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I stared at the screen, reading and rereading the email. The amateurs were far closer to the truth than the police. Kate Ngata had not mentioned going to the police with this new information but surely it was only a matter of time before she did?

A cursory look at Hoani Mata Productions website showed that it was a one-woman operation. But Kate was clearly smart. She had found a retired cop from Rotorua, and knew we lived next door to Rangi.

I felt a tightness in my throat. I was trapped. I needed to decide what to do. I wondered what Sally would say if I told her that Dad had abducted Lindy. I could lie that she had escaped, that I never knew what happened to her. Sally might believe it. She seemed to accept things as fact, but Mark was always suspicious of me. It was obvious he didn’t trust me and he never believed that Dad stopped being ‘an active paedophile’ the day he left Ireland. They would force me to go to the police. I couldn’t let that happen.

A week later, I responded to Kate’s email. I had to throw her off the scent and buy time.

Thank you for your email. I am away from Wellington at the moment, dealing with a personal medical matter.

I am shocked by the information you have gathered. But I’m afraid you have the wrong suspect. My dad certainly wasn’t connected to the death or disappearance of any of these kids. His only name was James Armstrong and I have a copy of his birth certificate at home. I was very young when I lived in Ireland and I have good memories of my mother. They were very happily married. We lived in Donegal in the north-west of Ireland. I was an only child. In fact, my mother died in childbirth along with my baby brother six years after I was born.

When we moved back to New Zealand after my mother’s death, we did indeed buy a house next door to Rangi Parata. I remember the time he went missing. I can confirm my dad drove his aunt in and out to the police station. As far as we knew, Rangi drowned because he was drunk. Weren’t empty beer cans found nearby? I didn’t know him well.

As for Linda Weston, I remember her story dominating the news for a long time. But she disappeared from Lake Rotorua around Christmastime that year when Dad and I were on holidays in Wanaka on the South Island. I can’t remember the name of the motel we stayed in, but I’m sure it could be verified too. Any of Dad’s old patients might remember he took two weeks off every Christmas, and we would travel around the country together.

I am happy to meet with you when my medical ordeal is over, though that may not be for another month or two. I’m sorry that your research has led you astray and I wish you every success in your quest.

Kind regards

Ngā mihi

Steven Armstrong

Once again, my freedom was on the line. All of the facts that I presented were vague on detail, hard if not impossible to verify as almost nobody would hold records from 1983, certainly not digitally. I made my ‘medical ordeal’ sound like a cancer battle so that she would be disinclined to harass me any further, particularly when I was so adamant that she had got her story wrong. I was alert enough to block my IP address so that nobody could know I was in Ireland.