PART FOUR

Anu Singh had been found guilty of manslaughter, but two months passed before her sentencing hearing was held. On that day, 21 June, I flew to Canberra and ran into D-C Hains outside the Supreme Court, lighting a cigarette in the lee of the building. He was the sort of man who, when shaking hands, kept his elbow bent so you had to stand quite close to him.

‘She could get as little as three years, you know,’ he said. ‘She’s already been on remand for six hundred and three days. She could be out in a year from now.’

My jaw dropped and he laughed, then pulled himself up. ‘Anyway it won’t happen today,’ he said. ‘This is only a hearing. We’re gonna hear more stuff. Another psychiatrist, and a parole officer.’

At that moment Anthony Cinque wandered up, in a loose dark jacket and sunglasses, smoking. There was something heart-stabbing in his smile. He was thin, wasted as if from within. He and Hains exchanged curt manly syllables.

‘Is she really only gonna get three years?’ asked Anthony.

‘Mate. Mate,’ said Hains quietly. ‘Mate, you gotta keep cool in there. It’s best for your family. Best for your parents.’

‘I’m worried about Dad,’ said Anthony.

‘Listen,’ said Hains. ‘There’s only one thing that’d change anything – if we could get Joe back. We all know that can’t happen. So you gotta keep cool in there. It’s what Joe would’ve wanted.’

‘I’ll keep cool,’ muttered the young man.

‘I know you will, mate. I know you will.’

I moved away, to let them talk in private. As I shifted my feminine sensibilities out of range, the detective’s language coarsened. The boy stood nodding, nodding, twisting his mouth, tearing the smoke from his cigarette in great gulps.

What Joe would have wanted. It was only rhetoric. No one can know what punishment Joe would have thought fitting – the man who more than anyone, except her parents, had felt for his killer and pitied her, as she thrashed about in the cage of her own nature.

With what an urgent rush Anu Singh and her guard entered the court! They moved differently from ordinary people – a disturbance, a commotion in the air, and suddenly they were there. Behind me one of her family sighed as she whisked past them and seated herself. She was dressed in a charcoal trouser suit with a fitted jacket. Her toes, their nails glowing with dark red polish, peeped out of her high, strappy black sandals. Her hair in its thick club was banded in black. In one hand she held a dark blue handkerchief. Despite her sophisticated heels, her feet were placed neatly side by side, like a good little girl’s.

The prosecutor who had conducted the Crown case, Terry Golding, was absent today. His job would be done by the Director of Public Prosecutions himself, Richard Refshauge, a tall, slender man in his forties with fair curly hair and long patrician cheeks.

I could not imagine what further material might be dredged up, but it turned out that three more people had something to say. As soon as Justice Crispin took his place, the Crown called the first of them, a man called Michael Ryan, a custodial officer at the Belconnen Remand Centre.

It appeared that Mr Ryan had ‘come to know’ Anu Singh at Belconnen.

‘You see them every day,’ he said. ‘You wake ’em, you put ’em to bed, you feed ’em, you talk to ’em . . .’

One day Anu Singh had handed him a letter in the yard. He skimmed the first few lines and stuck it in his pocket, then later transferred it to his locker without reading it. From his locker it went, still unread, with other unsorted stuff to his garage, until a domestic clean-up in April 1999, when he had found it and read it properly at last. The next day he handed it to the police.

The five large, closely-written sheets were handed up to Justice Crispin. While he perused them, leaning his head on his hand, I glanced behind me and noticed that Anthony Cinque, instead of sitting beside his parents, was occupying the very end seat of the back row of the gallery, right next to Anu Singh’s mother. I flinched at the thought of the psychic charge that must be zinging between them.

Justice Crispin explained that the letter was one Anu Singh had written, in some distress, shortly after certain other letters had been seized from her Belconnen locker and admitted as evidence in her trial. She believed that without the seized letters, which were damning, the Crown would not have had a case; in the letter now in the judge’s hands, she had asked Custodial Officer Ryan to help her commit suicide.

