On the Monday of the trial’s third week, waiting and gossiping with the media people outside the court in weak spring sunlight, we calculated that the following day would be the second anniversary of the children’s deaths. Imagining Farquharson’s dread as the date approached, I allowed myself the luxury of the word pitiful. One of the print journalists, a court veteran whose work I had long respected, spun round and bit my head off.
‘Pity?’ she cried. ‘How can you say he’s pitiful when he’s done the worst, the most terrible thing? Murdered his own children, who trusted and loved him? Three of them! Premeditated! And to get back at his wife! The utmost betrayal! Why is that pitiful?’
I flushed and fell silent. But that morning, when Farquharson was brought up from the cells and stuck out his hands at the door to have his cuffs removed, he looked even more blighted and rigid than usual. The next Crown witness would be his former wife.
Cindy Gambino slid in without fanfare, past the seats where her family and Farquharson’s sat tightly wedged. How small she was, this woman whose loss was beyond imagining, yet who would not lay blame. Her hair hung past her shoulders in silky falls. Her smooth face with its large, heavy-lidded eyes showed no expression, but her skin was the pale greyish-brown of a walnut shell, as if grief had soaked her to the bone, and she walked so carefully that she appeared to be limping. The raised witness box, near the front of the court, and the dock at the back were only fifteen metres apart. Down the length of the court, above the lawyers’ heads, Gambino and Farquharson would have to look straight at each other.
Mr Rapke leaned forward over the bar table and narrowed his eyes at Gambino like a man gazing into too bright a light. When he named the dead boys and gave their birth dates, when he asked her if she was their natural mother, Farquharson pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket, held it to his face with both hands, and began to weep.
For several years, said Gambino, she had known Farquharson merely as a friend. Then, in 1993, a year after the man she was involved with was killed in a road accident, she took up with Rob, who, at twenty-four, was still living at home with his parents. Even after they set up house together, Gambino was haunted by her grief for the man who had died. Soon Farquharson told her that, if they were going to get serious, she would have to put away her mementoes of him, take down his photos, and stop wearing his ring.
In 1994 their first child, Jai, was born. Postnatal depression joined forces with her unresolved grief, and she and Farquharson needed help from a counsellor.
He was not happy working for the shire. In 1996 he arranged a redundancy payout, and they bought a Jim’s Mowing franchise. Farquharson lugged his mower through the surrounding countryside, along the Surf Coast and down the Great Ocean Road, but the work was too much for him on his own. They lost money and had to surrender the franchise, which dropped them into $40,000 worth of debt.
‘I had a lot of resentment against Rob,’ said Gambino. ‘He wanted to work for himself. I didn’t want him to.’
Their second son, Tyler, was born in 1998. They had to move in with Gambino’s parents in Birregurra for six months, with the two little boys. Eventually Farquharson found a steady job as a cleaner at the Cumberland Resort in the upmarket seaside town of Lorne, where Gambino’s mother was in charge of hospitality. They managed to pull their finances into better order.
In 2000 they married. They built a house, but the work was not done to the standard they wanted. They sold it and moved into a rented place. In 2004 they bought a block of land in a Winchelsea street called Daintree Drive, and started to build another house.
All this moving, these houses. It seemed that Gambino’s will had been the driving force in the relationship, that she had had to drag her man through life. She had ambitions and restless hopes that his energy could not match. Their needs were at cross-purposes.
‘Rob didn’t want to build. He wanted to buy an established house. But I wanted to build again. We agonised over that. I usually got my own way.’ She gave a small, wretched laugh. ‘I wanted another child. Rob was unsure. He didn’t know if he could cope with three children. But he was pretty much a softie. He always gave in to what I wanted.’
Tears began to slide down her cheeks. Farquharson wept on, behind his red velvet rope. Except when he scrubbed at his face with his handkerchief, he did not take his eyes off her.
