by Helen Garner
‘Jai got me a back-scratcher,’ he faltered, ‘and Tyler—Tyler—a block o’ chocolate.’
Shocked by the tears that rushed into my eyes, I glanced along the jury. I was not the only one. At that moment I would have given anything to be convinced that he was innocent—and not because I ‘believed in him’, whatever that meant, but because, in spite of everything I had heard and observed and thought in this court, in spite of everything I knew about the ways of the world, it was completely unendurable to me that a man would murder his own children.
Within minutes Morrissey had squandered his advantage.
‘And so,’ he said gently, ‘what was the conversation in the car, driving home?’
‘Jai said,’ droned Farquharson, ‘“I have got you a back-scratcher”, and Tyler said he had a block of chocolate there for me.’
The journalists rolled their eyes and laid down their pens. A third time Morrissey pressed Farquharson to name the humble gifts. His hapless client trotted them out, and the tender moment, milked of its pathos, shrivelled and died.
And yet, as Morrissey took Farquharson by the hand and drew him into the bombed-out rubble of the story, aiming a hose at every smoking point of doubt, my heart softened again towards the awkward, unhappy figure on the stand. He still spoke of his dead boys in the present tense. He talked about Cindy, how she was ‘a terrific mother’ who, after their separation, never did anything bad or mean. The subtext was obvious—nothing bad or mean enough to make him want to murder their children in revenge. But then, needing to have it both ways, Morrissey coaxed from him the story of the day the shit car was in again for repairs, when Farquharson asked Gambino to let him take the boys to football in the good car, the one she got at the break-up, that he had seen Moules driving round the town. She knocked him back: ‘You’re not drivin’ that.’
Once, said Farquharson, he took Tyler back to Cindy’s place and found her absent and the other two boys in the house on their own. It turned out that she had gone to the local hospital to get a migraine injection, leaving Jai in charge of Bailey. After this and several other incidents that troubled Farquharson’s sisters, there was vague talk that he might go for custody. It never came to anything, though, because he worked full-time.
Greg King had spoken guiltily of Farquharson as his mate, and had copped scalding rebukes on the stand for having betrayed such a close old friend. But Farquharson now told the court that by 2005 King was someone he rarely saw, and in whom he never confided. If he had been in a confiding relationship with anyone, he said, it would have been with Darren Bushell or Michael Hart.
Oh, how bleak and windswept it seems to women, the landscape of what some men call friendship. Hart was the one who couldn’t bring himself to drive to Geelong with his gloomy, half-sick mate and his boys on Father’s Day; and Bushell, a year earlier, had not wanted to offer house room to the dumped and drifting Farquharson—‘He was hinting…but I never offered’. Still, when Bushell chanced to drive past the rescue scene at the dam and heard what had happened, he and a woman he knew turned back to Geelong and went looking for Farquharson at the hospital. This was surely the spontaneous act of friends. They got to Emergency just after the two Major Collision interviewers had been surprised by Farquharson’s emotionless state and lack of interest in the fate of his boys. ‘We went in,’ DB told the police, ‘and I didn’t know what to say to him. Rob was saying “I’ve killed my kids.” He was shaking. I didn’t know what to say to him so I didn’t push it.’
Morrissey asked Farquharson to explain why he had refused to let Cindy Gambino visit him in jail. Farquharson sighed. ‘It was a very tough time,’ he said. ‘You only get an hour a visit, so you’re not going to have a full conversation in an hour about what she obviously wanted to talk about, and the emotional state of me going back to my cell with no one to talk to, nothing—it’s just too hard. Too hard.’ He flapped one hand past his ear. ‘No counsellors, no nothing. You’re in prison.’
And finally he described two witnessed attacks of cough syncope that he had recently suffered. The first happened when he was in custody. Another inmate cracked a joke at the worktable. Everyone burst out laughing, and Farquharson turned his chair away to cough. He came to on the ground with medics and prison officers leaning over him, and a fractured leg. The second attack occurred in his sister Carmen’s lounge room, just after he was released on appeal. He started coughing and the next minute he was on the carpet.
The emotional weight of this evidence-in-chief was such that, by the time Morrissey sat down, Farquharson had taken on the lineaments of a tragic figure, a bereaved victim of fate outrageously burdened by the state’s accusations.
…
Then the prosecutor, Mr Tinney, got to his feet. He tore into Farquharson in a fast, rough style that made people sit up with a jolt.
‘Bailey was two years old at the time he died, correct? And he was quite incapable of undoing his car seat, wasn’t he? On your oath you never knew him to be able to undo his own car seat? Can’t you remember the last trip you had in a motorcar with your children? Don’t you have a good memory of the last minutes your children lived? Haven’t you tried to think about every single thing that happened in these last minutes and hours of their lives?’
