PART ONE

The first time I saw Joe Cinque among his friends and family, the first time I ever heard his voice, was in the living room of his parents’ house in Newcastle, in the winter of 1999.

By then, of course, he had already been dead for nearly two years.

This is the story of how I got to know him.

The house he died in, on Sunday, 26 October 1997, was not far from the Canberra ambulance headquarters. The paramedics would have been able to reach him in a flash, but it took the dispatcher almost twenty minutes to get the right address from the hysterical young woman who placed the 000 call. Like all emergency calls, this one was recorded.

Male Dispatcher: Okay, and the phone number you’re ringing from?

Could I get an ambulance please? I have a person potentially overdosed on heroin.

Potentially overdosed?

Well, he’s not – he’s vomiting everywhere blood stuff.

He’s vomiting blood? Right okay, what’s the address?

Is that a bad sign?

What’s the address?

Can you hang on, please just tell me is that a bad sign?

That’s – well it’s not good if he’s vomiting blood.

Oh, is he going to be okay?

I don’t know, I’ll send an ambulance for them to check him out.

Fair enough.

What’s the address?

30 . . . Antill Street.

Is that a flat or a house?

Oh, it’s a flat.

What number in Antill Street?

What’s going to happen?

What’s the flat number?

Oh shit, shit.

Listen to me.

Oh, hang on, what am I going to do?

Settle down. Settle down.

Okay, what am I going to do?

Well if you tell me the address I’ll get an ambulance out to you.

Will he be okay?

I don’t know, we’ll have to get an ambulance to you to assess him. What is the number of the flat in Antill . . .

Is – is – oh shit.

What is the number of that flat in Antill Street?

It’s um, 79.

Flat 30, 79 . . . Is that correct?

Yeah. No – hang on . . .

Flat 30 . . .

Hang on, where’s the ambulance?

The ambulance is at Dickson. Now just calm down. What’s your name? What’s your name?

Oh shit, he’s vomiting blood, what are . . .

What’s your name?

Is he going to die?

What is your name?

Tell me, tell me, please.

What is your name?

Oh – oh God – Olivia.

What is your name please?

Olivia, Olivia – oh fuck – hang on, hang on . . .

What’s the phone number you’re ringing from?

Hang on, his heart’s still beating.

Good. Right, now just settle down, for God’s sake.

Flat 30, 79 Antill Street.

Flat 30, 79 . . .

No – 79 Antill Street.

What’s the flat number?

It’s a townhouse.

It’s 79 in Antill Street?

Yeah, yeah, get here quickly.

All right, we’ll get someone there shortly.

Phone disconnected. Recording resumed:

Male Dispatcher: Ambulance Emergency.

Yeah, 79 Antill Street?

Now listen to me – listen to me.

Sorry.

Just be quiet for a moment and listen to me.

Right, right.

It’s no good you carrying on like that if I don’t know where to send the ambulance.

Okay, 79 Antill Street, go . . .

What is the problem?

He’s OD’d on heroin I think.

Right, okay.

Quick, oh . . .

The ambulance is on its way to you now . . . Is he breathing?

I don’t know.

Well – check for me?

No.

Okay, do you know how to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?

There’s a lot of blood coming out of his mouth.

Right, okay clear that away.

How?

Roll him on his side . . . Put your finger in his mouth, and clear it out.

Right, right, hang on.

. . . Okay, do you know how to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?

Oh shit, oh shit.

Do you know how to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?

Yes, I do.

Well start doing it now.

What if there’s still stuff in his mouth?

Get the stuff out of his mouth, put your finger in his mouth and get it out.

Shit, shit.

You’ve got to do something about it. You’re the one that’s going to help him right at this moment. The ambulance is on its way to you . . .

What am I doing?

I don’t know what you’re doing. Has the patient got a pulse?

Has –

Can you feel the pulse?

Their heart?

Yes.

Yeah. Yeah.

Right, okay, continue mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Mouth – I’m clearing that.

Clear the airway and continue mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

His teeth won’t open – he – his mouth’s not opening properly.

Well, prise it open.

Yeah.

