This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (4 page)

Morrissey’s labour was tremendous. Soon, though, I began to suspect that it was also
counter-productive. No matter how earnestly I strove to grasp it, his cross-examination
felt cloudy and insubstantial. The material itself was intractable. It was fiddly,
maniacally detailed, and catastrophically lacking in narrative. It made me—and, by
the looks of them, also the jury—feel panicky and stupid. By the end of the week
Justice Cummins would refer, with a desperate sympathy, to ‘three days talking about
tufts of grass’. Worst of all, Morrissey’s style of cross-examination on this technical
evidence was jerky and parenthetical. He was forever rephrasing things, backing and
filling, apologising, changing tack. He could not make the torrent of measurements
run clear. With the best will in the world, I could not follow it or see what he
was trying to do. To add to his troubles, he had developed a dry, barking cough that
rivalled the one he argued had sent his client’s car into the dam.

As the hours and days ground on, the air in the court became a jelly of confusion
and boredom. The judge took off his spectacles and violently rubbed his eyes. Journalists
sucked lollies to stay awake. Jurors’ mouths went square with the effort to control
their gaping yawns. Their heads swayed, or dropped forward on to their chests. But
Morrissey, oblivious to the fact that he had lost his audience, fought doggedly on,
his forehead gleaming, his gown trailing floorwards off his shoulders. Once, when
he suggested to a witness that some vehicle other than Farquharson’s might have left
the disputed tyre track in the roadside gravel, when he seemed about to return for
the hundredth time to the torture of what he called ‘the Exton marks’, I saw Rapke’s
junior, Amanda Forrester, close her eyes, twist her long legs round each other, and
beat, beat, beat
the knuckles of her fist against her forehead.

Was it some sort of barrister’s technique, to fill the courtroom with a soporific
gas? One lunchtime I consulted an old friend of mine, long retired from the bar.
His wife had died, and he spent his lonely days at home in a bayside suburb: I imagined
him standing at his lounge room window with a pair of binoculars, critically inspecting
passing vessels. His sole concession to the modern world was a mobile phone. He loved
to be asked for advice.

‘Farquharson’s counsel,’ I texted, ‘is killing us with boredom.’

He replied at once: ‘A time-honoured approach, when no feather to fly with. Still,
one has heard it said that the fear of boring oneself or one’s listeners is a great
enemy of truth.’

…

The only thing that woke the jury from its stupor was the Homeric clash between Morrissey
and Sergeant Exton. Under his brow Exton fixed the barrister with a level, burning
gaze. The two men lowered their big heads and went at each other like heavyweights.
Exton seemed galvanised by a rage that only his elaborate sarcasm could control.
He spoke with a droll punctilio, decorating every sentence with the word ‘Sir’. When
a pretty woman in a tightly belted white coat tiptoed out of the court, he paused
mid-sentence to appreciate her all the way to the door. His demeanour was so powerfully
wrought and outrageously complex, so glowering with dark energy, that I kept wanting
to break into anxious laughter. Louise, the teenager, contemplated him with alarm.
She passed me a note: ‘Imagine having
him
for a father.’ I did not reply; but I thought,
‘A bloke like that
would take a bullet for his daughter.’

When Morrissey took it right up to him about the faults in the yellow paint marks,
suggesting sloppiness, wilful interference, or even conspiracy—when the lawyer seemed
for a few moments to have the old cop on the ropes—Exton’s face blackened with fury.
He was prepared to acknowledge that he had sprayed the yellow paint marks on the
wrong angle, but maintained, with a tenacity Morrissey could not make a dent in,
that the mistakes were irrelevant; that the purpose of the paint was not to indicate
angles but simply to show the reconstructionists the spot where it was believed the
vehicle had left the bitumen surface. Challenged about the mysterious losing and
finding of Major Collision’s twenty-nine extra photos of the scene, Exton went out
on a limb and complimented his fellow investigator on the quality of his shots.

Wearily Mr Morrissey rocked back on his heels. ‘So,’ he said, folding his arms high
on his chest, ‘you think Sergeant Peters is a pretty good photographer, do you?’

