He wasn’t treating it as any kind of forensic detail. There was probably nothing in it. Like he said, it was just ‘an aside’. But perhaps everything was. Maybe the truth was in black and white.
One day inside that little shop of horrors in Levick’s garage, I reached for a folder marked SUTHERLAND. This was the name of the ESR scientist, Bjorn Sutherland, who had examined the crime scene. Sutherland was an important figure in the case. He’d discovered the two microscopic stains on Lundy’s shirt. I opened the folder. It contained photocopies of various ESR forms that Sutherland had completed. Further on, it contained photocopies of photographs taken of Christine and Amber, dead.
They showed what happened to Christine that night when her murderer struck her head and face many, many times. The photocopies were black and white; most of the images were black, with blood. Christine was killed in bed. Her face was black. Amber lay on the carpet in the doorway. The back of her head was black. She had got out of bed to see what was going on, and was killed as she turned to escape. She wore a nightie and little white socks. She was seven years old, for pity’s sake, and her left hand was curled beside her head.
I remember I was standing up when I looked at the pages. I remember a terrible silence in the room, and feeling very tired, and thinking: did he do that?
Chapter 2
That summer: Victor Wasmuth
Summer in New Zealand is the story we tell to ourselves to make us feel good, the annual regatta, the wide blue yonder of sea and sky and sunlight — it’s got Christmas in it. It’s the holidays. It’s the whanau on a porch. There’s sand on the pavements and the worship of food. There’s maize waist-high in the fields and a van broadcasting the strangely melancholic chimes of ‘Greensleeves’. It’s got outdoor flow. It’s island time. It’s all on for young and old. It’s the national ideal, a wonderful time to be alive, a favoured time to kill.
Intolerable summer, with its high sun sizzling, the light too bright, the nights too hot to sleep, too dry, too sticky — something’s got to give. Better to stay inside and fester. But summer brings it all out in the open. The empty country roads going nowhere, the fizz of waves on coarse black sand. The moths. The cicadas. The dogs barking in boarding kennels. The dogs barking in boarding kennels. The dogs barking in boarding kennels.
‘For some years I have been certain that I have been persecuted,’ wrote Victor Wasmuth. ‘Details of this business are best known to myself, but unfortunately I cannot prove any particular incident. In any case, I decided there would have to be a showdown to have the whole matter thrashed out.’
Summer surrounded him like a narrow ledge. He stepped over it on 7 January 1963. The dogs barking in boarding kennels at the back of a neighbour’s property, howling through the long, slow days and moonless nights in a dusty corner of Auckland. West, at Bethells Beach, a long and winding metal road cut through the hills towards the coast. The painter Don Binney lived out that way. There was a hermit in the valley, an old forestry worker who lived in a tip. Bethells was peaceful, obscure. It sagged in the heat. The summer of 1963 burned like a fire across New Zealand: passengers fainted on Wellington commuter trains when delays were caused by tracks buckling in the sun, temperatures were the highest in Christchurch for 101 years, concerns of a drought led to hose bans in Gisborne.
Wasmuth lived in the shade of a macrocarpa in a small fibrolite bach at the top of a rise. ‘We were two doors down,’ said John Porteous, ‘and I was 13.’ He boarded at St Paul’s in Ponsonby, and was home for the holidays. There were 10 children in his family. His parents had separated. ‘Father Cronin helped us deal with the situation,’ he said. ‘He was a great guy, the most amazing man I’ve ever met. He gave everything away. He always said life wasn’t about money, or fame, or any of those things. It was all about your immortal soul. He was all priest.’
Father Cronin was inside the house, playing cards with John’s sisters. Their mother had gone to visit their father. It was a Sunday. ‘I used to make bows and arrows out of branches and dry ferns,’ John said. ‘I was in the block of land between our place and the kennels, drying out these bits of fern in the sun. And all of a sudden there were police cars everywhere. Father Cronin said, “Get inside. There’s a bit of a problem up the road.”’
John’s brother Paul Church said, ‘I was seven. It was quite exciting. I was outside by the garage. It was just a lazy Sunday. Nothing ever happened at Bethells.’ Trucks from the Duck Brothers’ quarry bounced up and down the road every day. You could hear the train coming into nearby Waitakere station. Sometimes you could hear the surf. And then there was the matter of the dogs at the unromantically named Gorseland Kennels, owned by Jim Berry, between Wasmuth’s bach and the house where John, Paul and the other eight children lived with their mum.
The kennels accommodated 12 dogs. One belonged to the governor-general. Paul and his sister Frances would walk over to the Berrys’ to buy fresh eggs, and visit the kennels. He said, ‘She was terrified of dogs. “Oh, just pat them, they’re all right,” I’d say to her. I remember Mr Berry showed me the pups one day. A couple of weeks before it happened, he asked Mum if they bothered her and she said no. He said, “The guy
