This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (25 page)

CHAPTER 15

I had ignorantly imagined the second trial proper, when it opened on 3 May 2010,
as a canter across old territory, with a few shifts of emphasis, a fresh angle here
and there—an up-dated production of a modern tragedy whose characters and plot and
poetry were so familiar to me that it had lost its power to devastate. But from the
first moment the very air in the court felt different. There was grit in it. The
benign courtesies, the comradely sharing of the crowded space were no more. In the
jostling for seats in the body of the court that day, in the banishing of Farquharson’s
supporters to the upstairs gallery, in the hostile glances and ostentatious turning
of backs, my usual morning nod to the lawyers was rebuffed at the defence end of
the bar table by a clutch of belligerently blank faces. It dawned on me that I was
being sent to Coventry by Mr Morrissey and his whole team. Without my gap-year girl
I was a shag on a rock. I backed away, hurt, to a seat remote from the action. A
court in a long trial is a desert island. We are all castaways. Why make enemies?

But soon I would find my new spot to be an excellent one, so close to the dock and
the glass-paned rear doors that, as witnesses
were dismissed and headed out of court,
mine was the last face they saw before they reached the exit—except for Farquharson’s,
which most of them avoided looking at. In their relief at being off the hook they
would shoot me a secret beam of fellow-feeling. One of the medical witnesses, forbiddingly
severe on the stand, sent me, on his way out, a tiny smile that sparkled with ironic
self-deprecation. In the strained atmosphere of a court the merest glance from a
stranger carries serious psychic freight. I had been declared a non-person by the
defence, but for the first time I felt that I belonged in that room, that I had earned
the right to be there.

I tried to be the first stranger each day to step into the high, white space of Court
Eleven. Its tranquil order moved and comforted me. Everything gently shone. Counsel’s
chairs and microphones waited in rows down the long table. Cool air streamed in from
some mysterious source. The tall flasks of water, each encircled by a cluster of
polished glasses, stood ready on blue mats.

‘Nice in here, isn’t it,’ I said to the tipstaff.

‘Think so?’ He surveyed his handiwork with a pleased smile. ‘Yep. It’s nice. That
is’—he threw out one hand towards the bar table—‘until all
this
starts.’

…

Morrissey fought to have the judge exile Gambino and her parents to the perspex-screened
gallery upstairs, where Farquharson’s family now sat; he wanted to protect the jury
from the ‘pageant’ of suffering he said she was likely to present. Justice Lasry
was working like a Trojan not to load the dice against the accused, but he would
not
come at this. So, when the new jury filed in, pale with dismay that their lives
were to be put on hold for at least eight weeks, Morrissey in his opening address
gave them fair warning: in cross-examination, even if she was distraught, he was
going to take Gambino on. The point was not to beat her up. It was to get answers
that would help the jury in their deliberations. When he pressed her on certain questions,
he said, they would need to be quite strong in their role. Only a wooden-hearted
person would not feel sympathy for Gambino, and he did. But this was not the Oprah
Winfrey show. His job was to ask questions, and that’s what he was going to do.

…

It was the Friday morning of the retrial’s first week when Cindy Gambino was called.
As she passed me on her way to the witness stand I saw that she had run a purple
rinse through her long brown hair, and that she was not the only person in the room
wearing purple. Meaningful dabs of it shone here and there, scarves, jackets, blouses.
Even the Homicide detective’s tie had a purple stripe. I whipped off my faded lavender
cardigan and stuffed it into my bag.

The calm that Gambino showed seemed natural, not the effect of medication. Once or
twice she flicked a glance at Farquharson. Asked if he was the natural father of
the three boys, she bared her side teeth at him in a quick snarl. The unspoken things
that had shadowed her original version of their relationship and his character she
now brought to prominence in a most unflattering light.

