This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (22 page)

The Crown case was ‘a fairy story—the myth of the bad daddy who killed his kids’.
It was ‘glib, glib, glib’. Farquharson was not some monster. He was not an iceman,
not a brooding, angry, rage-filled person at all. He was a traumatised Anglo-Saxon
guy. He was just—
Rob
. He had been dealt a hard hit. The time had come to find him
not guilty—to let him go on with whatever life he had.

I scanned the jury. They were wide awake, sharp-eyed and concentrating, but their
faces were blank. Louise studied them too. She scrawled on my notebook, ‘I don’t
think this is working.’

In the lobby, when court rose, I pushed open the door of the ladies’ toilets and
found Farquharson’s sisters in there with the younger women of their party, crowding
together at the hand basins and the mirror. Someone was saying, ‘
He
was a
prince
.’
‘Yes,’ said Carmen tartly, ‘but princes can turn into frogs, you know.’ They all
burst out laughing. I ducked behind them into a cubicle, and waited there while they
merrily refreshed their make-up and bouffed up their hair. I wished I could stand
close to them. They sounded so
confident. Were they cracking hardy, working to keep
each other’s spirits up, or was I the one with the wrong end of the stick?

…

Late that afternoon my old barrister friend and I met on the steps of Parliament
House, and spent an hour drinking gin and tonic in the Regency-striped armchairs
of the lounge at the Windsor Hotel.

‘You’ve heard the closing addresses,’ he said, neatly arranging his feet in their
polished brogues. ‘Which way would you jump?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What if there’s doubt, but only a cigarette paper thick?
Is that reasonable?’

He closed his eyes. ‘What kind of answer’s that, woman? This is real life. Hard decisions
have to be made.’

I drank in glum silence. Why did lawyers always make me feel so stupid? I wanted
to ask him about gut feeling. I knew he would say it had no place in a court. But
what
was
it? Wasn’t it really a kind of semi-conscious reasoning, shaped by the many
weeks of evidence? A lightning-fast, instinctual matching up of the phenomenon in
question against every similar one you had ever come across, in all your life’s dealings
with other people?

…

Everyone could see that the jurors liked Justice Cummins. He had a way of acknowledging
their fear, and soothing it. Whenever he spoke directly to them, their weary faces
would soften. Even the usually expressionless men would turn to him, smiling, like
students of a
teacher who had earned their trust. Their duty, now, was to deliberate
on the facts of the case and arrive at a verdict; but first the judge would give
them careful instructions about the law as it applied to the facts. This address
is called the charge, and it is the part of a trial most vulnerable to the critical
eye of the Court of Appeal.

Cummins launched his charge on the final Monday morning. He spoke with energetic
expression, moving and swaying on his throne-like chair, leaning forward, rearing
back. He inhabited rhetorically, one by one, the conflicting testimonies, the competing
submissions the jury had heard over the long weeks of the trial. Once or twice he
had to pause, as if to control emotion.

Soon Louise nudged me. ‘Look at Rapke.’ The prosecutor’s glasses were folded on the
table in front of him and his cheek rested on a hand that threatened to go limp and
drop his head among his papers with a crash. As we watched, he settled back into
his leather swivel chair with his chin tucked into his collar and his starched white
jabot poking up in a curve, and sank into a frank slumber. His junior, Amanda Forrester,
swung to him, to whisper a comment. She froze, then quietly turned away. Soon she
too closed her eyes and sat with head on hand, her face in repose younger and sweeter.

Cindy Gambino sat between her parents. Since the last time I had talked with them
at the coffee cart, Bob and Bev Gambino had faded further into their quiet country
selves, coming and going with a nod or a smile. I admired their reserve, their composure.
What did they hope for in secret? How deep did it run, their fidelity to their daughter’s
support of her ex-husband, in the bereavement they all shared? Farquharson listened
keenly to the judge’s long address. At the mention of his son’s names he flinched,
and his jaw swelled with
stifled tears. At times he would pull an angry face, or
jerk about indignantly in his chair. Meanwhile, Gambino sat in the shelter of her
parents. She leaned her elbows on the rail and held a white hanky to her nose and
mouth, as if her tears would never stop leaking. At painful moments of the story
her face went into spasm and she put her hands over her eyes. Finally the three Gambinos
got up and discreetly left the court.

