He locked the door of Unit 10 and walked softly across the carpark. The motel had its NO VACANCY sign up. Among the guests were a woman on a week-long weight-watching course at Jenny Craig, a cigar salesman from Ponsonby Road in Auckland, a man from Firestone in Palmerston North, a watercress grower from Te Puke who was staying with his father, and Phil, a long-term tenant.
He’d moved the car from outside his motel room to over the road earlier that evening. It was all about thinking ahead, not leaving anything to chance. He might have woken a guest if he’d started up his Ford Fairmont in the motel carpark. But now he could make a clean getaway, undetected, unnoticed, a fugitive in the night.
A new moon had appeared in the sky at 10.20pm. There was low cloud, but visibility was good. A light southerly had died out in the afternoon. It had rained now and then during the day, but not heavily, and the roads were dry.
He got in the car. The bright green light on the Petone wharf glowed in the dark. Oystercatchers marched along the line of the tide, stabbing at food. Their soft, nagging cries were the only sound to be heard. It was after midnight. Petone had gone to bed; the lights were off in the charming cottages with their small front porches. Orange sodium streetlights burned all along the foreshore of the pretty seaside town.
He closed the car door, taking care not to slam it. Wellington’s hills formed a ring around the harbour. To the left were the gorsey slopes above Days Bay and Eastbourne; to his right, the shore curved towards the city. The Cook Strait ferry was in dock.
He’d stayed at the Foreshore Motor Lodge before. It was a good base for his travels around Wellington and the Hutt Valley, where he called in to see his customers. ‘Gidday, Mark,’ they said. ‘How’s Christine?’ Everyone liked Christine. ‘And how’s Amber?’ Their daughter was seven. They had a trampoline and a set of swings for her on the front lawn of their home at 30 Karamea Crescent in Palmerston North.
He started the engine. He drove along The Esplanade. The cigar salesman, who’d watched his daughter perform in a choir at the Wellington Town Hall that night, slept on. The watercress grower, who ate with his father at Valentine’s in Petone that night, slept on. The weight-watcher, who may or may not have counted calories when she ate dinner with a friend at her home in Mt Victoria that night, slept on.
He turned onto Hutt Road, opposite the welcome sign for Petone spelled out in flowers, and drove alongside the harbour towards the city. The lights were on in the Beehive. Perhaps Prime Minister Helen Clark was up late, plotting. The railway tracks were to his left, the hills to his right. He drove past a BP service station. Dust from the Horokiwi quarry floated in the air. The black water of the harbour was darker than the moonless night.
It had to be done. It had to be fucking done. He needed the money. Tomorrow was the deadline to settle with those cocksuckers who’d sold him the land for his vineyard in Hawke’s Bay. He could make it happen. He had dreams, aspirations; he couldn’t let Christine hold him back. Amber was young. She’d get through it. They’d move away, start a new life. He’d spoil her. The vineyard would pay for their future. He could fuck who he wanted when he owned a vineyard. Christine didn’t want to have sex any more. Fine. There were whores in every town. The one tonight was good. What was her name? He couldn’t remember. Well, he’d get a new one next time he was down.
He turned right into Ngauranga Gorge, heading inland, and left behind the beautiful harbour with its lighthouses and piers, its islands and reefs. He drove 150.2 kilometres carefully, not too fast, nothing erratic, past Otaki, Levin, Shannon, across the Manawatu plains to the killing field at 30 Karamea Crescent. He got the weapon from the garage, he crept inside, he put his knee on the side of the bed, he didn’t hesitate.
And then: ‘Daddy?’
God almighty. Don’t think about that. Don’t. And then he stripped off and put his outfit in the sack with the jemmy bar and Christine’s jewellery box and got rid of the stuff and got back to his motel room at about 5am. He sat on the bed. He’d done it. He’d done the hard part. Now he just had to get away with it.
The next anyone heard from him was at 8.09am, when he checked out. ‘We had a chat,’ said motel manager Bruce Sloane, ‘about nothing in particular.’
2
Everything in this lurid version of events — well, apart from some of the dialogue, travelogue, and various assorted details pertaining to the small matter of the double homicide — was taken from witness statements and prosecution speeches made during the opening weeks of the murder trial of Mark Lundy at the Wellington High Court in 2015. Was this how he did it? Was this where it started that night? The killings were in Palmerston North, but Petone held the key to whether or not the killer was Christine’s husband and Amber’s father. He either left the motel room after the escort left and set out on his so-called ‘killing journey’, or he fell asleep.
Now and then during the trial I would
