This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (11 page)

The exhausted King is backing away from this fire hydrant he has set off. ‘Righto
mate,’ he says faintly. ‘I’m going. I want to go and sleep. I’m bloody…’

‘Go and sleep,’ says Farquharson. ‘Why are they interviewing you? Just for a character?’

‘Just a character thing, I suppose.’

‘They’re only going to ask you what I was like as a person. All you have to do is
say, “I’ve known him for a long time. He’s great with the kids, he done this, he
done that.”’

‘All right,’ says King. ‘I better get home.’

He jingles his car keys, he must be edging towards the door, but Farquharson bores
on.

‘Look, you can say what you want. That’s your business. But if you think negative,
you’re going to come across negative.’ He runs King through it one more time: the
sports, the karate, the bike rides, kicking the footy, what a good bloke he is. ‘The
cops know all that. You’ll be right. Just settle. That’s all they want.’

‘Righto,’ says King. ‘I’ll catch you. See you, Rob.’

A car door slams. A motor turns over.

‘Just leaving now,’ murmurs King. He is already addressing the detectives, waiting
for him back at the dark boat ramp.

…

‘My God,’ I whispered to Louise. ‘Is this like something out of Shakespeare? Double
falseness?’

‘Not Shakespeare,’ she hissed. ‘
The Sopranos
.’

…

King’s recording did not satisfy the Homicide detectives. A month later, on the evening
of 13 October 2005, they persuaded him to make a second visit to Farquharson, once
again wearing a wire, and press him harder on the details of the fish-and-chip-shop
conversation. King, dark-faced with strain, sat next to Detective Sergeant Clanchy
behind the bar table while the second tape rolled.

The crunch of boots on gravel announces King’s arrival at Kerri Huntington’s Mount
Moriac house, in which Farquharson, after the funeral, had taken refuge from the
ravening attention of the media. But when King presents himself at the front door,
a little dog explodes into such wild territorial yapping and growling that, in court,
Farquharson and his entire family had to smother their fits of laughter. Kerri Huntington
heard herself on the tape: ‘Get out, Fox. Get out
now
!’ She went bright pink and
bowed forward in a convulsion. The rest of the court, reminded of the likeable ordinariness
of this family, could not help joining in.

‘He’s a fiery little thing!’ says King.

‘Doesn’t bite,’ says Farquharson. ‘Just bloody barks. Let’s sit in here.’

Family and dog withdraw. Farquharson tells King about his disturbed nights. His sleep
is so broken that he gives up and just sits watching TV. King sees his opening.

‘I’ve been the same, mate. I’m struggling real bad. That conversation, mate. It’s
killing me.’

This time Farquharson is on the front foot. ‘No,’ he says, ‘but it was never like
that. That’s what I keep telling ya.’

‘Not just “pay her back big-time,”’ says King. ‘You said to me about taking away
what was the most important thing to her. And you nodded your head towards that window
in the fish-and-chip shop, mate. I want to get my head clear, because it’s fuckin’
wreckin’ me. I said, “You don’t even dream of doing things like that,” and Rob, you
said to me, “Funny you should say about dreams—I have an accident and survive it,
and they don’t.” That’s what you said to me. I want all this stuff off my chest!
It’s eating me inside like a cancer!’

‘I never, never said that,’ says Farquharson.
‘You’re getting it all wrong, all twisted. I meant one day she’s going to wake up
that I’m not as weak as piss as what she thought—I’m going to
accomplish
something.’

And once more he launches his harangue. His voice is affectless, but still intimate
and persuasive, rising at the end of every phrase and sentence, as if listing a series
of points in an argument that is laid out coherently in his head. Several times King
tries to speak, but Farquharson rolls over him. On and on he goes, tireless, pouring
out his explanations, introducing new themes, while King keeps drawing in great,
painful sighs that are more like groans; and constantly, in the background, low and
persistent, runs the moronic gabbling of the television, its cries and splinterings,
and, once, the sharp blast of a whistle.

King’s whole purpose, on this visit, was to betray. But there was something strategic,
even masterful, about Farquharson’s
fast-rippling monologue, with its strange rhetorical
surges. He sounded like a man talking for his life.

