This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial

by Helen Garner

  King, choking, stuck gamely to his estimate. ‘I was eighty per cent sure.’

  ‘You claim Mr Farquharson said he would do this on Father’s Day? So everyone would remember it? And he would be the one to have the children for the last time, not her?’

  ‘That’s what he said.’

  ‘And then every Father’s Day Cindy would suffer for the rest of her life?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Did you say, “You don’t even dream of that, Robbie”?’

  ‘Yes.’

  And yet, said Morrissey, King did not raise the fish-and-chip-shop conversation after that day with anyone except his wife, Mary?

  No, he didn’t.

  Then the children died on 4 September? King made his statements to the police? He made the first secret tape and handed it to the police at the Modewarre boat ramp?

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘And after that,’ cried Morrissey triumphantly, ‘you went on a skiing holiday!’

  This was too much even for the battered King. He straightened his back and protested, ‘Ye-es! Up to me brother’s!’

  Morrissey stormed on. After all his secret taping and his four statements to the police, did King go into counselling at the Bethany Support Centre to deal with the intrusive visions, nightmares and problems that he was having?

  He did.

  King knew the Farquharson boys, right? He would never have exposed them to any danger?

  No, he would not.

  And because of his upset state of mind, King had got the details of the fish-and-chip-shop conversation horribly wrong, hadn’t he? Up to the point where he said Farquharson had nodded towards his children through the window of the fish-and-chip shop, all right, that was fair enough—but everything else was stuff he had added in his later statements, was it not? Robbie never said he was going to kill them, did he? He never said he was going to drown them in a dam on Father’s Day, did he?

  Yes, yes, he did.

  What he said to King was no more than a separated bloke’s grumble outside the fish shop on a Friday night, wasn’t it?

  No!

  And if King had really told his wife all these terrible things when he got home with the chips, then how come Mary King said in her witness statement, and at the committal hearing, that she had absolutely no memory of being told any such thing? Surely their kitchen couldn’t have been that noisy?

  Their house was always noisy.

  By the time he came to write out his statement for the Homicide detectives, three months after the fateful Father’s Day, King could no longer distinguish facts, could he, from the visions he’d been having in the very disturbed state of mind he’d been in since the children drowned?

  ‘It all come back to me,’ said King wretchedly, ‘in the night I got the phone call.’

  Morrissey was on a roll. Robbie’s so-called dream in which ‘the kids go into the dam, I survive and they don’t’—where was this dream in the police statements? It wasn’t there, was it? It had vanished from King’s memory! Would King agree that there was a major, major difference between Farquharson saying on the one hand, ‘I’ve had a dream that I go into the dam and the kids don’t get out but I do’ and, on the other hand, ‘I’m going to kill them in the dam, it’ll be an accident where I survive and they don’t’? One’s a dream, isn’t it? And the other’s a threat, a reality? Did King see the difference?

  Yes. King, roasting on the spit, could see the difference.

  His memory had been destroyed, hadn’t it, by the trauma he had gone through? He’d been treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, had he not? He had even come to see himself, hadn’t he, as a victim of crime? Had he, in fact, made a claim for money at the Victims of Crime Assistance Tribunal, on the basis that he was a primary victim of crime?

  ‘I’ve got a form to fill out, yes,’ whispered King.

  Morrissey rested his palms on the edge of the bar table, and lowered his voice from the thunder of oratory to a kinder, more conversational level.

  ‘I know I’m crossing swords with you on some things,’ he said. ‘The reality is that you have been terribly traumatised. And you’re not lying about that, are you. It’s still something that causes you trouble now?’

  ‘I just want this over,’ King burst out, in a voice cracked with tears.

  ‘You’re looking for something to finish the pain you’re in, correct? In the days after you heard the terrible news that the children were dead, you told the police you were pretty wrecked? You said you had to get it off your chest? It had been going over and over in your head? You couldn’t put it all together? You were crying constantly? It was eating you up? It was freaking you out? You shook? It was killing you? You were being placed under intolerable emotional stress? You were scared you were going to have a nervous breakdown? You couldn’t sleep?’

  ‘I was under too much stress,’ said King obstinately, sensing he was being led somewhere, not sure whether he should follow. ‘I was traumatised.’

  ‘You wanted to get it off your chest because that might give you some relief from the horrible tension you were undergoing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What I’m putting to you,’ said Morrissey, ‘is that your memory is playing you tricks because of the terrible situation you’re in. If Mr Farquharson had said anything like the extreme things that your evidence contains, you’d have done something about it, Mr King, wouldn’t you—if he really said it?’

  ‘He said it,’ muttered King between clenched teeth. Then, in his misery, he broke out again, ‘Why would I lie about something like that?’

