Joe Cinque's Consolation

by Helen Garner

  JOE CINQUE’S

  CONSOLATION

  OTHER TITLES BY HELEN GARNER

  AND AVAILABLE IN PICADOR

  The First Stone

  The Feel of Steel

  HELEN

  GARNER

  JOE CINQUE’S

  CONSOLATION

  A TRUE STORY OF DEATH, GRIEF AND THE LAW

  First published 2004 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  This Picador edition published in 2006 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  1 Market Street, Sydney

  Copyright © Helen Garner 2004

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing in Publication Data:

  Garner, Helen, 1942–.

  Joe Cinque’s consolation.

  ISBN–13: 978 0 330 42178 2

  ISBN–10: 0 330 42178 6

  1. Trials (Murder) — Australian Capital Territory.

  2. Murder victims — Australian Capital Territory. I. Title.

  345.94702523

  Typeset in Bembo by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane, Queensland

  Printed by McPherson’ Printing Group, Maryborough, Victoria

  Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of origin.

  These electronic editions published in 2008 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Joe Cinque’s Consolation

  Helen Garner

  Adobe eReader format 978-1-74197-068-5

  Online format 978-1-74197-671-7

  EPUB format 978-1-74262-387-0

  Macmillan Digital Australia

  www.macmillandigital.com.au

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com.au to read more about all our books and to buy both print and ebooks online. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events.

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  ALSO BY HELEN GARNER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  EPIGRAPHS

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  PART FOUR

  PART FIVE

  PART SIX

  PART SEVEN

  PART EIGHT

  PART NINE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I gladly acknowledge the different kinds of help I have been given, by those people who spoke to me about this story, by those who would not, and by those who could not.

  I offer special thanks to Richard Refshauge SC; Allison Will; Detective-Sergeant Harry Hains; Jennifer Giles and Hilary Bonney; Judith Lukin-Amundsen; Hilary McPhee; Robin Laurie and Mandy Mitchell-Taverner; Michael Gawenda and James Button; Claire Wood and the staff at Auscript; Manning Clark House; the University of Newcastle.

  The loyalty of my family and my friends, over these five years, has meant more to me than I can say.

  ‘. . . to place, consider, deplore and mourn . . .’

  GITTA SERENY

  ‘Suffering is not enough.’

  THICH NHAT HANH

  PART ONE

  The first time I saw Joe Cinque among his friends and family, the first time I ever heard his voice, was in the living room of his parents’ house in Newcastle, in the winter of 1999.

  By then, of course, he had already been dead for nearly two years.

  This is the story of how I got to know him.

  The house he died in, on Sunday, 26 October 1997, was not far from the Canberra ambulance headquarters. The paramedics would have been able to reach him in a flash, but it took the dispatcher almost twenty minutes to get the right address from the hysterical young woman who placed the 000 call. Like all emergency calls, this one was recorded.

  Male Dispatcher: Okay, and the phone number you’re ringing from?

  Could I get an ambulance please? I have a person potentially overdosed on heroin.

  Potentially overdosed?

  Well, he’s not – he’s vomiting everywhere blood stuff.

  He’s vomiting blood? Right okay, what’s the address?

  Is that a bad sign?

  What’s the address?

  Can you hang on, please just tell me is that a bad sign?

  That’s – well it’s not good if he’s vomiting blood.

  Oh, is he going to be okay?

  I don’t know, I’ll send an ambulance for them to check him out.

  Fair enough.

  What’s the address?

  30 . . . Antill Street.

  Is that a flat or a house?

  Oh, it’s a flat.

  What number in Antill Street?

  What’s going to happen?

  What’s the flat number?

  Oh shit, shit.

  Listen to me.

  Oh, hang on, what am I going to do?

  Settle down. Settle down.

  Okay, what am I going to do?

  Well if you tell me the address I’ll get an ambulance out to you.

  Will he be okay?

  I don’t know, we’ll have to get an ambulance to you to assess him. What is the number of the flat in Antill . . .

  Is – is – oh shit.

  What is the number of that flat in Antill Street?

  It’s um, 79.

  Flat 30, 79 . . . Is that correct?

  Yeah. No – hang on . . .

  Flat 30 . . .

  Hang on, where’s the ambulance?

  The ambulance is at Dickson. Now just calm down. What’s your name? What’s your name?

  Oh shit, he’s vomiting blood, what are . . .

  What’s your name?

  Is he going to die?

  What is your name?

  Tell me, tell me, please.

  What is your name?

  Oh – oh God – Olivia.

  What is your name please?