This letter, said Mr Refshauge, was relevant to her sentencing in that it showed such a striking absence of remorse. Mr Pappas claimed rather wildly that just because no remorse was expressed didn’t mean that no remorse was felt. ‘A young woman,’ insisted Refshauge, ‘who has graduated Bachelor of Economics, who has arrived at final year in law, who has been highly successful in her academic and social studies, but who suffers from a personality disorder and a depressive illness, and who writes that letter, is not remorseful.’

The judge, with his head in his hands, pored over the letter. Anu Singh’s mother sat in the back row beside the murdered man’s brother. One would have described her as elegant had she not looked so traumatised. Her eyes were closed. Her tired face was tilted back on an angle of dumb endurance. The only sound in the room was the low roar of the air-conditioning. At last Crispin spoke. Nothing was said in the letter about remorse, and its contents were relevant – but it was not dated, and since he had admitted the earlier letters, written closer to the time of the offence, out it went, and out of the court went Custodial Officer Ryan.

The second person to give evidence was a Senior Parole Officer called Naomi Buick, a slender, fragile-looking blonde in her forties. She read aloud her report, which was based on over five hours of interviews with Anu Singh, and sketched briefly a fresh version of Singh’s life story, adding a sprinkling of emotional details: during her affair with Simon Walsh, for example, she had become pregnant and had a termination, which had been ‘traumatic’ for her. ‘Joe Cinque understood the cultural situation with her parents. She “misses him like crazy”. He was possessive, constantly checking her whereabouts; she did not find this intrusive.’ I remembered Mrs Cinque’s complaints about the constant, driven, almost fanatical use of the telephone that had characterised their relationship right from the start. Perhaps they had been mutually obsessed, mutually anxious and distrustful; perhaps this was what they had thought of as love.

The account of her drug history that Anu Singh had given the parole officer was alarming. She had started in year ten with cannabis and alcohol, then at university moved on to acid, cocaine and speed. By June 1995, when she ended her relationship with Simon Walsh, she was taking drugs daily. She also used ecstasy and crystal meth, which caused hallucinations. Whenever she visited her parents (and Joe’s parents too, I thought, recalling the twitchy scene on the verandah that Mrs Cinque had described to me) she ceased to use drugs; withdrawing had brought on depression – and perhaps, I wondered, also the behaviour that her father had found disturbing on her visits home: the pacing, the crying, the skin-pulling, the sleeplessness).

In 1996 she had entered a cycle of bingeing and purging. This was when she had started taking the ipecac. She had been ‘too headstrong’ to accept her parents’ advice about getting psychiatric treatment. In custody, though, she had been taking a daily dose of Zoloft, and, in the words of the parole officer, ‘she feels freer now between four walls than she ever has before’. Her family had been visiting her in Belconnen every second weekend, and she spoke to her mother every day on the phone.

‘She says,’ continued the parole officer, ‘that she will still need to grieve for Mr Cinque.’

At this Mrs Cinque uttered a short sound of protest.

‘She misses the victim and says that if this hadn’t happened she would be married to him.

‘She wants to write to Joe’s parents.’

During her eighteen months in Belconnen Remand Centre, where male and female detainees are permitted social contact, Anu Singh had had ‘three romantic attachments’. Only one of these, she told the parole officer, was ‘of any significance’. The officer found Singh to be ‘an engaging, talkative, highly intelligent, educated young woman, but narcissistic. It is difficult to evaluate her expressions of remorse. She is self-absorbed and shows a paucity of personal resources.’

The Crown tendered a Victim Impact Statement written by Mrs Cinque. Mr Pappas, with a thoroughness that struck me as hard-boiled, objected to ‘a large portion of that document’. Justice Crispin scanned it in silence, and admitted the document in its entirety, but I felt cheated by the fact that it was not read out loud. Journalists would not be able to quote from it as they would, if they chose, from the parole officer’s potted history of Anu Singh’s hard times. Oh, if only Maria Cinque could read out the statement in her beautiful accent, to show her strength of character, to give voice to her family’s sorrow and rage in a public forum. I glanced at her. She sat silenced in the front row.

