This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (13 page)

‘I will say,’ was all she would concede, ‘that my husband’s been very upset over
the whole matter.’

It was the end of the court morning. As the journalists were getting to their feet,
Morrissey shoved along the bar table past his junior’s chair and faced us with his
hands planted squarely on his hips.

‘Those chops!’ he shouted, with a scornful laugh. ‘How important can a burning chop
be?’

…

Louise and I stepped out of the building into weak spring sunlight. We slid round
the mob of photographers and found ourselves walking east on Lonsdale Street only
a few metres behind Greg and Mary King. We trailed them discreetly for a block.

‘How can she not remember?’ I whispered. ‘Why would she lie about it? Or maybe he
didn’t tell her? Maybe he feels he should have, and wishes he had, and finally convinced
himself that he did?’

‘I think she’s repressed it,’ said Louise. She made a little vertical
barrier with
her flat hands. ‘It must be something she deeply feels doesn’t belong in her life.
And she just refuses to let it come in.’

‘Mind you,’ I said, ‘wives do get used to not listening.’

The minute the Kings got out of media range, they reached for each other with the
habitual gesture of a couple, and headed down the hill, hand in hand, with brisk,
firm steps.

…

Everybody knows that memory is not a simple accessible file whose contents remain
undisturbed from one inspection to the next. Memory is an endless, lifelong process,
fluid, active and mysterious. Nobody should be surprised, then, that King had remembered
things in bursts. But what, if anything, did it mean that, according to King’s first
statement, Farquharson had merely spoken of revenge and nodded towards his boys through
the fish-and-chip-shop window, yet in the later statements had said that he hated
the boys and wanted to kill them?

I did not think Greg King was a liar. Nor did I see him as the broken-spirited wreck
that Morrissey had laboured to conjure up. Still, something in me baulked at the
idea that Farquharson would have come out with such an explicit statement of intent.
Hate
?
Kill
? I tried and failed to hear him.

As it happens, I have kept a diary for most of my adult life. Like any journal-keeper,
I have a sharpened understanding of the way memory works. Once in a while, years
or even decades after some painful or important personal event of which I have retained
the most crisply detailed memories, I get an urge to read what I wrote on the
day
in question. I hunt out the exercise book and locate the exact date. There is rarely
anything surprising in the content: the story is always sorely familiar. But I am
often taken aback to find that aspects of the experience that I had clearly remembered
in the form of spoken dialogue turn out to have been no more than thoughts or silent
insights I had had in the heat of the moment and had recorded as such in the evening.
As time has passed, as the occasion has drifted in and out of my mind, my memory
has worked, without my conscious knowledge, to make explicit these waves of emotion
and private mental activity. It has translated them into passages of direct speech
and enclosed them in quotation marks. Yet, though they were at the time ‘no more
than thoughts or silent insights’, and though they were never uttered by me or anyone
else as speech, I notice upon rereading them that they still ring true to the tenor
of the experience. I can even say, with the authority of hindsight, that they are
the most convincing part of the account.

CHAPTER 7

Mild sunlight on the dam. Puffy spring clouds. The paddock is grassy. Its fence
is lined with thin saplings. A maroon Commodore, passenger side facing us, is dangling
horizontal from a crane, its tyres barely a metre above the surface of the water.
Men on the bank study the car as it hangs. A shadowy figure with an unnaturally large
head is ensconced in the driver’s seat. Down glides the Commodore on its chains,
gently, slowly, guided from the bank by wire cables. The sun makes huge spangles
on its duco. Just above the water it hovers. Behind the closed window the masked
diver at the steering wheel sticks up his thumb, then makes a forceful gesture. The
chains slacken and the car drops into the water, flat on its belly. It tips forward
at once and begins to sink. The rising water level slices on an angle across the
centre of its doors. The diver, visible only as head and shoulders, leans across
towards the passenger door and tries to open it. He fights with it, fails, then turns
his body more squarely towards it and tries again. It opens a crack, and shuts. The
car is going down.