  Olivia, Olivia – oh fuck – hang on, hang on . . .

  What’s the phone number you’re ringing from?

  Hang on, his heart’s still beating.

  Good. Right, now just settle down, for God’s sake.

  Flat 30, 79 Antill Street.

  Flat 30, 79 . . .

  No – 79 Antill Street.

  What’s the flat number?

  It’s a townhouse.

  It’s 79 in Antill Street?

  Yeah, yeah, get here quickly.

  All right, we’ll get someone there shortly.

  Phone disconnected. Recording resumed:

  Male Dispatcher: Ambulance Emergency.

  Yeah, 79 Antill Street?

  Now listen to me – listen to me.

  Sorry.

  Just be quiet for a moment and listen to me.

  Right, right.

  It’s no good you carrying on like that if I don’t know where to send the ambulance.

  Okay, 79 Antill Street, go . . .

  What is the problem?

  He’s OD’d on heroin I think.

  Righ
t, okay.

  Quick, oh . . .

  The ambulance is on its way to you now . . . Is he breathing?

  I don’t know.

  Well – check for me?

  No.

  Okay, do you know how to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?

  There’s a lot of blood coming out of his mouth.

  Right, okay clear that away.

  How?

  Roll him on his side . . . Put your finger in his mouth, and clear it out.

  Right, right, hang on.

  . . . Okay, do you know how to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?

  Oh shit, oh shit.

  Do you know how to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?

  Yes, I do.

  Well start doing it now.

  What if there’s still stuff in his mouth?

  Get the stuff out of his mouth, put your finger in his mouth and get it out.

  Shit, shit.

  You’ve got to do something about it. You’re the one that’s going to help him right at this moment. The ambulance is on its way to you . . .

  What am I doing?

  I don’t know what you’re doing. Has the patient got a pulse?

  Has –

  Can you feel the pulse?

  Their heart?

  Yes.

  Yeah. Yeah.

  Right, okay, continue mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

  Mouth – I’m clearing that.

  Clear the airway and continue mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

  His teeth won’t open – he – his mouth’s not opening properly.

  Well, prise it open.

  Yeah.

  Pinch off his nose. Pinch off his nose, open his mouth, tilt his head back slightly and blow into his mouth.

  Yeah, yeah.

  Okay, continue that – do not stop.

  Oh don’t stop – okay.

  Don’t stop . . .

  Okay, is someone here? Someone’s here.

  Just continue the resuscitation.

  He’ll be all right, won’t he?

  I can’t answer – I cannot answer that over the phone. Just continue the resuscitation.

  Oh God, I can’t – I can’t . . .

  Well, go outside and get the ambulance officers.

  Is he there?

  Go outside and get the ambulance officers. Two three, are you on location?

  Ambulance Officer: We’re approaching.

  As the ambulance sped towards the house, the paramedics spotted on the nature strip a young woman with long dark hair, desperately waving. They ran inside and up the stairs and found, lying diagonally across the double bed with the phone lead stretched over his legs, a naked young man. Vomit was coming out of his mouth before they even touched him: they saw that mouth-to-mouth resuscitation had filled his stomach with air. He was not breathing, but when they touched his skin, it was warm. They seized him and laid him on the floor with his feet pointing to the doorway.

  ‘How much has he had?’

  ‘He’s had a hundred and fifty,’ said the girl.

  ‘You mean three lots?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and he’s had some Rohypnol.’

  The paramedics got down on the carpet and started to work on the young man’s body. The frantic girl asked them if they were going to use Narcan. No, they were not. ‘Massage his heart!’ they shouted at her, and she obeyed, but she didn’t pound his chest hard enough: like most people she had no idea of the amount of force it takes. They tried to get a tube into his trachea, to keep his airway clear, but quantities of dark brown vomit kept coming up his throat and out of his mouth. There was so much of it clogging his airway that, try as they might, they could not get the tube past it. The brown muck was everywhere, all down the sides of the bed and on the floor, and it kept coming. At the second attempt they thought they’d got the tube in right, but there was so much vomit in there that they couldn’t be sure. They laboured over his body for more than five minutes. When they saw that it was too long since he had taken a breath – when they saw that he was gone – they gave up the attempt and stood back.

  The young woman began to shriek: ‘It wasn’t supposed to happen this way! We were supposed to go together!’ The senior ambulance officer tried to cover the dead man with a sheet, but the girl flung herself on the naked body and began to embrace it fiercely, screaming, ‘Can’t you do anything? This is not happening! I don’t believe this! You can’t stop! You have to bring him back!’ She tried to kiss the dead man; she sat on top of him, moving back and forth; she pulled at his face. They had to drag her out of the room. She kept fighting to get back in; when one of the paramedics blocked the bedroom door with the bulk of his body, she began to dart and rush about the house, moving restlessly from room to room, up and down the stairs, pacing, shaking both hands in front of her chest, rambling incoherently.

