This House of Grief

by Helen Garner

  But wasn’t the whole point of this, I thought, to explore the occurrence of cough syncope in people who didn’t have lung disease?

  How was it that Dr Steinfort disagreed so fundamentally with the two Crown medical witnesses, Dr King and Professor Naughton, about the rarity of cough syncope? This was due to a referral bias, said Steinfort, a filtering system. Because of seniority, King in particular, as a neurologist, would tend to have very complex cases referred to him, rather than patients who merely coughed till they keeled over. But Steinfort, down at Geelong, worked at the coalface. Back in the year 2000 one of his patients, while doing a lung function test, had actually blacked out from coughing right in front of him. The man buckled at the knees. Steinfort grabbed him just before he hit the ground. From that day on, the doctor always kept a grip on a patient’s shoulders when he administered such a test.

  Since May 2006, Dr Steinfort had seen Farquharson five times. He had taken a detailed history, and run his patient through a battery of tests. Farquharson said that he smoked up to twenty cigarettes a day—three times the number smoked by the ‘hypothetical’ driver Rapke had described to Professor Naughton. Farquharson told Steinfort that he had had ‘multiple dizzy spells’ at work and at home, and that he had coughed, at times, to the point where his vision darkened; Steinfort called this a ‘grey-out’. He had reported to Steinfort a ‘witnessed’ coughing fit at work during which he had lost consciousness. He had been for years what Steinfort described as ‘a horrendous snorer’: his throat was reddened by it. He was overweight. Steinfort had advised him to lose ten kilos, which he had been unable to do, and to sleep on his side rather than on his back. A diagnostic sleep study showed that on average his sleep (and no doubt that of his former wife, I thought with a pang) was disturbed twenty-six times an hour, which put him in the moderately severe category of sleep apnoea. But he did not report sleepiness during the day, so Steinfort had discounted falling asleep as a cause of the accident.

  …

  Mr Rapke’s cross-examination was courteous and leisurely. He pointed out that Dr Steinfort was not only an expert witness for the defence but also Farquharson’s treating doctor: that he ‘had Farquharson’s interests at heart’. With the delicate scalpel of a literary critic, he worked his way through Steinfort’s clinical notes on his consultations with Farquharson. He stressed from every possible angle that cough syncope is diagnosed on history, and that if the patient’s truthfulness is in doubt then the diagnosis cannot be trusted. Then he shone a glaring light on Farquharson’s account of his coughing fit at work, witnessed by his supervisor Susan Bateson—an account that for Steinfort’s benefit Farquharson had exaggerated, giving him to understand that in Bateson’s office he had blacked out. Yet Bateson herself, before this court, had stated that he had sat down, recovered at once, and worked the rest of his shift. Rapke piled up the contradictions between this embroidery of the facts and the testimony of other witnesses to whom Farquharson had clearly stated that he had never before passed out from coughing. He got Steinfort to agree, in a rather small voice, that in Farquharson he might have been ‘dealing with a man who was not a reliable historian’. He did the maths and presented Steinfort with the fact that, for all his claims to broad experience, only an incredibly small percentage of his patients—lower than .008 per cent—had cough syncope without underlying lung disease. And surely, he suggested, a loving father would not drive his children down the highway at night if he really was suffering from an untreated condition that made him liable to black out without warning.

  Listening to this suavely reasoned dismantling was giving me a pain in the stomach. Morrissey objected to what he called an ‘oppressive cross-examination’, but Steinfort stayed calm. He was an excellent witness, steady and thoughtful. His manner, when he restated his firm belief that Farquharson had experienced an attack of cough syncope, was undefensive, even humble. I remembered the greengrocer slumped across his steering wheel on the freeway. What if, despite everything, Dr Steinfort was right?

  When I glanced at Louise, I found her gazing at Rapke in silent admiration.

  …

  That lunchtime, at the coffee cart, I ran into an old ratbag of a lawyer I had known since the seventies. The years had not been kind to him. His smoking fingers were stained yellow, and his cheeks were scored with vertical lines. I introduced Louise. He studied her bright, wary face with pleasure.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘How did Farquharson strike you, on the stand?’

  ‘They didn’t call him,’ I said. ‘And they’re not going to.’

  His jaw dropped. ‘They’re not calling him? What’ll the jury think? “What? You’re not gonna look us in the eye?” The only thing you can do, when you’ve got nothing, is put the guy in front of the jury and let him eyeball them!’

  We watched him skulk away in his sagging suit and unpolished shoes, muttering cynically to himself.

  ‘Would you have called him?’ I asked Louise.

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Neither would I.’

  …

  David Axup, the defence’s second witness, was a traffic analyst who had visited the dam—even Mr Morrissey had slipped by now into using the term ‘crime scene’ without correcting himself—and come up with his own scale plan. Axup had spent ‘thirty-one years and one month’ as a member of Victoria Police, and retired in 1992, at the rank of Chief Superintendent commanding the Traffic Support Group. His bulky CV was studded with the names of university courses and Asian countries. Some of the officers currently working in Major Collision had been supervised in their academic work by him. He now ran his own traffic analysis consultancy, with expertise in collision investigation and reconstruction.