Even at the time of their marriage, she said, when they already had two children,
she knew in her heart that she did not really
love him. She had to fight past his
reluctance to have a third child. Farquharson was very protective, very possessive,
but he never called her or their kids by their Christian names. His nicknames for
the boys were Wobber, Bruiser, Bub. Cindy herself he addressed as Big Mama or Fat
Mama; he would grab her by her private parts. As Jai and Tyler grew bigger, Farquharson
used to get into play fights with them; he would stir them up till they got angry
and lashed out at him. Yet he left the disciplining of the children to her. He would
not smack them: he said that if he got really angry, he did not know how far he might
go. He whinged and moaned a lot, she said, always complaining that he was tired.
She was not physically attracted to him. Their intimacy faded and died. She was drawn
to Stephen Moules, but despite Farquharson’s suspicions she was not having an affair
with him. The marriage went downhill fast. She ended it in November 2004 and he went
back to live with his father. During an argument at her house after their separation,
Farquharson pushed her hard against a wall. She locked herself in her bedroom and
called the police. Later he came over and apologised, but she did not forget it.

Football was the main conduit between Farquharson and the boys. In the first trial
this was painted as something hyper-paternal, a passionate commitment on Farquharson’s
part that he had boasted of and worn as a badge of virtue. Now Gambino shrugged it
off as ‘his thing’. She had never denied his request to take the boys over to his
father’s house, but added a stinging detail: ‘He never really asked to have them
that often, and the children never ever asked, “Can I go and see Dad?”’

After she ended the marriage, Gambino said, Farquharson started to call the boys
by their proper first names, and stopped the
tormenting play. She quoted her favourite
aphorism: ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.’

On the Wednesday evening before Father’s Day, Farquharson phoned Gambino after tea.
They spoke for twenty minutes. It was a conversation that Gambino was no longer permitted
to say had made her fear that he was suicidal. He was very down and out, very ‘woe
is me’, very ‘glass half empty’. He hated living at his father’s. He wanted their
unfinished house to be sold so he could buy himself a place to live, and a new car.
He would never get ahead while he had to keep paying maintenance. He said he was
looking at starting some sort of business in Queensland. Gambino told him he could
not do that—he could not leave his kids.

…

The story of the night at the dam belonged to Gambino by right. Led by the new prosecutor,
Mr Tinney, she launched on it in a clear voice, spreading her well-kept hands in
expressive gestures. At the first trial she had dragged it out of herself with a
raw, agonised restraint, and people in the court wept with horror and pity. Now,
like her hair, the story was coloured by an element of self-consciousness. Her account
had become a recital, with the rhetorical figures and grace notes of a tale polished
by many a telling. How could it have been otherwise? No narrative can remain pure.
Often she spoke with a simple directness. Her tears, when they fell, were sincere.
But in spite of Justice Lasry’s hint that the prosecutor might ‘slightly increase
his degree of control’, Tinney gave her the green light, and she enriched her account
with the sort of emotional detail that causes judges to
scowl and journalists to
bend to their notebooks. While she ran up and down the paddock in the dark, she said,
she was screaming hysterically, ‘Please, God, not my babies, please don’t take my
babies, please, God.’ Until that night, Stephen Moules had never ‘admitted any feelings’
for her, but when he reached the dam and ran to her, he took her in his arms and
said, ‘Baby, it will be all right.’ And she characterised Farquharson’s demeanour,
as he stood watching the rescue attempts with his arms folded on his chest, in a
phrase that curdled with contempt: ‘like he’d lost his pushbike’.

…

Morrissey glided into his cross-examination with a pair of recorded telephone calls.
These had been captured, several weeks after the children drowned, by a bug that
the police had put on Farquharson’s phone. Gambino would have to listen, before a
roomful of strangers, to two deeply revealing conversations of which she had no memory.
Perhaps it was the intimacy of the exchanges that made her pull the faces she did,
at first, while the tapes rolled: the grimaces of a woman who has been married to
a man she did not respect, a man who needed a mother more than a wife.

She calls Farquharson at nine o’clock one morning, a fortnight after Father’s Day,
and asks him what he remembers of the accident. Her voice is quiet and matter-of-fact,
but Farquharson has surely been dreading such a call, for his tone is put-upon, and
the high-quality audio registers the fact that he is lightly panting: his heart rate
is up. He rattles out the account he has told to everybody: the coughing fit, waking
up in the dam, Jai opening the door, the
water coming in, his efforts to ‘go round
the other side’.

