This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial

by Helen Garner

  CHAPTER 4

  Towards ten o’clock on the night of the crash, two police officers from Major Collision carried a handheld tape recorder through Emergency at Geelong Hospital and into a cubicle where Farquharson lay under a sheet, taking the occasional suck of oxygen through a mask. They introduced themselves—Senior Sergeant Jeffrey Smith, who was head of Major Collision, and Senior Constable Rohan Courtis—and pressed the record button.

  At last we were to hear Farquharson speak.

  The voice of the bereaved father is dull and muffled at first, but grows firmer as he begins to answer the bite-sized questions: who he is, where he lives and works. Then, when the officers ask him what happened on the road, his voice fills with energy, gains clarity and strength. He sounds surprisingly young and eager, almost boyish in his speech patterns.

  ‘I think I just went up the overpass, and I started coughing…then, I don’t remember anything, and then all of a sudden I was in this water, and me son screamed at me—he opened up the door, and we nose-dived. I shut the door on him, and I tried to get them out—I tried to get out and get help, thinking I was only just in off the road, not realising I was…I was trying to get up near the road, get people to hear me, to help, and people just drove past, I don’t know exactly whereabouts it was, and it’s just a big blur, like, you know—it happened so quick.’

  ‘Mate.’ Smith, the senior officer, lays it down gently. ‘Do you realise that the children didn’t—make it? Out of the car?’

  Farquharson expels a short breath, and says in a low, flat tone, ‘I gathered that.’

  His questioners do not pause. What speed was he doing?

  ‘Oh, it was under a hundred.’ His voice brightens again and becomes emphatic. He offers his credentials as a father, poignantly still in the present tense: he never drinks with the kids, he never goes over a hundred with them, he’s always very cautious, he’s never had an accident before.

  Once the policemen twig that Farquharson and his wife have parted, and that he was bringing the boys home from an access outing, their antennae begin to quiver. How long has this been going on? Twelve months. What’s his ex-wife’s full name? He gets it out—Cindy Louise Gambino—but with a heavy sigh. He produces her address and date of birth, then, like a sick person reminding a visitor he has good reason to be horizontal, he emits a muffled grunt of discomfort.

  ‘You realise we have to ask these questions,’ says Courtis, the younger officer, politely, in his light, rapid voice. ‘Is everything sort of okay with you and your wife? Any dramas?’

  ‘We’re building the house,’ says Farquharson, in a conversational tone. ‘There’s a few hassles selling it, but other than that, I mean, look, how good does a divorce go, so to speak? Of course you have your disagreements and arguments, but the kids have always been put first, and everything like that.’

  Pressed for details of the drop-off of the boys that afternoon, Farquharson complains that his arm is sore. Give it a move, mate, says the cop. No, it really is sore, there, just in one spot. He relates the Father’s Day arrival and the arrangement to have tea in Geelong and visit Kmart in Belmont. On the road the little one, who was only two and a half, fell asleep in his car seat. So father and sons sat a while in the Kmart car park and listened to the footy on the radio. When the toddler stirred they roused him and went up to Kentucky to eat. Farquharson always had to deliver them back to their mother by 7.30, so, after a look around in Kmart and a quick stop at his sister’s place in Mount Moriac, they got back on the road.

  He trails off. Courtis nudges him forward. ‘Just getting back to the crash. Was there anyone else in the traffic, or…?’

  Again Farquharson’s voice firms up. ‘No. I can’t remember nothing.’ With growing vehemence, his volume rising and falling with the drama of it, he tells the story a second time: the coughing, the waking up in a lot of water, Jai in the front passenger seat opening the door. He adds that, when he leaned across to slam Jai’s door, all the kids were screaming. He tried to unbuckle Jai’s seatbelt and to get the other two out of the back, but because Jai had opened the door, the car nosedived. ‘Just a nightmare,’ he says. ‘I’m gettin’ distressed.’ His voice goes dull again, without expression.

  This is the moment the officers choose to caution him. Yeah, he knows he doesn’t have to say anything, and that anything he says could be given in evidence.

  They surge on. Did he go under the water at all? He falters. ‘Yeah, we sort of did, as I—I tried to get up—thinking I was in foot-deep, to try and get round and open the doors and drag ’em out. I’m getting really distressed.’ He sounds like a child calling for respite in a game that is getting too much for him. A pause. Then, out of a jumble of hospital white noise, his voice rises again.

  ‘But sir. Can I ask one question?’

  ‘You can ask any question you like.’

  ‘I’ve never been in trouble before. So what’s the likely scenario, for me?’ On the word likely he gives a tiny, matey breath of a laugh.

  Startled, I glanced at the uniformed Courtis sitting behind the bar table. A document dangled from his right hand. The stapled sheets were quivering.

  ‘Well, mate,’ says Courtis on the tape, his voice tuneful with surprise, ‘at this stage all we know is that you’ve been in an accident, where you’ve driven off the road, and your kids have been in the car.’