  ‘You saw it as being of therapeutic relevance to you, to come to some sort of memory?’

  King stared at him.

  ‘You needed to remember something in order to get better?’

  ‘It was coming back to me in bits and pieces,’ King insisted.

  ‘The trouble is,’ said Morrissey, ramping it up again, ‘what you’ve done is to put extreme and terrible words into Mr Farquharson’s mouth which he didn’t say. The reason you didn’t call Cindy, the police, or anyone else is because these extreme statements that you attribute to Mr Farquharson were not made at all!’

  ‘Why would I?’ cried King. ‘Why would I want to go and do that to somebody?’

  …

  It was four o’clock. The judge excused the haggard witness and sent the jury home. Mr Morrissey’s fighting posture loosened and he gave in to his harsh, barking cough. His skin looked pale and waxy. He wiped sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his big black gown. ‘I’m worried about him,’ whispered Louise. Justice Cummins too, as court rose for the day, gave him several concerned glances. Perhaps this performance of ferocity was violating something in Morrissey. I wondered if he was getting any sleep, what his dreams were telling him, and if he could afford to pay them any attention.

  …

  Next morning my brother, a chef, chanced to walk past the coffee cart on his way to the Victoria Market. He stopped to say hello, and I introduced him to Bob and Bev Gambino. While the two men keenly compared notes on the beautie
s of squid and how to clean and cook it, Louise and I turned aside with Bev. I asked her how they were managing. I did not expect a detailed reply, but in her gentle, friendly voice, not dramatising it or trying to impress, she offered one.

  ‘You’ve got this mask all over you,’ she said, and made a huge gesture with her flat palms down the front of her person, from forehead to knees. ‘You get up. You drive to work. You take the mask off and you do what’s expected of you. Then you drive home, and on the way the mask comes back, so you can handle everything that’s going on there.’

  I looked at her in confusion. I could hardly correct her, but wasn’t her image the wrong way round? Wouldn’t she need the mask outside her home?

  ‘See,’ she went on, ‘we haven’t been able to grieve for our boys. All this has been hanging over us like a cloud for two years. We have counselling. They teach you techniques. But it goes so deep. It cuts you to the bone.’

  …

  The journalists came bouncing into the court. One of the commercial radio guys slid into the seat beside me. Had we watched MythBusters last night? It was about opening car doors under water. Apparently you can’t do it till the car fills up and the inner and outer pressures equalise.

  I said in a low voice, ‘So, what does this mean? About Jai opening…’

  He turned his whole body in the seat so that his back was towards Farquharson’s family, and mouthed at me, as if to a simpleton, ‘It means he’s lying.’

  I glanced across at Mr Rapke, leaning back in his cushioned swivel chair, one hand clamped around his jaw. He looked like a general in possession of an arsenal packed with weapons so fearsome and so accurate that I contemplated him with awe.

  …

  Greg King presented himself for the final round of the defence’s attack on his credibility. The shirt he had put on that morning bore an image of his ordeal: it was white, with fine black vertical stripes, and printed on its chest was a shatter of black and crimson, like words exploding in a gush of blood.

  Today he would be painted by Morrissey as a pathetic figure, a broken man whose nerve had weakened and snapped, whose word could not be trusted—and not because he was a bad person, but because he could not help himself. He had ‘mental issues’. He was so demoralised and damaged that he had learnt his statement by heart and simply recited it to the court instead of answering questions afresh. Worse, by allowing the police to wire him he had disgracefully betrayed his mate’s trust. Morrissey laid on the pathos with a trowel. Robbie was a pretty lovable bloke, wasn’t he? Hadn’t he spoken to King in a confiding way, as a friend? Hadn’t King himself become emotional and tearful during the conversation, even though all that time he knew he had a tape recorder running secretly in his clothes?

  King squirmed and sweated. He kept pressing his hands into the small of his back, like someone in pain. Again and again, to explain the sporadic return of his memories, he pleaded stress and confusion. His voice trembled and cracked. ‘He’s a good mate, you know.’ He could no longer hold back his tears.

  ‘He’s not a good mate for nothing, is he?’ said Morrissey sternly. ‘He’s a good mate because he’s a good person.’

  ‘He’s my mate, yes,’ wept King.

  ‘And you saw him, didn’t you, at a footy club junior presentation, with Bailey in his arms, on the Friday night before Father’s Day? Wasn’t Cindy there too? If there was any truth in your memory of these threats, wouldn’t you have warned her that Robbie was planning to murder the kids in two days’ time? Your memory of the fish-and-chip conversation is false, isn’t it? Isn’t it false?’

  But somehow, in his strangled, suffering way, Greg King stood firm. He drew it up from the depths of himself one more time, in a hoarse whisper: ‘It’s true.’

