This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial

by Helen Garner

  Cindy Gambino listened, leaning forward, her eyes raised to a point on the wall above the jury’s heads. Their faces were inscrutable.

  The exhausted King is backing away from this fire hydrant he has set off. ‘Righto mate,’ he says faintly. ‘I’m going. I want to go and sleep. I’m bloody…’

  ‘Go and sleep,’ says Farquharson. ‘Why are they interviewing you? Just for a character?’

  ‘Just a character thing, I suppose.’

  ‘They’re only going to ask you what I was like as a person. All you have to do is say, “I’ve known him for a long time. He’s great with the kids, he done this, he done that.”’

  ‘All right,’ says King. ‘I better get home.’

  He jingles his car keys, he must be edging towards the door, but Farquharson bores on.

  ‘Look, you can say what you want. That’s your business. But if you think negative, you’re going to come across negative.’ He runs King through it one more time: the sports, the karate, the bike rides, kicking the footy, what a good bloke he is. ‘The cops know all that. You’ll be right. Just settle. That’s all they want.’

  ‘Righto,’ says King. ‘I’ll catch you. See you, Rob.’

  A car door slams. A motor turns over.

  ‘Just leaving now,’ murmurs King. He is already addressing the detectives, waiting for him back at the dark boat ramp.

  …

  ‘My God,’ I whispered to Louise. ‘Is this like something out of Shakespeare? Double falseness?’

  ‘Not Shakespeare,’ she hissed. ‘The Sopranos.’

  …

  King’s recording did not satisfy the Homicide detectives. A month later, on the evening of 13 October 2005, they persuaded him to make a second visit to Farquharson, once again wearing a wire, and press him harder on the details of the fish-and-chip-shop conversation. King, dark-faced with strain, sat next to Detective Sergeant Clanchy behind the bar table while the second tape rolled.

  The crunch of boots on gravel announces King’s arrival at Kerri Huntington’s Mount Moriac house, in which Farquharson, after the funeral, had taken refuge from the ravening attention of the media. But when King presents himself at the front door, a little dog explodes into such wild territorial yapping and growling that, in court, Farquharson and his entire family had to smother their fits of laughter. Kerri Huntington heard herself on the tape: ‘Get out, Fox. Get out now!’ She went bright pink and bowed forward in a convulsion. The rest of the court, reminded of the likeable ordinariness of this family, could not help joining in.

  ‘He’s a fiery little thing!’ says King.

  ‘Doesn’t bite,’ says Farquharson. ‘Just bloody barks. Let’s sit in here.’

  Family and dog withdraw. Farquharson tells King about his disturbed nights. His sleep is so broken that he gives up and just sits watching TV. King sees his opening.

  ‘I’ve been the same, mate. I’m struggling real bad. That conversation, mate. It’s killing me.’

  This time Farquharson is on the front foot. ‘No,’ he says, ‘but it was never like that. That’s what I keep telling ya.’

  ‘Not just “pay her back big-time,”’ says King. ‘You said to me about taking away what was the most important thing to her. And you nodded your head towards that window in the fish-and-chip shop, mate. I want to get my head clear, because it’s fuckin’ wreckin’ me. I said, “You don’t even dream of doing things like that,” and Rob, you said to me, “Funny you should say about dreams—I have an accident and survive it, and they don’t.” That’s what you said to me. I want all this stuff off my chest! It’s eating me inside like a cancer!’

  ‘I never, never said that,’ says Farquharson. ‘You’re getting it all wrong, all twisted. I meant one day she’s going to wake up that I’m not as weak as piss as what she thought—I’m going to accomplish something.’

  And once more he launches his harangue. His voice is affectless, but still intimate and persuasive, rising at the end of every phrase and sentence, as if listing a series of points in an argument that is laid out coherently in his head. Several times King tries to speak, but Farquharson rolls over him. On and on he goes, tireless, pouring out his explanations, introducing new themes, while King keeps drawing in great, painful sighs that are more like groans; and constantly, in the background, low and persistent, runs the moronic gabbling of the television, its cries and splinterings, and, once, the sharp blast of a whistle.

  King’s whole purpose, on this visit, was to betray. But there was something strategic, even masterful, about Farquharson’s fast-rippling monologue, with its strange rhetorical surges. He sounded like a man talking for his life.

  Yes, he was angry with Cindy when she threw up her nose at him. ‘I’m driving this good car, and look at you’—and now that other cunt was driving it. He was mad at her because she wouldn’t sell the house so he could get a better car. His sisters knew she used to treat him like shit. But what King didn’t realise, outside the fish-and-chip shop, was that he and Cindy had sorted it all out, that they had become amicable. He would never hurt her, and he definitely would never hurt his kids. Never. Why would someone go from not smacking them to killing them? That’s a big gap. Not one person thinks he would do that. It was never there—it’s what King has put there.

