‘Definitely not.’
Kelly asked about Lundy’s debts in the wine venture, and whether Christine was concerned. Lundy said they were both concerned. Kelly asked if they argued, and Lundy replied that they hadn’t.
‘I’m trying to solve the murder involving Christine and your daughter, Amber.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Be truthful with me.’
‘I am.’
‘I think perhaps you had argued about it.’
Lundy replied they hadn’t. The interview had picked up pace. Kelly said Lundy didn’t have an alibi between 5.30pm and 8.30pm on the night of the murders. ‘There’s a big window there,’ he said. Lundy said he was in Petone. Kelly then asked about Lundy’s marriage, and said it didn’t appear as though he and Christine were very close. They didn’t sit together at the wine club evenings. Kelly then said Lundy’s behaviour since their deaths ‘has not portrayed a loving, caring relationship’. The interview had arrived at a tipping point.
‘You think,’ Lundy said, ‘that I’ve killed them.’
‘All right, that’s what I’m thinking. You murdered your wife and daughter. How do you feel about me saying that, Mark?’
‘Bloody terrible, to be honest. Like, I’m bloody lost for words. It’s got to be the most heinous, heinous thought that I could come up with. It’s— I have told so many people, right, that I really like you, and said, “Steve, he’s a really good top bloke, he’s really neat”, until now.’
‘I’m doing my job.’
‘I know you are, I know you are.’
‘Let me say something. You’re dealing with a team of detectives that have worked well in excess of 20,000 hours trying to find who killed your wife and daughter. That equates to one man working for 10 years, a quarter of his working life, and we’re not finished.’
‘Yeah.’
‘In order for me to explain to you what happened there,’ said Kelly, arriving at the moment of truth in his interview, at its central drama, its leap of faith, ‘I’m going to have to show you some photographs.’
‘I didn’t want this,’ said Lundy, with a kind of whimper.
Kelly said, ‘The day has come.’ He opened up a folder and took out a photograph from the crime scene. ‘That is Christine.’
Lundy’s response to the appalling photographs Kelly showed him of the massacre were to prove crucial the following week. It was the things he said and the things he didn’t, and the way he behaved and the way he didn’t. The film brought the viewer into that small room, with its askew camera angle, its bare walls, its heaving fatty in yellow — it had something to do with his guilt or innocence.
It finished with Lundy’s arrest, off-camera. The interview had lasted three hours. Towards the end, Kelly sang a kind of aria, with Lundy as his prompt.
‘I can fully understand why you think I did it, I really can,’ said Lundy.
‘Mark, I don’t think you did it, I know you did it. I’m telling you I know you murdered your wife and daughter. I don’t think it, I damn well know it. And I have conclusive, absolutely irrefutable evidence that you did it. You will not get out of this, Mark. You murdered both of them.’
‘I did not murder them. I was not there.’
‘That is a load of bollocks, mate. Absolute bullshit. If you want to know what we’ve been doing for six months, we have been working on you. For six months, from day one, the number-one suspect on my spreadsheet is you. Now that’s the way it’s been for all those man-hours, all of those going to work at six in the morning and working till nine at night, seven days a bloody week, with cops thinking that you killed your wife and daughter.’
‘I didn’t. I was not in Palmerston.’ Lundy’s whinings that the lacuna in the whole story was himself — that he wasn’t in Palmerston North, that he was whoring in Petone — failed to impress Kelly.
‘You are a liar. That there is the evidence.’ He showed Lundy the images of stains on the polo shirt. It’s possible that one of the pictures was the same one I carried with me in Wellington — that purple outline a shape like the North Island, stained purple with hematoxylin and eosin dyes, its cell nuclei and nerve fibres revealing the apparent presence of Christine’s brain. Lundy peered at it, baffled. Kelly said, ‘This is the fragments in the shirt. This is what they look like close up. This is the conclusion, that either brain or deep spinal cord is present on your shirt. Caught you, buddy, absolutely caught you. You deny it till the cows come home, mate.’
The interview came to a halt at 10 past 12. Lundy called his lawyer, Mike Behrens. Hung-over, busted, a blob in yellow, he was taken to the gates of Manawatu Prison (‘I and many others are disappointed in you’) in long, flat Camp Road, just past the Linton army camp. Somewhere nearby flowed the Manawatu River. The gates opened. There endeth Lundy’s freedom for the next 13 years.
15
The trial had now fast approached its own moment of truth. What were the jury thinking? Had they already made up their minds? It was time for Morgan and Hislop to stand and deliver their closing addresses. Morgan delivered: the guy deserved a standing ovation. Perhaps not from Lundy, whom he smote with cold fury for two days, but when it was over the first person to rush to his side with unseemly haste and thrust out his hand in congratulations was defence lawyer Ross Burns. ‘I couldn’t help it,’ he said, when I invited him into my parlour in the courtroom during our wait for the verdict. ‘It was a tour de force. I went from feeling very confident about an acquittal, to thinking, “Oh, shit. This is now on a knife edge.”’
Morgan dressed like he bought his suits from Hallensteins, and his only hint of flamboyance was the silver streak of his widow’s peak. He was quite charmless, but his manner in closing