Rob’s mother, whom he loved and was very close to, was diagnosed with cancer in 2000, and died in 2002, the year Bailey, their youngest, was born. ‘He grieved,’ said Gambino. ‘He had mood swings. He was always down and out. He felt like he was never happy. I can understand that.’
By now she was speaking in a series of soft, gasping cries. Farquharson leaned forward with his elbows on his thighs and mopped hopelessly at his tears. People in the court had their hands over their mouths. The air was filled with a faint rustling.
Farquharson suffered from foot and back pain, exacerbated no doubt by his slogging physical work. When he got sick, he got really sick. Gambino had never seen him pass out from coughing, but most winters he had a cough that would sometimes take his breath away. If he went to the doctor about it, he would be told, ‘You’ve got what everyone else has got. Deal with it.’ Gambino’s experience of postnatal depression allowed her to recognise some of her husband’s symptoms, particularly mood swings and sleeplessness. She urged him to get help, but he would say, ‘No, I’m not depressed. I’m all right.’
By the latter half of 2004, Gambino was coming to the end of her tether. ‘I found it throughout my marriage very hard,’ she said, ‘to give my heart to my husband. You can love someone, but you can also be in love with someone, and I found it hard to be in love with Rob. He was a very secure person, he was a very good provider, but I just found it hard to give myself to him.’
In October 2004, when Bailey was almost two, Farquharson agreed at last to see their family GP about his mood swings. Dr McDonald put him on anti-depression medication, but for Gambino it was already too late. She levelled with him the following month, and it came at him out of nowhere.
Mr Rapke left her the silence, and she filled it, holding a handful of tissues to her eyes, her voice so high and weak that we had to strain to hear.
‘I didn’t want the marriage any more. I asked him to leave.’
There it was, the unbearable blow she had dealt him—expulsion from his family and his home. Like so many emotionally numbed, inarticulate and stoical husbands, he had failed to see it coming.
‘He went to live with his dad,’ she said. ‘He was devastated. It was a case of you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.’
‘Did you consent to see him,’ asked Rapke, ‘after you separated?’
She gave a harsh gulp. ‘I think I had him over to tea once. And that was for the children’s sake.’
I did not risk a glance at the journalist who had forbidden pity. But surely mine was not the only heart to ache, at that moment, for the hunched and humiliated figure in the dock.
…
Cindy Gambino was at pains to stress that the concreter, Stephen Moules, had not been the cause of her marriage break-up. They met in the winter of 2004. In September she engaged him to pour the slab for the new house. By November she had sent Farquharson back to his father.
Moules was still extricating himself from a child-custody mess with his former wife. He needed to maintain things with Gambino on a friendly footing, and for quite some time he kept her at arms’ length. It was not till after she ended her marriage that their relationship grew more intimate. When they began to sleep at each other’s houses that summer, Farquharson took it badly, but he claimed not to care what she and Moules were doing. His jealousy focused on the children. It bugged him that his boys had to associate with Moules’ two unruly sons. Jai Farquharson, at ten, became a very different little boy: he believed he would never be happy again. His parents, in turns, took him to see a counsellor for help in managing his anger and sadness. In spite of Gambino’s assurances, Farquharson was afraid of being edged out of his children’s lives. He feared that Moules was going to take his place as their father.
It took a while for Farquharson to get the hang of being a part-time dad in his own father’s house, which Gambino found so cold and child-unfriendly that she called it ‘the morgue’. He was not confident with Bailey, the toddler. At first he had the boys to sleep over only rarely. But football was their shared obsession and, once the season started, they stayed with him every second weekend.