The jurors’ faces froze. I heard Morrissey’s instructing solicitor utter a sharp gasp of protest.
Where Rapke in the first trial had been lightning on his feet, a fencer slicing the air with invisible steel, Tinney, after his initial onslaught, slowed his pace and settled into a slogging demolition job, phlegmatic, at times plodding, but always meticulous. He folded the story into tight pleats, then ripped it into jagged holes that soon began to emit a lurid glow. The familiar tale started to look bedraggled, misbegotten, full of contradictions and mysterious blurs. His juxtapositions of Farquharson’s differing accounts were so intricately detailed that the gaps between them, spotlit, made me feel like cowering in my seat with a coat pulled over my head.
For the first time I was obliged to register the complete absence of sensory detail in Farquharson’s account of being in the dam. For the physical reality of his experience we had only what our imaginations could supply. The sole bodily sensation he could come up with was the word ‘pressure’ and, in the way he used it, it was more of an exculpatory concept than a sensation—an idea, suggested to him in Emergency by Leona Daniel, the kindly grief counsellor, that he had remembered and clung to. Each time Tinney drew him to a specific point and leaned, leaned, leaned on him, Farquharson would slide off sideways into a vague generalisation, or a drab cliché: ‘It was a very confusing time.’ ‘It all happened so quick.’ ‘Like I said, I was going through a lot of shock, a lot of grief.’ ‘To be honest, it was a very painful time.’ ‘Like I said, in a state of confusion and everything else, I—’
‘Of course,’ said Tinney, ‘you could have reached back from where you were if you’d wanted to, couldn’t you?’
‘What—you mean lean over?’
‘You’re sinking in a dam—you could have leaned over and undone the seatbelt on Bailey?’
‘I probably could have. I don’t know. Like I said, everything happened so quick.’
Now and then the judge would underline or clarify Tinney’s point: ‘But did you not think—that’s the question—did you not think it was important to
do whatever you could to save your children?’
‘Like I said,’ repeated Farquharson doggedly, ‘I probably had no thought process.’
He had never told anyone before today, had he, said Tinney, that, when he got out of the dam and headed for the road, he had scrambled through a fence and hurt himself?
‘With everything I’ve been through,’ said Farquharson on a derisive out-breath, ‘I’ve got to try and think of every little detail? Going through grief, trauma—?’
He said he had ‘seen’ Jai open the passenger door—but how could he have seen it? Didn’t he say it was completely black? That the lights were off and he couldn’t see anything at all?
‘I may have saw it,’ said Farquharson, ‘or I may have thought it. I can’t recall.’
He had plainly been coached to stand up to the assault, but he came across as a strange, bristling automaton that pumped out repetitive answers and sometimes forced a smile, as if the flesh from nostrils to chin had hardened, drawn inwards and turned grey. Questioned on discrepancies between what he had told different people, he fell back on little mantras. Scores of times he said, ‘If that’s what was said, that’s what was said.’ ‘If that’s what I did, that’s what I did.’ In his first day on the stand he used the phrase ‘like I said’ twenty-nine times. Occasionally he would use an oddly dated expression. ‘The car was stopped when I was awoken.’ When the GP came to the house he was ‘bed-bound. Bed-ridden.’
The matter of whether or not he had manipulated Dr Steinfort, the Geelong thoracic physician, gave rise to serious dismay. Had he given Steinfort exaggerated accounts of his earlier coughing fits, saying he had blacked out? As Farquharson fumbled to answer, I saw one woman juror tighten her lips: her face, usually shining with good humour, darkened and turned sombre. The woman beside her sat with one hand over her mouth, but a sceptical smile leaked out on either side.
Challenged on what he had told police in the Homicide interviews about whether or not he had dived down after the car, he became huffy and put-upon: ‘Like I said, two days after me accident and you want me to be clear-headed?’
‘But in the interviews at Homicide, in the car, and at the hospital,’ Tinney pointed out, ‘you showed yourself to be very clear-headed.’
‘Who knows,’ said Farquharson in one of his rhetorical flourishes, ‘what was racing through me mind?’
If he knew all along that the cause of the crash was a coughing fit, why did he talk to the first people he met beside the dam, the young men who picked him up on the roadside, about a wheel bearing?
Farquharson said he had no memory of the two men. He did not recall what he said to them. He did not even know what a wheel bearing was. ‘I’m not a mechanic,’ he said with his grey smile.
Why did he mention it, then?
He had no answer; but it gave me a pang that at such a moment there should rise to his lips the words ‘I musta done a wheel bearing’—the sort of cool, blokey throwaway line he must have heard from other men, perhaps his father, or his workmates on the shire.
Had he ever looked up a book, or the internet, about coughing fits? ‘No. That’s why I go to the doctor for.’ Did he ever do a Google search in his whole life? No. He would look at cars sometimes, but his sisters had to set it up for him.