At every break, Farquharson’s family would throng into the paved courtyard, chattering
and smoking, bringing take-away coffee and standing about in the patches of sunlight
that narrowed as the day dragged on and shadows formed in the colonnaded corners.
The journalists politely left the open spaces to them, and clustered murmuring in
more remote spots. The girl from the
Herald Sun
, in her little black ballet slippers,
opined that the verdict would come fast, and would be not guilty. A cold shudder
ran through me: oh, wait! I haven’t worked it all out yet, and I don’t know how I’m
going to! I shifted away from her certainty, and hid in an alcove pretending to read
a magazine. When I looked up, the others had gone back in. I ran across the flagstones
in my soft-soled shoes, past a woman standing near the only bench still flooded with
afternoon light. It was Farquharson’s sister, Carmen Ross. Her weary husband, slumped
on the bench with his arms folded on his chest, had fallen asleep in the remaining
warmth. She stood facing him, watching over his rest. She raised one hand against
the sun, to cast a small patch of shade on to his bare, greying head. He did not
stir. As I crept by, she put out a forefinger and delicately touched his brow.

…

At the end of the second day, when Justice Cummins had concluded his charge and painstakingly
fine-tuned it, the jury of fourteen was whittled back to the requisite dozen by means
of a random ballot. The judge’s associate drew numbers out of a wooden box: two of
the women were liberated. The judge expressed his regrets to them, but they hardly
bothered to conceal their elation. In its final configuration, the group looked
compact, business-like—a twelve-person outfit, stripped back and ready to rock.

How terrible it must be for counsel to see the jurors’ backs as they retire. Morrissey’s
lips were white. Seven weeks of struggle, and now these twelve strangers of unknown
sympathies and reasoning power would take the reins.

‘The wait for the verdict,’ said Justice Cummins gently to Farquharson, who sprang
to his feet, ‘is the hardest part of the trial. I suggest you try to bear up.’

Farquharson nodded to him, courteous and present. For the first time I saw him as
he might have been in ordinary life, at work, at school. It touched me. Again I felt
shocked, as if this response were somehow illegitimate.

…

All Thursday we waited.

Families and journalists drifted around the echoing corridors, staying well within
call. Carmen Ross sat at the long table in the hall and laid out games of patience.
Another woman worked quietly at her crochet. The word among the journalists now was
acquittal, though no one could quite articulate a reason. I was glad that nobody
asked for my opinion. The responsibility of making a decision seemed beyond me.

Mid-morning the sun came over the roof of the building and we headed for the fresh
air. But a door burst open on the other side of the courtyard and disgorged a bunch
of people in bright casual clothes, dressed for spring. It was the jury. The frowning
tipstaff shouted to us, ‘You can’t come through here!’ We withdrew to the corridor
and gazed at them through the glass-paned door. They milled about in the sun, laughing,
shifting from foot to foot like guests at a barbecue. Many of them were smoking.
They seemed cheerful, and free. They did not look like people who might be about
to send a man to prison for the rest of his life.

Halfway through the afternoon a passing man called to us over his shoulder, ‘They’ve
sent out some dry-cleaning.’

The day ended without result.

On the train home I texted my scornful barrister friend. ‘The jury were laughing.
What’s that mean?’

He replied at once. ‘Their laughing is unnerving. But in the end their decision is
a purely rational one, devoid of sympathy and emotion. Rather like solving a maths
problem. At least so they are told by the judge. And that is how it should be. In
other words, the decision is made without ANY consideration of the consequences for
Farquharson.’

‘Big ask.’

‘In no other way can I explain the levity of which you speak.’

…

On the Friday I took to the courtyard some unfinished knitting, an old green scarf,
and tried to get it moving again. My hands were sweating and my tension was uneven,
but it helped to have something to do. The journalists drew together, looking each
other in the face more openly. There was a comradeliness. They shared food, brought
each other coffees without being asked. Someone reported that Rapke was not here:
it was the festival of Simchat Torah; he had to go to shul. We kicked the Farquharson
story this way and that. Had Rapke made a big enough hole in the defence’s medical
evidence? Would the jury give a shit about the mistakes in the yellow paint marks?
We wondered about Farquharson’s mother, what kind of woman she had been, whether
it was the loss of her presence alone that made Cindy Gambino call that house ‘the
morgue’. Strange hours, with no end in sight, analysing and speculating in the sun,
feeling our hearts beat faster than usual.