Now the defence called Dr Fatma Hadiye Lowden, a consultant psychiatrist whose qualifications were gained in Turkey and Australia. She was a blonde in her forties, pleasant-faced, broad in the beam, wearing a tailored jacket and calf-length skirt. The Canberra winter was chilly, yet under her high-heeled black sandals her legs and feet, like the prisoner’s, were bare.

She had made nineteen professional visits to Anu Singh in Belconnen Remand Centre, she said, flashing her a smile across the court. At their first meeting, Singh had presented as superficial, with great difficulty in expressing emotion. Since then, however, Dr Lowden had established greater trust with her patient, who had what was called ‘an as if personality’: she was able to put up a good facade. Dr Lowden had diagnosed ‘a borderline personality disorder which was complicated by either an eating disorder, or depression, or substance abuse, and maybe brief psychotic episodes’.

The psychiatrist, too, depicted Singh as ‘very upset’ about Joe Cinque, full of loss and remorse, and sure that if only she had accepted treatment earlier, she would now be ‘happily married’ and getting on with her life. Dr Lowden had asked her, as part of her treatment, to keep a diary. Often Anu Singh was so intensely emotionally distressed that she could barely read aloud to the doctor from this journal. The parts of it that made her ‘choke up’ were those to do with her pain, guilt and remorse ‘about what happened’.

Anu Singh would benefit, said Dr Lowden, from extended and intensive psychotherapy. Three to five years was the period over which she would require medication for her depression, that is, the biological part of her condition; and alongside that, she needed at least seven years, maybe more, of psychotherapy.

‘The core of the whole tragedy,’ said Dr Lowden, ‘is that due to her mental state she was not able to accept treatment. She is now ready. Given what happened to her, I suggest three to six months of hospital treatment. I believe she will recover from her condition.’ She would not, the doctor said, be a danger to herself or others in the future.

Maria Cinque, filing up the carpeted stairs for the lunch break, muttered to me, ‘Another one, eh. Another big pay cheque. This is all an act. The judge has already made his decision.’

D-C Hains pulled papers and tobacco from a pouch as he walked out the glass front doors of the building. He grinned at me. ‘What do you reckon?’

‘I don’t know how the Cinques can sit there and take it.’

‘Yes, there’s certainly something wrong with her,’ he said, skilfully composing a cigarette. ‘I’d be the first to admit that.’ He stopped on the path, took a big, grateful drag on his rolly, and laughed, emitting a column of smoke. ‘I understand that the Cinques want revenge. I don’t believe in it, of course. I know you can’t get it. But still – if anyone hurt my son . . .’

While we were talking, Anthony Cinque in his sunglasses was sitting on the ground with his knees bent to his chest and his shoulders pressed against the pale grey outer wall of the Supreme Court. He too was smoking, desperately, as if his life depended on it. What was he to do? Where was he to put himself? His pain and loneliness were terrible to see.

In a cafe at lunchtime I ran into one of the young journalists. We compared notes. Her sympathy for Anu Singh had lessened further, if that were possible. ‘What she needs is a good kick up the arse. And her silly friends. It was all a big game.’ She put on a thrilled, girlish, singsong voice: ‘Anu’s having a muuuurder party! Oooooh!’

‘I might write a book about it.’

‘You’re going to write a book? About that?’ She jerked her thumb at the court across the road. I nodded. She laughed scornfully. ‘Huh. Anu’ll love that.’

Under cross-examination by Mr Refshauge, Dr Lowden continued to avoid using the simple expression ‘what she did’. Again and again, with a spontaneous discretion, she dodged it.

‘She has never had time,’ said the psychiatrist, ‘to deal with what happened. Once the legal part is over, that will be the hardest time for her – coming to terms with what happened in her life. Exactly what happened on that day in 1997 she described to me as “a blur”. The bit she could remember was Joe gasping for air and she was trying to do CPR and there was blood everywhere, and eventually she rang an ambulance and –’

Mrs Cinque made a wordless sound of contempt.

