This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (9 page)

His coughing fit, he says, must have been triggered by the car heater, which he had
turned on when the kids said they were cold. He has recently been off work for eight
days with this cough, one of those colds that linger on. Has he been smoking dope?
He gives a gasp of laughter: he doesn’t do that sort of thing! He’s a normal, average
guy, trying to make a living and do the best by his family—and look what he’s done
now.

‘Mate, it’s a tragic thing. Your children in the car—what are their names?’

Jai. Tyler. Bailey. Farquharson intones them, spacing them out in a solemn hush.

Courtis breaks it. His voice is soft. ‘Did the car just go away from under you? How
far under the water did your car go? Did you have to put your head under water? How
many times did you have to duck under the water?’

‘Oh, several. Several times, probably about three or four or something.’ Stammering
and chattering, Farquharson tells the story for the third time. Then he lets out
a hard panting sound, and puts again his urgent question: ‘I mean, I mean, what sort
of thing’s going to happen to
me
, now?’

‘Well,’ says one of the cops.

‘You don’t know, do you.’ Again the little nasal out-breath of laughter, the striving
for a casual tone, making light of his need to know.

‘We haven’t even been to the crash site yet. We’re on our way down there now.’

Farquharson tries once more. ‘What’s the scenario? Got no idea?’

Courtis answers vaguely, dreamily. ‘We’ll go to the scene and have a look, and we’ll
come back and let you know what’s going on.’

…

I took a quick look at Farquharson. He was sitting quite still, staring straight
ahead. Were his sisters’ hearts in their boots? I remembered Cindy Gambino’s account
of the way he had stood in front of the car at the dam while would-be rescuers desperately
rushed about. ‘There was no movement. He wasn’t doing anything. He was like in a
trance.’

He didn’t sound entranced on that tape. He sounded…something else, something not
quite right. Too quick to answer? Too eager to please? A nose dive, in foot-deep
water? And when they pulled the car out of the dam, wasn’t the heater off? My head
was full of a very loud clanging. Nothing expert, nothing trained or intellectual.
Just a shit-detector going off, that was all. The alarm bells of a woman who had
been in the world for more than sixty years, knowing men, sometimes hearing them
say true things, sometimes being told lies.

What had passed through Farquharson’s mind, that night, on the dark country road
where there was nothing to distract a driver from his wild thoughts? Were the boys
squabbling? Was there a painful mention of their mother’s new man? Or did they just
sit quietly in their harnesses as the old car rolled along, making their father’s
heart ache that once more he had to give them back and say
goodbye? Did a casual
word, a rush of despair cause everything that he had shored up against his ruins
to buckle and give way?

And could it be that, underneath it all, naked on that hospital gurney, he was not
yet grieving, but seething instead with incredulous vitality? Was a fresh force
surging through this dull, lonely, broken-hearted man, deafening him, obliterating
without shame or mercy everything but the astonishing fact that he was still alive?

CHAPTER 5

Wheels leave different traces as they pass over the surface of the earth. A skid
mark happens when all four wheels lock and are dragged along the ground by the vehicle’s
momentum. A yaw mark occurs typically when a car is over-steered, and front and back
tyres track separately, leaving four tyre marks instead of two. And a rolling print
is simply the impression left by a cleanly rotating wheel: a raised pattern of tyre
tread in gravel or dirt; grass pushed down in the direction of the vehicle’s travel.
In the paddock between the road and the dam, Farquharson’s car had left rolling prints.
This undisputed fact was something we—and no doubt the jury—had to hang on to grimly,
during Mr Morrissey’s blistering cross-examinations of the police.

…

Mr Rapke began with Senior Constable Courtis of Major Collision. After the unsettling
interview with Farquharson at Geelong Emergency, Courtis drove on to the dam. It
was a clear night and
the road was dry, but by the time Courtis came down the overpass
at about 11 p.m., he noticed the odd patch of drifting fog. The murkily lit rescue
attempt was spread out on the right-hand side of the road. He parked, and set about
his task: to survey the scene and take photos of it.

