Joe Cinque's Consolation

by Helen Garner

  Rao’s knowledge of and participation in what had happened on the Friday night didn’t make any difference either: even if Justice Crispin were to find her participation punishable as a criminal offence, she still had no duty of care when she went into the bedroom and saw Joe Cinque lying there, on Sunday 26 October.

  The shiver that ran across my skin seemed also to lower the temperature in Justice Crispin’s veins.

  Wasn’t it rather a chilling concept, he said, that one could take part in a plan to kill somebody, go out and buy the drugs for the job – and then say simply, ‘I’m washing my hands of it now. I’ve got no responsibility. Let him die’?

  It was a heart-stopping moment, but Lasry pressed the point: it still did not create a duty of care. Even though Joe Cinque is unconscious and in obvious distress – even though Singh tells her she has given him heroin – even though she has had previous knowledge and participation – Rao owes him no duty. At that moment, Rao is in the same position as anyone else who might have gone there and seen what she saw. She sees him as an innocent bystander would see him. She had not assumed any care of Joe Cinque. She had not gone to the house with the intention of helping him or taking care of him. The evidence was only that she went there with Anu Singh. She simply went there.

  A wave of incredulity and revulsion washed through the gallery.

  And why was it, Lasry continued, apparently unperturbed, why was it that Madhavi Rao was the one chosen to wear this so-called duty of care? Why wasn’t it, for example, Bronwyn Cammack? If anyone assumed a duty of care for Joe Cinque, even temporarily, it was Cammack – but no one had charged her with any offence. She was an amateur expert where heroin was concerned, and Singh was aware of this. When Singh phoned her in a panic, Cammack assumed the role of adviser for some fourteen minutes. She might even have been giving advice while Joe Cinque was in his death throes. No matter how Singh pleaded, Cammack flatly refused to come to Antill Street – in fact, she hung up the phone, and tied up the line by making a call to her ex-boyfriend in Queensland.

  But Cammack – I thought Cammack – I admired Cammack! Because she was tough! Because she gave brutally pragmatic advice and tried to force Singh to act on it! Anyway how could she have gone to Anu’s house? Anu refused to give her the address! Cammack didn’t even know Anu’s last name. And Cammack lived in Campbell! She had no car! A girl can hardly ask her mother to drive her to the scene of an overdose. And even if she could, by the time she’d got across town, Joe Cinque would have been dead.

  How could this be happening? I sat sweating in my seat, completely thrown by Lasry’s brazen manoeuvre.

  He romped on down the list. Singh’s ‘suicidal tendencies’ and Rao’s assistance with them? Absurd. Sure, Singh had talked the talk ad nauseam, but had she ever walked the walk? Nobody who really knew her had ever taken a bit of notice of her histrionic declarations. (Again I recalled the Crown psychiatrist Dr Diamond: ‘It was important not to commit suicide. The purpose was not death. It was to keep the drama going for as long as possible.’)

  And motive? The only one that kept recurring in conversation was the ipecac business – ‘a ridiculous motive which no one believed’. Apart from Tanya Z—, who had met Singh only once, nobody ever believed that Singh was going to kill anyone – and for someone who was seriously contemplating murder and/or suicide, Singh spent an enormous amount of time telling a large number of people about it.

  In his quiet way, Lasry was on a roll. He was almost rollicking along. The whole thing started to take on a kind of ludicrous aspect. One felt a fool for having been upset.

  But Justice Crispin neatly thrust a pump between the spokes of Lasry’s wheel. What if he were to find that there had been an attempt to kill Joe Cinque on the Friday night? It was all very well for Len Mancini to say, ‘Singh was a histrionic person who went round making grandiose statements all the time – I didn’t believe a word of it.’ What if Mancini had actually been present, as Rao allegedly had, at an attempt to kill Joe Cinque the day before? That would rather change the picture, would it not?

  Lasry wobbled, but stayed in the saddle. His Honour would find whatever he found about the events of the Friday night – but what effect would that have on the events of the Sunday morning? Right now Lasry was talking only about the Sunday morning. Justice Crispin sat back, and Lasry pedalled smoothly on.