Yes, he was angry with Cindy when she threw up her nose at him. ‘I’m driving this
good car, and look at
you
’—and now that other cunt was driving it. He was mad at
her because she wouldn’t sell the house so he could get a better car. His sisters
knew she used to treat him like shit. But what King didn’t realise, outside the fish-and-chip
shop, was that he and Cindy had sorted it all out, that they had become amicable.
He would never hurt her, and he definitely would never hurt his kids. Never. Why
would someone go from not smacking them to killing them? That’s a big gap. Not one
person thinks he would do that. It was never there—it’s what King has
put
there.

King jacks up. ‘It wasn’t what I’ve put there! Come on! Don’t blame it all on bloody
me!’

All right, Farquharson’s not blaming him. He sees now that he should have confided
in King, that night, about what he was
really
dreaming of—not revenge on Cindy, but
a whole new moneymaking scheme. He had been thinking for months about buying into
a business, a successful yogurt-importing concern worth $300,000 a year that his
friend Mark in Lorne might be going to cut him in on, but it was still a secret,
so he couldn’t talk about it. If King thinks Farquharson could look in the mother
of his kids’ eyes and tell her a lie and walk away, he’d be an animal. Cindy’s belief
in him, and his psychologist’s, too, is a hundred and fifty per cent. This is what’s
holding him together—this and his own honesty, his integrity to stand and tell. Tell
them the truth. Prove the truth to the end, because that
is
the truth. They’ve got
nothing on him. The police have already told his psychologist that he doesn’t fit
the profile. When people do
things like that, it’s a very
planned
thing. Anyway,
when people are lying, they fuck up. That lady who poisoned her two kids. They broke
her in two and a half hours.
Broke
her. Because she couldn’t lie no more. He, on
the contrary, has told the truth from the start. He has been steadfast in the face
of police interrogation; he will not back down. His three interviews—with the paramedics
in the ambulance, with the police in Geelong Emergency, with the detectives at Homicide—were
all exactly the same. Again and again he tells King he has misinterpreted everything.
He is begging him not to mention any of that. He must wipe it clean out of his head.
Wipe it right out. Now.

‘I’m going to have to see a counsellor,’ says King, miserably. ‘Because I can’t sleep.
It’s visions. About what happened. What they had to—what they went through. I’ll
have to talk about it, mate.’

‘For God’s sake,’ says Farquharson, ‘please don’t mention that stuff. I’m fearing
you’re going to say something to incriminate me. The police’ll say, “We’ve interviewed
Greg King, he says you’re all right, but now he’s gone to a counsellor, and the counsellor’s
said this, and this, and this.” And that drags
you
into it. That’s what you don’t
want. I’d have to call Mark and say, “Remember I had a conversation about buying
a business?” It goes to another level that’s totally irrelevant.’

King makes as if to leave, but Farquharson has him by the sleeve. He’s had a freak
accident, a tragic accident, and now he’s got to live with it. He’s not lying. What
happened to him is common. Plenty of people have blacked out at the wheel. The trauma
team at the hospital all told him there was nothing he could have done. He’s not
Superman. Even his counsellor’s said to him he’s got to stop
blaming himself. Every
day he asks the question, why did this have to happen to me? What have I done?

He ushers King to the door, still talking hard. Remember how he never used to get
in fights down the pub when King and the others did? He is upset, he’s disappointed,
it cuts deep that King should think he’d do such a thing. It’s not in his nature.
He doesn’t want there to be any ramifications.

‘All right,’ says King. ‘I know you were angry that night. And I misinterpreted.’

Farquharson urges King to calm himself by means of the relaxation techniques that
his psychologist has taught him to use when he’s driving the car. He demonstrates,
in a whisper. ‘You count. You say,
The tension’s gone. The tension’s gone. The tension’s
gone.
Let it flow out.’

Are they already outside in the yard? Night birds pass, with faint, melancholy cries.
The chink of keys. A car starts up. But Farquharson talks on and on. He must be leaning
down to King’s open window, as he did outside the fish-and-chip shop.

‘When you drive off from here, you should be able to say, “It’s off my chest. He’s
telling the truth. He’s been truthful to everyone, truthful to me.” I mean, I’m an
honest person. Put it aside. Let it flow out. It’s gone. You’ll feel so much better.
As far as I’m concerned, that’s the end of the topic. And it should be for you. You’ll
sleep a lot better. But if there’s any problems, give me a bell before you do any
counselling.’

…

People filed out of the court, subdued. Louise and I walked all the way down to Tattersalls
Lane with our eyes on the ground.