Farquharson had agreed, without need of Family Court involvement, to pay maintenance at the monthly rate laid down by the Child Support Agency. Half of it he put straight into the mortgage payments on the house, and the rest he gave to Gambino, who as a supporting mother was receiving her own government cheque. He liked to buy his children gifts of clothes and toys, but financially he was struggling. He could not see how to get his life back on track. In the winter of 2005 his wages went up, and his maintenance payments were about to be raised accordingly. The letter announcing this increase did not arrive until after the boys had died, but he knew it was coming, and he was very angry with the Child Support Agency. He thought they ‘didn’t give the guy a fair go’. On what would turn out to be the last Wednesday of their children’s lives, Gambino suggested to Farquharson that he should stop paying her the non-mortgage part of the maintenance, and put that money towards a house of his own, so that when the boys wanted to see their dad they could hop on their bikes and go. But he said no, because it was not legal.
And then there was the sore point of the two cars. At the time she ended the marriage, Gambino had pressed Farquharson to take from their house whatever he liked. Many a rejected spouse has heard that rush of guilty generosity at the door, ‘I’ll give you everything!’—with its unspoken rider—‘except what you really want: my love’. The only thing she asked for, because she would have the kids full-time, was the newer of their two cars—a 2002 VX Commodore. The dejected Farquharson went along with it, but he did not like it one bit.
…
Father’s Day 2005 did not fall on one of Farquharson’s scheduled access weekends, but at Jai’s football presentation on the Friday evening, Gambino suggested to Farquharson that she should bring the boys to him on Sunday afternoon for a special visit. They arrived just as Farquharson got home from work. They brought gifts they had chosen for him: a framed picture of themselves, and a set of saucepans. Jai, the eldest, was upset because he had forgotten to bring a wooden back-scratcher that he had bought especially. The boys asked if they could stay with their father for tea. He was not expecting them for a meal, and had no food in the house. The children saw the chance for a rare treat: Kentucky Fried Chicken in Geelong. Farquharson agreed to have them back at Gambino’s place by 7.30 p.m.
‘It was three o’clock,’ she told the court. ‘Bailey said, “Cuddle, Mum”. I gave them a cuddle.’ Her voice rose to a register almost beyond audible. ‘That was the last time I saw my children.’
…
Gambino and Stephen Moules spent the rest of the day in Geelong, where Moules had to inspect the progress of a job. They got back to his house in Winchelsea by 6.30 p.m. and he started to cook the tea. Just before the appointed hand-over time, Gambino drove to her own house, taking with her Moules’ younger son Zach, who was keen to see her boys. Ten minutes later, while she was drawing the curtains against the dark, she saw a white Commodore pull in. ‘Here they are now,’ she thought.
But on her doorstep she found Farquharson with two men. He was saturated, delirious, and he kept saying, ‘The kids are in the car. They’re in the water.’
In the witness stand Gambino began to rock on her feet, a rhythmic swaying.
She called Moules on her mobile, then jumped into her car, with Zach beside her and Farquharson in the back seat, and headed out on to the Princes Highway. ‘Where? Where?’
‘Near the overpass!’ Farquharson shouted. ‘Keep going. Keep going!’
The boy screamed, ‘Slow down! You’re frightening me!’
She looked at the speedo. She was doing 145. She pulled up near the guardrail of the overpass.
‘We couldn’t see the dam. It was so dark, we couldn’t see anything.’
Moules and his cousin arrived in another car, and ran into the paddock.
‘We were trying to find out where the car had gone in,’ said Gambino. She began to sob. ‘The wire was down. It was spread across the paddock. Rob asked Stephen for a cigarette. Stephen said, “What? Where are your kids? Get out of my face before I kill you. Where are your kids?” Rob didn’t know. He kept going like that.’ She mimicked a flat-handed pointing gesture. ‘I said to him, “What happened?” And he said, “I blacked out.” He tried to comfort me, but I pushed him away.’
Farquharson between his guards was weeping soundlessly, without shame, his mouth gaping, his eyes locked on hers. A great knotted current of agony surged back and forth between the dock and the witness stand: a flood of terrible compassion. Something was happening to Gambino’s voice. It dissolved, it thickened, it throbbed and took on colour; it rose and fell in octaves, like a chant.