  Was Rao aware on the Sunday morning, as the Crown said she was, of ‘both a previous and a current attempt to kill Joe Cinque’? This was getting dangerously close to the terrible part. How would Lasry get round it?

  ‘I’m not clear,’ he said, ‘what “a previous and a current attempt to kill Joe Cinque” is.’ The previous attempt, he presumed, was what was said to have occurred on the Friday night. As for the Sunday attempt, Madhavi Rao knows nothing about that until she gets to Antill Street at eight o’clock on the Sunday morning.

  Hey – hang on – wait a minute! But Lasry had snatched the horrible accusation, blown it up like a party balloon, and tapped it into the air with the lightest of touches. It floated away over our heads.

  When Madhavi Rao saw Joe Cinque on the bed, did she know, ought she to have known, that he was in peril of his life?

  With the point of his blade Lasry peeled ethics away from the law. Whatever moral duty might have been on a person in her circumstances to act, no legal duty was created by those circumstances – unless some responsibility had been assumed by Madhavi Rao. Anyway, said Lasry, ‘Duty of care and duty to act are not the same thing.’

  Aren’t they? I had no idea. I had never thought about these things before.

  This surgical slicing and drawing apart of concepts was almost Olympian in its remoteness. There was something frightful about it. The three grey-wigged men, counsel and judge, probed away together at the precedents in their quiet, well-mannered voices. They searched for guidance in the authorities – earlier judgements that had clarified or interpreted a law and shown how it may be applied, stretched, narrowed or pointed to take account of things that people do to each other – or fail to do. I hardly dared glance towards Mr and Mrs Cinque. How on earth were they able to tolerate it, this serene sailing through rarefied air, high, high above the bedroom in which their beloved son was drugged, and drugged, and drugged again, and in which he innocently died, choking on his own black vomit? What stamina they possessed, to sit straight-backed through hour after hour of abstruse legal arguments in a language not their own, according to a system foreign to them. They were doing it in honour of their murdered son. They were keeping vigil.

  One strand of the Crown’s case against Madhavi Rao was that, when she reassured Tanya Z— that Joe Cinque was not in danger, she had secluded him from possible help. By secluding him, she had taken upon herself a duty to help him when she knew his life was in danger. The authority Mr Golding had used to support this argument was a case known as Taktak: the pitiful tale of a fifteen-year-old Kings Cross prostitute who, having overdosed on heroin in the course of a private job, was taken by a certain Mr Taktak to a shop in Randwick, where he covered her with a blanket in the hope that she would sleep it off. Instead, she died, and the ineffectual Mr Taktak was convicted of manslaughter.

  ‘So,’ said Justice Crispin thoughtfully, ‘a Samaritan may walk past the bound and injured person and leave them to their fate with impunity – but if he picks them up and attempts to look after them, he must do it properly or risk a conviction for manslaughter. That is not an altogether reassuring aspect of the law, is it?’

  Be that as it may, said Lasry, the seclusion into which Mr Taktak had placed the comatose girl was quite different from the seclusion of Joe Cinque. In fact, Joe Cinque wasn’t secluded at all. He had had a primary carer. That primary carer was Anu Singh.

  My brain sizzled in my skull. Anu Singh as primary carer? The one who had knocked him out with a huge dose of Rohypnol? Who had tied off his two arms and hit him up with heroin? Wasn’t this to strain the elastic of language till it snapped? Why wasn’t the w
hole court on its feet, in a roar of protest?

  But Mr Lasry, like a seamstress trying to alter the design of a garment that somebody else had created, went on unpicking the events of the Friday night from those of the weekend proper. There was no evidence, he said, that Madhavi Rao had had anything whatever to do with putting Joe Cinque in danger on the Saturday night and Sunday morning – beyond what the Crown would say were her ‘involvements’ in the getting of the heroin and the Rohypnol.

  ‘Is there any evidence,’ asked Justice Crispin, ‘that Rohypnol and heroin was acquired by Ms Rao with the knowledge that it might be used in an attempt to kill Mr Cinque?’

  By now I was completely flabbergasted. My mouth was hanging open.

