Every reporter writes these kinds of stories when they’re assigned to ring around the local police stations and ask for a record of the latest incidents. I wrote those kinds of stories for newspapers in Te Aroha and Greymouth, and a Palmerston North radio station. But they weren’t in the same class as the Timaru Herald’s ‘Police Notebook’. When I was doing it, I only selected the most dramatic, the most uncommon. It was a kind of snobbery. ‘Police Notebook’ publishes everything. It’s epic, a complete register. It walks the length of Stafford Street. Thus: ‘Police arrested a Timaru woman, 37, for shoplifting jeans from a Stafford St store.’ And: ‘A Timaru man, 22, will be given a pre-charge warning for urinating in Stafford St.’ Also: ‘Police are looking for a woman who allegedly vomited into a Crusaders hat yesterday afternoon in a shop on Stafford St.’
The latter incident prompted a rare additional sentence — the woman put the hat back on the shelf, and left the store. It was written with the usual economy of style. The weight and length of the lines often resemble verse. I once compiled a few sentences from the Notebook, and sent them as a poem to Wellington poet Bill Manhire for his appreciation. The repetitions, the dying fall, the echo of his own work (everyone knows his great opening line, ‘The naked cyclist came into the room’) — he gave it high marks.
A handbag and chocolates were taken from a Chalmers St address.
A 24-year-old man was warned for breaching the liquor ban in Stafford St.
A 30-year-old woman was warned for breaching the liquor ban in Stafford St.
A bicycle was reported stolen from a garage on Rathmore St.
A Baker St property was entered but nothing was taken.
*
Timaru, Timaru. You have to be careful what you say about Timaru. It’s a sensitive place. There were two alarming instances when the townspeople rose up and took umbrage at the Listener. In 1964, Timaru was the answer to a clue in the magazine’s cryptic crossword: ‘You may call it a rum city.’ Rum! What the devil was the Listener trying to say? The magazine was accused of blackening the city’s name, and suggesting it was awash in grog. The matter was raised in Parliament, where all umbrages go to die. And in 2003, journalist and photographer Jane Ussher created a photo-essay for the Listener on the sad, tender charms of Timaru’s Caroline Bay; Timaruvians hated it so much that they staged a mass bonfire of the magazine. I recall a photo of leering faces in the glow of the flames.
I come in peace. My ode to the ‘Police Notebook’ is sincere, admiring. Irony only takes you so far — barely across the road — and there are so many other things going on in the Notebook beyond the merely ironic. ‘A two-year-old girl was found wandering around King St in the weekend.’ God almighty. And what to make of this creepy little message: ‘A house in Thomas St was entered overnight on Saturday and two candles lit in the hot water cupboard’?
I’m very fond of Timaru. I visited a number of times with my father when he lived in nearby Fairlie. We’d come to town to do the shopping, to see friends, to have a drink, to have a stroll and see the sights. It’s a good place; you’d have to describe it as peaceful. It’s not every day that women fill a Crusaders hat with sick and stick it back on the shelf.
Every city has its crimes, its petty incidents, its inexplicable minor events. It’s just that they’re written better in the Timaru Herald than anywhere else.
A naked male riding his bike on High St at 3.30pm was ticketed for not wearing a bicycle helmet.
One of the great appeals of practising journalism is that you’re constantly writing sentences no one has ever written before. It barely seems credible that this should be so, because journalists are among the least creative and original people in modern society. They’re taught to write like each other. If you picked up the paper and someone had snipped out the bylines, it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. The identity of the author is an irrelevance. And yet the least talented of journalists routinely write the most amazing sentences; sentences that have never occurred to the poetic sensibilities of Shakespeare, Nabokov, Austen, Kafka, Larkin, even Ayers.
The naked cyclist sentence (‘Police Notebook’, 2014) contains the essence and mystery of journalism. It’s only 21 words, and yet its arrangement is unique in the annals of world literature. Incredible that these works in miniature, which make up journalism, should be unique. Fantastic that the infinite variety of human experience, which journalism reports, should form sentences that no one had ever thought of writing before.
The thing that makes these sentences unique is the existence and order of facts. Bores of all ages say to journalists, ‘Don’t let the facts spoil a good story.’ It’s a nonsense, because a good story demands the facts; the accumulation of facts is the story. The job of the journalist is to carry the facts in a pleasing and possibly even artful manner — or simply to get out of the way, and tip the facts out onto the road.
