This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial

by Helen Garner

  A pause.

  Clanchy takes his chin out of his palm. How did he try, though?

  Farquharson waves both arms at shoulder level. Well, he went around and he—he went and swam to the road to get people to help him, ’cause he—he just can’t recall everything—everything just went like that. He snaps his fingers fast, three times.

  Mm, says Clanchy.

  He wouldn’t lie, ’cause if he lies, what’s he gonna do, live a life of guilt?

  Does he feel guilty?

  Yeah, well anyone would. He feels bad. The counsellors he’s seen have told him he shouldn’t feel guilty, that it’s a freakish accident. He’s very concerned about what’s gonna happen. He’s never been in trouble before. He’s never done anything—anything. He throws out both arms in a large, heart-exposing gesture, then brings his palms together and makes a series of rhythmic, double-handed thrusting movements as if thumping down facts on the tabletop: he believes he’s a very good citizen in life; he’s a family man who’s looked after his kids and everything like that. So it’s pretty bloody hard and he doesn’t know what he’s thinking and what he’s not thinking, at the moment. But he’s telling them the truth. He’s not lying to them. He’s got no reason to.

  What did he have on, in the car?

  Just lights. The radio, it could have been music, he doesn’t know. The boys were wearing T-shirts so he turned the heater round to where it’s red, where it’s warm.

  When his son opened the door, asks Stamper, did Robert see water come in?

  Yeah, he thinks so.

  Where was it?

  Um, on the floor. He won’t say too much about that, ’cause he can’t ’pecifically—

  Why did he close Jai’s door?

  Farquharson pauses, looks at the detective with an expression that could mean either Why do you reckon? or Is this a trap? Because water, he says, was getting in.

  How hard was it to close the door?

  It could have been really hard, but he can’t say, because it was just all so quick. Again he snaps his fingers.

  When he got out of the car, did he have to swim up through water, or how was it?

  He thinks so, but he can’t recall. He thought for some stupid reason that they might have only been in a little bit of water, or rocking on a ledge, and he managed to get out but it was going down before that—he doesn’t even know how, he doesn’t know.

  Did he see the car go down?

  Yeah, he was trying to swim round the other side. He thinks he was under water when it went down, he remembers being under water, he remembers that. He thinks he remembers it nosediving. He got out and he looked to try and see what he could do, and he knew he couldn’t do anything.

  After the car went down, did he dive to try and find the car, at all?

  He tried, it was, he thinks it was really black and—

  Stamper presses him, quiet and patient. Did he dive down to try and find the car?

  Farquharson thinks he did, he can’t tell ’pecifically. He knows he went down somewhere but he can’t recall where, it was all so quick.

  But didn’t he tell the other police, earlier, that he dived down?

  Yeah, he went down to try and look and try and find it. He couldn’t do anything so he went back up.

  Why couldn’t he do anything?

  Because of the pressure.

  What does he mean, the pressure?

  Well, it was all under water. He knows he went to try and do something. What he doesn’t know is if he succeeded, or seen the car or not.

  He’s said something about the pressure. It’s a word he’s used several times, the pressure.

  Well, says Farquharson, that’s what the counsellor at Geelong Emergency said—that he wouldn’t have been able to do nothing because of water pressure and everything.

  Stamper doesn’t want to hear what someone else suggested might have happened. He’s asking if Farquharson himself remembers whether he dived down.

  Yeah, he did go down, because he remembers swallowing a little bit of water. He had a jumper on, and—

  Does he remember finding the car underwater?

  Farquharson stammers, he jabbers. He doesn’t think he did. Then he thinks he did. Then he doesn’t think he did. He’s sorry, it’s not a question he can really answer.

  Clanchy wonders, casually, about the date of the anniversary of his separation from Cindy.

  It’s coming up, but it’s totally irrelevant. Farquharson’s happy with the fact that Cindy doesn’t want to be with him. He’s accepted all that. All he knows is that they were his kids—

  So it’s not quite twelve months, is that what he’s saying?

  Pretty close. She’s moved on; he’s moved on.

  When’s the divorce going to be finalised?

  In about a week.

  So. His divorce is pending? And the anniversary of the separation’s also very soon?

  He’s not even sure of the date.

  Did he give the boys any drugs at all?

  No. He did not.

  Who’s his mortgage with?

  Westpac.