  All that was just an inference by the Crown, said Lasry airily. Anu Singh had certainly said she was going to use the heroin to kill Joe Cinque, but nobody – not Mr T, nor Mancini, nor anyone else who heard her – believed she was really going to do such a thing. And given the way Singh was in the habit of carrying on, there was no reason why anyone should have believed these utterances of hers.

  At the break, nauseated from the shock of the arguments, I went outside for a breather. Mr Lasry swept past me in his big black gown. He took off his wig and was transformed from the steely tactician of the court into a large, heavy-headed, short-haired, middle-aged man, perhaps once a blond. I remembered reading in the transcript that when he had to ask witnesses to raise their voices it was because his hearing had been damaged by his pastime of playing drums; and once he had tossed off a line from an Easybeats song, saying, ‘I have Friday on my mind, your Honour’ – a joke which probably sailed straight over Justice Crispin’s head.

  Madhavi Rao also emerged into the lobby, and was met by a fresh-faced girl with a ponytail. They strolled away chatting quietly together, laughing and smiling. As they passed me I heard Madhavi Rao saying, in a conversational tone, ‘My advice would be to . . .’ She still has friends who respect and love her, I thought. People ask her what she thinks, and she tells them. Her life goes on. Who was I to begrudge her this?

  But Joe Cinque is dead.

  I walked out and sat on the bench under the elm tree. The sky was seeded, as far as the horizon and beyond, with tiny, high, white puffs of cloud. I wasn’t hungry. I felt sick, miserable, morally at sea. I wished I could stay out there forever, and heal myself by breathing the summer air. But I was in this story now, and I would have to stay in it till the end.

  I had been assuming all along that the cause of Joe Cinque’s death was pretty well agreed upon: that on the Saturday night he had drunk a cup of coffee (instant coffee, in a mug! after the tiny cups of perfect espresso that Mrs Cinque served at their house) which Anu Singh had laced with a violent dose of Rohypnol; and that while he was unconscious she had injected him with heroin. Apparently, though, where Madhavi Rao’s involvement was concerned, my assumption was way too simple.

  Was there anything in the evidence, asked Justice Crispin, to show that when Madhavi Rao went into the bedroom at eight o’clock on the Sunday morning and saw Joe Cinque lying on the bed, he was at that stage in peril of his life? To show that he had already been given a potentially lethal dose of heroin?

  Again I sat gaping.

  Let’s suppose for a moment, Crispin went on in his musing voice, that an ambulance has been called. A couple of paramedics arrive. They have a look at Joe Cinque. They take the view that he’s not in a state of extremis. They decide there’s no need for him to be taken to hospital. So they tell Ms Singh to look after him, and they go away. Now – would that necessarily have prevented his death from a later dose of heroin?

  No, said Lasry, it would not. The evidence showed that after Rao had quit the house early that morning, Anu Singh had gone round to Mr T’s and bought another syringe full of heroin. But what became of that heroin, nobody knew. There was nothing to prove whether or not it was ever used. Not even the forensic scientists had been able to establish beyond doubt whether Joe Cinque had been killed by one injection or two. So nobody could be sure whether, when Rao went into the bedroom and saw him, he had already been given the fatal injection or not.

  Logic forced me to acknowledge that it was so. Even if Rao had done the right thing and dialled 000 then and there, it was well within the bounds of possibility that Singh might have waited till the dust had settled, till the paramedics had given her a lecture and forged on to the next calamity, till Madhavi Rao had stamped home in a shit – and then she might have driven over to Mr T’s and bought the second syringe, taken it home, and slid into Joe Cinque’s arm the lethal hit.

  Oh, it was all so fluid. Nothing ever settled, or became simple and stable. Everything could be flipped over and turned inside out – looked at afresh, upside down or backwards. Yes, it might logically have happened that way. And yet something in me rebelled against the deftness of the reasoning. It made sense intellectually, but on a gut level it went against instinct. It felt skew-whiff, all wrong. I wanted to cry out a protest – but in what words? Couldn’t she – shouldn’t she – wouldn’t I – oh God, wouldn’t I – have done something?

