by Helen Garner
A handbrake creaks. Breathing. Car doors slam in a void. Men’s shoes thud on concrete stairs. The whine and clash of a heavy door. Does he want a drink of water, a cup of coffee, tea? Take a seat. It’s quarter past two.
…
I looked at Louise. She was as white as the wall.
‘This is so over,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t stand what it’ll do to his sisters.’
But just as the video of the official interview was about to be played, I saw the two sisters get up and march out of the court with slow, formal steps that indicated a protest.
…
The bare, fluoro-lit room is empty but for a small, stocky man in a lime-green Adidas T-shirt. He sits sideways on a chair with his back slumped against the wall and one forearm resting on the table. His short brown hair is wavy, thinning and going grey. His eyes are set in deep, fatty sockets. He appears not to have shaved. His head is bowed. The slack curve of his spine gives prominence to the plumpness of his belly and chest. There is something piteous about his deflated posture. But when the door opens he straightens up and turns to face the two detectives, who enter briskly with notebooks, pens and paper cups of coffee, and sit with their backs to the camera.
Clanchy is a neatly built man in a pink shirt, with thick, prematurely grey hair in a pelt-like buzz cut. Stamper is taller, shambling, with rounded shoulders and dark hair. Farquharson says he does not drink tea or coffee. He accepts only water. On the table stands a flat box of tissues. One of them is sprouting from the slot.
At the first mention of the fact that his boys died on Sunday night, Farquharson closes his eyes for a second, in a moment of private pain. Then he sighs, and launches once more on his story.
When he speaks he keeps his eyes on the melamine tabletop. He has an anxious, hangdog look, like a schoolboy. Now and then he flicks a glance at his questioners from under his brow. When he relates the events, he illustrates his account with eager movements of his small, well-shaped, very clean hands. Sometimes he rubs one bare forearm, or audibly scratches his thigh or his armpit. At certain moments, when the questions come in a rush, he blinks rapidly, or licks his lips. He whisks his fingertips across his face, and glances at them. Once he presses his palms together, then wipes them on his trousers. When he speaks of his love for his sons, his over-protective attitude towards them, he shakes his head and clasps his hands. When he explains that his marriage ended because his wife, though she still loved him, was no longer in love with him, he distinguishes between these two states by flexing his bent wrists and knotted fingers to left and right. At the mention of his ex-wife’s new man, his jaw takes on a grey, tense look. The anti-depressant he has been on for twelve months, he says, has put everything in his brain back into perspective: he makes a delicate bridging gesture with the fingertips of both hands. When he refers to his cough, he taps his chest with one palm. Asked again if he had ever thought about hurting himself, he says, with a bitter smile, that he had a little glimpse of that at the start, but it passed. Several times he places his clenched fists on the table. His knuckles are white.
The questions in the interview transcript are numbered from 1 to 613. At number 323 they put it to him squarely: did he deliberately drive off the highway into the dam? No, he says, very quiet and firm. He did not. He had a coughing fit, blacked out, and found himself in water. Did he help with the boys’ seatbelts? He doesn’t know. It’s all just a big blur. He’s got nothing to hide.
Clanchy and Stamper swerve away to his mortgage, his maintenance payments, his medication, never raising their voices, always polite, always thoughtful and patient, always looping back to the question of what happened in the water. Under their sustained pressure, Farquharson flares out into passages of rhetoric. He feels pretty shithouse. The boys were his life. His world. He throws up his hands and lowers his head. His chin stiffens and goes grey; his mouth turns upside down and his voice trembles. He wouldn’t even go to Queensland for a holiday because they would miss him and he would miss them. They were his world, his whole life. Even his counsellor will tell them that. He never went and bothered meeting any other women because he wanted his kids for himself. Everything he did was for them, his whole life. And he had two arms and two legs and he couldn’t save ’em. He always wanted to protect them. Cindy always told him he was over-protective. Watching them like a hawk ’cause there could be cars on the road. If they stood up on the slide, he would bolt over. Sit down, sit down! Come down properly—don’t fall—flying underneath with his hands out to stop them so they didn’t hurt themselves—but he couldn’t save ’em. He blacked out. That’s the honest truth. He’s got no lies—no reason to lie. He’d do anything to have them back—he’s got to live with this for the rest of his life, that he couldn’t save his kids. His voice thickens. He is on the verge of tears. He looks up under his brow, angry, hurt, unfairly accused. He gabbles out again his mantra of helplessness—he had two arms, two legs and he couldn’t save the three of them. How was he supposed to do it? He tried and tried and tried.
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 position. 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, heate
r 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.