  Farquharson pushes it. ‘So what sort of scena—’

  Courtis cuts across him. He seems to be controlling himself. ‘Mate, it’s so early, we’re not looking at you for doing anything wrong.’

  ‘It’s something I’ve got to live with for the rest of me life,’ protests Farquharson. The stress he lays on the word life, the complex intonation he gives it, makes him sound plaintive, even petulant—a person with a legitimate grievance that is not being taken seriously. ‘What I’m trying to say, you can go through and check that I’ve got no record—’

  Courtis picks up on his anxiety. ‘Is there anything you want to tell us?’

  ‘No! That’s exactly as it happened. I’ve got no reason to lie, or anything of that nature.’

  His coughing fit, he says, must have been triggered by the car heater, which he had turned on when the kids said they were cold. He has recently been off work for eight days with this cough, one of those colds that linger on. Has he been smoking dope? He gives a gasp of laughter: he doesn’t do that sort of thing! He’s a normal, average guy, trying to make a living and do the best by his family—and look what he’s done now.

  ‘Mate, it’s a tragic thing. Your children in the car—what are their names?’

  Jai. Tyler. Bailey. Farquharson intones them, spacing them out in a solemn hush.

  Courtis breaks it. His voice is soft. ‘Did the car just go away from under you? How far under the water did your car go? Did you have to put your head under water? How many times did you have to duck under the water?’

  ‘Oh, several. Several times, probably about three or four or something.’ Stammering and chattering, Farquharson tells the story for the third time. Then he lets out a hard panting sound, and puts again his urgent question: ‘I mean, I mean, what sort of thing’s going to happen to me, now?’

  ‘Well,’ says one of the cops.

  �
��You don’t know, do you.’ Again the little nasal out-breath of laughter, the striving for a casual tone, making light of his need to know.

  ‘We haven’t even been to the crash site yet. We’re on our way down there now.’

  Farquharson tries once more. ‘What’s the scenario? Got no idea?’

  Courtis answers vaguely, dreamily. ‘We’ll go to the scene and have a look, and we’ll come back and let you know what’s going on.’

  …

  I took a quick look at Farquharson. He was sitting quite still, staring straight ahead. Were his sisters’ hearts in their boots? I remembered Cindy Gambino’s account of the way he had stood in front of the car at the dam while would-be rescuers desperately rushed about. ‘There was no movement. He wasn’t doing anything. He was like in a trance.’

  He didn’t sound entranced on that tape. He sounded…something else, something not quite right. Too quick to answer? Too eager to please? A nose dive, in foot-deep water? And when they pulled the car out of the dam, wasn’t the heater off? My head was full of a very loud clanging. Nothing expert, nothing trained or intellectual. Just a shit-detector going off, that was all. The alarm bells of a woman who had been in the world for more than sixty years, knowing men, sometimes hearing them say true things, sometimes being told lies.

  What had passed through Farquharson’s mind, that night, on the dark country road where there was nothing to distract a driver from his wild thoughts? Were the boys squabbling? Was there a painful mention of their mother’s new man? Or did they just sit quietly in their harnesses as the old car rolled along, making their father’s heart ache that once more he had to give them back and say goodbye? Did a casual word, a rush of despair cause everything that he had shored up against his ruins to buckle and give way?

  And could it be that, underneath it all, naked on that hospital gurney, he was not yet grieving, but seething instead with incredulous vitality? Was a fresh force surging through this dull, lonely, broken-hearted man, deafening him, obliterating without shame or mercy everything but the astonishing fact that he was still alive?

  CHAPTER 5

  Wheels leave different traces as they pass over the surface of the earth. A skid mark happens when all four wheels lock and are dragged along the ground by the vehicle’s momentum. A yaw mark occurs typically when a car is over-steered, and front and back tyres track separately, leaving four tyre marks instead of two. And a rolling print is simply the impression left by a cleanly rotating wheel: a raised pattern of tyre tread in gravel or dirt; grass pushed down in the direction of the vehicle’s travel. In the paddock between the road and the dam, Farquharson’s car had left rolling prints. This undisputed fact was something we—and no doubt the jury—had to hang on to grimly, during Mr Morrissey’s blistering cross-examinations of the police.

  …

  Mr Rapke began with Senior Constable Courtis of Major Collision. After the unsettling interview with Farquharson at Geelong Emergency, Courtis drove on to the dam. It was a clear night and the road was dry, but by the time Courtis came down the overpass at about 11 p.m., he noticed the odd patch of drifting fog. The murkily lit rescue attempt was spread out on the right-hand side of the road. He parked, and set about his task: to survey the scene and take photos of it.

  The only tyre prints he found in the roadside gravel were the ones that Sergeant Exton, his boss, had already marked with the dashes of yellow paint. With his torch Courtis followed the pair of rolling prints that ran through the long grass down to the edge of the water. Only when he looked back up towards the road did he notice that the angle of Exton’s paint marks was not right: it did not match up precisely with the angle of the rolling prints.