‘I’ve just lost my doubt,’ she said, at the shabby door of the Shanghai Dumpling.
‘But not my pity.’

‘He wasn’t very surprised, was he,’ I said. ‘You’d almost think he was expecting
it.’

She mimicked Farquharson’s histrionic trope: ‘And I loved
them
more than life itself.’

Students around us were yelling and laughing. We sat in silence. I could hardly meet
her eye. To have my residual fantasies of his innocence dismantled, blow by blow,
and out of his own mouth, filled me with an emotion I had no name for, though it
felt weirdly like shame. Our plates were thumped on to the laminex.

‘I’m coming round to that journalist’s way of thinking,’ said Louise, picking up
her chopsticks. ‘That he’s a selfish, cold-hearted bastard. Who betrayed his children’s
love and trust in the most horrible way.’

I was straining to hold it at bay. I wanted to think like a juror, to wait for all
the evidence, to hold myself in a state where I could still be persuaded by argument.

‘Journalists have to work very fast,’ I said. ‘That must be why they form a detached
view so early. We’re dilettantes. We’ve got time to wallow.’

She gave me a wry look. Without another word, we polished off the vegetable dumplings.

…

Was there a form of madness called court fatigue? It would have mortified me to tell
Louise about the crazy magical thinking that filled my waking mind and, at night,
my dreams: if only Farquharson could be found not guilty, then the boys would not
be dead. Cindy would drive home from the court and find them playing kick-to-kick
in the yard, or sprawled in their socks on the couch, absorbed in the cartoon channel.
Bailey would run to her with his arms out. They would call for something to eat.
She would open the fridge and cheerfully start rattling the pots and pans. I could
not wait to get home, to haul my grandsons away from their Lego and their light sabres,
to squeeze them in my arms until they squirmed. Young boys! How can such wild, vital
creatures die? How can this hilarious sweetness be snuffed out forever?

CHAPTER 6

Criminal barristers like to see themselves as free-spirited adventurers, armed with
learning and wit, who gallop out to defend the embattled individual against the dead
hand of the state. They love to perform. A rill of ironic laughter bubbles under
the surface of their discourse. There is something savage in the greatest of them,
and their brilliance is displayed to most devastating effect in cross-examination.

Peter Morrissey SC was not vain enough, I thought, to fancy himself one of these
dark riders. Still, no woman can ever quite grasp how acutely even the warmest and
most decent man cares about what his male peers think of him—even this one who, at
a break in proceedings, glanced up into the gallery and saw with a smile of open
gladness that his wife was looking down at him as he worked.

…

Greg King was the Crown’s star witness. Morrissey could nitpick about road camber
and steering-wheel turns and police paint marks
till he was blue in the face, but
surely it was on the jury’s response to King that his defence of Farquharson would
stand or fall. Morrissey would have to attack King’s memory, his truthfulness, his
personal honour, even his sanity. He would have to take him by the throat.

King stood in the witness box in his green-and-yellow-striped cotton shirt, clenching
his jaw, waiting for the onslaught.

First Morrissey, in a friendly enough tone, ran him through all the things King had
quoted Farquharson saying outside the fish-and-chip shop on that Friday night. King
agreed to all of them. Then Morrissey narrowed it down. Was King really alleging
that Robbie ‘then just stared at me in my eyes and said, “Kill them”?’

‘That’s correct.’

Morrissey raised his chin. ‘That’s false, isn’t it? You didn’t put that to him on
either of the two tapes, did you?’

King began to mumble. ‘I was too stressed and—’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Morrissey sharply. ‘You didn’t, did you?’

‘No.’

Morrissey leaned forward, propped his big footballer’s torso on both fists and let
fly. Had King then said to Farquharson, ‘Bullshit, that’s your own flesh and blood,
Robbie’? And had Farquharson replied, ‘So? I hate them’? That too was false, wasn’t
it? And when King warned him he would go to gaol, surely Farquharson hadn’t really
replied that he would kill himself before it got to that? Weren’t these very
extreme
statements? Farquharson had never before told King he was going to hurt his children,
had he? Hadn’t he only ever said that he loved his kids? Beautiful kids, weren’t
they? They obviously loved their dad, didn’t they? Farquharson gave them a lot
of
affection, did he not? Yet didn’t King claim that Farquharson had even told him the
place
and
date
of this cold-blooded murder of his three kids? Three beautiful kids?
Yes? Is that what King claimed?