Pinch off his nose. Pinch off his nose, open his mouth, tilt his head back slightly and blow into his mouth.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, continue that – do not stop.

Oh don’t stop – okay.

Don’t stop . . .

Okay, is someone here? Someone’s here.

Just continue the resuscitation.

He’ll be all right, won’t he?

I can’t answer – I cannot answer that over the phone. Just continue the resuscitation.

Oh God, I can’t – I can’t . . .

Well, go outside and get the ambulance officers.

Is he there?

Go outside and get the ambulance officers. Two three, are you on location?

Ambulance Officer: We’re approaching.

As the ambulance sped towards the house, the paramedics spotted on the nature strip a young woman with long dark hair, desperately waving. They ran inside and up the stairs and found, lying diagonally across the double bed with the phone lead stretched over his legs, a naked young man. Vomit was coming out of his mouth before they even touched him: they saw that mouth-to-mouth resuscitation had filled his stomach with air. He was not breathing, but when they touched his skin, it was warm. They seized him and laid him on the floor with his feet pointing to the doorway.

‘How much has he had?’

‘He’s had a hundred and fifty,’ said the girl.

‘You mean three lots?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and he’s had some Rohypnol.’

The paramedics got down on the carpet and started to work on the young man’s body. The frantic girl asked them if they were going to use Narcan. No, they were not. ‘Massage his heart!’ they shouted at her, and she obeyed, but she didn’t pound his chest hard enough: like most people she had no idea of the amount of force it takes. They tried to get a tube into his trachea, to keep his airway clear, but quantities of dark brown vomit kept coming up his throat and out of his mouth. There was so much of it clogging his airway that, try as they might, they could not get the tube past it. The brown muck was everywhere, all down the sides of the bed and on the floor, and it kept coming. At the second attempt they thought they’d got the tube in right, but there was so much vomit in there that they couldn’t be sure. They laboured over his body for more than five minutes. When they saw that it was too long since he had taken a breath – when they saw that he was gone – they gave up the attempt and stood back.

The young woman began to shriek: ‘It wasn’t supposed to happen this way! We were supposed to go together!’ The senior ambulance officer tried to cover the dead man with a sheet, but the girl flung herself on the naked body and began to embrace it fiercely, screaming, ‘Can’t you do anything? This is not happening! I don’t believe this! You can’t stop! You have to bring him back!’ She tried to kiss the dead man; she sat on top of him, moving back and forth; she pulled at his face. They had to drag her out of the room. She kept fighting to get back in; when one of the paramedics blocked the bedroom door with the bulk of his body, she began to dart and rush about the house, moving restlessly from room to room, up and down the stairs, pacing, shaking both hands in front of her chest, rambling incoherently.

The paramedics called the police. The girl asked if she could go out and get some cigarettes. They told her she couldn’t go anywhere till the police arrived. They asked her if a suicide note had been written. She said no. She told them the suicide had been planned for two months, and that the dead man had taken the drugs at about three in the morning.

The fire brigade arrived. One of the three fire officers was a woman. She noticed that the distraught girl was wearing a long, pale dress in a light-weight material: its skirt was stained with long streaks of dark fluid. Her lips and the skin around her mouth were smeared with dark stuff. The girl told the woman firefighter that the dead man’s name was Joe. ‘He had a lot last night,’ she said urgently, gripping the fire officer’s arm very tight. ‘He had a lot this morning. Who’s going to tell his parents?’

Into this squalid, hysterical scene walked four police officers: one uniformed woman and three male detectives.

‘What happened?’ asked one of the men.

The girl replied in a babbling rush. ‘The original plan was I was going to do it,’ she said. ‘We were supposed to go together. I gave him four Rohypnol. I’d had some. Then . . . I had some heroin – I just kept pumping it into him to put him to sleep, so he wouldn’t –’

The detective cut across her. ‘Listen carefully. You are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, and anything you do say will be recorded and may later be used in evidence.’

‘Yes – yes,’ she said.

‘Wouldn’t what?’

‘Wouldn’t be awake when I killed myself.’