  The paramedics called the police. The girl asked if she could go out and get some cigarettes. They told her she couldn’t go anywhere till the police arrived. They asked her if a suicide note had been written. She said no. She told them the suicide had been planned for two months, and that the dead man had taken the drugs at about three in the morning.

  The fire brigade arrived. One of the three fire officers was a woman. She noticed that the distraught girl was wearing a long, pale dress in a light-weight material: its skirt was stained with long streaks of dark fluid. Her lips and the skin around her mouth were smeared with dark stuff. The girl told the woman firefighter that the dead man’s name was Joe. ‘He had a lot last night,’ she said urgently, gripping the fire officer’s arm very tight. ‘He had a lot this morning. Who’s going to tell his parents?’

  Into this squalid, hysterical scene walked four police officers: one uniformed woman and three male detectives.

  ‘What happened?’ asked one of the men.

  The girl replied in a babbling rush. ‘The original plan was I was going to do it,’ she said. ‘We were supposed to go together. I gave him four Rohypnol. I’d had some. Then . . . I had some heroin – I just kept pumping it into him to put him to sleep, so he wouldn’t –’

  The detective cut across her. ‘Listen carefully. You are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, and anything you do say will be recorded and may later be used in evidence.’

  ‘Yes – yes,’ she said.

  ‘Wouldn’t what?’

  ‘Wouldn’t be awake when I killed myself.’

  They arrested her near the front door of the house, and put her into the police car. She tried to get out, she fought to get out, so they handcuffed her. Her name was not ‘Olivia’; it was Anu Singh. They drove her to the police station, and charged her with murder.

  Two days later, the police went to the house of Singh’s closest friend, Madhavi Rao, and took her in as well. She too was charged with murder.

  The first I heard of this tale was in March 1999. I received a phone call at home in Sydney from a respected senior journalist. He wanted to put me on to a story he had heard around the traps. Two young women, Anu Singh and Madhavi Rao, law students at the Australian National University, were being tried in Canberra for the murder of Singh’s boyfriend. The journalist wasn’t too clear on the details, but there was a bizarre touch – a special dinner party had been held at the couple’s house before he was killed. Had the guests been told that ‘the crime of the century’ was to be committed in the course of the evening? Anyway, Rohypnol in the young fellow’s coffee, heroin in his arm, convulsions, vomiting, death.

  A dinner party? My imagination supplied, with distaste, a cartoon version of the scene: a candle-lit table of glossy students in their twenties, flashing their brilliant teeth and lashing about with their manes of hair, while in their midst, sitting modestly, smiling to left and right, believing himself loved and among friends, their chosen victim picked up his fork to eat his last meal.

  Apparently, said the journalist, the one whose boyfriend had been killed was ‘head-turningly beautiful, the daughter of a wealthy famil
y, spoilt rotten’. The other one he hadn’t heard much about, but the word seemed to be that she was ‘nicer’. He wasn’t sure how to pronounce it or what nationality the victim was, but the name, he thought, was something like Cinque.

  ‘If it’s such a great story,’ I said, ‘how come you’re not writing it?’

  ‘Look,’ said the journalist patiently. ‘I can do history. I can do politics. I can even do economics, at a pinch. But I can’t do psychology.’

  He didn’t spell it out – you’re interested in women at the end of their tether – but I saw at once why I was the writer he had called. Four years earlier I had published a book of reportage called The First Stone, about two young women law students in Melbourne who had brought charges of assault against the head of their university college. By questioning the kind of feminism that had driven the story, and by writing it against the determined silence of the two women and their supporters, I had opened myself to long months of ferocious public attack. The parallels between that story and this one were like a bad joke. No way was I going back out there.

  As it happened, though, I had recently been forced to acknowledge that I was a woman at the end of my tether. I was fifty-five. My third marriage had just collapsed in a welter of desolation. I was living alone in Sydney, in a rented flat, on the fifth floor of a building on the top of a hill. I had no job, and lacked the heart to look for one. I knew I had to get out of my own head, to find some work to do. The journalist, whatever his motives, was offering me a story. But what did I care about these students and their trashy adventures?

  It was only a feeble sort of politeness, the inability to say a straight no to someone who thought he was doing me a favour, that made me copy down the phone number of the journalist’s contact, and call it.