‘It was dark. It was so dark. I was running up and down the paddock, trying to ring 000, but I was so hysterical I couldn’t press the numbers properly. Stephen was in the water. I remember sitting in the front seat of his parents’ car. Rob was standing in front of the car with his arms crossed. He was soaking wet. He was like a person, but there was no movement. He wasn’t doing anything. He was like in a trance.’
There was a helicopter over the dam. A paramedic walked up to her. She asked him, ‘How long has it been?’ ‘Forty minutes.’ ‘What are their chances?’ ‘Very slim.’
One of her brothers arrived. He took her away to his house in Winchelsea and called a doctor. It was a very long wait. Her socks were wet. At last the doctor came. He drove them through fog to the Winchelsea hospital. She staggered through the doors and someone came to her with the needle.
…
All Mr Morrissey wanted from Gambino, in cross-examination, was her assurance—which she gave earnestly and without hesitation—that Farquharson had loved his children very deeply. He was such a softie with them that the role of disciplinarian had fallen to her. The football side of things was his forte. After the separation he grew much closer to the boys. She had done everything in her power to foster this closeness. He was proud of them, especially of Jai, who at ten was intelligent, mature, responsible, a good sportsman, a very good big brother.
‘Everybody loved my kids,’ said Gambino, her voice thinning to a soft wail. ‘They were so popular.’
In the dreadful days after they died, asked Morrissey, had her family written Farquharson a card? Had she and Rob spoken to each other on the telephone? Had they offered each other words of comfort? Yes, she said, with an anguished gentleness, yes—they had.
Gambino left the stand with a wad of wet tissues held to her cheek. As she stumbled towards the exit, Farquharson’s head swung to follow her, and I caught the full blast of his distress. His face was ravaged, beseeching: his teeth bared, his cheeks streaming. The doors thumped shut behind her. Masonry, glass and timber could not muffle the rending sobs and cries that echoed in the cold hall outside.
The sleeve of Louise’s hoodie was black with tears. ‘Did she look at him on the way out?’ she whispered. ‘Did she look at him?’
‘She turned her head a little bit,’ I said. ‘I think she looked at him.’
Out on the street, seeing me wipe my eyes, the veteran journalist snapped at me, ‘I was at the funeral.’
Years later, when we befriended each other, I would see that she had been forcing me back to the point, but now she made me feel like a sentimental amateur. I was afraid of her, and it shocked me that she would not hold her fire, even for a moment, in the face of what we had just witnessed: two broken people grieving together for their lost children, in an abyss of suffering where notions of guilt and innocence have no purchase.
…
No sooner had we steadied ourselves after the spectacle of Cindy Gambino’s loyalty to the husband she was no longer in love with, than the prosecution called to the stand her new partner—and father of her eleven-month-old son, Hezekiah—Stephen Moules.
He faced Rapke’s junior, Amanda Forrester, in a grey suit, lavender shirt, and white tie. His hair was thick and fair. He had an upright posture, and a smooth, open face with the all-seasons tan of the outdoor worker. I was not the only woman in the court who shot at Farquharson a furtive glance of comparison. He sat with shoulders slumped and eyes downcast.
Moules described himself to the court as a former concreter turned full-time father. The water in the glass he sipped from trembled; but still he gave off that little buzz of glamour peculiar to the Australian tradie. Surely the month of September 2004, when the Farquharsons hired him to pour the slab of their new house, had marked the beginning of a period of exhilaration and fantasy for Gambino, while to Farquharson it must have brought nothing but suspicion, jealousy and pain.
Everything Moules said about himself suggested a figure of resolute virtue. His own family may have collapsed into chaos, but he seemed determined to haul it back to the light, and to establish himself in full view as a decent citizen. When the Farquharsons engaged him, he already knew their eldest, Jai, from the Cub Scout troupe he led. He was an active member of the Bayside Christian Church, an evangelical outfit formerly known as the Assemblies of God, and taught Sunday School there. The name of his concreting company was God’s Creations.
