I mucked around Thorndon waiting for the verdict. I foraged for delicious golden peaches growing wild in a tree in the carpark of the Indian High Commission, and shared them in court. I stopped and chatted with the religious maniac on Lambton Quay who wore a sandwich board that advised PERILOUS TIMES WILL COME. At the Corrections Department offices on The Terrace, I walked through its entertaining prison museum — a rope made from sheets, a tattoo machine made with a ballpoint pen and a motor from an electric razor. Inevitably, there were reminders of Lundy among the museum exhibits. He would have remembered the heavy serge-green uniform that guards wore until it was retired in 2011. Beautiful penmanship in the nineteenth-century admissions register at Invercargill Gaol recorded the execution of James Welsh for the murder of his wife.
On Wednesday afternoon I was sitting around at the courthouse with Mike White when Julie-Anne Kincade approached us, and said, ‘It’s time.’ Her face was intensely serious. The lawyers and the families and the media and the curious filed into the court. Justice France took his throne. The jury entered; they kept their eyes down. The registrar said, ‘Place Mark Edward Lundy before the court.’ He entered and gave his sister a smile; she sat behind him with her husband. He stood with his hands behind his back.
Detective Inspector Marc Hercock, a nice man who favoured Blues Brothers dark glasses, gave a press conference outside court. A police wagon took Lundy away. I stood around in a daze for a while. I said goodbye to Mary of Epsom. She said, ‘Thank you for all your support.’ What? I commiserated with Hislop, I said so long to Mike White. He emailed a few days later: ‘Were we the only two people in court other than the defence and Lundy family that were unsettled by the decision?’
Before I left, I received permission to sit in Courtroom 1 and study the crime scene photographs shown to the jury. I wanted to see what the case was all about. I wanted to see what had happened to Christine and Amber, in colour, not in the creepy black and white photocopies I’d studied at Kumeu. Many of the photos were pixillated. They concealed the worst of Christine’s injuries. But they were still very graphic and terribly sad. The little girl on her front, her head in a pool of blood on the carpet with its pattern of autumn leaves. Christine was photographed at postmortem, her face wiped clean. But it was no human face that remained. I was moved to something like a crisis of faith. I felt tired and depressed. I thought: maybe the jury got it right. They’d deliberated for 13 hours, over two nights. It can’t have been easy. Twelve adults looked at the evidence. Maybe all this really was his doing, his vicious and unforgiveable act. Maybe he did do that. He killed his wife and, having gone that far, having arrived at that state of euphoria and madness, took one or two quick strides towards his daughter. Maybe when Amber stood at the doorway and looked in, the last word she said was ‘Daddy?’
I don’t know. I think it was the same horror visited upon them by someone else, someone who was already in the house that night when their neighbour saw the sliding door open; I think the stomach contents and the gas tank put Lundy in Petone, sleeping off the rum and the escort, just another travelling salesman with a wire coat-hanger in the back of his car, who got up the next morning, threw his polo shirt with a food stain on it into his bag, ate a bacon and egg sandwich on The Esplanade with a view of Wellington harbour, and set about seeing his clients, selling a tap, fixing a scratch on a sink, showing no sign of sleeplessness or mania. The evidence didn’t stack up. What use was the discredited science of Sijen? The logic didn’t stack up. Who the hell would order an escort as an alibi? Reasonable doubt was all over the place. How to explain the flakes of dark-blue paint at the crime scene? In the eyes of the law, his monstrousness extended beyond the killings to lying about it. The alternative monstrousness was that an innocent man grieved for his wife and daughter, and was placed under arrest — and falsely convicted, certainly once, quite likely twice.
I visited Geoff Levick after the trial. The dementia unit in Kumeu had opened, and some poor soul in a cardigan was standing outside in winter sunlight. A black shag was drying its wings on a post in front of Levick’s fish pond. The mandarin trees were in fruit. There were new manila folders stuffed with documents in the room off his garage. We talked about Hislop, paint flakes, Miller, the jury. He hadn’t given up fighting, and likely never will. Julie-Anne Kincade had filed notice to appeal. Lundy was back at Wanganui prison. The house where he lived with Christine and Amber was up for tender. It had been painted and renovated, but was immediately recognisable — there was the driveway someone had crept around that night in 2000, there was the kitchen still with its blue cupboards, there were the bedrooms . . . I wept again to look inside that house of grief and horror, to be reminded of what had happened there, and what had happened, too, at the trial in Wellington. The house looked haunted. It felt haunted by the living: by Lundy.
Levick drove me to a foodhall in west Auckland after I visited. We talked about what would happen when Lundy’s 20-year prison sentence came to an end. Without confession or remorse, he’d probably keep going back inside each time he appeared for parole. Lundy had said to Levick that