They arrested her near the front door of the house, and put her into the police car. She tried to get out, she fought to get out, so they handcuffed her. Her name was not ‘Olivia’; it was Anu Singh. They drove her to the police station, and charged her with murder.

Two days later, the police went to the house of Singh’s closest friend, Madhavi Rao, and took her in as well. She too was charged with murder.

The first I heard of this tale was in March 1999. I received a phone call at home in Sydney from a respected senior journalist. He wanted to put me on to a story he had heard around the traps. Two young women, Anu Singh and Madhavi Rao, law students at the Australian National University, were being tried in Canberra for the murder of Singh’s boyfriend. The journalist wasn’t too clear on the details, but there was a bizarre touch – a special dinner party had been held at the couple’s house before he was killed. Had the guests been told that ‘the crime of the century’ was to be committed in the course of the evening? Anyway, Rohypnol in the young fellow’s coffee, heroin in his arm, convulsions, vomiting, death.

A dinner party? My imagination supplied, with distaste, a cartoon version of the scene: a candle-lit table of glossy students in their twenties, flashing their brilliant teeth and lashing about with their manes of hair, while in their midst, sitting modestly, smiling to left and right, believing himself loved and among friends, their chosen victim picked up his fork to eat his last meal.

Apparently, said the journalist, the one whose boyfriend had been killed was ‘head-turningly beautiful, the daughter of a wealthy family, spoilt rotten’. The other one he hadn’t heard much about, but the word seemed to be that she was ‘nicer’. He wasn’t sure how to pronounce it or what nationality the victim was, but the name, he thought, was something like Cinque.

‘If it’s such a great story,’ I said, ‘how come you’re not writing it?’

‘Look,’ said the journalist patiently. ‘I can do history. I can do politics. I can even do economics, at a pinch. But I can’t do psychology.’

He didn’t spell it out – you’re interested in women at the end of their tether – but I saw at once why I was the writer he had called. Four years earlier I had published a book of reportage called The First Stone, about two young women law students in Melbourne who had brought charges of assault against the head of their university college. By questioning the kind of feminism that had driven the story, and by writing it against the determined silence of the two women and their supporters, I had opened myself to long months of ferocious public attack. The parallels between that story and this one were like a bad joke. No way was I going back out there.

As it happened, though, I had recently been forced to acknowledge that I was a woman at the end of my tether. I was fifty-five. My third marriage had just collapsed in a welter of desolation. I was living alone in Sydney, in a rented flat, on the fifth floor of a building on the top of a hill. I had no job, and lacked the heart to look for one. I knew I had to get out of my own head, to find some work to do. The journalist, whatever his motives, was offering me a story. But what did I care about these students and their trashy adventures?

It was only a feeble sort of politeness, the inability to say a straight no to someone who thought he was doing me a favour, that made me copy down the phone number of the journalist’s contact, and call it.

The person who answered the phone was a tentative young woman. She told me she had been acquainted with Anu Singh and Madhavi Rao at university; she was a close friend of one of the guests at the fateful dinner party.

‘I’ve got ethical problems,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to rat on my friends. But the story’s in the public domain now, isn’t it.’

She sounded less than convinced by her own argument, but offered to meet me in two days’ time at the NSW State Library cafe in Macquarie Street. A blue-stocking, I thought; a swot. She’ll chicken out for sure; and when she does, I’ll be able to fade out too, without giving offence to anybody. But before our date, acting on a trickle of curiosity, I went to the office of a newspaper I often wrote for, and asked to see the cuttings file.

It was already surprisingly bulky. The murdered man’s name was Italian: Joe Cinque. He had been killed on 26 October 1997. The two women had gone on trial together in 1998, but a month into those proceedings, a legal problem had arisen. The jury had been dismissed and the joint trial aborted. The women were now to be tried separately, each with her own defence counsel. The trial currently in progress was Anu Singh’s.

Anu Singh, I gathered from the phlegmatic daily court reports, was the daughter of two doctors, a rather bright student who had come from Sydney to Canberra to study law at ANU. She was a keen recreational drug user and her student career had been chequered. But by 1997, the final year of her course, she was living in the Canberra suburb of Downer with Joe Cinque, a young civil engineer variously described in the press as her boyfriend, fiancé and de facto husband. He was a stable fellow with a good job and they planned to marry as soon as she graduated.