A male riding his bike on High St at 3.30pm would have been given a ticket for not wearing a bicycle helmet if he was naked.
Who was he? Part of the Notebook’s elliptical charm is its namelessness — it records the actions of phantoms, and is light on clues. Thus: ‘There was an attempted burglary at an Oxford St address. An occupant made the discovery after finding a shoe print on the toilet cistern.’ At most, we learn of gender, age and residence. And: ‘A Temuka man, 18, was warned for setting fire to a paper cup outside a fast food restaurant in Theodosia St.’
On and on it goes, the Notebook noting all. Greed and probably poverty: ‘A woman was arrested after stealing oysters and lollies from Countdown.’ Bored youth and broken glass: ‘A front bedroom window in a Selwyn St house was smashed when a water balloon was thrown at it.’ Odd that a water balloon would prove more effective than a wooden rolling pin. We cross live to St Andrews: ‘A car was found on fire in St Andrews. A 35-year-old Tinwald man was located nearby. It appeared he had accidentally set the vehicle on fire.’ What?
A kind of melancholy sets in when you read older entries in the Notebook. This, from May 2011: ‘A boy, aged about 15, stole two pouches of tobacco from a dairy in North St. The owner chased the boy but lost him when he turned into an alleyway.’ The thief will be 19 this year. Is he okay? Or is he further along the road to ruin? October 2009: ‘A 29-year-old Timaru man was arrested for offensive behaviour after he was found urinating outside Cheng’s Restaurant.’ Six years on, what does he feel whenever he walks past Cheng’s on Stafford St? Shame? The urge to piddle? March 2009: ‘A dining table was stolen from a Browne St address.’ Six years on, did they ever replace the table, or do they just walk around the corner to Cheng’s and take advantage of its marvellous $5 lunch special with free soup?
The online archive only goes back as far as 2009. But a version of the Notebook existed in the very first edition of the Timaru Herald, in 1864. A court report includes a single-sentence entry that records the name of the ancestor of everyone who breaches the liquor ban on Stafford St: ‘William Young was fined for being drunk and incapable in Timaru on Saturday evening.’ A paper cup in flames, a hat full of sick, the incapable William Young — misdemeanour and literature, riding naked through Timaru for over 150 merry years.
Chapter 8
Mark Lundy: Killing Christine and Amber
1
She phoned for the driver to pick her up. He said he wasn’t far away, probably five minutes.
‘Any problems?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Okay. Bye.’
She picked up her handbag, checked the $140 was inside. The client got off the bed and put on his green tracksuit pants. He said his name was Mark.
She said, ‘So, what do you do, Mark?’
He said, ‘Sell kitchen sinks and taps.’
She said, ‘Really.’
He said, ‘I fax the orders to my wife, and she does all the paperwork. It’s a very successful business — I’m the number-one salesman in the Lower North Island!’
She said, ‘Uh-huh.’
It w
as nearly 1am. She looked around the small motel room. There wasn’t much to look at — a photo of the Petone wharf on the wall, a 1.125-litre bottle of rum on the kitchen table. He’d polished off most of it. In fact, he stank of booze, but she didn’t think he was drunk, although her heart nearly sank when she met him an hour ago. She was small, and delicate; he was huge, his stomach rolling out of his XXL polo shirt. Well, she thought, she’d seen worse. Some of them were pigs, no better than animals. This guy was actually quite pleasant.
The driver from the nearby Quarry Inn escort agency in Seaview finally arrived. ‘Well, good night,’ she said at the door.
‘Good night,’ he said.
After she left, he got ready. The hooker had cleared his mind. He could focus on the job at hand. It was going to be a long night, and required courage, audacity, nerve. Above all, it demanded careful planning. He moved around the small room. He got out overalls, gloves, a paper hairnet and paper shoes from the bulging suitcase. He wore a polo shirt beneath the overalls, which he buttoned up to his neck. He put on a spare pair of glasses. He reached back into the suitcase and brought out a sack, and a jemmy bar. He double-checked he had everything he needed. It hadn’t taken him long. Don’t rush, he said to himself. Just be careful. He took a deep breath. It was time to go. Let’s fucking do this.
