“After great pain,” wrote poet Emily Dickinson, “a formal feeling comes.”
I think she means the way we sometimes respond to a crisis, a tragedy, a loss that may be death, or, just asdevastatingly, feel like death, by going about our business in an orderly manner. Something has come undone. Nothing can fix it. All that can be done is to make a cup of tea, answer the phone, observe whatever other formalities. Life goes on. Best not keep the funeral director waiting.
Something of the sort was evoked in courtroom 11 at the High Court at Auckland on Tuesday for day two of the media event (live blogs, podcasts, the sketches of an elderly crime portraitist) attending to the murder trial of Dr Philip Polkinghorne. The eye surgeon, 71, is accused of strangling his wife Pauline Hanna to death at their Remuera home on April 5, 2021, and staging it to look like she hanged herself. It’s an incredible case – the trial will hear about hookers, threesomes, heavy methamphetamine use and other associated depravities – and the Crown has acknowledged that much of the evidence will be circumstantial, pointing to a set of suspicious behaviours it suggests proves his guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
His defence is that he woke up one morning and found Pauline dead. She had hanged herself.
Pieces of his story were presented in court on Tuesday. It was a banal story, which is to say it described the typical New Zealand evening. They had dinner on the night of April 4, 2021. They drank wine in “the library” (the house had four bedrooms and four bathrooms). Pauline worked in senior management at a district health board. She worked from 7am til 10pm, seven days a week, and even her entertainment was a reminder of office life: on the last night of her life, she watched two episodes of medical drama The New Amsterdam on Netflix.
She went to bed at about 10pm. Polkinghorne put on the dishwasher. He didn’t do a great job: police found a wine glass on the counter the next morning, smeared with Pauline’s lipstick. The couple slept in separate bedrooms and he also went to bed at about 10pm. Lights out in Ōrākei, the tide creeping towards and away from the lovely oval basin; another peaceful Easter in the pretty eastern suburbs of Auckland.
Polkinghorne got out of bed at about 7.40am on April 5 and put on a dressing gown over his pyjamas. He walked downstairs to put on tea and toast, and at this exact point his story departs from the standard New Zealand drudgery because on the way to the kitchen he saw Pauline’s body slumped forward on a chair, with a belt around her neck, looped to an orange rope from a balustrade at the top of the stairs. He knew she was dead. The body was “blue and bloated”.
A police evidence photo of rope found at Philip Polkinghorne's Remuera home.
He tried to call 111 on his cellphone. He said he was too “flustered” to figure out how to do it. He called from his landline. Paramedics and police arrived. He said to Constable Alexander Rowland, “Do you mind if I make a cup of tea?”
The officer said that was all right.
Polkinghorne asked, “Would you like one, too?”
The officer said no thanks.
Polkinghorne returned from the kitchen with two cups of tea. Politeness is often the first thing to go in a crisis, but there was Polkinghorne fetching the unwanted tea for his guest, squeezing the teabag against the cup, observing the formalities, and, according to first responders who gave evidence on Tuesday, sometimes crying, even “wailing”, but, each of them agreed when asked by Crown prosecutor Brian Dickey, appearing “composed” and “calm”.
New Zealand never forgave Mark Lundy for breaking down in loud hysterics at the funeral of his wife and child. He was overdoing it, said the public; it revealed that he was, in fact, their killer. And now Polkinghorne is under suspicion for appearing “composed” and “calm”. There are so few acceptable demeanours at a crime scene. Polkinghorne, “flustered”, “wailing”, “composed” …
When the first responders arrived, Pauline’s body had been moved to a set of steps near the entranceway. She was covered with a duvet. Thoughtfully, tenderly, a pillow had been placed beneath her head.
