by Helen Garner
There was no imaginable resolution. Barrister and witness would prowl on forever, in this debate. Neither would be able to land a knockout blow. Again, in the dying fall of the cross-examination, the glaring fact presented itself: no one but Farquharson knew what had happened in the car that night, and, by now, perhaps not even he knew.
…
In a few deft strokes Rapke drew everything back into shape. While the bruised Naughton reasserted his professional integrity, Morrissey swung sideways in his chair and turned his face towards the jury, histrionically suppressing a sceptical smile.
Morrissey set great store by the vivid phrase ‘babbling mess’, describing Farquharson’s state when he flagged down the two young men on the roadside and begged them to take him to his ex-wife, but Rapke drained it of power: when it was traced back through the transcript, it was found to have originated not from the mouths of Shane Atkinson or Tony McClelland, but in a question that had been put to them by Farquharson’s counsel at the committal hearing in Geelong.
Lastly, Rapke dispatched the defence’s case study of four heavy-goods-vehicle drivers who were on the record as having experienced cough syncope immediately before they were involved in fatal smashes. Naughton pointed out that the truckies had each given ‘a classic description’ of cough syncope; that none of them had had prior episodes of it; and that all four episodes were unwitnessed.
And were those four fatal smashes the subject of police investigation?
They were.
‘Thank you,’ said the prosecutor, and sat down.
These casual coups that Rapke pulled off made the spectator in me want to stand up and cheer. At the same time a chill ran over me. While Morrissey slugged away with a big heart on his sleeve, Rapke sat hunched in his chair, unruffled, peering up at an angle into an invisible light that seemed too strong for his eyes.
…
I went to my local shopping centre to buy some vegetables. The friendly woman who ran the greengrocery asked me what I was working on. My answer upset her. She covered her mouth and her eyes filled with tears. I stood at the counter while she wiped them away. Then she told me something that surprised me.
‘My husband,’ she said, ‘had a coughing fit once and went off the road.’
She called his name and he emerged from the storage area. He was the sort of man Morrissey might have described as ‘a barrel-chested individual’: in his forties, thickset, carrying a bit of weight, used to long days of physical labour. His wife told him what I wanted to know. He looked at me narrowly.
‘Come out the back. We can sit down.’
We picked our way between crates and bags to a battered formica table. He listened while I outlined, in the most neutral terms possible, Farquharson’s account of his crash.
‘I can tell you what happened to me,’ he said. ‘It was about four years ago. I was driving my HiAce van—it’s a manual—along the south-eastern freeway in the middle of the afternoon. My daughter was with me. She was about thirteen. Quiet time of day. Not much traffic. Four lanes going each way.
‘I remember starting to cough. I remember slowing down to about sixty or seventy. I cut left across two lanes, to pull into the emergency lane, and I blacked out before the impact. After that I don’t remember anything till I heard my daughter saying, “Dad!” I came to slumped over to my left side, towards her. I only knew there’d been an impact because she was saying, “You hit the rails!” She’d grabbed the wheel and the car had swerved back to the right, across four lanes, and ended up in the median strip.
‘As I was coming to, I could hear sounds but I couldn’t see. You know when you’re on top of a hill and you can hear traffic far away? It was like that. I reckon I would have blacked out for about a minute. The vehicle would have been out of control. I wouldn’t have been able to brake or accelerate. And I came out of it slowly. My daughter shook me. I could hear her voice, miles away. It got clearer and clearer. She was saying, “We hit the rail!” and I was saying, “No, no, we couldn’t have.” Then I got out on to the median strip and had a look. I saw the damage. That’s the first time I believed what she was telling me. The front left indicator had got sideswiped against the guardrail of the emergency lane.’
He stared past me.
‘I’m trying,’ he said, ‘to picture this bloke shutting his kid’s door. Saying, “We’ll be right, mate”. Jumping out. Nah. This guy should’ve drowned. No way could he have got out, if he’d just been unconscious. I remember waking up and needing a few minutes to focus. To be in a mental state to make a decision—like with this bloke, to pull the door shut—I dunno—and I had my daughter shaking me.’
I asked him what his state of health had been. He said he had had flu in the preceding week. He had no lung disease and had not smoked for eighteen years.
‘One thing I remember clearly,’ he said, ‘is that when I started coughing and couldn’t stop, my very first thought was to get off the road—because of my daughter. My utmost concern was my daughter beside me. That’s why I pulled to the left—to get off the road.’
He expressed incredulity that Farquharson had got out of the car and left his boys in it. ‘You’d stay with them, wouldn’t you? You’d fight to get them out? You’d go down fighting to get them out?’
I told him about the police evidence that there had been a thirty-degree turn of the steering wheel. He pulled towards him a crushed sheet of paper with a list scribbled on it: chillies, cucumber. Impatiently he turned it sideways. He drew a rough circle and marked ninety degrees at three o’clock.
‘He couldn’t have been doing a hundred,’ he said. ‘In a turn that sharp, the tail would swing out. It would have skidded, or even rolled, when it hit the drain. He must have been going much slower than a hundred when he turned the wheel.’