‘At that session she was in tears, telling me how much she misses Joe – how much she wished this didn’t happen in her life. She told me about her constant thoughts of him, her sense of guilt and self-deprecation.’

Justice Crispin listened faithfully, his wigged head leaning low on his hand, his face solemn and thought-worn.

Anu Singh had not yet acknowledged to her psychiatrist that she had injected Joe Cinque with heroin and killed him. ‘There’s a difference,’ said Dr Lowden, ‘between logically accepting what happened and emotionally coming to terms with it. I expect to work on that a lot more, to get to the core of what happened.’ She made a delicate gesture, touching the pads of her thumb and forefinger together, as if deftly taking hold of a tiny, elusive thing.

The psychiatrist was warm, she was motherly, she was professional. The way she spoke about her patient was tinged with possessiveness. ‘I think she trusts me,’ she said earnestly, and a little flicker of spite ran through me: So you have gained the trust of this ‘witch’. You have tamed a wild, glamorous creature whom others fear and see as evil. You are not afraid of her. She will peck grain from your hand.

She told the court about a ‘love poem’ that Anu Singh had written about ‘very tender important moments’ with Joe, her love and longing for him, and the meaning of their relationship to her. ‘She couldn’t read it. She asked me to read it out. As soon as we scratch the surface, great emotional distress is underneath. She talked about her nightmares. Joe is always there. In one dream she found out that Joe was married to another girl – major distress and sense of loss, and then tears again.’

‘Huh,’ said Mrs Cinque loudly.

When Mr Refshauge pressed her for examples of remorse, however, Dr Lowden was obliged to paint with a very broad brush. She interpreted as remorse the fact that Anu Singh missed Joe very much, that ‘never a minute passes without her thinking of him’, that she wished she had had psychiatric treatment before ‘all these things got out of hand’.

‘“Remorse”?’ said Mr Refshauge. ‘In that she regrets that he is no longer here? Has she ever indicated what she might do as a result of these expressions of loss, guilt or remorse?’

‘She discussed with me writing a letter to Joe’s parents,’ said Dr Lowden. ‘ I supported her in this. I don’t know if she’s actually written it.’

Mrs Cinque shook her head.

‘She felt that Joe’s parents were so angry with her that they would tear it up or not even read it. But she was really aware of the pain caused to the family.’

When Mr Refshauge asked Dr Lowden to explain how Anu Singh’s mental abnormality had caused the offence she was guilty of, the psychiatrist shifted up a gear. ‘If she didn’t have this disorder,’ she declared, ‘she wouldn’t have ended up in this predicament. It’s well known that ten to fifteen per cent of people who suffer from this condition end up killing themselves. I don’t think anyone else in this room’ – the pretty doctor turned her head and cast a glance at the people in the public gallery – ‘would like to be in her shoes.’

Mrs Cinque uttered a loud, guttural scoffing sound.

‘Is there a risk,’ asked Refshauge, ‘that she will reoffend?’

Dr Lowden turned her torso forty-five degrees clockwise, and addressed her fervent argument not only to the judge but to everyone in the court. ‘Let’s say she gets into drugs again,’ she said, ‘and if she’s suffering from severe depression – there’s always a ten per cent risk. But anyone in this room, if they suffered from borderline personality disorder, if they had episodes of depression, if they had substance abuse – every single one of us would have that risk! We all carry that risk, if we’re suffering from that condition!’

The psychiatrist had picked up the antagonistic vibe. She was challenging our hostility, trying to crack us open: she was fighting to keep her patient out of prison. But people in the gallery sank lower in their seats. Some folded their arms across their chests and scowled at her under their brows. Mrs Cinque jutted her jaw. Her cheeks went hollow, and her face took on a bitter stubbornness.

