Sir David put in an elevator for his wife, Mary, a paraplegic. A year after her death, he married her younger sister, Dorothy. He had created fabulous wealth, and made a profound difference to the New Zealand economy, but a cold and joyless rage lingers over his name. In his history of New Zealand forest products, Brian Healy wrote, ‘Sir David lacked warmth and humour in his working relations and tended to be abrupt and demanding with his subordinates.’ Sydney Shep of Victoria University wrote in a research paper on the Kinleith mill, ‘Business contemporaries found him stiff, sombre, intense, driven, and dictatorial.’ Michael Roche, writing Sir David’s entry in the New Zealand Dictionary of Biography, noted his subject’s ‘erratic behaviour’ in later years. ‘Many meetings were held in his Mt Albert home, during which he repeatedly lashed out verbally.’
He died in 1963. The house went on the market after Lady Dorothy died in 1979. Historian Michael Bassett attended the auction. He said, ‘Every sticky-beak in the neighbourhood had a look at the place. The rooms were large, the kitchen had Terrazzo benches — they were all the rage in the 1930s. We had one at home. The only trouble was that whenever any lemon juice got anywhere near it, your Terrazzo would end up being all pitted. Anyway, it had Terrazzo benches, it had a lift that went up, it was dingy, dark, old. Nonetheless, at the auction, it went for the staggering sum of $155,000, which had everybody gasping and nobody could work out who had actually bought the place. Up steps this guy in short pants and a singlet. He slaps this woman next to him and says, “Meet my de facto!” And then, “Ho-ho-ho, keeps you young!” His name was Barrie Cardon.’
3
The first witness called by the prosecution took the jury on a guided tour through 23 Stilwell Road. It was a strange kind of open home. Jason Barr, a forensic technician at the ESR, who wore a tight black suit and a hipster’s full-strength beard, had used specialised camera equipment that allowed viewers to walk through 22 locations. A screen was set up in court. Barr loaded a DVD. It played moving images of the approach to the house — the driveway in sunshine and shadow, Tom Zhong’s body with one foot poking out from beneath a sheet, wisteria in the courtyard, a gas barbecue on the front porch.
The house loomed white and wonderful, gleaming in the sun. Inside, Michael Wu’s body lay face-down at the foot of the stairs. His white iPhone was nearby. He’d made his last call as he staggered down the stairs, dying. The number he called belonged to Zhong. It went unanswered. Zhong had already staggered down the stairs; his phone probably rang when he was outside, dying. Was it a call for help?
The hipster’s groovy ESR film delved into the basement, went up the stairs, looked over the balcony. And throughout, one thing jarred, kept intruding on the guided tour of a beautiful old house with lovely wood panelling and delicate leadlight: a sense of cheapness. It was there in the plastic clotheshorses in the front room and the upstairs lounge. It was there in the full-length mirror merely propped up against a wall in the hallway. It was also there in the absences. There wasn’t anything on the walls. There was a glass cabinet, and the only thing in it was a chamber pot. There was a bedroom with a cot, empty bags of potato chips, a flat-screen TV on top of a sideboard. There were cardboard boxes in the hallway. There were wet towels flopped over the bath. It was as though the occupants were passing through; it looked like a hotel which had seen better days.
Auckland businessman Dermot Nottingham discussed property investments with Wang, and visited him at Stilwell Road numerous times. He said Wang claimed to own several properties, and a $2-million duck farm.
He said, ‘There was always an undercurrent with Chris that he needed money. He was driving around in a small car, which was quite strange, because most affluent Chinese show off their wealth. The grass wasn’t kept; it had different layers of grass in the various gardens. It gave me the feeling there was something wrong financially.
‘I’d go around and it wasn’t unusual for Chris to be out in his kitchen, because when you live like a pauper, you live in the kitchen. There were hardly any furnishings in the house. The kitchen didn’t have a table and chairs in it. It was a large kitchen, and it was a kitchen you’d normally dine in. He did have large knives in the kitchen, very large knives, like cleavers. I put that down to him owning duck farms and maybe taking a couple of ducks home and killing them . . .’
It took a full day in court to screen the ESR silent movie. The auteur’s cameras moved around Wang’s bedroom, showed a telescope on the balcony, $5.50 in change and a knife sheath on a round table. In the next-door lounge, there were two knives in a pool of blood on the carpet, one pointing left, one pointing right.
The knives were the trial’s two most significant objects. They contained the meaning to what happened, were at the centre of
