house, which is his office.

He doesn't advertise and you'd be hard pushed to pick him from a line-up because you probably wouldn't recognise him again. The PI is wearing a beige top and beige bottoms and slippers. He is a nondescript fellow, which is probably handy in a PI.

Or it might be if he was the sort of PI who went on stake-outs and caught cheating spouses. But he doesn't.

He is a former top cop who investigates miscarriages of justice and this involves files and methodic plodding - and quite a lot of publicity. His own name is in the phone book. Anyone who has need of his services will likely know his name, not that of the unpublicised agency with its one staff member: Rowe.

He works from a gleaming and orderly house. We'd been fiddling with the blinds, trying an idea for a photo, and his wife Judith apologises for the dust. There isn't any that I can see. Rowe's house is, I think, a lot like his mind. He is very focused. There is no clutter inside his head. He doesn't just go for a walk every day but a "brisk walk".

Long before his retirement from the force on "April 2, 1996" he stopped socialising with other police officers. "It made it so easy when I left. Nothing changed as far as social life was concerned."

There is a John Connelly thriller on the coffee table. It belongs to Judith Rowe, who says: "Bryan doesn't read. He only reads boring stuff like files."

If he has one frivolity it would be a flutter on the horses. But he no doubt studies form - he also reads Best Bets - as closely as he examines a case.

He goes into his office off the hall and returns to the living room with three fat orderly files, flips one open and starts reading. These are the Rex Haig files, a case Rowe has been involved with since 1997.

Haig's conviction for murder was quashed by the High Court this week, but the ruling did not completely acquit him. So Rowe's mind is still on the case. He's got his files out and is looking for an affidavit; for one word, actually, among many thousands of words.

The word is "sea" and this word, he says, is a vital piece of the evidence that proves Haig did not kill fisherman Mark Roderique.

I haven't asked him about this. I am waiting, sitting on a couch, to interview him. I don't know why he's decided to get the files out; why he's decided, at this particular moment, to go looking for this particular word. He denies he is an obsessive type. He is also not combative, not dogmatic. He says.

He was a police officer and now he's a PI who often investigates police cases. To his mind, nothing has really changed. "When I was in the police ... I only did one thing and that was to search for the truth. I don't do anything different as a private investigator."

He goes at things methodically. It is also how he goes about talking about himself. He has a patience for talking, born, perhaps, of spending hours in small rooms getting information out of people. I think he enjoys the irony that people now come to him, sit in his living room for hours and try to get information out of him. I wouldn't care to interrogate him; it would take forever.

He has amazing recall of his career, from the time he was at police school. The file in his mind is another fat, orderly one.

He was a cop for three decades and he has a lot to say about being a police officer - and a lot to say about police officers which they may not enjoy hearing. He says that when he was a police officer he was naive and "bloody narrow-minded". Now that he is a PI he is not.

He can see why, because of the types of cases he now investigates, there might be a perception that he is anti-police. "Oh yeah, I'm sure that feeling exists within some police officers. A lot of them class me as, I guess ... a turncoat. But my heart's still very much with them."

When he was a copper he most certainly did not appreciate PI's "sniffing around".

PI Rowe has had what he calls "an enlightenment in my life". He is, actually, almost evangelical in his conversion to the other side - although he would never regard it that way. He's still on the side of right, according to him. There was the "Bryan Rowe [who] was bloody naive for 33 1/2 years in the police. Bryan Rowe never believed people in New Zealand could be wrongly convicted of serious crimes. I put my hand up. I was totally wrong because in the police there's a narrow-minded culture that you develop ... "

He says he is proud of his years in the force but I can't quite reconcile how this sits with that self-professed, narrow-mindedness and naivete.

"Yeah, well, I was naive in that I thought because I'd been doing what I was doing and locking up baddies - and plenty of them - that all my colleagues were doing the same and they likewise weren't making mistakes either."

He says he didn't make mistakes. "During my police career, of course you hear of people who are convicted later saying, 'I didn't do it'. I'm not referring to any case that I did. I'm confident that in all the major trials I had people were properly convicted. I've got no problems at all. I can sleep very easily every night."

This is not to say that he was the most perfect policeman in the country. "No. I worked with some bloody good policemen. I've got the greatest regard for them."

He once made this offer to then police commissioner Rob Robinson: "I have learnt so many important things about policing, about where things go wrong, I can really help. What I'd like to do is come down and pass on the help that I've got to some of your senior administrative courses."

This offer - he says he didn't want to be paid - was turned down on the grounds that senior police officers would not appreciate this. He is sorry about this but understands it: "A closed mind. I was like that, too."

Oh, I don't know. He was pretty good, by his own admission, at annoying those in authority from early on.

"I seemed to, in my career, from time to time, have a bit of strife with the administration. I was never a 'yes' man and I didn't tolerate wrong advice or wrong policies or things like that and in life ... you have the option of going along with the flow, even though you know what's being done is not in the best interests of the organisation, or you debate the issue.

"And within the police there's always been the culture and probably always will be, because of the type of organisation it is, that might is right. That if you're lower down the chain, then you do what you're told and if you want to debate the issue then you get into dangerous territory."

When he was a young detective he had a disagreement with a detective inspector who said Rowe had entered a wrong charge on an arrest sheet. Rowe went to the crown prosecutor, whom he knew, and "he said 'you're right' and gave me some legal background". He then told the DI this and that "I've got some pretty powerful support on this". The DI came back to him a day or so later and said, "over that matter. [The crown prosecutor] could be right."

He loves this story - and loves telling it many years later - because the DI wouldn't admit that Rowe was right.

His focus has never changed. His abiding interest is in what is right. Which usually means him. This would also be a very good thing if he decided your miscarriage of justice was one worth investigating. He is not, remember, combative, dogmatic or obsessive. He comes outside in his slippers to see us off. He looks like a mild-mannered 66-year-old retired policeman. But there's no sign outside advertising that a rather well-known PI lives here, either.