  The jury sat up and paid Axup full and serious attention. He was a wiry, well-turned-out fellow in a beautiful blue-grey tweed jacket, with delicate hands and a Kiplingesque moustache. When he smiled his face wrinkled dramatically: in a western he would have been addressed as ‘Oldtimer’. He must have had experience as an expert witness: he had brought with him to the stand a small wheeled suitcase such as lawyers trundle, out of which, to illustrate a point, he would extract a child’s palm-sized toy car. He seemed a figure of benign authority; but under the softly drooping moustache his mouth had a pugnacious set to it, and his voice was as grating as a dragged chain, loud yet oddly hard to hear.

  Morrissey dived in crisply, and within minutes Axup had made a categorical statement: Urquhart’s famous two-hundred-and-twenty-degree turn of the steering wheel? Impossible. At sixty kilometres per hour a car steered like that would have spun out. ‘It didn’t happen. It didn’t leave the marks.’

  Marks. The light went out of the jurors’ faces. A reporter scrawled on my pad, ‘Yellow paint mark syncope! Instant and total blackout.’ We snorted behind our hands, but soon, while Axup confidently set sail on a sea of steering ratio, friction value, critical radius, cord, middle ordinate, tapping at times on a big black calculator and pouring out figures in his harsh voice, a familiar stupor enfeebled me. A visible wave of resistance rolled through the jury. Their eyes dulled. Their backbones went limp. Yawns tormented them. Two of the younger ones leaned their shoulders together weakly. Justice Cummins took his glasses off and scrubbed at his eyes and forehead; he clenched his jaw, rubbed his cheeks with both hands. I thought, he is sick to death of this, and so
is the jury. Louise passed me a note: ‘This witness is deeply unpleasant. Inflexible and pedantic. Makes Urquhart look more engaging, thus, convincing.’

  Farquharson’s family was made of sterner stuff; this was their man and they sat straight-backed. Once, when Axup grudgingly allowed Morrissey’s estimate of a crossfall—‘It’s…close’—Kerri Huntington flashed me an indulgent smile. But even when Morrissey made sharply telling critiques of Major Collision’s surveying methods at the scene, Axup blunted their point with his long-winded replies. He was most at ease when asked a question to which he could respond with a lecture.

  Hadn’t Major Collision been remiss in not collecting the pieces of the broken fence and keeping them for analysis? What was the potential relevance of the fence? ‘It may be,’ said Axup, ‘that if in an investigation it becomes relevant to determine a possible force…in terms of doing that damage with the fence…which could be equated with…a velocity when we know the speed of the vehicle…or when we know the weight of the vehicle…’ Several times he seemed to lose his thread, or to miss the point of Morrissey’s question. Offered a protractor, he fumbled with it in a growing silence, then held it up awkwardly and rasped, ‘It’s not a very good one.’ Everybody laughed. Morrissey skated airily past the embarrassing moment—‘They don’t make ’em like they used to!’—but the witness suddenly looked fragile. His harsh voice began to seem poignant, a shield whose metal had worn thin.

  Morrissey toiled away, drawing from him an attack on Urquhart’s calculations. If the reconstructionists had used the geodimeter to measure and record the rolling prints as distinct from the yellow paint marks, could they have produced a diagram showing the course of any other visible marks? Yes, said Axup, but in fact their scale plan showed only the yellow paint marks. If the geodimeter had been used to record faithfully the path of any visible rolling print, would it have been possible to calculate the angle of departure of those prints off the bitumen edge? Yes, it would, said Axup—quite easily.

  This did not sound good for Major Collision. The uniformed officers seethed in their seats behind the Crown end of the bar table. Urquhart scowled down at his notes, scribbling, his face crimped with suppressed fury. Senior Sergeant Jeffrey Smith, one of the men who had interviewed Farquharson in Geelong Emergency on the night of the crash, sat with elbows on knees, his lined, black-browed face dark and closed. Shoulder to shoulder in their firm-fitting blue tunics, they presented a wall of dense male power. They looked hard, tired and angry; mutinous, deeply fed-up.

  …

  In the rush to the door at the morning break, Kerri Huntington grinned at me.

  ‘Can you understand this technical stuff?’ I said.

  She raised her eyebrows and nodded.

  ‘Were you good at maths?’ I said. ‘I can’t follow it at all.’

  Slowly and clearly, with exaggerated lip movements, she spelled it out: ‘He’s going against what the other bloke said.’

  Morrissey strode past us, rambunctiously cheerful. ‘They should just admit they made a mistake,’ he roared, ‘instead of rubbing it out with their boot!’ He paused to mime a scrubbing action with one outstretched foot. ‘There shouldn’t even be accident reconstructionists at all!’

  Twenty minutes later, on my way back in, I walked past a small interview room off the echoing hallway and glanced through its glass-panelled doors. The whole Crown team was crammed in there, Rapke and Forrester seated at a laptop, the others standing behind them and craning in over their shoulders: a cinematic arrangement of figures in buzz cuts and wigs, emitting a crackling aura of purpose.