The pitch of Dr Lowden’s voice rose. She sounded almost tearful. ‘This person is very severely ill. Being in gaol is like being constantly punished for being ill. Remand is not a therapeutic environment. If she’d come to me as a patient before these things happened, I would certainly have admitted her. I’m telling you!’ She swung back to the judge and threw out both hands to him, arms wide, in a passionate gesture of supplication. ‘She is severely ill! She needs treatment in the structured environment that a hospital provides – not a gaol! She was physically attacked at the Remand Centre, but she wouldn’t tell anyone about it – because in that culture –’

‘Objection!’ cried Mr Refshauge.

Dr Lowden sat back, flushed and unhappy. Again I thought how lucky Anu Singh was in not being at the mercy of a jury. If the body language of the listeners in the gallery was anything to go by, the psychiatrist’s ardent plea might have fallen on deaf ears; perhaps it would even have further hardened hearts already closed and locked against her.

Mr Pappas argued vigorously for a minimum sentence that would allow rehabilitation. ‘She accepts the tragedy of what she has done. This was not a man she disliked. This was a man whom she had planned to marry.’

Mr Refshauge invited Justice Crispin to impose a severe penalty. He asked the judge not to throw up his hands – not to decide that because nothing would bring back Joe Cinque, he would focus on rehabilitation. Hospitalisation, as proposed by Dr Lowden, would not do. The outrage of the community must be expressed. The taking of a human life, he said, was the ultimate crime, and there must be denunciation of it in the sentence.

By now Mr Cinque’s head was down on his arms, which were outstretched over the fence of the gallery. Beside him his wife was weeping.

Justice Crispin stirred on the bench. ‘They’re profoundly difficult cases to sentence, are they not?’ he said to the barristers in a quiet, almost conversational tone. ‘It’s obviously impossible to put oneself inside the head of someone who is seriously ill psychiatrically – and to make a judgement about what they were thinking, and why, and what measure of responsibility they had for their actions.’

He called for his diary: he would announce Anu Singh’s sentence on Thursday. But it was only Monday. Where would the Cinques go, in the meantime? What would the Singhs do? Would they go back to their devastated homes, and wait it out there?

At half past six that evening I walked across the tarmac in the dark. In a black sky hung half a moon, very high. The air was cold and smelt of wet grass. The fatigue I felt after the long day in court was also a kind of gratitude. I had been granted the inestimable privilege of looking into other people’s lives. What I had found there had absorbed my intellectual and emotional attention for many hours. Unlike the Cinques, unlike the Singhs, I could walk away.

As the small plane blundered along the runway and into the air, I suddenly remembered Facing the Demons, an Australian documentary I had seen on TV about restorative justice, the movement that sets up conferences between the perpetrators of crimes and their victims, or the families of their victims. The person I recalled most vividly from that hour of excruciating realness was a relatively minor figure, the mother of a young crim who had taken part in an armed robbery at a fast food outlet, in the course of which his mate had shot dead an innocent boy working behind the counter.

The mother, probably about fifty, had struck me as one of those mild women who are defeated by their sons’ destructive wildness. She had the demeanour of a church-goer, a dutiful, kindly neighbour: timid, thin, with short grey hair and big pale-rimmed glasses. She took her place in the ring of chairs and sat in a neat posture with her shoulders cramped. Her cheeks burned with an uneven flush. Her whole body was trembling.

The conference began. The murdered boy’s parents poured out at last their pent-up rage. His killer’s accomplices (the killer himself having declined to take part in the documentary) choked out maimed gobbets of speech or sat in shamed and brutish silence with their forearms across their thighs.

This mother waited for a pause, then began to speak. She stammered. She whispered. She tried to say that she felt herself partly to blame for her son’s character, for the terrible thing he had done, or helped to do, or allowed to be done. But the dead boy’s parents jumped on her. They came down on her like a ton of bricks. ‘It’s not your fault, Mrs X. He made his own choices. It’s not your fault.’ The woman subsided, unconvinced, unshriven, her entire face in spasm. Her son, a hulking, tattooed, low-browed boy in prison greens, sat silent beside her, holding her hand, his eyes fixed on the floor.