‘Going by these photos, excellent!’ declared the officer. His fist of a face split
open into a big white grin. The whole court went up in a shout of laughter: not just
the jury and the journalists, but Morrissey, Rapke, the judge, the two families,
even Farquharson himself.

After Mr Morrissey’s
Sturm und Drang
, Mr Rapke rose and shone a steady light on the
matter. Over the uneven terrain between the road and the dam, Sergeant Exton would
have expected a car that was not being steered to have deviated quite abruptly from
a smooth arc: certainly at the drain, definitely at the fence, and then more moderately
between the fence and the dam. But there were no marks on the bitumen, on the gravel
shoulder, or on the
grass leading to the dam, to show that Farquharson’s car was
ever out of control.

…

Sergeant Bradford Peters, a serene-looking man in his mid-forties, was on the stand
for a long time. Against the ramparts of his cheerful persona Morrissey’s artillery
thundered in vain. Peters made it seem absurd to suggest that the police might have
scuffed out the disputed tyre track between the yellow paint marks. Why on earth
would they do that, he asked, when they had already photographed it? At one stage
in his tracing of the rolling tyre prints, the yellow paint in his spray-can had
run out. Chivvied by Morrissey as to why he had planted a plastic marker on a certain
section of the track instead of walking back to the car for a fresh can of paint,
Peters said with a good-humoured shrug, ‘I don’t remember. I must have just been
too lazy to go back and get one.’ A gentle ripple of liking flowed across the court
towards him. The battered jury smiled and shifted in their seats, released by his
insouciant air from some constraint.

One day, late in that week, Louise and I came back from lunch a few minutes early
and found the court empty. One of Sergeant Peters’ aerial photos was still displayed
on the high screen, which from the press seats we had been able to see only at a
frustratingly acute angle. We sneaked along the deserted bar table and stood right
in front of the photo. Daylight. Thick grass. Wheel tracks, a single set, outlined
by police markers in a flat arc between road and dam. We gazed up in silence. Then,
in her dry, thoughtful voice, the girl said, ‘Coughing fit my arse.’

CHAPTER 2

On the Monday of the trial’s third week, waiting and gossiping with the media people
outside the court in weak spring sunlight, we calculated that the following day would
be the second anniversary of the children’s deaths. Imagining Farquharson’s dread
as the date approached, I allowed myself the luxury of the word
pitiful
. One of the
print journalists, a court veteran whose work I had long respected, spun round and
bit my head off.

‘Pity?’ she cried. ‘How can you say he’s pitiful when he’s done the worst, the most
terrible thing? Murdered his own children, who trusted and loved him? Three of them!
Premeditated! And to get back at his wife! The utmost betrayal! Why is
that
pitiful?’

I flushed and fell silent. But that morning, when Farquharson was brought up from
the cells and stuck out his hands at the door to have his cuffs removed, he looked
even more blighted and rigid than usual. The next Crown witness would be his former
wife.

Cindy Gambino slid in without fanfare, past the seats where her family and Farquharson’s
sat tightly wedged. How small she was, this woman whose loss was beyond imagining,
yet who would not lay
blame. Her hair hung past her shoulders in silky falls. Her
smooth face with its large, heavy-lidded eyes showed no expression, but her skin
was the pale greyish-brown of a walnut shell, as if grief had soaked her to the bone,
and she walked so carefully that she appeared to be limping. The raised witness box,
near the front of the court, and the dock at the back were only fifteen metres apart.
Down the length of the court, above the lawyers’ heads, Gambino and Farquharson would
have to look straight at each other.

Mr Rapke leaned forward over the bar table and narrowed his eyes at Gambino like
a man gazing into too bright a light. When he named the dead boys and gave their
birth dates, when he asked her if she was their natural mother, Farquharson pulled
his handkerchief out of his pocket, held it to his face with both hands, and began
to weep.

For several years, said Gambino, she had known Farquharson merely as a friend. Then,
in 1993, a year after the man she was involved with was killed in a road accident,
she took up with Rob, who, at twenty-four, was still living at home with his parents.
Even after they set up house together, Gambino was haunted by her grief for the man
who had died. Soon Farquharson told her that, if they were going to get serious,
she would have to put away her mementoes of him, take down his photos, and stop wearing
his ring.