His initial dealings with the Farquharsons, he said, were only ‘a business relationship’. But, having recently watched a bunch of blokes pour a concrete slab in my own backyard, I was equipped to imagine the effect of this sight on a young woman in Cindy Farquharson’s stifling situation. A concrete pour is a dramatic process. It demands skill, speed, strength, and the confident handling of machinery; and it is so intensely, symbolically masculine that every woman and boy in the vicinity is drawn to it in excited respect. Spellbound on the back veranda between my two small grandsons, I remembered Camille Paglia’s coat-trailing remark that if women were running the world, we’d still be living in grass huts. Could it be that Farquharson’s days as a husband were numbered before that slab had set?
…
Late in 2004 Gambino offered, in a neighbourly spirit, to pick up Moules’ two boys from school in the afternoons and look after them at her place until he finished work. Moules saw no harm in it, and was grateful for the help. It made me flinch to think of Farquharson stumping home sore-footed from his cleaning job, only to find his house thundering with another man’s kids and his wife flushed and enlivened by her new friendship with their father.
Across the dying months of the marriage, though, Farquharson naively confided in Moules his anxiety and distress. Even after his wife had called the whole thing off and he had moved back to his father’s—which chanced to be only five doors along from the house Moules was renting—Farquharson would often turn up at Moules’ place looking for somebody to talk to. He took the break-up very hard. He was distraught when Cindy did not want to reconcile. ‘He did not know what to do,’ said Moules, ‘in any way, shape or form.’ Moules ran a Christian line with him. He ‘counselled’ him on how to get his marriage back together. ‘I tried to sort of steer him,’ he said, miming the two-handed motion of driving a car. He gave Farquharson advice both spiritual and worldly, and recommended he see a counsellor from Bayside Christian Church. Finally he realised his efforts were falling on deaf ears. He gave up.
But Moules’ role as his neighbour’s counsellor must have been uncomfortably compromised, for Cindy Farquharson too, over the same period, was a frequent visitor to his house. She used him as an ear, said Moules, to ‘vent to’. They would ‘just sit there talking’. According to Moules’ police statement, she told him that Farquharson had spoken of moving up to Queensland, that he wanted to ‘wean himself off his boys, because that was how it would end up anyway’.
Once Farquharson had moved out of their house, Cindy made it apparent to Moules that she had feelings for him. Next, she changed her name back to Gambino. Her signals were unmistakable. Moules had to struggle, he said, to keep their relationship platonic. He declined to be used as a scapegoat. He wanted Gambino to ‘have all her business clear-cut’ before anything further developed between them. But Farquharson, he said, was beginning to hold him responsible for the failure of the marriage.
‘It’s got to be your fault,’ he said to Moules. ‘I can’t understand any other reason why the marriage shouldn’t be.’
And Moules replied, ‘Your wife is your wife, okay? I’ve got custody of my kids. I’m starting my life again. I don’t need any more dramas.’
…
When he spoke about the night of Father’s Day, Moules’ voice became low and husky. Tremors flickered in the skin around his eyes. To control the trembling of his hands he had to clasp them on the timber rail of the witness stand. He mimed his incredulity at Farquharson’s first words to him when he arrived at the dam: ‘Where’s your smokes?’ He described his helpless diving into the bitterly cold water, his repeated requests to Farquharson to tell him where the car had gone in, and Farquharson’s answer: ‘I don’t know. I had a coughing fit and blacked out.’ Two young men—they must have been Shane Atkinson and Tony McClelland—shouted guidance to him from the bank: ‘I think I see bubbles. Try there. Try there.’ Moules tried to dive in the direction of any movement he thought he could sense in the water. But it was too dark and too cold, and he was shuddering too much and swallowing too much water. It got to the point where he said to himself, ‘This is ridiculous.’ One of the men yelled to him, ‘Come on, mate. Get out or you’ll be next.’
