This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial

by Helen Garner

  Farquharson’s face, watching the video in Court Three, was stretched into a gape of anguish. He held his handkerchief to his cheeks with both hands. Bob Gambino and Farquharson’s brothers-in-law strained to look up at the high screen, but the three wives sat facing rigidly ahead.

  Now the diver at the wheel turns his back to the camera on the bank and tackles his own door. He opens it with apparent ease. Water must be rushing in, for the car lurches and tilts to that side. In a few seconds the front half of the vehicle is completely submerged. Its boot sticks up at a helpless angle.

  The screen goes black. Then suddenly the camera is inside the car, at roof height, looking down on to the front passenger seat and the interior panel of its door: we are seeing everything again, from a new perspective. The diver’s left hand comes into shot and reaches for the passenger door’s latch. He tries it, fails, then changes hands, grabs the latch with his right hand and puts all his weight behind his left palm which he slides rearward on the door. It opens a crack. Water gushes in and fills the footwell to the rim of the seat, where a passenger’s knees would be. The diver lets go his pressure, and the door clips shut, cutting off the flow. A second of stability. Then another violent surge of water comes roiling up the video screen, a creamy greenish tan, seething with distorted bubbles and flecks of matter. In seconds it obliterates everything but itself. The camera goes on faithfully recording, its gaze fixed on the blurred edge of the car’s instrument panel, but then it too is drowned, and the screen goes dark.

  This was the first of the police submergence tests.

  The diver stepped into the witness stand like a character from an action movie: Leading Senior Constable Simeon Ranik of the Search and Rescue Squad, a tall, powerfully built, dark-bearded fellow with a rumbling voice.

  Very little water was coming into the car, he said, until he opened the passenger door. As we saw, water rose to knee level. When he shut the door, helped by the water pressure from outside, the flow almost stopped. As for the driver’s door, it was fairly easy to hold it open for a number of seconds. When he took his hand off the door and placed it on the steering wheel, the force of the water rushing in closed the door. By then, the water was up to his waist. He tried several times to re-open the door, but could not get it open. He kept pushing every few seconds while the car sank, using his shoulder; but it was not possible to open it again until he was totally submerged—until the car was filled right to the top of the door.

  …

  The second test. The car is dropped into the dam and the driver does not touch the passenger door. All he does is open the driver’s door and get out.

  Seen by the camera on the bank, it is a simple manoeuvre.

  Then we see it again through the interior camera, which is fixed high on the rear shelf of the cabin, the vantage point of a kid strapped into a toddler harness. The instant the car hits the dam surface, the diver goes for his own door, shoves it open with his powerful forearm, and scrambles out against a gush of water. He is out, and gone, and the water invades, greenish-yellow with a wild curved top on it. Three beats and the car is full of it. There is nothing left to breathe.

  Farquharson wept without sound, wincing, desperately blinking, wiping his eyes, blowing air out between his lips. His family sat bowed forward, pressing clenched fists to their temples.

  Did the diver have any difficulty opening the driver’s door, in this second test?

  ‘No,’ said the witness in his deep voice. ‘There was water rushing in and I could feel pressure on the door, but it wasn’t adverse. It was a bit like someone leaning on you.’

  …

  The third test showed what would have happened had the car gone down without any of its doors being opened.

  Seen first from the bank, gradually, gradually, nose down, on an angle, heavy and slow, in endless silence the Commodore sinks into the dam. Its maroon colour loses intensity and turns to rose. At the very last moment, air bubbles surge in twin streams out of the disappearing boot. The water closes over it. Huge circles spread on the delicately flushed and wind-riffled surface.

  Then the two interior cameras show their sepia versions, more blurred and intimate. In the first the camera is strapped to the headrest of the front passenger seat, pointing across at the driver’s seat and footwell. For a long time nothing happens. Why are we looking at this? Wait. Something flutters and flickers in the nethermost corner: water, slipping in round the bottom seal of the driver’s door, and rising towards the level of the seat.

  Cut to the second interior camera, the child’s-eye view from the rear parcel shelf. Again, nothing is happening. A minute, two minutes tick by on the screen’s digital timer. Then water begins to pool to left and right of the gear stick. Up it comes, leisurely and secretive, commandeering the space with unstoppable authority, its surface twinkling and wriggling. It rises and rises until it covers the two seat-backs, and engulfs the camera itself. A ridged rubber floor mat floats up towards the lens, soars past it like a stingray. Now the entire screen is water, a creamy grey tinted with green. The car has taken almost eight minutes to fill and sink.

  Except for the low roar of the heating system, the court was silent. Morrissey heaved himself to his feet.

  When Mr Farquharson’s car was recovered from the dam, he said to the diver on the witness stand, a photo showed what looked like a gap of daylight round part of the rear windshield. What if Farquharson’s back window had popped its seal? Could its cabin have lost its bubble of air and filled with water more quickly than had that of the test vehicle?