How come he made no mention of coughing to the first police officer he spoke to at the dam, but told him he had had a chest pain? And how was it that he had told his friend Darren Bushell that he blacked out in his car at the Winchelsea service station, days before the crash, yet never mentioned this to the police?
‘It’s just something I forgot about. I mean, like I said, two days after me accident, losing my children, you want me to remember every detail?’
Whenever Farquharson made one of these petulant replies, Tinney would look down and riffle through his documents. Had he really lost his place, or was he leaving a pause for the weirdness of the answer to settle in the jurors’ minds? His cross-examination would have seemed slack-textured had it not been for these dreadful silences, thick with Farquharson’s resistance and the listeners’ growing suspicion. After each pause, the prosecutor would look up slowly as if a new idea had just occurred to him.
Wasn’t it strange that Farquharson had never asked anyone about how his children were found in the salvaged car? Their seatbelts? Where they were in the vehicle?
Farquharson appeared genuinely baffled. ‘Who was I supposed to talk to?’
He did not know how the headlights and the ignition of the Commodore had come to be turned off. He told the police he had no memory of doing it. But in the bugged phone conversations with Gambino, said Tinney, he told her he had turned the motor off in case there was a fire. Farquharson had no explanation for this discrepancy.
‘Why did the ignition of the car get turned off at all?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t answer that.’
‘Is there any other person who could have turned it off other than you?’
‘I can’t answer that.’
‘Oh, witness,’ said Tinney reproachfully. ‘Is there any person in the car who could possibly have turned off the ignition, other than you?’
‘Well,’ said Farquharson, ‘Jai could have, easily.’
The journalists turned to each other, their mouths ajar. Farquharson wiped his palms on his trousers. The jurors’ brows were knitted, their faces full of trouble.
‘Are you seriously suggesting that one of your children, in the moments before they died, would have had any reason to turn off the ignition of that car?’
‘I’m trying to answer it the best way I can.’
‘Why did you turn off the headlights?’
‘They could have been bumped or anything, I don’t know.’
‘Bumped? Bumped? Did you have some reason for wanting it to be dark out there?’
‘No, I did not.’
Tinney pressed him hard on why he had wanted so desperately to be taken from the dam straight to Cindy Gambino—wasn’t it his negative feelings towards her that made him want to tell her straightaway that her children were dead?
‘No.’
‘What was she going to be able to do, to help?’
‘All I know is that I had to see her. That’s all I know.’
‘To do what?’
‘I just had to see her.’
‘To do what?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What were you intending to do when you saw her?’
‘Tell her that I’d had an accident.’
‘Tell her you’d killed the kids?’
‘No. That I’d had an accident.’
‘And what was she going to be able to do about it?’
‘I don’t know, but I had to see her. Like I said, she’s the mother of my children.’
‘So you left the dam? And, when you left, your children were in a motorcar somewhere submerged in the dam? There was no one else there at the dam, and you just went off in a car and left them there?’
‘Well, that’s what happened, yes, but not in the terms you’re trying to put it.’
‘And you were a loving father, were you?’
‘I’m a very loving father, thank you.’
When Tinney pointed out to him the surprising haste with which he had assumed his children were dead, Farquharson uttered an aggrieved, angry laugh, thrust out both hands palms up, and protested, ‘I’d just lost me children in front of me eyes!’
He would not acknowledge that he had been angry about the whole set-up after Gambino ended the marriage. ‘Upset’ or ‘annoyed’ was as far as he would go. Tinney prised open this denial with a needling little manoeuvre that I wished young Eggleston had still been there to see.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘Mr Moules would have had a perfect right to drive your wife’s car if he wanted to, wouldn’t he?’
Five years had not healed this wound. Farquharson flared up. ‘Well, why? Drive our car? It was our car still, at the time.’
‘It wasn’t your car, was it, once you were separated?’ said Tinney. ‘It was your wife’s car, your ex-wife’s car.’
Farquharson flushed with old anger. ‘It was still both our car.’
But by then there had been no more ‘our’. Everything that had been ‘ours’ was wiped and gone.
Except the children.
…
Years later, a man I knew who had been in the upstairs gallery that day said to me with a groan, ‘It was like watching some poor animal dying. You wanted to call out, “For God’s sake, shoot him!”’
Yet all the while, Farquharson’s person of comfort, the pretty, motherly woman with her hands folded in her lap or pressed as in prayer under her chin, seemed immune to the awful effect of his demeanour. She gazed up at him from her seat with a wonderfully tender-hearted expression of approval and encouragement. She tilted her head, she nodded it slowly, thoughtfully, as if pondering the incontrovertible truth of everything he was saying. Once or twice she gave a tiny wink. While the wretched man blundered his way across the scorched earth of his story, she poured out upon him great streams of love from some inexhaustible Christian store.