This House of Grief

by Helen Garner

On the drive to Geelong Hospital the paramedics considered that their patient was more stunned than in shock. They heard him give vent to several more unproductive coughs. As the ambulance sped along the dark road, Farquharson, from his stretcher in the back, asked one of the paramedics, ‘Did I do the right thing? How am I going to live with myself after all this has happened?’ Perhaps these questions were merely philosophical. Perhaps Farquharson was murmuring to himself. Either way, the paramedic in the witness box, badged and epauletted in his dark blue uniform, did not say whether he had replied or tried to offer comfort. He told the court only that Farquharson then fell silent, and lay in the ambulance shaking his head.

  …

  Just across Lonsdale Street from the Supreme Court, outside the glass façade of the County Court, stands a shiny metal caravan that houses an espresso machine and a pair of gun baristas. Everyone from the world of the law seems to patronise it: the loftiest silk in wig and rosette; Homicide detectives with their sinister black folders; road police in bomber jackets; constables in caps and tunics; irritable tipstaffs smoking over the turf guide; all the way down to the lowly drifters from the Magistrates’ Court in William Street with spider webs tattooed on their necks and hinges in their elbow crooks. Even the occasional judge has been seen to throw back a short black at that democratic counter.

  On the Monday morning of the trial’s second week, a couple in the coffee queue struck up a conversation with the gap-year student and me. Hadn’t they seen us in court, with our notebooks? They introduced themselves: Bob and Bev Gambino, the parents of Cindy, Farquharson’s former wife—the drowned boys’ grandparents. We looked at them in awe, but they chatted on in their unguarded country way, drinking the good coffee, watching the lawyers come and go. Bob was short and round-faced and solid, Bev slender with fine-rimmed glasses and straight, greying hair. They told us they lived near Winchelsea, in the town of Birregurra. Since Bob was a CFA volunteer and one of their three sons a full-time firey, the firefighters’ union had offered them free use of a flat above the Fire Services Museum for the duration of the trial. Everything about the city seemed to please them: the hospitals, the trams, the fresh food you could buy at the Victoria Market. Bob rambled on unprompted, in his drawling voice.

  ‘The court people kept asking us “Which side are you on?” First I didn’t know what they meant. Then I realised they didn’t want to make us sit with Rob’s family if we didn’t want to. So I said to the bloke, “Listen, mate, there aren’t two sides.”

  ‘Rob and I used to work together on the shire,’ he went on, jerking his head in the direction of the Supreme Court. ‘He was a lazy little bugger. If he didn’t want to do something, well, he didn’t. Not motivated. He was—you know—a sook.’

  These unflattering estimations he delivered with an indulgent grin, as if teasing someone he was fond of or had at least learnt to put up with. His wife made little contribution, apart from her friendly attention.

  It was nearly 10 a.m. On the other side of the road I spotted Farquharson’s sisters and their husbands heading for the Supreme Court entrance in a phalanx: ordinary, reputable working people, self-effacing in their comportment. The woman I picked as the elder sister, identified by the Gambinos as Carmen Ross, had a soft, intelligent face and a serious demeanour. Kerri Huntington, the younger, more flamboyant one, wore her hair in a big bleached perm that flowed back over her shoulders. On my fridge door at home I had a newspaper photo of Farquharson leaving the court with the curly-headed blonde on the summer day he got bail after his arrest. What made me clip the photo and keep it was the way she is hauling Farquharson across the pavement. He trots beside her. She has an impatient, double-fisted hold on his left wrist that yanks his hand like a toddler’s across the front of her hips. As the eldest of six children I recognised that hold: it was a bossy big-sister grip. Now I watched her charge up the steps into the court, her hair bright as a banner in the grey street.

  ‘Today,’ said Bob, draining his paper cup and chucking it into the bin, ‘it’ll be the cops.’

  …

  Victoria Police contains a highly respected outfit called the Major Collision Investigation Unit. Its officers drive out at all hours from their bases in Brunswick and Glen Waverley to attend traffic accidents in which people have been killed or suffered life-threatening injuries. These are the cops we see on the TV news, standing pensively on the freeway edge around a pile of gashed and smoking metal.

  Sergeant Geoffrey Exton was the MCIU officer who had first taken command of the chaos on the night of the crash. He was a tough-looking fellow in his late fifties, with a thick moustache and a cannon ball of a skull that bristled with short grey hair. ‘Another perfect buzz cut,’ whispered Louise. ‘They must have a barber in there 24/7.’ He took the oath in a hoarse, smoker’s voice, holding the Bible away from him with a rigid arm.

  When Exton got to the dam towards 10 p.m., and found that a Search and Rescue Squad diver was already preparing to enter the water and that the coroner was on his way, he and Senior Constable Jason Kok set off to do a walk-through of the scene.