Moules’ teenage cousin, who shared his house, drove him home to get dry clothes. Mistakenly believing Gambino to have been taken to Geelong Hospital, Moules set out with a friend at the wheel to find her there. On the way past the dam he asked the driver to stop so he could let the police know he had been, as he put it in his witness statement two days later, ‘first at the scene’. In that statement, Moules said he had been asked whether he had told an officer or anyone else that night that Farquharson had killed his kids. He was very angry on the night, he said, and he might have said something like it, but he did not remember it.
…
Kerri Huntington, the younger of Farquharson’s big sisters, took the stand, her flamboyant blonde hair massing on her shoulders. Although at times she wept, she looked like the extrovert of the family, someone who would know how to throw a party, a warm person with laugh-crinkles radiating from her small, deep-set Farquharson eyes.
When Rob’s marriage had crashed, Kerri and her husband, Gary, opened their home to him and his sons. The Huntingtons’ house was kid-friendly. They had a pool. Their two daughters loved Rob’s boys, who would often come to stay with them on his access weekends. The Huntingtons would even have asked Rob to move in with them, but their house lacked an extra bedroom, and anyway they lived at Mount Moriac, halfway to Geelong; what Rob needed was a house in Winchelsea, so the boys could come to him off their own bat.
Kerri, who worked part-time at Kmart in the Geelong suburb of Belmont, kept an eye on real estate. She spotted the perfect house, right across the road from the Winch footy oval. But the Daintree Drive house still wasn’t sold; Rob couldn’t afford to buy. The Huntingtons offered to lend him what they could, and to help him get a better car. He didn’t want to be in debt to them. He said no.
Around six on the evening of Father’s Day, Kerri was about to go on her break at Kmart when Rob and his kids wandered in. She was surprised. His normal fortnightly access date had been the previous weekend; she remembered it because he had been so sick, with his lingering chest cold, that he had rung and asked her for help with the boys. When they had got to her place, Rob was lethargic with a nasty cough. It didn’t make him pass out, but it took his breath away. She had made him lie on the couch and sleep, while she looked after the boys.
Now, on the wrong weekend, here they were in her store, pestering Rob to buy them a cricket ball and some DVDs. They told her they were going to stop off at her place on their way home to collect a football that Tyler had lost in her garden the weekend before. Kerri and Rob made a plan to get their kids together the following Saturday, and away the four Farquharsons went.
Gary Huntington testified that boys and father did rock through the Mount Moriac house half an hour later. They picked up the footy, and towards seven, all correctly buckled into their seats, they set off for Winchelsea.
…
Outside on Lonsdale Street at lunchtime, while Louise and I were standing in a patch of sun against the Supreme Court’s honey-coloured stone wall, Bob Gambino drifted up to us.
‘You girls still here?’
‘Oh yes. We’ll be here till the end.’
He looked pleased, and stuck his hands into his coat pockets. His natural expression seemed to be a small, lopsided smile. ‘Some of those jurors,’ he said, without apparent animus, ‘aren’t even there. That dark one. She’s just eatin’ chewy and lookin’ round. She’s in a dream.’
I burst out, ‘Cindy was incredible. I couldn’t believe how she kept going.’
‘Nah,’ he said, looking into the stream of traffic. ‘You never expect to have to sit through this. I’ll certainly never forget that night. This arvo it’ll be the divers.’
Louise turned a whiter shade of pale.
‘They asked us if we wanted not to be here for that,’ said Bob. ‘But we know it already. We know it all.’
We stood there, keeping him company, in the bent rectangle of sun.
…
Before the jury was called in that afternoon, Mr Morrissey asked the judge for permission to show them two photographs.
The first was of Jai and Tyler jumping into the Huntingtons’ swimming pool. This, he said, would demonstrate that the two older boys were so confident and enthusiastic in water, so ‘not hopeless’, that it would have been ‘a risky proposition’ to try to drown them.
