Christine didn’t cook. Her friends conceded she wasn’t the tidiest person in the world, either. But she was brilliantly organised. She ran her husband’s kitchen sink business from an office in the house, and worked on the accounts until late at night. Afterwards, she’d play Patience and Solitaire on the computer to wind down.
She turned off the PC at 10.52pm that Tuesday. Christine was a night owl, and often stayed up late to read or watch TV. Amber had her routines — pyjamas on at 7pm, bed at 7.30pm, lights out by 8pm. ‘She was the easiest child to babysit,’ Helen Weggery told police. Sometimes her parents read her a bedtime story, sometimes she read it to them. She slept with a soft toy of Rolly, a jowly dog who featured on TV commercials for toilet paper. Lundy had fixed a net in her bedroom for her stuffed toys and her dolls. There were bunk beds in her room. She slept in the bottom bunk.
The dance lessons and swimming lessons, Pippins, friends, school, family — she loved her life. It was safe. Her mum and dad looked after her.
She spoke to her father for the last time on Tuesday, when she asked him over the phone whether it was okay to have McDonald’s for dinner. ‘Of course you can,’ he told her. The exchange was read out in court. A smile touched Lundy’s face, the memory reaching back to him after 15 years of a little girl saying, ‘Please, Daddy?’
After she put Amber to bed, Christine worked on her brother’s GST accounts. Glenn Weggery had called around that morning to see whether she’d finished. He’d called around the previous morning, too, and then on Wednesday morning, when the curtains were still closed.
Mark Lundy appeared on the witness stand the first time he was found guilty, at his trial in 2002, and was asked, ‘What do you miss most about Amber?’
‘Everything,’ said her father, who will be known and remembered for the rest of his days as her murderer.
17
Lundy was found guilty at two minutes to four on April Fool’s Day. The last I saw of him — the last time he might ever be seen in public — was when he was led from the courtroom after the jury were dismissed. He was a man in shock, in disbelief, in agony. The judge promptly sent him back to rot in jail for the remainder of his life. It was over. He was made to disappear.
I left Wellington the next day. It felt strange to be leaving Wellington for good. The brand-new paving at the Cenotaph war memorial beside Parliament was nearly finished; when I left court that afternoon, it was to the sharp, loud clang of the bell at the Old Government House. The flight was called, and I found myself in line with David Hislop. He was on his way home, too, to London; he was in jeans and a groovy shirt, and was glum, beaten, quiet. He’d emailed early that morning, ‘Just a word of thanks for your commiserations and support yesterday.’ I’d found him after the verdict, standing in a room in the High Court with Ross Burns and Julie-Anne Kincade, the three of them devastated. I didn’t stay long. He wrote, ‘I am unshaken in my belief that the jury got it wrong but perhaps 12 years of entrenched belief in his guilt was just one hurdle too high to clear. After four years on the case I am bowing out and others with more energy can carry on if they can.’ Burns was finished with it, too, but he’d made it plain all along that this was his swan-song — he’d come out of retirement for the case.
Hislop was at the airport with Kincade. She’d resolved to carry on, and was soon at work on Lundy’s appeal. Her lead argument was that the RNA evidence — Dr Sijen’s test in support of the Crown’s case that Lundy wore Christine’s brain on his polo shirt — should never have been allowed in court. The defence had bungled that one, made a poor submission at the pre-trial hearing when they had tried to get it thrown out of court. Their subsequent pleas to the Court of Appeal, and then directly to Justice France, had also failed. What chance of that same exact appeal finally working the fourth time around? And what difference had it made to the verdict, anyway? Did the jury seriously consider anything remotely scientific?
‘You are anonymous,’ Justice France had said to the chosen 12 on the opening day of the trial. Fine. I don’t want to know their names. I don’t want to see any of them ever again — yes, I’m sure the feeling is mutual. I think I probably hate them. I hadn’t really thought all that much about them during the trial. The pretty forewoman took a lot of notes. The cripple seemed as though he was asleep most of the time, and the callow youth looked as though he didn’t have a clue what was being said. The munter was in his own amazing production — that radical makeover had transformed him, but his face remained in a state of agitation. Were there little alliances, important cliques? The forewoman seemed on especially good terms with the hipster. He sat directly behind her, and now and then she’d turn and they’d exchange a knowing smile. They were sometimes seen sharing a joke as they entered court, and they were also sighted together