He locked the door of Unit 10 and walked softly across the carpark. The motel had its NO VACANCY sign up. Among the guests were a woman on a week-long weight-watching course at Jenny Craig, a cigar salesman from Ponsonby Road in Auckland, a man from Firestone in Palmerston North, a watercress grower from Te Puke who was staying with his father, and Phil, a long-term tenant.
He’d moved the car from outside his motel room to over the road earlier that evening. It was all about thinking ahead, not leaving anything to chance. He might have woken a guest if he’d started up his Ford Fairmont in the motel carpark. But now he could make a clean getaway, undetected, unnoticed, a fugitive in the night.
A new moon had appeared in the sky at 10.20pm. There was low cloud, but visibility was good. A light southerly had died out in the afternoon. It had rained now and then during the day, but not heavily, and the roads were dry.
He got in the car. The bright green light on the Petone wharf glowed in the dark. Oystercatchers marched along the line of the tide, stabbing at food. Their soft, nagging cries were the only sound to be heard. It was after midnight. Petone had gone to bed; the lights were off in the charming cottages with their small front porches. Orange sodium streetlights burned all along the foreshore of the pretty seaside town.
He closed the car door, taking care not to slam it. Wellington’s hills formed a ring around the harbour. To the left were the gorsey slopes above Days Bay and Eastbourne; to his right, the shore curved towards the city. The Cook Strait ferry was in dock.
He’d stayed at the Foreshore Motor Lodge before. It was a good base for his travels around Wellington and the Hutt Valley, where he called in to see his customers. ‘Gidday, Mark,’ they said. ‘How’s Christine?’ Everyone liked Christine. ‘And how’s Amber?’ Their daughter was seven. They had a trampoline and a set of swings for her on the front lawn of their home at 30 Karamea Crescent in Palmerston North.
He started the engine. He drove along The Esplanade. The cigar salesman, who’d watched his daughter perform in a choir at the Wellington Town Hall that night, slept on. The watercress grower, who ate with his father at Valentine’s in Petone that night, slept on. The weight-watcher, who may or may not have counted calories when she ate dinner with a friend at her home in Mt Victoria that night, slept on.
He turned onto Hutt Road, opposite the welcome sign for Petone spelled out in flowers, and drove alongside the harbour towards the city. The lights were on in the Beehive. Perhaps Prime Minister Helen Clark was up late, plotting. The railway tracks were to his left, the hills to his right. He drove past a BP service station. Dust from the Horokiwi quarry floated in the air. The black water of the harbour was darker than the moonless night.
It had to be done. It had to be fucking done. He needed the money. Tomorrow was the deadline to settle with those cocksuckers who’d sold him the land for his vineyard in Hawke’s Bay. He could make it happen. He had dreams, aspirations; he couldn’t let Christine hold him back. Amber was young. She’d get through it. They’d move away, start a new life. He’d spoil her. The vineyard would pay for their future. He could fuck who he wanted when he owned a vineyard. Christine didn’t want to have sex any more. Fine. There were whores in every town. The one tonight was good. What was her name? He couldn’t remember. Well, he’d get a new one next time he was down.
He turned right into Ngauranga Gorge, heading inland, and left behind the beautiful harbour with its lighthouses and piers, its islands and reefs. He drove 150.2 kilometres carefully, not too fast, nothing erratic, past Otaki, Levin, Shannon, across the Manawatu plains to the killing field at 30 Karamea Crescent. He got the weapon from the garage, he crept inside, he put his knee on the side of the bed, he didn’t hesitate.
And then: ‘Daddy?’
God almighty. Don’t think about that. Don’t. And then he stripped off and put his outfit in the sack with the jemmy bar and Christine’s jewellery box and got rid of the stuff and got back to his motel room at about 5am. He sat on the bed. He’d done it. He’d done the hard part. Now he just had to get away with it.
The next anyone heard from him was at 8.09am, when he checked out. ‘We had a chat,’ said motel manager Bruce Sloane, ‘about nothing in particular.’