Singh’s closest female friend was Madhavi Rao, by all accounts a quieter and more studious person. Like Joe Cinque, Rao was devoted to the floridly glamorous Singh, and solicitous of her welfare. But looking after Singh seems to have been an ever more onerous task, for she was a drastic dieter and a driven frequenter of gyms, obsessed with her physical imperfections both real and imagined: she had worked hard for her six-pack; she declared that she would ‘rather be dead than fat’.

During 1997 Singh got into her head the idea that she was suffering from an incurable and fatal muscle-wasting ailment. She consulted dozens of doctors. None of them would confirm her diagnosis but her conviction was unshakeable. She traced her condition to the fact that, in her endless quest for thinness, she had swallowed large doses of a vomit-inducing syrup called ipecac. This, like many things that were wrong in her life, she blamed on Joe Cinque: she claimed he had told her that models used ipecac to control their weight. She resented, too, the fact that while living with him she felt as if she had effectively ‘become a housewife’.

A month before she killed Joe Cinque, Singh had apparently approached a university counsellor, and alleged that Joe had hit her several times and abused her verbally. She claimed that Joe blamed her for the abuse, saying he had ‘never been violent to a woman before’. But she could not leave him, she told the counsellor, because she was rendered financially and emotionally dependent on him by her ‘medical condition’.

In the terse style of the press clippings, the story grew more and more bizarre. Singh’s fantasies were far-fetched and fluctuating. She used the words ‘vendetta’ and ‘rampage’. She bragged to companions that she had studied psychiatric texts and knew the law, that it would be easy to convince people you were insane. To her friends she spoke often and dramatically of killing herself – and as for Joe, she told some friends she would drug him so he would be asleep while she committed suicide, and others that she would go the whole hog and take him with her.

Madhavi Rao, whose counsel had described her as ‘a doormat’ with a tendency to ‘become involved in flights of fancy’, had apparently been privy from the start to these plans. Together the two women were said to have researched suicide methods at the university library. Singh tried to get hold of a gun. When this failed they turned their attention to drugs. Fellow-students were happy to give Singh and Rao injecting lessons, to score heroin for them and even to explain what dosage would bring about instantaneous death. Guests were summoned to a dinner party. After they had gone home, Singh laced Joe Cinque’s coffee with the sedative Rohypnol, then, while he was unconscious, gave him a lethal hit of heroin.

But the young man did not die the prompt and quiet death that she had been advised would follow such a dose. He lingered. For hours. Right through the night and into the following morning.

Towards noon, according to the cuttings, Singh started to get cold feet. She phoned the friend who had got hold of the Rohypnol for her, a girl called Bronwyn Cammack, and told her what she had done to Joe. His lips, she said, were ‘a tiny bit blue, and he was taking a breath every ten seconds or so’. She begged Cammack to come over and revive him. Cammack, a sometime heroin user, insisted Singh dial emergency at once. Singh threw an hysterical fit: Joe didn’t know she’d given him the drugs – if the paramedics brought him round with Narcan, he would find out what she’d done and would be furious. Cammack stood firm. So Singh dialled 000, but by the time the ambulance reached the house, it was too late.

While she was in custody after Joe Cinque died, Singh wrote a series of letters to her family and others. These were seized from her locker at the Belconnen Remand Centre, and admitted into evidence at her trial. I watched him die, she wrote. Didn’t save him. Then I thought, fuck, I don’t want to die . . . The prosecution has a very strong case against me. I could be looking at 20 years . . . What a mess I have made out of a potentially perfect life. How much I wish this didn’t happen so my life could be normal now – married to Joe, couple of kids, luxury, the works. I had the perfect life. Attractive, money, law career, everything. Now nothing because of my utter, utter stupidity . . . I could have had the most wonderful man in the world . . . Now everyone else is better off than me, when I had it all . . . I bet everyone is laughing at me now. People would have envied me before. Now no one would want to be in my shoes.