On the Thursday morning I took an early flight to Canberra. A man detached himself from the line of long black coats in the taxi queue outside the airport, and approached me.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I have the advantage of you – but would I be right in thinking I used to know you at Ocean Grove State School?’

Ocean Grove? I went to that school in the late 1940s. ‘You might. What’s your name?’

He said it. It was an unusual one, and at the sound of it I saw in a flash of shock a scene from my childhood: an angry man gripping a boy in short pants by the scruff of the neck, pressing his head down over an ugly grey cement basin where water streamed, and filling his mouth with foam.

‘I remember you! You had your mouth washed out with soap for swearing!’

He stood there in his good dark coat, holding his briefcase, and the smile faded from his lips. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘That never happened to me.’

‘But I saw it! I’ve told the story about a hundred times! I’ve dined out on it! I’ve never forgotten it!’

He kept shaking his head, looking at me in a puzzled way. ‘No, it wasn’t me. How could I have forgotten something like that?’

‘But I was there! In my double desk! The classroom door was open and we were all watching! It was awful! I remember you vividly! You were really clever! You had a brother! You were British migrants!’

‘Yes, I did, and we were. But I never had my mouth washed out with soap. No. Never.’

People in the taxi queue were listening and smiling. I gave up on it and stood impotently staring at him. We both began to laugh.

‘I married a girl who was in your class in Geelong,’ he said. ‘We’re about to move to Oxford. I’m going to take up a chair.’

We parted with expressions of good will; but his flat denial of the mouth-washing incident troubled me, and it still does. Nothing he said could expunge the scene from my memory, or even dim it: it shines as shockingly bright today as it ever did. If memory is not to be trusted, what can courts rely on? How can they establish what ‘really happened’? How can things from the past, even the relatively recent past, be proved?

The television crews were already loitering on the steps of the Supreme Court. Inside, Joe Cinque’s parents in their front row seats were surrounded by an intense group of police and Victim Liaison workers; but they seemed terribly vulnerable and alone. Of their son Anthony there was no sign. In the back row of the gently raked gallery, Anu Singh’s father wiped his eyes and nose on a big clean hanky. His wife sat very still, dark-faced, thick-haired, severe, her cheek twitching faintly.

The court was packed. There was a hum of subdued excitement. People bent to each other’s ears, hissing and whispering. Where had they been during the trial itself, its long arguments, its hours of tedium, its occasional flurries of drama? Why do people want only to be in at the kill?

Suddenly Anu Singh materialised between two women guards, one of them gripping her by the arm. Under her charcoal jacket she was wearing a striped cotton T-shirt, like the one she had on in the photo of her and Joe in the Cinques’ kitchen, that the papers ran and ran. She sat neatly on her chair and bowed her head.

At ten-fifteen a silence fell. It was like the moment before a funeral starts. I looked down at the Cinques. Mrs Cinque was crying quietly, wiping her eyes with a hanky, blowing her nose.

The tipstaff banged on the floor. We sprang to our feet and in stepped Justice Crispin to the bench, pausing only to make his sombre bow. He began to read aloud.

‘A profoundly tragic case . . . Ms Singh’s mental condition began to deteriorate . . . a bizarre and dark plan to kill herself, extending to killing Joe Cinque . . . a decent young man so full of promise . . . caused almost incomprehensible pain to those left behind . . . her parents blameless . . . tried to have her committed against her will . . . a tragedy for Anu Singh herself . . . lost her mental health . . . her plans for the future . . . sentencing unusually difficult . . . impossible to see clearly into the mind of the mentally ill and assess moral culpability . . . uncertainty about how long to serve . . . seriously ill psychologically . . . further psychiatric treatment in prison . . .’

Then, while the other fifty of us held our collective breath, he leaned forward across the bench and looked at Anu Singh, a few metres away on her metal-legged chair between the guards. She raised her chin and he spoke straight at her.

