Evidence presented in 2002 was also read out from Lundy’s father, Bill, and Christine’s mother, Helen, who had both since died. ‘Mark and Christine live for each other,’ said Bill. Helen also talked of a happy marriage. She was close to Christine; she visited every Wednesday for lunch. She wasn’t aware of any problems. The biggest issue confronting the Lundy household that week was choosing a lightshade for the spare room. ‘They lived,’ as prosecutor Morgan said, ‘in a modest little home in a blue-collar suburb.’ Life was about managing time — Pippins, scouting, guiding, dance lessons, seeing friends, work. The weekend before the killings, the Durhams had gone around for dinner. Lundy cooked a barbecue. The two families played cards until after midnight. In fact, the Lundys often hosted dinners, soirées, get-togethers; they led social, busy lives.
But two friends talked about how worried Christine was about her husband’s vineyard plan. The interest, she told Karen Keenan, was $600 a day. Keenan told the court, ‘I said, “How the hell do you sleep at night?”’ Caroline Durham told the court, ‘I knew they were paying a lot of interest. I’m sure she wasn’t very happy with the financial burden . . . It wasn’t a pretty picture.’ Neither woman looked at Lundy. Their instinct in cross-examination was to give short, grudging replies; hatred for the person who they believed had killed Christine and Amber filled the courtroom.
They were also the first signs that the prosecution’s case was getting somewhere. Their witness list was ordered, in part, to give their case a narrative shape; it was going to be a long story.
I made myself comfortable in the public gallery. I had plenty of leg-room and occasional company. There was a pretty ex-criminologist, whose thesis was apposite: parents who kill their children. There was a woman named Mary from Epsom, in Auckland. She commuted to Wellington especially for the trial, and took a room at the YWCA during the week. The rest of the media sat squeezed in the exact same places at two long tables, behind the two rows of lawyers; on day four, Ben Vanderkolk finally broke his silence when he was given the task of questioning parking officers. For the defence, Julie-Anne Kincade brought the pleasing vowels of Belfast into the room. It almost enlivened the questioning of the parking officers.
The jury elected their foreperson at the end of the first week. Slender, with long, straight, blonde hair, she wore expensive clothes, and smoked with her left hand, holding the cigarette out at arm’s length. An old courtroom saw has it that the juror who sits next to the foreperson is the one who really wanted the job. I could believe that at the Lundy trial. There was a pomposity to the Indian woman next to the forewoman; she looked as though she was used to taking charge. The faces of the jury had become familiar. There was the callow youth. There was the old boy with a limp. There were the two grey men in their fifties who came and went in a greyish fog. There was a small young woman in glasses, and a thin, worried woman of uncertain age. There was the dude with the shaved head who had the shrewd, ruthless features of someone who worked in advertising — worse, he looked like a hipster. There was the comical munter with the rubbery and really expressive face who wore talkative T-shirts. IF IT AIN’T BEAM, spoke one shirt, IT AIN’T BOURBON.
More witnesses who knew the Lundys were called to the stand. Lundy was given a conspicuously warm smile by family friend Bronwyn Neal.
Ross Burns asked, ‘Did you think Mark and Christine were very much in love?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said.
‘Very tender and affectionate towards each other?’
‘Yes. Very.’
‘Argumentative, would you say?’
‘Never.’
‘And Amber? Was she the apple of Mark’s eye?’
‘Ridiculously so.’
Milvia Hannah knew Lundy through work. He had come to her showroom in Mt Cook on the day the bodies were found. She said his behaviour was ‘odd’.
Hislop said, ‘But when you spoke to police at the time, you said, “He was happy, smiley, like he always was.”’
‘I was a bit like a possum in the headlights,’ she explained.
‘It wasn’t until after he was arrested, wasn’t it, that you described his beheaviour that day as “odd”?’
‘Yes, but I thought it on the day.’ She ignored Lundy on her way out of the courtroom.
Brent Potter knew Lundy as a sink salesman. He invited him for morning tea in his Lower Hutt joinery business on the day the bodies were found. He had an open, relaxed face, and looked like the archetypal good joker. When he left the courtroom, the two men gave each other the familiar New Zealand male greeting of raising their eyebrows at each other.
‘I bought a sink tap off of him that day,’ Potter remembered. ‘It was an impulse buy.’ He said Lundy and his staff sat down for smoko. ‘He was cheerful, the same as ever.’
Smiling, laughing; a cup of tea in the smoko room; the buying of a tap . . . All while Christine and Amber lay dead in their home, blood all over the walls, ‘brains’ as Glenn Weggery said, with the ranchslider open and the curtains closed and the phone ringing, and Christine’s mother about to drive over to her daughter’s house for lunch.
Maybe loyalty — and sympathy, and support — is like