‘Jai opened the door,’ muses Gambino. ‘Shit.’ She must be sedated, she is so slow
and thoughtful, like someone hearing for the first time an interesting but only vaguely
surprising fact. ‘How did the kids get out of the seatbelts, do you know?’

‘Not all of them would have had their seatbelts off.’

Would have
? How come he didn’t already know? Hadn’t he asked?

‘They all did,’ says Gambino. ‘I asked Gerard Clanchy.’

‘What?’ Farquharson’s voice rises. ‘They must’ve undone Bailey or something.’

‘Yep. So I reckon Tyler’s undone Bailey.’

Starting to panic, he shifts oddly into the present tense. ‘Because how can—how can
I reach him from where I am?’

Dully she soothes him. ‘I know, I know, I know it wasn’t you,
they
know it wasn’t
you. I think the kids have undone their seatbelts and tried to get out.’

‘Oh
no.
’ He breaks into racking sobs.

For the first time it hit me that he must have fantasised their dying as instant
and total annihilation—boom, gone—as in a cartoon or a dream.

She tries to keep talking, in her rational, unexcited voice, but he weeps on. In
the far wifely reaches of herself, she begins to lose patience with him. ‘Come on,
don’t get upset. I just need to know what you remember.’

He gets a grip, he sniffs, he sighs, but his voice trembles and he bursts out crying
again. ‘How am I gonna get through all this?’

‘You’ll get through it, Rob, you will.’

‘They were the love of my life. I never, ever could hurt them.’

‘You know how much
I
wanted them,’ she says, with a flare of rivalry.

‘I’d never, ever hurt them.’

‘I know that!’ she snaps. ‘You don’t have to keep saying that!’

‘I feel like I’ve gotta try and justify myself to everyone,’ he says, breathing hard.
‘To the police. I’ve got this feeling they want to put me away.’

She asks him further questions that he struggles with and fails to answer. After
each burst of his revved-up gabble she emits a short, soft hum of attention, or lets
a pensive silence fall. This must be worse for him than if she were sobbing or raging:
she sounds authoritative, like someone to whom he owes but cannot give an explanation.
He protests that her questions are traumatising him.

‘But there are things I need to know,’ she says mildly. ‘As their mother.’

They agree that the two young blokes who picked Farquharson up on the roadside should
have tried to get the boys out instead of driving him to her place. Why hadn’t they
stayed with the car? This suggestion—so frightful and unjust—that the outsiders,
Shane Atkinson and Tony McClelland, are to blame seems for a moment to soothe something
in both of them. Then Gambino cuts it off with a brisk realism. ‘But it doesn’t matter.
There’s no point in talking like that now.’

Listening from her seat, Gambino darted one desperate look at Farquharson. Journalists
corkscrewed to stare at him. While the technician cued the second tape, jurors put
their heads together and compared notes, muttering.

…

Ten days later, Farquharson calls her late in the afternoon, ‘just to say g’day.’

Somewhere outside a rooster is crowing. A dog barks. She can’t talk properly, she
says. The medication has made her tongue swell. He speaks at length, entirely about
himself. Anything she says, in her thick, drawling voice, he tops, or appropriates.
She’s had a bad week? So has he. She has to make a statement to the police? Imagine
what
he’s
had to do. She has calm days and then really shitty days? That’s like him
.
Her mum’s been having panic attacks, can’t face going back to work? That makes it
hard on
him
. All those things affect
him
, ’cause he’s affected everyone’s lives and
it’s on
his
shoulders too. How much more torture are they going to put him through?
It rips his guts out that people would think he’d ever in his wildest dreams do something
like this. It fuckin’ hurts big-time and he suffers. Anyone knows he wouldn’t do
it.

How was it, she asks with a dreamy curiosity, that the car’s headlights came to be
turned off? He stammers and fumbles. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t remember
anything
.
Probably when it first happened he thought he was in a ditch. So he stopped the car,
just in case it was a fire.