The letter got under my skin, with its panicky tone, its angry, shallow clichés. I had it all. Luxury, the works, the perfect life. It was a very adolescent voice. She seemed to lack a language deep enough for the trouble she was in, a language fit for despair. With dread I recognised her. She was the figure of what a woman most fears in herself – the damaged infant, vain, frantic, destructive, out of control.

In the fluorescent glare of the newspaper office I studied the pictures, smudged and blackened by the photocopier.

The first was an indistinct close-up, perhaps from a family album, of a young man with his peaked cap on backwards. He grinned frankly, straight into the lens, but the flash had bleached out his forehead, nose and mouth; the contrast gave his eyes a dark, warm glisten.

The second photo showed the same man standing against what looked like a kitchen wall. He was holding proudly in his arms a slender young woman in a striped T-shirt and black jacket. Her dark hair was up, her eyebrows were skilfully plucked into wing shapes. The man’s bare arm was strong, but the masculinity he radiated looked very youthful: he reminded me of the Italian and Greek high school boys I used to teach. He held his chin up with a shy, almost defensive smile, while the girl in his embrace turned her head to beam into the camera with the ease of someone accustomed to being adored and to looking good in photos.

The third picture was crisply focused, a professional news shot of a different young woman, against a background of asphalt. She paid the camera no attention. Her black hair was bobbed, with a centre part. She wore an open-necked striped shirt, rimless spectacles and no make-up. She looked serious, round-cheeked and strong-browed.

Anu Singh raised my girl-hackles in a bristle. Joe Cinque provoked a blur of warmth. Madhavi Rao filled me with a wary, puzzled curiosity. These were my instinctive responses, and over the ensuing years, as I picked a path through this terrible story, they remained remarkably stable. But that day in the newspaper office, ploughing through the repetitive cuttings, I thought it was all a waste of time. I was way behind the action. I had already missed the entire Crown case against Anu Singh. There was nothing here for me. I might as well go home.

Still, I kept my rendezvous at the State Library. The contact turned up, right on time: a straight-backed young woman with well-brushed brown hair and an intelligent, watchful face. We sat down and ordered coffee. I knew her name but she begged me, with an anxious grimace, for anonymity.

‘I’m angry,’ she said. ‘I never even met Joe Cinque, but I’m angry. People close to this have been miserable ever since – even the ambitious ones. It stuffed me around, and I’m peripheral. It’s the waste – the waste of someone’s life.’

She described the two women in fast, vivid strokes: ‘Anu’s tall. She’s thin. She came across as a very sexual person. She talked about sex a lot. She always had lots of men after her. She’s got the hair to the knees, the tailored suit – whereas Madhavi’s more the independent rock, Triple-J type of woman, with a pierced nose – warm, and a bit vague, with strong beliefs about stuff like environmentalism. Madhavi won’t cope in gaol. Anu will, but not Madhavi. She’ll be manipulated.’

Most of all, she wanted me to understand about drugs. This story might strike me as weird, she said, but in Canberra as it was in 1996, 1997, 1998, when hard drugs had cut a huge swathe through the city, it wasn’t weird at all. Small-time dealers hung out at all the university colleges. There were a lot of bored rich kids. The ANU Bar was where people would go to buy dope. Plenty of drugs were exchanged there for sex: fresher girls, she said, were ‘prepared to fuck guys in the toilet in exchange for a couple of tabs of ecstasy’.

I tried to register this gross fact without blinking, but she flashed me a wry look. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘I brought you something.’ She took out of her bag a folded sheet of newsprint and passed it across the cafe table. We shook hands and said goodbye.

On the train home I opened the paper she had given me. It was a double-page tabloid spread from the Daily Telegraph’s report of the committal proceedings: the transcript of the emergency call that Anu Singh had made to the paramedics while Joe Cinque lay dying on their bed.

It was the shrill blast of this dialogue that broke through my indifference and galvanised me: the killer’s voice pleading, dodging, feinting; the dispatcher’s desperate striving for command; and the jolting visual flashes of Joe Cinque’s death throes – the close presence, behind the screaming, of a young man’s body in extremis – his limbs, his mouth, his teeth, his heart.