Farquharson’s face, watching the video in Court Three, was
stretched into a gape
of anguish. He held his handkerchief to his cheeks with both hands. Bob Gambino and
Farquharson’s brothers-in-law strained to look up at the high screen, but the three
wives sat facing rigidly ahead.

Now the diver at the wheel turns his back to the camera on the bank and tackles his
own door. He opens it with apparent ease. Water must be rushing in, for the car lurches
and tilts to that side. In a few seconds the front half of the vehicle is completely
submerged. Its boot sticks up at a helpless angle.

The screen goes black. Then suddenly the camera is inside the car, at roof height,
looking down on to the front passenger seat and the interior panel of its door: we
are seeing everything again, from a new perspective. The diver’s left hand comes
into shot and reaches for the passenger door’s latch. He tries it, fails, then changes
hands, grabs the latch with his right hand and puts all his weight behind his left
palm which he slides rearward on the door. It opens a crack. Water gushes in and
fills the footwell to the rim of the seat, where a passenger’s knees would be. The
diver lets go his pressure, and the door clips shut, cutting off the flow. A second
of stability. Then another violent surge of water comes roiling up the video screen,
a creamy greenish tan, seething with distorted bubbles and flecks of matter. In seconds
it obliterates everything but itself. The camera goes on faithfully recording, its
gaze fixed on the blurred edge of the car’s instrument panel, but then it too is
drowned, and the screen goes dark.

This was the first of the police submergence tests.

The diver stepped into the witness stand like a character from an action movie: Leading
Senior Constable Simeon Ranik of the Search
and Rescue Squad, a tall, powerfully
built, dark-bearded fellow with a rumbling voice.

Very little water was coming into the car, he said, until he opened the passenger
door. As we saw, water rose to knee level. When he shut the door, helped by the water
pressure from outside, the flow almost stopped. As for the driver’s door, it was
fairly easy to hold it open for a number of seconds. When he took his hand off the
door and placed it on the steering wheel, the force of the water rushing in closed
the door. By then, the water was up to his waist. He tried several times to re-open
the door, but could not get it open. He kept pushing every few seconds while the
car sank, using his shoulder; but it was not possible to open it again until he was
totally submerged—until the car was filled right to the top of the door.

…

The second test. The car is dropped into the dam and the driver does not touch the
passenger door. All he does is open the driver’s door and get out.

Seen by the camera on the bank, it is a simple manoeuvre.

Then we see it again through the interior camera, which is fixed high on the rear
shelf of the cabin, the vantage point of a kid strapped into a toddler harness. The
instant the car hits the dam surface, the diver goes for his own door, shoves it
open with his powerful forearm, and scrambles out against a gush of water. He is
out, and gone, and the water invades, greenish-yellow with a wild curved top on it.
Three beats and the car is full of it. There is nothing left to breathe.

Farquharson wept without sound, wincing, desperately blinking, wiping his eyes,
blowing air out between his lips. His family sat bowed forward, pressing clenched
fists to their temples.

Did the diver have any difficulty opening the driver’s door, in this second test?

‘No,’ said the witness in his deep voice. ‘There was water rushing in and I could
feel pressure on the door, but it wasn’t adverse. It was a bit like someone leaning
on you.’

…

The third test showed what would have happened had the car gone down without any
of its doors being opened.

Seen first from the bank, gradually, gradually, nose down, on an angle, heavy and
slow, in endless silence the Commodore sinks into the dam. Its maroon colour loses
intensity and turns to rose. At the very last moment, air bubbles surge in twin streams
out of the disappearing boot. The water closes over it. Huge circles spread on the
delicately flushed and wind-riffled surface.

Then the two interior cameras show their sepia versions, more blurred and intimate.
In the first the camera is strapped to the headrest of the front passenger seat,
pointing across at the driver’s seat and footwell. For a long time nothing happens.
Why are we looking at this? Wait. Something flutters and flickers in the nethermost
corner: water, slipping in round the bottom seal of the driver’s door, and rising
towards the level of the seat.