  King jacks up. ‘It wasn’t what I’ve put there! Come on! Don’t blame it all on bloody me!’

  All right, Farquharson’s not blaming him. He sees now that he should have confided in King, that night, about what he was really dreaming of—not revenge on Cindy, but a whole new moneymaking scheme. He had been thinking for months about buying into a business, a successful yogurt-importing concern worth $300,000 a year that his friend Mark in Lorne might be going to cut him in on, but it was still a secret, so he couldn’t talk about it. If King thinks Farquharson could look in the mother of his kids’ eyes and tell her a lie and walk away, he’d be an animal. Cindy’s belief in him, and his psychologist’s, too, is a hundred and fifty per cent. This is what’s holding him together—this and his own honesty, his integrity to stand and tell. Tell them the truth. Prove the truth to the end, because that is the truth. They’ve got nothing on him. The police have already told his psychologist that he doesn’t fit the profile. When people do things like that, it’s a very planned thing. Anyway, when people are lying, they fuck up. That lady who poisoned her two kids. They broke her in two and a half hours. Broke her. Because she couldn’t lie no more. He, on the contrary, has told the truth from the start. He has been steadfast in the face of police interrogation; he will not back down. His three interviews—with the paramedics in the ambulance, with the police in Geelong Emergency, with the detectives at Homicide—were all exactly the same. Again and again he tells King he has misinterpreted everything. He is begging him not to mention any of that. He must wipe it clean out of his head. Wipe it right out. Now.

  ‘I’m going to have to see a counsellor,’ says King, miserably. ‘Because I can’t sleep. It’s visions. About what happened. What they had to—what they went through. I’ll have to talk about it, mate.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ says Farquharson, ‘please don’t mention that stuff. I’m fearing you’re going to say something to incriminate me. The police’ll say, “We’ve interviewed Greg King,
he says you’re all right, but now he’s gone to a counsellor, and the counsellor’s said this, and this, and this.” And that drags you into it. That’s what you don’t want. I’d have to call Mark and say, “Remember I had a conversation about buying a business?” It goes to another level that’s totally irrelevant.’

  King makes as if to leave, but Farquharson has him by the sleeve. He’s had a freak accident, a tragic accident, and now he’s got to live with it. He’s not lying. What happened to him is common. Plenty of people have blacked out at the wheel. The trauma team at the hospital all told him there was nothing he could have done. He’s not Superman. Even his counsellor’s said to him he’s got to stop blaming himself. Every day he asks the question, why did this have to happen to me? What have I done?

  He ushers King to the door, still talking hard. Remember how he never used to get in fights down the pub when King and the others did? He is upset, he’s disappointed, it cuts deep that King should think he’d do such a thing. It’s not in his nature. He doesn’t want there to be any ramifications.

  ‘All right,’ says King. ‘I know you were angry that night. And I misinterpreted.’

  Farquharson urges King to calm himself by means of the relaxation techniques that his psychologist has taught him to use when he’s driving the car. He demonstrates, in a whisper. ‘You count. You say, The tension’s gone. The tension’s gone. The tension’s gone. Let it flow out.’

  Are they already outside in the yard? Night birds pass, with faint, melancholy cries. The chink of keys. A car starts up. But Farquharson talks on and on. He must be leaning down to King’s open window, as he did outside the fish-and-chip shop.

  ‘When you drive off from here, you should be able to say, “It’s off my chest. He’s telling the truth. He’s been truthful to everyone, truthful to me.” I mean, I’m an honest person. Put it aside. Let it flow out. It’s gone. You’ll feel so much better. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the end of the topic. And it should be for you. You’ll sleep a lot better. But if there’s any problems, give me a bell before you do any counselling.’

  …

  People filed out of the court, subdued. Louise and I walked all the way down to Tattersalls Lane with our eyes on the ground.

  ‘I’ve just lost my doubt,’ she said, at the shabby door of the Shanghai Dumpling. ‘But not my pity.’

  ‘He wasn’t very surprised, was he,’ I said. ‘You’d almost think he was expecting it.’

  She mimicked Farquharson’s histrionic trope: ‘And I loved them more than life itself.’

  Students around us were yelling and laughing. We sat in silence. I could hardly meet her eye. To have my residual fantasies of his innocence dismantled, blow by blow, and out of his own mouth, filled me with an emotion I had no name for, though it felt weirdly like shame. Our plates were thumped on to the laminex.

  ‘I’m coming round to that journalist’s way of thinking,’ said Louise, picking up her chopsticks. ‘That he’s a selfish, cold-hearted bastard. Who betrayed his children’s love and trust in the most horrible way.’

  I was straining to hold it at bay. I wanted to think like a juror, to wait for all the evidence, to hold myself in a state where I could still be persuaded by argument.

  ‘Journalists have to work very fast,’ I said. ‘That must be why they form a detached view so early. We’re dilettantes. We’ve got time to wallow.’

