In law, Lundy is a murderer. In law, Clint Rickards, the former senior policeman accused of taking part in the gang-rape of Louise Nicholas, is innocent. He was acquitted in that trial, and another verdict of not guilty was delivered at a similar, subsequent trial. But it cost him his career, his reputation, his name; whereas Nicholas was referred to in a 2015 news story as a ‘rape victim’. In law, that’s false. But the certainties have moved on, and remain firmly on Nicholas’s side of the story.
I drank beers with Lundy on a porch. I had a cup of tea with Rickards in a café frequented by the mentally ill. I smoked cigarettes with Nicholas in an adobe house. And then there was the time I met Chris Wang, accused of killing two men with a steak knife bought from the Made In Japan $2 shop on Queen Street. I went there and bought the same knife. The packaging reads: ‘Always hygienic since blade is stainless-steel. Achieves a professionally cut surface!’
I never really knew what I was doing with any of these people. Freedom was at stake for Lundy and Wang. Something else was at stake for Rickards and Nicholas, something vital and important: belief. I was just passing through.
I’ve worked the past 15 or 20 years in journalism as a kind of writer at large, rarely assigned to anything, mostly just choosing stories that seem interesting. When at a loss, I’ll walk into a courtroom. I always feel at home the second I take my seat. I wait for the misery, the ambiguities, the accumulation of minor details.
‘Crime does pay, for the media at least,’ announces the nobody from Te Ara, in its section on crime writing. ‘Editors, journalists, television and radio producers know that there is an appetite for morbid, horrific and macabre news stories . . . The media’s crime coverage is highly selective . . . The most heinous or bizarre murders get the most media coverage. For example, a stabbing will receive little media attention compared to a man who kills his family.’
Fair call. No one else from the media bothered to attend the stabbing trial that spring afternoon. It was a slow day. I recognised one of the clerks in another courtroom. She said, ‘I’ve had a woman accused of killing her husband.’
I could have gone there, but I felt an important point was about to be reached in the case of the Maori guy who stuck a knife between the second and third ribs of an Asian guy, and killed him. The pathologist took the jury through his postmortem. The victim’s chin, he said, had an ‘irregular tearing’. He said it was consistent with falling face-first on the driveway. In the public gallery, the dead man’s widow fainted.
Court was adjourned. An ambulance was called. ‘Crime news . . . lacks complexity’ according to Te Ara. In fact, it deals with the most complex subject in life. The subject was addressed quite directly by the pathologist when court was resumed, and he described the deceased. ‘51 years of age. 74 kilos in weight, and 169 centimetres in length.’ A life reduced to statistics, the image of flesh on a slab: slowly, profoundly, we were being told what it’s like to be dead.
Chapter 1
Mark Lundy: Operation Summer
. . . the high authorities we serve would not order such an arrest without gathering exact information about the reasons for the arrest and about the person to be arrested. There’s no room for mistake.
— The Trial, Franz Kafka
1
It was a curious summer. Once a week I’d visit Geoff Levick at his beautiful rural property west of Auckland in Kumeu, with its dark pond and its plum trees, and sometimes we’d sit on the back porch with his house guest, Mark Lundy. There was an apple orchard next door, and a line of pines straight ahead, above a narrow creek. I went for a wander one day and surprised a pheasant. A harrier circled the orchard on the afternoon I first met Lundy.
‘Hawk,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said.
We sat in silence. There was another attempt at New Zealand small talk — cricket, the weather, Winston. He was under instructions from his legal team not to discuss his impending trial for the murder of his wife and child, but after five minutes that was pretty much all we ever talked about. Everyone else was doing it; for the better part of 15 years, the subject had formed part of the national conversation. The killings were so awful, so brutal. Christine Lundy was hacked to death in her bed. Amber Lundy, seven years old, had her head cracked open with the same weapon, which has never been found. The murders were conducted in their Palmerston North home at an unknown time of night, by person or persons unknown or by someone they knew and loved. You could walk a long day’s march before you found anyone who thought it wasn’t Lundy — the fat man who fucked whores, who murdered his own family for an insurance cheque, who staged it to look like a burglary gone wrong, who was found guilty and should never have been let