Cut to the second interior camera, the child’s-eye view from the rear parcel shelf.
Again, nothing is happening. A minute, two
minutes tick by on the screen’s digital
timer. Then water begins to pool to left and right of the gear stick. Up it comes,
leisurely and secretive, commandeering the space with unstoppable authority, its
surface twinkling and wriggling. It rises and rises until it covers the two seat-backs,
and engulfs the camera itself. A ridged rubber floor mat floats up towards the lens,
soars past it like a stingray. Now the entire screen is water, a creamy grey tinted
with green. The car has taken almost eight minutes to fill and sink.

Except for the low roar of the heating system, the court was silent. Morrissey heaved
himself to his feet.

When Mr Farquharson’s car was recovered from the dam, he said to the diver on the
witness stand, a photo showed what looked like a gap of daylight round part of the
rear windshield. What if Farquharson’s back window had popped its seal? Could its
cabin have lost its bubble of air and filled with water
more quickly
than had that
of the test vehicle?

It was an attempt to plant in the jury’s mind a seed of hope—that the boys might
have drowned immediately, with no time for what we were all imagining: Jai battling
in the dark to free his shrieking brothers from their harnesses, fighting the boiling
chaos to reach the rear door handle, wrenching at the broken latch…

It was true that the police mechanics who inspected the car had found the rear window
partially dislodged from its cavity; but this was not part of the diver’s knowledge,
and he was unable to console us.

…

Louise had not turned up that day: she had an appointment with her orthodontist.
I was relieved. I often forgot that she was only sixteen. Did her parents have any
idea what dreadful things she was learning in my company? When court rose at 4 p.m.,
I plodded up to the Sofitel for a disconsolate martini. Next to the high windows
I spotted a senior public servant I had known when we were girls at university in
the sixties. She closed her laptop and we compared notes on our current work. The
mention of Peter Morrissey brought to her tired face an affectionate smile. She had
had dealings with him over the years. He was the kindest, the most decent of men,
a devoted worker for the underdog. ‘He’s always appearing for these sorts of people.’
She laughed, fondly. ‘And apparently he believes they’re all innocent.’

…

When I got home I sat out on the back veranda for a while, mumbling to myself, sick
at heart. My third grandchild came wandering round the side of the house. He approached
me without speaking, turned his back, and stood waiting to be picked up. I lifted
him on to my lap. He was only a few months younger than Bailey Farquharson had been
when he drowned. For a while the little boy sat on my knee. He relaxed his spine
against my chest. Together we listened to the clatter of the high palm fronds, the
wail of a distant siren. He glanced up sharply when a flight of lorikeets swerved
chattering across the garden. Then he spread his right hand like a fan, inserted
a delicate thumb into his mouth, and tucked his head under my chin.

And yet only two hours later, when he and his four-year-old brother disobeyed me
at bedtime and went crashing and yelling like
maniacs down the hall to the kitchen,
rage blinded me. I ran after them, grabbed the nearest arm, and yanked its owner
round in a curve. Before I could land a blow, I got a grip on myself. The boys stood
frozen in attitudes of flight. Nobody spoke. In a cold sweat I leaned against the
cupboard door and took some trembling breaths.

CHAPTER 8

The next morning Louise presented herself early at the coffee cart, looking hangdog.

‘I have a confession,’ she said in the queue. ‘I didn’t really go to the orthodontist.
I went to a movie. With some friends.’

I laughed. She blushed.

‘I just needed a break. What did I miss?’

‘Everything, smart-arse. Now you’ll never understand it.’

She gave me a pert look. ‘Also, I’ve got no money.’

I shouted her a coffee and we sat down on the concrete bench.

‘I realised yesterday,’ she said, ‘that I’m hooked. I started to rave about where
I’d been, but they didn’t give a shit. The only thing they wanted to know was, “Well?
Did he do it?” The least interesting question anyone could possibly ask.’

…

Nobody said that it was
impossible
for Farquharson to have coughed until he blacked
out. The best anyone could say was that it was highly
unlikely. But, as Mr Morrissey
would point out, the statistical rarity of any adverse event is of little comfort
to the person whose number has come up.