  Here Courtis struck a snag. While he was trying to set up a new piece of surveying equipment, a Riegl 3D laser scanner, he bent one of the fine prongs on its cable. Because he didn’t have a spare cable, he packed up the Riegl and used instead Major Collision’s older and more familiar device, the geodimeter, sometimes known as George.

  On the stand, the young police officer battled to express in ordinary language the digital and mechanical capabilities of the Riegl scanner and the geodimeter. His testimony was studded with terms like infrared, dot-to-dot, prism, raw data and numerical codes. The jurors were given small bound books of photos that Rapke referred to by numbers, but in the press seats, lacking a clear view of the visual aids and having to follow by ear, we stumbled behind.

  When Morrissey rose to cross-examine, the atmosphere of the court sagged again into a sort of irritable misery. No wonder Courtis’s notes had been quivering. He was grilled on why he had not measured the road’s camber and crossfall, on whether vehicles necessarily left tyre prints on bitumen or in gravel, on the accuracy of his coding of the marks he claimed to have seen in gravel and through grass. Morrissey suggested that Courtis was ill-trained and incompetent—‘You’re not a professional surveyor by any means, are you? You’re a professional policeman’—and hinted that this was why he had subsequently been transferred from Major Collision to the Child Sexual Offences and Child Abuse Unit. Pressed to agree that the path of the rolling prints was ‘a smooth arc without any noticeable wiggles in it—more or less a straight line but bending somewhat to the right’, Courtis would go no further than to say, ‘Yes, there was a curve in it.’

  Morrissey’s aim seemed to be to establish that there was a lot of traffic in the area that night, that any one of those vehicles might have left the disputed tyre mark in the gravel, and that the police reconstruction of the scene, based on its admittedly imperfect paint marks, was worthless. But his cross-examination induced a crazed feeling of restlessness and frustration. Round and round it went, a flood of detail without graspable shape or direction, except in its constant return to the painfully familiar matter of Sergeant Exton’s yellow paint marks. Morrissey kept starting a sentence with the word ‘now’, as if about to bring his line of questioning around in a meaningful curve, but he never reached resolution. There was no relief. My mind lost its grip and slid away into reverie.

  ‘Maybe he thinks,’ whispered Louise, ‘that if he drags this out long enough the jury will forget that tape.’

  Indeed, the Emergency interview had made an impression so deeply disturbing that everything coming after it seemed to be beside the point. By now, close to the end of the third week of the trial, the very words ‘yellow paint marks’ provoked a Pavlovian response. The jurors glazed over and turned sullen. They rested their chins on their fists. Their eyelids drooped. Their necks grew loose with boredom; they were limp with it, barely able to hold themselves erect. Once I glanced over and saw four of them in a row, their heads dropped on the same protesting angle towards their left shoulders, like tulips dying in a vase.

  And hour after hour, as he laboured, Morrissey was tormented by terrific bouts of dry coughing. He barked, he croaked, he sweated and turned pale. Long pauses fell while he composed himself. Justice Cummins coddled him affectionately, offered to adjourn at lunchtime on Friday so he could rest his voice for two and a half days, threatened trouble if he saw him at the football at the MCG. Morrissey was embarrassed. He grinned and ducked his head and said that he would soldier on till the end of the week.

  Then, first thing on Friday morning, before the jury was called in, Morrissey told the judge that he had stayed up working half the night and would now be able to finish
his cross-examination by lunchtime.

  Justice Cummins’ brow came down. Overnight, he said sharply, inquiries had come from the jury: how much longer was this trial likely to go on? Some of these jurors were going to work before court, or during the lunch break. They were serious people, applying themselves to their task. They had made arrangements to cancel this afternoon’s work, and now they were to be told they would be released by lunchtime. They were not rag dolls to be thrown aside for the convenience of counsel. They had lives to lead. They should be treated properly.

  Morrissey stood at the bar table staring down at his hands. He looked offended, even wounded. Why, yesterday the judge had practically tucked him up in bed with a hot-water bottle. Today, he was rapping Morrissey’s knuckles with a ruler.

  But Farquharson’s supporters gazed loyally at their wigged champion. They believed in him. They urged him on. When Louise’s mother slipped into court one day to see what her daughter had been raving about, she looked around in surprise and said, ‘It feels like a family in here.’ The cramped court had become an intimate space, intimate enough for Morrissey—this decent, warm and very endearing man, perhaps sentimental, perhaps a little vain—to identify with his client to the point where, in its paroxysms of coughing, his own body was acting out Farquharson’s story. A story that was becoming more fantastical with every passing day.

  …

  On the Monday of the trial’s fourth week, the Crown introduced a crucial witness.

  Hostility showed in the rigid shoulders of Farquharson’s sisters as the man climbed the steps to the stand. His dark hair was freshly cut. In his jeans, runners and striped short-sleeved shirt he affected a rockabilly jauntiness. But his crisp-featured face was expressionless, his posture tense and wary. His name was Greg King; he was a bus driver; and he was about to be dragged through the sort of public ordeal that most people face only in nightmares from which, gasping and sweating, they are grateful to wake.