‘In the next few years,’ he said, ‘you will have to come to terms with the fact that you killed the man you loved. You have caused immense pain.’

The young woman wiped her eyes, but she kept her face up and continued to return his gaze, like a schoolgirl being hauled over the coals.

‘If you find the moral courage,’ he said, ‘you may be able to rebuild from this wreckage, to repay the trust people have put in you.’

Trust? Who had put trust in her?

The judge, for one. ‘Ten years,’ he said. Ten years with a non-parole period of four years. Back-dated to 26 October 1997, the day Joe Cinque died. I did the sum in the margin. She could be out by 26 October 2001. Two and a bit years from now.

The court let out its breath, and drew another.

‘I recommend she be considered a prisoner at risk. I publish my reasons.’

Pappas was on his feet. ‘May it please your Honour.’

‘The prisoner may be removed. We will now adjourn.’

The judge bowed and swept out. The wiry little blonde sheriff got down on all fours to yank open the trapdoor. Anu Singh descended once more into the hole. Once more Maria Cinque’s voice, solitary, thin at first, then gathering a hoarse strength, rose in the hushed court and spewed out curses. People stopped in their tracks and turned towards her. Transfixed by dread and by a strange, breathless need, we listened once more to her jeremiad: ‘You demon. Rot in hell forever. I’ll never ever forgive you. She’s a demon. My son – that’s all? Four years? How can you sleep at night? Four years? Is that all my son is worth?’

D-C Hains pushed through the frozen crowd in the aisle and stepped into the well of the court. He walked briskly along in front of the gallery railing, stopped before Mrs Cinque, seized the weeping, cursing woman by her upper arms, and gently kissed her cheek. The Victim Liaison people gathered around the Cinques and led them away, up the stairs of the courtroom and out into the lobby, along the carpeted hall past staring strangers, towards a place of shelter within the building. The supporters moved in a cluster, tightly jammed, like soldiers carrying two wounded comrades off the field; and the hot core of the group was Maria Cinque, stiff with anguish, staggering with her head back, wailing, weeping beyond shame. D-C Hains followed ten paces behind the stumbling group. Her sobbing cries streamed back to him. His face was closed.

Beside me in the lobby, watching this, stood a young TV reporter in a dark suit. Her smooth fall of blonde hair turned under perfectly at her shoulders. Her face was masked with makeup. She glanced at me.

‘Four years,’ she said.

‘She could be out in two and a bit.’

‘Before she even hits thirty,’ said the girl. ‘I’m nearly thirty. My whole life’s still in front of me.’

‘Still,’ I said. ‘She’ll have to live with what she did. They all will.’

The journalist said nothing. She was not convinced, and neither was I. We turned and walked out the big glass doors to the steps where the media crews were waiting in the bright, cold air, keeping themselves amused while the Cinques and the Singhs, in retiring rooms at opposite ends of the building, tried to compose themselves for the onslaught.

The doors opened and the press stirred, but it wasn’t the Cinques. A bearded man in his thirties with a hard face, square and mean, and a thin, ratty little plait hanging down the nape of his neck, emerged into the light. Beside him walked a broad woman who was obviously his mother. A car with a panel-beater’s logo stuck to the rear window screeched in to the kerb on the road behind the media. The pig-tailed man leapt with youthful vigour down the steps and across the footpath, yanked open the door and dropped sideways into the passenger seat. He lounged there, defiantly at ease, with one leg stretched out over the gutter. His mother, left like a shag on a rock at the top of the steps, saved her dignity by catching my eye and calling out, ‘Must be somebody important they’re all waiting for!’

‘What are you here for?’ I asked.

‘My son,’ she said. ‘That’s him, in the car. She says he come to her place and bashed her. Hit her in the mouth. But he wasn’t anywhere near the place!’ She smiled as she spoke, with an odd mixture of resignation and hollow bravado. ‘I’ve come up here to give him some support. You don’t like some of the things they get up to, when they’re grown – but you gotta back ’em, when they’re in trouble! The jury’s out. We’re just waiting.’