The only tyre prints he found in the roadside gravel were the ones that Sergeant
Exton, his boss, had already marked with the dashes of yellow paint. With his torch
Courtis followed the pair of rolling prints that ran through the long grass down
to the edge of the water. Only when he looked back up towards the road did he notice
that the angle of Exton’s paint marks was not right: it did not match up precisely
with the angle of the rolling prints.

Here Courtis struck a snag. While he was trying to set up a new piece of surveying
equipment, a Riegl 3D laser scanner, he bent one of the fine prongs on its cable.
Because he didn’t have a spare cable, he packed up the Riegl and used instead Major
Collision’s older and more familiar device, the geodimeter, sometimes known as George.

On the stand, the young police officer battled to express in ordinary language the
digital and mechanical capabilities of the Riegl scanner and the geodimeter. His
testimony was studded with terms like
infrared
,
dot-to-dot
,
prism
,
raw data
and
numerical
codes
. The jurors were given small bound books of photos that Rapke referred to by
numbers, but in the press seats, lacking a clear view of the visual aids and having
to follow by ear, we stumbled behind.

When Morrissey rose to cross-examine, the atmosphere of the court sagged again into
a sort of irritable misery. No wonder Courtis’s notes had been quivering. He was
grilled on why he had not measured the road’s camber and crossfall, on whether vehicles
necessarily left
tyre prints on bitumen or in gravel, on the accuracy of his coding
of the marks he claimed to have seen in gravel and through grass. Morrissey suggested
that Courtis was ill-trained and incompetent—‘You’re not a professional surveyor
by any means, are you? You’re a professional policeman’—and hinted that this was
why he had subsequently been transferred from Major Collision to the Child Sexual
Offences and Child Abuse Unit. Pressed to agree that the path of the rolling prints
was ‘a smooth arc without any noticeable wiggles in it—more or less a straight line
but bending somewhat to the right’, Courtis would go no further than to say, ‘Yes,
there was a curve in it.’

Morrissey’s aim seemed to be to establish that there was a lot of traffic in the
area that night, that any one of those vehicles might have left the disputed tyre
mark in the gravel, and that the police reconstruction of the scene, based on its
admittedly imperfect paint marks, was worthless. But his cross-examination induced
a crazed feeling of restlessness and frustration. Round and round it went, a flood
of detail without graspable shape or direction, except in its constant return to
the painfully familiar matter of Sergeant Exton’s yellow paint marks. Morrissey kept
starting a sentence with the word ‘now’, as if about to bring his line of questioning
around in a meaningful curve, but he never reached resolution. There was no relief.
My mind lost its grip and slid away into reverie.

‘Maybe he thinks,’ whispered Louise, ‘that if he drags this out long enough the jury
will forget that tape.’

Indeed, the Emergency interview had made an impression so deeply disturbing that
everything coming after it seemed to be beside the point. By now, close to the end
of the third week of the trial, the very words ‘yellow paint marks’ provoked a Pavlovian
response. The
jurors glazed over and turned sullen. They rested their chins on their
fists. Their eyelids drooped. Their necks grew loose with boredom; they were limp
with it, barely able to hold themselves erect. Once I glanced over and saw four of
them in a row, their heads dropped on the same protesting angle towards their left
shoulders, like tulips dying in a vase.

And hour after hour, as he laboured, Morrissey was tormented by terrific bouts of
dry coughing. He barked, he croaked, he sweated and turned pale. Long pauses fell
while he composed himself. Justice Cummins coddled him affectionately, offered to
adjourn at lunchtime on Friday so he could rest his voice for two and a half days,
threatened trouble if he saw him at the football at the MCG. Morrissey was embarrassed.
He grinned and ducked his head and said that he would soldier on till the end of
the week.

Then, first thing on Friday morning, before the jury was called in, Morrissey told
the judge that he had stayed up working half the night and would now be able to finish
his cross-examination by lunchtime.

