Lundy was a big man, slow, pale, very angry, very bitter. He almost looked gaunt. He was 43 at the time of the murders, fat and soft-skinned, with a lousy fringe. Fifteen years later, he’d lost a lot of weight and most of his hair. There was a peculiar goatee. He was assertive, verbose, nervous. We had a beer or two. Levick preferred a balanced diet of instant coffee and cigarettes. I liked Lundy, not overly; I liked Levick, a lot. The two of them were in such intense cahoots — they were fighting to clear Lundy’s name, to beat the murder charges in court — but they made an odd pair. Levick was small, with startling blue eyes set in a red face, and his conversation revealed a brilliant, nimble intellect. Lundy lumbered in gait and mind. It was difficult to imagine them meeting in any circumstances other than their shared obsession with proving Lundy’s innocence.
I said, ‘Do you two actually have anything in common?’
Lundy spoke first. He said, ‘Nothing.’
He helped out around the place. The next time I visited, he was up on a ladder, peering into a water tank. It didn’t have much water in it. The ground was hard, and turned brown by the end of January. The creek nearly went dry. The surrounding countryside was parched and the roads were empty. I loved heading out that way, past the prime minister’s Helensville electoral office with the big picture of Key’s gormless face, past the strawberry fields and the roadside stalls — watermelons $4.99, six cobs of corn $5. It was horsey and fruity. A new dementia unit was due to open. There was the famous sign with its berserk apostrophes advertising YUCCA’S BROMELIAD’S ORCHID’S SUCCULENT’S. There were the famous wine estates of Nobilo and Soljans. They were very pretty on the eye. Also, though, they mocked Lundy’s own hapless schemes to create a vineyard on prime land in the Hawke’s Bay. His dream came to nothing. Police regarded the venture as evidence in his prosecution; it went to motive — he needed money, fast. ‘There’s another way of looking at that,’ Geoff said, that first afternoon on the porch. He had two packets of Winfield Green beside the ashtray. He whittled them down while he explained that the wine venture contained the answer to the riddle: if not Lundy, then who killed Christine and Amber? It involved root stock, a frightened woman who called the police, an outstanding debt . . . Geoff liked to re-enact conversations, and he started to shout when he took on the role of his prime suspect. ‘Keep your voice down,’ Lundy said. A man was driving a tractor in the orchard. Levick padded into the house to put on the jug for more coffee.
I said to Lundy, ‘Who do you think did it?’
He said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think too much about that. I just want to know why. Why would you kill them? They were my life. In a way, they still are. It’s all I think about. They’re with God, waiting for me. I know I’ll see them in Heaven.’
He wept. Levick had come back with his mug of coffee. He said, ‘You all right, Mark?’
Lundy said to me, half in wonder, ‘I’ve talked to two other journalists, Mike White and Jared Savage. They didn’t make me cry. You do.’ The other half felt like rage.
2
These were his halcyon days. He was a free man, at large and on bail, not exactly happy, often tense, but hopeful that his retrial would get him the right result — not guilty, at last, of the murders of Christine and Amber on 30 August 2000. He was found guilty at his first trial in 2002. He successfully appealed to the Privy Council — thanks in large part to the incredible efforts of Levick, who didn’t know him and simply took an interest — and his conviction was thrown out in 2013. He bail conditions allowed him to travel to Kumeu, and he’d also driven to the cemetery in Palmerston North to visit the graves of his wife and daughter.
I said, ‘Were you nervous someone would see you there?’
He said, ‘Oh, shit yes. Terrified.’
He’d sat and talked to them, he said. ‘My girls.’
I imagined him sitting there, asserting his right to grieve. The text on the headstone was in his words. It was like a touching tribute to himself. It read: FOREVER LOVED BY HUSBAND AND FATHER MARK. And underneath, from the terrible song: UNFORGETTABLE. THAT’S WHAT YOU ARE. Palmerston North writer Peter Hawes, who attended the first trial and filed an extraordinary report to the Manawatu Standard, mentioned the headstone when we spoke on the phone. He hated the thing. ‘Not only do they get hacked to death,’ he said, ‘they get lumbered with banality.’
We spoke on a day when I happened to be visiting Levick and Lundy. I took the call in the trees by the creek, and talked in a low voice. It felt like an abuse of hospitality to talk with Hawes. He was in possession of one of the most original minds in New Zealand literature, but he echoed what everyone else thought when he said, ‘I know full well he is absolutely guilty.’ He had studied Lundy in court, tried to examine his pathology. He failed. He said, ‘I couldn’t get at him. I couldn’t find the gap in his brain. I couldn’t find why he did it.’
And then he said, ‘Amber’s death was an act of love.’
I said, ‘What?’
Hawes said, ‘A kid can’t live after seeing that. He killed her to save her.’
From his story in the Standard: ‘I sank my brain into the doings of this crime — it affected me