  It was an attempt to plant in the jury’s mind a seed of hope—that the boys might have drowned immediately, with no time for what we were all imagining: Jai battling in the dark to free his shrieking brothers from their harnesses, fighting the boiling chaos to reach the rear door handle, wrenching at the broken latch…

  It was true that the police mechanics who inspected the car had found the rear window partially dislodged from its cavity; but this was not part of the diver’s knowledge, and he was unable to console us.

  …

  Louise had not turned up that day: she had an appointment with her orthodontist. I was relieved. I often forgot that she was only sixteen. Did her parents have any idea what dreadful things she was learning in my company? When court rose at 4 p.m., I plodded up to the Sofitel for a disconsolate martini. Next to the high windows I spotted a senior public servant I had known when we were girls at university in the sixties. She closed her laptop and we compared notes on our current work. The mention of Peter Morrissey brought to her tired face an affectionate smile. She had had dealings with him over the years. He was the kindest, the most decent of men, a devoted worker for the underdog. ‘He’s always appearing for these sorts of people.’ She laughed, fondly. ‘And apparently he believes they’re all innocent.’

  …

  When I got home I sat out on the back veranda for a while, mumbling to myself, sick at heart. My third grandchild came wandering round the side of the house. He approached me without speaking, turned his back, and stood waiting to be picked up. I lifted him on to my lap. He was only a few months younger than Bailey Farquharson had been when he drowned. For a while the little boy sat on my knee. He relaxed his spine against my chest. Together we listened to the clatter of the h
igh palm fronds, the wail of a distant siren. He glanced up sharply when a flight of lorikeets swerved chattering across the garden. Then he spread his right hand like a fan, inserted a delicate thumb into his mouth, and tucked his head under my chin.

  And yet only two hours later, when he and his four-year-old brother disobeyed me at bedtime and went crashing and yelling like maniacs down the hall to the kitchen, rage blinded me. I ran after them, grabbed the nearest arm, and yanked its owner round in a curve. Before I could land a blow, I got a grip on myself. The boys stood frozen in attitudes of flight. Nobody spoke. In a cold sweat I leaned against the cupboard door and took some trembling breaths.

  CHAPTER 8

  The next morning Louise presented herself early at the coffee cart, looking hangdog.

  ‘I have a confession,’ she said in the queue. ‘I didn’t really go to the orthodontist. I went to a movie. With some friends.’

  I laughed. She blushed.

  ‘I just needed a break. What did I miss?’

  ‘Everything, smart-arse. Now you’ll never understand it.’

  She gave me a pert look. ‘Also, I’ve got no money.’

  I shouted her a coffee and we sat down on the concrete bench.

  ‘I realised yesterday,’ she said, ‘that I’m hooked. I started to rave about where I’d been, but they didn’t give a shit. The only thing they wanted to know was, “Well? Did he do it?” The least interesting question anyone could possibly ask.’

  …

  Nobody said that it was impossible for Farquharson to have coughed until he blacked out. The best anyone could say was that it was highly unlikely. But, as Mr Morrissey would point out, the statistical rarity of any adverse event is of little comfort to the person whose number has come up.

  People who have blacked out are often referred to neurologists, since a common cause of syncope—a brief loss of consciousness—is a failure of circulation of blood to the brain. So the first of the Crown’s two medical expert witnesses was Dr John King, a lean, dry, intensely reserved gentleman in gold-rimmed spectacles, who had been practising as a consultant neurologist at the Royal Melbourne Hospital since 1975.

  Dr King had seen many an individual with chronic obstructive airways disease go into a paroxysm of coughing, turn purple in the face, become distressed, and have to sit down; but not a single one of these had actually collapsed on the floor in front of him. He had seen it happen on a teaching video, but never in real life.

  In fact, during thirty years in his specialty Dr King would have come across only about six cases of coughing followed by a blackout. In each of these, the patient had reported a blackout to a GP who, wanting to rule out serious conditions like epilepsy, had sent him along to Dr King for a neurological check-up. Off the top of his head, Dr King could not remember even one of these six cases who did not have lung disease. He had diagnosed cough syncope in them only after getting from the patient a credible history, particularly one corroborated by an eyewitness.

  How brief was the loss of consciousness in cough syncope?

  Oh, very brief, said Dr King. Unlike an epileptic fit, where the patient can be unconscious for up to three or four minutes and is often confused and without memory for half an hour or so, an episode of cough syncope lasts only five, ten, twenty seconds. Afterwards the patient is usually rapidly orientated, and can recall what happened just before he passed out. There exists, too, something called a pre-syncopal episode, where the paroxysm of coughing can lead to a feeling of being very unwell, light-headed, dizzy. The sufferer will perhaps sit down and try to control the cough. Vision may narrow. Stars may be seen. But a blackout can also occur suddenly, without warning.

  Mr Morrissey asked whether cough syncope could be accompanied by compulsive activity. Was it beyond the realms of possibility that a person might maintain his grip on a steering wheel, or move a steering wheel to direct a vehicle in a certain direction?