In 1994 their first child, Jai, was born. Postnatal depression joined forces with
her unresolved grief, and she and Farquharson needed help from a counsellor.

He was not happy working for the shire. In 1996 he arranged a redundancy payout,
and they bought a Jim’s Mowing franchise. Farquharson lugged his mower through the
surrounding
countryside, along the Surf Coast and down the Great Ocean Road, but
the work was too much for him on his own. They lost money and had to surrender the
franchise, which dropped them into $40,000 worth of debt.

‘I had a lot of resentment against Rob,’ said Gambino. ‘He wanted to work for himself.
I didn’t want him to.’

Their second son, Tyler, was born in 1998. They had to move in with Gambino’s parents
in Birregurra for six months, with the two little boys. Eventually Farquharson found
a steady job as a cleaner at the Cumberland Resort in the upmarket seaside town of
Lorne, where Gambino’s mother was in charge of hospitality. They managed to pull
their finances into better order.

In 2000 they married. They built a house, but the work was not done to the standard
they wanted. They sold it and moved into a rented place. In 2004 they bought a block
of land in a Winchelsea street called Daintree Drive, and started to build another
house.

All this moving, these houses. It seemed that Gambino’s will had been the driving
force in the relationship, that she had had to drag her man through life. She had
ambitions and restless hopes that his energy could not match. Their needs were at
cross-purposes.

‘Rob didn’t want to build. He wanted to buy an established house. But I wanted to
build again. We agonised over that. I usually got my own way.’ She gave a small,
wretched laugh. ‘I wanted another child. Rob was unsure. He didn’t know if he could
cope with three children. But he was pretty much a softie. He always gave in to what
I wanted.’

Tears began to slide down her cheeks. Farquharson wept on, behind his red velvet
rope. Except when he scrubbed at his face with
his handkerchief, he did not take
his eyes off her.

Rob’s mother, whom he loved and was very close to, was diagnosed with cancer in 2000,
and died in 2002, the year Bailey, their youngest, was born. ‘He grieved,’ said Gambino.
‘He had mood swings. He was always down and out. He felt like he was never happy.
I can understand that.’

By now she was speaking in a series of soft, gasping cries. Farquharson leaned forward
with his elbows on his thighs and mopped hopelessly at his tears. People in the court
had their hands over their mouths. The air was filled with a faint rustling.

Farquharson suffered from foot and back pain, exacerbated no doubt by his slogging
physical work. When he got sick, he got really sick. Gambino had never seen him pass
out from coughing, but most winters he had a cough that would sometimes take his
breath away. If he went to the doctor about it, he would be told, ‘You’ve got what
everyone else has got. Deal with it.’ Gambino’s experience of postnatal depression
allowed her to recognise some of her husband’s symptoms, particularly mood swings
and sleeplessness. She urged him to get help, but he would say, ‘No, I’m not depressed.
I’m all right.’

By the latter half of 2004, Gambino was coming to the end of her tether. ‘I found
it throughout my marriage very hard,’ she said, ‘to give my heart to my husband.
You can love someone, but you can also be in love with someone, and I found it hard
to be in love with Rob. He was a very secure person, he was a very good provider,
but I just found it hard to give myself to him.’

In October 2004, when Bailey was almost two, Farquharson agreed at last to see their
family GP about his mood swings. Dr
McDonald put him on anti-depression medication,
but for Gambino it was already too late. She levelled with him the following month,
and it came at him out of nowhere.

Mr Rapke left her the silence, and she filled it, holding a handful of tissues to
her eyes, her voice so high and weak that we had to strain to hear.

‘I didn’t want the marriage any more. I asked him to leave.’

There it was, the unbearable blow she had dealt him—expulsion from his family and
his home. Like so many emotionally numbed, inarticulate and stoical husbands, he
had failed to see it coming.

‘He went to live with his dad,’ she said. ‘He was devastated. It was a case of you
don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.’

‘Did you consent to see him,’ asked Rapke, ‘after you separated?’