She fell silent. Together we watched her son blowing smoke out the open car door, sprawled there cursing and laughing coarsely with his invisible friend the driver. What sorrow or fear did her good-natured stoicism hide? Or did she really believe in this sleek, muscular thug with his nasty little pigtail?

‘Here they come!’ called the young woman from the ABC.

Maria and Nino Cinque stepped out on to the broad stage of the top step. A tide of cameras, microphones and shouted questions surged to meet them. The couple, squinting in the light, stood still for a moment, then Mrs Cinque began to speak.

‘For me,’ she said, ‘the sentence should be Hang on that tree over there. I know it’s not possible, but – for me, thirty years. When she come out, she’s sixty. That’s not possible, but it’s fair.’

Usually in public her husband stood quiet and let her do the talking. But one of the reporters shouted at him the hackneyed question: ‘Mr Cinque. How are you feeling?’

Nino Cinque stepped forward. ‘She write letter,’ he said, his voice trembling. ‘She say’ (he mimicked a falsetto tone) ‘ “I love him.” If she do good thing, why she don’t go to the other world and find him?’

The journalists closed in on him. His fragility was unbearable. I turned and ran away down the steps.

At the bottom I met D-C Hains, just hanging about. ‘What do you reckon, Haitch?’ he said, with his dry grin. ‘My wife was cryin’. She’s a police officer. She got upset because Maria got upset. Still . . . she got more than I expected.’

‘She could be out in two and a half years?’

‘Don’t be so sure!’ he said. ‘The parole board has to take her psychological condition into account – her own shrink said she needed seven years.’ And off he went with a wink and a wave, in his AFP jacket and tie-clip.

I set out for my hotel, but almost at once I spotted the Cinques across the stretch of unnaturally green grass that separated the Supreme Court from the Magistrates’. They had gone from the ordeal on the steps to sit out in the wintry air, on the terrace of the court cafe. I approached their table and stood at a respectful distance. When they noticed me they smiled and offered their hands. I leaned over and we exchanged formal pairs of kisses.

I was awe-struck by Maria Cinque’s composure. Nino Cinque maintained his place, with few words and a sweet expression, alongside the huge, elemental drama of his wife’s persona; but such power dwelt in her that others shrivelled in her presence, became wispy, insubstantial. She never grand-standed or behaved falsely; yet as their suffering and outrage intensified, there rose from the depths of her a tremendous, unassailable archetype: the mother. We recognised it. It answered to a need in us as well. Her outburst after the sentence was not a rupture of protocol. On the contrary, we had waited for her to speak, holding open a space for her to utter. It was an honoured and necessary stage of a ritual: a pietà. We listened in respect, almost in gratitude. We needed to hear the sufferer cry out against her fate, although we knew that for this pain and loss there could be no remedy.

That night I sat by myself in the empty hotel bar. The weight of the trial hung round me; I couldn’t shrug it off. Justice Crispin had said it was impossible to see into Anu Singh’s mind, to determine her moral culpability. But didn’t the fascination, the terror of her story lie in the fact that she embodied a barbaric force in each of us that we must at all costs control? I thought of her arriving at Silverwater in the dark, being bundled out of a horrible van. I tried to imagine her parents, how they must be suffering now at the thought of their only daughter in that place teeming with harsh, wild people who would corrupt her. Eighteen months in a provincial remand prison was one thing, but now she was being delivered to the very centre of punishment in this country to which her family had migrated, where they had thrown in their lot.

But she had killed someone. Perhaps she was already as corrupted as the worst of them. What is corruption? Is corruption ‘sin’? What is sin? Is it the inability to imagine the suffering of others? Surely she belonged in prison. Surely, now, she would pay for what she had done.

At last someone had cut through the euphemisms, the circumlocutions, and had stated it bluntly, in front of everyone, right to her face: ‘You killed the man you loved.’