‘You can’t rule it out,’ she said.
‘And are you also seriously suggesting the paint flakes in Christine’s hair were transferred to Amber’s head when they came in contact with the murder weapon?’
‘You can’t rule it out,’ she droned.
‘It’s too silly,’ Morgan said, ‘for words.’ He sat down without another word.
She’d come all the way from Kent to be made to look like a fool. But she had her uses. Her dour tones were put to work as a voice-over artist. Hislop asked her to provide a running commentary on a film he wished to play in the court. It was the police video taken at the crime scene. I leaned forward.
It was a silent movie, and that made it immediately frightening. There was the weatherboard house, and there was a policeman standing outside on the pavement. There was a daisy bush and a set of swings and a police tape that shook in the wind. The green paintwork on the windowsills was chipped and peeling. It matched the colour of the letterbox.
The camera went up the driveway and around the back, and examined the window that the police claim Lundy jemmied open to make it look like a burglary. There was an oil drum and a green corrugated-iron fence and a ladder with six rungs. Pallets from Lundy’s kitchen sink business were leaning in an untidy pile against the house. The back yard had a small scruffy lawn, a trailer, a sock on a clothesline. And then the camera moved into the house.
The kitchen was small, with blue cupboards. There was a coffee cup on a bench, and three cans of Lion Brown. The film lasted about six minutes. It was badly lit and badly edited, and the camera shook, and all that just made it terrifying. It went up the hallway. There was Amber. She lay on the carpet. She wore a nightgown. Her small hand was curled beside her hair.
There was Christine. Everything was shadows and blood, a dark room, a missing person — the murderer. Who was it? Who was it who made that happen, who created that bleak scene so badly filmed, so horrifying? ‘If you think about it,’ said Leak, ‘the assailant is part of the scene.’
Leak meant that his body interrupted the various flights and parabolas of the blood when he smashed Christine’s and Amber’s brains in, and indicated where he was standing, and the length of his weapon. The waterbed looked like it took up most of the bedroom, leaving the killer only a narrow space to stand by the side of the bed and start swinging his axe or some such weapon that killed Christine and chopped at the headboard.
She said Christine would have been lying on the left side of the bed when the first blow hit her. She tried to defend herself, and moved to the right, where she was killed.
‘Amber,’ said Leak, ‘wasn’t in bed with her mum.’ That was a heartbreaking thing to hear: ‘her mum’. Leak’s expertise in the field of blood splatter recreated that slaughter of an innocent. ‘She was upright long enough after the first blow for the blood to run down her shoulder . . . The final blows came when she was face-down on the floor.’
The police video continued to move around Christine’s bedroom. There was her body and there was the floral bedspread and there were the curtains. On the floor was a cloth doll. The killer had dropped it there. It used to sit on top of Christine’s jewellery box, which had been taken from the house and never recovered. The camera moved closer. The doll had a smile on its face.
So this was what I had wanted to see: a six-minute horror movie, set in a home in Palmerston North, with a white electric jug on the kitchen bench and a child, dead, on a patterned carpet. It was a winter’s day. The sky was grey, and the officer outside the house looked as though he was freezing. Someone had already left a bunch of flowers beside the letterbox — an offering of love for the family that no longer existed.
8
Leak’s appearance as a defence witness interrupted Morgan’s narrative. Justice France had allowed her to jump the queue because it was the only time she was available to travel from England to New Zealand. No matter; Morgan returned to his own witness list after she gave evidence, and arrived at the hot molten core of his story, the central drama of his narrative, the centre of his journey to establish guilt and win the trial — Lundy’s shirt.
It was fixed to an exhibit board at the front of the courtroom. Made in China, 65 per cent polyester, 35 per cent cotton garment, sort of grey–blue, size XXL, as vast as a tent — its former owner would likely disappear inside it now, and not find his way out. It was like a weight-watcher’s exhibit. The shirt was the ‘before’, Lundy was the ‘after’. He still took up a lot of room, but he wasn’t half the man he used to be; regardless, the shirt was like a shadow hanging over him, a ghost come back to haunt him. He wore it the night of the murders. That much was agreed by all parties. According to the Crown, he wore it under some kind of protective clothing — a pair of overalls, perhaps — and Christine’s brain somehow landed on the chest and sleeve of the polo shirt while he was engaged in the process of killing.
He changed into a white shirt the next morning. He ironed it in the motel room, and put the polo shirt, inside-out, in a travel bag with a pair of green underpants and some socks. The police took the bag and its contents after he sped to Palmerston North when he heard of the murders. It was placed in a forensic bag the following week, and was finally examined by