  …

  When Mr Rapke rose to tackle Axup, his opening questions sent a surge of adrenalin coursing through the thick stupor of the room. What was the issue that existed in this case? What was the actual area of dispute between the prosecution and the defence? At last, at last—the point! The jurors’ eyes cleared; they sat up.

  Rapke cross-examined with hands in pockets, eyes down on his papers, so that, when he did raise his head, squinting, lifting his top lip off his teeth, his gaze would hit the witness in the face, like a slap. He shot Axup’s persona full of holes. He filleted his CV, bringing out the fact that his training in accident reconstruction consisted of a six-week intensive course in Illinois twenty-one years ago, and that he had no tertiary qualifications in either maths or physics. Did Axup understand the Crown’s hypothesis about the car’s progress, and had he developed an alternative to it? In a series of silvery manoeuvres, Rapke coaxed the erstwhile cop to a position almost identical to that proposed by his former student, Acting Sergeant Urquhart: that the car could not have travelled from the road to the dam on the arc of those rolling prints without three distinct steering inputs. In its elegant way, it was a massacre.

  Morrissey, re-examining, could only attempt damage control. Would the terrain necessarily move a vehicle in that situation? No. Would the impact with the fence necessarily move the vehicle? No. Must there have been three steering inputs? No: it was only hypothetical. Axup climbed carefully down from the stand and left the court, towing his wheeled suitcase behind him.

  Between witnesses, Morrissey made a little legal jest to Justice Cummins. The judge laughed, then sat smiling down on the barrister, fondly, like a father.

  …

  Cam Everett owned the property on which the dam lay. He was a tall, slim, smiling fellow with a head of greying curls. He was a professional firefighter, he said, not a farmer. His sheep were ‘just lawnmowers’.

  In the last eight years, seven cars had come off the highway and through the fence on to Everett’s land. At least two of them had been heading from Geelong to Winchelsea. One bloke’s vehicle had landed upside down under a tree; Everett thought he had fallen asleep at the wheel.

  On the night of Farquharson’s crash Everett had stayed at the scene for an hour, then gone home and sat on the veranda to watch the rescue. Later, when he heard all about what had happened, he drove his Nissan Patrol down the overpass at a hundred kilometres per hour and took his hands off the wheel at three different spots—‘just a curiosity thing.’ On each occasion his car drifted to the right, as far as the central white line, before he corrected it. ‘The whole road,’ he said, ‘goes to the right.’

  Loping out of the court, he flashed a warm grin at Farquharson, who met his eye with a wry grimace.

  …

  Last up on the Friday of the trial’s fifth week was an expert in medical and forensic photography from RMIT University, a good-humoured American in a reefer jacket and elastic-sided boots. Associate Professor Gale Spring was asked, first, to compare stills from the Channel Nine video footage of the yellow paint marks with certain of Sergeant Peters’ aerial photos, and to confirm the degradation of the marks that the defence argued was visible. Second, he was to pronounce upon the reality or otherwise of some mysterious ‘pale marks’ in the long grass—possible tyre tracks that Morrissey accused the police of having purposely ignored in the ‘tunnel vision’ of their investigation.

  Spring stunned us with a lecture on the different provenances of the photos—video and still digital camera—and the effects of compression on these two formats. We struggled to evaluate his comparisons of the intensity of daylight, the positions of the sun, the angles of shadow in the different images—of black marks,
pale marks, black dots, yellow dots, a splodge and a smaller splodge, bits and pieces of grass. From his laptop he manipulated the images on the high screen, zooming in, blowing them up, shrinking them down, until we did not know whether we were coming or going. He compared pairs of photographs—‘gee, the screen is bad’—and made declarations of such audacious certainty about what was ‘really there’ and what was ‘an artefact of the photographic process’ that I stared at him in wonder.

  ‘Are they there, whatever they are,’ asked Morrissey about the strange pale marks in the grass, ‘or are they a trick of the camera?’

  ‘They’re not a trick of the camera at all. They’re as real as any of the other areas we’ve seen.’

  But how real was that? Morrissey’s long bow strained close to snapping. Why didn’t the whole court burst out laughing? When I looked at the judge I thought for a second that he was working to keep a straight face; but no doubt it was a trick of the light.

  And as the cheerful photography expert clomped out of the court in his Cuban heels, the spectre I had been trying to ignore for five weeks rose up before me. Sergeant Exton’s famous paint marks in the gravel were a red herring. The angle of them did not matter at all. Whether they had been scuffed out or degraded was neither here nor there. The only things that mattered in all this technical palaver were the steering inputs, and all the rest was noise.

  …

  When I stumped home at the end of that fifth week, I was surprised to find that the world beyond the trial was still carrying on its humble existence. Rain must have been falling while I sat in court: my tanks were more than half full. The big pittosporum tree over the back fence was about to burst into blossom. Junkies had held up the corner shop. Kids from the flats had crashed a stolen car on to the railway line. And my grandchildren reported that a runaway horse from the racecourse had been recaptured in our street by a neighbour, an old strapper, who had approached it with a carrot in one hand and an apple in the other. The modest glow of these facts filled me with gratitude and relief.