The police had tunnel vision. There wasn’t any motive. There was concern that several prosecution witnesses were ‘misleading’. There was no support for Sijen’s claims. X was a wretch. And: ‘If you accept the analysis that Mr Lundy could not do it because he did not have enough fuel, then you should stop there and acquit.’
Thus the glum faces of the police. Thus Lundy in good spirits outside court that afternoon; thus the celebratory night out on the piss for Hislop and Burns. I caught them on the way out. I said to Hislop, ‘How would you describe things as they are right now? Are they finely poised?’
He said, ‘I would have thought it was finely poised at nine this morning. But having heard the summing up, and watched the jury — and I was looking at them carefully — I think we’re a few yards ahead. I’ve seen some long faces on the other side.’ He meant the police and the prosecution. Hislop’s laugh was like a happy woof; the thought of those long faces made him bark.
I said, ‘What did you see when you watched the jury?’
‘I was seeing them writing down all the right stuff. But also, it was just that the summing up was much better than I expected. The judge was making some pretty sound remarks. He basically told them to forget the NFI [Netherlands Forensic Institute] stuff. He steered them.’
‘He said something like, “Sijen stands alone.”’
‘Yeah, exactly. And he’s right of course.’
Hislop had never heard of Lundy or his case when he took it on in 2010. I said, ‘What do you make of your client?’
He said, ‘He’s probably one of the least likely murderers I’ve come across. He does genuinely seem like a gentle, rather soft kind of guy. It’s one of the things that just doesn’t add up. I genuinely don’t think he did it. I don’t think he’s got the balls. You need big balls to do that.’
Burns had been on holiday in Cyprus with his wife, about to have his first beer of the midday, when he had opened up his emails to find Hislop asking him to join the defence team. He knew all about the case. ‘Like everybody else, I assumed he was as guilty as sin.’
I said, ‘You’re an officer of the court and your feelings about guilt or innocence don’t come into it. But did you cross that line, and say, “My client is not guilty”?’
‘I had that epiphany when I was going through the petrol consumption evidence and realised he couldn’t have done it,’ Burns said. ‘I remember sitting down — I was at home, at our house in Mangawhai Heads — and then getting up and saying to my wife, “This is an innocent man.” And that’s frightening.’
He didn’t think the Crown had presented enough evidence for a conviction. He didn’t think it had the jury onside. He said, ‘The body language of three, four people tell me they’re prepared to give Mark Lundy a free ticket home. That may change in deliberation . . .’
I said to Hislop, ‘If your guy didn’t do it, then what the hell happened?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Was it a hit wrapped up with the aborted sale of purchase, or the root stock . . . You just don’t know. There’s no evidence that that’s right. There are nutters out there. Was it purely a case of mistaken identity? A hit on the wrong house? We’ll never know.’
I asked him to comment again on France’s summing up, and he said, ‘Just his tone seemed to me to be very, very weighted towards the defence. He concentrated quite a bit on the burden of proof, which was nice. He kept coming back to our three impossibilities, especially the petrol. I mean, what are you going to do? The guy couldn’t drive there to do it. He didn’t fly.’
‘Well, Morgan talked about discrepancies in the mileage.’
‘Ahhh, that’s a pile of shit. No. This jury is hot on the petrol. Hot on it. A lot of serious note-taking on the petrol. But, hey,’ he said, and raised his palms to Heaven, ‘I could be dead wrong.’
He was dead wrong. The verdict was unanimous. ‘Guilty,’ said the foreperson, twice, in a small, childish voice on that beautiful afternoon in autumn. The word fell from her lips. It floated around the courtroom. It was the damnation everyone had expected since the jury had made an extraordinary request the previous day at about 2pm. Word went around that they had something to ask Justice France. It’s not uncommon for juries to seek clarification on particular issues; the difficult science at the Lundy trial meant that it was inevitable that a question would be asked of some arcane matter. But then the word went around that they didn’t have anything to ask about science whatsoever. They wanted to see films. They’d requested repeat screenings of two police videos — that frightening six-minute tour of the crime scene, and much of the second, climactic interview between Lundy and his nemesis, Detective Inspector Kelly.
There was a particular moment in the crime scene that they obviously wanted to see again. Three of them leaned forward when the camera showed the bloody glove print on the conservatory window. It was Christine’s blood, and the killer had left it there. I remember Levick miming his theory — the killer wore paper booties, and leaned his hand against the window for balance as he bent to take off the protective shoes. The police argued that the fact that it was on the inside of the window showed that Lundy had staged