  Stooping and crouching to shine their torch beams along the ground, the two police officers worked their way down the right-hand verge of the sealed carriageway on the Winchelsea side of the overpass. Part way down the slope they found marks in the roadside gravel that they thought must have been made by the tyres of a vehicle leaving the bitumen in the direction of the dam, at an angle of about thirty degrees. Then, in the grass beside the road, they spotted some rolling tyre prints that seemed the natural extension of the marks in the gravel, angled in a general westerly direction and curving slightly to the right. With no sign of braking or skidding, the rolling prints continued across the longer grass, through a broken post-and-wire farm fence, and all the way to the dam’s edge, where debris from a side-mirror housing suggested that the vehicle had clipped a small tree on the bank before it plunged into the water. From the bitumen edge to the bank of the dam the car appeared to have travelled about forty-four metres.

  From there, the men turned and retraced their steps, following in reverse the same long, linear indentations in the grass back to the point where they had first seen the tyre marks in the roadside gravel.

  These marks Sergeant Exton outlined with stripes of yellow paint from a spray can.

  …

  On the face of it, this was a brutally simple account of the car’s trajectory. Now it would be Mr Morrissey’s job to complicate it. In fact, to defend Farquharson against the Crown’s claim that, in order to get into the dam on that arc, he must have made ‘three steering inputs’ and thus could not possibly have been unconscious at the wheel, Morrissey would have to blast the police evidence full of holes. He would have to make the jury doubt the accuracy and even the integrity of the Major Collision investigation. He set about his onerous task with a will, aided by certain errors and miscommunications the police had made on the night and later.

  Of these there were quite a few.

  For example, Sergeant Exton’s yellow paint marks in the aggregate turned out, even before the sun rose on the Monday morning and the investigation continued, to be not quite parallel with each other. Nor were they correctly aligned with the rolling tyre prints in the grass; and the reconstruction team from Major Collision, when they arrived at the dam, had apparently based their entire mapping of
the crash on one of these imperfectly angled paint marks. Furthermore, twenty-nine photos that Sergeant Bradford Peters, one of the police investigators, took at the dam on the Monday and Tuesday—some from a helicopter, some at ground level—had been brought back to Major Collision HQ on a memory stick, downloaded into a job file, and forgotten for two years. It was only now, a fortnight into the trial, that the Crown, let alone the defence, had been made aware of their existence.

  Morrissey brought these errors to light with glee. For the next few days, he challenged police witnesses to defend their methods and to pronounce upon a bewildering array of photographs, both terrestrial and aerial. On the Smart Board he put up images sprinkled with dots and lines and arrows that purported to show the relative whereabouts of cars and emergency vehicles, of scuff marks on gravel and pale marks in lush grass. Police were confronted with booklets of photos, with their own diagrams and scale plans, with 3D mock-ups of the scene. They were tackled on road cambers, on steering-wheel turns, on terrain, on tussocks. And always, always, Morrissey dragged their attention back to the burden of his song: the mistakenly angled yellow paint marks that Exton had sprayed that night on the verge of the road.

  Morrissey’s labour was tremendous. Soon, though, I began to suspect that it was also counter-productive. No matter how earnestly I strove to grasp it, his cross-examination felt cloudy and insubstantial. The material itself was intractable. It was fiddly, maniacally detailed, and catastrophically lacking in narrative. It made me—and, by the looks of them, also the jury—feel panicky and stupid. By the end of the week Justice Cummins would refer, with a desperate sympathy, to ‘three days talking about tufts of grass’. Worst of all, Morrissey’s style of cross-examination on this technical evidence was jerky and parenthetical. He was forever rephrasing things, backing and filling, apologising, changing tack. He could not make the torrent of measurements run clear. With the best will in the world, I could not follow it or see what he was trying to do. To add to his troubles, he had developed a dry, barking cough that rivalled the one he argued had sent his client’s car into the dam.

  As the hours and days ground on, the air in the court became a jelly of confusion and boredom. The judge took off his spectacles and violently rubbed his eyes. Journalists sucked lollies to stay awake. Jurors’ mouths went square with the effort to control their gaping yawns. Their heads swayed, or dropped forward on to their chests. But Morrissey, oblivious to the fact that he had lost his audience, fought doggedly on, his forehead gleaming, his gown trailing floorwards off his shoulders. Once, when he suggested to a witness that some vehicle other than Farquharson’s might have left the disputed tyre track in the roadside gravel, when he seemed about to return for the hundredth time to the torture of what he called ‘the Exton marks’, I saw Rapke’s junior, Amanda Forrester, close her eyes, twist her long legs round each other, and beat, beat, beat the knuckles of her fist against her forehead.

  Was it some sort of barrister’s technique, to fill the courtroom with a soporific gas? One lunchtime I consulted an old friend of mine, long retired from the bar. His wife had died, and he spent his lonely days at home in a bayside suburb: I imagined him standing at his lounge room window with a pair of binoculars, critically inspecting passing vessels. His sole concession to the modern world was a mobile phone. He loved to be asked for advice.

  ‘Farquharson’s counsel,’ I texted, ‘is killing us with boredom.’

  He replied at once: ‘A time-honoured approach, when no feather to fly with. Still, one has heard it said that the fear of boring oneself or one’s listeners is a great enemy of truth.’