  Not in a purposeful sense, said Dr King. He may fall on the steering wheel and make some convulsive movements, but generally the movements seen in a person with cough syncope are merely ‘repetitive twitching of the limbs’.

  Morrissey had dug deep and come up with some case studies from American medical journals. According to one of these, dated 1953, chronic pulmonary or respiratory diseases were associated with seventy-five per cent of cases of cough syncope—in other words, only three-quarters of them. In 1998, the Aviation, Space and Environmental Medicine journal had described the case of a forty-one-year-old US Army helicopter pilot who was driving home from training with his unit. He had a mild cold, with a cough. On the road he coughed forcefully, experienced tunnel vision and light-headedness, and passed out. His car hit a tree. He was unconscious only for seconds, and recalled the incident immediately. He reported no headaches, shortness of breath, loss of bowel or bladder control, chest pains, tremors, nausea, vomiting or amnesia. His medical history was notable only in that he was a smoker and overweight. He had no chronic airways disease. A third case involved a healthy forty-five-year-old with the flu who had suffered a cough syncope episode. Had the neurologist read all of these documents? Yes, he had, replied the impassive Dr King.

  Morrissey was driving Dr King back against the wall, but there was a sense of strain in the cases he was quoting, a sort of thinness. They felt distant, sparse, dredged up. I looked at the jury. They were concentrating hard. The faces of most were unreadable. But one of the older women was listening with her head tilted back, the corners of her mouth pulled into her cheeks, her eyes narrowed to slits: the expression that in ordinary life prefaces a click of the tongue and a sharp ‘Come off it.’

  Ms Forrester, re-examining, drew from these same case studies the fact that most of the subjects had identified themselves as heavy smokers. The American chopper pilot had recently been subjected to G-force in the course of his aviation training. Dr King shrugged calmly. He knew nothing about the effect of G-force on cough syncope. But he pointed out that most people who reported incidents of cough syncope were in their forties and fifties, so that thirty-six, Farquharson’s age at the time of the crash, was perhaps at the lower end of the range. The twitching seen during cough syncope, he repeated, was ‘involuntary and purposeless’. A person in such a state would not be capable of the purposeful steering of a car.

  At this, the journalists en masse leaned forward to their notebooks, and the ABC television reporter sprang up and darted out of the court.

  …

  Professor Matthew Naughton, the Crown’s main expert medical witness, was the only man I had ever seen wear a pink tie with a tweed jacket. Rimless spectacles hung round his neck on a black cord. His turned-up nose made him look young, but he had a real mouthful of a title: Head of the General Respiratory and Sleep Medicine Service in the Department of Allergy and Respiratory Medicine at Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital. Mr Rapke led him through a CV of such vast scope and lavish detail that the journalists could hardly keep straight faces. The reporter beside me, stifling laughter, printed on my notebook, ‘Are you clever?’ But, as soon as Rapke’s examination began, Naughton showed himself to be soberingly quiet and modest.

  Cough syncope, he said, is a recognised medical syndrome—a very brief loss of consciousness that follows an episode of intense coughing. The medical literature has described it for half a century in middle-aged, ov
erweight males who are usually heavy smokers with underlying heart or lung disease. The mechanism most people accept as its cause is repetitive coughing that causes pressure within the chest. This pressure impairs the flow of blood on its way back to the heart from the lungs, so that the heart, when it contracts, has less blood to pump on its forward way.

  ‘I have trouble getting my head around this condition,’ said Naughton, ‘because it’s so nebulous. When I look through the literature on cough syncope, I find an absence of good quality scientific rationale to back up the validity of the condition. In twenty-five years as a medical practitioner I have never personally seen it.’

  He had asked his respiratory colleagues at the Alfred Hospital ‘in a casual manner’ whether they had experience of cough syncope. They all knew of it as a condition, but there was only one case that any of them were personally acquainted with—a young man who suffered from the severe and chronic pulmonary condition cystic fibrosis and a neurological condition that impaired blood supply to his brain. The nurses on the respiratory ward were aware of his vulnerability to cough syncope and had to try to manage it.

  Naughton had also consulted the physiotherapy staff at the Alfred. Part of their work is to test for the presence of a germ called pneumocystis that is common in the HIV population—people who, apart from their HIV-positive status and some breathlessness, are healthy. These patients are asked to inhale a hypotonic saline solution, which causes them to cough vigorously for up to thirty minutes. A physiotherapist who had administered this disagreeable-sounding treatment about once a week for ten years told Naughton she had not seen a single case of cough syncope in all that time.

  ‘Do people with normal lungs, hearts and brains,’ asked Rapke, ‘suffer cough syncope?’

  ‘I have never seen a case in which that has occurred,’ said Naughton. ‘Nor have I seen, in the modern medical literature, objective descriptions in which people have actually witnessed and monitored a person having cough syncope in which there has been normal heart, lung or neurological function.’