  All right. Does he need a drink? Go to the toilet?

  He shakes his head.

  Now they suspend the interview. The little room, with its garish white light, becomes calm. They ask him to sign authorities for the release of his records from the Geelong Hospital, from his GP and his counsellor. It can be seen that all three of the men at the table are left-handed. Farquharson grips the pen as a boy might, awkwardly, between forefinger and middle finger. They point to the correct spots, and he signs.

  …

  Before court rose, Farquharson’s sister Carmen returned. She slid back into her seat and established commanding eye contact with him in the dock. She mouthed instructions, perhaps about his clothes; she made stabbing downward gestures with one forefinger. Oh, I thought, he could never have pleaded guilty, not against this tide of relentless loyalty. My own brother has four elder sisters and one younger; all his life I have watched him deal with this. If he doesn’t fight back, a treasured boy can wind up as a man with women in his face.

  Louise and I bolted out the side door of the building and down Lonsdale Street. I believe I’m a very good citizen in life. We could hardly look at each other. At the lights she peeled off to the station. I kept going to a bar at the top of Bourke Street. I ordered a shot of vodka. Strangers near me were gossiping loosely about the trial.

  ‘I heard he’s got a girlfriend,’ said a young woman in a suit.

  I was thunderstruck. Had I missed something that obvious?

  ‘A blonde,’ said the woman, in an authoritative tone. ‘She accompanies him to court each day.’

  A blonde. It could only be his sister Kerri. What idiot had twisted up that piece of nonsense? I leaned rudely into their conversation. ‘“Accompanies him to court”? He’s in custody, for God’s sake. They bring him up from the cells every morning in handcuffs.’ I thrust out both arms, elbows stiff, wrists in shackled posi
tion. Offended, the woman and her companions moved away.

  Why on earth was I angry? Did I think I owned this story?

  It was a fresh spring evening, but in spite of the vodka I walked home from the train in a stupor of cold and horror. How could he have seen the water coming in? Wasn’t it pitch dark? In the kitchen I stumbled about trying to cook. I kept making mistakes and dropping things. Nothing I made resembled food. I gave up, wrapped myself in a blanket and lay on the couch. Night fell. How much longer would this go on?

  CHAPTER 9

  Seconds. That was all it took for Farquharson’s car to veer off the wrong side of the highway, flatten an old timber-and-wire fence, cross a stretch of paddock, clip a tree and plunge into the dam. What more could be said about that splinter of time?

  The young reconstructionist, Acting Sergeant Glen Urquhart, took the stand equipped with a protractor and a calculator the size of a shoe. He was one of Major Collision’s civil engineers, tall, fair and broad-shouldered, with an almost comically noble head and reasonable expression.

  ‘He looks like Chris Grant,’ I whispered to Louise.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Western Bulldogs.’

  She shrugged. Like Jai, Tyler and Bailey, she followed the Bombers.

  Urquhart had got to the dam just after midnight and, while the car was still submerged, had conducted his own torch-light walk-through of the scene. On the bitumen he found no marks of skidding or yawing that would indicate the path of a car that had been out of control. In the grass between the roadside and the dam he spotted the pair of tyre marks already familiar to us—rolling prints, with no sign of the churning or ploughing that emergency braking or loss of steering control would have caused. He traced the prints to the dam’s bank, where headlight debris and a broken branch showed him that the vehicle had clipped a tree on its way into the water.

  Back up at the roadside he saw the famous yellow marks that Sergeant Exton had sprayed in the gravel at the point where the car was thought to have left the road. The angle of these marks struck Urquhart as too great, but he thought their position was correct, and concluded that the car must have veered off the road at a sharp angle.

  He saw the car when it was hauled out of the water. He noted the positions and the condition of its various controls: ignition off, handbrake off, heater off, headlights off. His listing of these details, in the court’s deep silence, was like a series of calm blows.

  He paused and let out a long breath through tubed lips.

  He saw the three dead children. He described the postures in which they lay. The only sound, apart from his voice, was a terrible sob, almost a muffled scream, from Cindy Gambino. One of the women jurors glanced across at her, her face creased with distress. Kerri Huntington rubbed her eyes with the flat of her hand. Gambino, her mouth twisting, leaned towards Moules, rested against his shoulder, his chest. She was almost in his arms.