Just after two o’clock, one of the
Herald-Sun
journalists beckoned wildly from across
the courtyard. We ran down the hall in a pack and jostled into our seats. Morrissey
forged in. He went straight to Farquharson in the dock, and high-fived him. Police
officers slid into the pew behind the bar table. People we knew and others we had
never seen before sat tightly crammed, upstairs and down. The judge strode to the
bench. We bowed. He said, in a low voice, ‘I urge people, whichever way the verdict
goes, to try to contain their emotion.’ A sickening hush. The jury entered. Their
faces were grey. One woman was squeezing a fistful of soaked tissues. Another had
a hand over her eyes. The foreman worked his mouth, chewing the insides of his cheeks.

Each dead child was named and the charge of murder read.
At the first ‘guilty’, Cindy
Gambino let out a piercing, animal wail. Guilty. Guilty. Court officers rushed to
her aid. Beside her a pale face swayed and dropped: her mother had fainted. Bev’s
sons carried her to the door. The court swarmed with people turning and gasping and
pressing. Screams and sobs echoed in its high white ceilings. Farquharson must have
been whisked away to the cells: the dock was empty. In the uproar, Morrissey turned
towards the media seats and faced us in silence. He stood like a beaten warrior,
feet together, shoulders stooping, hands clasped in front of his genitals. His face
was chalk, and on it was a tiny, rigid smile.

The judge cleared the court. The tipstaff pushed the journalists out the door. In
the courtyard, paramedics trundled Bev Gambino past us on a gurney, flat on her back,
her face a greenish white. Gambino was already in an ambulance. Kerri Huntington
crouched on a bench, elbows on her thighs, smoking hard and staring up at the crowd
with loathing. I veered close to her and muttered a clumsy word. She scorched me
with a look. In a corner of the yard, beside the men from Major Collision, Amanda
Forrester fumbled for a cigarette. The cops, in their paratroopers’ loose pants and
heavy black boots, were a study in self-command. If they were triumphant they declined
to show it. But Forrester’s vivid, white-toothed face, gushing smoke, shone with
a fiercely suppressed satisfaction. A man behind me said, ‘What a courageous jury!’
A prosecutor I knew squeezed past. He too was restraining jubilation, but he said
to me, ‘You don’t know how much shit we cop, as prosecutors. Having to cut a path
through all that lying.’

The journalists were reluctant to part. ‘Oh,’ they cried, ‘that was the worst I’ve
seen. It doesn’t get any worse than that.’ They
hugged each other and rushed away.
One of the young women was six months pregnant; her face had turned yellow, and she
stood still with one hand pressed against her belly. The boy who was covering his
first murder trial touched my arm and stared at me, white-eyed, unable to speak.

At my elbow Louise the gap-year girl had been observing the pandemonium with her
customary dry reserve, though her cheeks were faintly flushed. ‘I’m out of here,’
she said.

‘What? You’re leaving?’

‘Text you later.’ She hugged me, slid into the crowd and vanished. She knew when
she had had enough.

I found the veteran journalist, and put out my hand to say goodbye. My face must
have been a sight, burning red. She looked at me hard, with an ironic smile.

‘You didn’t see this coming, did you. You’re shocked, aren’t you.’

‘Yes. I’m shocked.’

She drew me away from the others. ‘When
I
first came into court today,’ she said,
‘I was filled with wave after wave of
rage
. You see this is what these men
do
. This
is the most appalling, savage, cruel revenge a man can take on a woman—to make out
it was
all her fault
.’

From the train home I sent Louise an over-emotional text: ‘Don’t be alone today after
what we just saw.’

She made no reply. I felt foolish, but not surprised. I saw that unlike Morrissey,
unlike me, she was a person with sturdy boundaries. I tried to imagine what she
would have said, had she answered. Probably something philosophical. Something hard-nosed,
in Latin.
Dura lex sed lex.
The law is hard, but it is the law.