I was too embarrassed to look at Morrissey. Could he really believe that there was a meaningful connection between a joyful daylight leap and a violent plunge into the dark?
The second photo showed two-year-old Bailey on his father’s lap in an armchair, both of them sound asleep. Morrissey particularly wanted the jury to see the poignant shot of the slumbering father and son: it would counter what he said was the Crown’s suggestion that Bailey had been, to his father, an unwanted child.
The Crown declared it had made no such suggestion. Justice Cummins jibbed at the sleeping picture. ‘Naked sympathy is just as inappropriate as naked prejudice. Are you going to introduce a family album? Why pick this one out?’
‘I’m seeking,’ said Morrissey doggedly, ‘to demonstrate that he loved that child.’
There it was again, the sentimental fantasy of love as a condition of simple benevolence, a tranquil, sunlit region in which we are safe from our own destructive urges. Surely, I thought, Freud was closer to the mark when he said, ‘We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love.’
A pause. Justice Cummins shook his head. He gave Morrissey leave to tender the swimming pool picture, but he would not admit the second photo. So little Bailey was left to dream on, forever unregarded, curled in his sleeping father’s lap.
…
It was a woman who finally got deep enough into the dam, that night, to find the car.
Crop-haired and wiry in her dark blue uniform, a huge diver’s watch on her wrist, Senior Constable Rebecca Caskey of the Search and Rescue Squad stood in the witness stand with her hands clasped loosely behind her. Something in her easy posture reminded me of nurses I had seen at work: women of few words, unflappable, alert and calm.
Search and Rescue figured out, from the scattered debris their torch beams located near the dam, the car’s likely departure point from the bank. By 10.30 p.m. that night, Caskey was fully kitted up, with an attendant on the bank holding her lifeline.
In she went, all the way down. Compared with a farm dam, it was clean: there was no entangling vegetation. But the bottom was pure mud. The water was black and very cold. She could not see at all. A torch would have been useless in water so full of sediment. They used an arc search pattern: the man on the bank let out a length of line, and Caskey, keeping it tight between them, searched the available curve. He let out another arm-length and swept her back the other way.
She started feeling bits of metal and plastic on the bottom. Then she bumped into something with her head, something that moved. She touched it with her hand. It spun freely. A wheel. On the witness stand she squeezed her eyes shut, put her long-fingered hands out in front of her, and mimed blind groping gestures up and down an imaginary wall. ‘What was facing me,’ she said, ‘was the underside of the car. It was vertical.’
She backed away, and surfaced. They calculated the car’s position: wedged nose down in the mud, twenty-eight metres from the bank, in seven and a half metres of water. Standard procedure for Search and Rescue is to remove bodies from a submerged vehicle before they haul it out. But they agreed with Major Collision that Farquharson’s car should be sealed and brought up intact.
Oh God. This could only get worse. I sneaked a look at Farquharson. His lips were white, his mouth very low on his face. Like a child he ground his knuckles into his eyes.
Caskey dived again. In the mud at the bottom, working blind, she felt her way to what she guessed was the driver’s side of the vertical car.
‘The first thing I noticed on the driver’s side was an open door, just above the level of my head. Its window was closed. I felt around the edge of the door.’
Again, eyes shut and palms exposed, she mimed her fumbling search.
‘And then,’ she said, ‘I felt, slightly protruding from the car, a small person’s head.’
On the witness stand she cupped both hands before her face, and delicately moved an imaginary object sideways.
‘I pushed it back in. And I shut the door.’
She swam up the driver’s side of the car and down the passenger side, checking the windows and doors. All were closed.
Soon after midnight Caskey clambered out of the water for the last time. A police 4WD winched the Commodore to the edge of the dam, and a commercial tow-truck dragged it, still full of water, up on to the bank. Caskey had been in the water for several hours. She was cold. She was keen to get changed and go home.