He drew a diagram of his own vehicle’s progress, circled the point in the emergency lane where it had struck the guardrail, and said firmly, ‘I have no recollection whatsoever of this. The GP told me the coughing puts pressure on the blood vessels in your chest, and that cuts off the oxygen to your brain.’
We sat in silence, looking at his sketch on the scarred tabletop.
‘The insurance paid up,’ he said.
Then he breathed out sharply through his nose, and threw down his pencil.
‘One thing I know for sure,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘My van slowed down. The van. Slowed. Down.’
…
At my early morning Pilates class someone asked me how the trial was going. I said it was swinging this way and that. I told them about the fathers I had met who stated categorically that in Farquharson’s position they would have gone to the bottom and drowned with their kids. The four of us agreed in very low voices that this could only be a fantasy. As we worked with our pink and yellow weights, an unpleasant forty-year-old memory came to me. I was walking along a street in Werribee with one of my year-twelve students when a savage dog leapt over a gate and rushed at us. Next thing I knew, I was standing behind my student, clinging to her back, while the owner dragged the dog away. In a second of primal terror, of which I have no memory, I must have pushed the girl between me and the danger.
‘A teacher wouldn’t get away with that these days,’ someone said.
We laughed.
Then the youngest woman present told a story. One Easter, on a family camping trip, she was wading into a calm lake with her three-year-old son on her hip and his six-year-old brother paddling alongside them on a boogie board. The bigger boy screamed, ‘Mum! A snake!’ He turned his board and thrashed for the bank. The mother, waist-deep and hampered by the heavy toddler, saw the snake’s tiny head rippling towards her. Drop the kid, she thought, and get out of here. She struck at the snake with a foam floatie and it veered away, but fifteen years later, confessing the blind urge to save herself, she lay on the Pilates reformer with her feet in straps, trembling with shame.
…
‘To know a man’s car,’ according to the American novelist E. L. Doctorow, ‘is to know him. It is not useless knowledge.’ And surely, to see your wife and her lover flying around in the newish car you had paid for, while you had to clunk along in front of the whole town at the wheel of an ’89 VN Commodore Berlina with 387,000 on the clock, second-hand tyres, a faulty rear-door latch, rust in the back window seal, and an infuriating habit of cutting out on hills would be mortifying to many a man. ‘The car,’ said James Jacobs, the Winchelsea mechanic who had struggled to keep the vehicle roadworthy, ‘was not a shining example of its model.’
Who knows what midnight doubts had assailed Jacobs over the past two years? He was a skinny, dark man, whose eyebrows arched high into his forehead, giving him a bright, bird-like aspect. He spoke softly and very fast, all on one note and without expression, but he was extremely, almost anxiously articulate, and precise to the point of being pedantic. He had first met Farquharson about a year before the crash. ‘Acquaintance through mutual friends,’ he said, ‘would be the best way to describe our connection.’
The Commodore did not impress him. ‘It was in a fairly worn state, quite a high mileage vehicle, typical with the age of the car. I would suggest it had maybe sporadic maintenance. The main thrust of my work was to try and rectify its cutting-out and driveability issues.’ Farquharson was ‘frustrated’ that his wife had ended up with the newer car while he had to persist with the old one until he could afford to replace it. He did not want to spend money on the ‘shit’ car. Once or twice he had paid Jacobs in kind, by mowing his lawn. Jacobs had done his level best with the Commodore. Over several months he had worked on its brakes, fitted the roadworthy but mismatched front tyres that Farquharson turned up with, and installed a new crank angle sensor (the part that stops the motor from cutting out, commonly a source of bother in this model). The driver’s side rear-door mechanism, which had been giving trouble, he found to be worn and rusty. He lubricated it; it left his premises working.
In late July 2005, about six weeks before Father’s Day, Jacobs test-drove Farquharson’s car, with Farquharson beside him. He took it five or six kilometres eastbound out of Winchelsea towards Geelong, past the dam, up the overpass and down the other side, then did a U-turn and drove back into town. This was the route Jacobs habitually took on test-drives. It was ‘a very standard piece of road’, and he knew it well. On the way back up the overpass, westbound, doing about ninety, Jacobs noticed that the motor was still misfiring. He had to slacken speed to stop it from cutting out.
He also observed, when they reached the top of the overpass and headed down the Winchelsea side, that Farquharson’s car had a tendency to want to wander to the right—an easily correctable but palpable rightward urge towards the middle of the road. ‘I took my hands off the wheel because I could feel that I was having to keep some left-hand pressure on it. I could feel the car start to gently move across—it would not have crossed the white line before I corrected it, but it certainly would have got close to the centre of the line.’ The vehicle had shown no signs of correcting itself before Jacobs put his hand back on the wheel.