  Next, with the aim of producing a three-dimensional scale plan of the scene, Urquhart instructed Senior Constable Courtis to set about measuring it, using a piece of equipment called a total survey station or geodimeter.

  Three weeks later Urquhart drove down the overpass in a car of the same model as Farquharson’s—a 1990 VN Commodore, whose wheel alignment was within Holden specifications—to video what the vehicle would do if he raised his hands from the steering wheel at the point where Farquharson’s car was believed to have swerved off the road. These tests, he said, showed that nothing in the camber of the highway would have caused a car with an unconscious driver to veer towards the dam. Farquharson’s car could have diverged sharply to the right only if he had steered it.

  Wait, said Rapke. Hadn’t the Winchelsea mechanic noted, when test-driving Farquharson’s car down the overpass, that at this point of the road the car had a tendency to ‘move gently across to the right’? Yes, said Urquhart, but there was an enormous difference between a tendency to drift to the right and the sharp angle off the road that he had measured at roughly thirty degrees. For the car to have left the road at such an angle, the steering wheel would have had to be turned two hundred and twenty degrees.

  With a magician’s flourish, at which people could not help smiling, Rapke produced from under the bar table a steering wheel mounted on a three-dimensional metal frame and marked at certain points with strips of black gaffer tape. Urquhart set it up on the rail of the witness stand, and demonstrated that to turn it two hundred and twenty degrees, ‘either your arms are going to cross, or you have to release one or both hands.’

  Urquhart had used an ‘internationally accepted’ computer software program called PC Crash to create six cartoon-like simulations of how the car would have behaved at three different speeds—sixty, eighty and a hundred kilometres per hour—and with different steering inputs. The court lights were dimmed, and like kids at a matinee we watched the little car zoom down the overpass, swerve to the right across the oncoming lane, and dash across the paddock to the dam, leaving, according to its speed, a simple set of rolling prints, or an extended yaw, or a dramatic sideways skid.

  For the car to have travelled between road and dam along the path that the rolling prints showed, said Urquhart, three distinct steering inputs would have been required: the initial sharp one to the right, to take the car off the bitumen; then a brief straightening; then a second input to the right.

  If the first sharp input had remained constant, he said, the car could not possibly have left the tracks that the police had found.

  Obviously, said Urquhart, because the car had hit water it had left no landing marks that would have allowed a precise calculation of its speed. But before its wheels lost contact with the bank it had left no evidence of high speed: no skid marks, no sign that it had gone into a yaw. It did not bounce. It did not bottom out. It did not gouge the grass. There was no break in the rolling prints. They were continuous all the way to the dam. Thus Urquhart believed that the car had been travelling at between sixty and eighty kilometres per hour, probably closer to sixty.

  …

  ‘Herman the German,’ I heard one of the tabloid reporters mutter as we shuffled out for lunch. ‘Could there be a bigger calculator?’

  ‘I hate a bloke who thinks he knows his job,’ said Bob Gambino, across the street at the coffee cart.

  Was this some sort of country workingman’s joke? Louise and I laughed nervously.

  It was a while since our last encounter with Bob. He told us that a special ceremony had been held in Winch the previous weekend, at which Cindy had formally inaugurated an annual football trophy called the JTB Award: Jai, Tyler, Bailey. Coffee in hand, Bob settled in for one of his drawling ruminations. ‘Cindy and Rob always had the child locks on,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t done on purpose…Yeah…I was surprised Morrissey didn’t go in harder with Kingy. Rob’s lawyer at the committal went through Greg. He was cryin’ and that. But Morrissey said he didn’t want to go in any harder, because Greg was so delicate.’ He touched thumb and forefinger together in a zero. ‘He thought he might snap. He didn’t want to be responsible if Greg, um…’

  ‘Went into meltdown?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. If Rob really said, “I hate ’em, I’m gonna kill ’em,” well, those are hard words. Why would he need to be wired? How could you misinterpret those words?’
/>   He scanned the street, at his leisure. We waited.

  ‘They’ll appeal,’ he said at last. ‘If there’s a guilty verdict they’ll appeal. They need a good reason. More evidence turnin’ up. Or the sev—the severity of the sentence.’

  We looked at him, confused. He stood with his hands in his pockets and his feet wide apart, like a farmer.

  ‘Couple o’ people on that jury,’ he said, with his vague, beneficent smile, ‘look like people we know!’