Tragedy descends on desolate town

Peter Lamont is charged with murder. Photo / Supplied by Greymouth Star

Peter Lamont was the butcher of Blackball. But last weekend, the man behind one of New Zealand's top salamis and smallgoods companies turned up at a police station, distraught.

Police went to his home in the tiny West Coast settlement of Ikamatua and found the body of his wife, 49-year-old Lindsay Jane Lamont, with multiple stab wounds. There was "blood everywhere", police said.

Peter Lamont, 47, was charged with murder and remanded till July 21 for a psychiatric assessment.

Lamont is under "close watch" behind bars - it is understood he tried to take his own life - and it has been left to the couple's 17-year-old daughter, Falon, to tidy up the family's affairs and grieve a brutal tragedy.

Like so many before them in the small, damp, inland town that is Blackball, the Lamonts were Scottish migrants who had come to New Zealand in search of a better life.

A hundred years before, in 1908, the coal miners of Blackball had defied the foreign owners of their mine to walk out on strike for 10 weeks. The New Zealand Labour Party was founded out of that unprecedented action in pursuit of better working conditions.

So, too, in 2005 when Lamont, a Scottish butcher who had managed a large meat processing company, arrived in the town with his family to take up a job at the famed Blackball Salami Company. He had applied for the job over the internet. He had no idea what he was in for.

As he told Cuisine magazine in 2007, "I expected an airport, not a hangar!"

As the family drove into Blackball that first time, past a couple of dodgy houses and up the broad main street past the hotel with its wide verandas, "the banjo music started ringing in my ears".

Though Peter Lamont insisted to the magazine that his family loved the town, they seem to have found the change of lifestyle difficult, to say the least. After only four months - and to the annoyance of his boss - Lamont had left Blackball Salami to work as a butcher at the Fresh Choice supermarket in nearby Greymouth.

But in November 2006, he approached Blackball Salami owner Pat Kennedy and asked to buy the company off him. Kennedy agreed: he had set up the company 14 years earlier, nurtured it into a leading force in New Zealand deli smallgoods, and was ready for a break.

Lamont threw himself wholeheartedly into his new business. Though he employed about six people, he was by all accounts a micro-manager who delegated little. He would be in the shiny stainless steel salami factory from 5am to 5pm and at weekends. He cut the fat levels in the sausages to get a Heart Foundation tick. He was excited about a new type of salami he was developing.

Lindsay, meanwhile, got jobs as a receptionist at the High St Medical Centre, as an administrator at Grey Base Hospital, and did the salami company's books in her spare time.

But despite the company's success, the couple seemed to have struggled with their personal finances, especially when cashflow dropped away in the wintry off-season.

"To be honest, you don't get a lot of business here," says Detective Sergeant Andrew Oliver. "There are still some miners but it depends on who you speak to as to the image you will get."

Pat Kennedy, returning to Blackball to run the company after the tragedy, says: "I don't think they quite settled here - that's the best way of putting it. I think it was a bit of a cultural shock to them.

"The company will have to employ two or three people to replace Peter because he is an extremely hard worker."

Kennedy got to know Lamont over a few whiskies when they worked together. "He had commitments... he was doing all the physical work.

"He was physically sorting out meats. I mean, it was a seven-day-a-week job. He was very hands-on... He hand-made salamis himself, whereas I employed other people to do it. He took it on himself to do all that work. He was at work a lot of the time."

On Saturday night last week, for whatever reason, something happened that left his wife dead.

Kennedy says: "He worked too hard really... It's just tragic, really sad."

The next morning, Lamont picked up his daughter, who had not been at home.

"He spent an hour or so with her and then they both went to the police station." Kennedy adds: "It is very hard to get your head around something like this - she has lost not only her mum but her dad."

Doug Taffs, Lamont's lawyer, agrees that there may have been financial pressures on the couple.

"He did hand himself into the police and he was extremely distraught," Taffs says.

Falon and her friends hope to hold a service for her mother in Greymouth tomorrow before taking her ashes back to Scotland.

The community has started a collection to support her.

And the town has now pitched in to save its signature company. Kennedy even returned on Thursday to find a man, who he had previously sacked from the salami company, back there helping out after his shift at the coal mine had ended.

"He didn't go to bed and he worked all day to get the orders out. His father was helping him," Kennedy says. "There is a lot of community pride in that company."