  I indulged myself in a long, slow, careful look at the jury. They were sitting erect, focused, with clear eyes and solemn faces.

  …

  Greg King’s wife, Mary, was a slender, long-haired young woman in a fashionable trenchcoat. On the evening of the notorious fish-and-chip-shop encounter, Greg had come back late with the chips and thrown out her timing. The chops were burning. She was short with him. All she wanted was to get the chops off the grill before they were inedible, and feed the four kids. She did not remember being told what Greg and Robbie had talked about down at the shops. She had no memory of being told that Robbie planned to murder his children. She didn’t know if Greg had discussed it in detail with her, because she didn’t remember. She was busy doing other things. Mime disbelief as he might, Morrissey could not rattle her. She simply declined to engage with him about it. She was phlegmatic, unruffled, a study in refusal; yet where one might have expected her to appear evasive, she showed instead a stolid, housewifely composure.

  ‘I will say,’ was all she would concede, ‘that my husband’s been very upset over the whole matter.’

  It was the end of the court morning. As the journalists were getting to their feet, Morrissey shoved along the bar table past his junior’s chair and faced us with his hands planted squarely on his hips.

  ‘Those chops!’ he shouted, with a scornful laugh. ‘How important can a burning chop be?’

  …

  Louise and I stepped out of the building into weak spring sunlight. We slid round the mob of photographers and found ourselves walking east on Lonsdale Street only a few metres behind Greg and Mary King. We trailed them discreetly for a block.

  ‘How can she not remember?’ I whispered. ‘Why would she lie about it? Or maybe he didn’t tell her? Maybe he feels he should have, and wishes he had, and finally convinced himself that he did?’

  ‘I think she’s repressed it,’ said Louise. She made a little vertical barrier with her flat hands. ‘It must be something she deeply feels doesn’t belong in her life. And she just refuses to let it come in.’

  ‘Mind you,’ I said, ‘wives do get used to not listening.’

  The minute the Kings got out of media range, they reached for each other with the habitual gesture of a couple, and headed down the hill, hand in hand, with brisk, firm steps.

  …

  Everybody knows that memory is not a simple accessible file whose contents remain undisturbed from one inspection to the next. Memory is an endless, lifelong process, fluid, active and mysterious. Nobody should be surprised, then, that King had remembered things in bursts. But what, if anything, did it mean that, according to King’s first statement, Farquharson had merely spoken of revenge and nodded towards his boys through the fish-and-chip-shop window, yet in the later statements had said that he hated the boys and wanted to kill them?

  I did not think Greg King was a liar. Nor did I see him as the broken-spirited wreck that Morrissey had laboured to conjure up. Still, something in me baulked at the idea that Farquharson would have come out with such an explicit statement of intent. Hate? Kill? I tried and failed to hear him.

  As it happens, I have kept a diary for most of my adult life. Like any journal-keeper, I have a sharpened understanding of the way memory works. Once in a while, years or even decades after some painful or important personal event of which I have retained the most crisply detailed memories, I get an urge to read what I wrote on the day in question. I hunt out the exercise book and locate th
e exact date. There is rarely anything surprising in the content: the story is always sorely familiar. But I am often taken aback to find that aspects of the experience that I had clearly remembered in the form of spoken dialogue turn out to have been no more than thoughts or silent insights I had had in the heat of the moment and had recorded as such in the evening. As time has passed, as the occasion has drifted in and out of my mind, my memory has worked, without my conscious knowledge, to make explicit these waves of emotion and private mental activity. It has translated them into passages of direct speech and enclosed them in quotation marks. Yet, though they were at the time ‘no more than thoughts or silent insights’, and though they were never uttered by me or anyone else as speech, I notice upon rereading them that they still ring true to the tenor of the experience. I can even say, with the authority of hindsight, that they are the most convincing part of the account.

  CHAPTER 7

  Mild sunlight on the dam. Puffy spring clouds. The paddock is grassy. Its fence is lined with thin saplings. A maroon Commodore, passenger side facing us, is dangling horizontal from a crane, its tyres barely a metre above the surface of the water. Men on the bank study the car as it hangs. A shadowy figure with an unnaturally large head is ensconced in the driver’s seat. Down glides the Commodore on its chains, gently, slowly, guided from the bank by wire cables. The sun makes huge spangles on its duco. Just above the water it hovers. Behind the closed window the masked diver at the steering wheel sticks up his thumb, then makes a forceful gesture. The chains slacken and the car drops into the water, flat on its belly. It tips forward at once and begins to sink. The rising water level slices on an angle across the centre of its doors. The diver, visible only as head and shoulders, leans across towards the passenger door and tries to open it. He fights with it, fails, then turns his body more squarely towards it and tries again. It opens a crack, and shuts. The car is going down.