  …

  The only thing that woke the jury from its stupor was the Homeric clash between Morrissey and Sergeant Exton. Under his brow Exton fixed the barrister with a level, burning gaze. The two men lowered their big heads and went at each other like heavyweights. Exton seemed galvanised by a rage that only his elaborate sarcasm could control. He spoke with a droll punctilio, decorating every sentence with the word ‘Sir’. When a pretty woman in a tightly belted white coat tiptoed out of the court, he paused mid-sentence to appreciate her all the way to the door. His demeanour was so powerfully wrought and outrageously complex, so glowering with dark energy, that I kept wanting to break into anxious laughter. Louise, the teenager, contemplated him with alarm. She passed me a note: ‘Imagine having him for a father.’ I did not reply; but I thought, ‘A bloke like that would take a bullet for his daughter.’

  When Morrissey took it right up to him about the faults in the yellow paint marks, suggesting sloppiness, wilful interference, or even conspiracy—when the lawyer seemed for a few moments to have the old cop on the ropes—Exton’s face blackened with fury. He was prepared to acknowledge that he had sprayed the yellow paint marks on the wrong angle, but maintained, with a tenacity Morrissey could not make a dent in, that the mistakes were irrelevant; that the purpose of the paint was not to indicate angles but simply to show the reconstructionists the spot where it was believed the vehicle had left the bitumen surface. Challenged about the mysterious losing and finding of Major Collision’s twenty-nine extra photos of the scene, Exton went out on a limb and complimented his fellow investigator on the quality of his shots.

  Wearily Mr Morrissey rocked back on his heels. ‘So,’ he said, folding his arms high on his chest, ‘you think Sergeant Peters is a pretty good photographer, do you?’

  ‘Going by these photos, excellent!’ declared the officer. His fist of a face split open into a big white grin. The whole court went up in a shout of laughter: not just the jury and the journalists, but Morrissey, Rapke, the judge, the two families, even Farquharson himself.

  After Mr Morrissey’s Sturm und Drang, Mr Rapke rose and shone a steady light on the matter. Over the uneven terrain between the road and the dam, Sergeant Exton would have expected a car that was not being steered to have deviated quite abruptly from a smooth arc: certainly at the drain, definitely at the fence, and then more moderately between the fence and the dam. But there were no marks on the bitumen, on the gravel shoulder, or on the grass leading to the dam, to show that Farquharson’s car was ever out of control.

  …

  Sergeant Bradford Peters, a serene-looking man in his mid-forties, was on the stand for a long time. Against the ramparts of his cheerful persona Morrissey’s artillery thundered in vain. Peters made it seem absurd to suggest that the police might have scuffed out the disputed tyre track between the yellow paint marks. Why on earth would they do that, he asked, when they had already photographed it? At one stage in his tracing of the rolling tyre prints, the yellow paint in his spray-can had run out. Chivvied by Morrissey as to why he had planted a plastic marker on a certain section of the track instead of walking back to the car for a fresh can of paint, Peters said with a good-humoured shrug, ‘I don’t remember. I must have just been too lazy to go back and get one.’ A gentle ripple of liking flowed across the court towards him. The battered jury smiled and shifted in their seats, released by his insouciant air from some constraint.

  One day, late in that week, Louise and I came back from lunch a few minutes early and found the court empty. One of Sergeant Peters’ aerial photos was still displayed on the high screen, which from the press seats we had been able to see only at a frustratingly acute angle. We sneaked along the deserted bar table and stood right in front of the photo. Daylight. Thick grass. Wheel tracks, a single s
et, outlined by police markers in a flat arc between road and dam. We gazed up in silence. Then, in her dry, thoughtful voice, the girl said, ‘Coughing fit my arse.’

  CHAPTER 2

  On the Monday of the trial’s third week, waiting and gossiping with the media people outside the court in weak spring sunlight, we calculated that the following day would be the second anniversary of the children’s deaths. Imagining Farquharson’s dread as the date approached, I allowed myself the luxury of the word pitiful. One of the print journalists, a court veteran whose work I had long respected, spun round and bit my head off.

  ‘Pity?’ she cried. ‘How can you say he’s pitiful when he’s done the worst, the most terrible thing? Murdered his own children, who trusted and loved him? Three of them! Premeditated! And to get back at his wife! The utmost betrayal! Why is that pitiful?’

  I flushed and fell silent. But that morning, when Farquharson was brought up from the cells and stuck out his hands at the door to have his cuffs removed, he looked even more blighted and rigid than usual. The next Crown witness would be his former wife.

  Cindy Gambino slid in without fanfare, past the seats where her family and Farquharson’s sat tightly wedged. How small she was, this woman whose loss was beyond imagining, yet who would not lay blame. Her hair hung past her shoulders in silky falls. Her smooth face with its large, heavy-lidded eyes showed no expression, but her skin was the pale greyish-brown of a walnut shell, as if grief had soaked her to the bone, and she walked so carefully that she appeared to be limping. The raised witness box, near the front of the court, and the dock at the back were only fifteen metres apart. Down the length of the court, above the lawyers’ heads, Gambino and Farquharson would have to look straight at each other.