  She gave me a wry look. Without another word, we polished off the vegetable dumplings.

  …

  Was there a form of madness called court fatigue? It would have mortified me to tell Louise about the crazy magical thinking that filled my waking mind and, at night, my dreams: if only Farquharson could be found not guilty, then the boys would not be dead. Cindy would drive home from the court and find them playing kick-to-kick in the yard, or sprawled in their socks on the couch, absorbed in the cartoon channel. Bailey would run to her with his arms out. They would call for something to eat. She would open the fridge and cheerfully start rattling the pots and pans. I could not wait to get home, to haul my grandsons away from their Lego and their light sabres, to squeeze them in my arms until they squirmed. Young boys! How can such wild, vital creatures die? How can this hilarious sweetness be snuffed out forever?

  CHAPTER 6

  Criminal barristers like to see themselves as free-spirited adventurers, armed with learning and wit, who gallop out to defend the embattled individual against the dead hand of the state. They love to perform. A rill of ironic laughter bubbles under the surface of their discourse. There is something savage in the greatest of them, and their brilliance is displayed to most devastating effect in cross-examination.

  Peter Morrissey SC was not vain enough, I thought, to fancy himself one of these dark riders. Still, no woman can ever quite grasp how acutely even the warmest and most decent man cares about what his male peers think of him—even this one who, at a break in proceedings, glanced up into the gallery and saw with a smile of open gladness that his wife was looking down at him as he worked.

  …

  Greg King was the Crown’s star witness. Morrissey could nitpick about road camber and steering-wheel turns and police paint marks till he was blue in the face, but surely it was on the jury’s response to King that his defence of Farquharson would stand or fall. Morrissey would have to attack King’s memory, his truthfulness, his personal honour, even his sanity. He would have to take him by the throat.

  King stood in the witness box in his green-and-yellow-striped cotton shirt, clenching his jaw, waiting for the onslaught.

  First Morrissey, in a friendly enough tone, ran him through all the things King had quoted Farquharson saying outside the fish-and-chip shop on that Friday night. King agreed to all of them. Then Morrissey narrowed it down. Was King really alleging that Robbie ‘then just stared at me in my eyes and said, “Kill them”?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  Morrissey raised his chin. ‘That’s false, isn’t it? You didn’t put that to him on either of the two tapes, did you?’

  King began to mumble. ‘I was too stressed and—’

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Morrissey sharply. ‘You didn’t, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  Morrissey leaned forward, propped his big footballer’s torso on both fists and let fly. Had King then said to Farquharson, ‘Bullshit, that’s your own flesh and blood, Robbie’? And had Farquharson replied, ‘So? I hate them’? That too was false, wasn’t it? And when King warned him he would go to gaol, surely Farquharson hadn’t really replied that he would kill himself before it got to that? Weren’t these very extreme statements? Farquharson had never before told King he was going to hurt his children, had he? Hadn’t he only ever said that he loved his kids? Beautiful kids, weren’t they? They obviously loved their dad, didn’t they? Farquharson gave them a lot of affection, did he not? Yet didn’t King claim that Farquharson had even told him the place and date of this cold-blooded murder of his three kids? Three beautiful kids? Yes? Is that what King claimed?

  ‘Yes,’ whispered King, flinching and changing colour.

  Morrissey reared back and plunged his hands into the sleeves of his gown. ‘Did you ring Cindy Gambino,’ he asked, in a tone of incredulous challenge, ‘and let her know?
’

  Gambino uttered a single sharp cry, and began to sob aloud.

  ‘No,’ muttered King.

  No? What about the police? No? The teacher at the school? No? Did King call Robbie the next day and say, ‘Robbie, you were saying some way-out things—how are you travelling?’

  ‘No.’

  King had had a lot of bad dreams about this, hadn’t he, since he learnt of the children being drowned in a horrendous way in the dam? Yes? His ability to sleep was effectively destroyed at that time? And he had visions? Visions meaning waking pictures in his awake mind? Visions he could not control, right? They kept butting in on him, no matter how he tried to close them out? Visions of the children drowning? Yes? Dying? Terribly upsetting visions?

  King stood there sweating, gripping the rail of the stand. His face hardened, blanched, turned dark. In these few minutes he seemed to have aged ten years. ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘Of the kids. Yes.’

  And the visions King had, said Morrissey, were of Robbie being very bad, weren’t they? Telling King he was going to kill the children so as to upset Cindy? And these visions remained untreated until King went to get counselling in December 2005 or January 2006?

  Untreated. I sat up. Was Morrissey going to pathologise poor King and his horrible visions?

  ‘You’ve got your own kids, correct?’ said Morrissey. ‘You were shocked and upset when you heard about the death of the three kids? And then you struggled desperately to remember the conversation you’d had with Robert Farquharson two months previously? You had a lot of trouble remembering that conversation in any detail, right?’