  Again Justice Crispin articulated this mute disquiet. Couldn’t one say that, when she found Joe Cinque unconscious, Madhavi Rao should have known he was at risk of being injected again? Wouldn’t the Crown argue that she should have intervened, not just to get medical help, but to protect him from another attack?

  Yes! I thought. Yes – surely she should have? Wouldn’t anybody? But Lasry brushed this aside. It was ‘completely inferential, and indeed, more than that – speculative’.

  At lunchtime, heading along the colonnades of Civic, I saw a teenage girl bent over in a doorway. At first as I walked towards her I thought she was a shop assistant crouching to pick up a cardboard carton of books from the footpath beside her. Closer, I saw she had just hit up and was on the nod. She managed to stay on her feet, but then her eyelids slid shut, her jaw gaped, and her knees sagged in slow motion. She held that position, half up half down, for second after second, as if someone had pressed the pause button on a video. Other people too were glancing at her as they passed. Nobody paused. I thought about the hapless Mr Taktak, who had taken the dying fifteen-year-old prostitute to a squalid shop and inadequately covered her with a blanket. I remembered Justice Crispin worrying and worrying about the fate of the Good Samaritan: how disturbing it was to him that, in helping a stranger, a passer-by could put himself in the position of having a duty of care, which, if he failed to fulfil it, might leave him liable to criminal prosecution. But these were only vague thoughts. I left the girl to her fate and went looking for something to eat.

  That afternoon, Mr Lasry turned his attention to the charge of attempted murder. This was a hard thing to prove: there has to be not just an intention to inflict serious or grievous bodily harm, but an intention to cause death. All right, he said – it was true that Rao had helped Singh to get hold of the Rohypnol tablets. But if she had known they were going to be used for a criminal enterprise, to sedate the victim before he was murdered, why would she have signed her own name on the prescription form? Why would she have left the torn-up Rohypnol packet in her bedroom rubbish bin for the police to find?

  Clickety-clack. Elementary. Like something out of a teenage mystery novel.

  Next, Lasry turned to Tanya Z—. Along with Bronwyn Cammack, she was my favourite minor character in this tale. I clung to her desperate, bewildered decency, her almost-strong-enough desire ‘to be moral’. Her testimony, for all its weaknesses, was dear to my heart. But like a man attacking a rickety chookpen, Lasry dismantled it with two well-aimed hatchet blows.

  First, Tanya Z— had never actually stated, on the phone to Len Mancini on the Saturday morning, that Joe Cinque had been injected with heroin on the Friday night. If Rao had told her of an actual injection, the panicking Tanya would surely have mentioned it to Mancini – and he would surely have raised it with Singh, during that complicated four-way call.

  And secondly, t
here was simply no evidence to prove that Joe Cinque had been injected on the Friday night. Two puncture marks were found on his arms at the morgue. One was estimated to be a bit older than the other, but there was nothing to show that it had been given to him as far back as the Friday night. And if no heroin had been given to him on the Friday night, then the attempted murder charge against Rao could not stand up – and neither could the charge of administering a stupefying drug.

  Again, the gasp that follows a magician’s dexterous flourish. That which was solid had melted into air.

  And yet, I thought, yes – Joe Cinque may have been besotted with Anu Singh, but he certainly was not stupid. If he had come to, on the Saturday evening, and found a needle puncture in his own elbow crook, surely he would have grabbed his things and been out of that house in the twinkling of an eye.

  But wait – how long was Joe’s window of clear-headedness, between his waking from the Friday night Rohypnol, and his succumbing to the fresh dose of it that Singh slugged him with on the Saturday night? Rohypnol, a psychiatrist had told me, is a drug that you come out of as you would out of a general anaesthetic. You swim towards the surface but never get there; you are unable to recall what was real and what was only a dream. Did Joe Cinque have his wits about him long enough to grasp what was going on? Anu Singh must know, but she wasn’t talking. Nobody else would ever be able to tell.

  While I stewed over this, half stunned, Lasry polished off his submission. There was no direct evidence, he said, of what had occurred in the lead-up to Joe Cinque’s death; and the evidence that did exist was so lacking in weight and reliability that no reasonable court could convict on it.