2
Everything in this lurid version of events — well, apart from some of the dialogue, travelogue, and various assorted details pertaining to the small matter of the double homicide — was taken from witness statements and prosecution speeches made during the opening weeks of the murder trial of Mark Lundy at the Wellington High Court in 2015. Was this how he did it? Was this where it started that night? The killings were in Palmerston North, but Petone held the key to whether or not the killer was Christine’s husband and Amber’s father. He either left the motel room after the escort left and set out on his so-called ‘killing journey’, or he fell asleep.
Now and then during the trial I would leg it from the courtroom, cross the road to the Wellington railway station, and travel up the line to Petone. It was so nice to be beside that seaside. Grandparents played with children on the long, scruffy beach. Oystercatchers marched along the tide. The door to Unit 10 at the Foreshore Motor Lodge was open. There was a photo of the Petone wharf on the wall.
Chapter 9
Mark Lundy: Sleeping
1
Everything in the following version of events of an unsolved family tragedy — well, apart from some of the dialogue, travelogue, and various assorted details pertaining to sleep — was taken from witness statements and police interviews presented during the murder trial of Mark Lundy at the Wellington High Court in 2015. Does it most resemble the truth? Does it get closest to what happened in Petone that night?
I puzzled over these questions whenever I fled from court and took the train to Petone. I walked the length of the main road, Jackson Street, from the railway station to the vaguely terrifying other end, with its broken windows and wasted dudes in hoodies. It worked up an appetite. I filled my face with biscuits from the Girl Guides office, cheese from The Dutch Shop, and shortbread biscuits filled with raspberry jam from The German Bakery. I considered the menus at Magic Wok and Mr Ji’s, and settled for the shredded pork lunchbox and black glutinous rice with coconut milk at Foo Wah. Its shredded and glutinous delights barely touched the sides.
I needed something else. I needed the kind of food a fat man would eat, and I made my way to the tuck shop where Lundy always used to eat whenever he came to Petone. It’s now called the Shoreline, a small, narrow shop, and there was a queue outside the door at lunchtimes. Punters chose from waffle dogs and scotch eggs and yoyos. I went for the healthy option: a bun topped with tinned spaghetti and melted cheese. Lundy h
ad ordered a bacon and egg sandwich that morning of the deaths, and had eaten it in his car. I took my feed and ate sitting on the sand. Black-backed seagulls floated on the gentle tide. On the wharf, a fisherman marked his line with an orange balloon. He was after kahawai. I ambled over for a chat. He’d heard that someone caught a kingfish earlier that week. It was a beautiful summer’s day. ‘If it wasn’t for this breeze,’ he said, ‘we’d cook.’
The drab, grey beach, the inelegant lump of Somes Island in the harbour, the dark surrounding hills . . . Petone held the answer to the crime. This is where it started with Lundy that night, or where it ended. Petone, the gateway to the teeming bogan savages of the Hutt Valley; Petone, where the first colonists arrived on 22 January 1840, on the Aurora, and were taken ashore on small boats. Maori gave them fish and potatoes. It was a day in summer, but the scene would have looked miserable — a tatty shoreline, a swamp. ‘A wild and stern reality,’ as early settler John Plimmer put it. Petone’s settlement and its emergence as an industrial kind of Hell was recorded at the Settlers Museum, across the road from the Shoreline tuck shop. For years, blood and offal ran red into the harbour from the Gear Meats slaughterhouse, and the satanic mills of Colgate, Rinso and Lux created Petone’s working-class foundations. There was a small Maori urupa, with its water tap to cleanse the hands of visitors to the cemetery, squeezed in a depressing rectangle of land in between factories.
What happened in Petone on the night of the dead on 29/30 August 2000? Something? Nothing? The more time I spent in Petone, the more I was convinced that the jury — that everyone in the courtroom — needed to be taken there on an outing, to peer into his motel room (Petone locals referred to the Foreshore as ‘Lundy’s Motel’), to queue for a yoyo or some such treat at the Shoreline, to perambulate The Esplanade where he said he had parked under a streetlight in the early evening to read The Icarus Agenda by Robert Ludlum (‘Readers will be hooked’ — New York Times), and to try to picture the Crown’s lurid, possibly fantastically improbable version of events, which had him driving under cloak of darkness along The Esplanade and the Hutt motorway to execute his family and thence return to the Hutt motorway and The Esplanade at, oh, say, 5am.
The Scene of the Crime Page 14