Before she left, she took a quick look into the car. She saw three children. Two were in the back. Lying in the front was the one whose head she had touched and, for a moment, held in her hands.
…
The men from Major Collision looked into the recovered car before they opened it to drain the water out. Ten-year-old Jai was lying face down across the front seats with his head towards the driver’s door. When he was taken out of the car he showed signs of rigor mortis. Seven-year-old Tyler lay on his right side behind the driver’s seat. His head was near the door and his legs were between the two front seats. Two-year-old Bailey was lying across the top of the baby seat, facing rearwards and still tangled in his safety harness.
The police took careful note of the positions of the car’s controls. The key was in the ignition, off and locked. The automatic gearshift was in drive. The handbrake was off, as were the headlights and parking lights. The heater was off: its knob was at ten o’clock, in the blue part of the dial. All three seatbelts were unbuckled. The windows were all shut. The two rear doors were locked. When Sergeant Exton tried to open the driver’s side rear door, the exterior handle snapped off in his hand.
At two in the morning, the children’s bodies were formally identified by Stephen Moules.
…
Dr Michael Burke, a small, grey-haired, bespectacled forensic pathologist, was taken through his evidence fast and light, as if in mercy, but Farquharson’s face as he listened was contorted with anguish. He gasped and sobbed in silence, wiping at his eyes again and again. His sisters’ faces were flushed. They too wept without sound.
Apart from the surrounding circumstances, there is no definitive test to show that a person has died of drowning. A particular kind of foam, however, a plume of white matter, is often seen in drowned people, and this was found around the children’s mouths and noses. Toxicology tests revealed no evidence of alcohol, carbon monoxide, or other drugs or poisons. All three bodies showed minor abrasions and bruises here and there, marks that could have been caused either by the impact of the crash or by ordinary childhood play. Jai, who had been riding in the front beside his father, was marked above his left eyebrow; the left side of his face was discoloured; the soft tissue at the back of his neck was bruised in a way that suggested whiplash. A tiny flap of skin had been scraped from one of Tyler’s fingers. As for Bailey, the pathologist had found only a scratch on his elbow, with a bandaid on it.
…
At the end of the gruelling day the jury looked older, weary and sad. The men’s brows were furrowed, the women were stowing sodden handkerchiefs. Out in the courtyard we passed Bev Gambino. She gave us a small, shaky smile. Her face was thin, her eyes hollow behind the pretty spectacles. A puff of wind would have carried her away. Louise and I were beyond speech. We parted in Lonsdale Street. On the long escalator down to Flagstaff station I could not block out of my mind those small bodies, the tender reverse-midwifery of the diver. The only way I could bear it was to picture the boys as water creatures: three silvery, naked little sprites, muscular as fish, who slithered through a crack in the car’s rear window and, with a flip of their sinuous feet, sped away together into their new element.
…
At the coffee cart, early next morning, Louise rushed up to me in a fluster.
‘One of the jurors was on my train. That tall one with the nerdy fringe. He spoke to me.’
‘He what?’
‘He said “Are you Zach?” I had no idea what he was talking about and I couldn’t believe he’d spoken to me. I said no, coldly, and walked away. What did he mean?’
‘Zach. Isn’t that Stephen Moules’ son? The one who was in Cindy’s car when she drove to the dam—remember? Who begged her to slow down?’
We looked around nervously. No one was in earshot.
‘Don’t let’s tell anyone,’ she said. ‘I’d hate the trial to be aborted and for it to be my fault.’
It would hardly have been her fault. Surely the juror knew the rules, even if he could not tell the difference between a girl and a boy. But I felt for him. Starved as he was of human facts, restricted to the narrowest version of the evidence, his curiosity must have overwhelmed him. Like his fellow jurors, like us, he was striving to construct for each stranger an identity and a meaningful place in the mysterious web of the story.