Jacobs put this down to ‘minimal road camber’—the left lane of the road at that point tilted slightly towards the dam, he estimated, instead of the other way as it should—but he also suggested that Farquharson ought to have the Commodore’s wheels aligned, a process Jacobs did not have the equipment to perform. Farquharson had the common misconception that wheel alignment was the same as wheel balancing, which Jacobs had already had done when the tyres were replaced. The mechanic was too diplomatic to correct him on the point: ‘I do not recall that I elaborated on it,’ he said.
Now Mr Morrissey launched a slow, laborious, energy-thieving cross-examination of two police officers, Senior Sergeant Robert Leguier of the Mechanical Investigation Unit, and Senior Constable Wayne Kohlmann of the Forensic Services Department in Macleod, about the pre- and post-crash condition of the car in all its scrupulous detail. We heard again that the keys had been found in the ignition, that the ignition was off. The headlight switch was off. The heater was off. Because the car had been submerged, the investigators could not say for certain whether or not the headlights and tail-lights had been on at impact, or had been turned off in the water. This much was clear; but to anyone ignorant of automotive terminology, the mechanical evidence was almost as taxing as the yellow paint marks. The sheer bulk of technical minutiae induced a hopeless stupefaction. I had to flail at myself to stay alert. Some of the jurors appeared to be nodding off. Even the judge looked blank and stunned; he took off his glasses and fiercely polished them. One journalist near me skimmed the Age television guide. Another was doing Sudoku under the desk. The hands of the high clock seemed to slow and stop.
…
Then, on the Friday morning of the fourth week, just as our concentration seemed to have flagged past the point of no return, a short, quiet, terrier-eyed man in a dark suit stepped into the witness stand—Detective Sergeant Gerard Clanchy from Homicide, the officer in charge of the investigation. The evidence that the Crown was about to present through him would drag the story away from tail-light filaments and side-mirror housings, and thrust it back into excruciating realms of human behaviour, where reason fights to gain a purchase, and everyone feels entitled to an opinion.
Major Collision formally handed over the Farquharson investigation to Homicide early on the Tuesday morning after the crash. By lunchtime, Clanchy and his partner, Detective Senior Constable Andrew Stamper, were knocking at the front door of Farquharson’s father’s house in Winchelsea. A media pack swarmed outside the front gate. Farquharson was not arrested; he was asked to accompany the detectives back to Homicide headquarters in St Kilda Road, to be formally interviewed about the deaths of his children. He got into the back seat of the unmarked car. His sisters’ forceful and repeated offers to travel in the police car with him, or to drive him to Melbourne themselves, had been firmly repulsed by Clanchy: this we know because Stamper, who sat in the back seat beside Farquharson, was wearing a covert recording device.
I heard Louise expostulate under her breath, ‘How dare they?’ I too felt a shudder: so there was nowhere to hide.
In the dock Farquharson bowed over the transcript. His sister Kerri kept shaking her head with a small, contemptuous smile, which faded as the tape rolled on.
Once they have cautioned their passenger, Clanchy at the wheel rarely speaks, but Stamper rambles on in a sprawling, blokey style. He questions Farquharson casually, empathises with him about marriage break-ups—he’s been there himself and it takes a lot of getting used to. It’s tough, isn’t it, when you turn that light off at the end of the night, mate, and the kids aren’t there? Specially, says Farquharso
n, when he’s never had an accident or never been in trouble before or anything. Did they blue? asks Stamper idly. Did it ever get…untidy, or was it just verbal? Peeling off huge, unabashed yawns, he asks Farquharson if he’s eaten, had any sleep. Farquharson volunteers that he has had to ask people what day it was. Does he realise there’s a media car right behind them? says Stamper. The whole circumstance of what’s happened is why the media’s jumped on it, chimes in Clanchy from the front; all they’re after is the truth. Farquharson speaks in sporadic bursts. His voice is muffled, and faint. He’s never been in trouble before and it’s daunting. He doesn’t think he’s gonna like all this questioning. He doesn’t think what? He said he doesn’t think he’s gonna like all this questioning. He’s got nothing to hide. He loves his kids. He would never do anything to hurt them. He’s just so upset he couldn’t get them—he tried. He’s only got two arms, two legs. If anyone’s tryin’ to make out it was intentional, that wasn’t the case at all. Sorry? says Stamper. If anyone’s tryin’ to make out it was intentional, that’s not the case at all. For long periods in the ninety-minute drive there is no sound but the engine’s smooth hum, a steady rushing, like a river pouring towards the edge of a cliff. Is Farquharson looking out at the flat landscape sliding past the window, the tired mounds of the You Yangs? His children have been dead for barely forty-eight hours. They are not yet in their graves.
As they approach Homicide in St Kilda Road, with the media still in pursuit, traffic holds them up. In the idling car the two detectives begin to close in on him. ‘If something horrible’s happened, if you’ve done something horrible, you can tell us.’ Their voices, quiet but urgent, overlap Farquharson’s low, nervous gabble like the intensifying chorus of a song. ‘All we want is the truth. However horrible or bad that might be. All we want is the truth. If there’s a secret there, Robert, tell us. Tell us. Please tell us.’ Why isn’t he screaming? Women in the public row of the court softly moaned and shifted in their seats.