Justice Cummins’ brow came down. Overnight, he said sharply, inquiries had come from
the jury: how much longer was this trial likely to go on? Some of these jurors were
going to work before court, or during the lunch break. They were serious people,
applying themselves to their task. They had made arrangements to cancel this afternoon’s
work, and now they were to be told they would be released by lunchtime. They were
not rag dolls to be thrown aside for the convenience of counsel. They had lives to
lead. They should be treated properly.

Morrissey stood at the bar table staring down at his hands. He
looked offended, even
wounded. Why, yesterday the judge had practically tucked him up in bed with a hot-water
bottle. Today, he was rapping Morrissey’s knuckles with a ruler.

But Farquharson’s supporters gazed loyally at their wigged champion. They believed
in him. They urged him on. When Louise’s mother slipped into court one day to see
what her daughter had been raving about, she looked around in surprise and said,
‘It feels like a family in here.’ The cramped court had become an intimate space,
intimate enough for Morrissey—this decent, warm and very endearing man, perhaps
sentimental, perhaps a little vain—to identify with his client to the point where,
in its paroxysms of coughing, his own body was acting out Farquharson’s story. A
story that was becoming more fantastical with every passing day.

…

On the Monday of the trial’s fourth week, the Crown introduced a crucial witness.

Hostility showed in the rigid shoulders of Farquharson’s sisters as the man climbed
the steps to the stand. His dark hair was freshly cut. In his jeans, runners and
striped short-sleeved shirt he affected a rockabilly jauntiness. But his crisp-featured
face was expressionless, his posture tense and wary. His name was Greg King; he was
a bus driver; and he was about to be dragged through the sort of public ordeal that
most people face only in nightmares from which, gasping and sweating, they are grateful
to wake.

‘Mr King,’ said Rapke. ‘Do you know a man by the name of Robert Farquharson?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘How do you know him?’

‘We grew up together. He’s a friend of mine, a mate, a family friend.’

The two mates kept their faces turned in opposite directions. From my seat I could
see them in profile, each resolutely avoiding the other’s eye.

They were Winch boys. They went to the local primary school a few years apart, and
then to Geelong Tech. They did not really become friends until King at twenty and
Farquharson at seventeen found jobs with the local shire council. Outside work they
played football together, and hung out at the pub or at King’s house. By the time
Farquharson and Cindy Gambino got serious, King and his wife, Mary, had already started
their family, and the men’s friendship began to dwindle.

When Rapke asked him to describe the relationship between Farquharson and Gambino,
King began to breathe audibly. His voice grew husky. They were always
at
each other,
he said. He had urged them to see that as a couple you have to bond, but they kept
on niggling and arguing. When they married, they already had two children. King went
to their wedding. He and Mary would visit them for a barbecue, or the two couples
would go down to the pub for tea. But, as the pressures of parenthood increased,
Rob and Cindy argued all the time, particularly about money. Robbie was never happy
in his job—not on the shire, not in the Jim’s Mowing franchise, not even at the Cumberland
Resort. King seemed to be describing a pair of ill-matched malcontents: a grumbling
husband, a demanding wife. In his opinion, they had got way ahead of themselves by
trying to
build a $300,000 house on one wage. They had a habit, he had said in his
witness statement, of measuring themselves against what other people had. Farquharson
complained to King that Cindy was always buying things they couldn’t afford.

‘Cindy always wanted the best of everything for the house,’ said King. ‘She wanted
the
best
.’

Hearing this, Farquharson glanced at his sisters and executed a veritable dance of
grinning and squinting and shoulder-squirming. Kerri Huntington returned a sardonic
nod.

When the marriage ended, King went to see Farquharson at his dad’s place once a week
or so, ‘to comfort him, because we were mates. He was down. He was gloomy. He was
angry and upset of what had happened.’ One night Farquharson said to him, ‘Cindy’s
seeing someone else, the bitch.’ King did not tell him that he already knew this
from talk around town. Once, in a dark mood about the break-up, Farquharson spoke
to King about driving off a cliff or running his car into a tree.

Again Farquharson swung his head towards his family in the public benches. He rolled
his eyes and twisted his mouth into a bitter smile, as if at an outrageous lie.