Chapter 9
Mark Lundy: Sleeping
1
Everything in the following version of events of an unsolved family tragedy — well, apart from some of the dialogue, travelogue, and various assorted details pertaining to sleep — was taken from witness statements and police interviews presented during the murder trial of Mark Lundy at the Wellington High Court in 2015. Does it most resemble the truth? Does it get closest to what happened in Petone that night?
I puzzled over these questions whenever I fled from court and took the train to Petone. I walked the length of the main road, Jackson Street, from the railway station to the vaguely terrifying other end, with its broken windows and wasted dudes in hoodies. It worked up an appetite. I filled my face with biscuits from the Girl Guides office, cheese from The Dutch Shop, and shortbread biscuits filled with raspberry jam from The German Bakery. I considered the menus at Magic Wok and Mr Ji’s, and settled for the shredded pork lunchbox and black glutinous rice with coconut milk at Foo Wah. Its shredded and glutinous delights barely touched the sides.
I needed something else. I needed the kind of food a fat man would eat, and I made my way to the tuck shop where Lundy always used to eat whenever he came to Petone. It’s now called the Shoreline, a small, narrow shop, and there was a queue outside the door at lunchtimes. Punters chose from waffle dogs and scotch eggs and yoyos. I went for the healthy option: a bun topped with tinned spaghetti and melted cheese. Lundy had ordered a bacon and egg sandwich that morning of the deaths, and had eaten it in his car. I took my feed and ate sitting on the sand. Black-backed seagulls floated on the gentle tide. On the wharf, a fisherman marked his line with an orange balloon. He was after kahawai. I ambled over for a chat. He’d heard that someone caught a kingfish earlier that week. It was a beautiful summer’s day. ‘If it wasn’t for this breeze,’ he said, ‘we’d cook.’
The drab, grey beach, the inelegant lump of Somes Island in the harbour, the dark surrounding hills . . . Petone held the answer to the crime. This is where it started with Lundy that night, or where it ended. Petone, the gateway to the teeming bogan savages of the Hutt Valley; Petone, where the first colonists arrived on 22 January 1840, on the Aurora, and were taken ashore on small boats. Maori gave them fish and potatoes. It was a day in summer, but the scene would have looked miserable — a tatty shoreline, a swamp. ‘A wild and stern reality,’ as early settler John Plimmer put it. Petone’s settlement and its emergence as an industrial kind of Hell was recorded at the Settlers Museum, across the road from the Shoreline tuck shop. For years, blood and offal ran red into the harbour from the Gear Meats slaughterhouse, and the satanic mills of Colgate, Rinso and Lux created Petone’s working-class foundations. There was a small Maori urupa, with its water tap to cleanse the hands of visitors to the cemetery, squeezed in a depressing rectangle of land in between factories.
What happened in Petone on the night of the dead on 29/30 August 2000? Something? Nothing? The more time I spent in Petone, the more I was convinced that the jury — that everyone in the courtroom — needed to be taken there on an outing, to peer into his motel room (Petone locals referred to the Foreshore as ‘Lundy’s Motel’), to queue for a yoyo or some such treat at the Shoreline, to perambulate The Esplanade where he said he had parked under a streetlight in the early evening to read The Icarus Agenda by Robert Ludlum (‘Readers will be hooked’ — New York Times), and to try to picture the Crown’s lurid, possibly fantastically improbable version of events, which had him driving under cloak of darkness along The Esplanade and the Hutt motorway to execute his family and thence return to the Hutt motorway and The Esplanade at, oh, say, 5am.
They could stand on the beach and look out to the waters of the Cook Strait, then turn, and look at the Foreshore Motor Lodge on the corner of The Esplanade and Nelson Street, where an escort arrived at Unit 10 on that cold night nearly 15 years ago. She gave evidence via videolink. She was shown sitting at a boardroom table. She wore a white blouse, as though she were playing the role of a secretary. Her sad, battered face indicated a hard life, suggesting the usual misery of men and methamphetamine. It wouldn’t be accurate to describe her behaviour as tense or anxious. It was more like she was showing signs of a fast-approaching panic attack. Each question nailed her to a cross.
‘Did you knock on the door?’
She took a long drink of water, and whispered, ‘Yes.’
‘Then?’
She breathed in and out rapidly, and croaked, ‘I was let into the room.’
‘Did you have to get the paperwork out of the way?’
She stared at the camera, and said in fright, ‘What?’
‘Did you ask for the money?’
She took slower breaths, and said, ‘Oh. Yes.’
She told the court she was in the room for about an hour.
2
She phoned for the driver to pick her up. He said he wasn’t far away, probably five minutes.
‘Any problems?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Okay. Bye.’
She picked up her handbag, checked the $140 was inside. The client got off the bed and put on his green tracksuit pants. He said his
